A Struggle to Walk With Dignity: The True Story of a Jamaican-born Canadian

By Gerald A. Archambeau

Gerald Augustus Archambeau was born in Jamaica in 1933. Raised in Kingston by his three aunts, he was sent to Canada in 1947 to join his mother and stepfather in Montreal. He trained in the plumbing and steam-fitting trade, but at age eighteen decided to join the railway as a passenger car porter. He worked for Canadian Pacific and Canadian National until the 1960s, when declining passenger rail traffic and the ascendence of air travel caused him to switch to a career with a major Canadian airline in Toronto.

After his retirement from the airline, Gerald and his wife, Marion, settled in St. Catharines, Ontario.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jun 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9781926577333

Gerald A. Archambeau

Gerald Augustus Archambeau was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was sent to Montreal in 1947. He worked for Canadian Pacific and Canadian National until the 1960s, when declining passenger rail traffic and the ascendence of air travel caused him to switch to a career with a major Canadian airline in Toronto. After his retirement from the airline, Gerald settled in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Book preview

About this Book

Gerald Archambeau’s remarkable and courageous adventures along the frontiers of race relations in Jamaica, Canada and the United States form the core of this autobiography of a man who met discrimination with dignity and blazed a new path for equality in the process.

In the telling, Archambeau takes a reader into places he or she would not otherwise know about. On these pages you encounter the experiences of Black people who transformed and ultimately enriched North American life – from the Golden Age of North American railways to the jazz clubs of Montreal, from the growth of civil aviation and those working in the industry to the personal trials and family challenges in times of cultural change and social upheaval.

As well as important social history and cultural portraits, a reader is carried forward by the humour, irony and drama laced throughout this true-life story.

Travel now with Gerald Archambeau as he encounters prime ministers and human rights officers, or as he challenges discrimination in the work place and even within the Black community itself, which he calls the same old soup warmed over.

Praise for A Struggle to Walk with Dignity

"I’m developing a training program for Blacks and Hispanics and Gerald Archambeau’s riveting book will be required reading. A Struggle to Walk with Dignity has taken me through a full range of emotions from sadness, joy (when his seemingly spring-loaded arm punched out bullies) and to the depths of anger at the racism so prevalent in our societies. Yet I could feel his determination not to be destroyed by negativism."

Rev. Dr. Judy A. Fisher, Mitchellville, Maryland

"Growing up in America/Canada taught us to always treat people fairly. The problem was most times it ended up backfiring as fairness was interpreted as weakness. I’m going to make it mandatory that everyone in our household reads A Struggle to Walk with Dignity. What is most amazing to me is the solid man who rose out of that struggle and even found time to fight for the rights of others."

Marie Bruce, producer, Miami, Florida

The Human Rights Act came out after Gerry did the pioneering work. Where he originally cut the path is a four-lane highway now.

Paul Lefebvre, President, Airline Central Lodge 2323, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers

His experience as a Black immigrant arriving in Canada in the 1950s touches themes central to the country’s identity. In the face of the racism he encountered, Archambeau never lost hope that positive change was possible and that he would assume a role in affecting such change.

Don MacLean, Ottawa Life

This book is a must-read for any new immigrant coming to Canada in search of a better life and how to avoid the pitfalls that often befall them. Gerald Archambeau, with his personal testimony and a strong sense of faith in the human spirit, uplifts, encourages and teaches how to ‘walk with dignity’ when all the cards were seemingly stacked against him.

Sharleine M. Haycock, wife of pilot, Toronto

A Struggle to

Walk With Dignity

The True Story of a Jamaican-born Canadian

Gerald A. Archambeau

Blue Butterfly Books

THINK FREE, BE FREE

© Gerald A. Archambeau

All rights reserved. Written permission of the publisher or a valid licence from Access Copyright is required to copy, store, transmit, or reproduce any part of this publication.

Blue Butterfly Book Publishing Inc.

2583 Lakeshore Boulevard West

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M8V 1G3

Tel [phone] / Fax [phone]

www.bluebutterflybooks.ca

Complete ordering information for Blue Butterfly titles is available at:

www.bluebutterflybooks.ca

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Print edition, soft cover: 2008

ISBN 978-0-9784982-0-7

Electronic edition, epub format: 2010

ISBN 978-1-926577-33-3

A CIP record for this title is available from Library and Archives Canada.

All photographs are from the author’s collection.

Blue Butterfly Books thanks book buyers for their support in the marketplace.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Phyllis Angela Thomas, and my grandparents Leanora Thomas and Herbert T. Thomas. Herbert was author of Untrodden Jamaica (1891) and The Story of a West Indian Policeman: 47 Years in the Constabulary (1927). My mother was his third daughter, by his black wife, who always believed the truth must be told about our family.

Preface

MY STORY is one of a person born in the former British colony of Jamaica. I was brought up in a very typical middle-class Jamaican home, located in St. Andrew, on the outskirts of Kingston. Some information is drawn from my grandfather, Herbert T. Thomas, who authored two books in Jamaica.

In expressing my views and opinions, I have tried to give some insight into my ability as a young boy trying to adapt to life in a Canada of the 1940s, as I found it.

I speak about the attitudes I encountered from people of all races, including my own family. I describe my many experiences as a black man, working on the railways across Canada. Riding the rails of two great railways during the 1940s to the 1960s from Halifax to Vancouver was a way of life for many black men in Canada. My travels to many scattered communities and cities gave me a new faith in Canada’s future as a growing country.

I faced up to my responsibilities as a citizen of Canada by developing a political conscience. In the face of adversity, I secured a place for myself and contributed to this society. I have experienced negative and positive encounters with people during my travels across Canada.

I have addressed some of the preconceived ideas about Jamaicans immigrating to Canada, and given a new perspective and insight into the life and times of a Jamaican born of mixed African, French, and British ancestry.

My story covers the complexity of interracial relationships, including culture, heredity, and environment, with its causes and effects on my family life and the stresses it creates. I give an intimate and detailed look into my own life for the benefit of a new generation.

Some names mentioned are fictitious to protect the identity of friends and relatives.

I want to express my appreciation and thanks to some members of the African-Canadian and African-American communities who I had the pleasure knowing and working with during difficult times on the railways in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. I will always remember the kind impressions left on me by these men while railroading across Canada and the United States: H. Leek, Lyle Yearwood, Doc Weaver, Rev. Simpson, C. Lucey, Stan Carter, Carl Simmons, P. Mapp, Mr. George Tillman, Ed Este, Mr. Arthur Blanchette, Mr. Harry Pinnock, Mr. George Skyers, Mr. H. Gairey, Sylburn Husband, and C. Dawson.

Introduction

I WAS BORN in Jamaica. My ancestors first arrived there in the 1700s when my great-great-great-great grandfather came to the island as a Moravian missionary; however, this story begins with my maternal grandfather, Herbert Thomas. His first wife, Gertrude Thomas (née Nunes), was English; they settled in Jamaica after his training in Europe, and had six children, five boys and one daughter, who was a twin. He also had a brother, Edmund Josiah Thomas. My grandfather was educated in England and did some of his military training in Germany to enhance his career in the Jamaican Police Constabulary.

Herbert rose to the rank of sub-inspector and served most of the parishes in Jamaica before retiring in Kingston. Later, my grandfather Herbert was promoted to inspector of police, serving for a total of forty-seven years. But he never got over the loss of his five sons who all served in the military during World War I. All my step-uncles gave their Jamaican lives for the Empire.

Herbert T. Thomas

The eldest son, Captain Harry Reid Thomas, first fought in the Boer War with Baden-Powell’s South African Constabulary. As a result of his efforts in that campaign, he was awarded the King’s Medal with five clasps. He then went to fight in World War I in France, where he was killed in action on December 25, 1915. The next son, Captain Francis Hastings Thomas, was killed in 1916. Next was Major Arthur Crichton Thomas, killed in 1917, followed by Gunner Benjamin Thomas, killed in action 1917. The youngest son, Flight Lieutenant Godfrey Main Thomas, died in 1921 in the crash of the British airship R-38. His daughter lived, and went on to marry into the Daley family in the United Kingdom.

I was told that my grandfather’s first marriage eventually failed due to his wife’s alcoholism in Jamaica. He accompanied her to England in 1901, where he left her behind; he then returned to Jamaica in 1902, back to his police duties.

Due to his own indiscretion, an affair began with my grandmother, Leanora Chambers, long before his English wife died in 1921. They enjoyed a passionate romance while he served as an inspector throughout the island. This relationship with my grandmother started when as a seamstress she was sent by her mother to repair the uniforms of police officers. It continued and developed into love and remained throughout the rest of his career, and produced four daughters: my mother, Phyllis, and my aunts, Dot, Bet, and Kim.

As he moved around the island with his new family doing his police assignments, my grandfather was also involved in other activities, like the mapping of certain areas in the John Crow Mountains for the government. My grandfather, in carrying out his duties as a policeman, was often told by some black Jamaicans to Go back to where you come from, white man. It is ironic to see reverse discrimination showing itself even in these early times during Jamaican development.

Herbert went on to write articles for the British Geographic Society on fauna and flora in Jamaica. He also wrote two books. In the first one, Untrodden Jamaica, written in 1891, he describes his hikes in the mountains of Jamaica to document plant life and map some unknown areas. His next book, written in 1927 in his final family home at 3 Geffrard Place in Kingston, was about his early police life, and called The Story of a West Indian Policeman. In it, there is no acknowledgement of his black family.

My grandfather’s marriage to my grandmother was his one unpardonable sin under British colonial rule. The bigots and racists of that time were united on the matter of interracial marriage. While it was considered acceptable to have affairs with black women, societal customs insisted that one must never marry them. Being a white colonial male, my grandfather could never face his internal admiration for Jamaican blacks, and at the end of his life it almost drove him mad. It caused him tremendous hardships in his police career, and nearly prevented him from receiving his pension.

Leanora Thomas and Herbert T. Thomas, the author’s grandparents

My grandfather passed away three years before my birth in 1933. His British Victorian heredity had a profound effect on my life and on the environment I grew up with in Jamaica. Fortunately for me, he was human enough to break the poor attitudes of the white Victorian males in Jamaican under colonial rule by living with and eventually marrying my black grandmother, Leanora.

* * *

My mother had light brown skin, brown wavy hair, and large green eyes, and because of the attitudes that prevailed at that time, she should have known better than to have a relationship with the black man who would become my father. I do not know any details as to how my mother and father met, other than it was in Kingston.

I was born on Tuesday at 4:10 a.m. on September 19, 1933, in the city of Kingston, Jamaica, on Windward Road. This event must have been a very lonely time for my mother, Phyllis, who was forced by her sisters to leave the family home for having given birth to an illegitimate son. Despite the fact that in giving birth to me my mother was simply following in the footsteps of her own parents, the family’s reaction to her pregnancy was not supportive. These problems resulted in my mother being thrown out of the family home after my grandmother died. This was done by her eldest sister, Dot. The deep-rooted prejudices of the 1930s were well ingrained in Jamaican society. This made it impossible for my mother to sustain decent employment in any of the offices in Kingston, where her sisters already worked. My mother had to survive on her own, by being employed in a bar serving drinks to businessmen in the daytime.

Phyllis Thomas, the author’s mother

As a baby, I would be left for long hours during the day, and I may not have survived as a child had it not been for one of my mother’s female helpers. Out of kind-heartedness, the helper took it upon herself to bring me to my grandmother’s home at Geffrard Place. After seeing me for the first time, my grandmother was delighted because she had never had a boy child. She decided to take me in and she looked after me for her remaining three years.

The British customs of my grandfather were well entrenched in our family home, now consisting of three sisters, who assumed the responsibility of rearing me. The stability of the home was very much enhanced by my grandmother’s entrepreneurial abilities, as she ran a small bakery from the back of the home. My mother would not have the same chance, because she made the same mistake as her father, according to Jamaica society at that time, by falling in love with a black man from Panama: my father, Louis Archambeau.

Louis Archambeau, the author’s father

Not being happy about his lack of acceptance by my mother’s sisters, my father remained distant and resentful. He was also from an interracial background: French, African, and Aboriginal Kuna Indian. His complexion was dark African but his hair was straight, in the manner of the aboriginal population in the area. Because skin colour was so paramount and divisive in Jamaican society, my mother’s sisters ridiculed my mother constantly, but it never changed her mind about the race and colour of people. The big family secret is now revealed: all of my aunts and mother were born well before my grandparents were married. This caused my aunts great mental anxiety throughout their lives – with the exception of my mother, who was the strongest of all the sisters in her own self-worth as a human being.

Such incidents occur in most families, though, and I have grown very proud of my family heritage when I consider how few families can look back in such detail. My maternal grandfather, Herbert, has become one of the forgotten men in Jamaica – a terrible injustice when one considers his contribution to the island.

* * *

The Jamaica I grew up in was not the Jamaica of today. The only major drug in the 1940s was rum. Marijuana was regarded as an annoying weed. The smoking of this weed started with some poor people in Kingston, and evolved into a cult called Rastafarianism around 1935. The poorest of Jamaicans formed the Rastafarian movement in a desperate attempt to search for their African roots. Rastafarianism is a spinoff of the Marcus Garvey Back to Africa movement, which has now spread throughout the Caribbean, England, and North America, using marijuana as a base to attract newcomers to the cult.

The island in my youth was mostly free of major crime, except for the occasional murder, which was a major event. Jamaica became a very peaceful and cultured society under the British. The police did not carry guns. I remember as a young boy, after World War II started in 1939, enjoying seeing all the soldiers from England, Canada and the United States.

Canadians today may think Jamaica is what they read about in the sensational news reports, like those that covered the general election campaign in 1980 when 700 people died from shootings, and where crime and corruption are rampant with a thriving drug trade.

Most Canadians know nothing about Jamaica’s history, and little about its population. Some Canadians think if a person is white, light-skinned, French, Syrian, Lebanese, Oriental or Indian, then that person could not be Jamaican. In the minds of most foreigners, a Jamaican is black, only speaks broken English or patois, and has an inclination towards crime and drugs. This is an ill-informed viewpoint. Many Jamaicans from different racial backgrounds are shocked about this common misconception of their society.

The mix of cultures in Jamaica is predominantly British and African. People have the right to choose their cultural preference in a partnership not based on the colour of their skin, since all the races in Jamaican society mixed at one time or another. The popular Jamaican musical artist Bob Marley, for instance, was a person of a mixed racial background. He was born poor in west Kingston, and adopted the Rastafarian cult as his way of highlighting the plight of poor black Jamaicans.

After independence in 1962, unfortunately, some politicians played the race card to win elections, and moved on to enrich themselves, rather than trying to improve the lot of the desperately poor on the island. The Jamaica I remember prior to its independence was never considered in any way to be a third-world country. But with the coming of independence, things slipped into lawlessness and corruption, which was not necessary because the British left Jamaica in good economic condition.

I feel obligated to enlighten Canadians about Jamaican society, because the majority of Jamaicans of every ethnic and racial background who immigrated to Canada legally wanted to improve their life in a democratic country with a high regard for human rights.The silent majority of hard-working Jamaicans make their contribution every day in Canada, quietly and constructively. Most intelligent people recognize that there is no perfect society, but there are better ones. Many Jamaicans who came to Canada prior to independence did not come out of fear or threat of starvation, but came to improve themselves based on opportunity.

The Canadian Immigration Department never took the time to educate its officers about the structure of Jamaican society. This left the door open for the worst elements of Jamaican society to enter Canada and give many misconceptions about Jamaican people as a whole, causing many Canadians to stereotype them. Some of the newcomers totally ignore the benefits and opportunities they now have in Canada, compared to what they had before, and are encouraged by some elders to whine and moan about Canadian society and its injustice to them. Then the Canadian media, eager to report on cases of abuse of Canada’s human rights laws, makes it appear as if these Jamaicans represent the majority of us in Canada, which is far from the truth.

* * *

Canada has allowed me freedom of expression, as a person who has travelled extensively, so I attach great value to the productive Jamaicans who try to get along with their lives as best they can.

There is a tremendous amount of pride and strength of character in the Jamaican psyche, derived from a mixture of cultures. British colonialism had its inequities, but did not try to demean a person based solely on skin colour, unlike the case in North America. I couldn’t see people from a racial perspective, but did hear terms I remember to describe people, like black man, white man, China man, coolie-man (which meant East Indian), red man, and brown man. These terms were never used in a degrading manner in this rainbow society.

One has to think of the causes and effects when cultures mix and cohabit with each other. A child born from a mixed relationship with a white father was usually educated, due to the white father’s economic advantage – unlike a black child, born with less opportunity because of the black father’s inability to provide for his children. People in general from any racial or ethnic background sometimes tend to be dumbfounded when they see interracial unions, totally ignoring the fact that the mixing of the races could not occur if we weren’t all human beings first. This mixing has taken place since the beginning of time, and because of our emotions and general love of humanity, this is a normal part of human behaviour. There is no so-called pure race in mankind, even though some individuals believe the laughable big lie about their purity. The sad thing about colonialism in its heyday is that it came hand-in-hand with bad racist attitudes which in the end would seal its fate. Jamaica has evolved into a different society after its independence from the British. Hopefully, it can improve its economic position to help the poor, over time.

I was born of mixed ancestry and was always proud of my brown skin. I do not profess to be a historian; however, I intend to commence my story to the best of my recollection and in total honesty.

1

Youth in British Jamaica

MY STORY BEGINS in my grandmother’s home at Three Geffrard Place in the city of Kingston in 1936. My mother had already been away from the family home, since her sisters were ill at ease with the relationship that existed between my father and mother. My grandmother was not in the best of health in these years, so she allowed the eldest of her children, Dot, to take charge of the general running of the home. This gave my grandmother more time with the daily operation of her bakery in the back of the house.

My three aunts were working to bring in extra income. Two of them worked with prominent lawyers in Kingston, while Bet, the second-eldest, worked for a major rum merchant.

This lovely family home was an active, happy place on a quiet tree-lined street. My days were long and lazy as I played with the two family dogs. In the back of the house I enjoyed the chickens, ducks, and African guinea chicks. Large motley-green ground lizards would appear looking for food from the chicken coops, along with smaller brown tree lizards that roamed the various trees on the property. Breadfruit, mango, sweetsop, guava, and a lime grew near the kitchen. Birds of every description played in the upper lofts of the trees, while bees and yellow jacket wasps visited the profusion of beautiful flowers in the front garden. When passing by the kitchen I could detect the savoury smells of baking drifting into the backyard.

Life for me was peaceful, safe, and happy. With many caring hands to attend my every need, I felt much love and affection from all my human encounters.

This was a typical lifestyle for the average middle-class family in Kingston. There were no supermarkets in those days; most food was brought to the door by vendors. They carried their loads on donkeys in wicker hampers. A mule or horse pulled the bread man’s wagon, and other carts came daily with charcoal, wood, and milk. My grandmother employed a cook, housekeeper, gardener, and a nanny to look after me while my aunts were all at work.

Despite the fact that my aunts worked, my family – a middle-class one with servants – was aware of its status in society. Jamaican society under the British was very structured, with a strict sense of order and discipline permeating the class structures. A respect existed between these structures based on one’s standing in the community. In my family, a lot had to be lived up to because of my grandfather, the late Inspector of Police Herbert T. Thomas, author and respected citizen of his community.

My grandmother Leanora was a devout Catholic who never missed her daily early mass. I did not know my grandfather, but was told he had more than his share of religion. He came from a Moravian missionary background. A great respect and love existed between him and his beautiful