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Ethnicity
Lawyers (percentage)
Members of Parliament (percentage)
Chinese
3.1
East Indians
—
Jews
7.1
Syrians
—
White and light
38.8
10
Olive
10.2
13
Light brown
17.3
19
Dark brown
10.2
39
Black
5.1
10
Unknown
8.2
Look at the extraordinary advantage that their little bit of whiteness gave
the colored minority. Having an ancestor who worked in the house and not in
the fields, who got full civil rights in 1826, who was valued instead of
enslaved, who got a shot at meaningful work instead of being consigned to
the sugarcane fields, made all the difference in occupational success two and
three generations later.
Daisy Ford’s ambition for her daughters did not come from nowhere, in
other words. She was the inheritor of a legacy of privilege. Her older brother
Rufus, with whom she went to live as a child, was a teacher and a man of
learning. Her brother Carlos went to Cuba and then came back to Jamaica
and opened a garment factory. Her father, Charles Ford, was a produce
wholesaler. Her mother, Ann, was a Powell, another educated, upwardly
mobile colored family—and the same Powells who would two generations
later produce Colin Powell. Her uncle Henry owned property. Her
grandfather John—the son of William Ford and his African concubine—
became a preacher. No less than three members of the extended Ford family
ended up winning Rhodes Scholarships. If my mother owed W. M.
MacMillan and the rioters of 1937 and Mr. Chance and her mother, Daisy
Ford, then Daisy owed Rufus and Carlos and Ann and Charles and John.
4.
My grandmother was a remarkable woman. But it is important to remember
that the steady upward path upon which the Fords embarked began with a
morally complicated act: William Ford looked upon my great-great-great-
grandmother with desire at a slave market in Alligator Pond and purchased
her.
The slaves who were not so chosen had short and unhappy lives. In
Jamaica, the plantation owners felt it made the most sense to extract the
maximum possible effort from their human property while the property was
still young—to work their slaves until they were either useless or dead—and
then simply buy another round at the market. They had no trouble with the
philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a slave
and simultaneously thinking of slaves as property. Thomas Thistlewood, the
plantation owner who cataloged his sexual exploits, had a lifelong
relationship with a slave named Phibbah, whom, by all accounts, he adored,
and who bore him a son. But to his “field” slaves, he was a monster, whose
preferred punishment for those who tried to run away was what he called
“Derby’s dose.” The runaway would be beaten, and salt pickle, lime juice,
and bird pepper would be rubbed into his or her open wounds. Another slave
would defecate into the mouth of the miscreant, who would then be gagged
for four to five hours.
It is not surprising, then, that the brown-skinned classes of Jamaica came
to fetishize their lightness. It was their great advantage. They scrutinized the
shade of one another’s skin and played the color game as ruthlessly in the end
as the whites did. “If, as often happens, children are of different shades of
color in a family,” the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Henriques once wrote:
the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others. In
adolescence, and until marriage, the darker members of the family will
be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or fairer members of
the family are being entertained. The fair child is regarded as raising
the color of the family and nothing must be put in the way of its
success, that is in the way of a marriage which will still further raise
the color status of the family. A fair person will try to sever social
relations he may have with darker relatives… the darker members of a
Negro family will encourage the efforts of a very fair relative to “pass”
for White. The practices of intra-family relations lay the foundation for
the public manifestation of color prejudice.
My family was not immune to this. Daisy was inordinately proud of the
fact her husband was lighter than she was. But that same prejudice was then
turned on her: “Daisy’s nice, you know,” her mother-in-law would say, “but
she’s too dark.”
One of my mother’s relatives (I’ll call her Aunt Joan) was also well up the
color totem pole. She was “white and light.” But her husband was what in
Jamaica is called an “Injun”—a man with a dark complexion and straight,
fine black hair—and their daughters were dark like their father. One day,
after her husband had died, she was traveling on a train to visit her daughter,
and she met and took an interest in a light-skinned man in the same railway
car. What happened next is something that Aunt Joan told only my mother,
years later, with the greatest of shame. When she got off the train, she walked
right by her daughter, disowning her own flesh and blood, because she did
not want a man so light-skinned and desirable to know that she had borne a
daughter so dark.
In the 1960s, my mother wrote a book about her experiences. It was
entitled
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