Celebrating -- A Legacy -- Thanksgiving In Jamaica Reveals A Family's Roots

We trekked to Jamaica, my family and I, to meet my mother's relatives in Kingston for the first time one recent Thanksgiving week.

The Yankee holiday meant nothing to our Jamaican family, so after we broke Jamaican hard bread with our first and second cousins and great-aunt Vida (my grandmother's sister), we boarded a train to spend Thanksgiving in a villa we had rented off Montego Bay.

It was a back-to-the-roots trip for my mother, my brother, two of my three sisters and I, but the impoverished roots my grandparents had left in Kingston 70 years ago had borne a richer fruit for many of their descendants. Two of my mother's maternal first cousins were teaching at the University of the West Indies, a few more held posts in the government. Most of my grandfather's relatives had long since immigrated to Canada or the United States.

During the six-hour train trip, the Jamaica my Grandpa Percy had reminisced about reeled by: rural train depots, some with hand-lettered signs, a man bathing and waving to the train from an irrigation canal, children in simple cotton dresses like the ones my grandmother and her young sisters wore in old photographs.

Grandpa Percival Rainford and Grandma Isolina Suarez emigrated separately from Jamaica and met and married in 1927 in New York City, where Grandma still lives. During occasional visits from New York City to our Bainbridge Island farm, Grandpa Percy helped us care for my father's goats and told tales of herding cows as a boy in the red hills of Jamaica.

There, out the window, I saw the red hills. The clay bled a rusty red across these rural hills just outside of Kingston. I glanced at my mother. She stared out the window. Grandpa Percy died in September 15 years ago. As the red hills blurred by, it seemed as if he had just gone home and was there, watching from those hills.

We felt overly opulent as we drove our rental car up to the villa. The surrounding poverty, though not as stark as on the streets of Kingston, was quite apparent. Foreigners owned most of the vacation villas in this resort development. Jamaicans staffed them. The split bred resentment. A Texan owned the one we stayed in. When we arrived, we were treated as foreigners by the cook, maid and gardener - cordial yet distant.

But the staff soon realized we weren't the usual guests. For one, we weren't big spenders. We had saved for a year to rent the villa, and we had but a few dollars left. Within a couple days, the hard liquor and soft drinks disappeared from the bar refrigerator. They packed them away. They knew we couldn't afford that.

In the place of these amenities, we earned their respect. My sister Sharon gleaned cooking tips as she helped Mrs. B. cook. My brother Terrence and Jonah, the gardener, pounded the rental car wheel rim flat after we crunched it in one of the deep potholes. My sister Laura sketched portraits. We all washed dishes.

We also shopped for our own groceries, and as the Thanksgiving weekend approached, we noticed the supply of food dwindling on the grocery store shelves. By Thanksgiving, there was nary a chicken in sight - not a holiday shopping crunch, but an everyday food shortage.

"Mother is a Jamaican so you are all like family," said Mrs. B. as she hustled Sharon and me out the door early that morning to gather dinner. She used her influence to nab the fishermen's first catch off the local pier, fending off several offers to buy the fish as she carried it back to our car. From produce stands, she prepared rice and black-eyed peas cooked in coconut milk, sliced cucumbers in vinegar and ackee and salt cod. Ackee, a native Caribbean vegetable, has a hard red-hued pod on the outside and a yellow meat inside that looks and tastes like scrambled eggs when seasoned with salt cod. Since colonial times, Jamaicans have used ackee - poisonous if not prepared properly - to stretch their salt fish rations.

That evening, Mrs. B. and Jonah sat down and shared our meal for the first time. We gave thanks to them. And silently, I also thanked my grandparents for the rich friendships their native legacy had provided us.