Dead Woman Pickney serves as an interesting record of a key period in Jamaican society as a rigid color hierarchy began to make way reluctantly for the working poor coming up through the educational system, one which, as Shorter Brown argues, was not then seen “as a lever of social mobility for the working-class children who atended but only as a means of increasing their abilities as prospective farm and domestic labour” (p. 92). The details that the author provides of her movement through such a stratified system will resonate with those familiar with the Caribbean and interested in the interpellative apparatuses of colonial spaces. Those of us  commited to Shorter Brown’s mantra of “liberation through education” (p. 85) will take heart from her story.