An Anthology of Stories About My Family

By Wilton Broomes

My grandfather came from the Island of Barbados with his mother, brothers, and sisters to Tobago in about 1890. They established themselves in their new home, but no one alive today seems to be able to make any connection with our Barbados relatives, which for a very long time had been my desire.
My father had told me some stories that I wanted to share with some of my relatives and began to do so as attachments to e-mails. Those relatives enjoyed them and kept asking me for more. I included some stories of my own that I recalled from growing up in Tobago. This book is a compilation of fifty stories about my family that I want to share with you. I hope that you, too, would enjoy them.
Some of the conversations in some of the stories were written in dialect to retain a Caribbean flavor. Caribbean readers should have no problem following what was said, but for those who are unfamiliar with the way the ordinary island person speaks, I have included a key at the end of the book to help you understand what was being said.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514427071

Wilton Broomes

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Copyright © 2015 by WILTON BROOMES.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015919072

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-5144-2709-5

                 Softcover         978-1-5144-2708-8

                 eBook               978-1-5144-2707-1

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Rev. date: 06/06/2016

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Story One: Our Barbados Origin

Story Two: Trying to Find Ma’am Bec’s Last Name

Story Three: James and Mildred Broomes’s Family

Story Four: Catching Doves

Story Five: The Family Connection

Story Six: Carsey and the Roadside Bandit

Story Seven: Gra’ma Millie’s Story

Story Eight: Uncle Sammy Scott

Story Nine: Two Wives of Different James Broomes

Story Ten: My Father Choosing a Wife

Story Eleven: Training up a Child

Story Twelve: Under the Grapevine

Story Thirteen: Uncle Eddy Ran for His Life

Story Fourteen: A Conversation with Rupert Bishop

Story Fifteen: A Blessing or a Curse

Story Sixteen: We Lived in a Remote Area

Story Seventeen: Making Brown Skin Babies

Story Eighteen: My Legacy

Story Nineteen: My First Day at School

Story Twenty: Broadening My Horizons

Story Twenty-One: Impersonating a Police Officer

Story Twenty-Two: Walk a Mile in Her Shoes

Story Twenty-Three: Depression and Suicide

Story Twenty-Four: Diseases That Run Through Our Family

Story Twenty-Five: The Old Dry Corn Mill

Story Twenty-Six: Our Sources of Fuel to Make Fire

Story Twenty-Seven: A Disgraceful Act of My Youth

Story Twenty-Eight: Living with My Mother’s Aunt Vio

Story Twenty-Nine: A Discussion with My Father

Story Thirty: Primitive Medical Treatment

Story Thirty-One: A Fruit Called Breadnut

Story Thirty-Two: Some Snippets of Me Growing Up In Point

Story Thirty-Three: That Was How It Used to Be

Story Thirty-Four: Some Shameful Indiscretions of My Youth

Story Thirty-Five: Charcoal in Our Lives

Story Thirty-Six: Being a Small Cocoa Proprietor

Story Thirty-Seven: My Younger Brother Joseph’s Saga

Story Thirty-Eight: Some Games We Used to Play at Night

Story Thirty-Nine: Bicycles

Story Forty: Cassava Was One of Our Staple Foods

Story Forty-One: In Loving Memory of My Eldest Sister Rhoda

Story Forty-Two: Making a Pilgrimage

Story Forty-Three: How Fables Evolved into Life

Story Forty-Four: Enough to Make One Faint

Story Forty-Five: Scandals in the Family

Story Forty-Six: When I Left Home to Be On My Own

Story Forty-Seven: Making Movies

Story Forty-Eight: Coming to America

Story Forty-Nine: Point Long Mango Tree

Story Fifty: An Open Letter to My Sister

Key

Summary

DEDICATION

I wish to dedicate this book to my children Denise and James, my younger sister Gritley, my cousins Horace and Giselle, to all of whom I had been sending these stories as attachments to e-mails as the stories were being written. When I wanted to stop writing them, they encouraged me to keep them coming.

Special thanks to Denise, whom I called when I ran into computer problems as I typed the stories; kudos to her for the manner in which she would walk me through the computer problems over the telephone until the problems were solved.

Horace, you started a spark that began a fire in some of us who came after you.

ATTENTION

Please see key at the end of this book for an interpretation of some passages of those stories where the local dialect is used.

INTRODUCTION

I finally completed this project that I had wanted to do for a very long time, but, which had been deferred many times. I do believe that I have some information concerning our kinfolks that none of our living relatives has, and that I am obligated to share this information with you. I am always flattered every time one of my relatives would call me to find out about some family matters.

I owe a profound gratitude to my father for the numerous stories he had begun to tell me from a very early age, and I thank God for giving me the ability to retain them. Whether it was during our early morning trips to the various bays around Belle Garden—where Pappy would go to fish and take me along to bring home the fish and his fishnets while he would go off to see about his cows—or to work, or during breaks from gardening on weekends, Pappy loved to tell me stories. And I never grew tired of asking him questions. In 1982, I had invited him to spend the summer with me and my family at my current home in New Jersey, USA, and we discussed again many of those stories that he had already told me many years before.

As I attempted to put together this collection of stories about my family, I relied very heavily on what my father had told me. It was necessary, at times, for me to make some estimation based on discussions that I had with other relatives to fill in any missing information. I deeply regret that we did not get more information from our parents before they died, and I urge any living relative who may have any additional information to share them with me so I might include them in any update of this work.

Please, feel free to circulate these stories among members of our family, and as we continue to seek further knowledge about our history, let us document our family’s forward march for the benefit of our descendants.

STORY ONE

Our Barbados Origin

My father had said to me once that if I ever wanted to know who I am and where I came from, that I should go to St. Lucy, Barbados, and it has always been my aspiration to do so to find out.

However, after all my efforts, especially during the last few years, I have learned that it was not quite that simple to find my Barbados root. Starting with our matriarch, my grandfather’s mother, I found out that nobody seemed to know what her last name was. She was unmarried when she had her children, and her last name only would be the one recorded on her children’s birth certificates. Everyone just called her Ma’am Bec or Mama Becca; Bec and Becca came from her first name, Rebecca. No one alive today can tell me what her last name was.

Her children were fathered by different men in Barbados; there were Scott, Bishop, and Broomes—these were the names of the men who had fathered her three sons. Her daughters carried Toppin and Walcutt. I do not know if these latter names were acquired by the daughters through marriage or given to them at their births.

Apparently her two daughters and one son, Sammy Scott, had preceded her from Barbados to Tobago. When she first came to Tobago, she met one Mr. Andrews, an estate overseer, and she promised him that she would return to Tobago after going back to Barbados. When she returned, however, she brought along our grandfather, James Broomes, and his brother, Bradford Bishop, without Mr. Andrews’s prior knowledge that the boys were coming. The three of them stayed with Mr. Andrews.

I am not quite certain, but I believe that these migrations all took place when Tobago was still administered by the governor of Barbados and travel between the two islands had no restrictions. Tobago was annexed to Trinidad in 1889; before that time Trinidad had been won by the British from Spain in 1797, but was largely settled by France.

I am putting together an anthology of short stories about our family, and I hope that these stories might fall into the hands of people from Barbados and that someone would recognize the names in my stories from discussions they might have heard about some long-lost relatives who had migrated from Barbados to Tobago. Perhaps we could link our stories together, to see if we would be able to find out what Ma’am Bec’s last name was.

I have met people from Barbados, some coming from St. Lucy, since I moved to the United States. One such person was a young nurse who carried my last name, Broomes, and whom I met one night during the early 1970s, when we worked at the same hospital in New Jersey. She told me everyone wanted to know if I was her husband, and I told her that people kept asking me if my wife was working at the hospital. She resembled one of my first cousins, Valarie, from Tobago; and I was hoping that we would meet again, but she returned to England, where she had acquired her training, to get married, and I never saw her again.

Another Broomes from St. Lucy, Barbados, whom I encountered at a funeral here in the United States, was a young Presbyterian minister. I could not help but see a close resemblance to another first cousin, Michael, who is a magistrate in Tobago.

Then there was the father of one of the members of the church which I attended. Although his last name was not Broomes, he was visiting from Barbados, and I mistook him for another of my first cousins, Ezron, who lives in Tobago. I was within a few feet of him before I determined that I had mistaken him for my first cousin.

STORY TWO

Trying to Find Ma’am Bec’s Last Name

One night a stray dog was following my father from the woods. As hard as he might have tried to drive the dog away, it kept on following him. My father came home, washed, ate his extra-late dinner, and went to bed. The last he had seen of the dog, it was still standing in the road as my father turned into our yard on his donkey. The next day my mother discovered that the dog had eaten several eggs from a chicken that had laid them in a nest at the root of a cluster of bed grass behind our house.

My mother tied the dog and said anybody who claimed it had to pay her for her eggs; no one claimed it, so she kept the dog. My father boiled an egg and clamped the hot egg into the dog’s mouth. The next day he placed another hot egg in front of the dog, and it walked away, leaving the egg untouched; my father explained that that was how you train a dog not to steal eggs—which I will now advise against, because my father could have gotten himself into big trouble for his cruelty to an animal.

My mother named it Findam (pronounced Find-am, which meant "find it"), and the dog turned out to be a great blessing to us. Quite frequently she would have a litter of pups that grew up to be good hunting dogs, and almost all of the village folks always wanted to have one of the pups. My mother had priced the weaned pups at a dollar apiece, but she preferred a chicken in exchange for one of them. Our yard soon became full of chickens and the descendants of chickens from those exchanges.

I am not sure what her pedigree was, but she was brown and had a distinct look about her, and most of her pups grew up to look like her, except for those which were fathered by Mr. Short’s fluffy dog. The latter pups did not make good hunters, but we liked the way they looked and sometimes kept one of them for ourselves. Whenever Findam met one of her offspring, the dogs seemed to recognize each other, and it was as if they had much to catch up on: they would smell other, wag their tails, and utter affectionate whimpers, which I could not understand. (A litter of puppies can be fathered by different males.)

As I think about Findam and her descendants, my thoughts rummage through Ma’am Bec and her descendants. I now believe that it was meant to be, that no one is able to tell me what Ma’am Bec’s last name was; everyone called her Ma’am Bec or Mama Becca; ma’am was short for madam and all of us agreed that Bec and Becca meant Rebecca. In writing these stories about our family, I would have liked to trace our Barbados lineage, but in order to do so, it is essential that I know what Ma’am Bec’s last name was. In the old days when children were born they were registered as the boy/girl child of their parent(s). Since Ma’am Bec was unmarried, her children would have been registered as the illegitimate child of Rebecca Whatever-her-last-name-was.

Ma’am Bec came to Tobago from Barbados with three boys and two girls, all having a different father. I have already written about her children in these stories. I was hoping that when I had made contact with Uncle Sammy’s descendants, one of them could finally tell me what Ma’am Bec’s last name was, since Uncle Sammy seemed to have lived with her right before he emigrated to Moruga, Trinidad. Perhaps his descendants might have heard him say her last name or have seen a letter he had sent to her from his new home in Moruga, but the descendants could not remember any communication between the two. Uncle Sammy had left for Moruga with a son named Joslin, who died in the year 1972, and two daughters named Fidelyn and Maud, who died in 1991 and 2000 respectively. In Trinidad, Uncle Sammy had another set of children, one of whom is Samuel Scott Jr., who is one of the people to whom I spoke. I also spoke to Rodger, a son of Fidelyn, one of the daughters with whom Uncle Sammy had left Tobago.

Like Findam in this episode of our family story, and also like Abraham of old, and of whom we read about in the Bible, it seems that Ma’am Bec was predestinated to have a clan of her own, and as matriarch of her family she wanted to be known as only Ma’am Bec or Mama Beca. Her descendants have now spread themselves far and wide—Trinidad and Tobago, England, Canada, the United States of America, and other places; some have gone on to distinguish themselves and maybe are never mindful of from whence they came, but we all owe a debt of gratitude to Ma’am Bec despite her shady past. I sometimes try to visual what she looked like from bits of stories my father had told me of her, and if you will indulge me, I would like to share one of those bits of stories with you:

My father said she smoked a pipe and had a sore foot that did not seem to heal. One day she was sitting in the middle of a street attending to her sore foot, and Mr. Wilfred Melville, who was one of the first persons in the Windward District of Tobago to own a motor vehicle, came by with his vehicle; no matter how long and hard Mr. Melville honked his horn, she refused to come out of the road until she had finished what she was doing. Mr. Melville finally decided to drive around her and ended up in a ditch just as she had finished tying her sore foot. She removed her pipe from her lips, turned in the direction of Mr. Melville as she was leaving, and said, Boy, like your lorry capsize.

STORY THREE

James and Mildred Broomes’s Family

Gra’ma Millie was born in Tobago in 1884 and died in 1965, having lived eighty-one years. James (they called him Carsey), her husband, was born in Barbados; details of his birth were difficult for me to determine. However, from his death certificate I learned that he died in 1939, at the age of sixty-five, making his year of birth 1874, and him ten years older than Gra’ma Millie.

In 1992, our cousin Lorna had come to the United States, and she asked me to drive her to Brooklyn, New York, to see a couple of old friends from Trinidad whom she had not seen for a long time. On our way back to New Jersey she told me a story Gra’ma Millie had related to her in 1960 while she was spending a vacation at Lorna’s home in John-John, Trinidad. Gra’ma Millie told Lorna that she married our grandfather after he had ridden up to her mother’s house and told her mother that he wanted to marry Gra’ma Millie. When Gra’ma did not consent at first, her mother said to her, Gal, yuh stupid? Yuh want to guh barefoot?

Gra’ma Millie used to live in a great house with her white grandmother, her father’s mother. After her father had died and his mother decided to return to Europe, Gra’ma went to live with her mother, Gra’ma Dosha.

I remembered the occasion in 1960 when Cous’n Evy, Lorna’s mother, had taken Gra’ma Millie to spend time with Lorna. It was the very first and last time Gra’ma had left Tobago, and when she had come back, one could not get her to stop talking about all the things she had seen in Port of Spain, Trinidad. From where she was staying and overlooking the city, she had a good view of all the commotions that went on. She talked about the lights at night: "And if