Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem

PART ONE

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

. . . you see love liberates. it doesn’t bind, love says i love you. i love you if you’re in China, i love you if you’re across town, i love you if you’re in Harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but that’s not possible now . . .

—MAYA ANGELOU, LOVE LIBERATES

BEIJING, 2008

I WAS ALREADY AN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AT NBC UNIVERSAL IN 2008, when the Olympics were held in China. I had traveled to the games with some of the other executives. We were removed from the day-to-day operations of actually getting the events on the air, but we were seriously involved in an informal diplomatic mission from the United States to China.

As our plane circled over Beijing that August morning, preparing for landing, I glanced out the window and saw beneath me the wide landscape of China, a country that seemed not even to have a horizon; it extended so far beyond any dimensions that I had yet seen. To me, this was both a fact and a metaphor. Somewhere in the huge continent of Asia, in this vast country of China, I thought, responding to both the physical and the emotional dimensions of the place, I have family.

Given my appearance and my history, I should have felt this way when I went to Africa. I am, after all, to the world an African American. I have been to Africa more than half a dozen times; in fact, I started my travels there, in South Africa. When we landed in Johannesburg in 1998, I was weak in the knees as I got off the airplane. Like so many African Americans, I had a sense of finally arriving; and this continent of history and myth, liberation and domination, purity and contamination, evoked a complicated stew of emotions: sadness and joy, peace and anxiety, connection and alienation. I looked into African faces, hoping to see my own reflection.

But I didn’t.

I was truly happy to be there, but I didn’t feel as if I had found my spot in this world. It was different when we went to Ghana several years later. I learned only afterward that many Jamaican immigrants were descended from the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana. When I was there, people’s faces seemed familiar to me; indeed, I thought these people look like me. So did people in Jamaica, and some folks in Harlem. Still, the similarity of appearance did not give me a sense that I was connecting with my ancestors. I was simply connecting with, well, people who resembled me. I assumed, when I arrived in China, that the Chinese faces I saw on the streets of Beijing would have no relation to me at all.

One day, after the opening ceremonies were over, I took a walk in downtown Beijing. We were staying at the St. Regis Hotel in the heart of the city. I thought that I would walk past the embassies and office buildings there, and perhaps visit the Silk Market a few blocks away. The crowds seemed phenomenal, even to a New Yorker like me. As I walked, I absorbed the energy and the intensity of the place; my reportorial instincts snapped into action as I looked at the details of the people, the cars, the bicycles, the storefronts.

And then I saw a face that stopped me cold. I turned my head and watched the woman stride past me and disappear into the crowd. She was tall and graceful, walking with a kind of determination and detachment that I knew very well. Her walk made it clear that she was a woman to be reckoned with—whether in the streets of Beijing or on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem—but no one should dare to try. It was her face that had captured me in a split second. There, in the mass of people on the streets of Beijing, I saw my mother’s face.

My mother had been dead for two years, as had my father. So the small band of Williamses, which had become more numerous with marriages and the birth of children and grandchildren, still seemed nonetheless incomplete. But at that moment in the streets of Beijing, seeing my mother’s face, I realized that in death she might lead me as she never could during her life. Perhaps here in China, I would unravel the mystery of our identity that resided in our DNA, in our mother’s essential loneliness, in the contradictions and achievements that defined us.

THE OUTSIDE CHILD

IT STARTS WITH HOW I LOOK: BROWN SKIN, UNMISTAKABLY BLACK NOSE, nappy hair that I once wrestled into submission and have now, for many years, liberated to curly chaos.

My older brothers and I were born and raised on Amsterdam Avenue between 163rd and 164th Streets, a neighborhood that sent very few kids to college but many to jail. Years after we had grown up and left, our block—with its boarded-up windows, abandoned storefronts, and glassy-eyed men just hanging out—enjoyed the grim distinction of having the highest crime rate in New York City.

But we always knew we were different, set apart, not like the other kids.

Most of the kids we knew came from sprawling families with a tapestry of cousins and aunts and uncles. The really lucky ones had a grandfather or a grandmother, maybe even two. These families would feast on food, like ham hocks or collard greens or pigs’ feet, that never graced our table. We had rice at every meal—a starch I have loathed for most of my life and can now stand in only small amounts—and exotic vegetables no one else ate, like bok choy. During the 1950s and early 1960s, when we were growing up, most other families were intact, with a father and a mother in the apartment. Only four of us lived in our ground-floor apartment on Amsterdam Avenue—my older brothers Elrick and Howard, my mother, and I. My father, Elrick Sr., lived in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and was alternately engaged with our family and alienated. We were a tiny band of Williamses; I remember always feeling as if there were simply not enough of us.

Most other kids had families who would escape the city summers by getting on a bus and going to Georgia or North Carolina for big reunions with more cousins, more aunts and uncles. Perhaps the crown jewel, a grandfather, would command the head of the table.

When are we going Downsouth? I would ask my mother, as we sat on the summertime stoop of our apartment building. I was five years old and bored out of my mind, because the entire playmate population of Harlem seemed to have gone to this wonderful place called Downsouth.

We are not from down South, she would reply.

"Ma, everybody is from Downsouth," I would insist.

We’re not, she would say.

Well, where are we from? I would ask, already sick of the conversation.

We are from Jamaica, she would say. We’re from an island.

Well, when are we going there?

We aren’t going there.

And that was where it stopped. Was there only a one-way ticket away from Jamaica? No return? Or did she mean to imply that there were no means of transportation available? I tried another approach.

"How did you get here, Mommy?"

I came here on a plane.

Well, why can’t we . . .

Because we don’t have the money, she would say. Case closed.

But while money was important—clearly, you couldn’t do much without money—she did not bother to point out that even in Jamaica there was not much family with whom to reunite.

I grew up believing that both my grandfathers were dead, and that my grandmothers—though I knew they existed—were not well regarded by my mother. To ask my mother about her people was to hit a brick wall: the conversation, like the one about Downsouth, went nowhere. But this one was pervaded by a sense of loss that I could feel but could not fathom and would certainly never be able to discuss, let alone probe. Her mother was in Jamaica; we knew that. But where was her father?

He went back to China and died, she would say.

I have spent my life—my hardworking life—with a persistent and painful sense of loss. My yearning for clarity, my longing to feel somehow complete, was never satisfied by my prickly, demanding, beautiful, fair-skinned, half Chiney mother. How could it be, when she walked through her life, and the lives of her husband and children, as a woman of chronic impatience, enveloping depression, and ambient loss?

Once, when I was a reporter for the Syracuse Herald Journal in upstate New York, my daughter Imani and I were sitting at home. She was three years old and was gently stroking my hair, which was washed, combed out, and smooth. When will my hair be like yours, Mommy? she asked in a soft and thoughtful voice. Her halo of curls glistened in the light and I was startled by her question. "Your hair is like mine," I said.

No it’s not, Mommy, she replied sadly. I want hair like yours.

I never remember saying such words to my mother, although the difference in our hair was a defining experience for me; despite our attachment, it encapsulated our alienation from each other. My mother always looked more like her Chinese father than like her Black Jamaican mother. She was unusually tall, very slender and graceful, with jet-black hair that would have tumbled down to her waist, had she removed the big hairpins that kept her French twist tightly anchored. She was baffled by my hair, unable to cope with the tight curls and coarse texture, and would outsource its care to an upstairs neighbor, a sweet woman from Downsouth—North Carolina, to be exact.

I always resented my mother for that. I remember seeing other little girls in our neighborhood sitting on the floor, or on low wooden stools, or on thick Manhattan telephone books, leaning against their mothers’ shins, while the mother would carefully comb through their curls. I could feel the rift between my mother and me widen as her inability to cope with my hair seemed a refusal to cope with me. Her not knowing my hair, not sharing those moments with me, was of course a fact of my life. But it was also intensely symbolic; it meant that she did not, could not, appreciate who I was. When I was about four or five, my hair was long enough for my mother to routinely comb, braid, and twist it, but the memory of those very early years, when she didn’t, lingered.

My relationship with Imani—and hers with me—had all the ease and tenderness that was lacking between my mother and me. When there was a potential rift with Imani, I would be sure to bridge it. The day after my sweet little girl and I had our conversation, I had my hair cut short in an Afro, and I kept it that way until her hair grew longer than mine. Now, I said. Now do you see? I told you that you and I had the same hair. She touched first my hair and then hers, and a radiant smile illuminated her face. For Imani, this made sense. But when my mother saw me, she screamed. What have you done? she cried. Oh, my God! You look like a pickney!

That was the last time she ever called me a pickney—in Jamaican patois, a pickaninny.

Mothers and daughters. Or more to the point, my mother and my daughter. I don’t know any African American woman who has not had, at least once in her life, some issue with her hair. Its texture, cut, and color; the decision to straighten it or to let it assert with pride its occasionally impudent personality—all this comes with the implication that whatever we do, our hair will provoke some reaction or judgment. But the negative judgments usually came from someone other than your own mother. My mother’s reaction to me was a symptom of something fundamentally amiss in our relationship, a basic lack of identification between us. I was always my father’s girl, and this fact seemed to inflame my mother and provoke a longing in her. You don’t know what it is like to grow up without the love of a father, she would say to me.

She was right. But when I was young and she said this, I heard only an annoying bleat. Her complaint was repeated too often for me to take it seriously. It was as persistent and as easy to ignore as the hairline crack in the kitchen wall, a predictable rebuke that was just part of her repertoire. But sometimes, when we grow up, we look back on the things we heard too often, and try to hear them as if for the first time.

Nowadays I am hearing her for the first time.

And I find myself trying to imagine my mother when she was a girl.

PART TWO

WHERE LOVE BEGINS

The same mouth that courts you doesn’t marry you.

—CARIBBEAN PROVERB

KINGSTON, JAMAICA, 1918

KINGSTON HAD BEEN THE CAPITAL OF JAMAICA SINCE THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH century, and despite the ravages of storms and earthquakes, it prospered. The population soared from 1850 until 1920 as white imperialists, many from Great Britain; other island folks; Chinese; Indians; and more crowded the small port city. This influx of humanity also brought mass unemployment and areas of squalor and crime. One observer wrote, At the best of times . . . Kingston bore a foul odor of sweaty human bodies moving about in the tropical heat, of rotting garbage, the carcasses of dead animals, and sewage in street drains.

With its wooden houses and utilitarian architecture, Kingston may have lacked the charm of Spanish colonial towns, but nothing could beat its natural beauty. To the south is the seventh-largest natural harbor in the world, and the Blue Mountains surround the northern part of the city. Kingston became the most important trading center in the Western Hemisphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The city was all but destroyed by the earthquake of 1907, and what the tremors and shocks did not destroy, the ensuing fires obliterated. And yet, for some, the destruction offered an opportunity to rebuild and beautify the city. By 1917, a new Kingston had risen from the ashes, sustained in part by the influx of Chinese and other entrepreneurial immigrants making their mark on the city.

My mother was born in Kingston on November 15, 1918, the first child of a Chinese businessman named Samuel Lowe and a Jamaican woman named Albertha Beryl Campbell. One of the most important rituals at birth is to duppyproof the infant. There are ghosts and malevolent spirits everywhere in Jamaica and the culture has come up with all sorts of ways to either fight or protect themselves against these invisible but potent presences. A duppy could be the soul of a dead person or some other spiritual being, and it could wreak havoc on the soul, even the life, of a helpless infant. So parents duppyproofed a new baby by, say, having one name on the birth certificate but never using it.

My mother’s name is Nell Vera Lowe. I found her birth certificate, but not easily. We looked her up under her mother’s surname, as Nell Vera Campbell. We looked her up as Nell Lowe and as Vera Lowe. Nothing. And as the daughter of Albertha, Alberta, Bertha, even Beryl Campbell. Nothing. She was as duppyproofed as one can get.

It might be unnecessary to say here that Samuel Lowe and Albertha Campbell were not married. It’s strange to think that both my parents were out-of-wedlock, illegitimate, or, as they are known in Jamaica, outside children. My aunt Ouida, who is one of my father’s stepsisters, once explained, When you heard about an ‘outside child’ you knew that it was not a child that was part of a marriage, or part of a family that originated from parents who were married. My father had many adults in his life, perhaps even too many at some point; but my mother was fairly isolated, starting at a very early age. She shared little about those times, maybe because she didn’t recall, or maybe because the life she had was not one she wanted to remember.

Her father, Samuel Lowe, eventually became a prosperous shopkeeper in Saint Ann’s Bay in Saint Ann Parish. But he began his retail work by opening his first shop in Mocho, in Clarendon Parish. Mocho was a place so remote and backward that saying people were from Mocho became shorthand, in Jamaica, for saying they were practically barbarians. Samuel Lowe’s shop was a kind of small general store, called a Chiney shop. As a storekeeper, he was thoroughly integrated into the community of Mocho. As a young, unmarried man, he naturally developed some romantic relationships with local women and he was involved with at least two around the time of my mother’s birth. My mother’s mother, Albertha Campbell, was one, and Emma Allison was the other. It is likely that neither woman knew about the other, even though they both bore baby girls at the end of 1918. My mother was born in November and Emma’s daughter Adassa was born in December.

I suppose that a man with children from different women would divide his time, although as a very small child, my mother lived with Samuel and Albertha in a small shop he had in Kingston. The family would eat together, and Samuel would play with his little daughter, speaking to her, and teaching her to count, in Hakka, the native language of his Chinese ethnic group; and giving her small treats from his store. This was during a time of rising tension within the local community between the Blacks and the Chinese immigrants. Jamaican nationalism was just beginning, and this early phase included the work of Marcus Garvey—a Jamaican descended from the legendary rebellious slaves known as Maroons. Garvey’s worldwide campaign for Black Nationalism began around 1920.

After Nell was born, Albertha continued to manage Samuel’s shop in Kingston. Samuel was industrious. He had come to Jamaica to make money and so he also had the shop in Mocho, managed by Emma Allison, the mother of his other daughter, Adassa.

For the uneducated residents of Jamaica’s outer country parishes, the international movement of Black Nationalism was less important than the personal experience of seeing Chinese folks making money while Black folks stayed poor. Actions taken against the Chinese resulted from a toxic combination of genuine aspirations and acute class envy. Various free-floating resentments were galvanized by incidents large and small. Men regularly harassed women, like Albertha, who audaciously had a baby with a Chineyman. There were frightening incidents when Chinese people were blamed for crimes they had never committed, and beaten for infractions that had never even occurred. Sometimes shops owned by the Chinese were burned or a Chinese businessman would be murdered.

Albertha endured the danger and the slights, because Samuel gave her and her daughter a life she would not have otherwise known. She managed and ran his shop and had the security of knowing that while she was not the Mrs. she was the missus. But Samuel seems to have told her in 1920 that his relatives in China were sending him a Chinese bride from the prosperous Ho family. Swee Yin Ho was twelve years his junior and their families had engaged them sight unseen. As a traditionalist, Samuel assumed that his Chinese bride would raise his half-Jamaican children alongside the children that he and she would have together.

Albertha felt betrayed. She was already enduring verbal abuse and sideways glances from her bumpkin countrymen and -women, and Samuel’s decision to move on was a soul-deep insult. Now she was ridiculed for laying down with a Chineyman. Enraged, she took Nell away, permanently. Mother and daughter traveled into a countryside that was a mystery to Samuel but would become home to Nell. She was deposited there with an unloving grandmother, secreted in the countryside and hidden from her despondent father.

Albertha may have been furious, even heartbroken, but she was nothing if not resilient. Young, attractive, and—most important—unfettered by either a man or a child, she was free. She soon left on a succession of adventures, appearing and disappearing unpredictably. She moved on and up in Kingston, while Nell grew up unloved and unwanted in a world of