Bart (Bartholomew) Character Analysis

One of Moses’s Trinidadian friends. After meeting for the first time in a hostel, Moses quickly learns that Bart is a peculiar man when it comes to money, often pretending to be poor so that his friends won’t ask him to help them financially. This sometimes means skipping meals to fully cultivate his image as a hungry, broke person. A light-skinned black man, Bart tries to convince people that he’s Latin American. The narrator notes that he also is “always talking about this party and that meeting that he attend[ed] in the West End or in Park Lane.” As such, readers see that Bart is highly concerned with his public image (the West End and Park Lane being two places where people go to see and be seen, as the expression goes). Unlike many immigrants in The Lonely Londoners, Bart manages to secure a clerical job, most likely because of his light complexion. As a result, though, he constantly worries about the influx of black immigrants in London, fretting that these newcomers are going to “make things hard in Brit’n.” He even has “an embarrass[ed] air” when he walks with his darker-skinned friends on the street. When he falls in love with a white woman (Beatrice) and wants to marry her, he’s finally forced to confront his own blackness, as her father chases him out of the house when she brings him to meet her family. Before long, Beatrice stops seeing Bart, prompting him to scour the city in search of her. Sadly enough, he’s so concentrated on finding her that he gives up his clerical job in order to take a position as a doorman at one of her favorite clubs, hoping all the while to spot her on her way inside.