SOURCE: Austin C. Clarke: A Biography, University of the West Indies Press, 1994, pp. 108–15, 158–63.

In the following essay, Algoo-Baksh discusses the autobiographical elements in When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks and When Women Rule.

Of the total of sixteen stories in the Canadian and American edition of When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, two are set in Barbados, ten in Canada, and four in the United States,¹ and as a group they run the gamut of the types of crises, dilemmas, and trials Clarke has himself faced, seeming in many cases to be vehicles that allow him to make sense of the complexities of his experience as a black and even to confront ghosts from his past. “An Easter Carol,” for example, revolves around one important event in a boy's life—singing a solo in the Anglican...