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When Glynis Salmon, owner of the <span style="font-weight: bold">BalaPress imprint</span>, which <span style="font-weight: bold">has debuted with Easton Lee's Run big 'fraid and other village stories</span>, looked at the audience at Friday's launch, she beamed.
Salmon said that she has been in the book industry for 18 years and the gathering at Alhambra Inn, Tucker Avenue, St Andrew, was the largest she had ever seen for a launch.
"We are coming of age, where we are respecting literature and we are respecting the cultural icons in our society," Salmon said, describing Lee as one of those icons.
Another icon, actress Leonie Forbes, enthralled the audience as she read from Run big 'fraid, changing her voice to represent the various characters in a saga of domestic abuse that ended with Clarice getting Gladstone's testicles in a death grip and leading him around like a puppy before a supportive crowd of villagers.
Weakness of the flesh
"Now you understand why I had to write down these stories," a smiling Easton Lee said before he read 'Who Dat', a story about a pastor falsely accused of weakness of the flesh in a bamboo patch. Lee did a fair amount of singing, as the village rumour-mongering was refined in song, the audience showing its merry appreciation.
Guest speaker Barbara Gloudon put the humour of Run big 'fraid into serious context. "I think Easton is trying to remind us that there was a day when there was honour, the people respected each other," Gloudon said.
In that time, "you were not too poor to have honour, you were not brought up to be red-eye and grudgeful".
Gloudon described Run big 'fraid as capturing "the spirit of a people at a particular time in our history. The tragedy of our time is that we have not called our children to order".
Gloudon closed by commenting that many of the old stories are being lost, saying "I am glad Easton is doing this before it all disappears".
Franklin McGibbon, chairman of the Book Industry Association of Jamaica, said "these are the things we have to pass down to our children", while Kingston Bookshop CEO Steadman Fuller noted the lack of Jamaican titles, especially for children. "Let us have some children stories about mongoose and rat," he said.
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