The Juggler's Children

  The week he was born, Dianne sent an enormous electronic file of original Crooks wills she had managed to locate and photograph. So that spring, in those unpredictable hours when the baby slept, I read them. Despite the books and chronicles I’d read about Jamaica’s “coloured society,” the stories they told still came as a revelation. Every generation of Crooks men from the Cove, from James the first, buried in the Rossers’ front yard, to James the third, had a shadow family—coloured sons and daughters born of black women, mulatto women, quadroon women. Sometimes they left them money, a bit of land and slaves. Sometimes they gave them their freedom and then gave them slaves. James Crooks the second, who had inherited the plantation upon his birth and then died young himself, left behind five legitimate children and four illegitimate mulatto slave children, whom he freed, promising each one a slave when they turned sixteen. In turn, the mulatto children grew up to leave land, money and slaves to their coloured children—one set born to their coloured wives and another to their coloured mistresses.

  How flatly naive I had been to imagine I could distinguish whether we descended from slave or slave owner. In Jamaica those lines were as entangled as a double helix. Polygamy of a sort was as systemic as slavery itself. John Stewart wrote of it: “Every unmarried white man, and of every class, has his black or his brown mistress, with whom he lives openly; and of so little consequence is this thought, that his white female friends and relations think it no breach of decorum to visit his house, partake of his hospitality, fondle his children, and converse with his housekeeper [the island euphemism for mistress] … as if he had been guilty of no breach of decency or dereliction of moral duty! … a brown or sable favourite, and sometimes even a har[e]m of these ladies, was considered as an indispensable appendage to the establishment of a married man.”

  What nagged at me, as I read of all the provisions made for their illegitimate coloured children by the Crooks Cove men, was that nowhere did the name of William James Crooks appear. In the 1794 will on record by James Crooks the third—the man I assumed to be his father—he had set free “my mulatto woman Judy … and her child … a quadroon daughter Rebecca … and their issue and offspring.” It went on to bequeath new Negro slaves to his mistress and child, but there was no mention of a William James Crooks or any of his siblings. How was it that a quadroon man who quickly acquired land, wealth and social status during slavery days could be born of a white father who never once mentioned him in his will? Had the law capping the inheritances of coloured heirs resulted in a secret codicil, a document never officially filed? Dianne thought it was possible; coloured people often kept their wills private, and perhaps it was a custom passed down from their white forefathers.

  As summer faded into fall, I continued to scroll through the photographic copies of the wills Dianne had sent: Amee Crooks, Maudlin Crooks, a mulatto John Crooks, a coloured Richard Crooks. One afternoon a string of words suddenly leapt out at me from a grey sea of two-hundred-year-old text, as though by some optical illusion they had been penned in bold type: “Two Quateroon Boys named William James Crooks and Christopher Rice Crooks, sons of a Mulatto Woman named Lucy James.…”

  I scrolled up to remind myself what I was reading. It wasn’t the will of a James Crooks, or any Crooks of the Cove. It was the last will and testament of Christopher Crooks. Christopher Crooks? It felt as if someone had tipped my chair. I had been so sure, so convinced that we descended from the Crooks of the Cove, so trusting in my gut, the sway of a novel and a sandy beach, and what the Y-chromosome match with Paul seemed to confirm, that I never entertained the possibility of our descent from one of the other Crooks brothers. But there it was in black and white from 1793, in the words of my very own fourth-generation grandfather.

  We descended from a Christopher Crooks: a relation to the James buried at the Cove, a nephew perhaps, the son of one of James’s other brothers; possibly the “jobber” Christopher I had first come across in the 1774 Jamaica Almanac; or perhaps his brother Rice, a tavern keeper in the area. My God, what if I had dug him up, old James Crooks? His Y would have matched my uncles’ Y all the way up to sixty-seven markers and beyond, but it would have strung us along the wrong branch of the family tree. As brothers, James, Christopher and Rice would have inherited their Y chromosomes from the same man, but only one of those brothers was our forefather—and it wasn’t the man in the Rossers’ front yard. That truth wasn’t written in our cells after all; it was written in ink.

  Deciphering the eighteenth-century script exhausted the brain. But it wasn’t just the physical effort that drained me. The words themselves were hard on the stomach. When I’d started reading, there had been wonderment—our true descent confirmed, the identity of my great-great-great-great-grandmother revealed, a name, first and last—Lucy James, who had passed down to us stretches of her African code. Lucy James, apparently, was “his favourite sable.” As soon as I read it, her name seemed somehow familiar. It sent me back to the notepad I’d filled at the Mormon family research centre two years earlier, when I wrote down all the Crooks references I could find.

  And there it was, and had been all this time: Christopher Crooks, a white man, and Lucy James, a free mulatto woman, listed as the parents at the baptism of one Rebecca Crooks. Lucy James’s designation as a free mulatto woman immediately told me two things about her mother: she was black, maybe even Ibo, as Clive Harris suspected, and in all likelihood a slave, owned by a master named James. I had read that a Montague James first sailed out to Jamaica with the fateful Penn and Venables expedition to the West Indies in 1654. His grandson was William Rhodes James, whom James Crooks Senior referred to in his will as a relative and co-executor. Perhaps that’s how Christopher first met Lucy James—as the mulatto daughter of a cousin’s slave.

  The romantic in me wanted to embrace the will of Christopher Crooks as testimony to a taboo love, a story like Dianne’s—a white man pledging his undying commitment to the coloured woman he could never marry, the coloured woman with whom, according to the will, he had five children in all, two boys and three girls. Christopher and his legitimate white wife apparently had no children at all; he mentioned his wife only once, in the will’s opening passages: “I Give, devise and bequeath unto my beloved wife Ann Crooks an annuity of seventy pounds current money of Jamaica, that sum to be paid her Yearly and every year during her natural life.”

  Lucy James, on the other hand, cropped up repeatedly as Christopher set out his instructions to provide for both her and their “quateroon” children. To his mulatto mistress he left the annual sum of fifteen pounds a year for the rest of her life and the purchase of a new slave. He also set out a plan to use money owed to him by a neighbouring estate owner “to be laid out on purchase of Land or a House … in the name of Two Quateroon Boys named William James Crooks and Christopher Rice Crooks, sons of a Mulatto Woman named Lucy James, than deliver the premises so purchased to her the said Lucy James To hold for them the said William James Crooks and Christopher Rice Crooks until they shall attain to the age of Twenty One Years.”

  I wondered if Christopher Crooks was deliberately vague about the sum of money that was to be used to provide a future property for his “two Quateroon boys.” If he didn’t specify an amount, perhaps he could skirt the law that limited how much a coloured person could inherit in Jamaica before 1830. And it certainly wasn’t the only purse he left his quadroon children. Instructions were drafted to ensure that each of his five children—William James, Christopher Rice, Elizabeth James, Sarah James and Rebecca James—should be paid fourteen pounds each on their birthdays until they turned sixteen, for their upkeep and maintenance.

  Yet for all the provisions made, something troubled me as I read. When Christopher Crooks referred to his wife, who merited just a single mention in his will and then disappeared as though she had never existed, he called her “his beloved wife Ann.” When he laid out plans to support an invalid brother with a slave named Jack, he referred to him as his “beloved brother Will
iam.” He also mentioned a “beloved brother James,” “a beloved sister Barbara” and his “well-beloved friends and relatives.” Yet the woman with whom he had had five children had no such adjective preceding her name. Lucy James was simply “a mulatto woman,” their sons and daughters “two Quateroon boys … three Quateroon girls.” Never once did he use the word beloved, or any other term of endearment, to describe his coloured family members.

  In Toni Morrison’s masterpiece novel, dedicated to the millions of African lives lost to slavery, Beloved was the name of the baby girl murdered by her runaway slave mother to ensure she would never know a life in bondage. Beloved was the dead baby’s wily ghost, a vivid symbol of the psychological torment of repressed memories, the sacrifice one makes to forget the past. In my fourth-generation grandfather’s will, beloved was a sentiment reserved for whites. Was the omission to spare the feelings of his wife at the reading of his last testament? Or was it a stark reminder that his coloured mistress and their coloured children were but a whim away from slavery themselves?

  Dianne said that her Captain Stoddart had waxed poetic in his will. But there was no poetry here. As I ploughed through to the will’s final sections, I realized what a fractured heart this man must have cultivated. He had a white wife, a brown mistress, beige children and a lucrative business built on the trade and training of black slaves. By then I was well accustomed to reading of slaves left to loved ones, but it was the way he referred to the transactions that made it unlike any other will I had read. Of his eldest son, Christopher Rice Crooks, he wrote, “when he shall attain to sixteen years of age then seven prime young new negro slaves to be purchased by my Executors for him, and Have them apprenticed, of the slaves to be purchased five of them to be boys, the other two to be Girls, and the males To be apprenticed.” For his three quadroon daughters he ordered that, upon turning sixteen, each girl should have “two new negro boys and two new negro Girls to be bought by my Executors out of Guinea Cargoes of Slaves that shall be imported into this island and delivered unto each of them.”

  He was so clearly at ease with the acquisition of “young new negroes,” so savvy as to their worth, as if he bought them in bulk from “Guinea Cargoes”—those slaving ships that sailed directly from West Africa to Jamaican ports. Yet Christopher Crooks had no plantation of his own; neither did his will contain anything to suggest that he raised livestock or relied on the land for his living in any way. Why on earth would he have so many slaves? What work did they do on a cropless property? Did he train his own gang of slaves for renting out? Did his livelihood have something to do with turning newly imported Africans into compliant workers or skilled slave labour? Why else would he instruct his son Christopher Rice to send out the “seven prime young new negro slaves” bequeathed to him to be apprenticed? On the eve of abolition, slaves on the road to freedom became wage-earning apprentices, picking up a trade as a carpenter, say, or a blacksmith. But Christopher Crooks lived and died decades before abolition, when transforming an African into a willing “apprentice” suggested only one thing. Was my fourth-generation grandfather a slave-breaker, a jobber whose job was teaching Africans unconditional obedience?

  Slave-breakers—that’s what they called them in the Americas. In Jamaica, the British in their genteel way called it “seasoning,” and the island was infamous for its so-called seasoning camps, where Africans fresh off the boats were broken like wild horses, then often shipped on to the Americas to fetch a good price. In 1770s Jamaica, a “new negro” was worth only half as much as one who had been “seasoned.” Slave-breakers had elaborate instruments with which to ply their trade, but they failed so often at their job that about a third of their captives died during the first year. The seasoning process resulted in such a great need for doctors that it brought boatloads of Scottish medical school graduates to Jamaica. When I told Dianne about the will I’d found and my suspicions about Christopher Crooks, she said instantly, “Oh yes, he was a jobber all right.”

  “I’d assumed a jobber was someone who took various jobs, as an overseer or property manager.”

  No, she told me, jobbers made their money with blacks on hire, and that made the will historically significant. Her own ancestors, coloured though they were, had also been jobbers, she told me, renting out slaves to help around the house or to various estates through the summers. “They were all slave-breakers,” she said. “They had to be; they had to season them. If they had just come off the boat, they had to make them realize this misery was now the reality of their lives.… They regarded slaves the same as they did cattle—intelligent cattle, but cattle.”

  I wondered if Christopher Crooks sent his “young new negroes” to seasoning camps or if he “broke” them himself. I wondered whether he sold his seasoned slaves to planters in America as well as those on the island. It would explain why he was owed money by the other island estate owners, why he was so familiar with the investment value a “new negro” carried. It also explained how an islander without a plantation had managed to set up his coloured children for life, so that William James Crooks had the means to establish his own business and own land and eventually a wharf, becoming in the process “a gentleman.”

  The discovery of our slave-breaking forefather overshadowed any satisfaction I had about finally learning the truth about the Captain’s family. It took me weeks to tell my mother. When I did, I knew she was fighting the urge to run from the room. Instead, she stayed and listened and whispered, “My God almighty.” Even my father could do little more than shake his head.

  My mother said she was thankful now that her father had never gone to Jamaica, that Papa Freddie never learned the history of his father’s side of the family or profited from the proceeds earned through the torture of human beings. “What wickedness, what viciousness,” she said. “But the world was barbaric then, wasn’t it.”

  Suddenly the Cove seemed a place of sunburnt ignorance, a plantation worked by slaves already broken. To be a breaker required an iron heart and stomach that not even many of the day possessed. It had to be as far down the chain of humanity as it was possible to slither. What kind of man does that for a living? Was he the inevitable by-product of an inhumane culture? Or was it an evil inherent in his character? Was it—I had to ask myself—in his DNA?

  17

  A TALE OF TWO CHROMOSOMES

  My mother looked several times for the glass tumblers John Abraham had made before he disappeared, the ones Aunty Julie gave her after she first learned my great-grandfather had been a juggler. If Mum happened to be in the basement crawl space for paper towels or ginger ale, or for any item bought in bulk in the event of a natural disaster or a good sale, she’d poke around. I went with her one afternoon. We crawled along the concrete floor, keeping our heads low, opening old trunks, unpacking boxes. My parents had started culling the past that lived under their house, carting bags to Goodwill or the curb. I assumed the glasses had ended up in one of them.

  Mum was reluctant to tell my father she couldn’t find them, but when she finally spoke up, Dad said, “I moved them up from the crawl space long ago.” He reached into the back of the living room cabinet and, just like that, pulled them out one at a time.

  All four were identical: tall and lightweight, made of a thin, clear glass and unusual in shape, rounded at the bottom and squared at the top; their sides were flattened by a deep indentation about the size of a thumbprint, possibly his thumbprint. It gave the glass a slight wavy appearance. Whatever else he did or may have done, my great-grandfather had a remarkable talent for glassblowing. It was remarkable too that, more than a hundred years after he made them, they were still intact, having survived the trip down from the Nilgiri Hills to Bombay in 1958, the fretful sea voyages from India to England and across the Atlantic in 1972, and three house moves in Canada since then. His glass had endured, out of sight but preserved, like his Y chromosome. John Abraham had left us that much, if not his true name—four tumblers and a smattering of genes.

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sp; Further testing confirmed that my father’s Y chromosome is a subtype known as O3a3c (formerly known as O3a5). It totes the hallmark SNP mutations that define the branch of haplogroup O3 so prevalent in China. But as an offshoot, it also carries a unique blip known as M-134—a certain spot where a G, the nucleotide guanine, is missing from its code. Most research has found that this mutation is closely linked to Sino-Tibetan-speaking peoples and the Han Chinese, China’s largest ethnic group. But this subgroup of O3 also has a long reach, through East and Southeast Asia and all the way down to the South Pacific. Up to 3 percent of Aboriginal men in Australia carry it, perhaps a remnant of pre-colonial mingling between the Chinese and Australians. It can also be found in men from Nepal and northeast India, possibly a molecular memento of early Tibetan populations whose genes made a one-way trip south through the Himalayas. The O3a3c designation told a story about our ancient wandering ancestors, but once again it told me nothing about the wanderer my great-grandfather had been. The Abraham Y was still a lonely chromosome, with no apparent match to any man who could fill in the gaps of my great-grandfather’s story.

  In the spring of 2007 I’d begun exchanging emails with a young entrepreneur in Moscow by the name of Denis Grigoriev. Like my father, Denis had had his Y tested through Family Tree DNA, and like us he was one of its few customers to carry the O3a3c Y signature; we also had a few short tandem repeat markers in common. As small-world stories go, ours seems like a whopper. This young, white, muscular Russian shared the same branch of the human family tree as my octogenarian, brown, slight father in Mississauga. But then the Y is a master of disguise; no gene in its code is known to influence a man’s appearance, and nothing about a man’s appearance can confirm which Y he carries.