Chief among MacMillan’s concerns was Jamaica’s educational system. Formal schooling—if you could call what happened in the wooden barn next door to my grandparents’ house “formal schooling”—went only to fourteen years of age. Jamaica had no public high schools or universities. Those with academic inclinations took extra classes with the head teacher in their teenage years and with luck made it into teachers’ college. Those with broader ambitions had to somehow find their way into a private school, and from there to a university in the United States or England.
But scholarships were few and far between, and the cost of private schooling was prohibitive for all but a privileged few. The “bridge from the primary schools” to high school, MacMillan later wrote, in a blistering critique of England’s treatment of its colonies entitled Warning from the West Indies, “is narrow and insecure.” The school system did nothing for the “humblest” classes. He went on: “If anything these schools are a factor deepening and sharpening social distinctions.” If the government did not give its people opportunities, he warned, there would be trouble.
A year after MacMillan published his book, a wave of riots and unrest swept the Caribbean. Fourteen people were killed and fifty-nine injured in Trinidad. Fourteen were killed and forty-seven injured in Barbados. In Jamaica, a series of violent strikes shut down the country, and a state of emergency was declared. Panicked, the British government took MacMillan’s prescriptions to heart and, among other reforms, proposed a series of “all-island” scholarships for academically minded students to go to private high schools. The scholarships began in 1941. My mother and her twin sister sat for the exam the following year. That is how they got a high school education; had they been born two or three or four years earlier, they might never have gotten a full education. My mother owes the course her life took to the timing of her birth, to the rioters of 1937, and to W. M. MacMillan.
I described Daisy Nation, my grandmother, as “renowned for her beauty.” But the truth is that was a careless and condescending way to describe her. She was a force. The fact that my mother and her sister left Harewood for Saint Hilda’s was my grandmother’s doing. My grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer. He buried himself in his books. If he had ambitions for his daughters, he did not have the foresight and energy to make them real. My grandmother did. Saint Hilda’s was her idea: some of the wealthier families in the area sent their daughters there, and she saw what a good school meant. Her daughters did not play with the other children of the village. They read. Latin and algebra were necessary for high school, so she had her daughters tutored by Archdeacon Hay.
“If you’d asked her about her goals for her children, she would have said she wanted us out of there,” my mother recalls. “She didn’t feel that the Jamaican context offered enough. And if the opportunity was there to go on, and you were able to take it, then to her the sky was the limit.”
When the results came back from the scholarship exam, only my aunt was awarded a scholarship. My mother was not. That’s another fact that my first history was careless about. My mother remembers her parents standing in the doorway, talking to each other. “We have no more money.” They had paid the tuition for the first term and bought the uniforms and had exhausted their savings. What would they do when the second-term fees for my mother came due? But then again, they couldn’t send one daughter and not the other. My grandmother was steadfast. She sent both—and prayed—and at the end of the first term, it turned out that one of the other girls at the school had won two scholarships, so the second was given to my mother.
When it came time to go to university, my aunt, the academic twin, won what was called a Centenary Scholarship. The “Centenary” was a reference to the fact that the scholarship was established one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It was reserved for the graduates of public elementary schools, and, in a measure of how deeply the British felt about honoring the memory of abolition, there was a total of one Centenary scholarship awarded every year for the whole island, with the prize going to the top girl and the top boy in alternating years. The year my aunt applied was one of the “girl” years. She was lucky. My mother was not. My mother was faced with the cost of passage to England, room and board and living expenses, and tuition at the University of London. To get a sense of how daunting that figure was, the value of the Centenary scholarship my aunt won was probably as much as the sum of my grandparents’ annual salaries. There were no student loan programs, no banks with lines of credit for schoolteachers out in the countryside. “If I’d asked my father,” my mother says, “he would have replied, ‘We have no money.’”
What did Daisy do? She went to the Chinese shopkeeper in a neighboring town. Jamaica has a very large Chinese population that since the nineteenth century has dominated the commercial life of the island. In Jamaican parlance, a store is not a store, it is a “Chinee-shop.” Daisy went to the “Chinee-shop,” to Mr. Chance, and borrowed the money. No one knows how much she borrowed, although it must have been an enormous sum. And no one knows why Mr. Chance lent it to Daisy, except of course that she was Daisy Nation, and she paid her bills promptly and had taught the Chance children at Harewood School. It was not always easy to be a Chinese child in a Jamaican schoolyard. The Jamaican children would taunt the Chinese children. “Chinee nyan [eat] dog.” Daisy was a kindly and beloved figure, an oasis amid that hostility. Mr. Chance may have felt in her debt.
“Did she tell me what she was doing? I didn’t even ask her,” my mother remembers. “It just occurred. I just applied to university and got in. I acted completely on faith that I could rely on my mother, without even realizing that I was relying on my mother.”
Joyce Gladwell owes her college education first to W. M. MacMillan, and then to the student at Saint Hilda’s who gave up her scholarship, and then to Mr. Chance, and then, most of all, to Daisy Nation.
3.
Daisy Nation was from the northwestern end of Jamaica. Her great-grandfather was William Ford. He was from Ireland, and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784 having bought a coffee plantation. Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine. He noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the south coast. She was an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa. They had a son, whom they named John. He was, in the language of the day, a “mulatto”; he was colored—and all of the Fords from that point on fell into Jamaica’s colored class.
In the American South during that same period, it would have been highly unusual for a white landowner to have such a public relationship with a slave. Sexual relations between whites and blacks were considered morally repugnant. Laws were passed prohibiting miscegenation, the last of which were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967. A plantation owner who lived openly with a slave woman would have been socially ostracized, and any offspring from the union of black and white would have been left in slavery.
In Jamaica, attitudes were very different. The Caribbean in those years was little more than a massive slave colony. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of more than ten to one. There were few, if any, marriageable white women, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of white men in the West Indies had black or brown mistresses. One British plantation owner in Jamaica who famously kept a precise diary of his sexual exploits slept with 138 different women in his thirty-seven years on the island, almost all of them slaves and, one suspects, not all of them willing partners. And whites saw mulattoes—the children of those relationships—as potential allies, a buffer between them and the enormous numbers of slaves on the island. Mulatto women were prized as mistresses, and their children, one shade lighter in turn, moved still further up the social and economic ladder. Mulattoes rarely worked in the fields. They lived the much easier life of working in the “house.” They were the ones most likely to be freed. So many mulatto mistresses were left substantial fortunes in the wills of white property owners that the Ja
maica legislature once passed a law capping bequests at two thousand pounds (which, at the time, was an enormous sum).
“When a European arrives in the West Indies and gets settled or set down for any length of time, he finds it necessary to provide himself with a housekeeper or mistress,” one eighteenth-century observer wrote. “The choice he has an opportunity of making is various, a black, a tawney, a mulatto or a mestee, one of which can be purchased for 100 or 150 sterling....If a progeny of young colored children is brought forth, these are emancipated, and mostly sent by those fathers who can afford it, at the age of three or four years, to be educated in England.”
This is the world Daisy’s grandfather John was born into. He was one generation removed from a slave ship, living in a country best described as an African penal colony, and he was a free man, with every benefit of education. He married another mulatto, a woman who was half European and half Arawak, which is the Indian tribe indigenous to Jamaica, and had seven children.
“These people—the coloreds—had a lot of status,” the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson says. “By eighteen twenty-six, they had full civil liberties. In fact, they achieve full civil liberties at the same time as the Jews do in Jamaica. They could vote. Do anything a white person could do—and this is within the context of what was still a slave society.
“Ideally, they would try to be artisans. Remember, Jamaica has sugar plantations, which are very different from the cotton plantations you find in the American South. Cotton is a predominantly agricultural pursuit. You are picking this stuff, and almost all of the processing was done in Lancashire, or the North. Sugar is an agro-industrial complex. You have to have the factory right there, because sugar starts losing sucrose within hours of being picked. You had no choice but to have the sugar mill right there, and sugar mills require a wide range of occupations. The coopers. The boiler men. The carpenters—and a lot of those jobs were filled by colored people.”
It was also the case that Jamaica’s English elite, unlike their counterparts in the United States, had little interest in the grand project of nation building. They wanted to make their money and go back to England. They had no desire to stay in what they considered a hostile land. So the task of building a new society—with the many opportunities it embodied—fell to the coloreds as well.
“By eighteen fifty, the mayor of Kingston [the Jamaican capital] was a colored person,” Patterson went on. “And so was the founder of the Daily Gleaner [Jamaica’s major newspaper]. These were colored people, and from very early on, they came to dominate the professional classes. The whites were involved in business or the plantation. The people who became doctors and lawyers were these colored people. These were the people running the schools. The bishop of Kingston was a classic brown man. They weren’t the economic elite. But they were the cultural elite.”
The chart below shows a breakdown of two categories of Jamaican professionals—lawyers and members of parliament—in the early 1950s. The categorization is by skin tone. “White and light” refers to people who are either entirely white or, more likely, who have some black heritage that is no longer readily apparent. “Olive” is one step below that, and “light brown” one step below olive (although the difference between those two shades might not be readily apparent to anyone but a Jamaican). The fact to keep in mind is that in the 1950s “blacks” made up about 80 percent of the Jamaican population, outnumbering coloreds five to one.
Ethnicity Lawyers (percentage) Members of Parliament (percentage)
Chinese 3.1
East Indians —
Jews 7.1
Syrians —
White and light 38.8 10
Olive 10.2 13
Light brown 17.3 19
Dark brown 10.2 39
Black 5.1 10
Unknown 8.2
Look at the extraordinary advantage that their little bit of whiteness gave the colored minority. Having an ancestor who worked in the house and not in the fields, who got full civil rights in 1826, who was valued instead of enslaved, who got a shot at meaningful work instead of being consigned to the sugarcane fields, made all the difference in occupational success two and three generations later.
Daisy Ford’s ambition for her daughters did not come from nowhere, in other words. She was the inheritor of a legacy of privilege. Her older brother Rufus, with whom she went to live as a child, was a teacher and a man of learning. Her brother Carlos went to Cuba and then came back to Jamaica and opened a garment factory. Her father, Charles Ford, was a produce wholesaler. Her mother, Ann, was a Powell, another educated, upwardly mobile colored family—and the same Powells who would two generations later produce Colin Powell. Her uncle Henry owned property. Her grandfather John—the son of William Ford and his African concubine—became a preacher. No less than three members of the extended Ford family ended up winning Rhodes Scholarships. If my mother owed W. M. MacMillan and the rioters of 1937 and Mr. Chance and her mother, Daisy Ford, then Daisy owed Rufus and Carlos and Ann and Charles and John.
4.
My grandmother was a remarkable woman. But it is important to remember that the steady upward path upon which the Fords embarked began with a morally complicated act: William Ford looked upon my great-great-great-grandmother with desire at a slave market in Alligator Pond and purchased her.
The slaves who were not so chosen had short and unhappy lives. In Jamaica, the plantation owners felt it made the most sense to extract the maximum possible effort from their human property while the property was still young—to work their slaves until they were either useless or dead—and then simply buy another round at the market. They had no trouble with the philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a slave and simultaneously thinking of slaves as property. William Thistlewood, the plantation owner who cataloged his sexual exploits, had a lifelong relationship with a slave named Phibbah, whom, by all accounts, he adored, and who bore him a son. But to his “field” slaves, he was a monster, whose preferred punishment for those who tried to run away was what he called “Derby’s dose.” The runaway would be beaten, and salt pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper would be rubbed into his or her open wounds. Another slave would defecate into the mouth of the miscreant, who would then be gagged for four to five hours.
It is not surprising, then, that the brown-skinned classes of Jamaica came to fetishize their lightness. It was their great advantage. They scrutinized the shade of one another’s skin and played the color game as ruthlessly in the end as the whites did. “If, as often happens, children are of different shades of color in a family,” the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Henriques once wrote:
the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others. In adolescence, and until marriage, the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or fairer members of the family are being entertained. The fair child is regarded as raising the color of the family and nothing must be put in the way of its success, that is in the way of a marriage which will still further raise the color status of the family. A fair person will try to sever social relations he may have with darker relatives...the darker members of a Negro family will encourage the efforts of a very fair relative to “pass” for White. The practices of intra-family relations lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice.
My family was not immune to this. Daisy was inordinately proud of the fact her husband was lighter than she was. But that same prejudice was then turned on her: “Daisy’s nice, you know,” her mother-in-law would say, “but she’s too dark.”
One of my mother’s relatives (I’ll call her Aunt Joan) was also well up the color totem pole. She was “white and light.” But her husband was what in Jamaica is called an “Injun”—a man with a dark complexion and straight, fine black hair—and their daughters were dark like their father. One day, after her husband had died, she was traveling on a train to visit her daughter, and she met and took an interest in a light-sk
inned man in the same railway car. What happened next is something that Aunt Joan told only my mother, years later, with the greatest of shame. When she got off the train, she walked right by her daughter, disowning her own flesh and blood, because she did not want a man so light-skinned and desirable to know that she had borne a daughter so dark.
In the 1960s, my mother wrote a book about her experiences. It was entitled Brown Face, Big Master, the “brown face” referring to herself, and the “big master” referring, in the Jamaican dialect, to God. At one point, she describes a time just after my parents were married when they were living in London and my eldest brother was still a baby. They were looking for an apartment, and after a long search, my father found one in a London suburb. On the day after they moved in, however, the landlady ordered them out. “You didn’t tell me your wife was Jamaican,” she told my father in a rage.
In her book, my mother describes her long struggle to make sense of this humiliation, to reconcile her experience with her faith. In the end, she was forced to acknowledge that anger was not an option and that as a colored Jamaican whose family had benefited for generations from the hierarchy of race, she could hardly reproach another for the impulse to divide people by the shade of their skin:
I complained to God in so many words: “Here I was, the wounded representative of the negro race in our struggle to be accounted free and equal with the dominating whites!” And God was amused; my prayer did not ring true with Him. I would try again. And then God said, “Have you not done the same thing? Remember this one and that one, people whom you have slighted or avoided or treated less considerately than others because they were different superficially, and you were ashamed to be identified with them. Have you not been glad that you are not more colored than you are? Grateful that you are not black?” My anger and hate against the landlady melted. I was no better than she was, nor worse for that matter....We were both guilty of the sin of self-regard, the pride and the exclusiveness by which we cut some people off from ourselves.