“Ralphie at the races” is a story by Samuel Selvon that, like much of his short fiction, is structured as a joke. Set in Calgary, the immigrant tale follows a freshly arrived Trinidadian whose friend drags him to Stampede Park to watch the horse races. Ralphie refuses to bet, but he keeps picking the right horses and collapses into “utter despair” at the thought of the money he passed up. Finally, he bets on the last race and wins again, but in the ensuing excitement, he loses his ticket.
When Selvon himself immigrated to Calgary, in 1978, he was an accomplished writer with nine novels to his name. He leapt onto the scene in England with fiction that turned colonial subjects into protagonists, whether they be cane cutters in rural Trinidad or minorities in London hustling for jobs and women. His best-known work, 1956’s The Lonely Londoners, depicts the tragicomic struggles of working-class Caribbean men through an innovative use of creolized English and thrilling stream of consciousness. One largely unpunctuated, ten-page ode to urban promiscuity begins, “Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city and all them girls throw away heavy winter coat and wearing light summer frocks so you could see the legs and shapes that was hiding away from the cold blasts and you could coast a lime in the park.” These days, several of Selvon’s novels bear the imprint of Penguin Modern Classics. His good looks are on display in the National Portrait Gallery, right off Trafalgar Square, where his photograph appears next to Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.
