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CHAPTER ONE
NEW HAVEN, 1921-41
IN JANUARY 1975, I BEGAN LEAFING THROUGH AN OLD BOOK THAT WAS
KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY IN A SMALL WOODEN BOX WITH A GLASS TOP
in the back of St. John's Anglican Church on Nevis, a tiny island in the
eastern Caribbean. For the sake of tourists, the book had been opened to the recordation
of the marriage of Lord Horatio Nelson, then stationed in Antigua, to the widow
Frances Nisbet on March 11, 1787. Nevis has another claim to fame: Alexander
Hamilton, first United States secretary of the treasury, was born there in 1755. I
looked at every brown page of that timeworn document for evidence of my
ancestral past. Both my parents were born and reared on that island. I was
intrigued by a 1758 notation that reads: "John Huggins, mulatto, property of
Miss Huggins, baptized." My mother was a Huggins. She had a brother, nephew,
and great-nephew named John Huggins. A notorious Englishman, Edward
Huggins, and his two brothers (according to the local Tourist Bureau literature)
were major slave owners prior to 1833 and were undoubtedly responsible for the
fact that many people on the island of Nevis and their descendants, both black
and white, are surnamed Huggins.
The rector at St. John's had stopped writing in the old church record book in
1826, when England required the rector of each parish to keep a systematic record
of all christenings, marriages, and deaths and furnished
printed record books for this purpose. It took about two hours, with the
help of my husband and son, for me to leaf through the printed records
from 1826 to 1934, the year my paternal grandmother died.
Several former slaves and their descendants, as the printed church records
disclose, took the surname Huggins on being baptized. The rector
apparently insisted that the new Christian have a Christian name. Some of
the former slaves, perhaps bewildered by this requirement, took the surname
of the rector, Pemberton, who, in 1826, started baptizing slaves, as revealed
by the column headed "Occupation." The newly baptized slaves and former
slaves thus became Englishmen with black faces. The mulatto children of
plantation-owner Englishmen in the eighteenth century who were baptized
were also recorded as such. My mother's father, Alexander Huggins, was a
mulatto. She had an older brother named Edward Huggins. She named
one of my brothers Edward.
In anticipation of freedom, in 1833--the start of the official four-year
period of transition from slave to free man--the occupation of former slaves
who were christened was recorded not as "slave" but as "apprentice." England's
plan for ending slavery on this Caribbean island possession was to
have the slaves work five days a week for the master, as usual, and two days
a week for wages during the transition period so that they could learn how
to become paid workmen. Earlier, the slave owners had been required to
list, every three years, each slave by name so that if slavery ended the slave
owner could be paid for the loss of his property. Each slave had been
assigned an acre or less of land for growing his or her own food. The slave
owners had decided that it was too expensive to import food to feed slaves.
The sugar plantations were generally on low ground close to the Caribbean
Sea. Nevis is otherwise very hilly, with a dormant volcano at its center
called Nevis Peak, which Columbus reportedly spotted on his second voyage
to the New World. Legend has it that the peak reminded him of one of
the Swiss Alps, because it is usually enshrouded by white clouds, like snow,
and so he called the island Nieves, meaning "snow" in Spanish. And, of
course, when the British took the island from the French early in the eighteenth
century, the British called it Nevis. According to some historians,
England then removed the Jews from the neighboring island of St. Christopher
(St. Kitts), where they had settled, to colonize Nevis.
When slavery ended, much of the land on Nevis was owned by the
Crown. Some former slaves abandoned their assigned lots and settled on
crown lands, especially the hills. Consequently, the former slaves became,
in practical effects, landowners living in their own quarters with their own
mates and offspring. So the middle-class family structure and land ownership
on Nevis began early. The population was predominantly black and
mixed race. Most plantation owners left their lands and returned to England;
only a few struggled on. Runaway slaves who had fled to live among
the runaway Caribbean Indians in the hills largely remained there until
water and electricity were made available in the villages nearer the sea in
the middle of this century. The speech patterns of these isolated individuals
was a mixture of Elizabethan English, African, and Indian languages, which
has survived to this day.
The ending of slavery coincided with the decline of the Caribbean
Islands as the world's leading sugar-producing area. Nevis, which flourished
because of sugar production in the eighteenth century, had ground to a
poverty-stricken halt by 1837, the year slavery officially ended. That year,
my grandfather Alexander Huggins was born and christened in St. John's
(also known as Fig Tree Church because it is in an area then called Fig
Tree and now called Church Ground). His mother, the records disclosed,
was Ann Wyatt, all "apprentice," who was christened at St. John's as an
adult the year before. She was sometimes known as Ann Weekes. There
were no other Wyatts in the Church records. The parents of adults who
were christened were not listed. My maternal great-grandmother apparently
liked the surname Huggins for her firstborn, although, since he was mulatto,
she may have given him the name of her former slaveholding English
owner.
We next discovered that Ann Brazier, my father's paternal great-grandmother,
also an "apprentice," had been baptized at St. John's in 1833. She
apparently had been a slave on Ann Brazier's estate, which lies behind the
church in an area where my father was born in 1885. The name Brazier
can be found among the early-nineteenth-century memorial plaques on the
walls of the church. The name Thomas Woolward is also memorialized
there. His daughter, Frances Nesbit, had married Lord Nelson in 1787.
My grandfather Alexander Huggins married Jane Ann Woolward in St.
John's in 1864. They had twelve children, all of whom were baptized in
St. John's except the youngest, my mother, Rachel Keziah Huggins, who
was baptized in the Methodist chapel at Brown Hill in 1887. The reason
for this aberration was that my mother's mother had been baptized in the
newly constructed Methodist church in Charlestown, Nevis, in 1845. (The
stone building is still standing; in 1994, the church celebrated its 150th
anniversary.) Jane's parents were Methodists, Thomas and Cecilia Woolward
of Clark's estate. It appears, however, that Thomas Woolward was
first baptized at St. John's as an adult on March 1, 1839. My mother
attended the Methodist chapel in Brown Hill with her mother until it
burned down about 1897. Her baptism is recorded in the separate record
for that chapel. She and her mother then returned to St. John's, which her
father steadfastly had refused to leave on the ground that all of his forebears
had been members of that particular Anglican church. My mother's mother
had a brother or other male relative who was in charge of the chapel at
Brown Hill--which probably explains her desire to attend that chapel. It
was also much nearer, by at least three miles, to my grandmother's Brown
Hill home than St. John's. The Methodists originally were tormented on
the island of Nevis because of their early opposition to slavery, which accounts
for their ability to recruit former slaves in a land overrun by Anglicans.
There are five Anglican churches on Nevis, all built of stone and with
slave labor. Some, like St. John's, claim dates in the 1600s.
My grandfather was a prominent citizen and church member. My
mother told me that he often was selected to serve on juries, an indication
of his standing in the community. He had a two-story house that he had
built himself, according to my mother's cousin Sarah Pinney, on a low hill
overlooking the Caribbean Sea. A few of the stories from the foundation
remain. The house was built on land on which my grandmother had settled
after slavery. At the time of her christening in 1836, she listed her abode
as Low Ground, an area just below my grandfather's house but considerably
nearer to the sea. It is still so designated. My grandfather may have been a
carpenter or builder. When parishioners were required to pay dues for their
church pews, my grandfather, who was older and poorer by then, made
himself a small wooden bench, which he placed in the rear of the church
and dared anyone to move. It was there undisturbed, like everything else
in Nevis, until 1976, when eighty of its returned for a Huggins family
reunion. My grandfather was, in any event, a laborer who did many things,
as most island men did. When he was older, he injured his leg, which
confined him to making lobster traps for fishermen at home, a trade that
still goes on in the new Nevis. He died in 1917, at the age of eighty, and
was buried in the churchyard at St. John's. Jane died seven years before
him and was also buried there.
Ann Brazier's son, Abel Zephania Baker, named his son Moulton Zephania
Baker. The surname Baker is also found among the 1829 memorial
plaques on the walls of St. John's, which may explain why Ann Brazier
gave her son this surname. There were some other nonwhite Bakers among
the parishioners at St. John's and among the Methodists in Charlestown,
but our relationship to them is not clear. Bertram Baker, for example, the
first black in the New York State Assembly from Brooklyn, was born in
Nevis. His wife, Irene, whose maiden name was also Baker, was born in
Brooklyn. Her father was a well-known Methodist minister in Brooklyn
and Nevis. He also operated a small store in Charlestown that sold items
for schoolchildren. Many Nevisian elders remember him well for this
reason.
My paternal grandparents, Moulton Zephania Baker and Isabella Watley,
were married in St. John's in 1884. They were about twenty years
younger than Alexander and Jane Huggins. Their eldest son, Willoughby
Alva Baker, my father, was christened in September 1885. Isabella Watley's
mother was Mary Ann Tyson. (The father of the actress Cicely Tyson is a
member of the same clan.) Isabella's father was a white man, George Watley.
She, however, looked like a Caribbean Indian--short, moonfaced, with
long black hair to her waist--as we can see from the only photo of a
forebear in the family annals. She lived next door to St. John's Church
most of her life and died in Nevis in 1934. A part of her house is still
standing.
My father had a brother, Joseph Addington Baker, and two sisters,
Sadie Nellie Bell and Anna Virginia, all of whom migrated to New Haven
with my father's financial help. With the aid of both brothers, Virginia
attended Commercial High School after her arrival in 1924 at age fourteen.
She graduated about 1928. She lived with her sister, Nellie, until she joined
the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in 1942. Aunt Nellie had
married Samuel Paris, a Nevisian, and had two children, Doris and Calvin.
Uncle Joe also had two children. Pearl and Ruby.
Of my mother's eleven brothers and sisters, two brothers, Edward and
John, came to America. Edward, who had worked on board vessels traveling
between New York and various Caribbean Islands, settled in New York,
about 1902, where he got a job as a construction worker. He then moved
to New Haven in 1905, following the advice of some Yale students he had
met in the theater district of New York who told him about the availability
of easier service jobs there. John Huggins went to New Haven in the early
1920s, stayed for a while, and then settled in Boston. He went on to father
twenty-two children. He and his wife died in their forties. Their eldest son,
Harvey, is still living in California, age eighty-five.
One sister, Dorcas, came to the States in the early 1920s also but
claimed she could not stand the cold and returned on the next boat back
to the family home on Brown Hill in Nevis, where I now have a home.
My mother's brother Edward was followed to New Haven by one of
his friends, my father, in 1906. My mother, having somehow accumulated
the twenty-five-dollar steerage-class fare, came the next year. She and my
father were married that October in St. Luke's Episcopal Church, a newly
constructed brick edifice on Whalley Avenue. I was the ninth of their twelve
children, three of whom died in infancy before I was born in 1921. My
father's first job was as a dishwasher at the New Haven House (a hotel on
Chapel Street opposite Yale) for nine dollars a week. He escaped the draft
for World War I, since, when called, he was in the New Haven Hospital
with pleurisy.
My uncle Edward, who had established himself in New Haven with
the aid of Charles Mills (the first Brown Hill Nevisian to come to New
Haven, in 1902), sent first for his Nevisian wife, Meloria Gilfiland, then
his four children, John, Arlene, Josephine, and Ernest. He returned fairly
regularly to Nevis until the early 1930s, when he brought back his second
wife, Edna Sampson. (His first wife, had died about 1918.)
Ed had Secured employment as steward of the University Club at Yale
about 1915. He remained steward until about 1940, when it closed. Then,
he moved to the new fraternity row on York Street and became steward of
Zeta Psi Fraternity House, where he remained until 1946. He died in 1948
at age sixty-seven. The fraternity house closed in his honor the day of the
funeral, the largest I had ever seen. John, following in his father's footsteps,
became, sometime in the early 1930s, steward of the Fence Club at Yale,
where he remained for fifty-two years. When I was growing up, all of my
male relatives seemed to work at one Yale eating club or another.
My parents, as well as the others who migrated from Nevis, had the
good fortune of learning to read and write, add and subtract in what were
known as the English Standard Schools. They also learned a trade. In Nevis,
my father was a cobbler, and my mother was a seamstress. She also taught
very young children for a year or two before coming to America. My parents'
education was probably equivalent to the tenth grade in the States at
that time.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class household, where my father was head
of the house. Generally, West Indian men (particularly those from the British
islands) wanted to demonstrate, always, that they, were as capable as any
man. They considered themselves superior to the average American Negro
because of their education in the English Standard Schools. My father never
discussed race relations as such, but he always expressed his views on black
Americans, who he thought were generally lazy, no good, undisciplined,
and lacking middle-class values. (He had the same myopic view of American
blacks as most whites.) The few friends he brought home from work were
either white or West Indian, preferably Nevisian, with a lifestyle closer to
his own: "hardworking, law-abiding, self-respecting" people, who appeared
in public with white shirts, starched collars, ties, and jackets. My father
always expected to find the parlor straightened up and ready for company.
When he came home to rest for a couple of hours during the day, we
children had to be as quiet as church mice.
I was born in a three-family house on Day Street near the corner of
Chapel. Our apartment was on the third floor and included two attic rooms
and a hall room. Although blacks were only 2 percent of the population,
the neighborhood was quite thoroughly integrated. The grammar school
was two short blocks away. We seemed to have no more and no less than
everyone else. There was beautiful Edgewood Park with a playground
nearby. There were two beaches--one at Lighthouse Point and the other
at Savin Rock with its amusement park. Fear and racial conflict were simply
not a part of the landscape.
Just as my father kept his distance from working-class American blacks,
established middle-class blacks shunned the newly arrived West Indians. As
a result, my parents' friends were largely other West Indians. My father had
a friend, Henry Williams, who claimed he was born in Cuba. He later
changed his name to Henry Enrique, so he may have been a white Hispanic,
but he apparently had some black blood. His wife was from Jamaica, where
she would have been known as a White Jamaican; she had very fair skin
and reddish-brown hair. I suspect that Williams was also a White Jamaican.
In Jamaica, White Jamaicans were royalty; in America, they were largely
members of the servant class like most other immigrants. White Jamaicans
were whites who knew they had black ancestors. White Cubans, on the
other hand, were white descendants of the Spaniards. Williams may have
sought to take advantage of this subtlety. When necessary, this couple
passed for white. They stayed completely away from black Americans. They
visited with the few Jamaicans around who were also of mixed race. They
lived on Gill Street in the block behind us, which, at the time, was all
white. (Some whites would not [Illegible] to blacks.) Williams worked as a chef
like my father. He was one of the few people my father considered a personal
friend, somebody who would drop by uninvited for conversation and
usually for drinking. Their European backgrounds made these two friends
ineligible for membership in the Christian Temperance Union. The Williamses'
only son grew up without siblings or cousins. After World War II
and college, he married a white woman and left New Haven, like several
other young men who were similarly of mixed racial background. Williams
claimed he had been raised as a Roman Catholic in Cuba, but later he
became staunchly anti-Catholic, anti-religious. He occasionally had gone to
St. Luke's Episcopal Church at his wife's urging, but in the end, he did
not go to Church at all. He was a man who struggled constantly with his
racial and ethnic identity. There were times when we did not see him for
months. He eventually became ill and committed suicide by hanging. His
self-imposed deeply restricted life in the shadows apparently drove him
insane. I have since wondered how many others who straddled both worlds
also went insane. At the very least, they all lived stress-filled lives.
I learned from my father's constant debates with Williams that my
father was fourth-generation Anglican and had been the sexton of his church
in Nevis, as was his father before him and his younger brother after him,
though he was basically not a churchgoer. However, he always went to
church on Easter. One of my earliest recollections of my father is of an
Easter Sunday when my sister Eunice and I went to church with him. I
was six years old, maybe seven. This particular Easter Sunday, my mother
stayed home with three younger children. My father aided her by combing
our hair and helping us get dressed. My mother had made our dresses and
coats, and we had new patent-leather shoes, which my oldest sister, Olive,
had bought us. My father went to church wearing a high silk hat, a cutaway
coat, and striped pants, the way, apparently, the British in Nevis dressed
on Easter Sunday. The Nevisians were simply more British than the British.
We got to church late and had to walk down the center aisle and sit in the
front row. There we were, Eunice and I, trailing behind our proud West
Indian father.
My mother was a tolerant, peace-seeking person, who did not have
strong views on race and never disparaged any ethnic group. She understood
well America's basic creed of equality. When all of her children had finally
grown up, my mother felt free to go to church, as my father said, "every
time the church door opens." In New Haven, the church was not only the
house of God but the center for social intercourse. My mother became very
active in the Woman's Auxiliary and United Churchwomen, a statewide
group of Episcopalian woman. In 1936, she became the first woman elected
to an Episcopal Church vestry. My father, on the other hand, did not
belong to any church groups. Men generally did not participate in church
in the same way women did. The men (no women) acted as acolytes and
sang with the women in the choir, but my father did none of, those. He
could not sing or chose not to. (I guess that explains why I cannot sing
and why I got all F in Music in the third grade. I was deeply shaken by
this. I was finally put out of the church choir.)