Nearly 90 years after the publication of C.L.R. James’s only novel, "Minty Alley," a new set of five pages has been discovered that offers an alternate ending to the classic work. The unpublished pages were found by Kaneesha Parsard, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, during her research in the C.L.R. James Collection at the University of the West Indies (UWI).
In the original published version from 1936, residents of a Trinidadian communal yard are forced to leave when their home is sold. However, in these newly uncovered pages—typed and annotated by James—the story concludes differently: Mrs. Rouse, the landlady, dies and leaves most of her property to Haynes, the novel’s middle-class protagonist. This change shifts the narrative from collective dispossession to individual stewardship.
“At first I thought I had misremembered the ending,” Parsard said. “But as I kept reading, I realized these were entirely new events—characters acting in ways I had never seen before!”
Parsard’s initial visit to UWI's archives occurred in 2012 while she was a doctoral student at Yale University. She credited librarians Lorraine Nero and Aisha Baptiste for guiding her through uncatalogued materials. In 2019, as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UChicago, she returned and—with improved cataloging—found a folder containing this alternative ending.
“Without that groundwork, I wouldn’t have found the ending,” Parsard said.
Determining when James wrote these pages proved challenging since they were undated and could have originated anytime between the late 1920s and 1970s. Parsard compared handwriting samples from collections at UWI and Columbia University and consulted experts on typewriter and ink analysis but could not identify an exact date.
A breakthrough came with a letter from 1960 in which James mentioned rewriting "Minty Alley." This led Parsard to Selma James—C.L.R. James’s former wife—whom she met at a London event in 2023.
“I’m very shy in the audience, but I went up to her,” Parsard said. “She’s 93, she’s busy, still a full-time feminist organizer and yet generously made time to meet with me.”
Their conversation helped place the manuscript in the context of political changes during the 1960s when C.L.R. James was rethinking his relationship with Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams and considering questions about sovereignty and leadership within Caribbean society.
“It was a period when James was asking: What does sovereignty look like? Who gets to determine the future—the political elite or the masses?” Parsard explained. “The meaning of the alternative ending started to coalesce. The published version is collectivist. The revision experiments with placing stewardship in the hands of a single heir.”
Parsard sees these unprinted pages as evidence that fiction served as a space for C.L.R. James to explore political ideas related to power, inheritance, and independence.
“An alternative ending to Minty Alley … plays with the intimacy and distance among the West Indian writer, the middle class and the working class,” Parsard wrote in an article on her findings. “It exemplifies James’s tendency to revise.”
According to Parsard, archival research relies not only on preservation but also on expert cataloging by librarians—a process essential for discoveries like this one.
The full text of Minty Alley’s alternative ending along with historical analysis can be found in Kaneesha Parsard's research article titled “An Alternative Ending to Minty Alley.”