PREFACE
In the waning minutes of August 5, 1962 and into the early minutes of the morning of August 6, I had the privilege as an 18-year-old to participate in the ceremonies that gave birth to the nation of Jamaica when we gained our independence from Great Britain. That night, as a member of a combined high school choir that sang for the occasion, I stood on the grassy floor of the National Stadium in Kingston and watched and wept as soldiers lowered the Union Jack of Great Britain for the last time and hoisted the new national flag of Jamaica for the first time. Amid fireworks, we cheered as we became a self-governing nation whose motto was “Out of Many, One People”--a multi-ethnic group of people who were proud to be Jamaicans.
Like Jamaica’s motto, my own family reflects that theme and reality, for our roots go back to China, Africa, England, Scotland, and Ireland, from which our forefathers and mothers emigrated, traveled to this Caribbean island, established roots over several centuries, then scattered again in the mid 1900s to places like Hong Kong, Trinidad, Australia, England, Canada, and the United States. Family members included slaves, plantation owners, ministers of the Gospel, a fisherman, teachers, a famous pirate, and even a Scottish national hero.
Along with giving a narrative of my family’s historical roots in Jamaica, I have also told the story of my own odyssey to discover and fulfill God’s call on my life, heal family wounds, and share Christ’s message of redeeming grace and love.
This is not a “prosperity gospel” memoir, but one that testifies to the faithfulness of God who never calls us to be successful in the way the world defines success, but only calls us to be obedient in following his will for our lives. And it is in being obedient that we discover God’s brand of success for each of us. It is a story of forgiveness, redemption, and lives being changed by Jesus Christ.
Though I hope that the general public will be interested in this memoir, it is primarily for my children and their descendants that I have written it so that succeeding generations will have a record of their ancestors and find inspiration and encouragement to write their own memoirs.
I begin with one such ancestor, my maternal grandmother, Catherine Woolery, a descendant of the proud and fierce Maroons--runaway slaves that harassed and tormented the British army and plantation owners in Jamaica for over 140 years, and gained their freedom 98 years before Britain finally emancipated slaves from all her colonies in 1838.
CHAPTER 1
THE MAROONS
Catherine Woolery was my maternal grandmother that I affectionately called “Aiya”--or as her children called her, “Miss Katie.” I don’t know how the name “Aiya” originated but “Miss Katie” was the term used by customers who shopped at the grocery or haberdashery stores that she and her common-law husband, James Chin-Keow, owned in Jamaica during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Her children--Clarence, Gertrude, and Terry--helped in the shops as they were growing up, and hearing customers greet her daily as “Miss Katie,” they soon began to use those words to address her.
My earliest memory of Aiya was when I was around three or four years of age. She must have been around 46 or 47, though she always appeared older and frail. She suffered from a childhood illness and walked with a slight limp--a fact that allowed me to run away from her when she tried to put clothes on me or spoon-feed me a dose of castor oil to cleanse my system. Perhaps she allowed me to get away from her, but in my young mind I was faster than she was and gleefully ran around the yard or in the house dodging her and laughing.
Around the home, she wore colorful head wraps like many of the working-class women or those from the countryside, and she wore simple cotton dresses that reached below her knees, her thin legs always covered in brown stockings. On Saturdays, she would put on slightly more dressy yet simple church attire, complemented by a straw hat in place of the head wrap, brown stockings, and comfortable staid black shoes, and she would go off to worship at the Regent Street Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Hanna Town on the west end of Kingston.
Along with a gimpy leg that she tended to drag slightly, Aiya also suffered from bad eyesight caused by cataracts that grew worse as she got older. She was also semi-illiterate and relied on her children and grandchildren to read to her from her well-worn Bible. Years later when I could read, she often invited me to come sit with her and read the Bible to her. On several occasions she even took me to church--which I was never enthusiastic about because it was very difficult for a five- or six-year-old boy like me to sit through two-hour-plus worship services, followed by Bible study classes. So long were the services that members of the congregation often ate their lunches while the sermon was being preached. And, of course, I fidgeted and groaned and took every opportunity to excuse myself under the pretext of having to go to the restroom to pee, then later to go again to do a “number two.”
Aiya had a cool black complexion, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and full lips. She wore no makeup and her hair was worn natural, untouched by straightening irons, befitting her very conservative church background. And, of course, being Seventh Day Adventist, she followed a strict food selection that avoided pork and shell creatures such as lobsters, crabs, and shrimps. I remember on one occasion she opened a covered dish of meat that had been left out of the icebox for a while, maybe overnight or longer, and found maggots crawling on the meat. That convinced her that all meat contained maggots and she valued her church’s dietary guidelines even more.
Along with being a strong Seventh Day Adventist, she was also proud of having descended from the Maroons. As a young boy I had no clue who or what a Maroon was, but I heard her several times talk about her Maroon mother, grandmother, and relatives. It wasn’t until I was around ten or eleven that I began to learn about the Maroons and their part in the history of the island of Jamaica.
When Christopher Columbus discovered Jamaica in 1494, he found a population of indigenous Arawak Indians, peaceful people who sustained themselves by hunting, fishing, and farming. Columbus saw the island as a strategic place for the Spanish fleets to restock their vessels on their way to the Americas to find gold and other treasures. The Spanish soon established settlements on the island and for the next 80 years decimated the population of Arawaks through forced labor, violence, and exposing them to various European diseases, while some natives committed suicide rather than continuing in servitude. With a dwindling labor force, the Spanish had to replenish the workers by importing slaves from western Africa, chiefly from Ashanti, Coromantee, Mandingo, and Yoruba nations.
But these African slaves were not docile and many of them, along with some of the Arawaks, chose to escape high into the harsh terrain of the Cockpit Mountains on the northwestern mountain range of the island, pock-full with caves and ravines in which they hid. This was an almost inaccessible and hostile area into which the Spanish masters were reluctant to pursue them. The Spanish called those runaways cimarrones (cattle that escape into the wilds).