Memory #360

"The Mothers of Memory", Collage on Canvas, 2010

I come from a family of travelers. By the time I was six, I had already traveled at least twice, on my own, to Trinidad and back to Brooklyn. As driver licenses are an integral part of any suburbanite’s existence, so is the passport to my Caribbean family where migrating to the U.S. provided each and every one of us an opportunity otherwise denied in a country referred to as “home” but once left, would never be returned to, to live in, again.
My grandmother, Hildred Balbirsingh was a pioneer in my family. She dresses like Queen Elisabeth II for Sunday Mass. She keeps an enamel potty under her bed (tensil she calls it) and smells like freshly grated ginger and dinner mints. She has an archipelago of liver spots on her hands which, as a child, I traced with my little brown fingers, imagining them to be islands of chocolate.
By 1965 as Britain was closing her gates to her colonial charges the U.S.—influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and wanting to send the right signal to the then U.S.S.R. decided to open her arms to the more colorful of immigrants. My grandmother, a staunch Catholic and so would never get a divorce, did the next best thing: she woke herself up early one morning and joined a block-long cue in front of the American Embassy under the sweltering Port-of-Spain sun to secure herself a greencard.
So Mummy Hildred was the woman in the Balbirsingh clan to first migrate to the United States, something her husband didn’t take too kindly to. Coming from Trinidad, an old British colony, my Grandfather revered all that was British and despised the Yanks, who for his generation had invaded their Island paradise during the Second World War. It is true that these American soldiers built the road that winds through the hills to the, until then, inaccessible by car Maracas Bay. But these soldiers took something from them that some of the men had a hard time swallowing—their women. By the time these Americans had left Trinidad, it was a signal for all the locals to celebrate as heard in The Mighty Sparrow’s first calypso hit of the time, Jean and Dinah:
When the Yankee was in full swing
Just imagine how I was suffering
Mavis told me straight to me face
How she find I too fast and out of place
No, no, no, they would start to fret
Money or not poor Sparrow can't get
Because with the Yankees they have it cool
Calypsonians too hard to fool
But my grandmother loved the U.S. She loved the new appliances she could save her money for and so buy and ship back to Trinidad along with all the other American products like Colgate toothpaste and Nestle Quick’s chocolate milk powder. It gave her a status she had never had before: That of a capable consumer and she relished the role with joy. It was after the war and the U.S. had situated itself in the minds of all those weary of the old Empire as the new Hope. And as a product of the war, these now accessible items appealed to my grandmother’s and I’m sure many other’s need to store things away: My grandmother, with memories of sugar, coffee and salt being hard to come by, became a certified hoarder.
Words like, barrels (what you filled up with goodies to ship back “home”), Passage (what you had to save for your airline trip), green card (it wasn’t green!), Visa (what you cued up for hours for in the hot Caribbean sun), Sponsor (someone who promised to hire you once you got to the States, usually a family in need of a domestic) U.S. dollars (there is and always will be a parallel Trinidadian economy that uses the American dollar) and recession (jobs scarce, money scarce) were words that hitch-hiked sublimely into my own, much to my parents’ chagrin, growing Yankee girl vocabulary.
I was called Yankee Girl because I was the only member of my family to be born in the U.S. Not only were both my brother and sister born in Trinidad, but they, like my grandmother were Balbirsinghs. This was due to some pre-marriage indiscretions that we were too young to be told about, so we had to be satisfied with, “You’re a Brown because Mummy and Daddy were married before we had you.” So even as a child, I had to get used to being an outsider even from within my own family and as every one else referred to Trinidad as home, I had learned to settle with the idea that home was something that was outside of the Ocean Avenue apartment I shared with my parents and siblings.
And the way in which I was called Yankee Girl wasn’t nice either. My brother and sister taunted me and my grandmother, when visiting would say, “Don’t take them on girl—you belong to this world.” And I would beam with pride as she held me close to her.
So, I didn’t always necessarily see my outsider status as a negative thing. Rather, I realized it gave me access to worlds that many didn’t even think about getting to know. When I look back on my life, I see patterns where I actively sought after, the group of not-belonging.
And I have always loved difference.
My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Stein magnified this passion. Mrs. Stein was a peroxide blond, buxom brilliant human being. She was my 4th grade teacher and she dropped science. She always bought Avon from my mom and I'll never forget the color lipstick she liked: Wood Rose.
Today was going to be a great day: we would be making paper mache Native American masks.
As we ripped newspaper, Mrs. Stein informed us, “It was the Europeans who came over here and murdered all the buffalo so that the Native Americans would starve.”
We all ripped paper and looked at her with awe. She managed to do something no other teacher had done to us up until then: She spoke to us intelligently and in a way that her class of mostly African-American, Caribbean and Puerto Rican students could understand. She told us history from a perspective we could understand: Ours.
“They are a people of great culture and this land originally belonged to them.” Mecca raised her hand, “Yes, my mother says my grandmother was Indian.” Mecca arched her back and her brown face blushed with pride. She wore a striped turtle neck and I loved the way the beads on her cornrows clicked whenever she turned her head. I wish my mother knew how to cornrow! But my mother, also a migrant from Trinidad, sadly lacked the currency needed to be fly in Brooklyn: She could not cornrow, jump double-dutch and she still bought me white dolls!
“Yes, I am sure. There are probably many of you in here with Native American blood. In fact, many of your ancestors fought alongside these brave people against the Europeans. So you should be very proud.” We all beamed with pride. Although we were all children of the televised version of Roots there wasn’t much else for us to remind us of our glory. But here was Mrs. Stein, a Brooklyn Jewish woman, who insisted on reminding us of our greatness.
“So although you might only read about certain kinds of greatness in your school books, “ she continued, “remember that there are many other kinds of greatness as well. And many of them look like you.”
We all stared at her like love-struck puppies, so hungry for images of ourselves in school. It wasn’t that many of my classmates were ignorant of our own history either: with classmates with names like Kenyatta, Makeba, Mecca and Wajid, I kind of got my own dose of African-American history. But it helped having someone with some perceived sense of authority, to remind us of our beauty.
“You know kids, human beings can be really mean to each other. But no matter what, you have to remember the beauty.” She pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses and took a moment to look at her motley collection of students: There was Latisha who wore her hair plaited like two horns on either side of her head. There was Dexter—the slim brown boy with the white on blue pumas, handball king and object of every girl’s affection. There was the twins Okolo and Kelolo, the new kids whose novelty was beginning to wane like the elastic on my beaten up sweater. There was Naomi, the small Jewish girl who offered to tell the class how babies were conceived and Helle, the Easter-European who corn-rowed her hair and had us all over her house for her birthday party. There was Hector, the short Puerto-Rican who was the color of banana and me: A disheveled, hand-me-down wearing student who was on the verge of spontaneously combusting from one of her, yet again, inspiring lessons.
“Don’t forget children: Stereotyping is not good. You can not guess how someone is going to be based on their appearance. When people make generalizations, it hurts individuals.”
Don't ever generalize. People are different and when you generalize you forget people's individuality. Now as a Jewish American woman, she knew this lesson probably as well as any of us Black and Puerto Rican students in her class and because she introduced us to some real history, and showed us through her lesson whose side she was really on--we LOVED her and she gained our RESPECT. As a result, her lesson has always resonated with me. Need I add that we produced some of the most beautiful Native American masks in that lesson?
I have carried this with me my entire life and it was in this spirit, in this tribute to one of the greatest teachers I have ever had, that I decided to pack my things up and move to Copenhagen, Denmark despite the fact that to be honest? I didn’t even know where on the map it was.


Difference has never been a disability for me. It has always been an opportunity to uncover that one universal connection we all share: humanity. It is what I love about Great literature. It didn’t matter what the characters looked like or where they came from because if the writer did the job they had set out to do, then I felt that natural barrier we all seem to be born with towards difference melt. I fell in love with Don Quixote, as he set out on his quest as a Knight Errant on his dilapidated horse, Rocinante—oblivious to the reality every one else tried to bestow upon him. I loved Firefitz from Parzival, because although written in the 12th Century, it was proof that people from different cultures interacted and that despite the speed in which the media seems to now bring us together, we have been connecting since the beginning of time.
I loved If Beale Street Could Talk, because the picture of Baldwin on the back cover told me that, yes, writers could look like me and in fact, many do. Tolstoy, Nabokov, Morrison, Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston—it didn’t matter where they came from because they always brought the world to my doorstep and reminded me, lest I should ever forget, that we were all connected.

to be continued...