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This chapter discusses the varied dimensions of Walrond's short story collection, Tropic Death, as a compelling tome of black transnational fiction. The stories therein contain elements that confound the North American reader—his intended audience—even as they sought to assert the Caribbean experience. Walrond likewise abhorred what he felt was a tendency to disguise sociological tracts as novels, and instead introduced supernatural elements into plausible plots. In one sense then, Tropic Death delivered the “stunning blow” of an alternate Caribbean truth but, in another sense, it contested truth telling itself. In many ways Walrond pursued a certain literary fashion—ostentatious in its technique, elliptical in its storytelling—yet he also confounded convention, turning the Caribbean picturesque on its head, or more precisely on its ear.

This chapter discusses the latter part of Walrond's life in Harlem, even as it explores the writer's reasons for leaving the United States following the positive reception and success he'd obtained from the publication of his short story collection, Tropic Death. Walrond had plenty of opportunities to advance his career at this stage. He straddled the color line, interpreting developments in African-American culture for white readers and providing a “Negro” perspective on white depictions of his race. Yet Walrond sought to pursue his agenda with another work of fiction—The Big Ditch—by applying for a fellowship that would soon take him abroad.

This chapter discusses Walrond's final years, which were spent in a London radically changed after World War II. He made the acquaintance of Erica Marx, who needed help with a “Negro poetry” performance she wished to stage in London, the first event of its kind in England. The project rekindled his sense of involvement at the leading edge of a black cultural initiative, even as it faced difficulties in this new London—one in which race relations seemed to have declined over the years. More notable during the latter years of his life was the possibility of a reprint of his short story collection, Tropic Death, published with a new dedication for his three daughters. He would never live to see it in print, but one could not help but think that the prospect of its reissue was a kind of vindication.

This concluding chapter meditates on Walrond's career, remarking on the fact that Tropic Death did not aptly represent the totality of it. He was not the first West Indian in Panama, the first Caribbean arrival to New York, the first “Negro” in Paris, nor the first of London's “coloured” colonials—but he managed to compress these paradigmatic lines of flight into a single, extraordinary career, and the unusual perspective he acquired was necessarily comparative and transnational. Even as we recognize in Eric Walrond incipient forms of familiar contemporary identities and communities, we should also consider the “historical mutilation” of the anticolonial struggles, transnational periodical formations, aesthetic movements, and political solidarities that animated Walrond's work. He was not as prolific as some of his peers, but he was far more prolific than many realized.