conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book about Michael, Leila, England entitled The Final Passage?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Final Passage: The year is 1958.\nLeila is a 19-year-old woman who has to care for her very sick mother.\nShe has never known her father, and her mother, who is only 40, has even refrained from telling her about him.\nAs her skin is lighter than that of most of the other islanders she believes that she was the product of an affair her mother must have had with a white man.\nThat, she thinks, would also explain her mother\'s distrust of white people, an attitude she has always tried to pass on to her daughter.\nLeila has a very good friend in Millie, who is more down to earth and knows much better what she wants to achieve in life.\nLeila\'s boyfriend Michael, who is in his early twenties, is an irresponsible young man whose main interests are sex and drink.\nHe does odd delivery jobs on his scooter for his friend Bradeth, but most time of the day the two men can be seen outside one of the small bars getting drunk on beer.\nMichael has fathered an illegitimate child but has not made any real effort to move in with its mother.\nRather, as his own parents are dead, he still lives in his grandmother\'s house.\nRather than wait for Arthur, who has declared his love for her but left the island promising to come back soon, Leila has set her eyes on Michael, who before long agrees to become her husband.\nHowever, their marriage gets off to a bad start and cannot even be patched up when their son Calvin is born, whom Michael at first does not even come to visit.\nOne day Leila is shocked to find her mother gone.\nA letter informs her that on her doctor\'s advice she has left for England in order to seek medical treatment there.\nLeila finds life on the small island increasingly unbearable, and her wish to emigrate to England and to reunite with her mother becomes stronger and stronger.\nIt turns out that Michael is not averse to the idea, and so Leila arranges everything for her young family\'s "final passage".\nBradeth and Millie, who are also a couple now expecting their second child, cannot be persuaded to leave with them: [.\n] But Millie was adamant.\n"Too many people beginning to act like it\'s a sinful thing to want to stay on this island but there don\'t be no law which say you must go to England, you know.\nPeople here too much follow fashion".\nLeila did not have time to answer.\n"So Michael, why you don\'t say something.\nYou being too damn quiet for my reasoning".\n"Well, I think you right some of the way but I don\'t think it can be anything but good for a young family.\nI mean there is where all the opportunity is, and it don\'t mean to say we can\'t come back here with some profits after we finish working over there if it\'s so we choose to do.\nMillie was quick to speak again.\n"So just tell me how many people you see coming back from England with anything except the clothes they standing up in.\n" "No, Millie, it\'s not fair".\nMichael wanted to get up to make his point but he remained seated.\n"People only been going out there a few years so why they should be coming back now.\nIt\'s just starting".\nPeople leave in masses, the huge ship is packed with emigrants most of whom are lured away from their home by the prospect of a better life.\nAll they can go on, however, are snippets of pseudo-information, misconceptions, things they picked up when they were at school, exaggerated stories told by returnees, and second- or third-hand advice on how to tackle life in England.\nMichael, for example, just like other young black men on board their ship, is secretly looking forward to having promiscuous sex with white women, having been told by his friend Bradeth that he heard "about one coloured man out there who writing home saying he be having at least three or four different white girls a week".\nAfter a two-week voyage, Michael, Leila and Calvin finally set foot on English soil, have "nothing to declare except their accents", and eventually arrive at Victoria on the boat train from Dover with only her mother\'s address and some money to start a new life with.\nThey take a taxi to the fictitious Quaxley Street only to be faced with a shabby, overcrowded house divided into several bedsits, and her mother gone again.\nLeila learns that she has been in hospital for some time, and during the following weeks regularly visits her there.\nHowever, the heart-to-heart she has wanted to have with her never takes place as her health rapidly deteriorates.\nShe dies soon afterwards.\nAs newly arrived immigrants belonging to a visible minority who are looking for suitable accommodation and a regular income, Leila and Michael experience the kind of racism, petty and otherwise, prevalent in a city inhabited almost solely by whites which is suddenly being flooded by dark-skinned "foreigners".\nThey fall prey to unscrupulous estate agents, and Michael soon returns to his habit of coming and going whenever he chooses to, leaving all household chores to Leila.\nHe stops talking to his wife, is frequently drunk again and quits his job after only a few days to "go into business" together with a newly found friend of his.\nAlso, Leila discovers a blonde hair on the shoulder of his jacket and draws her own conclusions.\nWhen she realises that they have run out of money she starts working on the buses, but on her first day she has a breakdown and is informed by the examining doctor that she is pregnant again.\nAt the end of the novel Leila has come to realise that Michael is not going to be part of her future.\nThe novel is divided into five chapters of unequal length entitled "The End," "Home," "England," "The Passage," and "Winter".\nBasically narrated in chronological order, it does contain a series of flashbacks mainly outlining episodes of Leila\'s past life in the Caribbean island.\nThe Final Passage won the Malcolm X Prize in 1985.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book? Start with the sentence 'The Final Passage
  She and Calvin were near the front of the queue where they had been for nearly five hours'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Final Passage
  She and Calvin were near the front of the queue where they had been for nearly five hours. They had arrived around 6.30, anxious to secure a good place so they might get the cabin they had paid for. Rumour had it (and her mother had always told her there was a little truth in every rumour) that despite the markings on their tickets people just took whatever cabin they could find. If they could not find one they had to resign themselves to living on deck. Leila had paid for a cabin so she was making sure.
  At 6.30 the harbour had been a blaze of colour and confusion. Bright yellows and brilliant reds, sweet smells and juices, a lazy deep sea nudging up against the land, and looking down upon it all the mountains ached under the weight of their dense green vegetation. Leila watched as the women sold their food, cursing, pushing, laughing. She listened as occasionally a tired voice still found the strength to soar.
  As usual nobody did, and the woman fanned herself with a straw hat, her old, sun-blackened face gleaming with sweat. A small, angular boy stopped to tie up the frayed laces in his worn-out tennis shoes. Out of the corner of his eyes, he concentrated on the fresh peanuts scattered on her tray. Then her voice disturbed him.
  He smiled shyly, his white teeth a little too large, and a few too many, for his young mouth. The old woman pursed her lips and tossed her head.
  He pulled the fancy bows tight and stood up in such a way that the sun formed a halo around his head. He grinned at her, hesitated, then skipped away, his hacked-off oversized shorts brushing lightly against his thighs.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The barman peeled back his lips like the lid of an old piano, and his teeth played a friendly mocking tune. He picked up Michael's glass, rinsed it in a murky bowl of water, then pulled the towel down from his shoulder and began to dry it.
  Michael drummed his fingers lightly against the top of the bar and nodded. 'I don't blame you, man. I don't blame you at all.'
  He looked closely at the barman's face, noticing the veins around his temples, like branches from an old tree. In them he saw the hopeless truth. The man could no more return to the country than Michael could run a bar. It was too late. The man continued to dry the glass.
  The barman just nodded, then he put down the glass and scratched his head, wondering what it was he had said to drive Michael away. After a while he gave up. Everyone knew the boy had his funny ways.
  The ground was stained with a dark wetness where the shaved ice had melted, but the two boys had gone. Michael began the long slow walk down to the market, edging his way along the narrow and carelessly defined streets. Up above the gulls circled, and to them Baytown must have looked like a hot corrugated iron sea. Michael pressed on, trying not to look at the defeated faces that lined these streets, men in grease-stained felt hats and women in deceptively gay bandannas, their eyes glazed, arms folded, standing, leaning, resting up against the zinc fencing of their front yards, their children playing, racing scraps of wood in the liquid sewage, but the walk only seemed to get longer.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The barman peeled back his lips like the lid of an old piano, and his teeth played a friendly mocking tune. He picked up Michael's glass, rinsed it in a murky bowl of water, then pulled the towel down from his shoulder and began to dry it.
  Michael drummed his fingers lightly against the top of the bar and nodded. 'I don't blame you, man. I don't blame you at all.'
  He looked closely at the barman's face, noticing the veins around his temples, like branches from an old tree. In them he saw the hopeless truth. The man could no more return to the country than Michael could run a bar. It was too late. The man continued to dry the glass.
  The barman just nodded, then he put down the glass and scratched his head, wondering what it was he had said to drive Michael away. After a while he gave up. Everyone knew the boy had his funny ways.
  The ground was stained with a dark wetness where the shaved ice had melted, but the two boys had gone. Michael began the long slow walk down to the market, edging his way along the narrow and carelessly defined streets. Up above the gulls circled, and to them Baytown must have looked like a hot corrugated iron sea.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'The child in her body and the one in her arms would never know of Michael'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The child in her body and the one in her arms would never know of Michael. But she was sure that nobody would blame her for this. When the time did come when her children would ask her questions she could not answer, she would take them down to the harbour and wait with them, as the ship lay offshore, waiting. She would watch as they climbed into the small boat and made their way out to the ship and on to England to find a Michael, or men like him who might give them the answers they sought. She would continue to wait for them, holding Millie's hand, both their hair grey and hidden (Bradeth also grey, at home, waiting for Millie), knowing that being her boys (she had never entertained the possibility of a daughter) they would come back to her with the next tide. Then together, the three of them (mother, son, son) would make their way back to St Patrick's and sit and wait for night to fall, having finally, at the end of her day, shared something that she knew was beyond her or anyone else's explanation. Leila looked again at her mother's simple tombstone and from it she drew the extra strength that enabled her to get to her feet.
  Leila left the cemetery the same way that she had come in, through the tall iron gates. On her way home she did not stop to listen to the carols or to buy presents. She walked quickly through the back streets, wanting to keep off the main roads and away from people. Calvin was asleep in her arms and the baby she carried in her body felt heavy.
  The bitter December air bruised Leila's face. She stopped. It was beginning to get dark, and the streetlights had not yet been switched on. The only illumination was provided by the Christmas trees which lit up the windows of the houses in Florence Road. From around the corner a lorry sped into view and hurtled past them. They must have looked strangely eerie in the winter's dusk, standing there unmoving, woman, child, child to be. Then the snowflakes began to spin, first one, then tens of them. Leila watched spellbound. Then she fled into the house and locked the door behind her.
  A speckled, burnished light crept in off the street, piercing the awful inadequacy of the curtains. Leila caught sight of herself in a mirror. She looked like a yellowing snapshot of an old relative, fading with the years. She turned suddenly and saw that somebody had pushed a Christmas card through the front door. She stooped, with Calvin, and picked it up and read it, but it was from nobody.