Beyond the Horizon: A Jamaican Immigrant Chases His Dream in America

By Ransford W. Palmer

Ransford W. Palmer is Professor of Economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His recollections in this volume trace his life along a path which began in a small village in Jamaica and led him to professional achievements and the formation of his American family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479737086

Ransford W. Palmer

Ransford W. Palmer is Professor of Economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His recollections in this volume trace his life along a path which began in a small village in Jamaica and led him to professional achievements and the formation of his American family.

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Contents

Dedication

1 The Formative Years

2 Arrival in the United States

3 New Beginnings

4 The Winter of 1964

5 Back to New England

6 A Happy Return to Jamaica

7 Our Children Begin to Arrive

8 A Call from a Friend

9 Travels with the Family

10 The Reagan Years

11 A New Home

12 The Education of Our Children

13 The Death of My Parents

14 The Deaths of Siblings

15 Traveling the World

16 Reflections

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Sally, and to our children, Geoffrey, Christopher, and Laura. It is an attempt to weave together the important strands of my life and the people and events that shaped it. Much of what I am today was influenced by the experience of growing up in a dusty little village where people were self-reliant and where many saw my future promise. Much of my life has been dedicated to fulfilling that promise in America and to laying the groundwork for my own children to fulfill their own promise.

As a professor, I have had the good fortune to help shape the intellectual lives of thousands of students. And in the process, they also shaped mine. This recollection was influenced by many people along the way, but especially by Sally and the children we raised together.

1

The Formative Years

I was born early one November morning in a village called Braeton on the plains of the parish of St. Catherine in Jamaica. I was told that at the same time a British man-of-war entered Kingston harbor, carrying the country’s new governor, Sir Alexander Ransford Slater. This gave my father, who named all his children, the inspiration for my own name. My middle name is Wentworth, a rather upscale appellation for one born in such humble circumstances.

The village was virtually surrounded by the huge banana and sugar plantations of The United Fruit Company and had a population of around five hundred. Generations of men supported their families by doing physical labor in the surrounding plantations. Those not so employed eked out an existence from fishing in the sea, a stone’s throw away, or in The Great Salt Pond, thirty-eight acres of salt water separated from the sea by a sliver of sand. Some produced charcoal from wood cut, often illegally, in the nearby public woodlands.

My parents were James Cornelius Palmer and Cordella Albertha Palmer (lovingly called Cud by all who knew her, including her children). When Cud married my father, she had already had five children fathered by Ephraim McKay. They were: George, the eldest, who was swept out to sea while working on a fishing boat; Hazel, who often proclaimed me her favorite sibling and who, in later times, became bishop of a church she founded; Millicent, who ran a little bar in historic Spanish Town; Lloyd, also a fisherman, retired to upstate New York to live with his two sons; and Francis, who migrated to London to run his own construction company. After she married my father, she had seven: myself; Lorenzo Lincoln, known as Lincoln, who worked first for the Jamaican government and later for the state of Florida; Conway, a textile worker who now looks after the family properties in Braeton; Alvin, another migrant who found his home in Sheffield, England, working for one of the well-known producers of Sheffield Steel; and Terrence, who perished in a horrific accident carrying a mirror while riding his bicycle on a rough road. He lost control of the bike and dropped the mirror, which shattered and severed one of his arteries. He bled to death before help could arrive. My parents’ youngest children were twins, Rexford and Minerva; both died of measles around their second birthdays.

Another of my father’s children is Herbert, called Skipper or Skip and seven years older than I am. He was a master diesel mechanic employed at the Kaiser Bauxite Company in Ocho Rios. At this writing, only three of my siblings are alive: Francis, Skipper, and Conway.

My father was universally known as Mr. P. or J.C. He was largely self-educated and loved to read. He could often be seen in his shop in the mornings perusing the daily newspaper. Then he would brief his customers about what was new. My wife, Sally, once accompanied him on his morning stroll in Braeton, where he appeared as a jaunty figure with his felt hat and cane. He greeted everyone with a quiet Good morning and was greeted in return. To my wife, he seemed quite the picture of the village’s elder statesman.

In the village, no one had formal education beyond elementary school, and not every child who attended elementary school actually finished. Some had to work to supplement the meager incomes of their parents. A searing image of the time was a bullock-drawn cart loaded with sugar cane and led by a little boy. That image was always used by parents to scare their children into going to school.

At the center of the village economy was the grocery shop, which supplied a range of goods to the working population. The volume of business would rise at crop time when more workers were hired to reap bananas and sugar cane. The shops purchased their supplies from wholesale merchants in the capital, Kingston, who in turn imported much of their inventory from the United States and Britain. The banana and sugar plantations, on the other hand, exported their crops, which meant that the economy and the rhythm of the village ebbed and flowed with exports to foreign markets, particularly the United Kingdom. Of the three shops in the village, two were owned by Chinese merchants and the other was managed for a while by my father for the wholesale firm of Alexander Dolphy and Sons in Kingston, which owned several retail shops around the country.

The village had no electricity, no running water, no telephone, and for a long time, no post office. Communication with the outside world demanded some effort. A medical emergency required someone to ride a bicycle on unpaved roads to the nearest hospital in Spanish Town five miles away to request an ambulance—if one was available. The communication isolation encouraged people to develop home-grown solutions for many things. Many relied on herbal medicines handed down for generations. There was a local bush for every medical condition, and babies were delivered by the local midwife who had no formal training.

This self-reliance came home to me one day in the starkest way when a pot of boiling water tipped over on my younger brother Lincoln. It severely burned his chest and belly. My mother heard his horrible scream of pain and rushed in immediately. We carried him into the house, took off his shirt, and laid him on his back. My mother applied coconut oil to his chest and belly presumably to ease the pain, but in the days that followed, the sores became serious. Yet my mother was calm. She apparently had no fear that the sores might become infected, and she never thought it was serious enough to take him to the hospital five miles away for treatment. Instead, she instantly gathered some goat dung, parched it in a frying pan, pulverized it, and sprinkled it on the wounds every day for three weeks until they began to heal. I am sure that this treatment did not come out of the blue; it must have been part of a stock of practical knowledge handed down through the generations.

The village had a carpenter, a cobbler, a tailor, a barber, a butcher, and one beekeeper. The beekeeper’s name was Maximillian Sadler. He always wore suspenders, which strained against his protruding belly. The locals called him Mr. Maxi. He had an apiary on his property, and once a year he would hire a few local people to extract honey from the honeycomb frames with hand-operated extractors. My mother was one of the locals, and I often stopped by to watch the operation. Mr. Maxi had the biggest house in the village. He also had a horse and buggy and a small Ford truck for hauling the few barrels of his annual honey production to a honey dealer in Kingston. Mr. Maxi was married to the aunt of my friend, Richmond, a Spanish Town boy. Richmond drove both the buggy and the truck on various missions while his father tended Mr. Maxi’s apiary. On occasions when school was out and Richmond took Mr. Maxi in the horse-drawn buggy to the train station at Gregory Park, four miles away, he would alert me beforehand. I would then hitch a ride on the back of the buggy, unknown to Mr. Maxi. And when Mr. Maxi was safely aboard the train, I would climb into the cab and ride in his seat for the trip back home.

The cast of characters in the village also included some who were believed to possess special powers to do evil things. This belief played a prominent role in the case of my cousin, Randel Gordon, who lived next door. Randel was lying on his back on his bed in his house, seriously ill with bubbles of blood foaming from his nostrils. The family members who gathered around him were frightened by what they saw and thought his condition was the result of a curse placed on him by a man named Spider. Spider was a loner and a heavy smoker of marijuana, called ganja in Jamaica. He was known to practice necromancy, which the locals call obeah. People said that he had a long-running feud with Randel and that Spider had cast an evil spell on Randel to get even. As Randel’s condition deteriorated, his family decided to send him in a mule-drawn cart to the hospital in Spanish Town, five miles away. His sister, Curdel, accompanied the cart driver. Half way into the journey, Randel died, and they turned the cart around and