The day my mom and I left Jamaica was the happiest and saddest day of my life. I watched the tiny island disappear among the ocean waves as the plane took me and my mother from the only home I had ever known.
I sat back in my seat dressed in my Sunday best, and I looked up at my mother sitting to the left of me and saw a tear rolling down her mocha-caramel cheeks. I asked her if she was ok. She smiled and said, “Yes, just a little happy.”
Let me explain, because you are probably wondering why anyone would want to leave Jamaica. It’s an island paradise with food, music, and drinks! A lush and lavish ocean view haven with cabana boys at your beck and call to bring you your heart’s content.
That was not my mother and I’s Jamaica.
Our Jamaica was a dangerous concrete and brick tenement neighborhood where wild dogs roamed the streets and winos on every corner. It was a place where hunger was a constant and hard work only seemed to produce more strife than relief.
We lived at the edge of Spanish Town, Jamaica in a small parish called St. Catherine’s. Our home was a small two bedroom tenement. My cousins and I would take one room to sleep and my mother, Aunt Jackie and Aunt Marie would take the other bedroom. The left Grandpa Banton and Uncle Oliver to sleep in the living room on the old musty beaten-up pullout couch, whose best years were gone.
Each morning we would all rise with the sun. Auntie Jackie made peppermint tea and gave us a piece of coco bread before heading out to the sugarcane field to chop, seed, or otherwise tend to the crop. It was hard and tedious work, but it was what kept us fed most of the time and the “electric” on.
I remember nights hearing the adults fight and yell over things like money and space and asking my mother why she came back with another mouth to feed. At the time I had no idea what this meant. It wasn’t until my mother explained it to me some years later that I did understand.
However I wasn’t born in Jamaica and my story doesn’t start there. I was born in Ohio. My mother lived there since she was 16 years old. She lived with her father who had abandoned her and wanted nothing to do with her.
She lived in Toledo with him and was made aware that he was not happy with having another mouth to feed. He never paid for anything of hers and love was nonexistent.
So it was of no surprise that the first man to show my mother any kindness and affection resulted in my birth nine months later.
Unfortunately, my paternal father abandoned her, and my mom decided to move back to her homeland of Jamaica. It was only through much hard work that she scraped together enough money to get back to Jamaica with me.
We lived there for a couple of years, but had to deal with the hardships of living in poverty in an impoverished island. Life was decent during that time, but my mom knew there was no true opportunity for me on the island. She wanted more for me and decided to move back to America.
Much like before it required a huge amount of work. My mother worked hard as a seamstress when she wasn’t in the fields. It took close to a year, but before I turned five, she had saved enough money for tickets back to Ohio.
I wish I could say I was grateful, but at the time I was not. I saw myself being ripped from my family and friends and I didn’t know why until my mom told me that we were going to a place that didn’t care what part of the island we were from or how much money we had. It was a place that if you work hard and were a good person, you could have a better life. It was a place where you wouldn’t know hunger. In this place I could be anything.
As I saw the tiny island that I called home disappear from view, I sat back in my seat, sad but happy for the bright future I was promised and my mom believed in, because only in America could this happen, right?
To be continued as a two part series.
Justin A Baker
Staff Writer