The Triumph of Persistence, Determination and Preparation: If I Could Do It, You Can Too

By ORMAN GRANGER

Today is Fathers Day and our children are planning a get together at
their house. As is usual for this time of day, there was the morning fog
replaced later by a clear sky, bright sunshine and warmth. The expected
high temperature today is 71 degrees Fahrenheit up from this mornings
65 but nowhere near the 91 degrees that thermometers would normally
register on Fathers day when I was a kid. Our children have invited us over
to celebrate, since our oldest son is now a father himself, and as my wife
and I drove over to their duplex, I realized that three generations of my
family will be there and it became clear to me that the time had come for
me to provide them with a biographical accounting that will fill in some
blanks about their paternal roots and give them a clearer understanding
of one half of their cultural heritage. It may have appeared to our children
during their short childhood visits to the ancestral homeland of their
father, that their aunts, uncles and cousins lived differently, and were
apparently not as sophisticated as the people with whom they interacted
in Berkeley. They were too young to appreciate the fact that their aunts
and uncles had successful careers as teachers, master welders, policemen,
grocery chain manager, and personal assistant to the President of their
countrys Senate. They probably judged that their cousins toys were
comparatively primitive viewed against the electronic marvels that they
were accustomed to, nor were they as numerous. Television reception
there was deplorable compared to what they were used to at home, and
the duration of programming was limited, but academically, their young
relatives skills were comparable to their own. On one occasion they
were awed by the ability of a few of their cousins to build a functional
lean-to that fitted into the games they were

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465361523

ORMAN GRANGER

Dr. Orman Granger is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His specialty is dynamic, physical and applied climatology, climate change and its impacts on the environment and society. He is the author of many scientific publications and a book, Natural Hazards and social change. His research has covered time and space scales from moisture balance and surface processes, to ENSO phenomena and regional climate change, to millennial scale fluctuations and their impacts. He was born in Trinidad, West Indies and received his tertiary education in Canada. This book traces his life's struggles and triumphs over three quarters of a century.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Orman Granger.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011915880

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-6151-6

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-6150-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-6152-3

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.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

104078

Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1: THE EARLY YEARS

Chapter 2: ADVENTURES IN A NEW WORLD

Chapter 3: WESTWARD HO!

Chapter 4: BACK EAST TO TORONTO

Chapter 5: INTO THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND

Chapter 6: The Beginning of the End

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Today is Fathers’ Day and our children are planning a get together at their house. As is usual for this time of day, there was the morning fog replaced later by a clear sky, bright sunshine and warmth. The expected high temperature today is 71 degrees Fahrenheit up from this morning’s 65 but nowhere near the 91 degrees that thermometers would normally register on Father’s day when I was a kid. Our children have invited us over to celebrate, since our oldest son is now a father himself, and as my wife and I drove over to their duplex, I realized that three generations of my family will be there and it became clear to me that the time had come for me to provide them with a biographical accounting that will fill in some blanks about their paternal roots and give them a clearer understanding of one half of their cultural heritage. It may have appeared to our children during their short childhood visits to the ancestral homeland of their father, that their aunts, uncles and cousins lived differently, and were apparently not as sophisticated as the people with whom they interacted in Berkeley. They were too young to appreciate the fact that their aunts and uncles had successful careers as teachers, master welders, policemen, grocery chain manager, and personal assistant to the President of their country’s Senate. They probably judged that their cousins’ toys were comparatively primitive viewed against the electronic marvels that they were accustomed to, nor were they as numerous. Television reception there was deplorable compared to what they were used to at home, and the duration of programming was limited, but academically, their young relatives’ skills were comparable to their own. On one occasion they were awed by the ability of a few of their cousins to build a functional lean-to that fitted into the games they were playing from materials that were easily available in the backyard.

They knew that the beaches they visited were more idyllic and picturesque; that the water was much warmer; and that the plants and animals were quite unlike those at home in Berkeley.

They observed too that the meals they were served were different in components and flavor. The cuisine was a cross-cultural amalgam that was representative of the many peoples and cultures that made up the milieu they were experiencing. But even as they grew to be pre-teens they never asked why or how the differences they observed existed. They only knew that the people were different, much like their father and they probably concluded then that that was the way things were, that we were all one; their grandmothers and grandfathers, paternal and maternal relatives were just that, and to them, apart from the existential questions that nag youths their age, all was well with the world.

However, with a white Canadian mother and a black West Indian father, they had to face the inevitability of their multi-ethnicity in a country where racism was rife, as they moved into their teenage years. They had to struggle to avoid being labeled and marginalized despite the unique perspectives and experiences they could contribute and the astuteness of their intellect. They became acutely aware that how they were judged and categorized depended on how they appeared to others. They spent a lot of their time, as I did, explaining to people who they were only to be identified with the race they most looked like, as if they were not complete and multifaceted individuals but only some fraction of who they were. In my case, my name, especially as I pronounce it, suggested to people that I was French but I did not look French, after all I was black, hence an explanation was expected or I got a pronunciation of my name that I invariably corrected with some evidence of annoyance because the intent was to imply condescendingly that I did not know my own name or who I really was. Maybe I should have said, my great grandfather’s name was Rene Antoine Granger, but then that would have been only a name with little probative value to most of them. Similarly, my kids were verbally poked and prodded to choose their primary ethnicity, or to have it chosen for them by their peers, based on their looks. At school, they had the same problem with the pronunciation of their name. Like me, they corrected every mispronunciation of their name, and even though that approach became monotonous and to me, infuriating, we did the best we could to have our name pronounced correctly. After all these years, I am still correcting, and I am sure my kids are too.

Our children are self-assured and confident in their abilities, and resourceful in their enterprises, but as they became teenagers the problems they faced from their inter-raciality became more acute. We did not think it necessary to broach the question directly at home, relying instead on precept and example to provide the guidance that we thought they needed. It must have been clear, judging from our multiracial circle of friends that race and color were not qualities that were of importance to us. They were familiar with King’s content of character rather then the color of one’s skin assertion, and the concept of equality enshrined in the Constitution. The problem’s existence manifested itself, especially with our older son, who had a group of black buddies and another of white buddies and the two groups did not mingle much; our younger son founded The Association of Inter-racial Students complete with T-shirts and Logo at his High School whose student body exceeded three thousand. By that astute choice he assured himself of a group of students with whom he could comfortably socialize because of their inter-raciality. In the end both ended up with a group of endearing friends with whom they still ‘hang out’ as they say, a circumstance for which I can claim absolutely no credit.

Based on smatterings of conversations I was able to catch, I became aware that our sons were coming face to face with problems of inter-racial intolerance and despite their unconditional and reciprocated love for their parents, there might have been fleeting moments during their early teenage existence when they probably wished that their parents had made alternative choices. That they were able to confront and surmount those difficulties speaks well for their fortitude and good sense. The support that they received at home, and the examples we set there, provided the strength of character that saw them through those crucial formative years. Some of the precepts that we tried to inculcate and which they have hopefully being following are captured in the second stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s, If, a poem I had to memorize myself as a kid in Grade 6:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

––––––––––––––––––––

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!

Those kids are grown up now and are better able to appreciate their earlier experiences from the perspectives of their experiential growth and education. They both hold Graduate degrees from prestigious universities and are currently pursuing successful careers in their chosen fields. It is therefore timely to elucidate the story of their paternal roots and of their father’s heritage and experiences. It is hoped that the story that follows will not only answer my children’s questions but will serve as a source of answers for the questions their children will inevitably have. Also, I have lived many more years outside of the country of my birth than I have within it, and so this recounting of my life’s journey so far, will enlighten my living relatives about my travails and triumphs, my growth and accomplishments, and they may identify in this rendering of my memories and recollections the importance of their contribution in making me who and what I have become.

Chapter 1:

THE EARLY YEARS

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

‘This is my own, my native land!’

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d

As home his footsteps he hath turn’d

From wandering on a foreign strand?

Sir Walter Scott

My ancestral homeland is Trinidad, the ‘Land of the Humming Bird’ and the southernmost island of the Windward group of the Lesser Antilles in the Eastern Caribbean. Together with the island of Tobago, ‘Crusoe’s Island’, it forms the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. I am therefore, a ‘Trinbagonian’, or ‘Trini’ by birth and culture and an American by naturalization. I lived for a number of years in both eastern and western Canada where I attended University. I can, therefore, safely lay claim to being a ‘citizen’ of the Americas. A nineteenth century poet had this to say in part about the beauty of Trinidad and many who were born, or lived there, or those who have visited the island, will concur fully with the glowing poetic assessment:

Those who eat the cascadura will, the native legend says,

Where so ever they may wander, end in Trinidad their days,

And this lovely fragrant island, with its forest hills sublime,

Well might be the smiling Eden, pictured in the book Devine,

Cocoa woods with scarlet glory of the stately immortelle,

Waterfalls and fertile valleys, precipices, fairy dells,

Rills and rivers, green savannahs, fruits and flowers and odors rich,

Waving sugarcane plantations, and that wondrous lake of pitch,

Oh the Bocas at the daybreak, how can one describe that scene,

With those little emerald islands and the sapphire sea between,

My paternal great grandparents were Rene Antoine Granger and Marie Apoutine La Foucade. The second of their eight children, Alfred Felix Granger (1867-1956) was my grandfather and Angella Albertina Alvarez (1886-1921) who immigrated to Trinidad from Venezuela at age six was my grandmother. The first of their five children, Francis Alred Granger (1910-1988) was my father. He had four sisters, Romelia, Thecla, Louvinea and Andraide, all of whom are now deceased, as is his only half-brother, Felix, who during the execution of a childhood prank was responsible for my father having one thumb for most of his life. The two brothers had a length of sugarcane to be shared between them but neither trusted the other to be an equitable divider of the piece of sugarcane. They decided to mark what they considered to be the middle point of the loot and each held on to one end. Felix was to wield the cutlass but as he brought the weapon down, he simultaneously jerked the piece of sugarcane toward himself in an attempt to get a longer piece thus bringing his brother’s thumb under the blade and severing it. The thumb was not re-attached and so he lived ever after sans one thumb.

My mother, Petronilla Granger (1911-1987), was the third child of Anselmo Rodriguez and Marcilina Reyes, both of whom came to Trinidad from Venezuela as youngsters but met in Trinidad. My mother had two brothers Guitano and Ferdinando and three sisters, Camelia, Denisia, and Augustina all of whom are also deceased. My paternal grandmother died before I was born, as did my maternal grandparents. It is clear from the main branches of my family tree that I am both multi-racial and multi-ethnic.

I am one of thirteen children, the first and third of whom died in infancy. They were named Sweden and Rupert respectively. I am the oldest of the remaining eleven—six boys and five girls. My oldest sister, Monica, and two of my brothers, Joseph and Aldwyn, have since died. As of writing, I have three brothers, Edwin, Kenneth and Steven, and four sisters, Sylda, Anestine, Gloria and Julie left and nephews and nieces and grand nephews and grand nieces too numerous to enumerate.

Anestine Parents 2.JPG

My father Francis and mother Petronilla

My spouse is Donna May Granger, a native of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and the daughter of Donald and Gertrude Madlung. We have two sons, David Adrian and Logan Tyler and three grandsons, David Alexander, Donovan Carter and Dylan James and a grand daughter, Elizabeth May, and of course two wonderful daughters-in-law, Leah and Sandra.

family.jpg

My family (Orman, David, Donna & Logan)

I was born one hundred years after the emancipation of African slaves in the West Indies and ninety-six years before the beginning of indentured servitude of East Indians who replaced the African slaves that were apprenticed to the sugar planters after emancipation before being completely freed four years later. In the West Indies as a whole the decade of my birth was a time of great hardship and privation accompanied by social and political upheaval. The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s saw world production fall by a third and world trade by two-thirds. In places like the Eastern Caribbean that depended on one or two export crops, and where the inhabitants produced what they did not eat and ate a great deal of what they did not produce, the impacts were severe. Colonial governments lost their revenues from export duties, so that public work programs, which provided employment to large numbers of workers were suspended at the same time that the Colonial Office froze colonial spending. Stark poverty was rampant as was hunger, disease and illiteracy. My father eked out a livelihood as a carpenter building houses at wages that were barely enough to sustain his then small, but rapidly growing family. He had earlier built a small fishing boat that he and a few of his cousins with whom he was close, took out now and then, on over-night fishing trips. The boat’s propulsion system was wooden oars so that their fishing range was limited to one or two miles out. On their better days they would catch enough fish to recoup their expenses and had enough left to take home. Those that he brought home were either eaten fresh or salted and ‘buccaneered’ i.e. smoked and dried over a wood fire. As his family grew he also hunted wild game to supplement our meat demands. A century after emancipation, the economic conditions in the West Indies changed little. Cocoa and coffee joined sugar as export crops and Trinidad and British Guiana exported minerals, but the region, as a whole, did not retain enough of the profits from exports to meet the needs of the people. Fortunately, then as now, oil and asphalt saved the day in Trinidad even as the price of asphalt and agricultural goods slumped. Other colonies were not as fortunate.

Then, as now, emigration to the United States and its territories was made extremely difficult through the Restrictive Immigration Act of 1927 which prevented laborers from the English speaking Caribbean taking jobs in American dominated territories. The depression saw mass deportation of West Indian workers, first from Cuba, then from the Dominican Republic and Central American States. The repatriation of workers stopped the flow of remittances that were so important to the poorest colonies’ welfare. The returning migrants swelled the unemployment rolls and further depressed the pitifully low wages while their raised expectations molded by their stay abroad were being stymied by the incapability of the colonial system to meet their newly acquired socio-economic aspirations. The colonial administration failed to alleviate the suffering while stunting the initiatives of West Indians to find solutions of their own.

The depression driven collapse of the colonial economy, the rise of unemployment along with nationalist pro-independence sentiment countering the repressive authoritarianism of the unresponsive and unrepresentative Crown Colony system of government, led to labor disturbances and as was its wont, the Colonial Office convened and dispatched yet another do nothing Royal Commission headed, this time, by Lord Oliver to investigate and recommend. Among the recommendations were, preferential treatment for West Indian sugar in Britain and a union of the Leeward and Windward islands to cut the cost of government. The latter recommendation gave rise to the Closer Union Commission of 1932, which, despite proposals by leaders of the Eastern Caribbean governments for a Federation, did nothing of consequence. This rebuff of the colonies’ proposals for some political self-determination, forced workers to take matters into their own hands and so began a process that would end in the demise of the British Empire in the West Indies. The mechanism was the activism of the Trade Unions that campaigned vigorously for pension schemes, minimum wages and other amenities not only in Trinidad where trade unionism and opposition to crown colony government was especially strong, but in Guiana sugar plantations in 1931-32 and in St Kitts and St Vincent in 1935, as well. These trade unions later became the nuclei of some of the Political Parties that would lead the former colonies to independence three decades later.

On June 19, 1937, a general strike by Oilfield workers in Trinidad was joined by sugarcane workers and by some laborers in Port-of-Spain. An attempt to arrest the leader Uriah Buzz Butler led to riots and the deaths of strikers and civilians at the hands of police and troops called in by the Governor. The riots exposed the extent of British ignorance about the plight