The Juggler's Children

  “I’ll knock,” I said. As I followed the walkway through a fragrant riot of palms and bougainvillea, I caught sight of a burgundy sun hat alongside the house. An elderly black woman peered around the corner.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sorry to disturb you.” I explained that I was doing some family research, that my mother was a Crooks. “And we think there might be some connection to the Crookses here.”

  “Lucky you caught me. I was going round the back, herding my goats,” she said. “I’m a Crooks.”

  I introduced myself and she told me her name was Henrietta Crooks.

  “Have you lived here a long time?” I asked.

  She sighed and chuckled. “Oh yes, a long time. My mother was born here, and her father and her grandfather. They were in cane and bananas,” she said. “Going back, they were slaves.”

  She was born there, she said, in 1929, grew up there, left for a while and then came back to live again at the cove. She didn’t look seventy-eight; her frame was straight and strong, her face full and unlined. She wore short denim slacks and a cream blouse embroidered with bright orange flowers.

  Before long my mother was out of the van and at my side. “This is Henrietta Crooks, Mum. She has lived here all her life, and her parents and her grandparents.”

  “How lovely to meet you,” my mother said warmly. “You have a lovely place, a lovely garden.”

  My father, Stephen and Troy joined us. All the visitors in Henrietta’s front garden attracted a curious elderly man in a ball cap and red tank top. I couldn’t understand him, but I guessed that he was asking Henrietta if everything was all right. She nodded and, it seemed, told him why we were there. Then she introduced him as Thomas.

  We began sharing with her the little we knew of my great-grandfather, that he was a ship’s captain born in Falmouth, apparently came from a plantation and was coloured. Henrietta told us that in Jamaica there were dark Crookses and fairer Crookses; some of them lived much further inland, at a place called Ginger Hill. I recognized the name from one of the wills we had copied and asked if she was related to them. No, she said, she didn’t think so.

  I told her I understood that a man named James Crooks was the original owner of the land.

  “Yes,” she said. “He buried up dere.”

  “Up where?”

  “Up near de big houses.”

  But Thomas shook his head. “No, all de graves gone now,” he said.

  “No,” Henrietta told him. “Some of dem still dere.” She used to work up there, she told us, and remembered seeing the grave.

  “No, no, dey gone,” Thomas insisted. “When dey built de new road and de big houses, development pushed dem under.”

  “The big houses?” I asked.

  “Yes. English people live up dere,” Henrietta said.

  I recalled the large new homes we had passed before we veered off the highway. Apparently it was still white folks up in the big house on the hill.

  “Do you think you could find the grave?” I asked Henrietta. “Do you think you could help us find it?” I cannot explain why it felt important to actually set eyes upon the tomb. I suspect that I needed something concrete—hard evidence, finally, that there actually was a Crooks plantation, that it was a real place, not just an idea planted by a novel or a family rumour from long ago.

  “Yes,” Henrietta said without pause. “I could show you where it might be.”

  I imagined our convoy of seniors—my elderly parents, septuagenarian Henrietta, doubting Thomas—trekking back up the dirt road in the heat, crossing the highway, then climbing the hill.

  “We could drive up there, couldn’t we, Troy?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Would you come with us, Henrietta?”

  “I can do dat. Lucky you caught me,” she said again as we all piled into the van. “I was after my goats.”

  Troy pulled up on the shoulder of the north highway, just west of the big house. “It’s somewhere up there,” Henrietta said, pointing to the hills.

  We stepped out to find ourselves on the edge of a ditch—a deep one—lying between us and the slope, a fifteen-foot drop down to a mattress of gravel and weeds. My mother took one look and waited by the minibus. My father, eighty-two years and three months that fall, hurtled headlong into it, testing the limits of gravity and his knee replacements.

  “Dad, wait!” I shouted, scrambling after him, wishing that just this once he would act his age. It wasn’t even his side of the family. Meanwhile, Henrietta had already climbed down and up the other side, and the seventy-eight-year-old was hiking, unruffled, onward and upward. I was travelling with a pack of bionic seniors.

  Reaching the hilltop put us level with the big house. It was a custard-coloured two-storey, a handsome retreat with white trim, columns and a wide second-floor balcony that must have offered a spectacular view of the sea. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded its yard, separating a manicured garden from the stubborn jungle of the hillside.

  Henrietta and Thomas were still debating. “It is around here,” Henrietta was saying.

  “No, no, dere gone,” said Thomas, still shaking his head.

  Troy had wandered over to what looked like a knoll near the fence. Only when I drew up beside him did I see it was the grass-covered ruins of an old stone wall. “This must have been a building on the plantation once,” he said, crouching down on his haunches to take a closer look.

  It was then that I noticed the goats—a brown one with a white patch between its eyes, and another, black and skinny—atop another mound of rubble, still as statues, watching us. It froze me on the hillside for a moment. I stared at them and they stared back, acting as if they owned the place, just as they had on the tombs in Falmouth. I wished I’d never read that duppy lore.

  “Henrietta,” I asked, “the grave you remember seeing, was it from the seventeen hundreds?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “My mother, she was born in 1906. She used to talk about the Crooks tombs up here. Later, I remember when I worked up here for the Fowler family, I saw the graves behind a brick wall, and there was the Crooks name. I always remembered that.”

  Suddenly Troy began shouting. “I see two tombs here! Right here, two tombs!” He was balancing precariously on a bit of old stone, craning to see over the barbed wire of the fence.

  “In the front garden?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, leaping off the stone. He scampered along the fence, pressing his face against its links. “It’s a Crooks! It’s a Crooks! James Crooks!” he hollered, as though he were cheering for an underdog team that had finally scored.

  My father, who had disappeared further up the hill, came striding back down towards us, waving his arms for us to follow him.

  “Dad, Troy found tombs,” I called out. “There’s two in the front garden of this house.”

  “I know,” he called back. “I’ve spoken to the gentleman who owns the house. He’s in the back. He’s a relation to the Crookses buried there. Come on, he’ll talk with us.”

  A relation of the Crookses? A male? Thank God I’d stopped for Q-tips.

  We paraded up the hill, Henrietta, Thomas, Stephen, my father and me, the two goats now bleating steadily behind us. Troy went back to pick up my mother and drive her around.

  John Rosser awaited our arrival in his backyard. He was a pale and towering Brit with a crop of white hair and glasses. In blue satin sports shorts and a pink bush shirt, he had the rumpled look of a man who’d been loafing around the house. Yet for someone not expecting company, for someone suddenly ambushed by a seven-member search party creeping around his property, he was amazingly friendly.

  Rosser told us that he and his wife had retired to Jamaica and built their haven on this hill by the sea. In recent times it had been a coconut and banana farm, until a yellowing fever hit the crops. The land was an overgrown cow pasture when they arrived, he said, but back in the eighteenth century it had indeed been the Crooks sugar plantation.


  “I understand you are related to the Crooks family,” I said.

  “No, it’s not me,” he said. “It’s my wife.” But she was out with their son for the day, he said, and he wasn’t quite sure precisely how they were related.

  “Did you know the graves were on your property?” I asked.

  “No, it wasn’t until after the house was built. The landscapers were working in front and they hit upon the graves. They asked us if they should just plough them under. We said no, we didn’t think that was right—and we didn’t even know then that my wife was related to them.”

  We all gaped at that. It was one thing to discover graves in your front yard, but to learn they belonged to a long-dead relative was a coincidence beyond bizarre. I told John Rosser that I couldn’t be sure our family was related to James Crooks but suspected that was the case. I explained that I was using genetic testing to trace our Crooks line, and that while our great-grandfather had come from Jamaica, the DNA test results suggested paternal roots in the northwest of England, in Lancashire.

  Given the region’s shipbuilding history, its swift trade with the West Indies, through Liverpool in particular, it sounded plausible, he said. The original Crooks immigrants might have sailed there from Lancashire in colonial times.

  My mother and Troy had caught up by then, and Mum wanted to hear it for herself. “Is it true that James Crooks is buried here?” she asked.

  “Yes, it’s true,” he said, grinning. “Come on, see for yourself.” He led us around to the front of the house, to the garden’s west side, where two headstones lay nestled in the grass at the foot of an oval flower bed. I can’t say whether it was respect for the dead or simply—finally—the awe of discovery, but we all slipped into silence for a few moments. Stephen and my father photographed the headstones as Henrietta whispered an I-told-you-so to Thomas. My mother marvelled quietly.

  It was Troy who read the epitaphs aloud:

  In Memory of

  James Crooks

  Of Hanover Parish

  Who died the

  16th of October 1740

  Aged 32 years

  8 months and 9 days

  So there he was, James Crooks of the Cove, author of the will I’d pored over for clues. Dead in his prime, leaving behind a young daughter, a pregnant wife, an unborn son. Early death stalked his heirs like a curse: his daughter, and James Crooks Junior, the son he never saw, leaving thirteen children fatherless in all. The Captain had died at the same age. All of them buried before reaching thirty-five. Was it the sins of the father?

  My mother didn’t miss the coincidence. “Just like my grandfather,” she told Rosser. “He died so young; my father was only eighteen months old. That’s why we never knew anything about his people here.”

  Only a few inches away lay the tomb of James Crooks’s daughter (the surname had mysteriously gained a vowel).

  In Memory of

  Ann Dickson,

  Daughter of James Crookes,

  Who departed this life

  January 7 1769

  In the 31 year of her age

  Leaving one daughter and seven sons

  To mourn the irreparable lofs of a tender mother

  And the Best of wives

  I thought of the will, and the inheritance James Crooks had left the young Ann as a child: six hundred pounds and one Negro girl of her choosing.… It was one of Ann’s seven sons who took over the land, saving it from bankruptcy and becoming master when the first slave register was compiled.

  We peppered Rosser with more questions about his wife and her links to Jamaica. She’d grown up in a place called Maryland, he said, further inland. It was his wife’s mother, a Campbell, who had told them they were cousins to the Crookses.

  I recalled that the sister of James Crooks’s widow had married one of the Campbells, a Scottish family with several island plantations. It was the famed Duncan Campbell of London, who sold his relatives’ sugar in England, whose letters had told me nearly everything I knew about the white Crookses of Jamaica.

  I asked if I could talk to his mother-in-law, but Rosser told me she would be too shy to speak to strangers about such things. Instead he described how easy it was to stumble over the past on this island, not just in the museums or by way of ruins. You could walk through fields not far from there and find bottles in the grass, hand-blown, from the eighteenth century.

  As the chat continued I was again distracted, judging the distance of the grave from the sea, wondering about coffin materials and the moisture and acidity of the soil, whether 267 years beneath it would devour a cadaver, whether even a cheeseparing of bone might be left. For the second time that day I felt like a character from a horror film. I wanted to dig him up. After all the wild goose chases and dead ends and the prospect of going home empty-handed, I longed for a shovel. I wanted to pry that cracked headstone from its dirt bed and scrape up whatever remained of the first master of Crooks Cove, extract DNA from his long-dead cells and bury more than a century of rumour and myth. I wanted to find out once and for all if he was our forefather, if it was his chromosome that crossed the Atlantic to Bombay, rooting us to this storied sugar plantation, a stronghold of slavery, a site of bondage, rebellion and death. Was that our story too? Were we fugitives in one hemisphere and captors in another?

  I thought of Roberta Estes down in Michigan and the estimate she’d received of twenty thousand dollars to dig up her dad. How outrageous the prospect had seemed to me at the time; yet how entirely reasonable, even logical, it seemed at that instant, with mere barrows of earth between question and answer. Maybe the setting—the front garden of retirees—was obscuring the notion that I was contemplating desecration of sacred ground. After all, given the nod, the landscapers had been prepared to plough it under. And how many tombs were now buried beneath the new highway? How sacred was it to Henrietta to stand over the grave of the man who had brought her ancestors to this cove in chains? If we were next of kin, would we have a right to exhume him? Was it an if that only exhumation could resolve?

  My head ached under the hot sun as I hovered over the two graves, wondering what to do next. I looked out to the sea and back to the hillside we’d climbed to bring us there. On the other side of the fence, the goats had drifted closer to the yard, still watching.

  15

  BONES OF CONTENTION

  There have always been grounds for exhumation—graveyards oversubscribed or reconfigured, post-mortem attempts to determine identity or cause of death. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of the practice. For centuries it has exhumed the bodies of saints to see if, by some divine intervention, their corpses have been spared decomposition. The Church puts the bodies of those deemed “incorruptible” on display in glass coffins, like precious jewels. That winter, in fact, the Vatican was poised to announce the exhumation of Saint Padre Pio, an Italian monk who died in 1968 (despite the protests of his relatives and devotees, it went ahead in March 2008, and a Church official declared him well preserved).

  History has given exhumation a very bad name, rife as it is with tales of corpses ransacked and relocated or, as in the case of Oliver Cromwell, dug up and decapitated as a royal warning to dissidents. The head of the man who began the British peopling of Jamaica stood on a pole outside Westminster Hall for some twenty-four years. Disinterment was once so common that Shakespeare’s last words to the world did not take the form of a sonnet or a farewell verse, but rather a threat, inscribed on his tombstone in 1616 (here, with spelling modernized):

  GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,

  TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.

  BLESE BE YE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES,

  AND CVRST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES.

  The Bard still has good reason to worry. Digging up dead people for DNA testing has become as fashionable as reality TV. Occasionally it’s by court order or initiated by relatives hoping to prove the guilt or innocence of a long-dead loved one. But researchers, historians and the fanaticall
y curious have propelled what many—scholars, ethicists, critics—refer to as the “exhumation movement.” The desire to solve old mysteries, to rewrite history or to confirm final resting places of the famous and the infamous has led to a long list of the disinterred.

  Genetic tests have been run on remains said to belong to the Romanovs, Josef Mengele, Christopher Columbus, Butch Cassidy and, yes, the Sundance Kid, the soldier beneath Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns, and Jesse James—repeatedly (since few agree on how, when or where the legendary outlaw finally met his end, the posthumous manhunt has so far led to the exhumation of three bodies). Not that every request to exhume is granted. It has been a no-go for Billy the Kid, the Kelly Gang and, so far, Galileo, disappointing scientists eager to find out if the Renaissance icon had a genetic eye condition that clouded some of his observations (he first mistook Saturn’s rings for moons).

  The efforts seem to reflect an unspoken mantra of modern science: if we have the know-how, we have the right to know. Can we make a tomato frost resistant using the gene of a coldwater fish? Can we engineer flowers to bloom on your birthday? Can we find out if the father of astronomy had buggered-up eyesight? On the altar of science, human remains are not sacrosanct; they’re reference materials. And since certain rituals of science have found their way to the masses, maybe it was inevitable that the masses—that I—would consider them. People claiming to be descendants of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, of Salvador Dali, of Benito Mussolini, plus Canadians and Americans who believe they’re related to War of 1812 general Zebulon Pike, have all called for bodies to be exhumed to prove blood ties. No wonder Josephine Johnston reminded the genetic genealogists gathered in Houston not to do anything at night they wouldn’t do in the light of day. Anyone who uses DNA to investigate family history will, at some point, likely be tempted to reach for a shovel.

  After returning from Jamaica, I found myself flipping to the page in my notebook where John Rosser had written his phone number, wondering how on earth I could broach the possibility of unearthing James Crooks from his flowerbed. Would any excavator in duppy-fearing Jamaica even take on the job, and how much would it cost? It was a crazy idea, and I put the notepad away. But I would muse about it often enough that Jade drew a picture of James Crooks, a bird’s-eye view of his skeleton lying in a grave and wearing a pirate’s hat. “Here, Mom,” she said. “This is to decorate your office.” Wonderful.