I sometimes wonder about what sort of things were going through my five-year-old mind as I was gazed out the airplane window and watched my home disappear through the clouds. Was I thinking about all the friends and family that I would never see again? Maybe I was wondering when the next time would be that I would see my grandmother. More than likely though it wasn’t anything as melodramatic as that, chances are that I was probably just thinking about what type of food I would get to eat on the plane. I’m also sure that I didn’t know that it would be six years before I would see Jamaica again.
Our first stop was Canada, where we had family and some people who had regularly visited our restaurant whenever they came to Jamaica had promised my parents jobs. That was a dead-end; they only had a job for my father. Around this time things are a little unclear to me, but I do know that my parents found sponsors and were able to secure work visas for the United States and we ended up moving to Harvey, Illinois, and then finally the south side of Chicago in the Robert Taylor Housing Projects. Seeing snow for the first time was an amazing experience.
All this happened in the span of one year. About this point in time my parents were dirt poor once again. I say my parents because besides the fact that the four of us stayed in a one-bedroom housing project, my brother and I really didn’t know how broke we were. We had moved from a house in Jamaica with a yard on all four sides, to having a shared communal space. All our clothes and toys were second hand, but we never missed a meal. There was never the aura of hopelessness or self-pity in my home that is usually found in the homes of the destitute. My parents were hard workers and they viewed it as just a purgatorial stage, they had gone through so much more previously as children in Jamaica and they felt they could build back up in the U.S.
One might think that in the midst of all this chaos that our education would have suffered. One would be very wrong. My parents always stressed education; whenever I finished reading a book there was always another book waiting to be started. Since these were used books, they couldn’t be too picky in their selection, so I ended up reading a lot of older people books. We started schooling while we had been living in Harvey, and even though we moved into Chicago they still sent to us to the same school. We would get up religiously everyday early in the morning so that we could take the train into Harvey. Both my parents were working two jobs at the time, and I know that it must have been eating up time that should have been better spent sleeping. Thinking about it now, I don’t know what types of schooling laws were around at the time but they must have been lying to the school to pull it off. But they knew that transferring us to another school in the middle of the year would have adversely affected our education, so this practice continued for the rest of the school year.
My parents are proud people and the Chicago Housing Authority wasn’t our landlord for too long. By the end of that kindergarten year we were moving again, this time to the north side of Chicago. We moved into a much better area, it was still a low income area, but it just wasn’t as obvious. We also started at a new school, which was located about two blocks from our house, a sure selling point to my parents. It was a great location, especially since Sheldon and I were chased home after the first day of school. Actually, it was my brother who was actually being chased, I just happened to be with him. This was a pretty regular occurrence for a while. It was the neighborhood school and that included many of the local gang members, who were the ones that did most of the chasing.
Our problems should be glaringly obvious if you think about it. We were different. We hadn’t been fully assimilated yet; we still had our Jamaican mouths. We spoke with thick, strong and obvious accents. It wasn’t always as ‘cool’ to be Jamaican as it is now. Although "Patwa", the Jamaican dialect, is an English creole it was something that singled us out as being very different. This would become an ongoing theme in my life.