“But you’re not Jamaican, are you?”
Article continues after advertisement
This question has followed me all my life. It generally happens right after I speak, because my skin color—light-skinned, fair, mixed race, high yellow, red, white, she only t’ink she white—depends on the eye of the viewer and is at odds with my accent. Until late midlife, my slightly weary response was “All four of my grandparents were born here. My great-grandfather was a Baptist missionary.” This ancestral story was a relief. Not a plantation owner.
And it is true that the only ancestor my parents talked about was the Baptist missionary, who drowned at sea in 1905 while trying to get back to his four children in Jamaica after his wife died of tuberculosis. Those orphaned children were raised by their aunt in the town of Black River on Jamaica’s south coast in a modest house which still stands. One of them was my paternal grandfather, Gerald. I knew nothing of my mother’s people, just that her father died young and left her mother in debt.
Then, in 2014, I was contacted out of the blue by a New Zealand television company doing genealogical research for a program called DNA Detectives. They claimed I was related to a celebrity chef from New Zealand named Ray McVinnie and asked if I would be prepared to meet with him and be filmed as part of the show. Along with one of my sisters and a cousin, we met at the Liguanea Club in Kingston, an ultra-colonial setting. And there I learned that on my mother’s side, I was descended from a Portuguese Sephardic Jew named Hananel d’Aguilar, and an enslaved ‘mustee’ woman, Nancy McLean, who lived and labored on a plantation in a place I, as a bawn yah Jamaican, had never heard of: Mason Hall.
The producers of the show did try to get the three of us to say how we felt about this on camera, but it was too new, too confusing. For me, a storyteller, it was fascinating. For a light-skinned Jamaican, uncomfortable. Unwelcome. Or was it? Surely Black ancestry, however watered down over the decades, confirmed the Jamaican roots I felt so strongly? Surely most of us had those same roots, varying only by degree?
*
Although I declared my intention to be a writer at thirteen, my first serious attempt to write a novel, get it into shape, send it out, and have it rejected again and again started in about 2002 at a writers’ workshop held at—yes—a plantation great house. I was there because an old friend gave me a deal on the cost—she knew of my long-deferred literary ambitions. My small room was tucked under the front stairs, and I wondered what its historical function had been: A storage room? A resting place for an enslaved woman? During my time there, that woman moved into my mind; although then I had no idea we could share blood. Or that I would one day craft a novel about her.
If there is anything approaching a single story of humanity, it is surely one of movement, whatever the impetus.
During my environmental activist years, another old friend took me to the ruin of a different great house in the same region, mostly collapsed and smothered in vines and bush, apparently built over a sinkhole. Standing there in the heat, waving off mosquitoes, I looked down into that darkness and imagined the water flowing underneath—I knew this part of Jamaica sat over a large aquifer. Why did they build there? Was the sinkhole a bathroom or a source of fresh water? I was sure the woman in my mind knew the answer.
*
We modern-day Jamaicans cooked ackee and saltfish for our New Zealand celebrity chef cousin (he was scathing about our knives and chopping technique) and the film crew. Afterwards, the producer handed me a DNA kit. And using the many tools now available, I built a family tree with over twelve hundred names of people living in some two dozen countries. If there is anything approaching a single story of humanity, it is surely one of movement, whatever the impetus.
Then I learned of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project and I searched for the name of my direct ancestor, David McLean, the son of Hananel d’Aguilar and Nancy McLean, and sitting in my bedroom at my laptop, I found his name—and that he was paid £927.19.09 (just over one thousand US dollars) for the forty-five people he thought he owned at another place I’d never heard of: Middleton in St. David (now St. Thomas). A man born in slavery went on to own slaves himself. How would the woman in my mind justify this?
*
March 2020, lockdown. My fourth novel was due to be published in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was in that post-publication state when you’re sick of the whole book-writing thing. I would go on writing, but only for myself. I would let the woman in my mind out, see what she had to say for herself. Then I heard talk of a man, a foreigner, who had taken the stones of a collapsed great house to build his own house, and the woman in my mind said, Why a white man? Why not a Black woman? And what would that woman do to keep those stones and the shelter she built for herself if they were threatened?
I let that woman out, onto the page. By then, she was an elder, Miss Pauline, facing the end of her life and she had a lot to say. And so did the stones themselves. I called what I was writing a long strip of knitting, because I made no effort to shape it into anything recognizable as a novel. I wasn’t going to send it anywhere. The woman in my mind had a certainty about rootedness I had never achieved. She—and perhaps I—really do have roots of stone.
__________________________________
A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay is available from Algonquin Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
