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11
1945 – 55
The Way We Were
White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the Valley deck my garden walk
English Folk Song
We, the middle class Afro-European-Caribbean adolescents of the nineteen fifties, lived an existence spawned from the tensions of three continents, Europe, Africa and America. From Europe we would inherit most of our judgements about culture through the influence of our parents and our schooling. The culture being transmitted was of course not the culture of the masses but of the European middle class and the élite. Though of mixed races, we rarely had the confidence to challenge the convention of the implicit inferiority of people of African or Asian ancestry, totally convinced that European, (i.e.British) were the standards by which to judge everything from proper manners and decorum through speech and education. There was also a suspicion that the passage from Europe to the New World transformed everything in a negative way, as if the waters of the Atlantic of necessity diluted the qualities of human institutions. Nothing on the American side of the Atlantic seemed to please our adult mentors.
At school the King’s English was advanced as the goal to which successful students must aspire. Classical English Literature was promoted as part of our cultural patrimony. American expressions of the English language especially those coming from the deep south were judged sub-standard and barbaric, not even worthy of consideration. Even in the nineteen nineties an elderly Aunt refused to watch television diffused from the Excited States because said she:” Mi son, I don’t like their accents.” As for the modifications to the English language of our patois and the naive expressions of culture from local artists, they were pitfalls introduced by the devil himself to turn us from true refinement and real respectability.
Manners also reflected our preoccupation with things British. Eating had form. It was something done with knife, fork and spoon seated on chairs around a table. Food was introduced into the mouth with the aforementioned tools. Food was not eaten with the hands, on the run, while walking, while playing, and especially not on the roads and thoroughfares of the city, where the disapproving eyes of family friends could makes judgments about our lack of decorum. The manner of eating was also prescribed. One had to chew with closed mouth, making no audible sounds, and with enough duration to render the mouthfuls a certain consistency. “Cut and swallow” or rough, rudimentary or approximate chewing, where morsels were still too chunky was another of the many pitfalls that our brutish ancestors or the devil lay as temptations to lead us from the straight and narrow, upper class European way. Variants to the prescribed behavioral norms were markers of social inferiority and testimony to the low class origin of those people infringing the norms.
In matters religious, our spiritual correctness prescribed that understated devotion was to be preferred to excessive displays and religious passion: a certain formalism more cultivated than frequent interruptions of “amens” and “hallelujahs.” Calls and responses from the Pastor to the congregation had to be of the more formal kinds, prescribed and written down in a predictable, sober and routinized fashion, unvarying and free from the caprices of sudden inspiration or spontaneous outbursts. The free form, improvised religious inebriation, the so called “pocomania” reminiscent of the worship of Black Southern Baptists, was suspect. The congregation in those churches appeared to be having way too much fun, singing in an undisciplined and exaggeratedly animated way, with harmonies too fluid and attractive, clapping excitedly, swaying, shaking and dancing suggestively in the house of God. Having too much fun in Church was definitely a practice of a peasant culture and as such was to be avoided.
It was noteworthy, from our child perspective, that church services of the more formal kinds had a more predictable and shorter duration than those which depended on the whims of momentary inspiration and spontaneous enlightenment from the congregation and the protracted appeals to the unsaved of an evangelical pastor. A fervent member of the congregation giving testimony on the time, place and reason of his/her conversion could become infatuated with the attention he/she was receiving for his/her testimony and would wax eloquent for minutes on end, thus postponing the end of the service. “Just as I Am With Just One Plea,” the anthem sung by the congregation while those who were pondering a decision to give their heart to the Lord and follow Christ, sung for the tenth time interspersed with guilt laden metaphors, delivered in the dulcet tones of a broadcaster on the F.M. wave band, eroded our precious play time as we fidgeted and squirmed wondering if we should join the trickle of people going forward up to the pastor to accept the Lord to please the adults in the Church.
From Africa we inherited peripheral elements of a folkloric nature which we practiced as minor indulgences, some tales in the form of fables, stories of Annancy the spider, and the infamous duppy stories, scary, comically superstitious tales of the supernatural which, of course conflicted with the tenets of mainstream religion and was thus theoretically off limits to our innocence.
From Africa we also inherited the part of us which was to be our racial definition. We were coloured. Our hybrid Afro-European status was, for the most part evident and undeniable. In the blending of shades, however, some of us were more endowed with pigment than others, a fact illustrated by a brother who suggested that if some of us claimed genealogical lineage among the Mandingo tribe of Africa, we would be laughed out of the village, whereas his claim would be accepted as plausible. The fact of our African ancestry presented no difficulties to the extent that we moved within a system similarly tolerant to our own demography. Increasingly, however, an energetic, vociferous and gifted entity was imposing its values on the world, the U. S. of A.
My father, attempting to arrest the progression of his leukemia took a trip to the U.S.A. in 1944 to see medical specialists in New York. His white skinned sister-in-law was his traveling companion on a train trip from Miami to New York since his independence was somewhat compromised by his illness. He was warned by the black porters on the train not to make his face visible as the train from Miami stopped at communities on its way to New York, for fear that white folks would object to his traveling with a white woman, or worse, attack them.
The U.S.A. and the policy of segregation of the races effectively eroded our self image. We were increasingly alerted to the fact that our colour assigned to us innate inferiority outside the Caribbean. Abroad, in some parts of America, the status we had earned in our communities in Jamaica was worth no more than a seat at the back of the bus, or a meal through the servants entrance of a hotel. What an affront! We who had two servants in our employ!
Already class conscious through our adoption of of British values, we now had to confront our own latent, simmering colour consciousness. The logical consequence to our espousing European values, European aesthetics, of attempting to become European was potentially to awaken racial ambiguity, disavowing our families, betraying each other and ourselves.
Jamaicans sometimes chuckled at people who left the Island to spend a month in England, who returned converted to Caucasianism, British but for the colour, forsaking the lazy, sing-song delivery of the middle class version of English or the rapid staccato of the peasant patois and sporting proper English accents to lord it over his unfortunate island bound compatriots. Our family soon had to suppress our derision of counterfeit Brits when one of our own white skinned cousins acquired the linguistic mirror image of Queen Elizabeth 11, and by all appearances opted out of her coloured family. Fleeing reminders of her colour, she emigrated shortly thereafter to a whiter world, Canada. “Cor blimey!”
The United States, or simply “The States” to Uncle Sam’s good friends, provided us with yet another facet of our inherent ambivalence. In fact America seemed to present us with a clear picture of our conflicted states by reducing complex variables to simple binaries: New World versus Old World, progress versus status quo, Africa/Asia versus Europe, Europe versus America, black versus white, religious orthodoxy versus revivalism and the attractive liberalism of American pop culture versus the conservative, classically oriented, élitist culture which we had inherited from England. At TenDunoon we had an intuition that the World order was changing dramatically and that our European cultural orientation and our ‘race’ would make non-entities of us in the new scheme of things.
America had already begun to seduce us away from rigid, formalistic Albion. Betty Grable, Errol Flynn, Uncle Sam, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Packards, DeSotos, and Chryslers versus Charlotte and Emily Bronte and William Shakespeare, Austin, Morris, Vanguard and Riley! No contest! The cultural winner by knock out was the American way: an easy laissez-faire humanism, a culture of chewing gum, eat wherever, whenever, quick gratification of appetites: a cool, sexy post Second World War culture exported world wide in glossy magazines and in films from Hollywood.
I cut out pictures of each model year of cars from the major American automotive companies from old Ebony magazines from 1950-1953 and pasted the pictures in a giant scrapbook. I would also have cut out pictures of Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner had their pictures appeared in National Geographic magazines besides chimps or in ancient ruins, or had I not thought that divine and/or family authorities would condemn and punish my precocious, pubescent libido.
We adolescents were also keenly aware that as a family, the goal most cherished was the perpetuation of the idea of our respectability. We were vaguely cognizant, in our family chauvinism, that we had descended from a clan of angels, fallen angels to be sure. Our further goal, however, was indeed to arrest the fall and, if possible, reestablish our gravity defying, heavenward ascent through good works and high achievement to gain more social recognition, thereby enhancing the index of our respectability.
Of course, like all other families we had our share of rascals whose behaviors resulted in a net borrowing or loss against our accumulated credit of respectability. The discovery of those behaviors and events which led to the discredit of the family was the subject of much hand wringing and a chorus of sucking of teeth when the family supreme court convened at the weekly Sunday afternoon family visitation. To its eternal credit, the family collective even while condemning the behaviors and heaping judgments on the authors of the behaviors, still proceeded to make reparations, to the extent possible, to victims of the behaviors and to its wounded respectability. My father, Gaston’s parting gifts to his family, must have been among the more difficult to the family hopes of uprightness. Truth be told, as in most families, we, Gaston’s scattered progeny were by no means the only blemish evident in the good family book.
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In the late nineteen forties and early fifties I began looking outward. I became increasingly aware through newspapers and radio that there was a world out there. The Gleaner reported the annual movements of Jamaican farm workers going to the U.S.A. Later media reports would document the emigration of boatloads of migrants destined to the U.K. in search of a better economic future. Colonial Jamaica had also become somewhat restive politically and anxious to show its maturity. In a short time it would claim autonomy, taking its place in the community of nations. Little did I know that I too would be touched by these changes and that I also would in due course be internationalized.
Oh! don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
That will only happen when
The fairies sing.
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