JACK MUH NANNY GAP

My family and I moved to Barbados in 1962 from Guyana.  We were to be reunited with my father who had left Guyana two years earlier.  After a short stay in my grandfather’s house in Grazettes, we moved to the middle part of Wavell Avenue1.  Wavell Avenue – a street that had been renamed sometime in the 50s before my family started living there.  The avenue used to be called Jack Muh Nanny Gap, a colorful, Barbadian name, rich in culture and resonant with working class life and aesthetics.  According to Addington Forde [Place-Names of Barbados], the street was named after a brother and sister, Jackie and Annie.  The contraction of these two names must have happened over time and from constant usage.  For whatever reason, this name was replaced by Wavell Avenue, so named in honor of Sir Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl of Wavell, a British field marshal, and Commander of the British Armed Forces in the Middle East during World War II.  It is still not clear to me what is the relationship between Lord Wavell and Barbados, let alone a tributary avenue off Black Rock, a major traffic artery in the parish of St. Michael. People who lived on that street could not recall being asked either about retaining the name or changing it.  A decision was simply made to rechristen the street.

The first house we moved to in Wavell Avenue was not to the front of the street but nestled in the bowels of a long gap, which at night required good vision to wend one’s way to where our house was located.  You did not exactly get to the house by chance but at night, in the absence of a lit pathway, intuition was an important skill.  Our house was a classic Barbadian chattel house – one gabled roof, a shed and a kitchen.  I have had several conversations with friends about the way the Barbadian chattel house is currently being used merely as an icon of Bajan culture, to be consumed as art by tourists without an understanding of the history and social  implications of the structure of such a house.  In the post-emancipation period, the Located Labourers’ Act permitted the ex-enslaved to build houses on the land owned by the plantation.  The term chattel is given to these houses because they represented movable property.  These were very basic wooden structures, with gabled roofs, and set on blocks.  As Hilary Beckles noted, in the shadow of the Great House, stood the chattel house, which symbolized the landlessness of the newly emancipated.  The people who lived in or owned these houses, did not own the land on which they were located, so that the houses had to be built in such a way that they could be relocated from one lease-holding site to another, or on a spot that permitted  some respite from usurious land-owners. 

The Barbadian chattel house was architecturally designed to facilitate assembling and dissembling of its structure.  The house itself was not built on a solid concrete foundation but on blocks, which made moving the structure relatively easy.  Depending on how much land was being leased from the landowner, the lessee was often forbidden from building any permanent structure on the land they were renting – no pig pens, cow sheds or sheep stalls. Landowners were also wary of lessee’s planting trees on the land, for such action also implied a sense of permanence that made them uncomfortable.  Where there was sufficient land for the cultivation of food crops, this became a source of conflict between some landlords and lease-holders, who were either expected to share some of their products with the landlord, or to provide him with some cut of the proceeds of any sale of these crops from the market.  The relationship between landlord and lessee was characterized by considerable control, which the former held over the latter.  The lack of permanence that marked the relationship of the chattel house owner to the land was directly related to the vulnerability of the poor Barbadian worker.  It was in effect part of the hidden injuries of social class that the poor in Wavell Avenue and across the island felt in relation to the power of private property.

One could imagine also that the process of moving a house was an elaborate affair that required a great deal of planning.  Moving meant finding an appropriate size lorry to do the job, and a lorry-driver who could do the job at a time that was mutually convenient.  The task of dismantling the chattel house in one location, and reassembling it in another, required a group of men to accomplish this objective.  This process then became a Saturday or Sunday, all-day ritual, in which the men had to be fed with food supplied by the chattel house owner.  In addition, a rather lavish amount of rum had to be made available to the men, most if not all of whom would have been rendering their services free of charge.  The real cost of the labor of relocation was paid in grub and grog.

When my family first moved to Barbados, the number of gabled roofs you had on your chattel house was a signifier of your household income.  As children became working adults who contributed to the household finances, the additional income manifested itself in the building of a second roof, and a third, for those who had more adult children.  For families without children, better economic circumstances afforded more spacious accommodation, hence more roofs added to the original structure.  Those families with more household incomes began gradually to remove the wooden parts of the house and replacing them with a concrete structure, which most Barbadians called ‘wall’, a description which many non-Barbadians find amusing.  The use of concrete [‘wall’] in a part of the house, starting from the kitchen and moving forward, was the beginning of a flat-top bungalow, which was an expression of class mobility, of having made it socially in Barbados.  It is important to remember that up to that time (the 1960s), and still so to some extent today, grown children left the household of their family of origin only when they were going to start their own families, or if they were migrating.  Of course, some never left their original homes, they simply inherited the house of their parents in the fullness of time.  The idea of leaving home and going off to live in one’s own apartment at eighteen, nineteen or twenty, is a North American concept that had not taken root in the Barbadian culture of the family at the time. 

One lasting memory of the first place we lived in Wavell Avenue that did not register as significant to me until I was much older, was the presence of some older men in the community, who on occasion would speak to each other in a language that I did not understand.  In time, I came to realize that these were some of the men who had gone to help in the construction of the Panama Canal at the turn of the 20th century.  Many Caribbean men from Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, went in search of better economic fortunes in Panama.  It is here that they acquired fluency in the Spanish language.  When the canal was completed by 1914, some of them remained in Cólon in Panama, while some moved to the neighboring cities of Puerto Limón, in Costa Rica, the Bluefields of Nicaragua, and others moved on to Barranquilla and Cartagena in Colombia, and many went to Baraguá in Cuba.  During their time spent working in Panama, these men had sustained families back in their home territories through the remittances of their earnings.  Having worked abroad for several years some returned to Barbados to live out the rest of their lives.  Those who ended up living in Wavell Aveune tended to meet at one man’s house; they would drink, and they would talk about all types of issues, but when they wanted to exclude the rest of the community, they spoke in Spanish.  No one in our community at the time understood the importance of their history, because their lives seemed so mundane, that we were unable to discern any value in their lived experiences.  They were just old men who enjoyed sharing their memories among themselves, in a language we regarded as strange. That they had helped build the Panama Canal was beyond our imagination.

Mudheads

By about the middle of that year, 1962, we moved once again, to another house, this time, on the main road of Wavell Avenue.  Here we began to build a more solid family unit, and settled in our adopted homeland.  I started to attend St. Stephen’s Primary School and began to develop a network of friends both at school and in my immediate community.  It was about this period that I learned for the first time that I was a “mud-head”.  Understandably, this was never an issue in Guyana.  It was a nickname that was hurled at me often, but not so much by my peers, who were perhaps not as knowledgeable about the geography of Guyana or about the leaves and mud that made its water brown and murky.  My peers just thought then that I talked ‘funny’, and that I had a different vocabulary, for certain things that they called by different names. 

I said gineps and dongs, they said ackee and dunks; I talked about a ‘bottom house’, which was totally foreign to people in a country which was not below sea-level, and did not at the time, have much of a problem with flooding but with hurricanes, hence, the architecture of houses was built lower to the ground than the average height of a house in Guyana.  In other words, there was normally no area under the house in Barbados that could be utilized as a social space in dry weather conditions.  In Guyana, assuming that there was no flooding, children played under the house, adults slept in hammocks there, played cards and dominoes, stored things under there, or just relaxed in the ‘bottom house’, while chatting with friends or relatives. 

The costal plain occupies about five percent of Guyana’s habitable land.  It is where most of the people of Guyana live.  This area is made up of alluvial mud that is swept out to sea by the Amazon River.  The term “mud-head” is a reference therefore to this muddy area.  Because of the azure blue waters of the beaches of Barbados, the older boys held nothing but contempt for the murky creeks and rivers of Guyana.  A story is told by a friend of seeing an advertisement in the Barbados Observer, a local newspaper at the time, of a man who claimed that they were selling land in Guyana at $5 a gallon!  This tale is a measure of how much of a swampland Guyana represented to people in Barbados.   By the sixties, the pivotal role played by Guyana in absorbing Barbadian labor was but a distant memory.  These were hardly more than petty, national differences, which were not yet burdened by sentiments of insularity fueled by regional prejudices, and infused with the meaning of xenophobia, threats to job opportunities, or the presumed devaluation of Barbadian labor. 

Insularity intensified when Guyana played Barbados in the annual regional Shell Shield cricket competition.  It did not help that from time to time when Rohan Khanhai and Basil Butcher tamed the fury of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, or when Lance Gibbs proved way too much for the normally elegant stroke-play of Seymour Nurse, who incidentally hailed from Wavell Avenue as well.  Cricket is a very serious sport of national pride, passion, and masculine performance, so that the bragging rights of the two principal countries that dominated West Indies test cricket at the time, was not a matter of polite discourse.  Admittedly, we were never silent in our support for the Guyanese cricket team, which did not make matters any less tense.  Understandably then, regional rivalries tended to intensify the ardor of nationalism and insularity, and as the only Guyanese family around, we became the quintessential “mud-heads” from B.G. – a country associated in the Barbadian imaginary with bacoo men, obeah, rioting, looting, and muddy waters.   For as long as I can remember, Barbadians have never  acknowledged any expertise in the occult or supernatural world.  Obeah men and women are believed to come from Guyana or St. Lucia.  Presumably possessing no local practitioners, Barbadians have always retained the right to employ the services of a Guyanese obeah man or woman to do their bidding.  Baccos have always originated in Guyana, and consequently must be put back in a bottle and put out to sea, so that they would find their way back to Guyana. Barbadians have never made claim to preeminence in these areas of the spirit world, so that the Guyanese and to some extent, the St. Lucian, have always been loved and hated at a certain level, because of this knowledge and these skills they are presumed to possess.

Belonging

Wavell Avenue did not have a reputation as a rough area in which to live.  There was a drainage-well about the middle of this long avenue.  The well was at the corner of Wavell Avenue and Belfield Road.  Mostly young men, but also older men usually congregated there to shoot the breeze, call at women passersby, to argue about cricket or football, politics and a myriad of other topics.  They sometimes gambled on the concrete surface of the well.  Once, when our house cat went missing for a couple of days, someone informed us that one of the young men who frequented the well assembly, had thrown the cat down the said well.  It was an act of unmitigated cruelty, which outraged my mother.  Once we learned of this incident, we lowered a basket on a rope into the well, and the cat recognizing a mission of rescue and mercy, was only too happy to be hoisted out of there, evidently quite frightened and no doubt very hungry. 

From time to time, a policeman would pass through Wavell Avenue on a bicycle.  The men who had been gambling would scatter, because of the illegality of the activity, but the policeman, would hardly pursue any of them.  What I remember distinctly is that the police always collected the money that was left behind from the fleeing men.  Even as a child my sense was that these raids were never formally reported to the authorities. 

From time to time there were fights on or around the well.  Some were small scuffles, and some bloody ones, but Wavell Avenue was never really known for having bad men or scoundrels.  It did not resemble what Lamming described as the culture of violence of Carrington Village, but it did have its share of characters.  There was for example Goose, who was the best barber around, when sober.  Goose cut the hair of boys and men under a tree or next to his house in the upper part of Wavell Avenue.  Then there was John Jickum, an original cowboy, who was adopted by Dan Springer – one of the biggest dairy farmers of his time.  John Jickum worked milking, cleaning and looking after the cows on Springer’s farm.  I remember John terrorizing all of us as smaller boys in the avenue. 

We had a little ditty that we used to sing whenever John was in close proximity, of course, not close enough for him to catch us.  It went like this: John Jickum, the fountain rat/Live in a hole in Jack Muh Nanny Gap.   Usually he would simply curse after us, or he would make a run at us and we would all scamper away.  One afternoon a group of us were repeating this refrain.  John was a short distance away; he did not say anything until we got to the part where we shouted, ‘Live in a hole in Jack Muh Nanny Gap’.  John quite extemporaneously substituted a crude rhyming couplet that involved our mothers’ anatomy.   We were so stung by his vituperation, that I do not recall every teasing him in this way again.

Apart from the world famous cricketer Seymour Nurse, who by the time we moved to the street had long left the neighborhood, Wavell Avenue’s best-known residents were Dan Springer and Eric ‘Fingers’ Alleyne.  Dan Springer was one of the most successful dairy farmers in the country.  His cows often won prizes at the Annual Agricultural Exhibition.  Dan Springer was a very rich but unpretentious man.  He owned most of the land in the upper part of Wavell Avenue, in addition to a number of shops and houses.  Dan had a love for jazz, and often invited some of his friends to his home for jam sessions with him.  Most of us did not understand this genre of music at the time, but it was certainly refreshing to hear these melodies in the middle of the avenue at night. 

‘Fingers’ was an outstanding pianist, who played in the tourist circuit at night in all of the major hotels in Barbados that offered entertainment, even if only nightly dinner-time music.  ‘Fingers’ Alleyne played the full gamut of music from pop to jazz.  You would often see him walking down Wavell Avenue to catch the bus on Black Rock, which would take him to one of the top hotels on the West Coast of the island.  He would be dressed in a white cotton shirt; a pair of black pants, black socks and shoes, a black tie, which he usually held in his hand, and the ever-present cigarette in his mouth or between his fingers.

There were two fiery Pentecostal churches whose function it was to save the souls of residents from fire and brimstone.  One of these churches was near to the drainage-well, but never seemed to have had any particular impact on the men who gathered noisily in the same vicinity whether a church service was taking place or not.  It never seemed to soften the violent language, which was the currency of communication of the group of men who carved out space on the well.  They never seemed anxious or concerned that God might in fact grant them their impassioned entreaties to inflict blindness on their assembled colleagues or passersby. 

The second church, also of Pentecostal affiliation, was located at the other end of the avenue, nearer to Black Rock. This was not the type of street on which you would find an Anglican, Catholic or Methodist church.  These established churches were located in respectable parts of the island, catering to a different class of congregants.  Pentecostalism resonated with the folk of Wavell, either whole-heartedly, in terms of active membership in the church, or as a site of observation by those who congregated on the periphery of the institution for reasons of pure entertainment.

The arrival of television in 1966 in Barbados was an interesting communal experience for those who lived through the advent of this new technology.  At one point, one of the three white men who lived in Wavell Avenue purchased a television set.  There were a couple near, and not so near, white families on that street, but as Gordon Lewis reminded us in the Growth of the Modern West Indies, racial purity in the Caribbean is at a minimum.  To the best of my memory, Mr. Fenty was the first person to acquire a television set in Wavell Avenue.  The memory of this acquisition is not difficult to recall, because this television was not just his personal property.  We all laid claim to that set.  His television became ours.  Mr. Fenty had to open the windows to his veranda, so that all of us from the top of the street to the bottom could see what was showing on television.  He had no choice as to whether he wanted to turn on his set on this evening or that.  At about 6:00 p.m. people started assembling in his veranda, and that was it.  The community had expressed its viewing preference, and Mr. Fenty, the owner of the set, really had no choice but to comply with the wishes of the masses of children and young adults of Wavell Avenue.   We were such avid viewers of television that we had committed all of the commercials to memory, and recited them in harmony with their broadcast.  I could still remember the commercials for Sprite.  None of us black residents would normally have been guests in Mr. Fenty’s house, but his acquisition of a television set, changed our access to his property, even if we could only stand on his veranda.

There were so many markers of social class built into the experience of living in Wavell Avenue that one knew instinctively one’s status from very early.  We understood our social standing from the type and size house we lived in.  We knew who in the neighborhood were better off  because they had running water, and electricity.   Some people had an outdoor stall in the yard that served as a bathroom, where you would take a bucket of water to use for bathing.  Others simply had a tap [‘pipe’] set up in the yard that served as a shower, without the privacy of a stall, so that one’s nakedness was in full view of anyone in a nearby tree, or on a ladder painting or repairing the house next door.   Only a few houses had telephones, and fewer families owned a car.  Only one social  group in Wavell Avenue bought ice by the piece.  I remember being sent to buy three cents worth of ice from a neighbor.  People bought cheese by the ounce, not the pound, and a whole chicken was a luxury afforded only by those who reared their own stock of roosters and hens. At the dinner table, the part of the chicken you received with your meal was commensurate with your status in the household.  Parents, usually the father, but sometimes also the mother, got the chicken leg.  Children had to settle for the chicken wings.  A child would only occasionally be rewarded with the chicken leg, usually because of some kind of academic achievement or on birthdays.

There was a standpipe in the middle of the avenue.  It served all the residents who were without running water in their houses.  Standpipes date back to the nineteenth century in Barbados.  They are not peculiar to Barbados; they are to be found in Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean, where people did not have access to running water.  The standpipe in Wavell Avenue remains in the same spot today, but is no longer used.  Standpipes are a reminder of a different, pre-modern era, when they represented a focal point for bathing, washing clothes, socializing or providing water for cooking or for filling the ‘monkey’ – the goblet made out of clay to keep the drinking water cool in the absence of refrigeration. 

It was the role of women and girls to fetch water from the standpipe.  After filling their buckets, they hoisted them on their heads, where a piece of cloth was placed to cushion the weight of the heavy bucket of water.  With amazing balance, these women and girls would carry their buckets home without any spillage of the water.  Boys were rarely assigned this chore.  

As boys in the avenue, we played cricket, almost every afternoon.  We missed playing only when our parents were punishing us for some misdeed, or if we were ill.  We played until darkness prevented us from seeing the ball.  It was the location of our playing that was an important lesson of social class formation for me.  We played on the lawn of a fairly prominent family.  In the vocabulary of the Barbadian system of racial classification, the phenotype of this family would be ‘red’, that is, clearly not white, but embracing a respectable distance away from blackness.  Despite the high yellow tonality of skin color, blackness forever threatened to reveal racial admixture in the texture of hair, the shape of noses, lips and other facial features.  The area of the lawn was big enough to accommodate reasonably good cricket-playing conditions.  Our relationship to this front lawn was intriguing.  We had a place to play cricket in the afternoon, where we controlled who from the neighborhood was eligible to join us on the lawn; and the owner of the land and the big adjacent house, sat at one of his windows, and was entertained by our playing.  We were all working class children; a couple of the boys came from what would roughly qualify as a middle class background.  The two sons of the owner of the lawn did not play with us very often.  It was never clear to us whether this was the result of lack of interest on their part, lack of skill, or that their parents had instructed them not to mix up with us too often.  It may well have been also, that unlike us, they had to deal with the demands of social activities, like the private lessons they received to improve their performance in school, piano or violin practice, etc. 

On the rare occasion that the children of the owner did play with us, their mother summoned them inside fairly early, to do their homework.  Though our parents had hoped for the best for us, they had less of a hands-on approach than their middle class counterparts.  It is not that our parents were lax, indeed, we were punished more severely than our middle class peers, but discipline on the part of our parents was less directed.  We were just expected to go to school and learn well, grow up and get decent jobs. 

I believe that the owner of the lawn, as a parent, had much higher expectations for his children, especially given that they had already started off with the advantages of color, class and an established social network of influence.

I had never given much thought to all the above reflections until I had left for the United States to do my master’s degree.  By this time we had moved from Wavell Avenue to Deacon’s Farm, this was a bigger and better house but in the government housing area, which made my living arrangements and my social status even more stigmatized in the Barbadian context.  While abroad studying in graduate school, my father wrote to me to tell of an encounter he had with the owner of the lawn.  They had a chance meeting somewhere, and the owner of the lawn expressed satisfaction over the way both his son and I had turned out.   His son had become a doctor.  He told my father: “Mr. Lewis, who would have expected that these boys in the yard would have turned out this way?” My father reported being impressed by this declaration of conviviality. 

For me the comment by the owner of the lawn to my father had less to do with sociality than would appear on the surface.  He and his wife had socialized their children for success, had carefully nurtured their paths with all of the activities that only a privileged class status could afford, and had in effect, adequately prepared them for assuming a position of prominence in society, to rise to heights that even they had not managed to achieve.  How then could he possibly have been surprised by the success of his son?  He would only have been surprised if all of the preparation had not been successful and his son had turned out to be a social failure.  What in my view he was expressing was surprise that one of these working class boys from the yard had risen through education to where he could transcend the limitations of his upbringing.  When I returned to Barbados in 1989 with a Ph.D. in hand, this had exceeded any expectation he could possibly have had of me or any other boy from the yard.

When I returned to Barbados I entered into a different relationship with the family that owned the lawn.  For one thing, I was actually invited into the house, a courtesy, which I do not recall ever having been extended to me before.  The closest I recall getting to the inside of this big house, was to the veranda, where the wife of the owner of the lawn had served us some refreshments one day.  At this point, I do not recall the occasion for her generosity.  I had played cricket on this lawn from 1962-1969 and had never seen the inside of this house until 1991 when I had completed my contract at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, and was returning to the United States, to take up the position which I still hold at Bucknell University.  On the one occasion that I visited with the family, I was moving back from the kitchen of the house to the veranda.  As I made my way to the front, I overhead the son who, by now had established himself as a doctor, saying something to his cousin, who was also visiting at the time, and who had known me well.  The doctor was pointing out the house where I had lived, from 1962-1969, which was obliquely opposite his own family’s house.  It was a very small house.  In fact, having become spoilt by the size of houses in the United States after so many years, it seemed awfully tiny in comparison, even to me.  I remember wondering how it was that five of us, my father, mother, brother, sister and I, had lived so comfortably in this seemingly cramped space.   I was just a bit surprised that the doctor had found it necessary to point out this biographical detail to his cousin.

While I was marveling over how successful my family was negotiating space in this small house, my friend, the doctor, with whom I had grown up, was concerned with something quite different.  He was, from what I had overheard as I approached the veranda, indicating where I had lived so many years ago.  He was making a statement about my social class origin.  He was in effect, bringing to the attention of his cousin that, though I might have gained some mobility as a result of my educational achievement, that this recognition, this respectability, should not obscure or confuse anyone about my lowly origin.  His hushed tones, and abrupt end to the discussion of the matter as I approached, suggested to me that perhaps this was a place about which he felt that I might feel some measure of embarrassment.  It was a moment of singular clarity for me.  It reminded me of what separated my friend, the doctor, from me.  Despite our friendship over the years, there was this matter of social class that separated us, even though we had both achieved much in our lives.  It was a matter of breeding, or as my father-in-law once said in another context, it was a case of being from ‘good’ blood. 

Two things struck me about this incident, and I have never indicated to the doctor that I had heard what he had said about me.   First, was the reaction of the doctor’s cousin, whose upbringing, though similarly middle class, had been given a radical trajectory, and for whom the revelation of where I had come from would not have made much difference.  His terse response to the doctor was: “Yeah, I know”.  Indeed, he did know.  He had spent time in Wavell Avenue and had known where I lived.  It was not like this cousin to see my place of abode as a measure of who I was or who I am today.  In short, his was a dismissive response that signaled to me, that my former place of residence did not matter in terms of the way he viewed me.  The second point for me was that little did the doctor know I had never sought to hide my humble beginning.  As a matter of fact, I wear it like a badge of honor to inspire others to dream of transcending the obstacles of their own modest beginnings.  Rather than engage in a kind of historical amnesia about my class origin – a posture assumed by too many recent middle class, educated and professionally well-off Barbadians – I fully embrace my working class background. 

This reflection about my life in Wavell Avenue however, is not intended to suggest a philosophy of personal uplift.  As a sociologist I am fully aware that there are structural and other social impediments that could hamper an individual’s chances of making it out of one’s poverty and away from one’s social class origin.  Needless to say, recognizing the existence of some issues outside of one’s control is not an excuse for failing to make a serious effort, or being disciplined or having big dreams.  If I have learnt one thing about Barbados and Barbadians over some twenty years of living in this country, it is the primacy of class snobbery.  Class snobbery is about not revealing the unmentionables.  It is about class erasure and the tendency to forget origins.  Often, though not always, irrespective of how much transcendence might occur, the specter of class origin continues to haunt the progress of social mobility.  There is part of the Barbadian culture that is always ready to remind one of the facts of blood, belonging and status.  I refer to this phenomenon as class snobbery and not class-consciousness because it seeks to pigeonhole the lives of individuals, as opposed to a conscious process intended to transform the material conditions of peoples’ lived experiences. 

For me then, the reality of my time lived in Wavell Avenue, confirms in my own mind, the inescapable nature of social class, and how in subtle and not so subtle ways, we are socialized from very early into accepting socially constructed differences, how we cultivate different expectations of ourselves, and how we fathom our life chances.  Coming to terms with this phenomenon is the awakening of a political consciousness about social class.  It is therefore important that we understand these unstated lessons about social class, especially if we intend, at some juncture, to engage in a rendezvous with history.

(Endnotes)

1          I have used the name Wavell Avenue throughout most of this essay because this was the name of the street at the time that I started living in the area.  Jack Muh Nanny Gap was its original name.

References:

Beckles, Hilary. Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers’ Protest in Barbados, 1838-1938. Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004.

Forde, G. Addington. Place-Names of Barbados.  Barbados: [Publisher?], 2003.

Lewis, Gordon K. The Growth of the Modern West Indies.  New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1968.

Rodney, Walter. “Barbadian Immigration into British Guiana, 1863-1924”. Paper presented to the Ninth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, April 3-7, 1977.