The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  My grandfather had believed that, dreaming of leaving India for his father’s land. That couldn’t have been the Cove estate, it had been out of Crooks hands for more than a century by then. So what land was it? Whose was it, and whose had it been? For the most part, the only free coloured people who had a shot at economic success were those supported by their white fathers, who schooled them and provided for them. In their wills, Jamaica’s white men left so much land and money to children born of their black and brown mistresses that it threatened the white establishment. According to Gad J. Heuman’s Between Black and White, as whites “realized how much wealth was passing into coloured and black hands,” they did their best to put a stop to it. In 1761 the Jamaican government passed a law barring whites from leaving assets in cash or property worth more than 1,200 pounds to anyone coloured or black. “The whites,” Heuman wrote, “had decided that it was more important to keep the land in European hands than to follow parental instincts.”

  The law eventually changed in 1830, after the coloured population had grown larger and more politically powerful. I was sure it was a Crooks man from the Cove who had been the benefactor of the Captain’s ancestors. But discovering the identity of that man and my great-grandfather’s link to the Crookses of Hanover would best be done on the ground in Jamaica, in the archives of Spanish Town and Kingston. I’d found nothing when I was there myself, when the lights had died in the vault, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something to be found.

  A few scrolls through genealogy sites led me to Dianne T. Golding-Frankson on the Internet. She was based in Kingston and came highly recommended as a family-tracing expert in Jamaica. She knew her way around the national archives circuit, wrote reports for the island’s heritage groups, specialized in its pre-Columbian history, consulted on archaeology projects and most recently had worked on the genealogies of celebrities featured in the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?

  She told me during our first conversation that she is a black woman but of mixed ancestry. Her father had blue eyes, she said, brown skin and loose curls in his hair. Family legend suggested that their ancestors included a white planter, and when she grew up she tracked him down. Her fifth-generation grandfather was a Captain William Stoddart. There’s a Stoddart’s Peak named after him in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, where in 1734 her captain made history helping to destroy Nanny Town, the famous Maroon stronghold and refuge of runaway slaves. Family lore also had it that this very same captain was in love with one of his own slaves. “That’s what we heard,” Dianne said, “that it was not a relationship of suppression.” When she found his will in the late 1980s, she discovered it was true. “Stoddart spent three pages waxing poetic about his slave mistress,” she said. “He never married her. Whites were forbidden by law from marrying slaves.” But when he died, in his will Stoddart freed his slave mistress, Mimba, her mother and her brother. He also provided for the two children they had together. One of them was Dianne’s fourth-generation grandmother.

  I fantasized about tales of forbidden love after this first conversation. I wondered if our story was, like Dianne’s, romantic. Maybe it wasn’t the black-and-white tragedy Elizabeth Barrett Browning had described at Pilgrim’s Point. Maybe it was something else, grey—like all our stories, something in between.

  Winter came early in 2008, and I would have paid Dianne to ring me whether she’d found something or not. She had that fabulous Jamaican way of oozing sunshine over a telephone line. “Hullo, daahling. How are you, my deah? And how is dat bun in de oven? You keepin’ it warm?”

  “Dat bun” was our second child on the way, and Dianne asked for a progress report whenever she called with news—and she always had news. In late November it was the marriage record of the Captain’s parents. George Atkinson Crooks had wed Catherine Ann Storks in February 1866, she told me, in the parish of Trelawny, where the Captain was born seven years later. The record indicated that both George and Catherine were coloured, Dianne said, which meant that the black and white blood that flowed through the family had mingled in an earlier generation. In mid-December, after a long search in the Registrar General’s Department in Spanish Town, she uncovered a geographical link to the Crooks of Hanover. According to a baptismal record she had tracked down, the Captain’s father, George Atkinson Crooks, was born in Hanover in 1833. That was five years before slavery ended in Jamaica, and Dianne told me he was listed as a quadroon.

  “Meaning his mother was mulatto and his father was white?” I asked.

  “Yes, it does mean that,” Dianne said, “but in this case his parents were both quadroons. The child of two quadroons is also a quadroon.” It was complicated, this colour business. “I know they were quadroon because the document also named the parents,” she added. “They were William James Crooks and Sarah Atkinson of Lucea, in the parish of Hanover.”

  “Oh, you found the names of the Captain’s grandparents!”

  “Yes,” she said, “I most certainly did. And this William James Crooks must have been of standing, because he’s referred to as ‘a gentleman’ in the baptism record of George Atkinson Crooks—who, by the way, was one of twins.”

  I told her I’d read that George Atkinson Crooks eventually had triplets, three boys born a few years after the Captain. Their safe arrival had made the papers in Falmouth at the time.

  “There are lots of multiple births in Jamaica,” Dianne told me. “It has one of the highest rates in the world, I think.” She told me she herself was a twin, but her twin brother had died as an infant.

  I knew of no multiple births on my mother’s side of the family. I had to ask, “Are these natural multiple births in Jamaica today, or the result of fertility treatments?”

  “Oh, very natural,” Dianne said, laughing her big laugh. “It’s all dem yams!”

  From what I could tell, no experts have been able to dispel the yam-and-multiple-baby theory, particularly in West Africa, the ancestral home of most Jamaicans. There the rates of natural non-identical twin births are four times higher than the rest of the world—forty-five twins for every thousand live births. Southwest Nigeria is the epicentre of the phenomenon. In the sleepy farming town of Igbo-Ora, a sign apparently welcomes people to “The Land of Twins.” Most people who live there are Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, but it’s also a home to Ibo people, and from what Clive Harris told me, we had “a touch of the Ibo.”

  Many believe the babies come in twos because of a diet heavy in tuber yams, which scientists have found contain high levels of phytoestrogen. In theory, this estrogen-like plant hormone could be triggering Nigerian women to release more than one egg at a time—most twin births in the region are non-identical, meaning the result of a multiple-egg conception. It could also be that genes make Nigerian women susceptible to the estrogen effects of yams. Either way, experts believe that genetics must play some role in the remarkable multiple-birth rates of West Africa, to which our quadroon Crooks parents of twins and triplets owed, apparently, at least a quarter of their heritage.

  The Spanish were the first to call them cuarterón, meaning literally “a fourth”: people who were one-quarter black and three-quarters white. Britain adopted the term as quadroon throughout its colonies, right down to Australia, where the quarter referred to Aboriginal, not African, parentage. But it was the quadroons of the Americas, particularly the women, whose honey skin and broken hearts inspired writers and poets. While Dianne searched and the snow fell that long winter, I read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Quadroon Girl,” from 1842.

  “The soil is barren,—the farm is old,”

  The thoughtful planter said;

  Then looked upon the Slaver’s gold,

  And then upon the maid.

  His heart within him was at strife

  With such accurséd gains:

  For he knew whose passions gave her life,

  Whose blood ran in her veins.

  But the voice of nature was too weak;

  He too
k the glittering gold!

  Then pale as death grew the maiden’s cheek,

  Her hands as icy cold.

  The Slaver led her from the door,

  He led her by the hand,

  To be his slave and paramour

  In a strange and distant land!

  Most writers painted quadroon women as Longfellow had, and Walt Whitman as well: tragic beauties “sold on the auction-stand.” James Mursell Phillippo, a Baptist missionary who authored a book on Jamaica in 1843, wrote that parents of coloured daughters often raised them to be concubines—that this was “the general rule … rather than the exception”—to be given away in friendship or sold as slave mistresses. Quadroon women were regarded as prized mistresses at a time when mixed marriages were forbidden. In his 1928 book Fabulous New Orleans, Lyle Saxon describes the lavish nineteenth-century Quadroon Balls, weekly affairs attended by wealthy white men, free quadroon women and their mulatto mothers, anxious for a liaison that would give their coloured daughters economic security if nothing else. Heuman wrote that coloured women themselves sponsored the same type of dances for white men in Jamaica. So even if these cuarterón lovelies were freed, or born free, many remained trapped, like exotic birds in a cage.

  Had the Captain’s grandmother been a bird like that, my grandmothers going back two or three generations to a mulatto woman on the Crooks plantation? If the Captain’s grandfather William James Crooks was a quadroon, and if he belonged at some point to Crooks Cove, only four adult slave women at the plantation in 1817 could have been his mother: Nancy, Peggy and Lucy, all listed as mulattos, and Bessy, whose Christian name was Elizabeth Smith, the only quadroon.

  Dianne had yet to determine if William James Crooks had been born in bondage. But even if the Captain’s grandfather was born free, freedom for coloured people before abolition came with strict limits. They couldn’t vote; they were forbidden to testify in court; they were kept out of theatres, church pews and any public place designed for whites; they couldn’t hold public office of any kind or become overseers or bookkeepers. They were not permitted to possess sugar or coffee estates, and unless they owned an estate they were barred from posessing so much as a cow or mule (though owning slaves was acceptable). Those without an estate to their name had to wear a blue cross on their right shoulder as proof of their freedom.

  Richard Hill, one of Jamaica’s most prominent coloured citizens of the time, once said that educated coloureds in Jamaica regarded themselves as “blasted trees—barkless, branchless, and blighted trunks upon a cursed root.” Phillippo put it this way: “In whomsoever the least trace of an African origin could be discovered the curse of slavery pursued him, and no advantages, either of wealth, talent, virtue, education, or accomplishments were sufficient to relieve him from the infamous proscription.” So how was it that the Captain’s quadroon grandfather managed to become “a gentleman” by 1833, five years before slavery ended?

  From what I could gather through the Jamaican Family Search site, my third-generation grandfather William James Crooks had been a bit of a mover. His wife, Sarah Atkinson, seems to have had ties to a prominent white island family. John Atkinson was an American Loyalist whom the British rewarded with a land grant in Jamaica in 1784. A decade later, George Atkinson became the island’s secretary. I could only imagine what stories Sarah’s bloodline might have to tell. Had she named her son, George Atkinson Crooks, the Captain’s father, after the white man who freed her or freed her mother?

  One of the oldest references to William James Crooks I found appeared in Caribbeana, a periodical of miscellaneous historical papers. It seemed that in 1822 he and five others had jointly signed a deed for a property known as the Lyesworthy estate. One of the co-signers was Utten Thomas Todd, whose father in England, Thomas Todd, had forged a partnership with William Crooks as a West Indian merchant. In his 1836 will, Thomas Todd left to William Crooks a portion of various properties acquired under Thomas Todd and Company. By 1840 William James Crooks is listed as owning sixty acres in Hanover, in the same parish as Crooks Cove. By the time the Captain’s father, George, was born, William James had become “a gentleman” with a wharf near Falmouth and slaves of his own. According to the Jamaica Almanacs for Hanover, in 1825 he kept a dozen slaves, and he owned them straight through to abolition thirteen years later. Dianne told me that wasn’t unusual. In Jamaica, she said, as soon as a coloured man earned his freedom and a bit of money, “the first thing he did was set up house and buy himself some slaves.”

  The more she spoke and the more I read, the more convinced I became that I could just as easily have been reading about the history of Anglo-Indians and Eurasians in British India. Our captain must have felt right at home in Bombay in that in-between world of a hybrid people, dismissed by whites and disdainful of dark skin, emulating the ruling class and denying any tie to those being ruled. In Jamaica the coloured population adopted the Anglican religion of the white planters, sought a European education and the latest European fashions, developed European-styled cultural organizations with names such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and owned slaves. Still, the whites never accepted them. After all, as Heuman pointed out, “the privileged free men [of colour] upset the racial stereotype that was at the heart of the slave society.” If people of half-black descent could be as smart and successful as whites and own land and slaves, then how could whites continue to lord over blacks?

  As we cleared the dishes on the Sunday evening before Christmas 2008, Dianne called with her final report. “Hullo, dahhling!” she said. “I have news for you, my deah.” I could tell by her tone it was big news. She had combed through all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century birth and marriage records for black, white and coloured Crookses in the island’s western parishes, plus the registers, and they told quite a racy story. “All three brothers from the Crookses seem to be pretty free-wheeling with the dark women that you have so many coloured Crookses around in two generations!” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised to hear it. I had lost count of the Crookses in the nineteenth-century directories I found online. At the same time, my uncles’ twelve-marker matches were by then nearing eight hundred. Dianne promised she’d send a full report of her findings in writing, but in the meantime, she said, she wanted me to know that she had indeed found a connection between our captain and the Cove. The proof appeared to be in the registry for the western parish of St. James, which neighbours Hanover. It was there that the Captain’s grandfather, William James Crooks, was baptized on June 18, 1789. He was fourteen months old at the time, she said, and the record described him as a quadroon with a white father and a mulatto mother. In that same register she had discovered that William had two quadroon siblings: Christopher Rice Crooks, christened that same day in 1789, at age five, and Elizabeth Crooks, baptized in 1797, when she was eight. “Unfortunately there is no mention of the parents,” she told me. “It notes only that the father was a white man named Crooks.”

  I assumed it would have to be a Crooks from the Cove, I told her. These quadroon children carried the same first names as the white Crooks family: Christopher, Rice and Elizabeth, all mentioned in the will of James Crooks Senior. “That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?” I asked. “Naming your coloured children after your white family?”

  “No,” Dianne said. “White men often named their coloured children after members of their own family.” It was usually a sign of their emotional attachment to them, she added, even if the law forbade them from marrying their mothers. What a thing, that you could tell by a name whether a child was loved.

  Dianne said that even though the father’s name was missing, she had a solid hunch that our white forefather was James Crooks the third, the one who had returned from England to become a merchant in Falmouth.

  “What makes you think it was James Crooks?” I asked her.

  James, she said, had a white wife, Sarah Green, and they had named their first-born son William James Crooks. They had him christened on t
he same June day in 1789 that our coloured William James Crooks was baptized. But the white William Crooks was an infant, Dianne said, and in those days infants were christened quickly only if they were expected to die, or even if they actually had died. By her reading, the white William had passed away, and that very same day, James Crooks the third had dashed out and baptized his coloured child with the name of his dead white son.

  “The same day?”

  “Yes, the same day.”

  What coils of sentiment might unwind in a man’s head on a day like that? Did James the third then redirect all his affection and assets to his illegitimate heir? Is that how my grandfather’s Jamaican family first acquired their wealth? I tried to remember what I’d read of James Crooks the third: one of the five children left fatherless at the Cove plantation; schooled in England; a Falmouth merchant with, according to Dianne, a wife and a mistress and children with both of them. “Do you think there might be any way of finding who the mistress was—the mother of his illegitimate children? I suppose she would be my fourth-generation great-grandmother.” Dianne said she doubted it. Her name was not recorded at any of the baptisms. For whatever reason, she had remained in the background.

  Whoever she was, her blood ran through us just like that of the Crooks man who kept her. But with no paper record of her existence and no genetic test available to reveal her identity the way the Y can point to a patriarch, she was out of reach. That was the aching truth of it. Using only the male chromosome to trace family history is like making your way into a smoky old boys’ club: it’s hard to see clearly and the women are always left out.

  My son arrived in the spring of 2009, all eight pounds, nine ounces of him. Jackson came home two days after his birth, and we studied him as we had Jade during those long quarantined hours, to see what permutations of the past would show up in our new boy. He had the family cleft in his chin, a hint of a tan and the length of his father. Like his older sister, he carried a Mongolian birthmark on his tailbone, big, blue and shaped like Asia. A nurse at the hospital, utterly unprompted, said he looked Chinese. I couldn’t wait to tell my father. But then she added that, in her opinion, most babies do.