Sugar in the Blood (43 page)

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. While 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:

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.

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.

Initially the couple and their baby son Edward (named after his father and grandfather) settled in Bridgetown, presumably because my grandfather, who was fond of urban distractions, wanted to live there. He set up a small business in the capital while his wife stayed in Speightstown to manage the smaller of her father’s businesses. “
She was good at it,” my mother remembers, “while my father seems to have been poor at it and, I rather think, hated it.” Vere would come home to his family at the weekend, but he felt unsettled. It was a difficult period for them both, made more so by the death of the infant Edward. But the marriage somehow survived. They had two more children during this
time—my aunt Muriel and my mother, Barbara—and soon the entire family moved to a house in the Garrison (once the military headquarters for the Imperial forces) with my grandfather’s sister’s family, the Donovans.

It was only later, after the failure of a number of commercial ventures, that Vere was finally forced to consider Plumgrove, the sugar estate he had inherited from his now dead father, which had been abandoned and was daily growing more derelict. When they moved there, my grandmother was delighted. She had happy memories of her father’s plantation, Checker Hall in the parish of St. Lucy. But Vere was desperate. Not only was he forced to live in Barbados, he had to become a planter—a role he had no desire to assume.

It is interesting to speculate on why both my great-grandfathers would want, so to speak, to return to the scene of the crime by purchasing sugar plantations. On one level, the explanation is rather mundane: the acquisition of a piece of land was the aspiration of every islander, and was the most common way to cement a family’s middle-class status. But why a sugar estate? Again, the answer comes down at least partly to economics: despite the plummeting prices, sugar was still the biggest game in town, and no one could quite envisage what would take its place. It was a route to power, too, since for the first half of the twentieth century the planters still had a monopoly on the political machinery of the Caribbean islands: a sugar estate represented both wealth and social superiority.

But the idealization of plantation life was not just about privilege. It also sprang from an intense nostalgia for the certainties and security of the past. Despite the dark realities of plantation life, the image propagated by planters was of a world of leisure and luxury, ease and elegance, and it remained a potent romantic symbol for some. Maybe there was also some wistfulness for what was seen as the planter’s role: being one’s own boss and not being beholden to anyone. Conceivably, my great-grandfather, Edward Albert, also shared with planters that passionate attachment to place, and the synthesis offered by estate life of where one lived and how one lived. But on another, more profound level, perhaps it was a psychological attempt to reclaim the past. In a
curious variation of the Caribbean historian Edward Brathwaite’s idea of “the inner plantation,” in which the enslaved individual internalizes the pernicious values of the plantation and oppresses himself and his fellows, the slave now gains the opportunity to recast himself as master, thus finally escaping his enslaved status.