1.
My first memory of a place beyond Jamaica is a small bite of a green-skinned apple. It’s spongy, nothing like the red-skinned, pear-shaped Otaheite apple I know. “An American apple,” someone says. I don’t remember who, but I remember I didn’t like the texture of this American apple and I know that this is a fruit I do not like. But I don’t yet know enough to associate home with a fruit or food.
2.
“I’m going to tell Daddy to send you back to Jamaica,” my sister, still a toddler, tells our mother. She’s angry at Mom for some reason; perhaps something was denied or taken away. My sister is learning the names of countries and places, boundaries, where is home and where isn’t, and that being away from home is both punishment and reward. But my older sister and I—probably five and six years old at the time—laugh at the toddler’s mistake. In time, she figures out that Jamaica is where we live, that when we drive some thirty or fifty miles away from home, we’re still on this island called Jamaica. Perhaps she meant to say, “I’m going to tell Daddy to send you to America,” to that place where other relatives live, some of whom rarely, if ever, return to their first home.
3.
When I’m six or seven, America is a scent, a mixture of mothballs, detergent, fabric softener, and perfume drifting from suitcases, clinging to the new dresses, black ballet flats, dolls, candy, peppermint gum, and cereal that emerge from the suitcases in batches. The perfumed scent drifts out each time my aunt lifts the lids of her suitcases, lingers in the guest room of this house we’ve been living in for a year or two now. The scent follows my aunt from room to room until it fades, overpowered by the everyday smells that flutter inside on the breeze, and burnt out, perhaps, by the tropical heat. It’s not my aunt’s scent alone. The same scent emerges from suitcases when any relatives visit from abroad, and it leaves when they do. I don’t yet know Jamaica’s scent, but I know what it isn’t.
4.
When my older sister is eight, she goes away on vacation to Washington, DC. She’s American, a little girl returning briefly to the country where she was born. Her passport separates her from the rest of her family. My sister, though, is not American, and America is not her home. She sounds like me. She isn’t like our American cousins who come to visit and who take risks, walking on a ledge that is the equivalent of a high beam, cavorting through space like child acrobats. My sister is reserved and careful, where the American cousins are carefree risk-takers. She is one of us, except in immigration when her deep navy-blue passport stands out from ours that are another shade of dark blue, and the Jamaican immigration agent asks, “When will she return?”
5.
When I am eight, America is a distant place where most everybody in Jamaica aches to go. We are a nation divided by our country’s experiment with democratic socialism and a prime minister who is forging stronger ties with Cuba—and therefore Russia. There are those who prefer the prime minister’s rival who champions capitalism and stronger ties with America. In pockets of our capital city, Kingston, gun battles decide which political party represents that specific community, whether a person wearing orange is friend or foe, whether green clothing can be worn on the neighborhood’s streets. We learn not to wear green or orange or flaunt any color that from a distance might be mistaken for one or the other. Political fliers appear on lamp poles and walls beside the spray-painted letters spelling the acronyms of the two leading parties, and the daily newspaper tallies the lives lost to political-related violence. I learn about machine guns and Molotov cocktails, how some communities barricade their roads to prevent members of the rival political party from coming in. Years of dissent and division come to a head in 1980, and the number of Jamaicans who acquire American visas and migrate skyrockets, as does the number of Jamaicans who overstay their visas rather than return home.
At some point, a fire destroys the local Agricultural Marketing Corporation in my hometown, and rumors that an employee stole money, set the building ablaze, and got on a plane to America spread across the neighborhoods. I don’t know what is true or what is false, only that the charred concrete walls remain in place for a long time, a symbol of unease and the nation’s complaints of how rough things have become. I don’t understand much, but I know that it is an uneasy time. Whether the arson story is true or not, America remains a refuge, a beacon of hope for all who want something more, and I learn again and again that home is not a permanent place.
6.
Also when I’m eight, America is a city of lights shimmering below the massive A300 airplane slowly descending toward John F. Kennedy International Airport. We arrive at night into the neon and fluorescent lights of New York City, shuffle through immigration lines, into still harsher light. My mother unfolds the frozen ackee, roasted breadfruit, and green avocado wrapped in foil and newsprint and nestled among our clothes to prove we have nothing illegal, repackages everything, and pulls the suitcases closed. Our uncle greets us in the hall outside immigration and customs, hurries us out to his car—a massive hunk of metal that speeds along the highway and holds the scent of cigarette smoke.
“Move it, monkey!” he says, over and over to drivers who will never hear.
The lights and high-rise buildings zip by quickly, and soon we’re on a tree-lined street in Crown Heights, my uncle hurrying us from the alleyway, up the long walk adjacent to the side of the house, and toward the front door. After unlocking lock after lock, he tells stories of the city’s violence, of being robbed of his wire-frame glasses at gunpoint. I won’t learn about the crack epidemic of the 1980s that devastated that community until many years later. But we heed our uncle’s words and keep watch in this slice of America, a place where you take great care to lock yourself away.
My mother unfolds the wrapped and once-frozen foods. In the days to come she’ll steam or fry slices of breadfruit and cook the ackee with salted codfish, and the smell of home will rise throughout the house and linger for a while. Now I know Jamaica’s scent.
Mornings, my uncle and aunt leave for work and, unmoored from our usual life—a gentle hill sloping away from our house, trees bursting with fruit, a full yard we can explore at will, dolls we line up in front of a chalkboard for pretend school, a piano I hate having to play—my sisters and I drift toward the television to watch cartoons and soap operas with storylines that, for us, will have no closure. My mother drifts toward Utica Avenue with three girls in tow, wandering into store after store, fingering pots and pans and curtains and other household things, dresses or shoes for us girls, button down shirts and undershirts for my father. My sisters and I look through books and purses in Woolworth’s, think about how we will spend the money our uncle gifted us. And we drift back toward our temporary home, careful as we walk, our feet crunching oak bark and leaves that line the sidewalks, being even more careful as we tramp up the steps onto the small porch and into the dark hallway, looking behind to ensure no one has followed us in, looking inside to ensure there are no surprises there, then clicking each lock behind us, once again locking ourselves in. My sisters and I drift back to the television, and my mother heads toward the small galley kitchen where she makes dinner.
Most days we walk to the shops, touching new things: nonperishable foods, cleaning supplies, school notebooks, pens and pencils. America is the place where we buy the things that are scarce or too expensive in Jamaica—the goods shopkeepers ration or “marry” with other goods, forcing shoppers to buy floor polish when all they need is cooking oil or rice or flour. Mom carefully packs away all these things—detergent, toiletries, cereal, grape jelly, peanut butter, canned tuna fish—wrapping our clothes around them like bubble wrap. Somewhere in the suitcases are Dum Dums lollipops. I’ll save every wrapper and return them to the candy company in exchange for a gift of some sort. Months later, I receive a blue bag for the candy wrappers, and I use it for everything until it frays and falls apart.
A year later, in the summer of 1981, “Nuh Wey Nuh Betta Dan Yard” wins Jamaica’s annual festival song competition that leads up to our August 6 Independence Day celebration. The song tells a different story from the one most Jamaicans will tell. It doesn’t talk of flight and scarce food items. Instead, it celebrates our little island, instills a sense of pride, and reminds every listener that no country is better than this place we lovingly call “yaad.” Home is this island, this place we have come to call “yard,” this place the song tells us is better than any other country in the world.
7.
1983. jamaica 21 signs are pasted everywhere. Our national colors—yellow, green, and black—are displayed on most everything. We are a proud nation celebrating twenty-one years of independence from British rule. Years later, we still wear our colors with pride to sporting events, reggae concerts, and other cultural functions. We wave our flags, drape our bodies in towels and cloths that sport oversized versions of our flag. We are proud of our little island, our rock, and we celebrate every Jamaican’s achievement on an international stage as if it were our own.
Many years later, deep into adulthood, I will learn that hoisting a flag sometimes means something else, that flying an American flag from porches and car windows may signal exclusion rather than inclusion, unity for some, but not for all. It’s sobering to learn that home is who you leave out rather than who you invite in.
But before that new knowledge about flags comes to me, the year’s winning festival song is “Jamaica I’ll Never Leave You Again,” another song that tells a different story of flight—legal immigration or not—and return. A mere two months later, Jamaican troops join American troops and a military contingent from six other Caribbean nations to invade the tiny island of Grenada. The reason: Grenada’s neighbors were alarmed at its military buildup that threatened stability in the region. U.S. President Ronald Reagan says then that America invaded the island to “restore order and democracy.”
I don’t know enough to fully understand the invasion. I know just about enough to understand that America is a beacon of both order and democracy around the world. I know what invade means. I know just about enough to understand Mighty Gabby’s “Boots,” a calypso song that criticizes the Barbadian government’s assistance in the U.S. invasion. The song was popular in Jamaica that year and for some time after. Even now the words resonate. “Was it necessary to hire them soldier jokers to out a fire?/ No, no, no./ Was it necessary to give them weapons they claim was unloaded to shoot Vincentians? /No, no, no./ Well don’t tell me, tell Tom, man. / He send them to Vincyland, gun in they hands, to make a stand to quell a non-existent rebellion.”
I learn home is not a sacred place. It’s not safe from invasion and disruption from larger, more powerful countries.
8.
My father, younger sister, and I sit in church on a Sunday morning in July 1988, staring up at the pulpit. The priest speaks for some twenty or thirty minutes about parents sending their children abroad. I don’t recall his exact words, or how he twisted any biblical passage to incorporate the loss of a country’s youths to immigration. He doesn’t call my name, but I know he is talking about me, about my family. A year earlier, the priest made some statements about my older sister leaving, ignoring the fact that my sister wasn’t technically migrating but rather returning to the country of her birth. My mother knowingly stays home, and, had I known better, I would have stayed away too.
What the priest says is partly true. Immigrants play a significant role in building America, and the countries they leave behind suffer the consequences of brain drain, becoming increasingly reliant on the money immigrants send back home. But he leaves out so much else—the crippling effect of a small island’s international debt, the health, educational, and social services our government is forced to cut to repay the loans to countries and entities much bigger than our small island. Still, he comes to bid me farewell.
For a long time after, home, Jamaica, is the place you leave with guilt in your heart.
9.
Sundays we take the train from Coney Island to Church Avenue in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section. My aunt—really my mother’s first cousin, but who has always been aunt to me—walks in a hurry, her heels clopping on the concrete. Her hat is either stiff-brimmed or one that flops in the breeze. She’s always in a hurry, early for everything, especially her role preparing the altar for the day’s services. America, my new home, is a place of constant movement. Nothing stays still. We don’t dawdle. We run to catch the train, push through the train doors to grab a seat, and fight our way out before the door closes on us. We hurry to cross a street before the light changes. And I remember my uncle always saying, “Move it, monkey!” to prod drivers along.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church is like home with accents as distinct as mine. Here we shed our other masks. Here we are full, complete, not defined by our skin color. America is the place where I learn that I am a minority. Except that here, at St. Paul’s, we are not. In Flatbush, we are not. Our culture overflows, spills from windows and doors in the reggae and soca rhythms we play, the odors of food on a fire, our voices, our language, our way of being. We are not minor. Home is that place where you count fully.
10.
1989: America, this still-new home of mine is a place of contradictions. America invades Panama, ignoring disavowals from the Organization of American States and the European Parliament. It succeeds in overthrowing military dictator Manuel Noriega at the cost of almost seven hundred Panamanian lives—civilians and troops—as well as twenty-three American soldiers. America is both the defender of democracy and the stalwart leader against corruption in government.
America is a refuge, except when it is not. Hundreds of Haitian immigrants on fragile boats, so close to shore, are turned away. Someone must decide whether the Haitian migrants are fleeing economic or political persecution. And someone decides flight for economic reasons isn’t a legitimate reason for Haitians to come ashore. The pattern repeats on different borders, different shores. America becomes the place that closes its borders to some.
11.
When I was little, America was the meter by which the “developing” world measured our progressiveness, as in, “You think in America, you could get away with that?” That could be anything—a police officer accepting a bribe to waive off a traffic ticket, a government official caught in some scandal or another, a parent taking a child out of school to help with carrying produce to market and selling the goods.
When I was little, most everything stopped when there was too much rain. My classrooms on a rainy day were largely empty, and you could tell from the handful of students in class whose parents had cars or some means of transporting their children to school in the rain. After a rainy day, my mother put our sneakers in the oven to dry. Our uniforms—blue, green, or red plaid shirtwaist dresses—hung on lines stretched across the veranda to dry. Beneath, my mother lined the floor with old newspapers to soak up the water blowing in and dripping from the clothes.
“You think in America anything stops because of a little rain or snow?” my mother asked often.
Back then, none of us knew the answer to this, but America became the place where nothing stopped or slowed, where progressive meant you tried to dominate the elements.
Little by little, I unlearn the things I once believed defined America, defined the place that so many people were dying to call their home. What is this America, this adopted home of mine, now? America in 2020 mirrors my childhood days when flight and return were constant thoughts. Except this time, America, once a refuge for those around the world, once the place everyone wanted to go, is now the place some of us want to leave. And, again, I think home is fleeting, a place we carry around in our hearts and the scents and sounds that linger in our memories.