The Juggler's Children

  “Crooks … that’s not ringing any bells,” Dr. Parrent said. He added that he had just received a list of those buried in the local cemetery, and as far as he remembered, he was sure no one named Crooks was on it. He promised to check through his files and call back if he found anything.

  I returned the phone to Peter just as my sister wandered over to tell me that the sign in front of the old building now under renovation said it had once been the local Masonic lodge. “How’s that for a coincidence?” she said.

  It had been the lodge, but more important, where was the lodge now? I asked Peter, and he said it was located further into town, above Brown’s Supermarket. We passed small homes on our way there, some behind white picket fences, tarted up like Easter eggs, others ready to lie down in their yards. Brown’s market sat on one of the main streets, its entrance half hidden by the scaffolding of another revitalization project. The smell of cinnamon and cloves greeted us at the door. It was a cool refuge from the midday sun.

  Troy asked in patois where we could find Mr. Brown, and the cashier directed us to the back of the store. We were waiting there, Troy, my sister and me, beside shelves of instant oatmeal when a worker popped out of the storeroom and said something to Troy that made them both laugh.

  “He says Mr. Brown is in the back talking, and that he can chat.”

  “You mean chat with us?”

  “No,” Troy said, “as in he can really chat.”

  Finally, after several minutes, Mr. Brown appeared. He looked to be in his late fifties. He had a thick afro with grey at the temples, gold wire-framed glasses and several pens in the breast pocket of his floral print shirt.

  “Sorry to trouble you, but I understand that the Masonic lodge is located above your shop,” I said.

  “No, no,” he replied. “It’s not the Masonic lodge, it’s the Mechanics’ lodge.”

  “Oh … the Mechanics lodge? Do you know where we can find the Masonic lodge?”

  No, he said, he didn’t.

  I told him we were looking for information about my great-grandfather’s family, that they were Crookses who lived in town.

  “Oh, hold on,” he said. “There’s someone could help.”

  Mr. Brown motioned for us to follow him through the back storeroom, past large burlap sacks of sugar and flour, to a small rear loading dock, where an old man was perched outside on a crate of dry goods, smoking and talking with two workers. Mr. Brown told the old man we were visiting Jamaica to look for Crookses. The old man studied us and I studied him—his face, cracked and hollow like a riverbed run dry, missing teeth and most of his hair. He turned back to Mr. Brown, said something, and the two of them erupted into rapid-fire patois.

  Finally Mr. Brown translated. “This man knows a Crooks. He thinks he is your family,” he said. And then, looking directly at me, “He has eyes like yours.”

  Eyes like mine?

  “He lives in a big house that used to belong to an MP, outside of Wakefield. He used to be in sugar or something.”

  Brown gave Troy directions and we thanked him and the old man, who offered us a wide, toothless grin.

  As the skies clouded over we sped south into the interior, rattling over gravel and rutted pavement. The further inland we drove, the steeper the roads became, until we were once again winding and climbing as we had been in the Nilgiri Hills. In Coonoor we could look out over the tea crops, marvelling at their brilliant green and compact geometry. Here the sugar cane dwarfed us. Gangly and wild, it flanked both sides of the narrow roadway, obscuring everything but the asphalt ahead, its leaves brushing against the minibus as we rumbled past. Our ancestors had probably toiled in both fields, sweating on opposite sides of the world for the British, who were our forebears as well. My family seemed to owe its existence to England’s love of sweet tea. “So true,” my mother replied when I said so out loud. “But who doesn’t like a nice cup of tea?”

  With the exception of salt, few condiments have inspired as much ink as sugar. There are books on sugar and slavery, sugar and power, sugar and ships, sugar and railroads, even a nineteenth-century manual written by an Englishman to encourage his fellow planters to stay in the sugar business after the slaves had been freed: The Practical Sugar Planter; A Complete Account of the Cultivation and Manufacture of the Sugar-Cane According to the Latest and Most Improved Processes. The oldest known variety of sugar cane dates back eight thousand years in New Guinea. A thinner version grew up around the riverbanks of India, where the sultan of Mandu fed it to his cows to sweeten their milk.

  Indians were the first to find a way to convert the sweet sap of the tropical grass into crystals, naming it sharkara after the ancient Sanskrit word for gravel or sand. Once foreigners discovered “the reed that produced honey without bees,” they showed it off to the rest of the world. Arabs carried the cane to northern Africa and the Mediterranean during their conquests; the Crusaders took the “sweet salt” back to Europe. The Portuguese introduced it to Madeira, the Azores, West Africa and the Canary Islands. From there, in 1493, Columbus transported it to Hispaniola, where it eventually evolved into the thicker “noble reed” of the West Indies, destined to transform kitchens, medicine cabinets and entire kingdoms.

  But producing sugar was a brutal business. Sugar cane grows four metres tall, its long leaves sharp enough to slice flesh. Before a harvest, cane fields were often set alight to burn off the razor-like leaves and smoke out poisonous snakes hiding among them. The stalks were then cut from the root, requiring a bend-and-whack manoeuvre that taxed even the strongest backs. From there the canes had to be dragged to the mill, crushed, boiled and re-boiled. The extracted juices would finally cool into crystals around a hard core of molasses. Some say sugar cane is the most labour-intensive crop the world has ever grown. Of the twelve million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World—out of the some thirty million men, women and children who were kidnapped—an estimated 70 percent became slaves to the cane.

  On the outskirts of Wakefield, Troy parked in front of a bungalow larger than any we’d seen in the area. It was set far back from the road, surrounded by a chest-high fence and an even taller hedge. From inside the minibus we could see over it and into the yard, which had the look of a bright, sprawling putting green. Troy and I climbed out. We walked around to the front gate, which was iron, and locked, but low enough to afford a full view of the rambling pale peach-coloured house. It was shaded by a striped metal awning, below which another iron barricade ran the length of the porch. Another set of bars covered the windows and doorway. It was a fortress—or a pretty pastel prison.

  “The front door is slightly open,” I said, and called out a hello.

  “Hello?” Troy called as well. “Hello? Mr. Crooks?”

  Beyond the bars I could make out a figure moving through shadows in the front hall. The figure seemed to be looking out. We called again. This time the figure opened the barred entrance-way wide and stepped out onto his gated porch.

  I caught my breath. His face, his features, his colour.… He looked like my grandfather. He stepped out of the house, unlocked the porch gate and came down the front steps and up the walkway towards us. Then he stopped, three feet from where we stood on the other side of the gate. He didn’t look like anyone else we’d met that morning. He wasn’t black—he had a caramel complexion. He wasn’t young or tall but was disarmingly handsome for his apparent years. He wore a golf shirt with thick vertical stripes in grey and burgundy, a ball cap emblazoned with a red New York logo, and a chunky gold watch that suggested wealth. In one hand he carried a cellphone and in the other, not surprisingly, an enormous bunch of keys.

  The closer he came, the more he looked like my grandfather. I turned back to see if my mother had seen him as well. She had. Her face was pressed against the bus window with an expression of delight and disbelief. She rose quickly out of her seat.

  “How can I help you?” the key man said in a clipped Jamaican accent.

  “Hello. Are you Mr. Cro
oks?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  I introduced myself and told him I was from Canada, researching my mother’s side of the family. “You see, my mother is a Crooks and my great-grandfather was born in Falmouth,” I said. “Some people there mentioned there was a Crooks living out here, so—”

  My mother was suddenly beside me, nudging in front of me, my father too. We were all of us sandwiched between the idling bus and the gate’s metal bars, captivated by the familiarity in a stranger’s face.

  “I’m a Crooks,” my mother said.

  “I know,” he said, looking at her intensely from the other side of the gate, grinning now. “I can see it.”

  For a few moments we just stared.

  “What is your name?” my mother asked.

  Everett Lance Crooks, he said, and then he volunteered that he was seventy-four years old and that there were Crookses all over Jamaica.

  “Where did they come from?” my mother asked.

  “All of them descend from three Crooks brothers who came from Scotland to settle the island, a long ways back, maybe late in the seventeenth century.”

  My mind leapt instantly to the Cove and the will of James Crooks. I was sure those brothers had been named James, Christopher and Rice.

  One of the Crooks boys settled in Kingston, Everett Crooks continued, another in Westmoreland, the parish south of Trelawny, and a third in Hanover parish, which I knew had once been the home of Crooks Cove.

  The heat of the idling minibus began to roast our legs and the diesel fumes billowed, but Everett Crooks seemed not to notice our discomfort. Even as an afternoon rain began to fall, he never found it in himself to pluck the front gate key from his jangling bunch and invite us under the awning of his verandah. But then, how bizarre our posse must have seemed to him—Stephen, a six-foot Scandinavian-looking fellow rambling around his perimeter with a long-range lens at the ready; Christine hovering too, with Jade in tow; me scribbling his words into my notepad; my parents in their matching Tilley hats, stuck to his gate like clematis. Yet Everett Crooks kept talking. He told us his father’s name was Egbert and his grandfather was Simeon, that they had land in the interior, that he used to be in cattle, that he had bought this house from the former MP several years ago.

  “You live alone?” my mother asked.

  He said his wife and children all lived in New York now, but he was an island man.

  “But to live alone?” my mother said. “At this age?”

  “I know, I know, I’m getting on. I may have to reconsider.”

  All through the chit-chat I found my attention divided, wondering how I would ask Everett for his DNA. We’d only just learned his name. Of course, this was a scenario I had envisioned when I first began this project—finding a possible relative in a faraway place, proving or disproving it with a swab. But it was one thing to imagine it and another to have the patties to actually pull it off, particularly when the beguiling subject in question deliberately stands on the other side of an iron gate, beyond the reach of even a handshake. If he didn’t feel comfortable enough to open his gate, to offer us shelter from the rain, what were the chances he would open his mouth to give his DNA to a stranger?

  I didn’t have much time to deliberate. The rain picked up speed and the ink in my notepad began to run. Everett finally seemed to notice the downpour and said he was sorry he couldn’t be of more help. It was our cue to leave. If not his DNA, I did manage to ask him for his phone number (he obliged) and whether he knew anyone who could tell us more about the Crooks families. He suggested that a local relative of his, Curniff Crooks, might be helpful. As I jotted down the cell number he provided, Everett suddenly startled us all. He took two steps forward, shook our hands over his tall gate and wished us well. Then he was gone.

  Bouncing down the road towards the coast again, we were all atwitter about our first Crooks encounter, dissecting his features, his coy grin (yes, he was a Crooks, all right), his iron-clad security and his insecurity. Even Troy chimed in. “That man had something to hide.”

  “He must have been frightened,” Mum said, defending her father’s lookalike. “It was his age, and he lives alone.”

  “No, no, he thought we were after something, all right,” Dad said. “An inheritance, his property.”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, it was just a bit of his tissue.”

  “No, he’s all alone there,” Mum said again, “and there are so many of us.” Meeting Everett had touched my mother—flesh-and-blood evidence of a Jamaican family perhaps, and a large one, apparently. Crookses all over the island, Everett had said.

  As we neared the coastal highway again I dialled the number for Curniff Crooks. He answered on the first ring. “It’s good to hear from some fellow Crookses!” he said immediately. Everett had clearly called ahead.

  Curniff’s accent was thicker than Everett’s, his tone warmer. Like Troy, he was a driver with the Jamaican Tourist Board. He told me he was at a bank in Falmouth just then, and if we drove straight there we could meet in the parking lot.

  A short while later, Troy pulled up beside the bank on Market Street and shut off the engine. We kept our eyes trained on the entrance, waiting for Curniff.

  “This feels like a stakeout,” Stephen said.

  “I wonder who he’s going to look like,” Christine said.

  “What’s a stakeout?” Jade asked.

  One of the town’s retro new builds, the bank sits across the road from a house built in 1799 that once belonged to the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Barretts had owned great swaths of Falmouth once, and Edward Barrett, the poet’s father, was born in Jamaica. But like so many in the island’s early planter families, he left to be schooled in England and never returned. I had read that Edward Barrett forbade his eleven children to marry. He apparently knew that his Jamaican roots included an African bloodline, a secret he feared would be revealed in the complexion of a grandchild. But Elizabeth Barrett married Robert Browning all the same. Shortly after her elopement she wrote “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” telling the tragic story of a slave woman raped by a white master, bearing a white child she was compelled to suffocate with a handkerchief.

  The poet was too frail for most of her life to endure the voyage to Jamaica, but in 1838 she wrote about her yearning: “My dream is of an island place, / Which distant seas keep lonely,—/ A little island on whose face / The stars are watchers only.…” I thought of my grandfather whenever I read it.

  14

  STICKS AND STONES

  A heavyset man in his fifties stepped out of the bank. He had salt-and-pepper hair cropped short, a beard, jeans, a linen shirt and a cellphone clipped to his breast pocket.

  “Curniff?” I called out.

  Where Everett had seemed wary and aloof, Curniff was warm and enthusiastic, greeting us with a broad smile and a vigorous handshake. “Yes, yes, you are Crookses, I can see it,” he said.

  It was inevitable that we would search each other’s faces for traces of ourselves. He looked more African than Everett, but he too had that milk-in-his-coffee complexion, light brown eyes and something—in the slope of his jaw, the set of his mouth and nose—that somehow looked familiar. He didn’t hesitate when we invited him to lunch.

  “You like patties?” he asked, and climbed straight into our minibus.

  On the way, he told us that he and Everett were related—second cousins or some such, he didn’t know for sure. We told him we were looking into our grandfather’s heritage and he told us the same story we had heard from Everett: that the Crooks name came to Jamaica with three brothers. He had heard they were Scottish.

  At a fast-food restaurant in the newer part of Falmouth, my parents and I sat with Curniff on opposite sides of a Formica table. “I feeeel it,” Curniff said suddenly, looking intently at my mother and me. “I feeeel de connection. We are family—you look just like my daughter,” he told me. “All the Crookses on the island are one family.”

  Recalling t
he slave list from the Cove and the way surnames were assigned to Africans in mass baptisms, I had my doubts about that. But Curniff maintained that in one way or another the three brothers had left a legacy of hundreds of Crookses. We told him what we knew of our Crooks ancestors: George Atkinson Crooks, an accountant in Falmouth; the Captain; triplet brothers; possibly a sugar estate. The names meant nothing to him.

  “The Crookses have tended to be high-prestige, low-profile people on the island,” he said, “into cattle, cane and cultivation. Property owners, businesspeople.” Then he added, “You know, you are not the first Crooks group from Canada to speak with me about their family here.”

  We were bewildered.

  A man and woman from Canada came to Jamaica in 1974, he said, and spoke with him about their Crooks ancestors. He remembered the year clearly because he was in hospital at the time, in traction after breaking his leg in a car accident.

  “What were their names?” I asked, wondering if we had been following in the footsteps of my uncle and aunt, Dennis and Merlyn. “Oh, I don’t recall their names, and I wished I could have told them more,” he said, “but I was in too much pain to talk.”

  Whoever they were, I thought, they must have been on an urgent mission, so intent on finding their Jamaican relatives they would interrogate a man in traction.

  “I told them what I am telling you,” Curniff said. “All the Crookses are one family on the island.”

  It was my opening, my chance. “You know, Curniff, there’s a way we could actually find out if that is true in our case.”

  “Really?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  Over the crumbs of our lunch I told him about the Y-chromosome tests we could take to find out if we were descended from the same male line of Crookses. “All I would need would be a sample of your DNA,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt at all—just a swab of your inner cheek.”

  “But why do you need the test? Don’t you know the answer already? We are family. I do feel it. Can you feeeel it?”