She remembered him chuckling as he spun his yarn: “He started out by saying that he was born on the road between Spanishtown and Kingston, and we loved that, because we were these urban children, and we couldn’t imagine being born on the road. And then he said he stowed away on a banana boat, and I didn’t know what to think. But when I cleaned out his apartment after he died I found sort of a passage document from a United Fruit Company boat. So maybe he stowed away, but with papers? He chuckled when he told us the stowaway part, so I don’t know if he was trying to give us an adventure tale, but that’s all we ever knew. We knew that there was something funny but couldn’t quite discern what it was.”
It turns out that Elizabeth’s grandfather’s story about being a stowaway on a banana boat was a riddle of sorts. We found the actual records of her grandfather’s immigration to America. They show that his story was an interesting mix of fantasy and fact—leaning heavily toward the side of fantasy. The SS Turrialba—owned by the United Fruit Company (in a way, a “banana boat”)—arrived at Ellis Island, New York, from Jamaica on August 31, 1918, and its manifest lists twenty-one-year-old Clifford Alexander not only as a paying passenger but as a first-class passenger as well. His race is listed as “West Indian,” and his home is Kingston, Jamaica.
We were also able to find his birth certificate in Jamaica. It indicates that Clifford was born in Kingston to a woman named Emma Honeywell, a seamstress living at 4 Wildman Street. No father is named on the birth certificate, but Emma’s address gave us a starting point for some theorizing. Wildman Street is in the oldest part of Kingston, a very poor neighborhood. Number 4, where Clifford was born, is today an alley running behind the street. Some of the oldest residents of the neighborhood told us that, for the past century at least, the alley has been filled with one-room rental apartments. So Clifford Alexander was born into intense poverty.
The fact that no father is named on Clifford’s birth certificate indicates that the family legend about his being illegitimate is almost certainly correct. I wanted to find out if the stories about his Jewish father were also true. According to Elizabeth, Clifford had told her, at the end of his life, that his parents were named Emma and James. The Emma part had checked out. What about the James part? Could we locate a Jewish merchant named James Alexander?
If you do enough genealogical research, you will be forced to face the sad fact that family stories are often pure invention. In my own family, we cherished the idea that we were all related to Horatio Gates, the Revolutionary War general. Research showed there wasn’t a shred of truth to the story. For many African Americans, whose ancestry is hidden by slavery, myths of Native American roots or Igbo princesses from Africa abound. Very few are true. Another, less common but nonetheless persistent mythology in some West Indian families is the existence of a male Jewish ancestor; Malcolm Gladwell’s family, as we shall see, shared the same belief. (As a matter of fact, about 35 percent of all African American males are descended from a white male ancestor, according to their Y-DNA.) Of course, there are often kernels of truth in family lore, and sometimes family stories turn out to be true. From our research, it seems that it might be possible that Clifford Alexander’s father was a Jewish merchant. We don’t know for certain, but there is significant evidence to support it.
First is the surname: Alexander. Alexander in Jamaica is thought of as a “Jewish” name, and it’s not uncommon for a woman to give her illegitimate child the father’s name to create a connection to the father, even if they’re not legally associated. This was, indeed, quite a common practice at the time when Elizabeth’s grandfather was born. There are other factors that led us to think that he might have been Jewish as well. Jamaica in the nineteenth century was a very complex society with regard to race and class. Everyone had a place, everyone knew that place, and that place was signified by color. The white ruling elite, of course, was at the top. Jewish people and free people of color were at the same social level one tier down (and both groups, curiously enough, won the right to vote in the same year, 1831). Below them was the bulk of the population: black slaves of all different skin tones but predominantly pure, unmixed black people. So in spite of the second-class status of Jews, claiming a Jewish ancestor for a black person meant that you had white ancestry. And in Jamaica that was a very good thing. For a black woman, slave or free, a relationship with a white man, even a Jewish man, could be a dramatic step up in the world. Emma may have been willing to engage in a relationship for this reason alone.
Unfortunately, this is all speculation. With the records available to us we were not able either to prove or to disprove the existence of a Jewish merchant in Elizabeth’s family or to document a connection between Emma Honeywell and any man who might have been the father of her son Clifford. There are no records of a man named James Alexander living in Jamaica at that time, nor is there any evidence that a man fitting his description might have died in the 1907 earthquake, as Elizabeth’s family story says. (DNA, however, has something to say about this story, as we later found out.)
Our research, however, was not entirely fruitless. It did yield more information about Elizabeth’s great-grandmother Emma Honeywell. We found her baptismal record, dated May 6, 1859. It shows that she was born in Kingston, in the parish of St. Elizabeth, sometime in March 1859. Her parents are listed as Edward and Esther Honeywell, and her mother’s occupation is listed as “servant.” We also found the marriage certificate of Edward Honeywell and Esther Elisabeth Powell. They were married on July 15, 1857, by the Reverend R. D. Lynch in St. Elizabeth Parish. We wanted to see if Esther Powell was related to Colin Powell, whose family is also from Jamaica, but unfortunately we found no connection at all.
Further searching uncovered Emma’s father’s baptismal record. It shows that Edward Honeywell, “a Domestic of Northampton,” aged twenty-one years old, was baptized on September 17, 1852. This record also contains a very telling omission. It does not state Edward’s complexion, which in the Jamaica of this era means that he was black (white people and those with mixed blood made this known because it was a badge of honor). So, based on his profession as a “domestic” and the absence of recorded information about his race, I told Elizabeth that it was almost certain that her great-great-grandfather was black and a former slave.
“That’s amazing,” said Elizabeth. “It doesn’t surprise me, but I also never even allowed myself to speculate beyond the one person that we knew. We had heard of Emma, but I never thought about her parents.”
Elizabeth and I were both intrigued by the fact that Edward was baptized at age twenty-one. This means that he was born about 1831. And although the British act abolishing slavery in Jamaica passed in 1833, and became effective in 1834, slaves were still held in apprenticeships until 1838. So Edward most likely spent the first years of his childhood as a slave and then, when he was about seven, received his freedom. But he was free for fourteen years before he was baptized. Why did he wait so long? There’s no way of knowing. It is possible that he came under the sway of religion at this point—possibly through another person such as his wife, Esther, or via the influence of a preacher. Records show that he was baptized on the same day as many of his neighbors, so it seems entirely possible that some kind of a hell-fire preacher came into his community distributing the fear of God en masse. There is no way to know for sure, but it seems a very likely explanation.
Elizabeth and I both wanted to know more about Edward’s slave past. His baptismal record notes that he was a domestic servant and that he lived in Northampton. This was not a familiar place name to us, so our researchers began searching and found hand-drawn maps from the early nineteenth century of St. Elizabeth Parish. They showed that the parish contained something called “Northampton Pen.” The word pen was the Jamaican term at that time for a cattle farm, and Northampton Pen was one of the largest pens in the country—including a plantation house and an estate of over fifteen hundred acres. This is where Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather and m
ost likely his parents were slaves.
The farm is a ruin today, just some walls, the bare remains of some kind of entrance gate, open fields crossed by a single road, and lots of goats. But in the first decades of the 1800s, it was a very significant operation, owned by an Englishman named John Chambers. Records show that in 1826 Chambers owned 299 slaves. That’s a large number of slaves for Jamaica and is much larger than most plantations in the United States held, even at the height of slavery here. When Chambers died in 1832, the inventory of his estate listed all his slaves. On the list is a boy named Edward, age two and a half years, valued at forty pounds (which would be about forty-five hundred dollars today). Incredibly, this two-and-a-half-year-old boy is Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather.
“My God,” said Elizabeth, looking at the record. “When you see in black and white what it is to be valued as property when you’re a toddler—I’m sorry, but these are all babies. That’s hard to take.”
This inventory told us more about the lives of Edward and the other slaves. It appears that Chambers did not treat his property as badly as many Jamaican slave owners did. Jamaica, like the rest of the Caribbean islands and much of South and Latin America, was a death camp for African slaves, a far worse place to be than the United States in terms of life expectancy. As a matter of fact, of a total of about 10.8 million slaves who survived the Middle Passage, only 450,000 or so Africans arrived in the United States between 1619 and 1865. The common practice in many parts of the Caribbean and South America was for owners simply to work their slaves until they died and then replace them, devoting little or no effort to maintaining their health or adequately feeding them. In America, by contrast, the importation of Africans was abolished in 1808, so slaves could not be easily replaced through importation. They were thus bred for generations of work and, while clearly mistreated, were not primarily viewed as replaceable parts. As a result, although there were only 450,000 Africans brought to the United States in the slave trade, the African American population today numbers over thirty-five million people. Far more slaves went to the Caribbean and to South America—and the vast majority of them died, leaving no descendants. But the Northampton Pen was an exception. Chambers’s records show a large number of births on his estate and many slaves who seem to have lived into their seventies and eighties—which in the 1830s was a very long time. So they must have been fed decently and received some kind of medical care. This, of course, does not make Edward and his family’s slavery acceptable in any way. Elizabeth and I simply find it interesting to know that it could have been much worse.
Unfortunately, we could learn nothing more about Edward—and nothing at all about his parents. But, as I told Elizabeth, I think this scarcity of detail in itself tells us something about the Honeywells and illuminates her grandfather’s silence about his past. Genealogies reflect a family’s history in many different ways. They are so much more than a list of names. And when you find lives as elusive as these, it is because, for whatever reasons, our ancestors could not, or did not, record key facts about their existence. They were too poor to have access to records or for records to have access to them; they didn’t own property or pay taxes on property. Often, births of the poor were not recorded; some churches kept records of baptisms, marriages, and funerals; others did not. And even when these sorts of records were kept, sometimes they have been lost, destroyed, or discarded. Frankly, if you think about it, most of our ancestors, on any branch of our family trees, were regular people who lived on the lower levels of society, most often beneath literacy. The only records that we were able to locate across two generations of Honeywells were a baptismal certificate, a marriage license, and the estate records of the white man who owned them. These were not prosperous people. I am always astonished by how much we can find out about anyone’s ancestors, to tell you the truth, given the small percentages of literacy in Europe and America and in any country until very recently and given that the overwhelming percentage of our ancestors were, at best, members of the working poor.
“But there they are,” said Elizabeth, pointing to her great-great-grandparents’ marriage license. “It’s hard to imagine. I mean, what you can know is that the kind of work they had to do wouldn’t have left much time for imagination, but what we also know about people under all kinds of difficult conditions and what we know about black people is that creativity and beauty comes out of that privation. So we have the spirituals, and we have folk tales, and we have aphorisms—we have so much production that comes out of people under very, very extreme circumstances. And I imagine in that regard they were like so many others. But it’s all imagining, isn’t it? Even with what we know as scholars about the sorrow songs—we have some records, but really, really trying to understand the circumstances from which those arise you have to use imagination.”
Elizabeth is right, of course. It’s a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents or property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth—and the worlds they might have made had they been free.
Moving back down Elizabeth’s paternal line, we looked at the ancestry of Clifford Alexander’s wife, Elizabeth’s grandmother, Edith MacAlister. Edith was born in 1902, in Yonkers, New York, just a few miles north of the Harlem neighborhood where she spent most of her adult life. She died when Elizabeth was a baby, and Elizabeth has no memory of her. Fortunately, her life is well documented. Her mother was a woman named Harriet, who was born sometime around 1880 in Pennsylvania, and her father was Walter Nathan MacAlister, born in July 1880 in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Harriet and Walter were almost certainly the children of freed slaves. And though we could not identify Harriet’s last name or the identity of her parents, we were able to trace Walter back two generations into slavery using plantation records and census data. His parents were Nathan MacAlister, born in 1840 in Cumberland County, and a woman named Margaret, who was born a slave in Virginia in January 1854 and died a free woman sometime in 1900. We even found Nathan MacAlister’s mother: a woman named Maryanne MacAlister who was born in 1816 in North Carolina.
This meant that on Elizabeth’s father’s side, we were able to trace her ancestry into slavery back to 1816 in America and 1831 in Jamaica—which is quite extraordinary for any African American.
Turning to Elizabeth’s maternal line, we started with her mother, Adele Logan, born in 1938 in New York City. She has an impressive family as well. Adele’s mother was Wenonah Bond, born in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 18, 1906. Her father, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, was Robert Percy Bond, born on June 18, 1868, in Norfolk, Virginia. His father was a remarkable man named John Robert Bond, born on May 24, 1843, in Mold, a town in Wales. John is Elizabeth’s immigrant ancestor on her maternal line. According to her family’s lore—and to some very impressive research done by her mother, a highly regarded historian—John was the son of a white woman from England and a black ship’s cook named Robert Bond. According to the family, John came to America as a young man to join the fight against slavery. It’s a wild story, more like a Hollywood movie than what we tend to find in the historical record, and I was eager to see what portion of it might be true. Much to my surprise, records suggest that the family account is substantially true, but with a few surprising twists.
Census records from Liverpool, England (which is about twenty miles from Mold) show that in 1851, an eight-year-old boy named John Robert Bond was living with his thirty-five-year-old father, Robert Bond, and his thirty-year-old mother, Ann Evans. In our records, Robert Bond lists his occupation as “cook on a ship” and states that he was from Bermuda. These are, undoubtedly, Elizabeth’s ancestors.
“That’s a total shock,” said Elizabeth, ecstatic. “It was a big unknown, and again I didn’t know enough about the history to be able to even speculate on whether he would have been in Liverpool for some time, for another generation, or come from Africa as a s
lave or come from the West Indies. That’s fascinating. Bermuda was never in the equation.”
Records also show that John Robert Bond left England and journeyed to New Bedford, Massachusetts, around the time of the Civil War (we could not identify the precise date of his arrival, but records definitely place him there by 1863). In that era, New Bedford was a center of the shipping and whaling industries, the latter of which was perhaps the most open occupation in the entire American economy for black men. Shortly after escaping to freedom in the North, Frederick Douglass had moved there for this very reason. We don’t know exactly what drew Elizabeth’s ancestor to New Bedford or what he did there, but we do know that John made a very unusual decision for a foreign-born black person. In May 1863, as the Civil War entered its third long year, he enlisted in the Union navy. He was twenty-one years old and had lived almost all his life in England. But he clearly believed in the Union cause, and he served with honor. On February 1, 1864, he was wounded in action when a bullet pierced his chest. It could have been a fatal wound, but he survived, was honorably discharged, and was granted an invalid’s pension of eight dollars a month. He was just twenty-two years old. And around this time, he met an African American woman named Emma Thomas. We weren’t able to track down records of where Emma was born or who her parents were, but she and John Robert Bond married in June 1865, just weeks after the end of the Civil War. They eventually headed north to New England and settled in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they raised a family of four children, one of whom was Elizabeth’s great-grandfather Robert Percy Bond.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 51