Short Tales

By: Roy Van Dyke

Narrated by: Gary Clayton

Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Short Tales is a collection of eight books. The first three books deal with the life of a young man of mixed ancestry back in the 1940s. His name is Wacarasa Joe( WA-CA-RA-SA) Joe and his mother, Lynmai, was an indigenous Carib woman of Guyana, South America. His father, Henry Hawkins, was a dutchman from Holland who worked with the colonial government at the time. Wacarasa Joe’s parents were both killed when he was a child only eight years old. His mother, Lynmai, taught him the ways of the Carib people, and his father, taught him the ways of Dutch.

Wacarasa Joe was born at Wacarasa Settlement, a settlement of indigenous people in the AKIWINI Creek (A-KI-WI-NI), a tributary of the Pomeroon River. After his parents’ death, Wacarasa Joe was brought up by members of the Carib tribe. He married a girl from the tribe, Leona and they had two daughters, Maitai and Silvia. Leona and her daughters were raped and killed by goldminers (Pork knockers) who attacked the Settlement. Wacarasa Joe was away hunting at the time. He found the bodies of his family staked out naked on the sands of Wacarasa Settlement. The four men who carried out the attack, were still there, when he got back to the settlement. He attacked them, killed one and wounded another, before one of the men shot him and the three escaped. He trailed and killed all of them. Wacarasa Joe left Wacarasa Settlement after that and found a friend and countryman of his father, at a place called Grant Bethany. His father’s friend, Ernest Van Den Berg, gave him a home at Grant Bethany.

Dorcas, Say I Do!, deals with two very old people, both with acute hearing loss, who decided to get married after 50-odd years of living together and producing enough children to field two basketball teams. It is meant to be hilarious.

The Cobra Woman is about a woman, Ketura Daniels, aka the Cobra Woman, who was more masculine than the men in the Village of Riverstown, on the Essequibo Coast, where she lived. It’s a funny and sad

©2019 Roy Van Dyke (P)2021 Roy Van Dyke