OLD MAN AND THE SEA, excerpt

I was surprised to discover that the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's 1952, classic, novel, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, is probably African. I am still reading the short work . I had seen an old black and white movie decades ago featuring some heavily suntanned white man who played the part of the principal character. I remember very little about the movie, except an arm-wrestling contest between he and some "Negro" as they drank rum. It involved a deep-sea fisherman who waged a daily, epic, poetic, organic struggle with the Caribbean Sea from Cuba to earn a living, for personal dignity, for self-validation, and for raw natural joy of release . I do not know now how the movie ended . Nor how the book ends. But, I had been called back to the story over the years , perhaps , as the fisherman was recalled to sea. Only now that I too am an old man have I found opportunity to read it. I willingly share a piece of my catch from Hemingway's masterpiece, here with you, the part that suggests our hero's African ethnicity: "'Sleep well old man.' "The boy went out . They had eaten with no light on the table and the old man took off his trousers and went to bed in the dark . He rolled his trousers up to make a pillow, putting the newspaper inside them. He rolled himself in a blanket and slept on the other old newspapers that covered the springs of the bed. "He was asleep in a short while and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt his eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum on the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning." P. 24-25