There is of little interest botanically to write about today, as December 14 was all about walking into town to see about procuring a copy of my grandmother’s birth certificate. After a brief side trip to check out the library, we headed to the government courthouse where I was disappointed to find out that my grandmother’s records were too old. They’d been destroyed in a fire several years back. Heartbroken, we went in search of groceries and lunch.
A cannonball tree (Couroupita guianensis) outside of the library.
Lunch offered our first, and best, snack shack experience (my new band name) at the Maggi, owned and operated by Mary Lestrade. It is common here for snackettes to be named, or at least referred to by the company that sponsors them rather than the owners name. I suppose it makes sense in the case of Maggi since the logo dominates the exterior of the building. What I loved about this snackette was that despite its size, there was space inside for 3-4 people to sit down and eat under protection from the glaring sun. I have to admit that I also enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversation between Mary and her patrons. Older Dominicans have a beautiful, sing-song way of speaking that I knew through my grandmother, Scylla, but could not put a mind to until I stepped off of the plane and suddenly my grandmother’s voice was everywhere. After the trip a friend asked if going to the place where my family is from was like stepping into my gene pool. I would say that it was in that I felt a connection to a deeper part of myself that isn’t right out on the surface. However, borrowing from the pool analogy, I would say that it was most certainly like diving headlong into a culture that I had grown up with, yet experienced only indirectly. Suddenly, I had direct context for a myriad of little things that had long confounded me about my grandmother.
Notice the creole/madras cloth used as a curtain. You can read a bit about the history of madras cloth in the Caribbean here.
Lunch: boiled chicken, brown rice and beans, provisions. Just like my grandmother used to make.
The sorrel was too sweet. This proved to be a trend everywhere we went. I was especially disappointed on occasions when freshly squeezed juices were sweetened with sugar.
As we ate our food, we quietly listened to one man talk about emigrating to England in the 60s and eventually coming back to Dominica to retire. The immigrant experience is something that I am interested in, for obvious reasons. Happening upon his story was a gift, especially on the day that I had begun my quest to trace my origins and get a sharper picture of the path my grandmother had taken to leave the island a good 20 years before he had.
On the way back up to Morne Bruce, we stopped at the Catholic Church, hoping, at best, for baptismal records. I wasn’t even sure that my grandmother had been a member of this church, but it was worth a shot. Dominicans are a generally religious people and Scylla had the glory glory in a MAJOR way. It was one of, if not THE characteristic that defined her. Given that there are few churches in Roseau — chances were good that there was some little nugget of info to glean. We were brought into a room where I was asked a series of questions about my grandmother: name, birth date, parents, and by the way, Who are you and why do you want this info? After some wait I was beckoned to another building where I was presented, to my utter shock and surprise, with a duplicate copy of young Scylla’s certificate of baptism. The year was 1912 and she was barely 2 months old. Happily, the form included her mother’s name (I already knew this), father’s name (a key piece of information that I was missing) and the name of the co-signer. In that moment it felt like being reunited with a long-lost piece of myself. I cried like a baby while standing on the steps outside, still in shock, that little piece of paper clutched in my hand. I had felt the absence of this loss, this not knowing the names and dates of the people who came before me, but could never put a name to it until now. For practical reasons this information proved to be vital in searching public records for breadcrumbs that I hoped (and still hope) would lead me to find out more of my ancestral past.
