Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  Almost immediately after the wedding, the couple decamped for Harlem in New York, where my grandfather had spent a number of his teenage years and early manhood and had many relatives. Initially they stayed with my great-grandmother’s family, the Barneses, who had migrated there after the turn of the century. Later they took an apartment in central Harlem and my grandmother gave piano lessons to the offspring of the more affluent black migrants who had moved there from the South. My grandfather took a job as a bellhop at a large Manhattan hotel that was, according to my mother, “a desirable occupation for a coloured man at that time.” Of course, this was true only in an American context; back in Barbados my grandfather would never have dreamt of taking a job in the service industries, as he would have considered it far beneath him. This downward mobility was typical of the lot of many migrants who took positions they considered inferior to get a foothold in the American job market.

  My grandfather was not alone in his enthusiasm for Harlem. Black migration there had begun before the wars, when Caribbean immigrants joined the droves of African-Americans from the South who were migrating north in search of new beginnings. These groups had many parallel experiences. Americans from below the Mason–Dixon line (the cultural boundary that separated the northern United States from the South) had fled from racial persecution—the spectre of lynching and those “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees; or men in white sheets, burning crosses on lawns; or black women who were too well dressed arrested for “acting white”; or separate entrances and second-class carriages—and the West Indians too had their own stories of racial violence, denigration and segregation. (As late as the 1940s one of Barbados’s foremost political leaders could drop his white wife off at the island’s Yacht Club but could not go in.)

  It was no wonder therefore that these migrants’ numbers were so prodigious. According to the historian Irma Watkins-Owens, “Between 1900 and 1930 some 40,000 immigrants of African descent, most of them from the British held colonies of the Caribbean, settled in Harlem as it was emerging as a black community in New York City.” So during the first few decades of the century, for an adventurous and aspirational person of colour like my grandfather, all roads led to Harlem: New York’s Jazz Age Mecca, which had been an exciting place since the late nineteenth century but had become even more so at the end of the First World War.

  Post-war Harlem was also a magnet for white people. The atmosphere of social experiment and licentiousness that had emerged there in these years meant that black Harlem in the middle of white America had become the most glamorous destination of all. Indeed, Harlem in the 1910s and 1920s had become a commodity, an aphrodisiac, where whites, emboldened by bootlegged alcohol, acted out their enchantment with the primal and exotic. They flocked to venues like the legendary Cotton Club and the Plantation Club, or to the more seedy, dingy speakeasies like the Clam Bake, to be scandalized by the double entendres of singers like Bessie Smith, to watch sex shows and to take marijuana. Part of the whites’ penchant for “slumming uptown” was based on the stereotypes they held about black people being hypersexual and musical, but the black Harlemites—enriched by these tourists—often colluded in these fantasies. Harlem became a “city within a city,” a place that encouraged its reputation for “anything goes,” becoming one of the few areas in America that was tolerant towards homosexuality, for example. Whatever the real thoughts of its local residents, it was a place where people could take “shore leave” from accepted morality; where they could do what they dared not do anywhere else.

  Though undoubtedly a playground for whites, Harlem was also a hub for ambitious black people in the post-war period. It was the height of the “Harlem Renaissance” and black musicians, writers and performers flocked there. Here they could at last taste the glamorous urban life of the North, as immortalized in the black popular songs of the day. Harlem was awash with music: blues, spirituals, jazz. In venues as varied as the Hot Cha and the Apollo Theater, black musicians like Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton and singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith articulated the pains and possibilities of modern life for those blacks who had fled to urban centres eager to reinvent themselves after emancipation.

  The Harlem Renaissance was more than Josephine Baker and jazz. It was also a literary and political movement in which Caribbean-born Americans would achieve genuine prominence and distinction. Alongside luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were writers of Caribbean origin like the Jamaican-born Claude Mckay, whose bestseller Home to Harlem was published in 1928, and Eric Walrond, whose background was rooted in both British Guiana and Barbados. What characterized their work was the idea of the “New Negro,” whose art, music and literature challenged the pernicious racial stereotypes that were propagated all around them. It is often forgotten how seminal the West Indian presence was in the Harlem of the 1920s.

  Many West Indians also found a prominent place in the radical movements of Harlem’s political scene. Most significant was the emergence of the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which enjoyed its heyday in the years between 1917 and 1922. Garvey, whom W. E. B. DuBois described as “a little fat, black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes,” began his career as one of those infamous stepladder orators who roared their speeches at passers-by traversing the streets of Harlem. He promoted a radical message that eschewed the conciliatory goals of social integration in favour of the desirability of a return to Africa, declaiming passionately: “Black men, you were once great, you shall be great again.” His was a vision that was particularly beguiling for many disillusioned black Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, and remained influential even after 1923, when Garvey was “got out of the way” on trumped-up charges of mail fraud. Indeed, I can still remember my uncle Lionel Yard, the husband of yet another Barbadian aunt who had migrated to New York, declaring many years later that he was “the greatest man who ever lived.” (Lionel Yard would go on to write the definitive biography of Garvey’s wife, Amy.)

  There were many others, too: men like Colin Powell, Shirley Chisholm, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, as well as radicals like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Over the years, these Caribbean migrants would not only enrich their adopted country materially but also become some of its most notable citizens of African descent. As early as the 1920s, W.A. Domingo in his book Gift of the Black Tropics noted that “it is probably not realized … to what extent West Indian Negroes have contributed to the wealth and power of the United States.”

  The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was profound. It changed how black Americans were viewed, not just by other Americans but across the world. It provided black people with a new racial consciousness and gave them an appreciation of their own culture and a spirit of self-determination. Indeed, many argue that the Harlem Renaissance laid the foundation for the post-war Civil Rights movement.

  Among the other members of the Ashby clan who migrated to America during the same period as my grandfather was the family of my Brooklyn-based cousin Andrea Ramsey, who is a descendant of Robert Cooper and his slave Sukey Ann. Their American chronicle began when two of Andrea’s great-grandfather’s sisters, Anne and Sarah Nurse, migrated to the United States just after the turn of the nineteenth century, eager “to expand their options.” Several years later, in 1909, they were followed by their brother, William Edmund Thomas Sinclair Nurse, a headmaster. His wife, Charlotte Ashby Nurse, followed the next year, but though the couple never divorced, they never lived together after her arrival. The marriage had been doomed virtually from the start, as the family members recalled: “He wouldn’t give and she wouldn’t give!” Instead Charlotte settled on the Upper West Side and worked as a laundress for private families. Like my grandparents, these Ashbys had to adjust their expectations and take the work they were offered.

  Indeed, many of these new migrants quickly found their exhilaration at being in America tempered by frustration, once they had had a chance to settle in. Wh
ile the status of black people was better than it had been and there were now high-profile advocates for change, things were by no means equal: the segregation laws were still very much in place in the South and discrimination was still a feature of their everyday life. As a result there were sporadic outbreaks of rioting and racial violence, and employment opportunities were extremely limited.

  The novelist Eric Walrond wrote:

  On coming to the United States the West Indian often finds himself out of patience with the attitude he meets there respecting the position of white and Negroes. He is bewildered … at being shoved down certain blocks and alleys “among his own people.” He is angry and amazed at the futility of seeking out certain types of employment for which he may be specially adapted. And about the cruellest injury that could be inflicted upon him is to ask him to submit to the notion that because he is black it is useless for him to aspire to be more than a tap drummer at Small’s, a red cap at Pennsylvania Station or a clerk in the Bowling Green Post Office.

  These limitations had a profound impact on Andrea Ramsey’s great-grandparents. Despite letters of reference, her great-grandfather William was never able to find a teaching job and instead worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a policeman. Many new immigrants like my grandmother and father accepted this downward social mobility as the sacrifice they would have to make to step onto the employment ladder and to ensure their descendants had greater opportunities in the future, but some voiced their frustrations. According to family lore, William had a reputation as a perfectionist and was difficult to deal with. Despite being “so light skinned, that he was often mistaken for white,” he was “very outspoken about being a Negro and lived his entire life in New York in the heart of the black Harlem community.” Like many Caribbean migrants, he was militant in not allowing any injustice to pass uncontested. As Andrea recalls: “They tried to fire him or lay him off three times, but each time he appealed the decision to multiple political, government and Naval officials and got his job back. His civilian personnel file weighed over 3lbs!”

  For this generation, then, the experience of migration to America was distinctly mixed. William was impressed that in America he could exercise his rights to fight for his job, but he never found a position that was commensurate with the one he left behind in Barbados. His sisters, Sarah and Anne, found it impossible to adapt to this new place—to the alienating hubbub of a large city with its restless, anonymous mass of people, its inclement weather and inexplicable ways of doing things—and eventually returned to the island.

  As well as the tensions between the black and white communities, encounters between Caribbean blacks and African-Americans were often deeply ambivalent. Both the Caribbean and mainland America had been shaped by the Atlantic slave system in which blacks toiled in order to create vast wealth for whites. Across the region, people of African origin were the descendants of slaves, and their cultural experiences had been determined by the racial theories, social hierarchies and justifications that such a system brought about. The two groups also had a shared imagery of the past: the well-upholstered planter and the ragged slave; the “Big House” with its endless luxury and the meanness of the slave quarters; the cane and cotton fields, ministered to by black backs bent beneath an unforgiving sun.

  But there were also important differences. It seems hard to imagine now, bearing in mind what we know of the horror of Southern slavery, but the Caribbean slave system was appreciably harsher than that of mainland America. In part this was because cutting cane in the torrid conditions of the Caribbean was one of the most terrible occupations in the world. It can also be traced back to the West Indian planters’ initial decision that it made economic sense to work their slaves to death rather than sustain them from generation to generation. As a result, the region had an obscene death rate, and a steady stream of new Africans who brought with them fresh energy and newly minted resentment. Thus there had been a long tradition of violent revolt across the region and many felt that this made the West Indians more aggressive in response to injustices they encountered in America, more willing to take on the system.

  Yet the Caribbean blacks’ experience of life in the years following emancipation had probably been easier than for their Southern counterparts. By the time slavery was abolished, the black population formed a huge majority in the Caribbean, but only a minority in the United States. So it was inevitable that some black faces emerged to hold prominent positions, and that their children would eventually become accustomed to seeing other blacks in a wide range of occupations—teacher, doctor or political leader. These role models gave them ambition and confidence, and perhaps a greater degree of impatience, when they came to America.

  There was also a very different attitude to the mixed-race population in the two territories. In the Caribbean, miscegenation was implicitly accepted and the products of interracial liaisons, like my ancestor John Stephen, frequently received some sort of recognition from their planter fathers. The plantocracy of the Caribbean were also aware that they were vastly outnumbered by the slave population, so they extended privileges to their brown descendants in order that this group could then act as a buffer between them and the mass of black slaves. But the United States, with its “one drop rule,” had a more rigid and hostile attitude to this community, so this group had less support to develop and enrich itself.

  These variations in experience and expectations sometimes led to hostility between the two communities. African-Americans frequently denigrated Caribbean migrants’ small-island origins and referred to them derisorily as “monkey chasers.” Eric Walrond noted that African-Americans not only discriminated against them in the workplace but also burlesqued their accent on stage and street corner, and dismissed their pride in their British heritage as putting on “airs.” West Indians, in their turn, felt that African-Americans were “too touchy” about white people and were frustrated that they were so passive and dispirited in their acceptance of the status quo. As Claude Mckay explained, he felt more confident than “Aframericans who, long deracinated, were still rootless among phantoms and pale shadows and enfeebled by self-effacement before condescending patronage, social negativism and miscegenation.” These tensions lingered for generations. As a little girl growing up in the Bronx, Andrea Ramsey told me: “I remember my grandmother being called ‘a monkey chaser.’ When I visited Barbados and saw the green monkeys, I just had to laugh.”

  Whereas my grandfather loved the excitement of New York—the escape it offered from the insularity, rigid hierarchies and stultifying preconceptions of island life—my grandmother did not. To her, as to my cousin’s great-aunts, Harlem was a strange world indeed. The rigours of a North American winter made her miserable, and the omnipresent prejudice of American life at the height of segregation demoralized her. She was not the sort of person to be apologetic about her race and she bitterly resented the limitations imposed on her life because of it. She yearned for Barbados, where she was known in her community and where her fair complexion and straight hair, as well as her middle-class background, marked her out as part of a social elite. According to my mother, “She missed her father, and the way of life she was used to—sheltered, well connected, affluent—with domestic staff, a comfortable home.” To a proud woman who believed fervently that she was just as good as anybody else, and a great deal better than some, America was a rude awakening. Her sojourn in Harlem was probably the first time that she had ever been reduced solely to a phenotype: that is simply and merely “black.”

  Perhaps Vere was also enjoying New York a bit too much. He was a convivial man who often found himself “falling among thieves,” his way of describing his impromptu and extended sessions of drinking and carousing that so exasperated his wife. And nowhere provided as much temptation as his new neighbourhood. Harlem was so replete with dives and taverns that one African-American Baptist minister called it “little less than a corner of hell.” So hazardous was Harlem to righteous living that the minister concluded:
“Fathers and mothers away down south or far off in the West Indies, little know of the shame and degradation that have overtaken many of their sons and daughters who have come to this city to improve their condition and perhaps aid their parents, but have been lost to them and the world.” Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, my grandmother’s antipathy to their new life continued, and within a year, they were back in Barbados in time for the birth of their first child, my grandfather’s dream of relocating to America well and truly over.

  19

  The architecture of our future is not only unfinished, the scaffolding has hardly gone up.

  —GEORGE LAMMING

  MY GRANDPARENTS RETURNED to an island that was still in the doldrums. The Barbadian economy had enjoyed a brief return to prosperity around the time of the First World War, when the production of sugar beet was disrupted by the hostilities and demand for cane sugar soared. But when beet cultivation restarted, the island’s economy was once again in trouble. The situation was worsened by the epic cloud of the Great Depression, which descended over the entire international economy. Socially, too, Barbados remained a depressed and depressing place. In many ways, it had not changed since the days of Robert Cooper Ashby. The island remained rigidly hierarchical, with a small white elite at the top, a slightly larger coloured middle class beneath them and at the bottom, only inches away from absolute poverty, the mass of black workers.