Could I? Was it the resemblance—mine to his daughter—that convinced him of our kinship, the way it had convinced us with the elusive Everett? We’d known Curniff less than two hours, shared a ride, a meal, no more, and he was ready to embrace us as family—one clan, one love. What was my benchmark for feeling the bond, a common chromosome? I had swapped pictures and family stories with men I had never met, men in Maine, Brisbane, Miami, with only a meagre strand of DNA binding us. Yet here I was at last in the homeland of Captain Crooks, sharing a table with a man named Crooks who, if I squinted, bore some likeness to one or more of my uncles.
“So what will the test tell you?” he asked.
“Well, if we know for sure that we are related, we might be able to find out how we are related.” We knew so little about our Crooks heritage in Jamaica, I told him, that maybe by learning the details of his family history we could discover our common male ancestor.
“Sure, sure,” he said, softening again. “That sounds interesting.”
I let the DNA issue lie for the moment; I wasn’t keen to swab at the Juici Patti. Curniff mentioned that he had a bit of time before his next appointment and said that if my mother was certain her ancestors were Protestant, perhaps he could help us find their tombs in Falmouth’s old Anglican cemetery.
“Oh yes,” my mother said. “That would be very good of you.”
The skies cracked wide open as we left the restaurant, drenching us on the short run to the minibus. We drove Curniff back to his car at the bank and then followed him to the centre of town, to St. Peter’s Anglican Church, which from the looks of it had weathered its share of storms. It was the oldest public building in Falmouth, a single storey of brick and stone constructed on Barrett lands in 1795. We took it in while waiting for the rain to stop: black mould clinging to its exterior, windows broken, the clock on its steeple stopped at ten past two, and the steeple a spire of such grand dimensions that the little church seemed to sink beneath it.
When the rain slowed, Curniff led Stephen, Troy and me into the church cemetery. The tombs sat a few feet above the ground. Grass and weeds had grown over so many that I didn’t see them until my shins banged against stone. Many bore inscriptions too worn to read. There may well have been a Crooks lying in this verdant patch of anonymous souls, but there seemed no way to be sure. I was rounding the church to head back to the minibus when I noticed the goats. They stood like sentinels on top of the graves, staring at us. “Eerie,” Stephen said.
Goats on tombs at St. Peter’s Anglican cemetery in Falmouth, Jamaica.
And they were. In island folklore a goat might well be a duppy, the patois term for a restless spirit or ghost, and usually a nasty one. Jamaica loves its ghost stories: tales of departed souls tormenting the living, haunting mansions, taking animal forms, terrorizing people at night. Most of the island’s superstitions stem from a long history of African folk magic that once made white captors fearful of the sorcery slaves might wield against them. To this day the Jamaica Customs Service allows no books on black magic to cross its borders.
Back at the minibus, Curniff put his arms around us and posed for a group photo before bidding us farewell. We all thanked him for the time he had spent with us. Just as he was turning to leave, he turned back. “Call me later in the week,” he said. “Before you go, for my DNA.”
“Really?” I said.
“No problem,” he replied. “Why not?”
I had pictured how it would go in Spanish Town. My parents and I would get to the archives early and work backwards in the record books from the date of my great-grandfather’s birth until I found the marriage of his parents. I was sure the registration of George Atkinson Crooks’s marriage to Catherine Storks would include the names of the bride’s and groom’s parents, and then I could trace their history, perhaps to the Cove.
Troy picked us up early and we made it to Jamaica’s old capital shortly after nine o’clock. Only after numerous lineups to get into the Registrar General’s office did a glum woman in a grey tunic tell us that the lights had burned out in the vault where the records are held. She wasn’t sure when they would be replaced. The best she could offer was to retrieve nineteenth-century records at random. She disappeared into the vault and returned wheeling a trolley piled high with ledgers the size of paving stones, and nearly as heavy. We hauled a few at a time onto a long table under fluorescent lights and dug in. We found loads of Crookses, but none with familiar names.
I found references to mass baptisms at which several African slaves were renamed Crooks on the same day. I also came across wills written by Crookses making it clear that owning slaves in Jamaica was not a right exclusive to whites. Free coloured people—men and women who were part African themselves—bequeathed African slaves to their loved ones just as the white master of Crooks Cove had done. For the first time it occurred to me that drawing lines between slave and slave owner in our family might well be impossible. I remembered reading in the nineteenth-century chronicles of John Stewart that coloured people were considered the worst kind of slave owners, mimicking the ways of the white man to excess, as if by mistreating blacks they owned they could beat the colour right out of themselves. “The negroes,” Stewart wrote, “are wont to say: ‘If me, for have massa or misses, give me Buckra one—no give me mulatto, dem no use neega well.’ ”
But for all the hours I had in that archive to imagine who the Captain’s ancestors had been, I couldn’t find them. None of us could. We stayed until closing, with only a few photocopied wills to show for it. One was written in 1919 by a David Atkinson Crooks of Hanover. I suspected he might have had some connection to the Captain’s father, George Atkinson Crooks. He described himself in his will as a mariner, “exposed to the dangers of the sea,” just like my great-grandfather. He’d apparently had a home on the shore of Johnson Town, a large tract of land that ran off the main road to Lucea, a town I understood to be near the old cove. Maybe his Crooks descendants still lived there.
On our last day with Troy, we were again cruising westward along the north highway when I reached Curniff by phone. He was in a chipper mood and we chatted a while before I asked.
“So, Curniff, I was wondering if you had a chance to think about it, allowing me to have a sample of your DNA?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, without hesitation. “You can have it. Whatevahhhh you want, my deaaah.”
I told him we were on the road, nearing Falmouth, and he suggested meeting outside a hotel where he had business that afternoon. We hung up and I cheered. But then panic set in. I grabbed my daypack and rummaged through it. I felt ill. I had switched bags before setting out that morning.
“Troy, I have to buy Q-tips. I forgot the DNA kit, and we’ll never meet Curniff in time if we turn back.”
“That we can get. No problem, don’t worry,” he said in that quintessential island way.
We stopped at a convenience store a few moments later, where I bought Baby Buds cotton swabs and zipper-lock bags to store them for testing. It was crude but it would have to do. I comforted myself with an assortment of DNA retrieval stories: labs that had managed to extract it from hair and licked stamps for other family researchers; police who had swabbed it off cars, floors, underpants; private investigators who’d pulled it off dental floss.
Back in the minibus, I wrote up an impromptu consent form for Curniff to sign, acknowledging that he was giving over his DNA to Family Tree DNA to be used only for Y-chromosome testing in my Crooks family project. I finished just as we arrived at the Starfish, a tall hotel in a patch of jungle by the sea, paint peeling off its sides like sunburnt skin. Curniff was parked across the road and we pulled up behind him.
“Hello, hello!” he said as he walked over, poking his head inside my window, greeting everyone. Then he asked if we could speak alone for a moment.
I jumped out of the van and we walked only a short way along the shoulder when Curniff turned to me with a solemn expression—and I knew. He had changed his mind.
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“I’m not really sure about this DNA thing,” he said. “I feel I should consult my attorney.”
“Your attorney?”
“At first I didn’t think anything of it, but say if it falls into the hands of someone who wants to accuse me of something—an investigator or something. I don’t know if it will be secure, or who could have access, or if it might be used against me.”
I tried for a few moments to assure him that tens of thousands of people had submitted their DNA for this sort of ancestral testing. I told him I would mail his sample directly to Family Tree DNA, which had a privacy policy preventing any other person or company from having access to it. Nor could any test be performed on his sample without his direct consent, and he could also have it destroyed immediately after the test.
But Curniff returned to his original point, that he need take only one look at me to feel the family connection. Didn’t that make a DNA test unnecessary? I explained again that if we could confirm that we shared a common line of male descent, then we had a good chance of finding out precisely how we were related. That’s what was missing in our Jamaica story, the who and the how of us.
But then it occurred to me that Curniff likely had little desire to know the how. I thought of Adrian Williams running his massive Williams surname project out of Missouri, and his great lament that so few Europeans were willing to take genetic tests to prove kinship with Americans. By his reckoning, it was because they already had a sense of origin and history, place and identity. They were living it. He guessed they saw nothing to be gained from a genetic test except the knowledge of distant cousins in the colonies. “For them it would be growing their family tree, finding new members to add to their branches,” he had told me, “not finding its roots.”
Maybe the story was similar for Curniff. A Jamaican born and bred knows who he is, where he comes from. He was satisfied that all the island Crookses belonged to one clan. Would it be worth the risk of using DNA to prove it when he feared that doing so might somehow come back to bite him? Or perhaps his reluctance was simply a visceral resistance to the prospect of giving his DNA to a relative stranger, baring secrets of his genetic soul that not even he, the bearer, might know. And what did it make me, with swabs in my pocket, verbally strong-arming this kind fellow who had walked me through a graveyard in the rain? What would I feel like afterwards, driving away with his cells in a sandwich bag, knowing he was probably behind the wheel of his own vehicle feeling regretful or, worse, violated?
“Oh, Curniff, I don’t want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” I said. “This really has to be something you decide yourself, not something I talk you into.”
It was as if I’d handed him an antacid. He reached for my hand and smiled gratefully. “You know, you really do look like my daughter,” he said.
“Thank you, Curniff, really, for all your help,” I said. “I hope we have a chance to meet again one day.”
“I hope the same,” he replied.
I climbed back into a quiet minibus. No one had to ask. Nor, it turned out, was anyone surprised.
Troy did his best to raise everyone’s spirits as we passed through Montego Bay, playing tour guide in his hometown, pointing out its clubs, the shops, the Pope’s vacation residence on the water. But I was distracted, and wallowing—two Crooks men from the island and no Crooks chromosome for comparison; coming up empty in the Falmouth graveyard; mistaking the Mechanics lodge for the Masonic lodge; and then there was the dark vault in Spanish Town. With my luck we’d never find Johnson Town, where the very late David Atkinson Crooks had apparently once lived. Troy was certain that if it was west of Montego Bay, en route to Lucea, we were bound to see it eventually.
And we did, but only after we’d whizzed right past the small, faded sign pointing to Johnson Town. It took us along a narrow and badly paved road bordered by tiny old houses in disrepair. An elderly man and two women were sauntering up the lane as we approached. Troy called out to them and the two of us got out. The younger woman, with a baby on her hip and dark nipples poking through holes cut in her T-shirt, answered Troy’s questions in a thick patois. She told him there hadn’t been Crooks people around there for a while. There was once an old Crooks man who lived up in the hills, the man said, but no one was sure what had become of him. Go on to Lucea, the woman said. There’s Crookses there.
Lucea, the capital of Hanover. I recalled from my online searches that the keeper of the Lucea town clock had once been a man named Crooks. The clock was a grand one, originally bound for St. Lucia but mistakenly sent to the little seaside town instead, where the residents refused to part with it. In Ancestors, Lucea was the place where Africans were sold in the marketplace, where the young boy August was branded with a C, destined for Crooks Cove. The town struggles now, like a middle child between the tourist hot spots of Negril and Montego Bay, to establish itself as a destination in its own right. To that end we passed a massive construction project near Lucea Harbour. Troy explained that it was a Spanish development, slated to be the largest resort on the island.
“Just think,” Dad said, as we passed it. “They’re building all this on your grandfather’s land, Tweet.”
In the absence of any other leads, we stopped at the bank to change money. I asked the teller, a thin young man in a tie, if he happened to know if there were any people named Crooks around.
“Crooks?” he said, and howled with laughter. “Lotsa Crooks round here!”
I wasn’t sure if he was having sport with my asking for crooks at a bank. He turned and relayed my query to a colleague, and she laughed as well. “Oh yeah, we got Crookses. Even our mayor was a Crooks.”
I had a brief flash of setting up a DNA dragnet in the bank parking lot. Was there anyone in the bank at that moment named Crooks, I asked. There wasn’t. “Well, I understand there was once a Crooks Cove nearby, owned by a Crooks family a long, long time ago. Do you know where it is?”
The teller said he didn’t but suggested we follow the highway through Hanover and ask at the library we’d find along the way.
“You must think we’re slightly crazy with this hunt for ancestors,” I said to Troy as we lit out westward once again.
“I’m going to advertise myself as a family history guide after this,” he joked. “So this Crooks Cove, it was a plantation?”
“Yes, it was. I don’t know if it still is. The first Crooks family was white, but our great-grandfather, he was coloured.”
“Ah, everybody here has a little milk in their coffee!” Troy said cheerfully.
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“Milk in your coffee, or sometimes ants in your milk,” he said. “But what you definitely don’t want are rats in your cupboard. You can’t get rid of the rats!”
From his laughter we took rats to mean philanderers of any colour.
“Once you find yourself shacked up with a rat, there’s no easy way out,” he continued. “A lot of men in Jamaica, they have lots of children with lots of women.” His own father had nine children with different women, he estimated. But Troy said he was determined to lead a “more modern” life. He had two children with one woman to whom he was happily married, and that, he said, was enough for him.
The greenery enveloped us on the spanking new leg of highway that led to Negril. Flanked by limestone cliffs, we crossed into Hanover, a small coastal parish of rugged valleys and peaks known for its fine cattle, yams and sugar. The library sat just off a bend in the road, and inside I met a pleasant young woman who directed me to old maps of the area. She’d never heard of Crooks Cove, but as we studied the coast together, she pointed out that there was a Cousins Cove nearby. I recognized the name instantly as the same one that had appeared on the old Crooks plantation when the first slave registry was compiled. We couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes away.
As I returned to the minibus, it suddenly felt hotter than it had all week. There wasn’t even the whisper of a breeze, and the salt was so thick in the
air I could taste it on my lips.
“The sea is close,” Troy said.
We passed new-looking homes on the hill, more stretches of green, scanning for something, anything, that would signal we had finally reached our destination. Off to the right the land dipped low towards the shore, where we spotted a cemetery below the ridge—tall headstones, bone white, glinting in the afternoon sun. Troy turned around and followed the dirt path that led down to the sea. A shack painted green, advertising videos for sale or rent, sat across the road from the shore. In front of it, two men toiled under the generous shade of a majestic old tree, fashioning a lobster trap from netting and whittled branches.
Troy turned off the engine and he and I got out. By now we had our routine down pat. In patois he told the men we were looking for people named Crooks, and asked whether this land had once belonged to anyone by that name. They answered and Troy translated.
It did, the elder of the two men said, a long, long way back. There was still a Crooks around: an old woman the men knew as Nan. Follow the road past the cemetery, they told us, past the store. Her cottage is on the right.
As we rounded the bend we saw a clapboard shack that served as a coffee shop and another, according to the spray painting on its side, that housed a farmer’s market on Fridays. It suddenly dawned on me where we were … the road hardly wider than a footpath, the one- and two-room shacks and cottages of a tight and tiny community. This had once been a slave village. I pictured it as Paul Crooks described in Ancestors: the slave huts with their vegetable patches, loved ones buried before their time in their gardens, night gatherings by candlelight, the beating of drums, whispered plans to strike and rebel. I doubted that any of the original slave homes had survived this close to the shore; they would have been battered by the centuries and by hurricanes.
The first dwelling we saw looked modern and well kept. It was painted a deep Indian red and had a white iron gate across its front porch. Troy stopped. “This must be it,” he said.
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