Westward: The Walk of a Bahamian Doctor

By Harold Alexander Munnings Jr.

1. This is unusual, a memoir written by someone under fifty years of age. What made you write?
My parents were growing old, and I wanted to record their stories for my children. My father, who is halfway through his ninth decade, was born during the heyday of Prohibition, twenty years before the discovery of penicillin and thirty years before the hospital that I was born in was even built. He was the first Bahamian qualified civil engineer, and his connection to the public board of works helped to influence development of the City of Nassau at a critical time in its history. As president of the Bahamian Amateur Athletic Association, he traveled with our Olympic team to Rome in 1960. He is really the one who ought to have written a biography, and so should have my mother, whose story is equally compelling, but it was never going to happen. So I took it upon myself to write their stories, and over time, the narrative became my own.

2. Why the title Westward?
The title reflects a dual movement, figuratively, toward a sunset that is hopefully still a good ways off, and physically, I have moved house farther and farther westward on the island of New Providence over the last twenty years. I grew up in the eastern community of Danottage Estates, moved to Westward Villas after marriage, and lately, farther west to Old Fort Bay. The subtitle Walk is a reference to life and how it is lived. Walk good is a well-known expression in our region of Jamaican origin that means good-bye and be well.

3. Why do you tell crime stories?
Firstly, I am a true crime buff, a fan of Forensic Files and truTV. When I discovered that a man who shared my last name appeared on the list of persons sent to the gallows in the Bahamas, I simply had to research the event, and the fascinating story that I unearthed ended up in the book. Two decades ago, our neighbors were slaughtered, and story of the familys grisly murder is recounted in Westward. Other harrowing crime stories retold in Westward appear because on top of being so interesting, they mark important signposts on my journey, or they help to underscore a general theme. I did not want to write a mundane memoir.

4. Other doctors have written about their medical school and internship experience. Whats new here?
Nowhere in the publicly available literature is there to be found a personal account of the making of a doctor in the Caribbean. This is a process that has relevance outside of this region because the University of the West Indies in Jamaica has been producing doctors for sixty years, and hundreds of its graduates have emigrated to the USA, Canada, and Great Britain where they practice and teach. While the university adheres to the standard model of a grueling course of preclinical and clinical studies followed by a punishing internship, there are significant differences in the education style and substance. The West Indies style is evident in Westward.

5. Why do you say that Westward is a sort of spiritual journey?
Looking backward over ones life, the benefit of maturity almost always takes on a spiritual dimension. I have had a Christian upbringing in a nation that has written our recognition of these values into the preamble of our Constitution. My mother has always told me that I am blessed, and in Westward, I probe the interplay of luck, hard work, and divine intervention in my own personal achievements. The conclusion is by no means foregone.

6. Have you any regrets in writing your memoir?
Ten years ago, two old men, Gasper Weir and Cleophas Adderley Sr., who were friends of my late grandfather, invited me to their homes to talk about the bygone days. I wish that I had taken them up on the offer.

7. What was your most memorable experience in researching Westward?
There

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462816972

Harold Alexander Munnings Jr.

Harold Munnings was born at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, and he now works there and at a private clinic as a consultant gastroenterologist.

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Copyright © 2009 by Harold Alexander Munnings Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Tecamachalco

Chapter 2 The Hilltop

Chapter 3 Tarpum Bay

Chapter 4 Macaroni And Cheese

Chapter 5 The Old Pit Stop

Chapter 6Queen’s College

Chapter 7 O Canada!

Chapter 8 Jamaica

Chapter 9 What’s Up, Doc?

Chapter 10 St. Michael’s Hill

Chapter 11Partnership

Chapter 12 Fatherhood

For Harry and Jennifer and in memory of Valerie

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book began with my probing the excellent memories of my parents; my aunts Helen Smith, Gwen McDeigan, Priscilla Carey, and Sheila Pessoa; uncles James and Archie Carey; Sir Orville Turnquest; cousins Harrison Lockhart, Patricia Collins, and Shawn Turnquest—all of whom I repeatedly interviewed. Cousin Kenneth McCartney, who wrote Glenelg: Native Talesfrom Eleuthera, provided a valuable resource on my great-grandfather. I am grateful to Mr. Jack Sturrup and Mr. Wendell Barry for information on my grandfather’s involvement with the Royal Eagle Lodge No. 1 of the Free and Accepted Masons, Prince Hall affiliation, and to Maude Lockhart of J.S. Johnson & Company for information on W. C. B. Johnson. Father Rodney Burrows, rector of St. Agnes Church, kindly allowed me to examine the old parish register of births, and Mrs. Joanne Maura assisted with my research at the Department of Archives. I am grateful to the late Mrs. Joan North, who, at the risk of disturbing a painful memory, courageously shared with me the story of her daughter, Gina. Mr. Richard Demeritte, Lillith Adderley, and Mrs. Millicent Munnings kindly shared memories of Balls Alley going back sixty years. I am grateful to Emma and Rodney Munnings for their harrowing firsthand account of the day they lost a sister and to Mr. Miguel Obregon, for sharing the story of his father Dr. Segismundo Obregon. To my in-laws Jennifer Johnson, Anthony Ferguson, and Kenris Albury, and friends Lorette Evans, Zelda Allen, and Prescola Rigby-Nails, thank you for tutoring me on my wife’s childhood. For news articles, thanks go to the Tribune, the Department of Archives, and to Alpheus Hawk Finlayson, who shared his Track World articles. Thanks are also due to Mr. Stephen Ball for information on the Deepdene School and to Mrs. Marianne Smith, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh librarian, for her assistance in obtaining an image of the painting Opisthotonus.

I am grateful to my wife, Moneira, for being a perpetual and levelheaded sounding board as I wrote my story. The end result is much improved thanks to insightful critique from Marion Bethel. For corrections I am grateful to a number of friends, especially Charlotte Rolle, Denise Francis, Dr. Christine Chin and Nicodemus Johnson. I was fortunate to have such a knowledgeable person as Mrs. Anne Bootle edit the manuscript and I am very grateful for the time that she gave to this project. I appreciate the work of the team at Xlibris who prepared the manuscript for publication. Finally, I am grateful to my two beautiful children for whom Westward was started in the first place.

Introduction

I must charge you in the name of Progress, to find out who you are and where you came from so that you can stand tall and strong, and be better able to decide where you are going and how you might get there.

—Sir Lynden Pindling to the Bahamas Federation of Youth

He gets about at amazing speeds lying flat on his stomach on a vehicle he operates himself, parting the crowds with yells of Look out—here comes Fangio! I know who he is, but who is he really? I have no idea.

—Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Old Fort Bay lies eleven miles west of the city of Nassau on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, a tropical archipelago that is spread over eighty thousand square miles of the Atlantic off the south coast of Florida. The Bahamas is famous for its beaches of powdery white sand, and on the capital island of New Providence, the best of them is arguably the beach of Old Fort Bay.

A grand limestone ridge forms the eastern margin of Old Fort Bay, and the owners of the regal homes in a row atop the ridge are spoiled by the relaxing cadence of rolling surf, the view over blue green crystal water, and the blessed renewal that accompanies silent sunsets in red and gold over the horizon. At the western end of the ridge, where the beach swirls at its feet, stands a fort overlooking the bay. The British built it in the turbulent late 1700s complete with walls more than three feet thick and reinforced with an insulating sandwich of sand, battlements, and cannon. For a century, it was a peaceful sisal plantation house; and in the 1920s, the fort that gave the bay its name became the home of Suydam Cutting and his wife, Helen. The colorful Cuttings expanded and redecorated their fortress home with embellishments brought back from globe-trotting forays to Holland, Portugal, and Spain. On the beach of the bay, the intrepid travelers entertained in style under a giant tent that they brought back from Tibet.¹

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fort was reborn as an exclusive private club within the confines of a gated community that was laid out on eighty acres of land behind the dunes of the beach with properties arrayed around canals created from wetlands that old maps show was called Lightbourn’s Creek. A lush coppice of native poinciana, pigeon plum, and kamalame lines the main thoroughfare, and it is here in Old Fort Bay that my family and I have made our home.

This is a book about my journey to Old Fort Bay. It is not a story that I have always longed to share, and my profession really leaves me no time to write; but in 2001, things changed. My mother caught pneumonia and landed in the hospital, followed a few weeks later by my father, who suffered (of all things) a stomach ailment that lay him low for a month. It dawned on me then that my parents were growing old, and I was seized by new ideas and new worries that my wife said was another midlife crisis. I’m not so sure about that, but whatever you call it, it included the desire to record my parents’ life stories. And in the process, the narrative that I began became my own.

Respected friends invariably raised an eyebrow and urged me to wait a decade or more for the kind of wisdom that comes with seniority when I mentioned that I was writing a memoir, but I ignored their prudent counsel. I was inspired by the example of two famous and younger contemporaries: the brilliant Barack Obama² wrote his when he was just thirty-four years old, and Jean-Dominique Bauby managed to complete his mesmerizing memoir even though he had been reduced to communicating by blinking one eye. If men busier, younger, and even handicapped could write a memoir, then why not I?

For three years, I procrastinated before beginning; and in the midst of a hectic schedule, writing proved to be a tremendous struggle. More than once, I was tempted to throw in the towel; and I might have done so if not for my cousin Valerie, who chuckled when she read an early manuscript and then cheered me on. Lifting Valerie’s spirits, even for a moment, was no mean feat since she read the draft in her hospital bed while she was literally dying of cancer.³

My story is not a noble tale of rags to riches; I grew up with the advantages that come with having had two educated and working parents who could afford to send me to a private school. I also had the intangible benefits of a boyhood spent at the feet of leaders of the Quiet Revolution;⁴ a few of whom were my father’s closest friends and who fell on both sides of the traditional Bahamian political divide. Largely because of this, I grew up with friendships without regard to political affiliation or race, and readers will not find much here to sink their teeth into in that regard. Boys, future doctors, and others in the up-and-coming generation can learn something from the triumphs and mistakes that I chronicle in my turn-of-the-millennium memoir, and true crime buffs may enjoy the little-known stories of murder and mayhem retold here; this darker side of the Bahamas throws some of the signposts of my age into relief while exposing a personal fascination.

Ever since I was eleven years old and learned to play the guitar, I have been tuning the instrument, which, unlike the piano, needs daily adjustments and, every now and then, a complete change of strings. It has struck me how like a guitar is the constant tuning needed to keep one’s body, mind, and spirit in harmony. I have succeeded and failed at this to a greater or lesser degree in the Bahamas and Canada, Jamaica, and England—wherever my protracted education has had me live. My story spends time in all those places, but we begin in a little known town in Mexico, in a place called Tecamachalco.

Chapter 1

Tecamachalco

Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

—Exodus 20:12, King James Version

I wish to record those actions of my ancestors and my peers that have contributed to the shaping of the present. It is so easy to forget what they have contributed; there are those of the present generation that even do not know that some of the things that I have recorded in this work ever took place.

—Dr. Cleveland W Eneas, Let the Church Roll On

May 2006 was as hot a month as any that I could remember. It was the month of my daughter’s Spanish-class play, and on the big day, after a short stopover at my mother’s house, I prepared to set out for St. Andrew’s School. To avoid the usual blast of heat from the oven of a closed-up car, I had parked under the poinciana tree with the windows down. Now as I brushed its litter of a thousand little leaves from the seat, my mother piped up, Son, you are blessed. It was a phrase that she proffered often as a declaration, as a call to pray, and as an expression of gratitude for the fortunes of her children. The context revealed her intent, and on this occasion, she was referring to the blessing of my little actress—one of the gems clustered in her crown of grandchildren. With a wave, I pulled away; and as I rounded the corner and disappeared from her view, I tooted the horn. The toot was a farewell habit picked up from my wife, Moneira, who had promised to meet me at the school.

For once, I arrived early, but Moneira was already there. I picked my way along the nearly empty row of seats near the rear of the auditorium, where she was nodding and gesturing in conversation with a parent whom she knew. Noise from the scraping of folding metal chairs and from the chatter of children steadily rose as the room filled. I sat almost motionless because it was just too hot for me to move without breaking into a sweat, but I spared a few calories to check my equipment. Damn, I muttered and sucked my teeth. What’s the matter? asked Moneira, and she turned to see me hold up my useless digital camera. Dead battery.

It was the fifth of May, and my nine-year-old was in a play in honor of Cinco de Mayo, translated literally, the fifth of May. In Mexico, this is a widely celebrated regional holiday that commemorates the victory of an indigenous militia over the French army at the Battle of Puebla that took place on that day in 1862. The performance gave me the idea that reminding my little princess of that day’s event would be a good beginning to the story of how her grandparents were married. She was not going to have to wait for more than four decades to hear the tale that I finally prized from my parents with the aid of the disruption in routine brought by a recent hurricane.

During the dry September weeks that followed Hurricane Frances, I visited my parents often. Their Danottage Estates mansion that was once alive with six active children now sheltered only two senior citizens and three scraggly potcakes. The children were all grown and gone, leaving behind a jumble of schoolbooks in empty rooms and a host of termites. Despite the crumbling woodwork and carpets matted with age, the old homestead still felt cozy. Lately, it had come into a sort of revival with grandchildren shrieking through the long upstairs corridor, bounding down the stairways, slamming doors, and splashing in the pool.

One particularly humid afternoon as I sat with my mother near a wobbly oscillating fan in the breakfast room, peppering her with questions on our family history, she momentarily disappeared into my father’s study. When she reappeared, she held a trove of important-looking documents that she plunked down on the table in front of me. There in folders, I found her marriage certificate, Grandfather James’s will, and deeds bearing seals, bound with ribbons of pink cloth. It was the first time that I had seen these documents, and I wondered whether after all these years, my mother was now ready to open a window to that area of her life about which I knew so little. What was her life like before I was born? For some years now, this was something I wanted to know.

I studied the marriage certificate on the table. It was stamped November 15, 1960, Tecamachalco, Mexico. Why Mexico, Mum? I asked. Her face was impassive, but she abruptly rose from the table without a word and walked over to the kitchen. I watched her, suddenly busy with plates and paper, and I realized that I was mistaken if I thought that she would willingly do more than crack open a window to her past. This time, however, I decided that I would not give up so easily; I simply continued looking in her direction, and I repeated my question. A tense, long silence followed, and I held my breath, almost expecting my mother to ask me to leave. The hush was broken by her single-word reply, Problems.

My mother did not speak to me for the rest of the afternoon, and I dared not push my luck any further. I had already learned in one hour more than years of gentle inquiry had yielded, so I returned my attention to the fascinating papers on the breakfast table. I would have to figure out the rest for myself.

In 1960, my father lived in an apartment on East Street. He was an up-and-coming employee in the Department of Public Works, already with several promotions to his credit that bode well for his prospects in the civil service. His first marriage in 1950 to June Maplethorpe, whom he met on his first tour of studies in England, had produced two children: Richard Alexander and Linda Ellen, who remained with him after the short marriage failed. They were nine and seven years old respectively when he was about to marry my mother.

As a youth, my father had distinguished himself in track-and-field, cricket, and tennis; and he remained actively involved in sports. Just ten weeks before his trip to Mexico with his fiancée, he had been in Rome on a sports mission; as president of the Bahamas Amateur Athletic Association, he helped to lead the national team to the 1960 Olympiad. According to my father, the athletes, who were mostly sailors, acquitted themselves well. Durward Knowles and Cecil Cooke, in particular, gained valuable experience in the Star Class that culminated in a gold medal for them four years later in Tokyo. It would be decades before my father’s dream of a Bahamian on the podium for an athletic event would be realized. It was a lofty target, but that was where he set the sights of the B3As.

Image355.JPG

Harold Munnings, president of the BAAA, leads the Bahamas delegation at the opening ceremony of the Rome Olympiad, 1960.

My father’s eyes sparkled when he spoke to me about the games, especially as he remembered Wilma Rudolph, who was known as the Tennessee Tornado. Of the women’s one-hundred-meter dash, he gushed, She was tall and graceful. In the one hundred, she just walked away from the field. There is no doubt that she dominated her events, as her record speaks for itself; she took home the gold in the one hundred meters, the two hundred meters, and in the four-by-one-hundred-meter relay, setting a world record in the process. In 1960, Rudolph, who was almost crippled by polio as a child, was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year; and at the turn of the new millennium, Sports Illustrated magazine named her as one of the greatest sports figures of the twentieth century. At the 2008 Olympics in China, when Usain Bolt took triple gold in the sprints, the pundits had to go all the way back to Wilma Rudolph’s record for a comparison of the magnitude of his feat. I saw the Lightning Bolt run, so I understand what my father felt when he saw Wilma.

By comparison, my mother’s life in 1960 seemed almost mundane. Then five feet ten inches tall, the elegant twenty-nine-year-old government audit clerk was on a salary that had recently climbed to £28 a month. She lived with her parents in a clapboard house on White’s Lane and saved the extra income that she earned from her second job that kept her cloistered in a dressmaking shop. Her relationship with my father led to a rift between her and her church brethren (see chapter 3) that she accepted, but there was a limit to what she was willing to forgo for her fiancé, and one day she told him, I’m not going to live in any apartment. If you want to marry me, you have to have a house. The ultimatum caused him to purchase on terms a home on Mackey Street that Karl and Betty Bethel had put up for sale. The ink from my father’s pen was scarcely dry on the documents when he and my mother took off to Mexico.

* * *

Tecamachalco (Teekah-ma-CHAL-ko)—this town is located on a central mountain plateau thirty-three miles south of the metropolis that is Puebla City, Mexico. Its nineteen thousand or so inhabitants are primarily farmers, but there is a small tourist industry built mainly around the steady stream of special-interest visitors who go there to see the art of the native Mexican painter Juan Gerson. In 1562, he created a cycle of paintings for the Franciscan church ofTecamachalco that he produced on ovals of traditional indigenous bark paper. The extraordinary works of art illustrate the events recounted in the biblical Apocalypse of Saint John that was, and still is a passionately studied subject, especially by the Franciscans. A Bahamian who wishes to view Gerson’s original work must travel via Miami or Fort Lauderdale to Houston and then fly from Houston to Puebla, Mexico. Once in Puebla, an hour’s drive south on pretty-good roads leads to Tecamachalco. In 1960, the trip was not so straightforward, and the long trek that my parents made there was not to view art. They never even saw the famous Franciscan church but went directly to a justice of the peace, and after a requisite waiting period in the town, the pair was declared officially wed. The newlyweds were given their marriage certificate that was signed, stamped, and recorded in the register, and they quickly departed. The blushing bride was already five months pregnant and anxious to return home.

So you eloped? I boldly asked my mother at the very next visit while I studied her face and prepared to duck. No, my family knew what we were doing, she replied. My father even helped. She held up her left hand and displayed her wedding band. See this ring? I bought this with money that my father gave me for the trip.

My dad claimed that the only thing that he could recall ofTecamachalco was that roadside hawkers pursued them as they left town, and from one of them, he purchased a cheap little minisombrero. What became of it? I prodded and got a surprising reply. I still have it—it’s upstairs, on my nightstand. Immediately, I bounded up the stairs to his bedroom where, to my utter amazement, I found the little time capsule—black minisombrero with colorful stitching and shiny bits attached.

He is a complicated fellow, my father. Grandchildren excepted, he has never believed in public displays of affection; and he has adhered to that conviction from long before I first spied that decree posted in the Bahamas, at the entrance to Club Rush, the nightclub for teens at the Atlantis Resort. My siblings and I grew up accustomed to his roundabout way of showing his love—the nod and the grunt, the guitar, and the school fees. He was the same way with my mother; the most physical contact that I have ever witnessed between them has been a birthday peck on the cheek. What passion they have shared has all been behind closed doors, so when I discovered this memento on his bedside table, I knew what it said about my father’s heart. The day that I decoded the cryptic sign of how much he loves my mother, I almost choked up.

Image362.JPG

Opisthotonus, Sir Charles Bell, 1809. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

Chapter 2

The Hilltop

I learned about the strength you can get from a close family life. I learned to keep going, even in bad times. I learned not to despair, even when my world was falling apart. I learned that there are no free lunches. And I learned about the value of hard work.

—Lee Iacocca, Iacocca: An Autobiography

We love; we work; we raise our families. Those are the areas of significance in our individual lives. And love and work and family are the legacy we leave behind when our little moment in the sun