Slaves and Slavers, Then and Now : HIGHER GROUND <i> by Caryl Phillips (Viking: $17.95; 218 pp.) </i>

It will come as no surprise to fans of Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips that his latest work, a triptych of stories called “Higher Ground,” shifts in setting from Africa to America, and finally to England, because Phillips, despite his young age, (31) writes as if he was raised everywhere.

In “The European Tribe,” his last book, which won the 1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, Phillips went Alexis de Tocqueville’s odyssey across America one better by traveling for a year through Europe and Africa to examine racism and persecution on a global scale. By placing himself firmly within the protest tradition of Pan-Africanist literature, Phillips is obliged to write as a world citizen, one as politically concerned about neo-colonialism in Morocco as anti-Semitism in Amsterdam, and the censorship of writers in the Soviet Union. As his friend James Baldwin, he is cosmopolitan, his artistic approaches are varied, and his over-riding theme is the exploration of oppression in both the public and private realms.

His first story, “Heartland,” is a chilling, Kafkaesque parable about the slave trade. Here, a nameless African shepherd is forced to betray his own people by assisting British traders in their harvesting of “black gold.”

“Some years ago a king’s trader captured me and sold me to one of their factors,” explains the narrator. “He, in turn, taught me the principles of their language and methods of trading. He seemed loath to follow me to join the coffle, partly on account of my age, but also because, as he declared, he could espy some spark of intelligence. When he died . . . I was brought by his undertrading officer to this Fort and subjected to vile abuses until they realized that a replacement factor would not be forthcoming. I subsequently acquired some status in their eyes and began to assist in their trading.”

But his “soul is not at peace.” He is half-slave and half-free, poised in a nightmarish limbo between two cultures, and hated equally by the whites and Africans, especially after a sadistic trader named Price uses him to bring a 16-year-old black girl to the coastal fort for the trader’s pleasure. She is tortured and treated as a whore by him and others until the narrator, who can helplessly watch her defilement no longer, resists. The cost of rebellion is, of course, his own negligible freedom. As with free blacks condemned to serve white slavers in classic stories such as Prosper Merimee’s “Tamango” (1829), he is sold into bondage, and from the auction block laments, “My life is ended. . . . My present has finally fractured; the past has fled over the horizon and out of sight.”

Two centuries later a 25-year-old black American, Rudi Williams, who could be this shepherd’s descendant, sits in solitary confinement in a story entitled, “The Cargo Rap.” Convicted of robbing a liquor store after learning of his girlfriend’s pregnancy, Rudi is a fire-breathing Marxist-Leninist. He proclaims, “I am a captive in a primitive capitalist state. I live on Max Row in a high-security barracoon.” His story, told in a series of bristling, bullying letters to his family and the “Rudi Williams Defense Committee” during the tumultuous years 1967-68, describes how the prison guards torment him by tossing feces into his cell, and his own efforts to strengthen his body through exercise and his mind by consuming books authored by Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright and Du Bois.

Ironically, Rudi’s black nationalist tirades to his family against “race-mixing” and integration are at odds with his uncritical acceptance of (white) Marx and Lenin. Phillips does a fine job of showing the contradictions in Rudi’s character, particularly the paranoia, sexism toward black women, and egotism (“I refuse to bend. I am, in fact, unable to bend. Homo Erectus Africanus”) that eventually alienate him from his attorney and parents, and accelerate his physical and mental decline.

Throughout these letters, Rudi attempts to politicize his sister, Laverne; he provides her (and the reader) with capsule biographies of every black leader from Sojourner Truth to Paul Robeson. If you know nothing of African-American history, these entries will be enlightening; however, if you’ve read even the most basic text on black history, they will unfortunately seem like filler in an epistolary story often marred by excessive essayism.

What saves “The Cargo Rap,” though, is Rudi’s realization when his mother dies that the love and kindness preached by Martin Luther King are profounder approaches to life than politics. Sadder but wiser by the story’s end, he concludes, “I am strong in theory, in self-discipline, in ability, but I have not learned how to marry these virtues with another type of strength. It involves, I imagine, giving up, not acquiring; opening doors, not closing them; reaching out, not holding back. I am not made of this material.”

“Higher Ground” completes Phillips’ cycle of stories about emotional and physical exile with a portrait of Irene, a Polish Jew (called Irina as a child) sent at age 18 by her father to England as a way of saving her from the Nazis. Her life is dreamy, internal and, like Phillips’ other characters, she cannot reach her past and family--”a refugee who had lost everything but her accent.” While working in a munitions factory, Irene meets Reg, who takes her to bars where he attempts “to slot her into convenient pockets of . . . gossip” with his male cronies. Although she marries Reg and becomes pregnant, the marriage sours so after the war Irene tries to throw herself under a train. She loses her baby and is placed in a hospital.

There, she “learned to hate friendships proffered and attempted attachments and imagined love, and she would let nobody touch her.” This painful withdrawal is dramatized when, briefly released from the hospital to work in a library, she meets Louis, a West Indian as adrift in England as Irene. Their friendship across the gulf of cultures falters, for she feels, “If you could lick my heart, Louis, it would coat your tongue in salt . . . I can’t forget Irina . . . You don’t know her.”

Yet, Phillips’ ever-growing skill as a writer does allow us to know Irina and the suffering of the dispossessed, the forgotten. Occasionally, he gives in to a young, committed writer’s urge to preach to us, but with each book he grows a little more, and we, as readers, should feel privileged to grow in imagination and feeling with him.