If I Survive You

Delano is Trelawny’s older brother. He resembles their father both physically and in temperament, and Trelawney correctly perceives that Delano is their father’s favorite. Delano, because he is older, goes to help their father rebuild their hurricane-damaged home in “In Flux.” Delano also eventually moves in with his father, leaving Trelawny and his mother to move to Kendall, south of Miami, together. As an adult, Delano starts a landscaping business with the help of his father, and the two retain the close bond that they shared during his childhood and adolescence. He marries and has two children, but struggles to provide his wife with the kind of life that she expected, and ultimately, his wife leaves him, taking their two children to California. A talented musician, Delano (like his father and brother) longs for a career in the arts despite his practical disposition toward work.

Delano’s most overt characteristic is the deep bond that he shares with his father Topper. Topper’s favoritism toward Delano is obvious to everyone in the family. Although young when the family immigrated, Delano was born in Jamaica and retains his Jamaican cultural identity much more than the American-born Trelawny. He thus resembles his father not only physically, but also in speech, mannerisms, interests, and temperament. He takes his role as the eldest son seriously, and he expects to be the sole inheritor of his father’s houses. As an adult, Delano gifts his father an ackee tree, which bears fruit that are an important cultural food in Jamaica. The fruit, which must be cooked before it is eaten, has a singular flavor that is often unpalatable to those outside of Jamaica. Delano, who remembers eating ackee fruit, enjoys the delicacy, but his brother spits it out.

Delano shares with their father an interest in practicality, a fondness for manual labor, and a disdain for college and careers that require a degree. Because he spent so much of his adolescence helping his father to repair and rebuild their home after Hurricane Andrew, he grows up with an appreciation for hard work. Trelawny notices that the construction causes Delano’s muscles to develop, and the more work that he does with his father, the more Delano seems like a man. After high school, his father helps him financially when he chooses to start a landscaping business. Delano is successful in his work until the 2008 financial crash, after which point he struggles.

As an adult, Delano also struggles with fraught family dynamics once he starts his own family. His wife had pictured greater success, and when Delano’s business begins to falter, she leaves him. Although the two have a series of strained, hostile conversations about their situation, it is clear that Delano deeply loves his children, and he is pained by his wife’s choice to relocate with them to California. Although he and Topper had been close, Topper’s alcoholism and philandering had caused the dissolution of his own marriage. There is a sense that Delano is trying to do better for his own offspring than his father did.

Although committed to hands-on fields like construction and landscaping, Delano shares the family proclivity for the arts. Topper is a talented visual artist, and Trelawny’s true passion is literature. Although neither Topper’s own artistic interests collapsed under the weight of family obligation and immigration, and Delano too chose a more lucrative field, he never gives up on his dream of being a Reggae singer, and both Trelawny and Delano’s neighbors note that he has real talent. The closest he gets to success in this text is a broken-up band and his part-time work as a guitar instructor; as the final story comes to a close, he has formed a new band, and they are rehearsing for a battle-of-the-bands competition.

Topper is a general contractor. A Jamaican immigrant, he does not have very much respect for African Americans, and he wants his children to remain culturally and behaviorally Jamaican. He has an alcohol addition, which compounds his already difficult relationship with his wife. During their marriage, he often disappears for long stretches, and the two ultimately separate. He had wanted to be an artist as a young man. He doesn’t seem to see that he shares a certain sense of being an outsider, a sensitivity, and an interest in art with Trelawney. While in Jamaica, Topper cheats on his wife Sanya and fathers another child, leading to their divorce. He is hard on Trelawney, but he is a complex character and is not a true antagonist.

Topper is initially introduced through his relationship with sons Delano and Trelawny. Topper favors Delano both because he sees more of himself in his older son and because Delano has retained more of a Jamaican cultural identity than his brother. Topper admires his older son’s ability to work hard; his commitment to practical endeavors over academic pursuits; and his interest, even as a teenager, in helping Topper to rebuild their storm-damaged home and to construct a new one. When the family is split apart by Topper’s alcoholism and philandering, Topper and Delano move in together and leave Trelawny with his mother. Topper does not hide his preference for Delano from Trelawny, and in the story that he narrates, he is clear that he is disappointed in Trelawny’s bookishness, in his American identity, and in his lack of interest in real-world skills like construction.

In his marriage to Sanya, Topper’s fondness for rum, his penchant for disappearing from their family home for long stretches of time, and his philandering strain their relationship. Trelawny recalls his father’s many disappearances and notes the unhappiness that it caused his mother. The difficulties in Topper’s marriage to Sanya become a stressful backdrop to the family’s interpersonal relationships, and the boys grow up in the shadow of their parents’ anger and dysfunction. The two reach an inflection point when Sanya learns that Topper has fathered a child with another woman in Jamaica, and the betrayal ends their marriage.

Much of Topper’s “bad” behavior toward his wife and son is rooted in the trauma of immigration. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to leave Jamaica, but was driven to emigrate by the increasingly violent climate in his home country. In Jamaica, he had been relatively well off. The son of the owner of a successful construction company, he was unaccustomed to struggle. Topper lost that stability when he and Sanya moved to the United States, and he initially worked a series of unskilled jobs that did not quite generate enough income for the family to be comfortable. In addition to the increased precarity of life in America, Topper keenly felt the distance between Miami and Jamaica, never feeling that he fully fit in. He displays a marked antipathy toward African Americans and often speaks about them using slurs. He desperately wants to retain a sense of Jamaican identity and is chagrined when he sees so little of it his youngest son. Additionally, Topper had always been a gifted artist, but was forced by his father to choose construction over art. His attempts at reviving his art career in America are not successful, and even in construction jobs, he continues to struggle. Interestingly, he does not seem to make the connection between his own judgmental parenting and his father’s, and this becomes a missed opportunity for connection, with Trelawny especially. There is some form of reconciliation between Topper and Trelawny at the end of the text, but it is unclear whether this redemption is possible because Topper shows signs of softening, or because Trelawny realizes that it is up to him to forgive and forget.