My mother encountered many challenges, right from the start, but she persevered throughout.
Born in New York city, my mother told me that a doctor told her parents to take her someplace warm, as she would not last another winter. Taken to live with her grandmother in the Manchester parish countryside in Jamaica in the 1900's, she was left there for a number of years. Mother told me that her grandmother had four? sons and so was a "tough" woman and that she beat my mother when she lost her eyeglasses in the bush. Mother spoke about that often and also wrote a story about it for her Queens branch AAUW group. I wrote a poem about it for my Ph.D. dissertation which I'll post another time.
Later, after her primary and secondary schooling ended, she became a teacher of Spanish. She was living or visiting with distant relatives or friends (Claude and Kathleen Clarke) where my father met her when visiting the Clarkes. My mother assured me it was only because she needed a place to stay while going to school in town, as her parents had moved back from NYC to the countryside, had a house with furniture brought from the U.S. therefore she was not needy. Photos show my father hanging out with the young Clarkes (Yvonne, Valerie and Neville) so it appears he was a close friend or distant relative of the Clarkes. The furniture part surprised me as at another time she told me her father lost a lot of money in the Wall St. crash in the 1920s. He was an elevator operator and her mother was a nurse who died of problems related to diabetes. I referred to Kathleen Clarke as "Aunt Kathleen" and our family maintained contact with them long after the marriage of my father and mother so I suspect there was some kind of blood relationship never made clear to me.
While I was growing up, I knew my mother taught at Excelsior High School and that she, at one point, was studying for her B.A. through the University of London's extension program in Jamaica. She graduated. At another time, when I was little, she was away in the U.S., on Long Island, working as a nanny for a family. That separation was not good for me at all. It might as well have been six years.
A wife, a mother, and a teacher, her love of Spanish culture and music was great. Something about Cervantes' story of Don Quijote de la Mancha as well as the stories in the Novelas Ejemplares, resonated with her. Persevrance in spite of obstacles. Her love of Spanish classical music and dance she gave to me. I remember listening to Manuel de Falla's "El Sombrero de tres picos" - The three cornered hat - over and over. I loved and love the dance movement at the end. There's also the Fire Dance of which I used to be able to do a pretty good rendition.
Later, when I was in high school, she never pressured me to take Spanish as my foreign language. She encouraged me and arranged for me to have a tutor in Latin in order to meet certain class requirements (i.e. stay in the A track for "office" work rather than the B track for "wife" work). Knowing Latin was a huge help for when I went to law school.
She knew the importance of music and the arts in general. I thank her for the five years of private piano lessons and the band concerts we attended in Hope Botanical Gardens, as well as for introducing me to Jamaican pantomime, such as in "Eight O'clock Jamaica time." She loved to sing but did so less and less as she got older.
My mother encouraged a life in public service, especially for females. One of her best friends was a female magistrate. My mother probably wanted to go into law, but the obstacles were too many.
When I was 16 and my sister 8 years old, our father died of a heart attack. Within one day, my mother went from wife to widow with two teenage daughters. Shortly after, political unrest worsened in the island. My sister and I were caught in the 1968 Rodney riots, in danger of losing our lives. My mother said I came home traumatized. She handled finding a place for us to move to in the U.S. and a job for herself and for me and registering Marie at Flushing High School. The stress must have been tremendous but she carried on. She soon got her license to teach in the New York City schools and in short order got her M.A. from St. John's University.
When the opportunity arose she took a tour trip to Spain and the UK and other European countries. Finally, she was in the land of Cervantes and all the other Spanish writers, artists, and passionate music she so appreciated.
She so loved being amongst people and having conversations. She regretted being an only child but tried to make up for it by gathering friends around her and being very diligent in keeping contact with cousins on her side and the Lawrence side.
She loved words and great literature, frequently quoting from Shakespeare and poets like Tennyson. In the weeks before she died, she was quoting from the "daffodils" poem. She also would reference Jamaican folk sayings like "cockroach should not be in fowl business." In her later years she loved playing scrabble and liked crossword puzzles although she did not always finish them. Throughout it all, with such a hill and gully ride-o life, she persevered, not much different from one of the heroes in Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares.
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