Sugar in the Blood (42 page)

BY THE TIME
my grandfather Edward Everton Ashby was born in 1899, Barbados had become a place to leave. The heyday of cane sugar had passed, eclipsed in popularity by the highly subsidized sugar beet produced in Europe. And Barbados, “the most esteemed and ancient of the British colonies,” was in a desperate state. Across the island, living standards had deteriorated: wages had plummeted and jobs had disappeared. Food shortages meant that prices rose, malnourishment was pervasive and infant mortality soared. The situation was only exacerbated by a hurricane in 1898 that destroyed the homes of thousands of workers and prompted outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery and later smallpox. By 1902, Barbados seemed on the point of economic and social collapse and its citizens were departing in droves, eager to try their luck elsewhere.

Migration was an instinctive solution for the population of a region where restlessness and movement had been a way of life for centuries. Most of these migrants were desperate to escape what the historian Sidney Mintz described as the “iron grip” of sugar, and the economic and social limitations it had created in their society. They left in the first instance largely for other Caribbean colonies like Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana, which were bigger and offered more opportunities. Hopefuls would often take on short contracts and return home with their pockets heavy. After 1880, the epic construction project that was the Panama Canal attracted tens of thousands of Barbadians and Jamaicans whose livelihood had been affected by the dip in sugar prices. Many of these workers, who moved backwards and forwards between Panama and their home territories, eventually returned to the
sugar islands, boosting the economies there with their earnings. But a goodly number moved towards the land of opportunity: America. These “dusky destiny seekers,” whose number peaked at the end of the 1910s and the early 1920s, settled primarily in Harlem and Brooklyn and soon carved out prominent roles for themselves in the intellectual, political and economic leadership of the communities they established there.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, virtually every black family in the Caribbean had lost someone to the dream of migration: field workers who had been turned off the land; tradesmen who fantasized about expanding their horizons; middle-class people frustrated by the lack of change; all of them determined to find a way out of a system that was as unyielding as cement. Some left on a whim, others planned meticulously; some left fearfully, others in a fever of optimism. So many people were leaving that locals referred to it as “the Exodus.”

In 1923, the
Barbados Weekly Herald
wrote:

My grandfather Edward Everton, known as “Vere,” was amongst this group of eager émigrés. Born in 1899, he was the second son of Edward Albert Ashby and his wife, Edith Barnes, a white woman (or “near white,” since most of the people in the Caribbean who identify as Caucasian are really of mixed-race origin). Their rather stormy marriage nonetheless managed to produce four children: my grandfather, my great-aunt Una, my great-aunt Reba, who migrated early to America and lost touch with the family, and my great-uncle Ross, a dashing, handsome man, who became a merchant marine and was killed during the Second World War.

Vere’s father, Edward Albert, had, like other descendants of Robert Cooper, benefited from the social and financial advantages associated with his background. Known as “the Colonel” like his illustrious ancestor, he owned a number of shops as well as several valuable properties in the Oistins area. Edward Albert’s brothers, Reginald and Charles Frederick, had also taken advantage of their good fortune and were successful merchants in Bridgetown. Indeed the latter’s various emporiums on Swan Street, which sold everything from jewellery to hardware and bicycles, marked him out as one of the pioneering coloured merchants of the era, opening the doors for other members of his caste to succeed as entrepreneurs. The Ashby family would also be associated with the founding of the Barbados Progressive Bank, which had ambitions to break the stranglehold that whites held on the business community.

At the age of twenty-five my grandfather Vere Ashby married Muriel Haynes Skinner, who was six years his junior. For him it was love at first sight. He was besotted, he claimed, as soon as he saw her “plump yellow thighs” ascending a flight of stairs. She was probably quite impressed with him, too. As a youth my grandfather was a good-looking, rather foppish young man, who sported immaculately tailored clothes and had round, soulful, puppy-dog eyes. But marriages among the mixed-race middle classes of this era were more than a romantic liaison. A certain amount of social engineering was encouraged. The status of families like the Ashbys was still precarious. The “wrong marriage” to someone darker or poorer could easily precipitate a slide back into that world of powerlessness and discrimination to which the majority of those of African descent were consigned. But marriage to a person of equal or lighter skin colour and some material worth would maintain or even boost the privileges of the next generation. It was unsurprising, therefore, that his bride-to-be also came from a successful mixed-race family; and that her father was also a merchant, who had a number of shops in Speightstown on the west coast of the island.

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.