The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  At one point I shot off messages to Lanclist.com, where I’d found some present-day Crookses in the area, broaching the subject of DNA testing. One respondent asked for specific dates and places first, which, if I had them, would have made the DNA unnecessary. Another said she knew her ancestry back only two generations and thought it premature to consider such a drastic step as DNA testing. That sent me to Ysearch.org to see if anyone named Crooks had uploaded DNA results, and while I was there I checked in vain for matches for my father’s Y chromosome as well. When this fell flat, I remembered that my mother-in-law had read a genealogy magazine that recommended Cyndi’s List as the most comprehensive index of genealogy sites.

  So off I clicked, only to discover TheShipsList, an astonishing online archive related to vessels, voyages and passenger lists. Two Canadian scholars run it, women by the names of Swiggum and Kohli. It was there I discovered the Bombay and Persia Steam Navigation Company, founded in 1877, which owned the ships my great-grandfather sailed. The ships were indeed active in the “pilgrim trade,” and in 1939 the company was renamed the Mogul Line, as my father had known it. But both ships, like the Captain, met tragic ends. SS Ahmadi was wrecked off the shore of Mombasa in 1909, where it still lies, and SS Rahmani, en route from Bombay to Genoa, sank in the Mediterranean Sea after a collision in 1917. Buoyed by information even tangentially relevant to our ancestry, I scoured (again) the Mormons’ FamilySearch site, where I found a seemingly endless list of Crookses, from the West Indies to West Virginia. But none of them was named George Atkinson Crooks or Frederick William Crooks, and there was no way to distinguish my kin from the others.

  I contacted the Jamaica Archives and Records Department and emailed a request for any records related to George Atkinson Crooks. A staff member replied, promising to take an initial peek at no charge, but within a week another message informed me that nothing had come up, either in Falmouth or in its entire parish of Trelawny. She could, she wrote, for US$30 an hour, continue to search elsewhere, but there were a full fourteen parishes in Jamaica’s three counties. Beyond the birthdate of the Captain I had no other specifics for them to search. I envisioned taking out a second mortgage for what could be a completely pointless quest—my great-great-grandfather might not have been from Jamaica at all. Maybe George Atkinson Crooks was originally from England and had settled in Jamaica only later in life, marrying a coloured woman there. And so back I’d go to reading about the quasi-lords of Lancashire in Bolton-le-Moors and Whittle-le-Woods, finding myself humming “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.”

  It was a book that saved me.

  Some months before, the novel Ancestors, by the British author Paul Crooks, had arrived by mail. I’d put off reading it, too distracted by the questions about our DNA. But once I picked it up, it became my refuge that hot summer—an uncomfortable one but a refuge—my introduction to slavery in Jamaica. True, it was a work of fiction, but, as one reviewer put it, “fiction based on terrible fact,” forcing me to look into the stony heart of the story I was chasing. It was impossible to read and not imagine that some version of it was our story as well, the backstory of our “coloured” Captain Crooks.

  It begins with the Atlantic crossing, in 1789, in the dank bowels of a slave ship where a boy is shackled, a small link in a human chain of agony. Captured from his village on the Gold Coast of Africa, stolen from his parents, the boy finds comfort only in the words of a woman, Ami, a stranger who speaks to him of home. Her voice is a salve that sustains him through the hundred sunrises he counts through cracks and portholes, through miles of stench and death.

  When they reach Jamaica, they lose each other, the boy and the woman, sold to different estates. At the slave market a white man brands the boy with a C, and he arrives in chains at Crooks Cove, a lush plantation on the coast. It becomes his new home and August is his new name, assigned to him by Big Belly Massa John, the white Crooks man, the buckra. Crooks lives in the grand house on the hill, watching over his cane and the slave village below, where August stays with an old woman who teaches him to survive a life of bondage. He becomes a field worker and a Christian with a Christian name—John Alexander Crooks—and he prays for freedom. It is a time of unrest, the eve of abolition. In the swirl of riots and rebellion he finds Sarah, a free mulatto woman, one of the “black-white” children of a neighbouring master—and, he discovers, the daughter of Ami, who nurtured him across the Atlantic so many years before. When freedom comes, John and Sarah Crooks leave with their babies and their loaded cart, heading deep into the hills of Jamaica, determined to put a “big mountain between us and this place.…”

  I studied the author’s notes, hoarding clues from his research, the true details that had inspired him to reconstruct the story of his ancestors. Paul Crooks wrote that he was an administrator with the National Health Service in England and about my age, from what I could tell. He’d also started asking questions about his ancestry when he was seven and realized the connection between Africa and black people. He wondered how they had got their family name, Crooks. It sounded odd to him. “Who was the first Crooks who ever lived?” he’d asked his father. “Was he a white man?”

  Similar questions haunted him into adulthood, and eventually he became preoccupied with trying to find his slave ancestors. He spent long nights at the Mormons’ Family History Centre and the British Library, and after more than a dozen years, his efforts paid off. He found his fourth-generation grandmother, Ami Djaba, born in Africa and the inspiration for the Ami character in his book. The boy whom Ami nurtures on the eighteenth-century slave ship was based on the life Paul Crooks imagined for his great-great-great-grandfather, John Alexander Crooks, who actually was kidnapped from Africa at the age of ten and put aboard a slave ship bound for Jamaica, and who eventually did lead his family to freedom.

  Once liberated, they settled in the south-western Jamaican parish of Westmoreland, where many Crookses could be found. But what the author still did not know—the missing piece in his ancestral puzzle—was where they had all come from. Where had his Crooks ancestors been enslaved before abolition? At the Royal Geographic Society in London, he found his answer. A map of Jamaica from 1768 depicted a large plantation on the northwest shore of the island: Crooks Cove. I searched a modern-day map of Jamaica but found nothing in the region named Crooks Cove, only a Cousins Cove. If that was it, it wasn’t far at all from where my great-grandfather had been born in Falmouth. I wondered if DNA would connect us to that place, whether my answer would lie on a genetic map.

  12

  MEN ABOUT TOWN

  DNA first convicted a killer in 1986. It happened in Leicester, just a stone’s throw from the English university where DNA fingerprinting was pioneered. Two local teenaged girls had been raped and murdered two years apart and the prime suspect was a seventeen-year-old local boy named Richard Buckland. A new DNA profiling test performed on semen taken from the crime scene, however, did not match Buckland. Instead, after police ran a DNA dragnet, testing five thousand area men, they found it matched a baker by the name of Colin Pitchfork. He was the first man ever convicted with DNA evidence, and Buckland the first man exonerated because of it. The double helix has grown in the public consciousness ever since, as a kind of weapon of truth wielded to prove guilt, innocence, paternity, history, health, identity.

  But DNA can be a dull blade. A lab tech talks too much while processing a sample and her spit contaminates it. A prenatal scan points to a disability that isn’t there in an unborn child. A Y-chromosome test suggests a family link between a Florida professor and Genghis Khan that doesn’t exist. Like all human endeavours, genetics is a science subject to the fallibility of human reasoning, to errors and misinterpretations.

  Never was this more evident to me than one Wednesday afternoon in August. I received a message from Family Tree DNA informing me that my Uncle Dennis had a Y-chromosome match with a man who shared his Crooks surname—my Uncle Basil, his brother. After a year of wretched hand-wringing, the ghost of anx
iety lifted from my shoulders. Two men with the same surname and an exact twelve-marker match on their Y chromosomes have a 99 percent chance of sharing a common forefather in the recent past. In the case of Dennis and Basil, it couldn’t be more recent. They were full brothers, fathered by the same man, my grandfather. I no longer had a secret to keep, a family skeleton to shove back in the closet. I had an urge to pull out my grandmother’s prayer card and offer up an act of contrition. DNA had exonerated her. But then it was DNA that had misled me in the first place, wasn’t it?

  My maternal grandparents, Freddie and Gladys Crooks, enjoying cocktails on my father’s ship docked in Bombay in 1951.

  The circumstantial evidence had been striking: there was motive, opportunity. Earnest had been the live-in handyman, for crying out loud. And he liked to dance. What’s more, the basic conclusion was not incorrect. At a dozen markers, Dennis’s Y chromosome does match the Y of a man named Meek. But that is because the human population is so young and puny that the paternal lines of the Crooks and Meek sides of my family lead back to the same man, sometime between the last ice age and the emergence of surnames. The global family is just that tight.

  Basil’s test result made me as confident as I could be that I had the Crooks chromosome in hand, passed down from my grandfather and his father before him. It confirmed a branch of European heritage and made the connection to Lancashire more concrete. But most remarkable to me was what it said about the Captain. His christening record from Spanish Town described him as “coloured.” But like a third of African-American men and many of the world’s dark-skinned males, my great-grandfather carried the Y of a white man. And white men had been sailing to Jamaica ever since Christopher Columbus stepped ashore in 1494.

  Columbus called Jamaica “the fairest island eyes have beheld,” bigger than Sicily, full of valleys and fields and mountains that touch the sky. When his expedition arrived, it was home to the Taino people, a peaceful tribe of Arawak Indians who fished and farmed, drank cassava beer and slept in hammocks. They called their island paradise Xaymaca, meaning “land of wood and water.” But it became their hell after the Europeans laid claim to it, bringing disease, enslavement, famine. The Arawak were wiped out—an estimated sixty thousand people in fifty years. The only trace left of the indigenous people Columbus encountered in the Caribbean may be genetic, the DNA passed down from Native women who bore the children of European men.

  It was the Spanish who introduced slavery to the Americas. As the Arawak disappeared, the Spaniards began importing Africans to Jamaica. Columbus had originally claimed the island for Spain as a rich source of silver and gold. When it turned out not to be, the Spanish monarchy gave it to the Columbus family in 1540 as a personal estate. Not much was done to develop it. Colonists established a few towns and farms, but the Spanish generally treated Jamaica like a drive-through, a port of call for its warships bound for South America. When the British Navy arrived in May 1655, the Spanish barely mustered a fight.

  But for Britain too, Jamaica was initially the consolation prize of the Caribbean. Oliver Cromwell, who had recently defeated the royalists in England’s Civil War and executed King Charles I, sent ships to attack Spain’s trading power in the West Indies and stem the spread of Catholicism. Under the command of Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables, they were to capture the Spanish-held island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). But they were foiled by bad planning, bad drinking water and a motley crew. In the end, the British suffered a near massacre at Santo Domingo; only then, fearing Cromwell’s reaction, did they sail for Jamaica.

  Cromwell was not impressed: he locked up Penn and Venables in the Tower of London upon their return. But eventually he decided to make the most of his new island colony, offering free plots to the expedition crew and those willing to move there. Others he sent by force—criminals, unsavoury characters, Irish boys as indentured servants, Irish girls for the soldiers who stayed, and more than a thousand Scottish prisoners-of-war to serve wealthy English settlers. Thousands more Scots followed of their own accord: impoverished young men who signed on for years of servitude, and others keen to make a quick fortune in the white gold that was sugar. Europe had grown a sweet tooth and even men of modest means could become rich by the cane.

  The Spanish were the first to bring sugar cane to Jamaica, importing it from Haiti in 1509. But it was the British who turned its cultivation into a behemoth industry, powered almost entirely by slave labour. After Cromwell’s death and the return of the English monarchy, King Charles II made sugar the signature of his reign. He recruited investors and planters and chartered the Royal African Company to ensure that Britain would never have to buy its slaves from foreigners. By 1734 Britain was shipping in ten thousand Africans a year to toil on the island’s 429 plantation estates, and at least one of them was owned by a man named Crooks.

  It was hard not to picture him as the Massa John portrayed in Paul Crooks’s novel—the fat, rum-swilling overlord having his way with his house slave, burning alive the black man who dared to rebel. In his afterword the author wrote that the Cove plantation actually did belong to a John Crooks for a time, but that a James Crooks owned it before him. I wondered if James Crooks had sailed there from Lancashire, whether he was a forefather of the Captain’s—of ours—along with ancestors born in bondage on his land.

  It sounded logical, the Crooks Y chromosome being of European origin, tying us to the European Crookses who settled the island. But the Meek match had taught me the dangers of assuming too much. Maybe there was more than one white Crooks settler in Jamaica, maybe an indentured servant from Scotland, for all I knew. But if I could find descendants of the Crooks plantation family—hopefully a male willing to donate his Y to my cause—I could theoretically learn whether we actually did have a connection to that slave estate by the sea, whether it was the cove our Captain had left and the place my grandfather had dreamed about.

  I had no luck with the usual sources one uses to hunt for ancestors who crossed the pond. There was nothing about a Crooks sailing to Jamaica in The Complete Book of Emigrants, The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage or even the classic nineteenth-century tome The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold for a Term of Years; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed; And Others who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600–1700. That was compiled in 1874 by John Camden Hotten, the shady proprietor of a small London bookshop, distributor of pirated editions of Walt Whitman poetry and Mark Twain novels and a purveyor of his own eclectic body of work, which included biographies, erotic poems, picture books and A Modern Dictionary of Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words (which saw numerous reprints). He is rumoured to have died from eating too many pork chops. Hotten’s text is a favourite of North American genealogists, but the only Crookses I found in his book ended up in Virginia.

  I had more success tracking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Crookses on twenty-first-century websites. One in particular, Jamaican Family Search, turned out to be an astounding trove of the island’s history. The site was created and maintained by Patricia Jackson, a genealogist in California who grew up in Jamaica. All sorts of family historians have contributed to it over the years, making it a rich repository of directories; census records; birth and death registers; lists of early immigrants, landholders, and military personnel; wills; personal correspondence; newspaper clippings; and essays historical and contemporary.

  I signed up, and on my first day trawling through it I found a reference to a George A. Crooks, whom I took to be the Captain’s father and my great-great-grandfather. It was a brief item published in the Falmouth Post on Tuesday, July 24, 1877, under the headline EXTRAORDINARY BIRTH: “On Thursday night in this town, the wife of Mr. George A. Crooks gave birth to three Sons. The young fellows are strong and healthy, and along with the mother, are doing well.” Triplets. We had triplets in the family. The notice did not spell out George’s middle name as Atki
nson, but the timing and the place fit perfectly—Falmouth, four years after the Captain was born.

  The birth announcement was just one of 150 references to the Crooks surname on the site. In nineteenth-century directories for the north-western parishes of Trelawny—home to Falmouth and, apparently, the Captain’s family—and Hanover, where the Crooks plantation had been, I found mention of a labourer named Crooks, a fisherman named Crooks, a schoolmaster, a schoolmistress, a merchant, a mariner, a carpenter, a tinsmith, a goldsmith, a deputy bailiff, a baker, a wharf operator and even a keeper of the town clock in Lucea. It seemed as if all the people who lived on this shoulder of the island were named Crooks. Then I came across a document that explained why. It was a slave register.

  Written sixty years before the birth announcement of the Crooks triplets, twenty-one years before abolition, the register listed all the slaves owned at the Cousins Cove plantation. From the map of Jamaica I’d seen, Cousins Cove seemed to lie in the stretch of land where Crooks Cove had once been. Of the 179 men, women and children listed as slaves on the property in 1817, sixty-three were named Crooks.

  Property owners in Jamaica had not been required to track slaves by name until Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. Only then did the Crown start demanding a regular accounting of slaves, to ensure that Africans were not being secretly imported to the island. The planters were apoplectic. They saw it as an attack on their right to govern their own affairs. Some even mused about following in the footsteps of American revolutionaries and breaking from Britain entirely. But for all their fomenting, the registration of slaves became law in 1815.

  The tally I came across appeared to be the first one ever conducted at the Cove. It was titled “A Return of slaves in the parish of Hanover in the Possession of Richard Dickson as owner settled on Cousins Cove Sugar Plantation on the 28 day of June in the Year of Our Lord 1817.” I wasn’t sure who Dickson was, or how he had come to own the Crooks property and its slaves. The register listed their “old names,” Christian name, colour, age and whether they were African-born. Two names were familiar to me: August, age thirty, the real-life grandfather, three generations back, of author Paul Crooks; and the African matriarch of his family, “Ammie Jabba,” age forty, one of forty-eight slaves who had arrived in Jamaica from Africa. The rest had been born on the island and were designated as “creole,” from the Spanish word criollo, meaning “to breed.” The registration of creole slaves included information on their parentage. There was Pallas, a twenty-two-year-old “Negro … Daughter of Fanny Frazer,” renamed Fidelia Crooks. There was Richard, eighteen, a “Sambo … Son of Anny Dickson”; two-year-old John Stewart, a “Mulatto … Son of Margaret Stewart”; and wee Eliza, just four days old, the youngest slave at the Cove. Eliza was the daughter of Elinor Crooks, and Elinor was the daughter of “Blk Eliza Crooks.”