The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  The slave register was the only genealogical document I’d seen that included the identity of the mother—and only the mother. Of course it had nothing to do with recognition of women, quite the opposite. It simply confirmed them and their offspring as chattels. Any child born to a slave woman automatically became the property of the master, who essentially could breed his own assets. Identifying only the maternal line not only diminished the very existence of black fathers, it offered anonymity to the slave owners and their white associates who sired a substantial number of the slave children born on the estates. From what I could tell, that figure was more than 12 percent at the Cove.

  Having the Crooks name did not necessarily mean the slave had a Crooks father, since slaves often ended up with the master’s name one way or another. But the careful colour classifications of the slaves spoke volumes about paternal bloodlines. A negro was the child of two black parents. A mulatto had one black parent and one white. A sambo had one black parent and one mulatto parent. A “quadroon” was the offspring of a white parent and a mulatto parent, a “mustee” had a white and a quadroon parent, and a “mustafina” was the child of a white parent and a mustee; members of this last category were white by law and therefore free. India’s ethnic designations paled next to such precision. But then, this colour code carried actual value in a slave economy. Those with less “black” blood were considered less rebellious and were therefore often more expensive.

  Working from the assumption that the white parent was almost always male, it seemed that white men were the biological fathers of at least fifteen slaves at the Cove in 1817. Five of them, all bearing the Crooks name, were the mulatto children of Nancy Crooks, a forty-five-year-old creole woman. No wonder she appeared as the Massa’s “housekeeper” in Paul’s novel. But was she in fact the slave mistress of a Crooks patriarch? Could she have been a maternal ancestor of the Captain? Either of her two sons could have been his grandfather.

  But my great-grandfather was born thirty-five years after slavery ended, and with it the official use of colour classifications. Knowing he was “coloured” told me only that he was a mixture of black and white, not whether his mother was black or a mulatto or a quadroon or whatever. By that vague descriptor, any one of the forty-one slave women at the Cove could have been a maternal ancestor of his, of mine. Or maybe none of them were. Maybe the Captain’s line had originated with a Crooks man and a free coloured woman.

  In his book Between Black and White, the historian Gad J. Heuman writes that by 1820 the free coloured population in Jamaica had tripled within a span of thirty years. By 1844 there were sixty-nine thousand free coloured people, outnumbering whites by more than four to one. Most of them had been set free by the white men who were their lovers or their fathers, a fact that brought me back from the slave register to the only solid lead I had: the Y chromosome of a European man.

  He was a boy, the first white Crooks I came across—James Crooks, a minor, listed in the quit-rent book of 1754, a written record of annual fees paid to the Crown for land granted in Jamaica in the seventeenth century. It was a mysterious entry: the Crooks estate, all 763 acres in Hanover, was in the hands of a child. The second white Crooks I found was a “jobber” (someone I took to be a hired hand) by the name of Christopher Crooks who owned forty-one slaves in St. James, a parish near Hanover. The next mention of Crookses came in a 1776 list of Hanover property owners that identified the owners of Crooks Cove as the “Heirs of James Crooks.”

  One of these heirs must have been a Crooks named John, since it was his name that appeared as the author of this warm and fuzzy notice published in the Cornwall Chronicle:

  Cousins Cove, Hanover, Sept. 19, 1792

  WENT OFF in a Canoe, from Launce’s Bay, on Monday the 17th instant, the following Negroes:

  GEORGE, a Moco, about 5 feet 8 inches high, very stout, and of a yellow complexion.

  KENT, a Moco, 5 feet 11 inches high, very slim made, of a black complexion, and stoops in walk.

  DONALD, a Moco, 5 feet 6 inches high, is well made, and has a short round face.

  NELLY, a Moco, 4 feet 10 inches high, a yellow wench and bow-legged.

  All of them, except Donald, (who was purchased about a month ago) speak a little broken English, particularly Fox, they have no brand mark. A suitable Reward will be paid to any Person apprehending any of the above Negroes, and giving information to GEORGE MALCOLM, Lucea, or the Subscriber, or lodging them in any Workhouse.

  JOHN CROOKS.

  They may well have been caught, those runaway slaves. Both a George and a Nelly appear on the 1817 slave register of the Cove property, and once again the fictional portrayal of Massa John Crooks had a ring of truth to it. But how, in real life, were these Crookses related to one another, the boy, the jobber, the slave-owner? It was a remarkable document from 1740 that first allowed me to piece some of it together: the last will and testament of James Crooks, the earliest known proprietor at the Cove.

  I James Crooks of the parish of Hanover and Island of Jamaica … being sick and weak in Body but of a disposesing [sic] mind and memory thanks be given to the Almighty God …

  Give and bequeath unto my brother Christopher Crooks one Negro wench named Betty with her three children named Sisley Jenny and Easthere to him and his heirs forever …

  Unto my brother Rice Crooks six Negroes to be bought out of the produce arising from my Estate …

  Unto Thomas George son of my sister Elizabeth George £100 at the age of twenty one years

  Unto my daughter Ann Crooks £600 pounds at the age of twenty one years or six months after marriage and also one Negro girl to be chosen by her out of the Negroes belonging to my estate

  Provided the child which my wife Anna Petronella now goes with be a Boy and live but in case it be a Girl I bequeath unto the said girl the Pimento walk with all the land thereunto belonging … and Ann Crooks shall have all the residue and remainder of my Estate both real and personal … and her heirs …

  But in case a Boy be born alive then he shall have all the before mentioned remainder and residue of my estate … and his heirs …

  I can’t say how many times I read it. Enough that certain phrases lodged in my memory: unto my brother … a Negro wench named Betty and her three children; unto my daughter … one Negro girl to be chosen by her. How comfortably tenderness curled up with inhumanity. A man on his deathbed bequeaths black people, children, to his loved ones like silverware. The 1817 slave register was a cold inventory, but the will of James Crooks, with all its good intentions, seemed colder still.

  The will contained enough details to sketch the beginnings of the Crooks family tree at the Cove. James Crooks had at least two brothers, Christopher and Rice, and a sister, Elizabeth. Christopher may have been the white jobber I’d read about who had forty-one slaves of his own in a nearby parish in 1774, but the timing—thirty years after James died—seemed off. Certainly James was the planter; dying young, he left behind his young daughter, Ann, and a pregnant wife. His widow, Anna Petronella, eventually did give birth to a boy and named him after his dead father. The younger James Crooks was the minor in possession of the Crooks plantation in 1754, the thirteen-year-old master of the Cove.

  Nothing I found revealed how or when the Crookses had first come to Jamaica or whether they had set sail from Lancashire, only that England was their likely point of origin. They had to be among the island’s earliest settlers, judging by the fees listed in the quitrent book. But however James Crooks Senior came to be at the Cove, being a literate white landowner placed him among the island’s gentry, and one in need of a wife. But women were in short supply in Jamaica, white women rarer still, and as one soldier hinted in a letter home, “comely white women” were as scarce as snow. Planters married cousins or neighbours if they married at all. When James Crooks married Anna Petronella, her father, William Launce, owned the estate next to the Cove.

  I tracked the Crookses and their descendants through wills, registers, directories
and personal letters. It was a story with all the trappings of a Jane Austen novel: A handful of wealthy plantation families establish themselves in the island’s western parishes. Within a century they’re all related by marriage, business and blood, by fortune and misfortune—of which the Crookses had their fair share.

  Ann Crooks, who lost her father as a child, married John Dickson, a millwright from Scotland, had a daughter and seven sons and died at thirty-one. James Crooks Junior, who had inherited the Cove estate as a boy, was away on business in New York when he died at the age of thirty-three. He left his widow with five children under the age of ten and an estate struggling to survive in a time of falling sugar prices, successive hurricanes, debts and growing calls to abolish slavery.

  Details of what happened to the Crooks family next were laid out in the letters of one Duncan Campbell, a London shipping merchant and a major figure in British penal history: he oversaw the notorious prison hulks anchored in the Thames and sent the first British convicts to Australia. The Campbells owned several estates in Jamaica, and one Campbell married the sister of Anna Petronella, making the family cousins to the Crookses. So it was that Duncan Campbell came to be the money man for his Jamaican relatives, selling their sugar and advancing them cash. After the death of James Crooks Junior, he also seems to have become guardian of the five Crooks children—three boys, two girls—who were sent to school in England after their father died.

  Only one of the Crooks daughters returned to the island; the youngest girl died in England of a “violent putrid sore throat and fever” at the age of eleven. But from what I could tell, all three boys—James, Richard and John—made their way back to Jamaica. Richard became an army doctor or surgeon and disappeared from the records. James Crooks III may have become a merchant in Falmouth, the birthplace of my great-grandfather. It was John Crooks who took over the plantation. He kept it afloat for a while with borrowed money, most of it from his cousin Richard Dickson. One of the seven sons of John’s late aunt Ann Crooks, Richard Dickson was a merchant and real estate mogul who eventually ousted John, merged the Crooks plantation with a neighbouring estate and called it Cousins Cove, as it appears on the 1817 slave register and as it is still known.

  Duncan Campbell’s letters stopped in the 1790s, and with them, my trail. I couldn’t tell what had become of John Crooks after he lost the farm, whether he married and had sons, or whether his brothers had sons, leaving chromosomes for me to chase. But I thought there was a good chance that some of their descendants might still be living in Jamaica. Maybe a few of them were even scattered around the Cove.

  I was sure that my family was somehow connected to that plantation. But I realized I might be confusing the familiar with family. I’d spent days poring over their correspondence, reading their old-fashioned English, envisioning ruddy complexions and riding boots, pale ladies hiding from the sun under silk parasols. Their own words had landed me in their big, sad house on the hill in the same way that reading Paul Crooks’s Ancestors had drawn me into the tortured lives of the slave village below. I tried to reach the author in the fall of 2007, hoping he might provide his Crooks chromosome for comparison. It was worth a shot, even if it was a long shot, since I knew he’d already traced his father’s line back to Africa. I also thought he might have come across my “coloured” branch of Crookses in his research. I sent an email, introducing myself and our mutual island roots, and raised the possibility of testing his Y. I didn’t fully expect a reply.

  My sister phoned on Halloween night. I could hardly hear her between the trick-or-treaters and the two four-year-olds, Jade and her friend, bouncing through the living room with their bags of candy.

  “I know this probably isn’t the best time to talk,” Christine said. “But I just had the most incredible call from Aunty Doreen. She wanted to call you but she didn’t have your number. She told me this amazing story about a patient of hers who knows a lot about the Crooks family in Jamaica.”

  Aunty Doreen is a retired nurse and the wife of my father’s younger brother Howard. She was one of the few keepers of the Abraham family history and had a thick collection of birth and marriage certificates. I couldn’t fathom why she would have information about my mother’s side of the family.

  “I know,” Christine said. “It’s almost unbelievable, but Doreen happens to know a man who knows about the Crookses. She heard you were going to Jamaica and so she wanted to pass on this information. So let me read you my notes.”

  She took notes?

  I scrambled for a pen and a quiet corner and wrote the highlights on a pizza box—Doreen’s old patient … a man from Jamaica … knows the Crookses … was adopted by the Captain’s sister …

  It was uncanny. I’d just found out myself that the Captain had a sister. I’d spent time that fall at one of the Mormons’ family history centres, trying to trace the ancestry of the Captain’s father, George Atkinson Crooks, the old-fashioned way, reading records on microfilm—celluloid over cells. The centre I visited in Toronto’s west end is one of more than 4,500 around the world. Each houses microfilm copies of documents held at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the Mecca of genealogy. That their documents are freely available to the public is a gift—but not an entirely altruistic one. Since Mormons believe that dead people can be baptized by proxy, hunting for ancestors holds posthumous potential for swelling the ranks of Mormons eligible for entrance to the Kingdom of God. Latter-day Saints adherents gather and organize documents from all over the world. I had tucked into the Jamaica microfilms, copying any mention of a Crooks in the island’s western parishes—where the Captain was born, where the Crooks estate had been. I found a Sarah Crooks, an Edward Crooks, a May Crooks and a Rebecca Crooks, and at some point I’d come across the birth registration of a Margaret Isabella Crooks. She was described as “colored and legitimate,” born July 1875 to George A. Crooks, a Falmouth accountant, and C.A. Storks. I assumed that Margaret Isabella had to be the Captain’s sister. At the time I thought it was the only relevant note I had taken that day.

  I called Doreen the morning after Halloween. She told me that the story she was about to share, she had first heard twenty years ago. She was working at a hospital in the Cambridge area, an hour west of the city, where she and Howard live. One of the patients in her charge was a gentleman from Jamaica. She grew fond of him, she said. He was good fun, and feisty for his age, which she guessed was about seventy then.

  She and Uncle Howard bumped into him over the years at shops and malls around town, and they always had a pleasant chat. During one conversation it came up that Doreen and Howard were Anglo-Indians from Bombay. That’s when the man told her he’d had an uncle Crooks in Bombay, where he worked as a railway stationmaster. Doreen guessed immediately that he was referring to my mother’s family. Then she’d run into him recently, she said, at a department store and delved deeper into his Crooks connection. The man told her he had been adopted as a boy by a Sarah Crooks, whose family owned a sugarcane estate somewhere on the island. He also said he had lived with Sarah Crooks in Kingston and that the uncle Crooks in Bombay had once written to them asking for financial help to immigrate to Jamaica.

  I was speechless.

  “Apparently they didn’t have money to give away and Sarah got rid of the letter,” Doreen said. “She was apparently very Victorian and firm in her ways.” She added that she had never thought enough of the conversation to mention it. But when she had seen my parents recently and they’d told her I was heading off to do research in Jamaica, she thought this man would be worth a conversation.

  I agreed. I reached him by phone the afternoon before we flew out. His name was Clive Harris. He was about eighty-eight, completely lucid and lived in a seniors’ apartment. He had a wonderful voice, deep and warm, with a rich island accent that made a mischievous grin of every pause. I liked him instantly.

  “I’m glad you called,” Mr. Harris said. “I understand you’re a young lady looking for answers. It will be my pl
easure to help any way I can.” This man could charm the headphones off an operator. Harris told me he had immigrated to Canada from Jamaica in 1987. He was an accountant, he said, and, not surprisingly, a public speaker.

  “My aunt told me you happened to know my mother’s family in Jamaica—the Crookses.”

  “Yes, I do. I do indeed.” Harris told me that his biological mother was from Cuba and his father was a public works employee in Jamaica. They died when he was a boy and Sarah Louise Crooks adopted him.

  Sarah came from a large family in the Falmouth area, he said. She had a sister, Maggie, who married a man from Panama in the horse-racing business. Maggie, I presumed, was Margaret Isabella Crooks, whom I’d discovered at the research centre. Maggie eventually moved to Panama, Harris continued. I thought of the New York uncle who had written to my mother and Dennis, and his death registration noting that he had died in Central America—perhaps while visiting his aunt Maggie.