I was brought up knowing that my grandparents were West Indian immigrants. I knew my father was born with dual citizenship. It wasn’t until this part of our talks that I realized how it affected him.
Earlier you said you didn’t really think of yourself as a child of immigrants despite the fact that you were born with dual citizenship. Why weren’t you aware you were a child of immigrants?
I wasn’t included in that story, I wasn’t part of the immigrants who built America. They were all white. We were from Bahamas, Trinidad, like that.
Some said West Indians were siddity (stuck up). Is that true?
Harlem – Strivers Row
No. that was nonsense. First of all they were a culture apart. The siddity black folks were American born Blacks they lived on Strivers Row and Sugar Hill and they were the cheapest. If you were at their house they would feed each other one by one rather than offer some food. (I was taught, as my father was taught, that if one ate, all ate. If there wasn’t enough to share we had to wait until our company went home to eat. If the meal could be stretched it was, and we all ate together.)
West Indians would come over here and bust ass. I grew up during the welfare times. The Great Depression. My father’s biggest pride is he never went on welfare. He had a job the entire depression. And I think that attitude that was real. I will admit my mama thought that all these people were no good. I swear. We lived on the fourth floor. I’d sit up in the window and my mother would be coming down the block and if there was an elephant lying on the sidewalk she’d trip over it. Her face was up in the air.
Young cricket player in Harlem
Pride? Oh yeah tons of pride. And they were British. All these folks were British. There was bunch of cultural stuff that was West Indian. There was a formality as such that comes with the culture. They flew box kites, they played cricket. There was a bunch of cultural stuff that wasn’t these folks (African-Americans)
But my mother, if I brought someone home I had to do a twenty page paper, where their mommy came from, where their daddy came from, what they did for a living.
And there is other stuff. I came out to California 1950 got a job as a recreational director at Hoover Junior High School and across the street from the playground there was a little grocery store that sold Ebony (magazines). Ebony was comparatively new, four or five years old. The Ebony cover was a question. “Are West Indians taking over Negro Society?” I had to crack up. My parents had an accent and I had a little one for a while. But there again these were Black people. When I got into the larger Black world I became a monkey chaser, Black dudes were down on us. Seriously!
You became a jungle bunny?
Oh yeah. Somehow it was cooler to come out of some cotton field than to come from the islands.