Meditations on voices of a common tongue

Melda oh you making wedding plans

Carrying me name to obeah man

All you do, you can’t get through

I still ain’t goin married to you.

Obeah Wedding - Mighty Sparrow

The crowd sang in unison, its partially inebriated state adding folly to the chorus. Singers crooned at the top of their untrained and unrehearsed voices. But they maintained the tune of the almost drunk. But their oneness came from much more than the sharing of imbibed and imbued spirits. They spoke the same language. Not just English or some dialect thereof.

In singing that song on that Saturday night in Atlanta, those of a particular generation demonstrated a shared oneness, the things that keep them united, that draws them like black sand soldiers to a steel magnet from cities far and near.

It defines who they are and always will be. It is the shared language of the exile. For them, distance from home is calculated not by time and space but by memory. Theirs is a shared memory of a time and place, when and where they listened to the same songs, heard the same stories, believed in the same rituals. The words evoke particular images of a particular time and place. That stamps them as a member of a particular tribe. The name of their tribe distinguishes them by geography and history, but also biology and anthropology.

Their song is one of longing, a desire for home, to belong even when they don't. It is a cry of affirmation. To see them is not to know them, but to hear them is to begin to understand them. But only just a little. For understanding takes time, requires patience, and a generous portion of honesty and introspection. People from a small place they are. And always will be.

Going Home-A remembrance of things past

from the archives

Under the ash, home
By ANDREW J. SKERRITT
Published January 8, 2004

OLVESTON, Montserrat - I finally went home again. Eight years after my last visit, I walked down the gangway of the Opale Express, an Australian-built catamaran, and stepped on the concrete jetty.


Ahead of me the landscape rose sharply in parched bluffs and rock outcroppings. Wooden shacks lined the road from the waterfront. Unfamiliar faces greeted me at the customs house.


My return home was a familiar ritual, to bury family, my father. But on that placid October afternoon, none of that mattered. I was home, even if home was a vastly different place.


Montserrat, the 38-square-mile island where I grew up, had been sliced in two when the volcano rumbled to life in July 1995. It uprooted most of my relatives, friends and former neighbors. Some of them stayed on the island, but most left. You can find them mostly on the streets and in double-decker buses in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester, England, or in New York and Miami.


Those who remained inhabit a truncated world of exclusion and safe zones, ash gray and tropical green, fear and hope.

Click here to read the entire article
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/08/Floridian/Under_the_ash__home.shtml

From Jubilee to Johannesburg

 

The black and white photograph sits timeless in my photo album. It shows a team of gangly youth. The players look westward towards the horizon. Behind them stands a cinder block wall. In the distance,  mountains  loom large, like giant hedges protecting the players’ backs.

This was the Montserrat national under 19 soccer team. Circa 1978.  I was 16. In the front row, I crouched low and squinted against the afternoon sun.  The players standing behind me were boyhood friends: Oscar, the star striker who could dribble through a school yard of rampaging  boys. Norman, the left footed striker and midfielder. Dwight, the goalkeeper. And his brother Gershom, a striker. Their father was a Seventh Day Adventist minister so Saturday games were off limits.

Eddy was the right winger. His skill was to work the ball down the right side of  the field and  cross it over in front of the goal, where one of the forwards would either head or kick one time into the goal.  I was the right midfielder. Eddy and I were an inseparable tandem.  We worked the one-two, the give and go, like Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, with feet instead of hands.

 It was almost psychic. Without looking for Eddy, I sent passes into his speeding path. Opponents took to calling us hyphenated: Eddy and Andrew in one breath. That’s how quickly we zipped through defenses. We played domestic league football on a team made up of students from the island’s only high school, our teachers - Peace Corps  volunteers and the British equivalent - and employees from Higgs & Hill, the international building contractor that constructed the pier at the harbor. We were a lethal mix of old and young, black and white, skinny and brawny.

As we raced up and down those hard-baked fields, the youth players dreamed of international soccer glory. But those illusions were dashed each summer as our national youth team was thrashed in the regional competition. It wasn’t for a lack of effort.  Half of our summer vacation was dedicated to two-a day practices. As each day dawned, my coach and teammates woke me with a knock on my louvered windows so we could jog three miles to the park.

In 1978, as in the years before and after that, our endeavors proved fruitless. Undersized and overmatched, heart and energy were no answer to our man-sized opponents, who were mature enough to grow beards. But the results didn’t matter. We danced and cheered partied afterward. Desire, friendship and  a game of soccer on a tropical Sunday afternoon.

I loved soccer before I loved girls. I grew up with cricket but soccer conspired to steal my heart early. One afternoon after Sunday school,  I walked to the park to watch a league game. Arrived early. One team was a few players short. They scoured the sidelines for scrubs to make up the numbers. Somebody heard I was good, so they selected me.  But I was ill-prepared to play. My t-shirt was fine, but my bell bottom pants and imported English shoes were not soccer wear. Undeterred I dashed on to the field. Somewhere, somehow, the ball fell at my feet and I smashed it into the net. Exhilaration. Triumphant. Goooooal!  I was hooked. I was a soccer prodigy. I was going to be a star.

That was a long way from kicking a deflated netball barefooted on asphalt in front of my home in Jubilee, the small village on Montserrat, the Caribbean island where I grew up. Kicking with toes meant unkind collisions between skin and gravel. Games often ended in blood and sweat but never tears. Those are the ingredients of soccer dreams. For many of the players competing at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, that is where their soccer dreams usually begin.

I even dreamed of migrating to England to play soccer professionally. But eventually, reality intervened. I settled for the mundane; I became a government civil servant.

But I got lucky.

 I discovered journalism by writing about soccer. From early on though, I vowed never to be a sportswriter. I wanted to go to the games to cheer on my team. I would always be a fan.

Soon my fandom becomes the ultimate fantasy. My soccer journey will take me from Jubilee to Johannesburg, the scene of the 2010 World Cup.

I will be a fan of the game and a journalist at the event. I will have the best of both worlds. I

 will write about the host country and enjoy the spectacle of the competition. Best of all, I will

 share it with the world. Come along for the ride.

Hurricane season 20 years after Hugo

In recognition of the 2009 hurricane season, I'll reproduce an essay which appeared 20 years ago after Hurricane Hugo struck Montserrat. I, like many other ex-pat Montserratians, was sitting around for the phone to ring, hoping in vain for good news from home. After this piece appeared in Gannett Westchester Newspapers, my editors sent me to Montserrat for a week. As the 20th anniversary approaches, I am looking for people who are willing to share their memories of Hurricane Hugo - whether its in the Caribbean or in the Carolinas. Caption information:This is a view of Kinsale from Fort Barrington,Montserrat, about a week after Hugo struck.

Memories of Hurricane Hugo: Waiting for news- Sept. 1989

The tone of my sister’s voice over the phone Friday night was calm, even nonchalant. We’re stocking up. But we’re not boarding up. It’s too much trouble. Insurance would pay for the damage. Anyway our houses are built properly. This isn’t Jamaica, she said.
Those were the last words I heard from home for a week. For the subsequent four days, like hundreds of other Montserrat and Caribbean nationals living in the United States, I havebeen hanging on to last words from home. Words of misplaced optimism.
I talked to my sister just hours before Hurricane Hugo lashed Montserrat with 150-mile an hour winds, high seas and torrential rain. For days afterwards, I waited ,worried and listened to hear word of what was left of my island, my home.
The first twenty four hours were the worst. The early television news accounts of storm damage were dominated by reports from the larger islands - Guadeloupe, Antigua, the U.S Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. There was no news about Montserrat.
I wondered:If Hugo could tear apart Guadeloupe and Antigua, then what could possibly save Montserrat, a hilly, 39-square-mile, pear shaped island which sat between them.
News from Montserrat began coming in late Sunday the mountainous lush green island and its twelve thousand residents took the brunt of Hugo’s fury.
At first the only detailed information came from exhausted amateur radio operators who reported that six people were dead and the hospital, police headquarters and court house had been destroyed. Half of Plymouth, the island’s capital, was reported to be under water.
I thoughy back to my sister’s optimism. This was worse than Jamaica.
Furtive phone calls and hourly news bulletins confirmed my worse fears. Ready or not Montserrat had been hit by one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the Caribbean in decades.
I called Linelle and Wendel Lee, a Montserrat couple vacationing in NYC, whose return trip was delayed by Hugo. Not knowing what happened to their son, home, and pharmacy had made it nearly impossible for them to eat or sleep.
“You can’t comprehend the size of this disaster,” Linelle said. “I won’t be able to understand until I see it for myself. You can’t get anything specific. You think about it and you cry.”
News of Montserrat’s plight has not been easy to get. A call to the British Consulate, which handles matters dealing with Montserrat, wasn’t much help either. So my wife and I traded updated information with the Lees by telephone.
It wasn’t until three days later that television news reports brought me face to face with reality: Virtually the entire population was homeless, the reports said.
British television provided live footage of the disaster, but I still could hear no definite word about who was safe and was wasn’t. What of my sister, her husband and her three children who had spent part of the summer with me in New York? Were my dad, granddad, grandparents and numerous friends and relatives safe?
My wife, Chris, had reason to be concerned too. Although most of her family lived in New York City, her parents were in Montserrat. Their wood frame house is nestled in the rural northern section of the island, exposed to high winds and susceptible to flooding.
A first time expectant mother, Chris has taken things in stride. She decided she’d worry when the time came. Amid the worry and the wait I knew there was one person , my grandmother, who would not take the approaching storm lightly. At 67, she had experienced two devastating hurricanes in her lifetime. I remember as a child that whenever there was an approaching storm, she would talk about the hurricane of 1928. It ripped the roof off her parents’ house and forced her to put her younger sister on her back and take seek refuge in the nearest church. The hurricane of 1958 was equally devastating.
Growing up, I was her companion on numerous hurricane vigils. Together we braced for storms that always seemed to weaken or radically change course at the last minute. On Montserrat, hurricane warnings are a summer ritual, as much a part of our lives as cricket, calypso and tourists. Hurricanes are to the Caribbean what tornadoes are to the American Midwest.
As a young boy, it was my responsibility to nail the windows shut, stock up on batteries, kerosene and other essential items. Every few years or so a small storm or a distant hurricane would bring heavy rains and strong winds. Trees fell. Corrugated metal roofs flew away. Dry gulches became raging ravines. The inconvenience of life without electricity or running water for a few days was a small price to pay for days off from school or work. I knew my grandmother would take no chances. I feared more for the young, able and inexperienced. Like me, they were accustomed to the hurricane watches and warnings that amounted to be little. To them fallen trees, surging waves and swollen creeks were matters of adventure and fun, nature's spectacles to admire.
They had seen near misses. They saw Hurricane David in 1978 when it glanced Montserrat and devastated Dominica. After so many nea0r misses it was easy for the young to believe that the worst can never happen to them. They were wrong.

Under the Evergreen Tree - Oral History Project

The need for this project was reinforced in December 2008  as I attended funeral services for Richard “Richie” Allen, a former newspaper and television journalist and ex-press secretary to several Virgin Island governors. Allen was also a native of Montserrat.

 I never met Richie Allen, although near the end of his life we lived a few miles apart in Tampa Bay, Florida. He was my wife’s relative and so we received the news of his death from a cousin in Connecticut who was flying to Florida for the funeral. That weekend I learned about Mr. Allen’s work as a journalist, his humble upbringing in Cudjoe Head, his involvement in the expatriate Montserrat community in St. Thomas, and his dedication to his family and his faith. During his lifetime, Allen met presidents and other dignitaries. He made a difference. It would have been wonderful to sit and talk with him about his life in Montserrat, what inspired him, his influences and record his life story for posterity . Unfortunately, I never had that opportunity. Standing at Mr. Allen’s gravesite in Tampa,  I was struck by the urgency to begin an oral history project for the Montserrat diaspora. Gathered for that solemn occasion were dozens of fellow Montserratians who had immigrated decades ago; some had never returned to home, but all cherished vivid memories of their childhood, adolescence and young adult hood on the island. Their memories are frozen in time. They deserve to be collected, shared and saved to inspire future generations.

Montserrat is a nation of immigrants. Many Montserratians grow up and aspire to leave the 39- square- mile British colony to seek their education and fortunes abroad – England, America, U.S Virgin Islands, Europe and Africa.

During the nineteen fifties and early sixties, Montserrat experienced significant waves of  immigration  to England  to fill the void in the labor force caused by the devastation of  World War II. Those immigrants, gone more than half  a century, are fast exiting the stage and their stories of struggle and perseverance are being lost to history. Now is the time to reach out and document their long overlooked personal narratives.

The eruption of Soufriere Volcano in 1995 and the violent deadly explosions two years later set off an unprecedented exodus. More than any time in the island’s history, Montserratians have been scattered around the world. Only a brave remnant soldier on. In time that remnant will be outnumbered by an influx of immigrants from other islands in the region. Already we see the Spanish influence of Dominicans immigrants who have relocated to the island. Indian dances at the Montserrat Christmas festival events portend the cultural shift. That influence is not always a negative one, but therein lurks the peril. Our open embrace of other cultures usually comes at the expense of our own. Our sense of identity as a people and as a culture is endangered.

Currently a number of projects are undertaken to preserve our national identity for future generations. I propose Under the Evergreen Tree, as an addition to those efforts.

Under  the Evergreen Tree will be patterned on the Story Corps,(www.storycorps.net) listening  project, which allows ordinary Americans to visit audio booths and record their  families’ history romances, struggles and triumphs of everyday life. Like Story Corps, Under the Evergreen Tree is predicated on the unshakeable premise that stories matter. This is an audacious attempt to honor that belief and gather our history before it’s too late.

Just imagine, there already is a generation of Montserratians who are too young to remember what it was like to live in Plymouth before the volcano erupted; they have not experienced a Christian crusade or a political rally at the War Memorial, a walk down Parliament Street at 4 p.m. on Friday afternoons,  the majesty of the Evergreen tree at the round about, the magic of Boxing Day at Sturge Park. If we don’t collect these stories now, all future generations will have only pictures. Under the Evergreen Tree is an attempt to provide the stories and the historical context.

          This is an opportunity to gather family and personal histories of all Montserratians wherever they may live. The stories will dwell on various themes - family, natural disasters such as hurricane Hugo, the 1974 earthquakes, immigration, family, love, the volcano eruption, the 1960s Plymouth fire, education, religion, recreation, culture, calypso, sports and village life, the Lasso man episode of the early seventies.

Under the Evergreen Tree includes five major components:

 

1. Collection: The first step is to invite Montserratians from the four corners of the globe to sit down and digitally record their stories - sons can interview fathers, daughters their mothers, grandfathers and grandsons, uncles and nephews. I and other professionally trained individuals will visit cities with large Montserrat communities and conduct interviews. I also plan to travel to major cultural events where Montserratians are gathered, such as the Caribbean carnival weekend in Atlanta on Memorial Day weekend, Labor day in Brooklyn and Columbus Day weekend in Miami/Fort Lauderdale, to personally collect  stories for the archives. The St. Patrick's Day events are a perfect venue to begin collecting those stories.

Each interview will be recorded on CD and sent either by mail or in electronic form over the internet to designated collection points to be processed, catalogued and archived.

2. Archiving:. Oral histories on CDs will stored at the at the Montserrat National Trust or other designated  Montserrat location. The archived material will form part of a permanent multi-media exhibit that can be hosted at the Cultural Center. One can even envision that in the future, this initiative could be part of a stand alone multimedia, interactive Montserrat historical and cultural center to showcase all aspects of  what makes the Emerald Isle special.  I also plan to approach Florida A&M University and Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., to serve as U.S depositories of the stories so that scholars in future generations will have access to Montserrat history.  Similar partnerships are being sought in England.

3. Sharing: The aim is to share stories with family members and the wider community. We will provide each interviewees with a copy of their CD, keep a copy at the archive and, with the family’s permission, air segments weekly on Radio Montserrat and other outlets. Podcasts and YouTube versions will also be created.

4. Marketing. A major part of this project would be the outreach to the Montserratian communities scattered throughout the world. This initiative will require tremendous legwork. I plan to travel to New York, London, Boston, Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington D.C, St. Thomas and other places with significant Montserrat communities to visit churches, homes, businesses and community groups to spread the word. Traditional media outlets that serve ethnic communities will also be targeted to get out the message to this unique audience.

Under the Evergreen Tree will be heavily promoted on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Hi-5. Presently there are dozens of online Montserrat related communities forged by a common love and longing for a prosperous Montserrat.

 I also plan to create a web site where visitors can click and hear podcasts of the stories, and upload their own stories and pictures.

5. Organization and Operation: As part of the process, interviews can be catalogued and archived at the Montserrat National Trust or the Montserrat Cultural Center. Each week Radio ZJB will air one segment, one family’s story. Businesses will be encouraged to sponsor the broadcasts. The goal is to establish permanent booths and liaisons in each city. These individuals will coordinate the interviews, process the CDs and ensure they get posted to the web,  sent to the National Trust, aired on radio, and given to each family. 

This project will  be accompanied by an aggressive promotion campaign world wide, using free media interviews over Caribbean radio programs, internet email list etc. to get Montserratians to sign on to this project. I plan to tap into the vast network of Montserrat associations abroad. With the easy availability of technology, however, many individuals and families will be encouraged to conduct the interviews in their own homes and email the audio or upload directly to the web site for editing and listening.

Interviews will be catalogued and cross indexed in various ways. By geography for example, , former residents of  St. Patrick’s could be grouped together. The interviewers will try to get interviewees to talk about significant family and national happenings, wedding, births, hurricanes, epidemics, the earthquakes of the 1970s, and life during World War II. The volcano experience will have a separate category.

 As envisioned, a permanent booth will be set up at the National Trust or  the Cultural Centre and or studio space provided a ZJB radio to allow Montserrat residents and Montserratians visiting from abroad to come sit and record their stories. To enhance the visuals of this project we will be encourage people to submit copies of  family photographs, obituaries and death notices of Montserratians, career announcement notices etc. Funeral announcements on Radio Montserrat will be added to the  Under the Evergreen Tree archives.

 As part of this project, Under the Evergreen Tree’s web site will display old family photos, pictures of Montserrat etc. The site will allow people to listen to the interviews and upload their audio files of interviews to be edited. There will be detailed instructions to show people how to submit their stories.

This initiative will be conducted under the auspices of a  soon to be created nonprofit entity, with an active board of directors. The not for profit corporation will work in partnership with the Government of Montserrat and civic groups who support the goal of gathering and safekeeping Montserrat history. Success and longevity will require financial, logistical and moral support from a variety of government, philanthropic and individual donors.

If you're interested email me at drewskerritt@gmail.com.