The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  Sarah also had brothers, Harris said—three or four, and one of them was a ship’s captain. The captain had a son in India, and that son once wrote a letter to his mother from Bombay. “I was there when the letter came,” Harris told me. “He said he wanted to come to Jamaica, that he was a stationmaster, but that he had a large family, several children, and needed assistance. She was quite peeved that this relative suddenly wanted to maintain ties. The Crookses were very snobbish people.”

  “Yes, I know my grandfather wrote letters looking for his father’s family in Jamaica. I think he received only one reply, and it was harsh. It accused my grandfather of being an impostor and warned him against any future contact. Did Sarah write it?”

  “No,” Harris said quickly. “Sarah would not have written such a letter. She might have told him she had no funds—the boys had the money on the estate. Sarah did social work. She developed the Stoneyhill Reformatory for girls in Kingston—” Then he stopped himself.

  “But now, wait,” Harris said. “It could be that her husband wrote it. Sarah was married to a fellow named Braine, the son of a bishop, a nice-looking man who turned out to be a drunkard. He eventually got involved with voodoo. Sarah met him in Kingston, but the Crooks family did not approve of their union and they eventually did divorce.”

  Had it been just the scribbles of an occultist drunk trying to scare off his wife’s nephew? Is that why my grandfather had crumpled that letter so quickly, why it had changed his mind so completely that, after all his efforts, he abandoned the notion of even visiting his father’s birth land?

  Harris wouldn’t put it past Sarah’s husband to send a poison-pen letter, and to my mind that’s what it had been. Braine was a white man, or at least close to it, Harris said. Yet the reply sent to my grandfather warned him against coming to Jamaica if his wife was white, as if they were a black family that wanted nothing to do with whites. Harris had nothing good to say about Braine, but it was obvious his affection ran deep for the woman who had raised him.

  “They called her Sally for short,” he said. “She worked in a law firm and died in the 1960s at the age of eighty. She was quite a happy woman. She loved dancing; she used to attend dances at the town hall. She was short, only about five foot two, and slim. She was pretty fair in complexion.”

  “I know the Captain’s baptism record says he was coloured,” I offered.

  “Well, there was some understanding that she had a touch of Ibo in her.”

  His revelation reminded me of a verse Paul Crooks had included in his novel that mentioned the Ibo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. It was a song that slave women sang as they worked in the fields with babies strapped to their backs:

  If me want for go in a Ebo

  Me can’t go there

  Since them tief me from Guinea

  Me can’t go there …

  Harris knew nothing else about Sarah’s Ibo heritage. “But they called her a mustafina because she was about 98 percent white. She had long black hair—what you’d call a white Jamaican, a good-looking woman.”

  “They call you sambo, you know, if you are 25 percent white,” he said with a zesty laugh. “This means you have a little milk in your coffee!”

  Sarah’s father, George, died in the Falmouth area, Harris told me. But her mother, Catherine, came to live with her in Kingston for a time. He said she’s buried there, my great-great-grandmother, in the Maypen Cemetery. He went there once with Sarah to visit her mother’s tomb. “But you don’t want to be walking through there without a police escort,” Harris warned me. “You’ve got to get to Falmouth. The Crooks family was a big deal there, and that was when Falmouth was more developed than Montego Bay.”

  Did he know where exactly the family had an estate? He didn’t, only that it was out towards Falmouth.

  Did he know anything about their being members of the Masonic lodge?

  “They might have been part of the Masonic lodge, the brotherhood helping each other. But you’ll find something about them there. The Crookses also owned a wharf, and the Crooks boys seemed to be … men about town, if you get my meaning.”

  “Men about town?”

  “I think they made lots of women happy—and there’s nothing wrong with that!” He gave another big laugh.

  I wanted to tell him that the Crookses had apparently been men about town since the last ice age, but I couldn’t imagine where a conversation on the Y chromosome might lead, given the spry mind of Mr. Harris.

  I sat at the kitchen table for a while after we hung up, trying to process the scale of the coincidence—that this honey-voiced old man from Jamaica, the adopted son of the Captain’s sister and witness to the desperate letter my grandfather had sent from India sixty years ago, lived just up the highway. I didn’t need DNA to tell me how interconnected humans can be.

  13

  AN ISLAND PLACE

  “Oh, really?” people said when they heard. “You’re going to do research—in Jamaica?” I understood their skepticism. I have the same reaction when I scan a list of upcoming medical conferences and see a winter meeting in Hawaii to discuss catheter techniques. But when the people you tell are family, they believe you. They say, “Well, if it’s family research, the family should go along … to help.”

  So there we were that November on our roots tour—Stephen, Jade, my father, my mother, my sister and I—having lunch at the airport while we waited for a plane to Montego Bay. We ate club sandwiches and drank beer and bloody Caesars. We pulled out an island map and laid fingers on our destination. None of us had been to Jamaica before.

  The country’s annual homicide rate hovers around 1,500. On an island with fewer than three million people, that’s nearly fifty murders for every 100,000 residents, twenty-five times higher than the Canadian rate and one of the highest in the world. Most of the bloodshed flows from the gang-infested slums of Kingston, where stories of drug wars and gunfights clog the press. It can leave the impression that there are safer places to get a tan. But the bulk of Jamaica’s billion-dollar-a-year tourist industry revolves around the resorts of the north shore, far from the crime-plagued capital. That’s where we were headed, to the north coast, partway between the archives of Spanish Town and the hometown of the Captain.

  My father pointed out that Jamaica had a dramatically different reputation when my grandfather was hoping to sail there. In the 1940s, he said, violence was a word used only to describe the island’s hurricanes. Jamaica had been like an exclusive country club for the rich and famous: Noel Coward, the Kennedys, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin. Author Ian Fleming built a cliffside home on the north coast he called Goldeneye, where he brought James Bond to life in a booze-fuelled haze of five weeks. To Fleming, Jamaica was “a refreshment for all the senses.”

  “In Papa’s time, when you said you were going to Jamaica, it sounded exotic,” my father said as we ate. “That was all—an exotic place, still a British colony, as India had been, but a paradise of sunshine, farms and sand.”

  We touched down in the dark at Sangster International Airport and trudged blurry-eyed into the hot night air, herded onto resort-bound coaches headed east. We had more than an hour to ride, and the hum of the diesel engine lulled us. Jade stretched out across our laps and slept. My eyes slid over the black shapes of distant hills, where lights twinkled like stars. The requisite reggae played soft and low over the speaker system, Marley singing about how no one can forget their past.

  “This is a nice track,” my mother said. “Who is this?”

  “Bob Marley, Mum.”

  “I must get this one.”

  Our first full day inched along as a good Sunday should in Jamaica, at the beach. My father was there first, stretched out with a newsmagazine under a thatch-roofed gazebo. Stephen joined him and I headed for the half-moon of the shoreline with Jade and my mother. It was hurricane season, and nearly empty. Jade busied herself gouging ditches against the tide. My mother and I
wandered neck-deep into the sea.

  “How does it feel,” I asked her, “to be here?”

  What could she say … warm saltwater lifting our limbs, the sun on our cheeks.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mum said. “I wish my father could have been here. Who would have imagined that now, after all these years, I would be here, at this age, looking for his people.”

  His people. Our people. Mine. I floated along on my back. A few grey clouds drifted into the blue. The old Crooks Cove was probably just a few hours away by car. I’d seen slave quarters once, at an old plantation in Louisiana: small clapboard squares where whole families had lived. I wondered if my mother was prepared for what we might find here, or who we might find. When Roots first aired on television, she hid—not just her eyes but her whole self. You should see this, my father had said to her. But episode after episode, my mother would bury her face in her hands and then finally leave the TV room and stand out in the hall. My father narrated for her from the far end of the sofa. “Come on, Tweet! It’s all right now; that scene is finished. Come back. You’re missing it.”

  My mother’s thoughts must have been gliding over similar waves. “We never knew anything about black people growing up in India,” she said suddenly. “We never saw them. And oh, when they came, everyone was frightened.”

  “When who came?”

  “During the war, must have been ’43 or ’44. Papa was posted at the railway station in Daund.” It was a small town southeast of Bombay but a major railway hub. The Allies established bases in India to fight the Japanese on the Burmese front, and the Americans had stationed a “negroes only” regiment in Daund. “Everyone said, ‘You better be indoors by six o’clock,’ ” my mother said. “No one knew what to think. Everyone was scared of blacks. No one had seen blacks before—can you imagine?”

  My mother remembered returning from midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with Nana Gladys, her siblings and Nana’s father, Grandpa Thompson. “We walked home from the church through a cornfield, and the corn was quite tall. One of the boys up ahead—Shepherd, I think it was—started shouting like mad. ‘There’s a drunken man down here, lying down. Be careful, don’t step on him. He’s black!’ We were terrified; everyone started running. But Grandpa couldn’t run, and we were so scared, shouting, ‘Run, Grandpa, run!’ But we all took off and left him behind.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “It was, but we didn’t know any better. I don’t think those men were treated very well. The black soldiers rarely left the barracks.”

  Jade had wandered into the water at the shoreline and was rolling back and forth with the waves. Stephen splashed by with his snorkel gear but I was reluctant to join him. My mother was paddling quietly in circles, distracted.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m hesitating,” Mum said. “I don’t even like to think about this, and I do, because it comes back to my mind whenever I take a shower. Certain things stain your mind.”

  “Well, you can’t say that and not tell me.”

  “During that time, during the war, I went away as a boarder to school. I remember coming back on one of the holidays and Papa’s friend, Albert Hales, took us to the barracks in Daund and I saw a punishment they were giving to those black soldiers.”

  “Who were ‘they’? White officers? To the black soldiers?”

  My mother nodded. “They had them outside on the ground,” she said. “Three or four of them, with a big kerosene vessel suspended over them, and water was dripping on them—drip, drip. And my father said, ‘Come. Come quickly,’ and he pulled me away.”

  “Water … It was water dripping on them?”

  “I put it together later that it must have been some form of torture—maybe water torture, isn’t it, when there’s the drip, drip? I hate to think of it. I think of it in the shower, always, when the water is dripping down my back.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised by my mother’s having witnessed the torture of American soldiers by their own officers when she was a child, or by the fact that she had never told me the story. “That’s a traumatic scene for a child to see. Obviously, if you still think about it in the shower.”

  She paused again. “I know, but you know, I never really knew what I saw.… I don’t remember how they were held down to the ground, if they were lying on their backs, if there were three or four.… But I hate to think of it—hate to—and hate to talk about it.”

  I had always wondered if a certain prejudice had diluted my mother’s interest in whatever African heritage she might have. But as we swam that day, I saw my mother’s ambivalence about her Jamaican roots as something else: fear. It was the fear of discovering a family history she did not have the stomach to contemplate. I had told her about Paul Crooks’s novel of his slave ancestors, but my mother never asked to read the book, or even to see it. But if we found out that we actually had slaves in our family, we’d all be pushed to consider their existence in one way or another—not in the abstract, as characters in a book or a miniseries, but as our people, our not-so-long-ago grandfathers and grandmothers, stolen from their homes, condemned to bondage and fates far worse than water torture.

  Everton Esmie was waiting for us outside the hotel the next morning with his brand-new minibus and a smile like a wilted corsage. I couldn’t blame him. Groups like ours are hard to move quickly. Trim, young and tidy, outfitted in a starched baby-blue shirt and navy slacks, Mr. Esmie gave the impression of a serious, allbusiness sort. Everything about our driver, except for that drooping smile, seemed permanently pressed.

  “You must be Everton,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Please,” he said, “call me Troy.”

  We took off westward along the north coast highway, drinking in our first daylight views of the island beyond the resort. Like all West Indian islands, Jamaica is essentially the top of a submarine mountain range, prehistoric peaks that managed to keep their heads above water. They run like a spine from east to west, crisscrossed by ridges branching off north and south, making a rumpled mass of most of the island. With their limestone cliffs, their slopes clad in malachite coats of Jamaican pine and blue mahoe, the hills had been a temptress, once upon a time, to runaway slaves. If they didn’t break out by canoe, they often disappeared into the hills, finding refuge and freedom with the famous mountain-dwelling Maroons.

  Originally the Maroons were a band of African slaves the Spanish had armed and left behind to torment the British. But over time their numbers grew, and these rebels managed to wage two wars against the British before six hundred of them were shipped to Nova Scotia. In Ancestors, Paul Crooks writes that he longed to find that he had a Maroon ancestor, the more rebellious the better. I had brought his book along with me, tucked in my backpack with my notebook and maps. The author had finally replied to the email I’d sent him that fall. He was intrigued by my request to test his Y chromosome and said he would be happy to talk further. But I’d only managed to connect with his answering machine before we left.

  Troy’s minibus slowed to a crawl when we reached Falmouth. Its narrow eighteenth-century roadways teemed with life: school girls in kilts, old men, young men, women waiting for a bus, motorbikes, taxis, goats. Rastafarians in bright berets hung around tin-roofed shacks selling coconuts and pop, and we lurched to a halt in front of them. A Jamaican traffic jam.

  Back when the island was the world’s sugar bowl, when being “rich as a West Indian planter” meant wealth on par with monarchs, Falmouth was its heart. It had more sugar estates around it than any other part of the country. Local planters, in need of a port, founded the town in 1769, and like the cane, it grew fast and wild. A giant cage once stood in the town square to hold the nightly batch of drunks, and money flowed like the rum. There were factories and foundries, shops, hotels and planters’ town homes. Falmouth was said to be the wealthiest New World port south of Charleston; it had piped-in water before New York City. According to the historian Daniel Ogilvie, on any
given day at least twenty tall ships could be counted in Falmouth’s harbour, loading rum and sugar, unloading goods and slaves. But the steamship killed Falmouth. Its harbour was too shallow to accommodate the hulking bellies of the new ships, and with the abolition of slavery and sugar prices falling, plantations began to fail. Falmouth must have been dwindling by the time my great-grandfather was born, on its way to becoming a weekly market town, blighted by time and the salt air.

  Ambitious efforts were underway to restore the port and its fine Georgian architecture, mostly coordinated by Falmouth Heritage Renewal, a non-profit group devoted to saving the city’s history. I hoped to find leads to the Crookses of Falmouth at their offices, which were in a handsome moss-covered two-storey building with a portico and Palladian windows—and empty. The interior was stripped to its studs. The only people inside appeared to be carpenters and contractors. I asked if anyone could tell me where I could find the Falmouth Renewal offices. A voice called back from the darkness inside, saying they would fetch “Peter, the supervisor.”

  Peter appeared a few moments later, covered in a fine layer of dust. He was a young black man in a football jersey and jeans. “I’m sorry to interrupt your work,” I said, and explained what we were after.

  “Crooks?” he said. “Don’t they own a nightclub in Montego Bay?”

  “Oh. Well, could be,” I said, thinking that would be an entirely predictable vocation for my kin. “Which club is it?”

  “No, wait a minute,” Peter said, pulling a cellphone from his back pocket. “Let me see if I can get Dr. Parrent.”

  Dr. James Parrent, the executive director of Falmouth Heritage Renewal, was away in Kingston. Peter got him on the line and passed me the phone. I told him briefly that I was looking for information on the Crooks family that I understood had lived in the area, owning land and possibly a wharf sometime back.