Triangular Road

by Paule Marshall

  Our association ended shortly thereafter.

  By now the runaway part of my mind has reached the end of the James River. The sixty-mile run down from Richmond is over, and I’ve finally reached historic Jamestown as well as Point Comfort, the name given to the actual landing site of that first band of English settlers in 1607. A dozen years later, Point Comfort would also, ironically, be the place where the first “scrambles” of a sort took place. The captain of a Dutch three-master, a consignment of “twenty-and-odd negroes” (lowercase “n”) in the hold of his ship, put them up for sale at Point Comfort. The exact provenance of the group was uncertain. It’s unlikely that they were directly from “the kingdoms of Africa”—since, at the time, the trade in chattel cargo was routed mainly from West Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean archipelago. In all likelihood the “twenty-and-odd” were probably transshipments from a Caribbean island or former property of some bankrupt West Indian planter that had been peddled up the archipelago until the Dutch ship finally reached the Atlantic shoreline and Jamestown. In any event, they were immediately put up for sale at Point Comfort. No money as such changed hands. The Dutch ship being low on provisions, the chattel were exchanged for so many sacks of corn, beans and oats, so many barrels of smoked and salted meat. The exchange concluded, the “twenty-and-odd” were quickly led off to the monumental work awaiting them as well as the eight million like them who would follow over the centuries.

  “LaborDay.”

  Startled, my friend Virginia looks over at me. I’ve broken our silence again. A few minutes earlier, we had been discussing where to have a leisurely holiday lunch in downtown Richmond. Once that was decided, we had fallen silent, each of us privately taking leave of the river and the last of the morning.

  “Seems to me this particular holiday needs to be more inclusive in whom it acknowledges.”

  “Paule . . . ?”

  “All those centuries of hard back, donkeywork done gratis. When I think of that . . .”

  Troubled by my tone, my friend sits around to face me fully on our stone ottoman. Virginia’s face. To all appearances, it is a white woman’s face. In my friend’s complex genealogy, white has seemingly overwhelmed all the black in her DNA. On her maternal family tree, there had been a German grandmother, a cook in a well-to-do, late-nineteenth-century New York household, who fell in love with the family’s black coachman recently up from Amelia County, Virginia. Her paternal line reaches even farther back to the son of one of the antebellum’s wealthiest planters. The family still ranks among today’s F.F.V.s, the First Families of Virginia, that is, the true aristocracy. Their long-ago son also figured in the whiteness that dominates my friend’s bloodline. But only physically. Only in appearance.

  Certainly not in Virginia’s mind, heart and reading of history. Indeed, occupying a place of honor in her living room is a lovingly preserved, dim little snapshot of an elderly couple seated in front of a shotgun house that is as old and weathered as they are. The man’s long John Henry legs seem to extend beyond the picture’s frame, while his aged wife has clearly passed down, intact, her small, sinewy body to my friend. The couple are a Southern Gothic, and they are both as black as me. They are Virginia’s great-grandparents on her mother’s side, once chattel labor; then sharecroppers, once they were freed.

  Virginia had taken the picture with her box camera once when visiting them as a teenager.

  The snapshot of the old couple always reminds me of my West Indian grandmother, whose history was not all that different. There was a small, worn, sepia-brown photograph of her that my mother—a devoted daughter—had brought with her to America. She had kept it for luck, she said, next to her passport in her pocketbook when she landed on Ellis Island over a half century ago.

  “By the way,” Virginia says suddenly, “I almost forgot to tell you that while you were away there was talk again, even official talk this time, about maybe putting up a historical marker at the Manchester Docks. . . .”

  She waits for my reaction.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I say.

  “Me neither, I guess,” Virginia adds.

  With that, we gather up our empty water bottles and the cushions we had also brought along, and with my intrepid friend once again in the lead, we start the arduous climb up the north bank, leaving behind the huge willow oak of a punkah fan, our stone ottoman and the once-pristine but now shamefully polluted and ill-used river.

  I’VE KNOWN SEAS: THE CARIBBEAN SEA

  Barbados, Part I

  I saw New York rise shining from the sea.

  —ADRIANA VIOLA CLEMENT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1923

  If it so happened that “the twenty-and-odd negroes” did, in fact, arrive at Jamestown’s Point Comfort by way of the West Indies instead of directly from Africa, then the island of their provenance might well have been Barbados—Barbados being, circa 1600, as important a holding pen and transshipment point as Richmond, Virginia, would become, circa 1820, owing to a surplus at the time of locally bred chattel. A green little coral gemstone of an island situated in the lower half of the Caribbean archipelago, Barbados is considered part of the conga line of islands doing their winding dance from the Florida Keys to the tip of Venezuela. Actually, Barbados has excused itself from the dance line to sit like a lonely wallflower off to itself some distance out in the Atlantic. It is the easternmost island in the chain, a tiny outpost of 166 square miles that, geographically, is the closest point in the Caribbean to the great pregnant bulge of West Africa and the former barracoon slave pens at Goree, Guinea, Elmina, Whydah, the Bight of Benin et al.

  When the trade in chattel cargo began in earnest, diminutive Barbados was invariably the first bit of terra firma sighted on the long, grueling Atlantic run. The island was at once landfall and a safe haven, with a natural harbor along its Caribbean coastline. Thus, it was often the place where the chattel cargo—those that had somehow managed to survive the crossing—were prepared for market, first cleansed of the caked shit, then fed—force-fed if necessary—to put flesh on the wasted, festering limbs, and the will and spirit further broken. Once this was done—and it could take weeks—the better part of the cargo was then transshipped for sale up and down the hemisphere. Left behind was a portion needed to work the ever-expanding fields of tobacco (“the jovial weed” again) and, later on, the great sugarcane estates that would supplant tobacco to overrun Barbados. Then there were the incorrigibles, those among the consignment who somehow withstood the whipping post and the pillory, their resistance unbroken. Difficult to sell, they, too, were left behind on the little wallflower island.

  Barbados, British-owned and colonized from the beginning, was a principal way station at the outset of the trade.

  It was also the birthplace of my parents, descendants perhaps of the incorrigibles left behind. (I like to think as much.) My mother, Adriana Viola Clement, grew up in a hilly district called Scotland on the Atlantic or windward coast, while my father, Sam Burke, who totally disowned “the damn little two-by-four island,” never mentioned either his family or the name of his birthplace, aside from referring to it, when pressed, as “some poor-behind little village buried in a sea of canes, a place forgotten behind God’s back.” Shortly after World War I, along with scores like them from other English-speaking islands in the Caribbean, Adriana Viola Clement and Sam Burke immigrated north to Big America. Although separately. They didn’t know each other as yet.

  Adriana Clement was eighteen. A photograph of her when she first arrived in New York revealed a sweet-faced girl with a childish appearance that was at odds with her tall, large-boned, fully fleshed woman’s body. Physically, Adriana took after her father, Prince Albert Clement, a John Henry workhorse of a man who died when she was a child. A master cooper on one of the sugar estates, Prince Albert’s sole weakness had been the rum that went into the huge casks he skillfully fashioned by hand. Adriana, as one of the youngest of his fourteen children, had been pampered growing up. Indeed, she had left Barbados not kno
wing how to braid her own hair. Her eldest sister, who practically raised her, had always done that for her.

  The SS Nerissa brought her north, a leaky old tub that, according to Adriana, must have been in existence “ever since Man said, ‘Come, let us make boats.’” It was a slow, turbulent journey up the Caribbean Sea that kept her, she said, “puking and praying,” and clinging to the sepia-brown photograph of her mother.

  “All the same, I reach safe, yes. I saw New York rise shining from the sea.”

  Whenever Adriana recalled the sight of the city emerging from the Atlantic, she always slowly raised her hands, palms up, like a conductor motioning a symphonic orchestra to its feet.

  The soaring wonder of New York City! That first day, amid the throngs from Europe on Ellis Island (“White people like peas! And not one of them speaking the King’s English”: Adriana’s scathing comment); that day she had presented her papers to the authorities, along with the “show money” required of those emigrating from the Caribbean. She would later explain “the show money” to her American-born children: “If you was from the West Indies you had to have fifty big U.S. dollars to show to the authorities when you landed, to prove you wasn’t a pauper or coming to the country to be a pauper. Back then, if you was black, you cun [couldn’t] set foot in big America without fifty dollars cold cash in you’ hand.”

  The “show money,” as well as the much larger sum that had paid her passage north, had come from a single source: Panama Money from an older brother she had never really known. It was money so named after the canal, begun in 1905, that he had helped build. While she was still an infant, her brother, Joseph Fitzroy Clement, the eldest son, had been among the legion of young men from the islands who, hearing of the money to be made on the canal, had eagerly left for the isthmus; there to work from the time God’s sun rose till it set, hacking away at the near-impenetrable jungle, draining the huge pestilential swamps, carving a waterway to link the two great oceans. A hellhole of mud, torrential rains and brutal sun, with temperatures at 120 degrees well before noon. Close to 5,000 would die over the course of the construction. Malaria. Yellow fever. Bubonic plague. The plague eventually claimed Joseph Fitzroy, but not before he dutifully sent home the better part of his pay during his years there. So, too, did most of the other islanders.

  The remittances were known as Panama Money—and they were largely responsible for what might be called the West Indian wing of black America’s Great Migration North, the momentous exodus that, figuratively speaking, saw “a black million-man march” from the South to the northern cities of America in the early twentieth century. During that same period, 1900 to 1925, more than 300,000 islanders, mainly from the English-speaking Caribbean, most of them Barbadians—or Bajans (pronounced Bay-gins), as they called themselves—also emigrated to the States, settling mainly in northern cities along the eastern seaboard: New York (i.e., Harlem, but even more so Brooklyn), New Haven, Hartford, Boston.

  The West Indian wing of the Great Migration North could not have taken place without Panama Money.

  In the Clement family, the dutiful remittances from Joseph Fitzroy were used to purchase small plots of sugarcane—or “canepieces,” as they were called. These were usually rented out until one of the Clement children, or later grandchildren, was of an age to travel. A “canepiece” would then be sold to pay his or her passage to America, England or Canada.

  In charge of the entire operation was Adriana’s mother. She was both the “Chancellor of the Exchequer” in charge of the Panama Money as well as the architect and administrator of the “canepiece” plan. Her name: Alberta Jane Clement, née Sobers, an Alberta who had married a man named Prince Albert Clement, had borne him fourteen children, nine of whom had lived; who for years had struggled mightily with her husband over the rum drinking, and then, when he died, had gone on to outlive him by decades. Her children called her M’ Da-duh, a pet name that on their lips became an honorific title. They said “M’ Da-duh” the way a commoner bowing before royalty instinctively knows to say, “M’ Lord,” “M’ Lady.”

  M’ Da-duh inspired that kind of deference.

  I met her only once. I was seven, my sister four years older, when M’ Da-duh, then in her eighties, wrote to Adriana saying that her last wish before closing her eyes on the world was to see her “American-born grands.” She had already sold a good-sized canepiece to pay for our passage, she wrote. The money for the tickets was on its way. Adriana was to bring us forthwith. My father had opposed the trip: “Wasting good money going back to that damn place!” For his part, he would have made some excuse to the old woman and saved the money she sent to do “something big” in America.

  Adriana, the dutiful daughter, ignored him, and we set sail.

  Only fragmented memories remain of the crowded disembarkation shed at Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. However, what remains vivid in my mind is the sight of the small, resoundingly black old woman bearing down on us in a long-skirted dress that was the same blinding white as the tropical sunlight outside. Ever fresh in my memory also is the way my mother suddenly came to attention like a lowly private before a general at the approach of her mother. The crowd in the shed even seemed to part like the Red Sea in my Sunday School book to make way for the juggernaut figure of the old woman. M’ Da-duh. Decades later, still taken with her authority, I would write a story about her and her island world. Indeed, she appears, in one guise or another, in every book I’ve written.

  On hand to meet Adriana when she landed at age eighteen in New York was an older brother, Winston Carlyle Clement, whom M’ Da-duh, using Panama Money, had sent north immediately after World War I. Practical, responsible, hardworking, a good Bajan determined to progress, Winston Carlyle had quickly established himself in Brooklyn—first, with a job in a mattress factory, where he had every intention of becoming a supervisor; he had then found himself a wife, an equally hardworking girl from home, who was also eager to progress. Moreover, Winston Carlyle was truly his mother’s child in his ability to take charge and organize the lives of others. Consequently, he lost no time in finding work for Adriana. In less than a month after her arrival, the overgrown baby who didn’t even know how to braid her hair found herself on Long Island cleaning the ten-room house of a white lady she was to call “Madam.” She served as a nursemaid for the Madam’s three small children, as well as tending to the Madam’s sickly old mother. The Madam was even “learning” her how to cook like white people. The work hard, the nights though were harder still. Evenings found her relegated to a basement room without so much as a fly for company.

  Many a night, head buried under the pillow to mute the sound, Adriana bawled for family and home. . . .

  Until two years into the sleep-in job, when, on one of her Sundays off, she met up with one Sam Burke, a fella from home, at her brother’s place in Brooklyn. Over the two years she had met a few other fellas from home, friends her brother had invited by the house. She hadn’t felt anything one way or another about any of them. But this Sam Burke had a smile, a kind of playful, sure-of-himself “town” way of speaking and dressing and carrying himself. In truth, you would think he was somebody born and raised in big Bridgetown back home.

  Right off Adriana took a liking to him.

  Sam Burke was an illegal alien. No passport, no visa, no documents or official papers of any kind, not even a birth certificate. Moreover, he’d had no need for the fifty dollars “show money,” since he’d never passed through Ellis Island. Rather, Sam Burke was a stowaway who had reached New York by way of Cuba. There had been no Panama Money to legally finance his passage north. Nor had there been any known relatives already settled in the States who might have been willing to sponsor him. He was just another bare-behind, chigger-foot country boy destined for a life cutting canes for pennies on an island that had been transformed by then into little else than a sugar bowl to sweeten England’s tea.

  So that desperate for a chance, any chance, Sam Burke had turned to the con
tract-labor scheme that occasionally sent young men like himself from the smaller islands to work for a limited time on the larger ones in the archipelago. Sam Burke signed up, was chosen, and wound up in Cuba, in Oriente Province, where to his surprise most of the people were as black as him. Cubans, speaking Spanish, singing Spanish, dancing Spanish, their names Spanish, but their skin sometimes blacker than his. The work? Unhappily, it was the same damn thing he had fled: cutting canes from dawn till dusk and on a plantation twice the size of the whole of little Barbados. The work hard. The machete he wielded sometimes sending the tough slivers of cane-skin piercing his own skin worse than the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head! The Cuban sun hotter than all the fires of hell burning together one time! At least in little miserable two-by-four Barbados, there were the trade winds to once in a while cool you’ skin.

  Occasionally, in a reprieve from the canefields, Sam Burke was allowed to help in transporting the raw sugar from the plantation mill to the seaport of Nuevitas. He loved this part of the work, loved even more the port city of Nuevitas, the Spanish kind of life abounding in the place. What attracted him even more about Nuevitas was that its many docks were always crowded with freighters, their holds being filled with tons of raw sugar. Once loaded, nearly all of the ships, he learned, headed due north. Their destination? The big Domino Sugar Refinery—the biggest in the world. And sitting there in New York’s harbor-self!

  Sam Burke waited good till he saw his chance.

  He reached safely. And in short order found a job in a mattress factory in Brooklyn. Not long after, he met up on a Sunday with one Adriana Viola Clement, sister of a fella who was a supervisor on the job. She was a sweet-faced Bajan girl with good solid flesh on her bones and nice ways about her.

  Right off he took a liking to her—and she to him, he could tell.