Sugar in the Blood (44 page)

So the past continued to shape the aspirations of the post-emancipation generation and, like many newly affluent, mixed-race descendants of planters, my great-grandfather had pursued the plantation dream. He was one of only a handful who would realize these aspirations, however. Indeed, Edward Albert was the only descendant of “the Colonel” through the line of John Stephen who would also become a planter. And although Vere only took up his inheritance reluctantly, Plumgrove became the heartland of the modern Ashby family. For the generations who followed it would be the place from which they would journey and to which they would return, as well as where they would live and love, sin and repent. The intensity of the relationship that its inhabitants had with this land is proof that we are made by the places we love, just as we make them.

Plumgrove was situated about ten miles from Bridgetown. It was accessible either by the coast road via Oistins, where their ancestor Benjamin had had his shop and where Robert Cooper had gone boldly about with his vast illegitimate brood; or through the back roads, cutting across Kingsland, the property from which Robert Cooper’s father had carved out his little fiefdom. The estate had its origins in a much larger plantation called Waterland Hall which, like so many plantations, had been broken up and sold off during the difficult times of the early twentieth century.

The estate was divided informally into zones, each fulfilling a different function. At the front of the property, where the land was rocky and infertile, was the tenantry which housed the labourers and their families. This community was a jumble of small wooden houses, perched jauntily on blocks of limestone and painted in the candy-box colours the islanders are so fond of. Behind them, separated by a strip of scrub and grass, were acres and acres of whistling cane. Nestled in the middle, and accessible by a rocky marl track known as “The Gap,” was
the great house, set in its own lush and beautiful grounds. As was the tradition, this large stone monolith, built in a variation of the Palladian style, was visible from any point on the land. The Ashby family and their tenants could therefore catch sight of one another through the trees as they went about their daily lives, always aware of the gulf of status and life experience that separated them.

Life at Plumgrove was not dissimilar to that at Burkes so many years before. As in the days before emancipation, the Ashby family was very much the ruling family at Plumgrove, around whom all plantation life revolved. My mother and her brothers and sisters took it for granted that, even as children, they were addressed as “Miss Barbara” or “Master John,” just as their parents were addressed as “Master” and “Missus.” The great house was as busy as a railway station, with cooks, cleaners and maids going in and out along with other workers and tenants. The family members were approached with requests for favours, guidance or financial assistance, while they blithely meddled in the affairs of their tenants, dispensing (often unwanted) advice, admonishments and opinions. In this environment, where the violence of plantation life had been almost entirely eliminated (despite the presence of my grandfather’s ubiquitous shotgun), the pleasure of this incestuous, villagey world was easier to understand and my mother recalls her plantation childhood with affection, warmth and humour.

Like their nineteenth-century forebears, the twentieth-century Ashbys found that their life was punctuated by the rhythms of sugar production. The “burns” that signalled the beginning of the harvest affected them just as they had previous generations: their skin was irritated by the cane ash and their noses were assailed by the cloying scent of burnt sugar. And even as children, my mother and her siblings were aware of the tensions during crop time, when everything felt more urgent, and my grandfather and his hands worked more intensely. Indeed, the harvest looms large in my mother’s recollection of her plantation childhood. One of her first memories is of being put along with her siblings on a blanket that was placed adjacent to the fields, and being given “fingers” of newly cut cane to suck.

For all its local specificity, however, family life among the Caribbean
middle classes still aspired to a notion of Englishness. Indoctrinated to be ashamed of their African roots, this generation rushed to leave behind any evidence of this heritage as they climbed the social ladder. Of course, their Caribbean customs weren’t banished completely—it was there in the food they ate, the way they moved and the exuberance with which they lived—but in many other ways they modelled themselves on their counterparts in the “mother country,” valuing conventionality and a conspicuous respectability. So the Ashby family’s façade was not that different from that of much of the English middle class of that era. It featured an avuncular patriarch and a suitably submissive matriarch, and children who were appropriately laundered and pressed. Regular church attendance was mandatory and, like every affluent home, they had antimacassars on the furniture and a piano in the lounge that my grandmother played beautifully.

As was common in those days, Vere was rather a semi-detached figure within his own family; it was his wife, Muriel, who acted as the nucleus. She was a force to be reckoned with: the eldest of her siblings and her father’s favourite, she was beautiful, talented and had a wicked sense of humour. She was also well educated, so she was the one the children consulted when they needed help with homework. She had inherited her father’s business acumen and never lost it, continuing to assist with the rents and accounts at Plumgrove till her death. “
She was so glamorous,” my mother once told me. “Watching our mother dress for a dance was like going to a movie. We’d sit on the bed and watch her going through all the stages of beautification—she would choose in advance her accessories and shoes. It was a creative process that was truly fascinating and the results were often stunning.”

Glamorous moments aside, my grandmother’s role as mistress of the house was not unlike that of Mary Ashby so many years before. She too was expected to oversee the household and servants, making sure that everything ran smoothly, and providing the sweetness that made everyone content and get along peacefully. But since Plumgrove was neither as large nor as productive a plantation as Burkes, money was always a worry and my grandmother had to work much harder than Mary ever did.

My grandfather’s role was also very similar to that of his forefather: there were workers to oversee, rents to be collected, repairs to be initiated
and books to be balanced. His relationship with the tenants had echoes of his planter ancestor, too: he often regarded them as lazy and unreliable, and adopted a posture towards them that was by turns paternal and exasperated, bullying and indulgent; while they no doubt sometimes regarded him as overbearing and arbitrary, or mean and uncaring. But there were also some profound differences between my grandfather and his hallowed ancestor. Vere would not have chosen the life of a planter: he was not the sort of man who enjoyed the pedantry of listing expenditures and keeping accounts. In fact, according to my uncle Trevor, he was “terrible with money” and always in shallow water financially. Intensely sociable, Vere had been much more at home in the dives of Harlem with his polyglot friends and their urban interests, rather than mouldering away in rural Barbados farming sugar.

Though Vere felt obligated to play “the planter,” bluff and loud and straightforward, his own interests were miles away from sugar prices, farming equipment and seeds. He read a lot of Rosicrucian literature, and was a firm believer in homeopathic medicine long before it was popular, as well as a user of health food products including shark oil. He loved experimenting with cooking: at breakfast he would find innumerable ways to serve eggs, and at Christmas he made an excellent sorrel liquor and cured pork leg or ham. He had a share in a fishing boat because he believed, rather far-sightedly, that fish was healthier than meat, and he once tried his hand at goat rearing. So life with Vere was a roller coaster: eternally precarious, both financially and emotionally, as he alternated between intervals of torpor and manic schemes to make money. Vere was never able to reconcile the disparity between the man he thought he should be and the man he really was. My mother has said: “
Quite early, I felt my father’s vulnerability. I think he was a weak man but not a vicious one, easily influenced, wanting to be popular but having very little judgement about people or situations.” And one of his contemporaries described him as a complex man, perpetually “uneasy in his own skin.”

To make life even more frustrating for him, there were the wider problems associated with an industry in decline. Making any kind of living from sugar during this period was a challenge, so Vere was forced to try a number of other crops—such as corn and cotton—to make a go of things. But the situation didn’t improve and he finally had to take
another job to shore up the family’s finances. Following in the Ashby family tradition, he joined the local Vestry, as one of the Poor Law Inspectors who made periodic inspections of poor relief institutions. It was an important job because of the level of fiscal distress in many parts of the island, but it was also disheartening, since the annual reports he submitted could recommend improvements but not enforce them.

If my grandfather had the status and responsibilities of a planter, he also had the vices. Not only did he manage to gamble away a good portion of his wife’s inheritance, he was an epic drinker. His alcohol-induced excesses were legendary: in a drunken frenzy he once took pot shots at the workers on the land, though mercifully his aim was so poor that no one was hurt. But the legacy of plantation life was most evident in the way that my grandfather conducted his illicit private life. Much like Robert Cooper, he had a taste, as my cousin put it, for “low-bite” women: that is, those from further down the social scale. These liaisons produced a number of illegitimate children, some of whom were born to women who worked on the Plumgrove estate.

His legitimate children often found out about these half-brothers and -sisters in rather serendipitous ways. My uncle Trevor, who went to Foundation School, which his planter ancestor had helped to establish, remembers striking up a conversation with a pupil, who then pointed out another boy in the classroom, and said: “
Do you know who that guy is? He’s your half-brother.” My uncle was surprised, but not too surprised. As time passed they became close. And eventually Trevor told his mother about his new friend. Muriel, not a woman to harbour illusions, said she would like to meet the young man. But the boy refused: he felt that my grandmother was too “great a lady” to be sullied by an encounter with her husband’s by-blow. His shame at his illegitimate status illustrated how persistently the internalized values of the slave system lingered on in modern Barbados.

Of my grandparents, it was my glamorous grandmother Muriel who was the more shrewd businessperson, and on the rare occasions when Vere’s pride would allow her to manage their affairs, things would begin to improve. But these interludes were short-lived; Vere was very conventional in this regard and insisted that a woman’s place was at home. Nonetheless, she stayed married to this flawed and complicated man for almost half a century. In their long and tumultuous marriage,
my granny Muriel would bear him seven children, two of whom died soon after birth. In many ways, her life was a harder one than she had been prepared for. As a little girl, I would sit on her capacious lap at the dining table at Plumgrove as she flicked through the glossy fashion magazines that were her favourite escape from reality. I remember her motto, which was one that experience had clearly taught her to live by: “It’s
a great life, if you don’t weaken.”

THANKS TO MY
maternal family’s prominent involvement in the sugar industry, I have been able to follow their story through the documents and records of several centuries. Tracing my black father’s line is more of a challenge. Although my father’s family had links with the industry—indeed, in Barbados it was almost impossible not to—they were not themselves planters, so the history I have been able to uncover is far more recent.

My grandfather Egbert Augustus Stuart was born in the late 1800s, and his forerunners had probably laboured as cane cutters on the Springhead plantation in St. James on the west of the island. In his twenties, Egbert Stuart married a woman named Louisa Rock, from St. Lucy, and the couple settled in an area called Black Rock, which was favoured by the black middle classes after the turn of the century. For much of his career, Egbert Stuart worked as the senior steward at the Bridgetown Club. This exclusive retreat in the heart of the capital was a genuine power hub, preferred by the island’s white elite: affluent planters, politicians and professionals who met to discuss local affairs, make deals and forge alliances. (It admitted black people as members only in the 1970s.) Egbert had a rather Victorian perspective on many things and was a stern disciplinarian. He believed devoutly in the maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and his preferred method of chastisement was the infamous tamarind switch. His marriage to my grandmother was not an easy fit. Granny Louise was in many ways the real “paterfamilias.” According to my father, she initiated many of the activities that would have been the formal responsibility of a father: choosing the
schools the children should attend, saving for a house in a more upmarket locality and the purchase of the family’s first car. She was a much more voluble and flamboyant character than her husband, who loved cooking and gossiping with her woman friends and, after their children had left home, the couple would separate. In subsequent years my grandmother would rather melodramatically refer to her failed marriage as “my tragedy at the altar.”

My father, Kenneth Lamonte Stuart, was born on 16 June 1920 and his childhood was typical of the era. The Bridgetown of his youth had almost as many horse and donkey carts as it did cars, and many of the island’s street lamps were lit by gaslight. Across Barbados, people from the various villages gathered under them at night to chat and dissect the day’s doings. His little community had a public bath that served both sexes and stank of disinfectant. When not at school he preferred to be by the sea; he was an excellent swimmer, and he spent a lot of time there bathing and splashing with friends, or watching the fishermen pull in their huge nets filled with silvery, twitching flying fish. Tired and hungry, he and his friends would return to Black Rock and with a penny buy a “cutter,” a round salt bread sandwich stuffed with fish, or fragrant coconut cakes, shavings of coconut bound with sugar syrup. The rest of the time he spent running, jumping and climbing with friends. His was the eternal brinkmanship of childhood, searching for adventure without provoking the heavy hand of my grandfather.