RESEARCH - EVENT OR WORK
Below are extracts from interviews conducted by Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson whilst researching for the publication Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic.
Living in Complex Families
With grandmothers, by contrast [to grandfathers], there was much more often a very special relationship: they are recalled as an `angel’ or a `saint’, `wonderful’, `sweet old grandma’, `caring, warm’, `giving’, `really there for me’.
Rickie Constable
now a professional in New York and London, vividly recalls his feeling of physical closeness with his Jamaican grandmother:
"Oh God, I remember her eyes, you know how some people get the blue ring around their eyes when they get old? I liked her voice, and I loved, always loved her smell! She used to smell sweet, like corn.’ Some children called their grandmother simply as `momma’: `my mother never got “mother” title from me".
Sarah Chisholm
now a Canadian administrator, was brought up in Jamaica belonging to a family of twelve full and half-siblings on both her father's and her mother's sides. Her father had a good job with the Parish Council. She declares forcefully:
We are very close, and I don't refer to them, I don't consider them as half-brothers or half-sisters. They are my sisters, they are my brothers, irrespective of whether we share the same mother: they are my sisters. I think it's ridiculous people talking about, `That's not my full brother. He's my half-brother.’ I think that's – very low.
But she does in fact make some clear distinctions. She recalled of her eldest sister,
'at one time I thought she was my mother, because she was very very caring.’
And particularly strikingly, when her father adopted the sister of a half-sister abroad who was not a blood relative, she was able to treat her as a full sibling:
`the bond is so close, so tight... that eventually you say, “Oh this is my sister...” We had that closeness.’
In both of these instances one can see how the term from one formal relationship can be substituted by another term for positive reasons.
Stella Wadham
deliberately chose to live in one such complex grandparental household rather than with her own parents. She could have lived with her mother in Kingston, but chose to live with her father’s mother in the country.
`My mother went to a wedding in the country, and she [grandma] “borrowed” me for a week… So it went from a week to two weeks, to a month, to “when she’s ready for school”’.
Stella went back to her mother at three, but
`I’d barely eat, and I would just sit and suck my fingers’, and `started getting skinny’, until eventually, `I broke down, and I started crying, and I said, “I wanna go to my grandma! Grandma let me feed.”’
They sent Stella back to her grandmother until she was a teenager. And for Stella, `my grandmother was everything to me’.
But they were also living with an aunt and uncle, and up to a dozen other children.
`We always had, like, extended family – cousins who lived further up in the country that needed to go to school nearer, so they would stay over. So we always had … just one big extended family.’
Stella’s upbringing also helped her to understand that having children with more than one partner did not have to lead to friction. She is one of seven children herself, and although only three came from both parents she is fully in touch with them all. A still stronger influence came through the aunt she lived with, who Stella sees as a model in dealing with family transitions.
`There’s been situations with her husband, and she’s just dealt with it so well. He has had outside children, during the marriage, and when push comes to shove, she ends up with the kids.’
She not only took in these outside children, but was an `inspiration’ to them: an example which for some of them was to be relevant to stepfamily relationships in the post-migration situation:
She was just telling me that, Mother’s Day, she got this big card, and this is one of his daughters that she grew, and she’s now in Canada. Not hers. And she sent a letter back in the card, and said to her, `Thank you for everything you did for me. Because now, what you did, has taught me now to deal with my husband’s kids’ – which is now her step-kids. Because each time anything happens, she just remember that she had taken her in. And she never treated her less than her kids.
Breaks and continuities with migration
Sarah Chisholm
contrasted experiences of childbearing in Jamaica and North America. Now an administrator in Toronto, she came from a poor rural background in Jamaica, where, after three days in hospital –
I went home, I had a sister, a mother, two nieces, those two nieces are with me now, and the neighbours, and the community, that would come by, who would wash the clothing for the child, who would want to take him for a walk. It was so different… Here it’s a different story. You have the child all on your own.
But very often migrants were able to recreate extended family support in their new country.
Arnold Houghton
a finance worker, describes his situation in Toronto:
Two sisters close by. Parents not far away. It used to be like every Saturday, we just hang out at mother's... We still get together quite a lot, unrehearsed. You just pick up and end up at G's, and then you might end up at Verity's. My parents I see at least twice, sometimes three times a week, sometimes every day, because I might pop by at lunchtime.
Innovating
On the other hand, some migrants wanted family relationships to be different from what they had known in Jamaica – for example, in terms of child-rearing.
Pearl Selkirk
a London factory worker, said,
`I’ve done it differently, I never beat them! They never got a beating!’
Olive Carstairs
a Canadian assembly line worker, also aimed to become more emotionally expressive.
Growing up, as a West Indian family, hugging wasn’t, wasn’t there… We weren’t comfortable, we didn’t do that as a family… It’s now that I’ve gotten older and my parents are now older, when I go down to see them I give them a hug and a kiss to see hello or goodbye, and I try to reinforce that in my kids. I say, `Well, here’s your grandmother, go and give your grandmother a kiss’.
Vivia Perrin
a London nurse, with her husband decided `we should try the opposite of what happened to us’, replacing severe discipline with encouragement, and putting their emphasis above all on communication. The focus of this was a weekly family `round table’.
No matter what it is, we sit, Sunday afternoon, after lunch, before we go to the park, we will sit and discuss what’s going to happen, who’s doing what in the week, who’s going dancing, who’s going to pick up… This is how we’ve been running the family. We would have this round table, and we would make sure everybody agree before we leave the table.
In Brigette Umber’s family
the pivotal figure is her father, Hopeton, a New York builder, `the icon of the family… He tries to keep the family very close’. They organise a family reunion every five years in Jamaica, hiring one of the biggest hotels in Montego Bay. More modestly, most Sunday mornings Hopeton gets on the phone.
He call one family member in Jamaica, and then he’ll put that one family member onto the family member in Canada. Then she’ll hook that one to the family member in England. Then England will hook that one back up to the family in Brooklyn, and then all of them is on the phone. Sunday morning it’s chaotic in my house. It’s always been like that, every Sunday, because that’s the only time they get to talk.
This is when family business is sorted out. `The wedding is coming up, it’s even more chaotic, because they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to get from here… They’re all over the place’. But often it is just chatting to share their ordinary life experience.
Every Sunday morning, the routine is still the same – ackee and saltfish and fried dumpling, and callaloo. Every family member does it. And then they’ll call over, `What did you cook?’ `Ackee’. `Okay, I’ll come and I’ll have the callaloo’. Then they go, `You bringing over the callaloo?’ `Yes’. `Okay’. Then they call the next one, `What did you cook?’ `Dumpling’. And then it all start all over again! They are chaotic! … My family’s insane! They call one another, you’re in Brooklyn and they’re in Connecticut, all of them get on the phone, and they call… `Uncle Hopeton, what are your eating?’ `Oh, ackee’. `What are you doing?’ `Nothing’. `All right. You going to church?’ `Yes, ten o’clock’. `Okay, what time is it?’ `Oh, around eight.’
And so this regular weekly round continues, bringing more and more news of ackee and saltfish and fried dumplings, punctuated – even after just a week’s interval – with the refrain, `Sure thing, a long time I don’t hear from you’. In such a family ritual the new and the old, the world of globalised migration and information technology and the country practices of church and cooking in Jamaica, fuse into new forms.