GROWING UP AT “ROUND HOUSE” WITH OUR BROTHER KAMAU:

In 1945 Mother switched occupations and became a school teacher – not planned, but brought about by measles (or chicken pox) in the family, so that Joan could not continue school at Mrs Smith’s Private School in River Road. Mother therefore started teaching her right there at the RH front window. In a matter of days, three other parents, noticing this, brought their children to her, and “The Round House Private School” started, with four children. It continued until 1965, growing from strength to strength, and her pupils passed for all the well-known high schools. Mother was also an entrepreneur: she sold school books (among them the respected Royal Reader) in a little white book-case at the front window; and she made dungaree school bags for the children and calico apron “pockets” for the vendors outside Hill’s shop at Jemmott’s Lane Corner. After she closed her school, Mother went on to teach at the St Gabriel’s School in Collymore Rock for a few years.

Mother died on 27 March 1985, and Daddy on 6 February 1990. Aunt Lucille had died in 1952, while Kamau was at Cambridge, and on the day that Mary had to face the UCWI entrance and scholarship interview. Kamau’s poem, simply titled “Aunt Lucille”, written at the time, appears in his new book, Elegguas (2010).

On our father’s side, Edward Hilton Brathwaite was born on 30 January 1905, the fourth of nine children of Henry Lawson Brathwaite and his wife Eleanor, née Agard, also of Mile & Quarter, St Peter. Henry was a shop-keeper and butcher, who used to ride his horse and cart to Speightstown “to sell his meat,” as Kamau’s poem ‘Ancestors’ – in Islands (1969) – informs us (p. 82). The poem speaks about our grandfather as “six foot three and very neat: high collar, winged, a grey cravat, a waistcoat, watch-chain just above the belt, …: black English country gentleman.” Daddy told us that, in Grandpa’s days, the rare trip from Speightstown to Bridgetown would have been made by schooner.

Daddy’s siblings whom we knew –“the aunts and uncles” of our nightly prayers – were Uncles Carlyle, Lawson and Elmo, and Aunts Edith (later St. John) and Miriam (later Hunte). All of them have now passed on, but Uncle Carlyle’s son, Philmore, is continuing to hold the fort in Mile & Quarter with cows, trucks, grocery store, gas station; while Uncle Lawson’s daughter Lawsmar (like Mary and Thelma, a widow), lives near Thelma in south-east London.

Spending time in the country formed a great part of our growing up. During summer vacations, led by our brother and accompanied by our cousins the Agard grand-children (Vern and Frank Welch from Hart’s Gap; Lloyd, Myrts, Barbara and Rodney Mayers from Chelsea Road, and their siblings) and followed by Philmore, sometimes Lawsmar and later Joan and the other younger ones, we would roam Mount Brevitor’s cave and the surrounding hills; walk down to Maynards and out to All Saints and Indian Ground. Occasionally some of our great-aunt Elizabeth Sealy’s grandchildren came too: Joyce Sealy and the Kennedys (Vilma, Lucille, Margaret Rose and the others); and great-aunt Evvie Agard’s two grandsons, Barton and Carl from ‘over-in-away’ in the States, spent one summer here with us. This had a bonding effect on us all, influenced Kamau’s work and is reflected in his poetry.

But before arriving at the old red two-storey home, there was the walk from RH to the bus stand in the Lower Green – near Jubilee Gardens, between St. Mary’s Church, Courts Barbados Building and the Old Town Hall – to board the ‘Sonny Loo’ bus for the 14-mile drive to Mile & Quarter, changing buses at Speightstown. This journey took well over one hour in those days and seemed much longer, especially with numerous stops on the way to take on/let off passengers (often wait for them!) and/or packages and provisions. It was like going from one time/world into another.

On our return, we would sometimes take a no. 13, 14 or 15 bus from the Fairchild Street bus stand to the Jemmott’s Lane bus stop, but more often we would walk home, up Broad Street passing the stores; the Nelson Statue and across the Swing Bridge; up Lower Bay Street by Aunt Jane’s house and the Murray’s and Bethel, past Wellington, Beckwith and Combermere Streets and Jemmott’s Lane, greeting friendly neighbours, until we arrived back at “Round House”, tired and happy after our holiday experiences. Much of this is in Kamau’s poetry.

We grew up in a very active household. Kamau (“Eddie” in those days) brought his friends home to swim/play on the beach (cricket, sandball wars); catch crabs in our yard; or act out Sword-Fight/Stick-Fight and Cowboy & Crook up and down our back steps and the inside steps leading down to the large dark unused ground floor room/cellar at RH – now beautifully restored and appointed for use (2010). Victor Cooke (the Sheriff); George Murray (the Young Genius who made their swords); Tony Lambert (‘Basil Rathbone’); Sidney Arthur (‘The Shadow’); Richard Clarke (the Group’s Griot); Kenneth Pile (the Older Counsellor); Oliver Jackman (mainly for jazz, comic books and boxing) – listening to his collection of jazz records and winding up the gramophone, was a big thing for Kamau and the boys in those days, and among Kamau’s collection was a now rare Louis Armstrong/Jack Teagarden (Okeh 78), which Eustace Burnett’s grandmother had given to him, and Eustace remembers not only the fun and games, but also that our brother helped him unravel the mysteries of fourth form physics and geometry; Alvin ‘Boots’ Cummins, and the Hopes and the Clarkes from Brittons Hill, and as Kamau said when recalling those days: “evvabody of course was Errol Flim!” Our cousins Kenny and Eric Layne (Sealy grandchildren), who came for sea-baths, would also join in, as well as members of the 1st Barbados Sea Scouts, under Lisle Harrison.

Indeed, Kamau recalls that when he was in the Sea Scouts, he was among the first Barbadians to ride around the island (a bicycle race, which he won). He also remembers being with the Harbour Police in a successful rescue of three fledgling sea scouts one Saturday morning. The Sea Scouts’ longboat was moored at the Harbour Police pier (now the Bayshore Complex obliquely opposite Bethel Church on Bay Street), and the troop met there for training: the boys used to row from the pier to the Aquatic Club, pausing at Browne’s Beach and “Round House” on the way, and – in the other direction – through the Pelican Channel to Pelican Island.

Kamau recalls also that Richard Clarke and himself were among the first schoolboys to walk from Bridgetown to Mile & Quarter, St Peter and that he and Edward Cumberbatch were possibly the first to walk along the beach from Road View, St Peter to Bats Rock, St Michael. The Cumberbatches, who lived at Road View, were almost family: their Uncle Kenneth St John was married to our Aunt Edith.

We girls, too, brought our friends home: Millers, Trotmans, Thorntons, Smiths, Norrises, Austin and Shirley Clarke, Everil Newton, Cynthia Jackman, others from school and church, and our cousins. Some of them used to go sailing with us – to Pelican Island, now part of the Deep Water Harbour, and along the St James coast – in the beautiful yachts (made right there on Bay Street) belonging to Ned Carrington (a relative of Captain King, the pilot) and his friend Darnley. Captain King appears in Kamau’s Sun Poem (p.11).    

Above all, there was always the sea at our back door; the constant lapping of the waves on the beach pervaded our lives and shaped our thoughts. The movement, the tides, the changeable nature of the sea, its generosity and even its cruelty, informs Kamau’s work and has been a lasting influence on us all.

When we were children we heard little of hurricanes (Barbados experienced severe hurricanes in 1780, 1831, 1898, and “Janet” in 1955) but we knew stormy seasons and storm surges, when the sea unleashed its power and white horses raced in from far out, building up until they rolled up the beach, crashed against the breakwater on which our back fence was built and came swirling into our yard. We would hear the sea roaring at night, and would wake early next morning to a more piquant tang in the air than usual and there would be choppy blue water stretching from our sea-gate to the horizon! Later, when the water calmed down, we could dive from the open gate, but we never risked swimming out, for fear of underwater currents. For weeks afterwards there would be no beach.

Thelma reminds us of an experience we all shared as children, and which we have now come to identify as ‘the tsunami.’  One day, when Joan was a baby, we all went into the sea with Mother. The water as usual was calm, with an occasional “biggish” wave. Suddenly we were aware that even Thelma’s feet could touch the sand, as the water had receded, and when we looked out to sea we saw this huge wave coming. Thelma recounts: “I began to run out of the sea. Mother was calling me to come out to her but I took no notice. The wave was quicker than me, knocked me down and rolled me over and over. I remember thinking that I’d never get up again.” Mary recalls that, having read that one should dive into a big wave, she did so – with the same result. Kamau immortalises the moment, and movement, in “Return of the Sun”, Part ii, first written at Cambridge in 1951, later published in Sun Poem, (p.77), and repeated in Ancestors (his second Trilogy) and Barabajan Poems. 

It is interesting that Thelma (little more than a baby herself) recalls only Mother, the baby and herself; her “ears were full of sand and I’m sure I must have swallowed some as well.” Meanwhile, although part of it and terrified at the time, Kamau and Mary seemed to see the whole episode almost like a film clip.

We have very happy memories of living and growing up here – of seeing our father walking or running up and down the beach doing his exercises; watching the ‘physiques’ building pyramids with their bodies; cheering the beach cricketers (see Kamau’s ‘Rites’) including no doubt young Gary Sobers from nearby Bay Land. Browne’s Beach at that time stretched only the 200 yards from the groyne at the Old Eye Hospital, behind our house to the Weatherhead’s wall and the massive pile of rocks behind the Ice Factory. Friends used RH as a place to change before going for a swim; and there was a flurry of activity when, once a month, the United Holy Church of America, a Pentecostal Church, founded by Bishop Harry Gentles, used our house and yard as a base for beach services and baptism. On the street side there was a rich streaming tapestry of sight and sound – people walking, talking, riding tinkling bicycles, cars, buses, donkey carts, and braying donkeys – and on holidays and/or race days hundreds trekking back from the Garrison Savannah. And if we had gone out and it was getting late, you would be sure to see Mother and/or Daddy looking out of a window for our return.  All this is in Kamau’s poetry.

The activity slowed down after 1950. Eddie (not yet Kamau – this name was not to come until Kenya in 1972, from the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgῖ wa Thiong’o’s mother) went off to study at Cambridge in that year, having won one of the four Barbados Scholarships in 1949. Then Mary, in 1952, went to the University College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; and in 1953, Thelma left to study nursing at Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, in the UK.  Only Joan remained at “Round House” with the parents, attending lectures and women’s meetings with Mother, who was involved in several organizations, for example, the Bethel Women’s League, and the Barbados Women’s Alliance, through which she was fortunate to meet Mrs. Amy Ashwood Garvey, the first wife of Marcus Garvey in 1953. In 1955, she was presented to HRH The Princess Margaret while she was on a Commonwealth visit to Barbados, and who also opened the Princess Margaret Secondary School (8 February 1955). Much later, in 1975, Mother became the first Secretary of the newly formed Barbados Diabetic Association, since renamed the Diabetes Association of Barbados. Meanwhile, Daddy became fully involved with the Enterprise Credit Union, of which he was a founding member and Secretary-Treasurer for several years. Many of the early credit union meetings were held at the “Round House”, and Daddy travelled to conferences in other islands, as well as attending meetings of the Shamrock Credit Union, which met at the Roman Catholic Church (as it then was) in Jemmott’s Lane.

As the years flowed on, Kamau, after successfully completing his studies at Cambridge (Bachelor of Arts and Diploma in Education), went off to Ghana (then the Gold Coast) in 1955, as a Government Education Officer at a place called Takoradi. In 1960, while on leave back home in Barbados, he met and married (in three weeks!) Guyanese Doris Monica Welcome, who then accompanied him to Ghana. In 1962, Sir Philip Sherlock invited him to be Resident Tutor of the University of the West Indies Extra-Mural Department in St. Lucia, and – a year later – to the History Department on the Mona Campus, Jamaica. It was during his early years at Mona, and later when he was working on his doctorate at the University of Sussex (1965-1968), having absorbed the culture of Africa and felt the anguish of the Middle Passage, that he was able to write and publish Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969), which later became his first trilogy, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973). His second trilogy, Ancestors, was published in 2001 – from Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987).

Kamau’s third trilogy, not yet named and not yet published, comprises Missa Solemnis – which won the Frank Collymore Literary Award in 2006 – The Rwanda Poems and the in-progress Dead Man Witness (DMW), about his current ‘cultural lynching’ in New York – an unexpected and dire development. The ‘Time of Salt’ trilogy, not yet published under one cover, chronicles the harsh, cruel passage of years in the Jamaica of the 1980s, which saw the sudden death of Doris in 1986 – The Zea Mexican Diary (1993); the near destruction by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 of his home at Irish Town, described in the long-poem, Shar (1990); and Kamau’s 1990 near-death experience at the hands of ‘three gunmen of the Apocalypse’ in a Marley Manor apartment in Kingston: Trench Town Rock (1994).

In 1966, while working on his doctorate, Kamau, Andrew Salkey and John La Rose founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), which is still nurturing young persons from throughout the diaspora. He returned to Mona in 1968, was elevated to a personal professorship (of Social & Cultural History) in 1983, and resigned in 1991, after and as a result of the ‘Time of Salt’. He took up the post of Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University in 1992.

Kamau has produced varied and path-finding work. One only has to google his name on the internet to see his many publications, and Doris, just before her death, completed a comprehensive bibliography of his work: EKB. His Published Prose and Poetry 1948-1986: a Checklist, published by Savacou and New Beacon Books, London, 1988. Among those who influenced Kamau’s early writings were our late cousin, Cyril Brathwaite, himself a poet, but better known in the pharmaceutical field, and for his involvement with the Boy Scouts at the Bethel Methodist Church; his god-mother, the late Daphne Joseph-Hackett, a pioneer in West Indian drama, who dramatized some of Kamau’s poems, and encouraged others to do so as well; and the late Frank Collymore, who encouraged him from his days at Combermere School, (prior to Kamau’s transferring to Harrison College where he became involved in The Collegian), and who accepted and was instrumental in publishing his first poem, “Shadow suite” in the former BIM Magazine 12 (1950): 325-329.

Among his academic publications are: his doctoral thesis, The development of creole society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, published 1971 by the Clarendon Press, Oxford; the oft-referred to Contradictory Omens: Cultural diversity and integration in the Caribbean, published in 1974 by Savacou, a Journal of the Caribbean Artists Movement; History of the Voice (1986), and the 2-vol MR/MR – his aesthetics of Caribbean/Americas magical realism (Savacou 2001) – that won the Casa de las Americas Premio (Cuba) in 1998. He was awarded the Silver Feather and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 1994; and in 2006 won the Griffin Award for Born to slow horses, two other Casa de las Americas Prizes and the Musgrave Gold Medal (Jamaica) for Literature. On 27 March 2010, he received the W E B Du Bois Award (Medgar Evers, NYC) for his contribution to the literature and culture of the black diaspora.

Kamau has been awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships; he holds honorary doctorates from Tougaloo College (Mississippi), Sussex University and the University of the West Indies; and he is Professor Emeritus in Social & Cultural History at UWI Mona. But the accolade par excellence is the national award from the country of his birth: the Companion of Honour of Barbados (CHB), awarded in 1987 for his contribution to arts and particularly literature.

Kamau married Jamaican Beverley Reid in 1998 and until his problems with the ‘cultural lynching’ they shared the time between New York, and Cow Pasture, Barbados. He is the father of one son, Michael Kwesi Brathwaite born in Ghana, and grandfather of Ayisha, both of whom live in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

In the above photo, taken at a Convention at New York University on December 8 & 9, 2000 organised by Professor Timothy Reiss, honouring Kamau on his 70th birthday (KB70), “Between Caliban and Sycorax: Kamau Brathwaite and Caribbean Culture”, he is seen with wife Beverley, grand-daughter Ayisha, sisters Mary and Joan, and son Michael.

We, Kamau’s sisters – Mary (Jamaica), current owner of the “Round House”, Thelma (London), and Joan (Barbados) – and our families, are grateful for the opportunity accorded through this special BIM Issue, November 2010, to pay tribute to our brother in his 80th year. But even as we give thanks that he has attained four score years, we are deeply concerned about what he terms his ‘cultural lynching’, when so much of his work and so many of his treasures (thousands of items in print, manuscript, tape, disk, even the Musgrave Gold Medal awarded by the Institute of Jamaica) have strangely, unaccountably disappeared from his New York apartment and no-one can determine how or why. Of late, Kamau and Beverley dare not leave the apartment together lest there should be something else missing on their return.  These disappearances are worrisome and we pray for their safety. May they be blessed.  On the Barbados side there is the uncertainty of their future comfort at their home, “Cow Pastor”, if permission which has been given, with certain stipulations, limits the extent to which the property may be modified to house his archives.  There is also still concern about the proposed road which is to be constructed in the area.  Yet may they be blessed…

Kamau’s nostalgic poem about “the morning & meaning of home” (pp 82-84 in Barabajan Poems) is appropriate here –

“But today I recapture the islands’

bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean

rolling into the fishermen’s houses

By these shores I was born: sound of the sea

came in at my window, life heaved &

breathed in me then

with the strength of that turbulent soil”

And we close with words from Mary’s ‘Highway to Vision: This Sea our Nexus’ (presented at the symposium North-South Counterpoint: Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean Word, Hostos Community College, City University of New York, Oct 24, 1992) – which speak to the centrality of the sea, and “Round House”, in Kamau’s work:

“We were brought up by the sea. ….  And we came to appreciate, and to learn, the movement of the sea, which forms so much a part of Kamau’s work. The sea, our highway out (immigration, to study); our wave-ride back – back to what Brathwaite calls “the centre,” after England and Ghana: ‘I had, at that moment of return, completed the triangular trade of my historical origins.’”

References

Books/Journals/Magazines:

1          Brathwaite, Doris M. EKB. His Published Prose and Poetry 1948-1986: a Checklist. Savacou and New Beacon Books, London, 1988.

2          Brathwaite, Joan A. The changing landscape of Bay Street and its environs: A disappearing heritage? A comparative pictorial kaleidoscope. (A research paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History (Heritage Studies) of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados), 2007. 

3          Brathwaite, Kamau.   His works.

4          Broberg, Merle. Barbados. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

5          Mapp, Hugh. “The birth of the Diabetes Association of Barbados”. In Lifestyle Choices Magazine, vol. 6, no. 1 (July 2010): 12 [35th Anniversary Special of the Diabetes Association of Barbados].

6          Morgan, Mary E. “Highway to Vision: This Sea our Nexus” in World Literature Today, Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, vol. 68:4 (Autumn 1994 KAMAU BRATHWAITE 1994 NEUSTADT INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE): 663-672; in Caribbean Quarterly vol. 44, nos. 1 & 2 (March-June 1998 KONVERSATIONS IN CREOLE: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF KAMAU BRATHWAITE): 169-176.

7          Ngũgῖ wa Thiong’o. “The Voice of African Presence” in World Literature Today, vol. 68:4 (Autumn 1994 KAMAU BRATHWAITE 1994 NEUSTADT INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE): 677-679

Archival Records:

Information from the Barbados Department of Archives

Deeds, Wills, Conveyances, Correspondence, Invoices

[Property of Walcott-Gill-Brathwaite Family]

Reminiscences [Brathwaite Family]