Triangular Road: A Memoir (6 page)

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.

 

 

 

O
n 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 contract-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.

“But why you does call yourself Sam and not Samuel? And what’s your middle name?” Adriana might have asked when she was less shy with him.

And Sam Burke might have said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “Middle name! I forget that long since! Bajans believe in having too many long, old-time English names. I decide to modernize mine. Sam Burke is all the name I need.”

“Wait, you sure you ain’ from Bridgetown?” Teasing him.

He laughed, pleased. “People did say that about me from when I was small, y’know. ‘That boy! He gets on like somebody raise up in big Bridgetown-self.’”

Acting the part of a town blade, Sam Burke might have then abruptly changed the conversation. “But you know, you got some sweet, sweet flesh on you’ bones.” His mouth to her ear. His hand reaching for the sweetness.

“Wait, where you goin’? You’s too forward!”

“You must tell me to stop then.”

Adriana probably gave a loud suck-teeth to register her disapproval, but might not have said a word.

There remains a standard studio photograph of Adriana and Sam Burke taken shortly after the birth of their first child. Adriana, seated with the baby on her lap, is wearing a cream-colored flapper dress, a long strand of fake pearls and the de rigueur headband around her neatly combed-out hair. Dangling from her arm is an extravagantly large English garden-party hat—in all likelihood a prop supplied by the photo studio to enhance her outfit. The baby on her lap is a pretty little
girl-child (my older sister), a love child, conceived some months before the marriage vows. (A fact that would come to light only after Adriana’s death.) She’s holding the baby’s tiny hands in her own, and with quiet pride offers the camera not only the sight of her perfect child but herself as well, someone who has been rescued from cleaning a ten-room house on Long Island and is now a wife, a mother and a Madam in her own right. And with her own home, if you please! True, it’s only a cold-water flat in Red Hook, Brooklyn, up with the Eye-talians who can scarce speak a word of English. True, the bathtub is right in the middle of the kitchen. But never mind. Like all Bajans she and her new husband are looking to do better, determined to progress.

Beside her in the photograph stands Sam Burke, his thick bush of hair parted boldly down the middle above his sharply planed, long-jawed, handsome face. He, too, is dressed for the occasion, in a three-piece suit that, although cheap, looks expensive on him, even custom made. A boulevardier’s bow tie complements the bespoke-looking suit, as does the handkerchief and fountain
pen in his breast pocket. One hand is thrust into his trouser pocket. His other hand holds a cane (probably also a studio prop) angled just so at his side.

Adriana and Sam Burke (and their firstborn),
Brooklyn, 1925

Sam Burke presents himself as someone who has never been near a canefield, or, for that matter, inside a damn mattress factory where he has to wear a snood like a woman to protect his hair from the lint flying about the place. The ignominy of that snood! No, Sam Burke has never been near a field or a factory in his life! The haughty gaze he directs at the camera dares it to reveal otherwise.

That was his way. My father went about life insisting, by his manner, that his was a higher calling than the series of factory jobs he held over the years. In his eyes he possessed the ability and talent to be so much more. . . .

The course he took in radio repair—which he never finished—almost ruined our priceless secondhand console radio in the living room. Once he abruptly discontinued a home-study course he was taking in accounting. Too damn long, too many figures, too expensive. The trumpet lessons
that went on every Saturday and Sunday morning for months kept us with our hands clapped over our ears until the trumpet, too, was abandoned.

Also, on and off for years, he was a salesman after work and on weekends. Sample case in hand, cheap suit fitting him just so, he made the rounds of black Brooklyn selling a variety of products not to be found in the white department stores downtown. One time it was hair grease and hot combs; then a line of cosmetics compatible with the dark skin of his customers; later on, ladies’ hose in a monochrome of brown. These and other selling ventures Sam Burke pursued until they either failed to turn a profit or he simply grew tired of repeating the sales pitch: “Each time you singing the same damn tune just to sell a pair of stockings. Finish with that!” Or—and this was more often the case—he had again decided that selling door-to-door was beneath his talents.

Although the holy grail of his true calling continued to elude him, Sam Burke remained surprisingly optimistic. A vocation that truly suited him? A job that didn’t call for the overalls and work clothes of a common laborer? It was only a matter
of time. So that, especially with me and my sister, he remained his playful, irresistible “Bridgetown” self.

“Ladyfolks, ladyfolks, rise and shine and give God the glory!” was the way he roused us each morning. While in Cuba he had fallen in love with all things Spanish and had named us accordingly: Anita for my sister; Valenza, after Valencia, for me—although I was called by my middle name, Pauline. (A name I promptly changed to Paule with a silent “e” the moment I reached my majority at age thirteen.) Among the few Spanish words and phrases our father had retained was
“Quieta la boca”
—so that he loved it when our noisy sibling rivalry gave him an excuse to cry out,
“Señoritas, señoritas, quieta la boca, por favor!”