The novel begins in 1956 with Norman Alonso, a gardener and Jamaican emigrant, who resides in Blixton, a coal town, part of the Black country, named after industrial pollution, but also for the first wave of the Windrush immigrant generation who journeyed from the Afro-Caribbean West Indies to Britain from 1948 to 1971. They came to fill labor shortages after World War II, hoping for a more prosperous future. Norman started as a boxer but bad health, and limited options forced him to revert back to his horticultural skills, much prized by his clients. He muses, "We leave the Garden of Eden for the Land of Milk and Honey and find Sodom and Gomorrah." However, he's going blind and can no longer work, so his wife supports the family through two jobs. Then the plot skips ahead to 2002, introducing us to Jesse McCarthy, a 20-year-old Black man, whom we will later discover is Norman's grandson. Gloria, Norman's daughter and Jesse's mother, had left his abusive father and married an older white man, Graham, converting to his Jehovah's Witness religion.
Of gay sex black raw skin#
Starting as a young boy, with no Black male role models, he attempts to erase himself by using a Brillo pad on his skin with "the hot tap on until it ran scalding and set to scratching off the black, rubbed until the foam went pink." His mother resents Jesse because he reminds her of past failures. Later a friend will observe about him, "you're like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy," meaning learning what it means to be Black from white men. Jesse develops into "the darling of the congregation," with talk of him entering the ministry. He makes a flimsy pass at his friend Fraser, thinking he's gay, suggesting they run away and share a flat together: "I'd be like your girlfriend.
I'd look after ya." Now outed, the church "disfellowships" him. Jesse flees from his family to London, where in order to survive, he becomes an in-demand rent boy, esteemed for his capable sexual skills (i.e. no gag reflex), especially servicing older white daddies. He starts to live on his own terms, which includes unprotected sex and degrading encounters, as he searches for a white savior, even rejecting other black men as clients.Īll his early sexual encounters are rooted in shame and humiliation. The intense sex described here is raunchy, explicit -almost like reading pornography- and after a while these scenes become repetitive (perhaps intentionally). He is abused and assaulted, with tricks projecting their demeaning racial stereotypes onto him. It becomes clear how Jesse is both hated for being Black and desired for that same reason. Being a sex worker, he's trying to learn to love that which he'd been taught to hate and suppress. It will be one horrifying encounter with a man using a razor blade to infect Jesse with HIV, that will shock him into ending this self-destructive behavior, by finding a different line of work. He secures a job as a waiter in a posh restaurant, but on the first day, is demoted to kitchen porter due to the manager's racism. He works in other eateries and cafes, but no matter how high class, racist snobbery raises its ugly head. "Rainbow Milk" -the title comes from the sweet/repulsive Fruit Loops cereal his mother fed him for breakfast- at its very best reveals how racism has been ingrained into Jesse's very identity and records his long bumpy often heartbreaking journey to healing and self-acceptance, by creating another "center of gravity." Settling down with a former housemate, Owen (Cambridge-educated and a published poet), Jesse, despite feeling inferior, develops his own ambitions to become a writer.