Beyond The Horizon: A Jamaican Immigrant Chases His Dream In America 6t36u

BEYOND THE HORIZON

A Jamaican immigrant chases his dream in America

A MEMOIR RANSFORD W. PALMER

Copyright © 2012 by Ransford W. Palmer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919686 ISBN: Hardcover Softcover Ebook

978-1-4797-3707-9 78-1-4797-3706-2 978-1-4797-3708-6

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Contents

Dedication

1 The Formative Years

2 Arrival in the United States

3 New Beginnings

4 The Winter of 1964

5 Back to New England

6 A Happy Return to Jamaica

7 Our Children Begin to Arrive

8 A Call from a Friend

9 Travels with the Family

10 The Reagan Years

11 A New Home

12 The Education of Our Children

13 The Death of My Parents

14 The Deaths of Siblings

15 Traveling the World

16 Reflections

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Sally, and to our children, Geoffrey, Christopher, and Laura. It is an attempt to weave together the important strands of my life and the people and events that shaped it. Much of what I am today was influenced by the experience of growing up in a dusty little village where people were self-reliant and where many saw my future promise. Much of my life has been dedicated to fulfilling that promise in America and to laying the groundwork for my own children to fulfill their own promise. As a professor, I have had the good fortune to help shape the intellectual lives of thousands of students. And in the process, they also shaped mine. This recollection was influenced by many people along the way, but especially by Sally and the children we raised together.

1

The Formative Years

I was born early one November morning in a village called Braeton on the plains of the parish of St. Catherine in Jamaica. I was told that at the same time a British man-of-war entered Kingston harbor, carrying the country’s new governor, Sir Alexander Ransford Slater. This gave my father, who named all his children, the inspiration for my own name. My middle name is Wentworth, a rather upscale appellation for one born in such humble circumstances. The village was virtually surrounded by the huge banana and sugar plantations of The United Fruit Company and had a population of around five hundred. Generations of men ed their families by doing physical labor in the surrounding plantations. Those not so employed eked out an existence from fishing in the sea, a stone’s throw away, or in The Great Salt Pond, thirty-eight acres of salt water separated from the sea by a sliver of sand. Some produced charcoal from wood cut, often illegally, in the nearby public woodlands. My parents were James Cornelius Palmer and Cordella Albertha Palmer (lovingly called “Cud” by all who knew her, including her children). When Cud married my father, she had already had five children fathered by Ephraim McKay. They were: George, the eldest, who was swept out to sea while working on a fishing boat; Hazel, who often proclaimed me her favorite sibling and who, in later times, became bishop of a church she founded; Millicent, who ran a little bar in historic Spanish Town; Lloyd, also a fisherman, retired to upstate New York to live with his two sons; and Francis, who migrated to London to run his own construction company. After she married my father, she had seven: myself; Lorenzo Lincoln, known as “Lincoln,” who worked first for the Jamaican government and later for the state of Florida; Conway, a textile worker who now looks after the family properties in Braeton; Alvin, another migrant who found his home in Sheffield, England, working for one of the well-known producers of “Sheffield Steel”; and Terrence, who perished in a horrific accident carrying a mirror while riding his bicycle on a rough road. He lost control of the bike and dropped the mirror, which shattered and severed one of his arteries. He bled to death before help could arrive. My parents’ youngest children were twins, Rexford and Minerva; both died of measles around their second birthdays.

Another of my father’s children is Herbert, called “Skipper” or “Skip” and seven years older than I am. He was a master diesel mechanic employed at the Kaiser Bauxite Company in Ocho Rios. At this writing, only three of my siblings are alive: Francis, Skipper, and Conway. My father was universally known as “Mr. P.” or “J.C.” He was largely selfeducated and loved to read. He could often be seen in his shop in the mornings perusing the daily newspaper. Then he would brief his customers about what was new. My wife, Sally, once accompanied him on his morning stroll in Braeton, where he appeared as a jaunty figure with his felt hat and cane. He greeted everyone with a quiet “Good morning” and was greeted in return. To my wife, he seemed quite the picture of the village’s elder statesman. In the village, no one had formal education beyond elementary school, and not every child who attended elementary school actually finished. Some had to work to supplement the meager incomes of their parents. A searing image of the time was a bullock-drawn cart loaded with sugar cane and led by a little boy. That image was always used by parents to scare their children into going to school. At the center of the village economy was the grocery shop, which supplied a range of goods to the working population. The volume of business would rise at crop time when more workers were hired to reap bananas and sugar cane. The shops purchased their supplies from wholesale merchants in the capital, Kingston, who in turn imported much of their inventory from the United States and Britain. The banana and sugar plantations, on the other hand, exported their crops, which meant that the economy and the rhythm of the village ebbed and flowed with exports to foreign markets, particularly the United Kingdom. Of the three shops in the village, two were owned by Chinese merchants and the other was managed for a while by my father for the wholesale firm of Alexander Dolphy and Sons in Kingston, which owned several retail shops around the country. The village had no electricity, no running water, no telephone, and for a long time, no post office. Communication with the outside world demanded some effort. A medical emergency required someone to ride a bicycle on unpaved roads to the nearest hospital in Spanish Town five miles away to request an ambulance—if one was available. The communication isolation encouraged people to develop home-grown solutions for many things. Many relied on herbal medicines handed down for generations. There was a local bush for every

medical condition, and babies were delivered by the local midwife who had no formal training. This self-reliance came home to me one day in the starkest way when a pot of boiling water tipped over on my younger brother Lincoln. It severely burned his chest and belly. My mother heard his horrible scream of pain and rushed in immediately. We carried him into the house, took off his shirt, and laid him on his back. My mother applied coconut oil to his chest and belly presumably to ease the pain, but in the days that followed, the sores became serious. Yet my mother was calm. She apparently had no fear that the sores might become infected, and she never thought it was serious enough to take him to the hospital five miles away for treatment. Instead, she instantly gathered some goat dung, parched it in a frying pan, pulverized it, and sprinkled it on the wounds every day for three weeks until they began to heal. I am sure that this treatment did not come out of the blue; it must have been part of a stock of practical knowledge handed down through the generations. The village had a carpenter, a cobbler, a tailor, a barber, a butcher, and one beekeeper. The beekeeper’s name was Maximillian Sadler. He always wore suspenders, which strained against his protruding belly. The locals called him Mr. Maxi. He had an apiary on his property, and once a year he would hire a few local people to extract honey from the honeycomb frames with hand-operated extractors. My mother was one of the locals, and I often stopped by to watch the operation. Mr. Maxi had the biggest house in the village. He also had a horse and buggy and a small Ford truck for hauling the few barrels of his annual honey production to a honey dealer in Kingston. Mr. Maxi was married to the aunt of my friend, Richmond, a Spanish Town boy. Richmond drove both the buggy and the truck on various missions while his father tended Mr. Maxi’s apiary. On occasions when school was out and Richmond took Mr. Maxi in the horse-drawn buggy to the train station at Gregory Park, four miles away, he would alert me beforehand. I would then hitch a ride on the back of the buggy, unknown to Mr. Maxi. And when Mr. Maxi was safely aboard the train, I would climb into the cab and ride in his seat for the trip back home. The cast of characters in the village also included some who were believed to possess special powers to do evil things. This belief played a prominent role in the case of my cousin, Randel Gordon, who lived next door. Randel was lying on his back on his bed in his house, seriously ill with bubbles of blood foaming from his nostrils. The family who gathered around him were frightened

by what they saw and thought his condition was the result of a curse placed on him by a man named Spider. Spider was a loner and a heavy smoker of marijuana, called “ganja” in Jamaica. He was known to practice necromancy, which the locals call obeah. People said that he had a long-running feud with Randel and that Spider had cast an evil spell on Randel to get even. As Randel’s condition deteriorated, his family decided to send him in a mule-drawn cart to the hospital in Spanish Town, five miles away. His sister, Curdel, accompanied the cart driver. Half way into the journey, Randel died, and they turned the cart around and headed for home. Curdel, a tall athletic-looking woman, ran ahead of the cart, wailing all the way and shouting for everyone to hear that her brother had died. Back in the village, everyone believed there was foul play and that Spider was involved. So the local constable sent word to the Spanish Town Police Department, which arranged to have the coroner come to the village to conduct an autopsy. The body was placed under a shed in the yard, and the younger children were kept at a distance. I was close enough to see the coroner cut open the body to examine it. His verdict was that Randel died of tuberculosis. The disease had severely damaged his lungs, causing blood to foam through his nostrils. Spider, after all, was innocent, although his reputation lingered. Despite the absence of telephones, word got around the village quickly when it needed to. When word went out that my maternal grandmother, Susan Gordon, had fallen seriously ill, relatives and friends, including the principal of the elementary school, were at her bedside in no time. The principal, who had a high status in the village, stood near the head of the bed and asked for a small mirror. He placed the mirror over my grandmother’s nostrils, and when he saw no mist on the mirror, he declared her dead. My grandmother was the matriarch of the Gordon family, and the news of her death was met with much sadness throughout our small village. My father would teach me to count whenever I spent time at his shop. At age six, I was enrolled in the village elementary school, which also doubled as a church on Sundays. I lived about half a block away from the school, and every lunch time, I would run home. This earned me the nickname “Runner.” Throughout my years at the school, I incurred the jealousy of other students as I was advanced two grades at a time and became the youngest student in the sixth and final grade. The school was a public school, but the building it occupied was owned by the Methodist Church. One day the pastor of the church, the Reverend Alphonse, came to visit the school. As we assembled to greet him, he asked the

school principal, E. M. Johnson, to point out his brightest student. The principal pointed to me. It was a moment that never left me. I was the first person to go to high school from my village. After ing all three of what was then called Jamaica Local Examinations, I applied to the Anglican-run Beckford and Smith’s High School for boys in Spanish Town and was accepted. In the years that followed, I rode the ten-mile round trip to school daily on my BSA bicycle, on unpaved roads that cut through the seemingly endless sugar plantations. This was the same bicycle my father rode when he was a young man. In the city of Spanish Town, my route took me past the Crystal movie theater with its large posters of movies playing and coming, past some well-to-do homes, and on to the campus at Ravensworth, a stone’s throw from the shallow flowing Rio Cobre. High school was a happy time for me with lots of studying mixed with sports. I was captain of the second eleven cricket team, with an occasional stint on the first eleven. I one low moment on the field when I muffed a catch because the sun was in my eyes, causing a spectator in the stands to yell, “That boy couldn’t catch a cold.” I maintained my composure and later redeemed myself with two difficult catches. In the absence of electricity at home, I studied at night by a kerosene lamp, much like the ones American pioneers used in western movies. On weekends when I wasn’t playing cricket, I would position myself in the crotch of a large genip tree nearby to review my notes. I also devoted some time to raising chickens, a hobby I developed after iring the success of one of my neighbors. Most people in the village raised some kind of livestock to supplement their income, so I decided to try my luck with chickens. One day, I made a brave trip to Kingston by bus and bought a dozen Rhode Island Red and Leghorn baby chicks along with some chicken feed. I also picked up some instructions on how to raise them. From an early time, I was handy with tools, so I built an elaborate coop to house the chicks and to safeguard them from predators such as my neighbor’s dog or the occasional mongoose. As the chickens grew up, I gave them names, some of them after famous cricketers. I named a large Rhode Island Red rooster after the burly Guyanese cricketer, John Trim. It weighed about six pounds and was my prized chicken. One day when I returned home from school, I discovered that John Trim was missing. I checked the coop for a possible opening through which he might have slipped, but there was none, which led me to conclude that it couldn’t possibly have escaped from the coop. I was

perplexed, so I asked my mother if she knew anything about it. She said quietly that the chicken man had come around, and she was running low on funds so she sold John Trim. Naturally, I was disappointed that I was not consulted. After all, he was my prized chicken. But upon reflection, I felt good about contributing to the family budget. Over the years, my family earned extra money by raising goats, pigs, and cows in our backyard. I a large sow named Agnes that had a litter of six to eight piglets once a year. One Saturday when I was about ten, my mother took me along with three of the piglets to the central market in Spanish Town. She paid the fee for a spot to display the piglets for sale. My job was to keep an eye on them when my mother was elsewhere doing her Saturday shopping and to tell anyone who inquired that they were ten shillings apiece. I would sit quietly and watch the foot traffic around me and make sure the piglets were secure. In a relatively short time, we were able to sell all three of them, and my mother rewarded me with an ice-cream cone for my vigilance. Late one afternoon, someone came to our house to tell us that our sow, Agnes, was killed by the United Fruit Company’s ranger because she had strayed into the company’s property. We were shocked and saddened because the property was not even under cultivation at the time. Moreover, the ranger who cut its throat was a resident of the village, a man named Shengé, whose name will live in infamy. While we had no reason to believe that he knew it was our sow, we saw him as agent of a multinational company that willfully destroyed our income-earning asset. We retrieved the body of the sow, butchered it, and gave some of the meat to our neighbors. Years later, my father was transferred to a larger store in the middle of the country in the small town of Alston in the parish of Clarendon. During the summer holidays, my mother would take us there, and we would help behind the counter with sales and other chores. Under the counter, there were barrels of rice, flour, cornmeal, and sugar. Nothing was prepackaged. When people came to buy a pound of rice or sugar, we would scoop it from the barrel and weigh it in the scale on the counter and then wrap it in brown paper. I was a good wrapper. In anticipation of the weekend crowd, we would wrap a shelf-full of one-pound packages. On a separate counter, we sold salted mackerel and salted cod from Nova Scotia. We chopped the large, flattened cod into smaller pieces weighing anywhere from a half-pound to several pounds. People called the salted cod “salt fish.” It is an integral part of the national dish called “ackee and salt fish.”

The mountainous topography of the parish of Clarendon was in sharp contrast to the plains of St. Catherine. Agriculture was small scale and diversified instead of large monoculture plantations of bananas and sugar cane. Individual farmers grew a wide variety of food products, which they sold in the local market. To negotiate the steep hills, the typical mode of transportation was a donkey with a hamper on each side. The hilly terrain even affected the way people walked on level ground: they tended to step high. In the summer of 1951, we did not go to the country because of warnings that Hurricane Charlie was imminent. We battened down our windows and secured our doors and waited with some trepidation in the house for Mr. Charlie to arrive. We worried about whether the house would survive the predicted force of the wind and the rain. The architecture of our house was typical of houses in the village. It was made of wood, and it rested on concrete pillars about two feet high. The roof was corrugated zinc, and the ceiling was lined with wood. It had a verandah and jalousie windows as well as windows with glass panes. Close to midnight on August 17, we began to hear the noise of wind rushing through the trees. The wind intensified, and the rain on the corrugated zinc roof grew louder. As the wind grew stronger, the house shook, and we feared that we might not survive to see daylight. But as the wind abated and the rain diminished to a drizzle, we all expressed a sigh of relief—we thought the ordeal was over. Little did we know that the quiet interval meant that we were in the eye of the storm and that the backside of the hurricane was yet to come. Less than half an hour later, the intensity of the wind picked up again, sounding louder than the first phase. As we huddled in the drawing room, we heard a heavy thud on the roof as if something big had fallen on it. When the storm ed, we anxiously ventured outside in the darkness of the early morning to assess the damage and saw a coconut tree resting on the roof. My older brother Lloyd and I decided to take a tour of the village to assess the damage. The road was an obstacle course of fallen trees in a river of swiftly rushing water from the overflowing irrigation canals of the nearby sugar plantations. As we ed the homes of people we knew, we shouted out their names to find out if they were alive. There were no casualties. That same year, I ed the Senior Cambridge School Certificate examination, which determined graduation from high school; I chose the option of staying on for an extra two years to study for the Higher Cambridge School Certificate examination. In those days, the examinations in the colonies were graded in

Britain at Cambridge University and students did not know the results until they were published in the local newspaper. One morning, one of my neighbors came running toward our house shouting at the top of her voice that she saw my name in The Daily Gleaner. I had ed all areas of the exam. It was an exhilarating moment for me. I was now ready to look for a job. The social and economic setting in Jamaica at the time was one which placed a large on high school graduates because the share of the high school age population actually attending high school was small. For graduates like me who had ed the Higher Cambridge School Certificate Examination, the prospects were particularly good. I was assured of a white-collar job with the government of Jamaica. With the help of my older sister Hazel who lived in Kingston, I began my working life in the capital as a junior civil servant in the Colonial Secretary’s Office, with thoughts of further education never far from my mind. Every morning, I would ride my bicycle four miles to the Gregory Park station where I would leave my bicycle at a Chinese retail shop and catch the 7:15 train for the twenty-minute trip to Kingston. After a while, this daily commute became difficult, particularly when it rained. Sometimes when I was about half a mile from the train station, I would hear the whistle of the approaching train and would board it with only seconds to spare. I eventually moved to Kingston to live at the home of Hazel and her husband George and later found a place at a boarding house which catered to young civil servants like me. I was transferred from the Colonial Secretary’s Office to the Ministry of Finance and then to the Ministry of Communications and Works. Later, as fortune would have it, I was sent to the Collector General’s Office, assigned to the Kingston waterfront as a customs officer. It was fortunate in the sense that it allowed me to earn extra income from overtime work as ships loaded and unloaded late into the night. This enabled me to save more for my further education. Many young men of my age had plans to go abroad to study, especially to the United States, where we heard there was the possibility of working one’s way through college. Such a possibility did not exist in Jamaica. Moreover, at the time, the local university had a limited curriculum and could not accommodate those who wished to study in fields not offered. As I contemplated the possibility of study in the United States, I ed the words of a visiting African American who spoke to us at my high school years before. He told us to “dip down your bucket where you are.” By that, he meant that we should utilize the resources at home to advance ourselves. A similar

message was conveyed indirectly to me a few years later by a white American cruise ship enger from the state of Georgia while I was on duty as a customs officer at the pier where his cruise ship was docked. In a brief conversation, I told him that I was planning to go to the United States to study, but his response was not encouraging. He thought I would be better off in Jamaica. These two different people may have had legitimate reasons for their views, which may have been shaped by the way they saw the status of black people in America. But ultimately, the view of America by many young people of my generation trumped the recommendations of those visiting Americans. My view was shaped by Time magazine, which I read avidly every week, the movies, which I attended regularly, and the great American singers and entertainers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Billy Eckstein who had visited Jamaica. As in all views from a distance, important details tend to get obscured. But the details were not important to me at the time; what was important was the bigger picture of further education. Life as a young civil servant in Kingston had many happy moments. I traveled around with a group of friends, Douglas Garel, Aston Kong, and Leonard Wong. Their nicknames were Gus, Tuts, and Puggy, respectively. They called me RP. As single young men, we went to many parties and sometimes drank too much. As time ed, the dynamics of the group began to change. One by one they either got married and started a family or left the island to study abroad. This made my objective of pursuing further education even more urgent. I visited the local public library and spent hours going through the encyclopedia of North American universities. I had had prior information about Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from my friend Dudley Cawley, who had gone there two years earlier. Based upon the information I gathered, I applied to three schools, one in Canada and two in the United States, including Marquette. I was accepted by all of them, but I chose Marquette, a Jesuit institution, because it seemed the most affordable for my budget. I left Jamaica on September 14, 1958, on an Eastern Airlines flight to Miami where I changed planes for Chicago and then on to Milwaukee. It was my first flight and the first time I was leaving my country. Many of my relatives and friends came to see me off at the Kingston airport. It was a bittersweet moment. I was leaving the comfort of my family and friends and all that was familiar for an unfamiliar destination that had the power to determine my future. Like Columbus, I felt I was on a mission of discovery. I sat in a window seat on the left side of the plane, and I watched my native landscape slip away below me as

the four-engine propeller DC-7 aircraft climbed north over the Blue Mountains and beyond the horizon.

2

Arrival in the United States

A fter changing planes at Midway Airport in Chicago, I flew into General Mitchell Field, the Milwaukee airport, on a North Central Airlines DC-3 aircraft, fully expecting a delegation from Marquette to welcome me to America. I collected my suitcase and walked around the arrival area, hoping to see someone with a sign with my name on it. After all, they knew I was coming for I had sent them my travel schedule. My suitcase was beginning to feel heavy because in those days suitcases didn’t have wheels. It contained all my earthly possessions, including a tin of Ovaltine, which my big sister Hazel insisted that I take because, in her words, “You might need it.” She suspected that I might run into difficult moments and might need something to pick me up. As I wandered around the arrival area, trying to figure out my next move, a limo driver spotted me, thinking no doubt that I looked lost, and asked me where I was going. I told him Marquette, and he said he was going back into town and would take me there for five dollars. To me, at the time, five dollars was big money, but I was glad for the ride. The limo driver took me to the university issions office on Wisconsin Avenue. If people were watching the scene as I alighted from the limo, I couldn’t blame them for thinking that I was the offspring of wealthy parents. I inquired about housing at the issions office, and they recommended I stay at the nearby YMCA for the night until they were able to find a place for me. I spent my first night in America in a room on the thirteenth floor of the YMCA. I never felt so alone. I wrote a long letter to Hazel, describing my journey and what I had seen so far of Milwaukee. The next day, I went back to the issions office, and they recommended a privately owned off-campus building at 1046 North 12th Street, which housed some older male students. It would be my home for the next four years. I was beginning a new life in a place far from my relatives and friends. As time ed, I began to encounter episodes of cultural collision. Much of what I inherited from the colonial culture in which I grew up began to be challenged by the daily realities of American life. This came home to me on a city bus. It was inculcated in me that if a man is sitting in a crowded bus, it is good manners for

him to give his seat to a standing woman. This was precisely what I did on a bus in Milwaukee. The woman was white; she looked at me scornfully and did not take the seat. I was puzzled by her reaction. But later, upon reflection, the incongruity of the situation dawned on me. My act, seen against the background of blacks in the South fighting for the right to sit up front in the bus, must have appeared subservient or even clueless. The woman must have wondered—who is this black dude completely oblivious of the broader context of race relations in this country? Or she might have been completely flabbergasted by my unexpected gesture of civility. My American education had begun. I grew up in Jamaica reading the only newspaper available, The Daily Gleaner. Ideologically, the Gleaner was right of center and the prism through which I saw the world was undoubtedly influenced by its reporting. After I graduated from high school, I became an avid reader of Time Magazine, also ideologically right of center. Time presented a glowing image of President Eisenhower, an image I thought was held by everyone in the United States. Upon arriving in the United States, I was exposed to an array of opposing views, which presented a more complicated picture of America. During the racial school integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, I was shocked to hear singer Eartha Kitt call President Eisenhower a nitwit for his slowness in ordering troops to protect the black school children from angry crowds. I later learned that she was banned from performing at the White House and that her career suffered as a consequence.

Life at Marquette

My greatest challenge in the first months at the university was to adapt myself to the discipline of study. I had been away from school for several years doing whatever I wanted with my time after a day at work. It was my decision to leave all this behind to pursue higher education. Now it was up to me to develop a plan that would force me to work on my assignments in an orderly manner. My fellow undergraduate students at Marquette were coming directly from American high schools and were therefore familiar with the American approach to education—an approach that I had to learn from scratch. After a year at Marquette, my funds began to run low. Since I had no family

resources to fall back on, I was confronted with the daunting task of finding a part-time job in a city that was in 1959 experiencing a deep recession with an unemployment rate higher than the national average. My father had given me the entire proceeds of five hundred pounds sterling (worth approximately two thousand dollars at the time) from his life insurance policy, which had matured just as I was preparing to leave Jamaica. Together with my savings, I thought I had enough money to cover my education and living expenses for at least two years, but my living expenses were higher than I expected. As an international student, finding a part-time job to supplement my finances during a deep recession was a struggle. Moreover, whatever jobs that were available for a student of color in this racially segregated city were typically menial. This meant I had to undergo a kind of a cultural transformation in order to earn some money. After frequent visits to the university employment office to check on part-time jobs, I discovered the only one available job was at a chicken-processing plant. Completely unaware of what to expect, I went to the plant, inquired about the job, and was hired to do cleanup chores. One of the first things I noticed was that all the employees on the production line were black women. They picked slaughtered chickens off a conveyor belt, cutting them into various pieces. I don’t know what they thought of their jobs; I hated my mine. It was certainly different from my white-collar civil service job with the Jamaican government. But I consoled myself with the thought that it was temporary. And there was one fringe benefit I liked: occasionally, management allowed me to take home a chicken or two. Upon reflection, the job was an important part of my education outside the classroom. It exposed me to what I saw as the dark underbelly of the American economy. Milwaukee was a residentially segregated city. The black population was concentrated in the low-income section in the north, the Poles were in another sector in the south, and the Germans and Anglos occupied the rest. With a generally low level of education and skills, blacks were a source of low-wage labor for local employers. And with low wages and racial prejudice, it was difficult for them to break out of the trap of residential segregation. At Marquette, an island of sanity in this milieu of segregation, there were only a handful of African American students, most of whom were basketball players. And at the time, none came from the city of Milwaukee. In almost all my classes in the School of Business, I was the only student of color. However, throughout the university, there was a small contingent of international students, including several from India, Africa, and a few from the Caribbean, which provided

opportunities for social interaction. I was active in the International Students Club and was the editor of the Club’s newsletter, Nota Bene. I also designed the covers. In the School of Business, I served as treasurer of the Management Club and was a member of the Marquette delegation to a Mock United Nations Convention at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After two years in America, I grew homesick. In the summer of 1960, I ed a group of fellow Jamaicans from the Milwaukee area on a trip back home. We decided that the most economical way to travel was by car to Miami and then by plane to Jamaica. Traveling through the South allowed me to see firsthand what the civil rights struggle was all about. In this land of the free, there were few hotels, motels, or restaurants along our route which accepted black people. We made as few stops as possible for gas and refreshments. At one stop in Georgia, we casually entered a store, which apparently had never had black customers before. The store owner did not take kindly to our presence; he regarded us as uppity and pointed a gun at us and ordered us out. We also noticed that blacks working as helpers on trucks were not allowed to sit in the cab with the white driver. Along the way, we paid close attention to our speed, fearing that we might be pulled over for the slightest infraction. This was precisely what happened to us on our return trip. The Florida highway patrol stopped us midway between Miami and Jacksonville, claiming that we were exceeding the speed limit. When we protested, the officer threatened to take us all to jail if we didn’t pay a fine of one hundred dollars right there. We had little money left over after our trip to Jamaica, but the five of us were able to scrape together that amount. As time went by, my circle of friends at Marquette grew and included many from Wisconsin, such as James Botsch, whose father was vice president of a local bank, and Sandy David, a student from Pennsylvania. There was also Jerry Pogozinski, a fellow student who lived with me in the same boarding house. I the time I called Jerry from the middle of Lake Michigan on my first trip to Canada. I was traveling with my friend Tony Mensah from Ghana, who had been accepted into medical school in Montreal. We were aboard the ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan, our plan being to drive his car from Michigan to Montreal. In the middle of the one hundred-mile-wide lake, I discovered I had left my port in my room at the boarding house. I panicked because I needed it to get into Canada and to reenter the United States. The ferry’s skipper allowed me to use the ferry’s telephone to call Jerry to ask him to retrieve my port and send it by special delivery to the U.S.-Canada

immigration station at Sarnia at the border of Michigan and Ontario. It took Tony and me a full day to get to Sarnia. To my great relief, the port arrived the following morning. We traveled on to Montreal where I spent a few days visiting Jamaican friends who had migrated to Canada. My mission at Marquette was to get my bachelor’s degree in as short a time as possible, so each semester I carried as many courses as I could handle. I was credited for the year of economics I did in the last two years of high school. This allowed me to complete the requirements for the bachelor’s degree with a major in economics in three years, including two summer school sessions. My transition into graduate school in 1961 was a major milestone, for the modest stipend from my fellowship provided a financial cushion, saving me the agony of looking for another part-time job. My fellowship also put me in with two professors who were later to play an important part in my life: Theodore Marburg, who became my mentor, and Father Richard Porter, S.J. That same year, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president of the United States. I how he electrified the students on his campaign trip to Milwaukee. Although I was not eligible to vote, his campaign rhetoric made me feel I was part of his new frontier. I hoped for his victory in the general election. Kennedy’s victory at the polls signified an exciting time of change in America with the young president replacing the aging Eisenhower. As president, Kennedy was to face his most difficult test in the Caribbean where significant geopolitical change was underway. The failure of the British attempt to unite its colonies into a federation presented the United States with the emergence of a group of small, independent, poor, and vulnerable new nations on its third border. This fact was not inconsequential for the civil rights movement in the United States—a movement in which many Caribbean-born immigrants such as Harry Belafonte and Stokely Carmichael played a significant role. The United States also faced a communist threat from nearby Cuba as the Soviet Union began to establish a missile base on the island. This culminated in the Cuban missile crisis, with Kennedy forcing the Soviets to withdraw their missiles. But this confrontation was not without cost. As we later learned, the United States paid a price by giving up its missile base in Turkey, which the Soviets found threatening. The American concern was more than about missiles, however; it was also about the fear that emerging Caribbean countries might find

the Cuban model attractive. This fear was later confirmed in October 1983 when President Reagan sent troops into tiny Grenada to crush the socialist government that seized power there.

Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

I finished the M.A. degree in economics at Marquette in 1962 and was itted into the Ph.D. program at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, upon the strong recommendation of my professor and mentor, Dr. Theodore Marburg, a Clark alumnus, whom I served as a graduate assistant at Marquette. During my last summer at Marquette, I met a red-headed girl named Sally Williams from Appleton, Wisconsin—famous at the time for also being the hometown of Joe McCarthy, a head-strong, Communist-chasing U.S. Republican senator. Sally had majored in English and history and minored in theology and radio-TV as an undergraduate. When we met, she had just finished her first year of grad school, seeking a Master’s in Journalism. That summer, she was a staff writer and copy editor of the university newspaper, The Marquette Tribune, and desperately seeking a full-time job in one of her fields. Coincidentally, Jamaica was celebrating its independence from Britain. Sally wrote a story on that event and in another issue, a second writer did a profile of me and my hopes for my young country’s future. When the latter story appeared, it featured a photo of the handsome young foreign student in question. Sally saw the picture and, since she had seen me around campus, immediately engineered an introduction through a mutual friend. Having done that, however, she suffered a sort of “buyer’s remorse” and stood me up for our first date, to play tennis on the campus courts. This inauspicious beginning to our relationship was no augur for the future: at the time of this writing, we have been married for forty-eight years. The end of that summer of 1962 came quickly, and soon I was headed to Worcester, Massachusetts, for a new chapter in my dream chasing. Sally saw me off at the old Chicago Northwestern train station in Milwaukee, a sad good-bye. And once again, I was leaving a familiar setting with close friends to find myself

a stranger in a new place. When I arrived at Clark, Edward Kennedy was campaigning to be the junior United States Senator from Massachusetts, and John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth after the Russians had beaten the United States into space. Glenn’s flight had particular resonance for Clark University because the noted rocket pioneer, Robert Goddard, did his experimental work in rocketry while he was a member of the Clark faculty. The Goddard Space Flight Center at the National Aeronautics and Space istration (NASA) in Greenbelt, Maryland, is named in his honor. In the wake of Glenn’s successful flight, President Kennedy set the nation’s sights on landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Sadly, the following year, the president was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I being glued to the television set in the student union at Clark as television anchorman Walter Cronkite announced Kennedy’s death, fighting back tears. A pall came over the campus, and it seemed as if the whole country stood still. Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as president on Air Force One as it flew from Dallas to Washington, carrying the dead president and his grieving widow Jacqueline in her blood-stained dress. The 1960s was a time of upheaval and excitement: it ushered in the miniskirt and the Beatles, singers Johnny Mathis and Harry Belafonte rose in popularity not only on college campuses but also across the country, the civil rights movement was gathering force, and there was a raging debate over whether Taiwan should give up its seat at the United Nations to Red China. As an international student, I found the ethos of this changing time invigorating. I often participated in heated discussions with fellow students. President Johnson started the war on poverty at home and escalated the military conflict in Vietnam. He also threw his weight behind the 1964 civil rights legislation. Together, those events generated hope and resistance—hope for African Americans and resistance from young Americans to the military draft. As an international student, I was not required to for the draft, but I did anyway. I was not called up. In my two years at Clark, I made many friends, including Jesse Pendleton from the Virgin Islands and his wife Betsy, originally from Connecticut. Jesse was a graduate student in geography who went on to teach at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Andy Harvey came from Nova Scotia and was a fellow graduate student in economics. After he earned his Ph.D., Andy taught at Dalhousie

University in Halifax. My life was enriched by a variety of cultural activities on and off the Clark campus. I saw many events at the Worcester Memorial Auditorium, including pianist Leon Fleisher, conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, and George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. On campus, I went to plays put on by the Clark University Players Society. These included The Diary of Anne Frank and The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Among the visitors to the campus were The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, the Broadway musical The Fantasticks, and Malcolm X. I also saw the Worcester Orchestra and the Clark University Choral Society perform the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I went with friends to the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island to watch some of my favorite jazz artists perform live. Dave Brubeck played selections from his astonishingly successful album, Take Five, and Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk featured many selections from their hit recordings. In the spring of 1964, I ed a group of friends on a train trip to the World’s Fair in New York City. I touring the General Motors Futurama exhibit and lingering at the Pieta statue at the Vatican Pavilion. As an amateur photographer, I tried earnestly to capture the highlights, including the Unisphere, the symbol of the Fair, which still stands. During this time, Sally and I courted by U.S. mail and the telephone. I found our evening conversations disconcerting. Sally is a world-class tear producer, and she often filled my ear with sniffles and worse. Nonetheless, we got officially engaged in 1963.

3

New Beginnings

B y August 1964, after I had completed the course requirements for the Ph.D. degree in economics and ed the relevant comprehensive exams, I returned to Milwaukee to marry my fiancée, Sally. On August 15, my former professor, Father Richard Porter, officiated at our wedding in the Gesu Church on the Marquette campus. Our friends, James Botsch and Sandy David, were best man and maid of honor. Sally’s father and other relatives were there and so were many of our Marquette colleagues. None of my close relatives from Jamaica were able to make it, but I did have the blessing of my parents. Another friend, Delroy Thomas, a fellow Jamaican, was in charge of picture taking with my camera. Unfortunately, he loaded the film incorrectly, and the pictures he thought he had taken did not . We did, however, have an official photograph of the wedding party taken at a nearby photo studio. That night, Sally and I stayed at the Milwaukee Inn downtown, and the following morning, we flew to Boston on United Airlines for our honeymoon. We stayed at the Bradford Hotel. Before the wedding, I bought a white 1959 Ford Fairlane from the son of my landlady in Worcester with a loan of five hundred dollars from a local bank, cosigned by one of my professors. After we arrived in Boston, we took a bus to Worcester, about forty miles west, to pick up the Fairlane. We then visited a number of historic places, including Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, and Plymouth Rock where the pilgrims landed. Along the way, we stopped at a picnic site where I photographed the scenery as Sally wrote postcards to friends. In the city of Boston, we took the subway to Cambridge and roamed around the Harvard Yard. We watched Sammy Davis, Jr., star in the play, Golden Boy, and Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in Beckett at the Schubert Theater, conveniently located close to our hotel.

Keuka College, Keuka Park, New York

At the end of our honeymoon, we drove to Worcester to pick up my belongings and headed for the town of Keuka Park in the Finger Lakes area of New York State since I had received a one-year appointment as an economics instructor at Keuka College, a women’s school, now Keuka University with male students also enrolled. Before the wedding, I had had a job interview at Trinity College in Hartford, but Trinity took a long time to make a decision. In the meantime, I went for an interview at Keuka and was offered the job. Shortly thereafter, Trinity called and offered me its job. I really wanted to go to Trinity, but I had already committed myself to Keuka, so I regretfully had to decline a future at Trinity. (Sally, who had been working all this time, also turned down an enticing job offer from a Milwaukee publisher in order to get married and move east.) When we arrived in Keuka Park, we were directed to what was to be our abode for the year—a small college-owned cottage, a quarter of a mile away from the main campus, with its problematic septic tank and large sloping lawn carpeted with dandelions still in full bloom. The tank and the lawn turned out to be the least of our problems. The Keuka Park water system did not extend to our house. Instead, our water supply was delivered in a tank truck piloted by a friendly man named Mr. Moon and dumped into what would have a basement in a normal dwelling. Sally complained from the beginning that the water had a strange taste and refused to use anything that hadn’t been boiled, an echo of my young life in Braeton. After a week of arguing about it, we filled a bottle with the stuff and took it to our college landlords. It was, I it, nasty looking. The landlords agreed and checked into the matter— only to find a very deceased raccoon inhabiting the water we had used for everything from brushing our teeth to scrubbing the kitchen floor. The matter was rectified, and I began my first full-time teaching position after part-time stints as a teaching assistant and a lowly instructor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. At Keuka, I was the entire Economics Department and taught all four courses in the curriculum. We found a warm welcome from the other faculty and their spouses, with dinner invitations and cozy evenings to temper the relentless snow that piled up, courtesy of the winds off Lake Ontario. The young women at the college were overwhelmingly white, lively, and studious and took Sally into their confidences, which consisted mainly of

worrying about the young men at their “brother” schools Hobart and William Smith, some twenty miles away in the town of Geneva. For a small school, Keuka attracted many foreign students, from India to Sweden. I moderated their activities and in return they hosted a dinner for us that consisted of specialties from their home countries. At the end, they presented Sally with the recipes. The school is located on the Y-shaped Keuka Lake, and boating is a popular activity both for students and the residents of the summer cottages that dot the shoreline. The husband of one of the faculty tried to get us to take up kayaking. We politely declined. The Finger Lakes region is New York State’s wine country. On weekends, Sally and I toured the wineries and traveled the nooks and crannies of the region, from the Genesee Gorge (The “Grand Canyon of the East”) to the world famous automotive race track at Watkins Glen to Mark Twain’s burial site in Elmira. In our one year in the area, we put twenty thousand miles on the faithful Ford Fairlane. One day, we saw an ad by a publisher in a photographic magazine, inviting readers to submit film strip documentaries. The list of previously published documentaries did not include anything on the Finger Lakes. We wrote to the publisher and asked if we could do one on the region, and he agreed. We thereupon set to work as a team, combining Sally’s journalistic skills with my amateur photography knowledge to make a documentary featuring the wineries and the history of the American Indians who first inhabited the place. It was accepted for publication.

4

The Winter of 1964

T he winter of 1964 was severe with heavy snow fall. In December, Sally and I flew from Rochester to visit my parents in Braeton, Jamaica. It was their first chance to meet my new bride and Sally’s first trip outside the United States. She was warmly received, and I was welcomed back like a prodigal son. Although no one killed a fatted calf, there was plenty of “curry goat” and my mother’s legendary “fry fish” cooked with onions and other—secret—ingredients. We traveled around the village to meet and greet relatives and old friends. I took rolls of photographs, and at each stop, it seemed, we were treated to Jamaica’s “whites,” 100 percent proof white rum. Sally, who never touched anything stronger than Diet Coke, sipped very cautiously. I held up my end of the bargain, though. We both listened with great interest as older relatives told tales of my boyhood exploits and generally reminisced about old times. During the two weeks we spent in Jamaica, I tried to show Sally as much of the country as I could. I rented a car, and we drove to some of the island’s famed tourist attractions, including the popular Dunn’s River Falls in Ocho Rios, the perfect setting for photographing my young bride. When we were ready to return to the United States, the processing of my permanent resident visa by the American embassy had encountered an inexplicable snag, causing us to change our travel plans. We agreed that Sally should go ahead while I remained behind to sort out the problems. She left Kingston to fly into John F. Kennedy International airport where she spent the night. In the morning, she flew into Rochester and was driven to Keuka Park by old friends from Marquette who lived in that city. Each day, she trudged the freezing quarter mile through the snow to the tiny Keuka post office to see if there was word from her absent husband. There never was. To this day, I believe the reason for delaying my visa may have been deliberate on the part of the embassy, caused by my annoying them through a rather nationalistic letter I wrote to the Jamaican Prime Minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante, about the US airbase at Vernam Field, in the middle of the country, which was published in The Daily Gleaner on August 14, 1962. The letter is reproduced below:

The Editor Sir:—I would appreciate it if you would publish the attached copy of an open letter to Sir Alexander Bustamante, Prime Minister of Jamaica. I am, etc. Ransford W. Palmer Dept of Economics Marquette University Milwaukee 3 Wisconsin USA August 14, 1962

Dear Sir Alexander: As a Jamaican student studying here in the United States, I watch with much anxiety the day-to-day developments in Jamaica that are reported by the various news media. I glow with pride over our smooth transition into independence and I share your optimism of a rapid rate of development in the ensuing years. Like you I am ready and willing to help fight off any ideology that may attempt to encroach upon our democratic way of life. However, there is one thing that confuses me: your willingness to let a great power—the United States—have whatever military bases it wishes in Jamaica. In the August 11 issue of the Catholic news magazine, America, you were quoted as saying “. . . Whatever I am today I owe to the United States. I lived there for eight years and I was treated quite kindly and properly. As far as I am concerned, anytime the United States wants to re-establish a military base here, the land is theirs.” After reading this, I couldn’t help getting the impression that you are ready at anytime to offer Jamaica on a platter to Uncle Sam. This frightens me because in time to come we may find ourselves under a different brand of colonialism. I trust that you will not allow your personal likes and

dislikes to be your sole guide in public policy decisions of this nature. I am aware that Jamaica must ally itself with great powers and that these great powers must necessarily be democratic nations, of which the United States is foremost, and I realize that our size and geographical position forbid us to embark upon a policy of neutrality. But do we have to sell our birthright to be sheltered by the protective arm of a giant proverbial uncle to the north? Do we have to mortgage the little real estate that we own—that which all of us look back to, no matter where we wander? Sir, I urge you to take a critical view of recent world developments. Occurrences in the past decade have shown that binding decisions made by past executives and politicians with foreign powers have brought grief upon later generations of peoples in many countries. the Chaguaramas squabble? Do you recall that thousands of Tunisians died in a vain attempt to reclaim their own land from the French at Bizerte just a year ago? Panamanians are now whining over Panama Canal policy decisions of the past. These are but a few of the longterm arrangements made in the past without much thought of the future. To make matters worse some of these are even signed in perpetuity. Sir, beware of “perpetuity” in whatever treaty you may sign, because this brutally shackles future generations to past policy. No great power is willing to call it quits when it knows it has a legal right to stay in a particular territory. I am not suggesting, however, that you should not make defense arrangements with the United States. Of course, you should. But when you do, do not sign long-term treaties—treaties that will commit vast portions of our land for a great period, or in perpetuity. The 4,500 square miles of mountains and plains is all the real estate we have and we intend to have every square inch of it under our control. We need aid from our powerful friends. This is pretty obvious. But I don’t think we should be so willing to pay the price you have indicated. You have said that throughout your eight-year sojourn in the United States you were treated well and this to a great extent s for your extreme proAmericanism. As a free citizen brought up in a democratic environment in Jamaica, I am naturally pro-American because America is the western world’s main hope in the so-called cold war. But, Sir, you are perhaps not aware that

your darker brothers here in the States have not and are not faring as well as you did, and hence are restrained from sharing your over—enthusiasm. It is in view of all these considerations, Sir, that I strongly urge you to take a larger view of the situation. I am sure when you do you’ll see a different picture. I am, Sir, Yours respectfully, Ransford W. Palmer August 14, 1962.

The visa was issued a few days later, and I arrived at the Rochester airport to discover the visible effect of the winter weather I had briefly escaped. My car was covered with no less than a foot of snow, and it took a heroic effort to remove it once I was able to retrieve my snow remover. With that accomplished, my next challenge was to start the car. After several anxious moments, I started it and was on my way. Midway between Rochester and our house in Keuka Park, the car shut down on a dark lonely road. I slowly nudged it onto the snowcovered shoulder and prayed that someone would come to rescue me. There was no sign of civilization in the immediate vicinity and the temperature felt as if it was approaching zero. After a while, I began to shiver from the cold and thought of warming myself up with a sip from one of the two bottles of Appleton rum I brought back with me from Jamaica. But as I was about to open one of the bottles, something providential happened. A flashing light appeared on a very welcome police car. I quickly slipped the unopened bottle back in its case. The officer approached. I told him my problem, and he agreed to take me to a service station several miles away so that I could make arrangements to have someone pick up my car and fix it. The officer then drove me to my home some twenty miles away in Keuka Park. That winter, Sally’s father ed away, and she went back to Wisconsin for the funeral. On the night she returned, I picked her up at the Rochester train station. It was snowing lightly. On the way home, I needed to turn left off a main street, but all the traffic signs said no left turn. When I finally found an intersection where I could turn left, I was so anxious to make the turn that I failed to notice

an oncoming car. We slammed into each other. We were both shaken up, but no one was injured; both cars were damaged but drivable. After exchanging information, I drove the Fairlane home with its right front fender severely crumpled. With all that, much of my thoughts that year was on completing my dissertation and moving on. I did not see this small undergraduate women’s college in rural New York as the place to build my career as a professional economist. As the end of my one-year contract approached, I applied for and received an appointment at Central Connecticut State College in New Britain, Connecticut. I looked forward to returning to New England from the isolation of mid-state New York. If Sally had different feelings, she didn’t voice them.

Feasting with hungry Marquette housemates, 1960

As an undergraduate student at Marquette University, 1960

My B.S. finery being inspected by friend, Delroy Thomas, 1961

Sally’s father gives her a kiss after our wedding, 1964

With me, Sally sees the sights of Braeton, Jamaica, 1964

Family reunion: Skipper’s son Andre, my father, Skipper, his son Greg, me, Lincoln, Port More, Jamaica, 1964

Sally at Dunn’s River Falls, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, 1964

I pose with our 1959 Fairlane before our little house in Keuka Park, NY, 1965

With Sally at my Ph.D. graduation, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1966

Back to New England

I n the summer of 1965, we loaded up our belongings in a trailer and headed for New Britain, Connecticut, a working-class town where the tool manufacturing firm, Stanley Works, was the biggest employer. The drive from Keuka Park to New Britain was the Fairlane’s last big trip. Before we left, a colleague advised us to avoid the New York Thruway to save money and recommended an alternate route—N.Y. State Route 17, which had more twists and turns than a double helix. The journey took us twice as long as it should have. Along the way, we had problems with the trailer. It apparently had not been hooked up properly, so we had to stop and get it fixed. Then the hood of the Fairlane flew up and wouldn’t stay closed, forcing us to tie it down with a piece of twine. As we entered Connecticut, we sought the quickest way to New Britain and failed to notice the sign on the Merritt Parkway that said “No Trailers.” As we continued on the Parkway within the posted speed limit, I noticed the flashing lights of what appeared to be a police car behind me. Since I couldn’t imagine what traffic violation I had committed, I continued driving. The flashing light bar convinced me to pull over. The officer informed me that it was illegal to tow a trailer on the Parkway and ordered us to get off at the next exit. We did and finally found our way to the Burritt Hotel in downtown New Britain, where, for whatever reason, they put us up in the honeymoon suite. Despite that hospitality, our introduction to New Britain was anything but smooth. Playwright Eugene O’Neill had it right—our trip was a “long day’s journey into night.” The Connecticut night was black, filled by slashing rain that made it nearly impossible to see the newly asphalted road we were on—so newly paved it possessed no lane markings. Sally and I were both exhausted; we spoke little to each other and what we said could not be described as “loving.” We had—that first night—an appointment with an agent to check out what was touted as brand-new apartments. They were located at the end of a small strip development, whose future amenities promised a Grand Union supermarket and neighbors. The parking lot lacked its finishing layer and was studded with rocks and giant puddles. We hustled across it in the dark, getting soaked from head to toe, for the driving rain had not let up. The agent grandly displayed what was

meant to be our future home. Sally re the walls as being cementcolored; at any rate, it was the dreariest and darkest place we would ever see. It had next-to-no light fixtures; we had no lamps. It was unfurnished; we had no furniture. At any rate, after viewing the disastrous apartment, we fell into bed at the Burritt and lay awake worrying that someone would break into the car and steal the beginnings of my dissertation. I was a bit wary of the apartment search: this was prior to the Equal Housing Opportunity Act of 1968, and we had no idea of the mindset of the people in central Connecticut regarding people of color, not to mention those in interracial marriages. I one landlord who couldn’t identify me by race when we talked on the phone but who lurked in the doorway to scope me out before I entered his building. In another incident, Sally’s red-headed temper flared, and she nearly accused a very young landlord (of Italian descent) of being racist when he seemingly couldn’t decide if we would be suitable tenants. We would have taken this place probably as a last resort, since the kitchen was hardly big enough to chop an onion, and its nine square feet of linoleum was as garish as our Keuka curtains. Coming back to the Burritt after one more day’s search, the Fairlane threw a hubcap. Sally, watching the thing go bouncing merrily and irretrievably away, felt she had reached the lowest point of her life. We laugh about all this now, but we both understand that our “ordeal” in finding housing in no way compared— or compares—to the extreme difficulties faced by many people, even today. Back in fall of 1965, I bucked myself up with the certainty that we would find something suitable. I was, after all, a college professor. And college personnel solved our problem by recommending we visit a downtown furniture store to speak to a man with an apartment for rent. And thus we came to live at the Monopoly-esque address of 22 Park Place. Twenty-two Park Place was unique—a three-story building with six apartments in the front connected by a breezeway to the six back apartments. We were shown to the third-floor apartment in the rear, which we immediately took. It was just the right size for the two of us, and Sally was delighted with the private deck overlooking New Britain’s extremely large Stanley Park. She could scoot down three flights of stairs, jog across a block of well-manicured land, and be at the door of the Carnegie Library.

For me, I had come from the “bush” of Braeton to rooming houses in Kingston, Milwaukee, and Worcester to the rural Keuka cottage and now to an attractive city apartment, with employment among professional colleagues, and with only the completion of my dissertation and its defense separating me from a Ph.D. degree. The horizon I sought was moving closer. Well, there was the matter of furniture. For the first few nights at Park Place, we slept on a pile of oriental rugs that Sally inherited from her mother. Then it was back to the furniture store. We got a couch, a table and chairs, a bed, and a charming desk (which Sally still uses). With these comforts in place, it was obvious we still lacked a few essentials: bookcases to provide a home for the books and papers and dressers for our clothing. I turned to my woodworking skills. This was more of an adventure than I had counted on. I carefully drew my plans and had a lumberyard custom-cut the wood. I smuggled the boards into the apartment at night and, armed with a drill, a screwdriver, glue, and stain, set to work stealthily. Despite my care, there was some low-level noise occasionally, which did not please the landlady who lived on the floor below us. Today I find it hard to believe I was so pleased with the screwed-together bookcase that I set about making two dressers, one for each of us, both of them fastened with screws—and both still in use almost fifty years on. (I drilled the holes for the screws whenever the landlady was out, and she, in turn, snuck into the apartment to see what we were doing whenever we were out.) In New Britain, we made friends quickly. We were closest to the young faculty who arrived the year we did: Dr. Peter Tolis and Dr. James Walsh, who both received their doctorates in history from Columbia University in New York City, and Dr. Joseph LePage who came from Kentucky. Pete was a native of New Britain and quickly introduced us to what he called “The Seafood,” a bar and restaurant specializing in the denizens of the deep. He and his wife Dottie had a house and three children. Jim was also married. His wife Anne, however, was a native New Yorker who could not be pried away from their apartment in “the City.” Joe was single, smoked a pipe, and loved to tell stories of his years working for the Kentucky state legislature. The legislature, he said, was legally bound to meet once every two years for ninety days; popular sentiment held the term should be once every ninety years for two days.

We all worked hard, but we had a lot of fun, too, and we have fond memories of those days. Sally, when not deciphering the handwritten drafts of my dissertation, volunteered at our church, putting together and mimeographing the Sunday bulletin, snickering to herself as she corrected grammatical errors in the pastor’s weekly message. By this time, the Fairlane was ready for retirement. I replaced it with a 1966 Dodge Coronet—my first new car! We parked it in the driveway belonging to a neighbor, and it soon became involved in one of the strangest incidents. We were in the apartment on a sunny, calm afternoon, with absolutely no wind blowing, when we heard a knock on the door. There was a man who’d been working in the neighborhood; he bore the news that a large tree limb had fallen squarely on the car. Back to the dealer went the car to have the sheet metal hammered out and repainted. The new paint blistered almost immediately. In the end, some three attempts were made before the job was acceptable. One of my first trips with the new car was to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to visit two of our Jamaican friends, Llewellyn Mullings and his wife Pearl. Llew received his Ph.D. in economics from Clark and was now a dean at the University of Bridgeport. We shared many pleasant occasions when they lived in Worcester. In the spring of 1966, my committee at Clark approved my dissertation, The Financing of Economic Development in Jamaica, and set the defense for later in the semester. The defense went well, and I was set for graduation. At the June ceremony, Sally took pictures as my name was called and as the hood was placed around my neck. I was now Dr. Ransford W. Palmer.

A Call from Washington

In the fall of 1966, I received a call from my former Marquette professor, Dr. Theodore Marburg, who was ing through Washington. He said there was a position open at The Catholic University of America, and if I were interested, I

should the economics department chair. I was indeed interested, and I ed the chair who invited me down for an interview. I drove to Washington on a snowy day for the interview and got the job. After only three semesters at Central Connecticut State College, I submitted my resignation, totally ready to move on. Sally claims that after the original, very optimistic call from Dr. Marburg, we sat and looked at each other and laughed for forty-five minutes. Like George and Louise Jefferson, we were movin’ on up. We hated to leave our friends behind, but we remained in touch. We drove back to visit the Tolises, and Pete later came down to inspect our offspring. Jim Walsh proudly shared an offprint of his first article with Sally, and he was our daughter’s godfather. Joe LePage, however, vanished from our lives. While in Washington I searched for a place to live. This was my first foray below the Mason-Dixon Line and again the accessibility of desirable housing worried me. (The Equal Opportunity Housing act was still not law.) I went to an apartment complex on Route 1 in nearby Hyattsville, Maryland, and the woman at the front desk, bouffant hairdo and all, told me that management did not rent to black people. Then she had the gall to add, “You are such a nice-looking fellow.” We subsequently learned of a group composed of academics and other professionals who were investing in homes in the Brookland section of Northeast D.C., close to Catholic University, who would consider us as tenants. These folks were both blacks and whites, and their sub rosa intention was to insure that the neighborhood remained balanced. We met two of them in a charming bungalow on Newton Street N.E. After we toured the house and learned the pertinent details of the rental agreement, they retired to their own homes across the street to allow us to discuss things. The rent was a little more than we liked, but before we could mention this, they lowered the amount. We were, after all, with one of us black and one white, ideal tenants for their agenda. Our new home was perched upon a rise of ground, twenty-seven steps from the sidewalk to the porch. The steep front lawn was covered in rampant ivy, which Sally discovered had to be whacked back seriously every spring to keep it from

taking over. A front porch ran the width of the house and led to a just-big-enough living room and a large dining room, both featuring gorgeous old-style woodwork. The kitchen was miniscule but overlooked a large backyard for gardening. (Sal comes from a family of professional and enthusiastic amateur growers.) The house also had a basement and a finished half story. The place was cozy, and we quickly settled in, having shipped our belongings by United Van Lines this time around. The neighbors were friendly, and the personnel at Catholic made us welcome. The students at C.U.A. were generally bright. They came from some of the best Catholic high schools along the east coast. Later in my tenure, the Department of Economics asked me to visit a few of those high schools in New Jersey and Long Island to talk to students about the university and the benefits of pursuing a major in economics. I don’t know how effective I was because there was no follow-up survey of issions from these schools, but I was impressed with the questions they asked. During my first semester at Catholic, there was uproar on campus. Faculty and students shut the university down for two days in an angry response to the firing by the board of trustees of the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a professor of moral theology in the School of Sacred Theology. Father Curran was approved by the school’s faculty and the academic senate for promotion to the rank of associate professor but was fired by the board of trustees for his liberal position on birth control, which the board felt contravened Catholic teaching. Many regarded the action of the board to be an attack on academic freedom. In the end, the strong reaction of faculty and students, and many influential people beyond the campus, forced the board to back down and to reinstate Father Curran. In the years that followed, my research really began to take off. My first article on financing corporate investment in Jamaica appeared in the journal Social and Economic Studies in 1967. The following year my first book, The Jamaican Economy, was published by Praeger Publishers. In the summer of 1967, Sally and I drove to the World’s Fair in Montreal. From a station near our guesthouse, we took the rubber-wheeled subway train directly to the fairgrounds. The complex of national pavilions was spectacular, with those for the United States and Russia being the biggest. But others such as the Canadian and Czech pavilions were impressive. My favorite was the Canadian

outdoor bar that sold exotic mixed drinks and beer in 22-ounce glasses. The year 1968 was splattered with violence in America. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and Washington, D.C., erupted in violence. Blacks set fire to buildings along U Street and broke into stores and looted merchandise. Many streets of the city were closed off; armored police and the National Guard patrolled the area. Smoke billowed above the city making it resemble the Middle East. And on June 5, while campaigning for the U.S. presidency in Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, depriving not only the Kennedy dynasty of another son but the entire country of a leader who seemed always to come down on the side of reason. Sally and I went to watch the motorcade carrying Kennedy’s body from Union Station to the Rotunda of the Capitol as suspicious security people photographed onlookers. Sally was struck by the young face of Caroline Kennedy (JFK’s daughter and RFK’s niece) peering in sad bewilderment from a limousine window. That summer, we drove to Nova Scotia to visit our old Worcester friends Andy Harvey and his wife Dawn in Halifax. We toured Cape Breton Island and the spectacular rock formation of Peggy’s Cove. This was Sally’s second trip to Canada and my third. At the Newton Street house, we became pet owners for the first time. Sally found a tiny, blue-eyed, black-and-white kitten at the rear of the yard next to the fence. Since it was too small to navigate the fence, she deduced it must have been thrown over. We discussed whether or not to keep the creature, and cuteness won out. Besides, his coat matched the criteria our landlords were striving for. We named the cat “Cat.” He was not the brightest being in the universe, and Sally was certain he’d been abused. He was frightened of everything (except food). Sal kept the cellar door ajar so that when someone knocked on the front door, Cat could streak down the steps to safety. Outdoors, he chased shadows on the front porch and stalked the spaces between the floor boards, overwhelmed with pride when he caught one. The bane of his existence was the cat across the street, a brute named Thomas Aquinas, after the 13th century theologian. When Thomas Aquinas spotted Cat, he would barrel off his own porch, down his own steps, across the pavement, and up the twentyseven steps to our porch. Cat, choosing flight over fight, would hustle down his

own steps and seek asylum through a small hole in one of the lattice s between the porch and the ground. Thomas Aquinas, too big for the opening, would eventually sulk off. Sally, at this time, was working in downtown D.C. for a company called American Aviation Publications, which put out a variety of magazines dealing with everything from commercial aviation to space technology. Her job was to solve customers’ problems; one letter she especially re came from an employee of Air America, the Central Intelligence Agency’s supposedly secret operation in Vietnam, wondering why his magazine hadn’t followed him to Southeast Asia. Sal loved the diversity of the people she worked with; she met a man—not that old—who had gone through the segregated D.C. school system. Meeting him, she re, was like shaking hands with someone who’d stepped off the front page of a newspaper. Rumors began circulating that a New York publisher, Ziff-Davis, was going to gobble up AA Publications, and many of the employees would be fired. (In those days, the phrase “laid off” meant a person would eventually be rehired. The AA people faced the finality of “termination.”) After many denials, by both companies, the pink slips were handed out. Sally blithely confided to a coworker that she didn’t really care—she was pregnant. After five years of marriage, we were going to have a child. The thought of little feet pitter-pattering made the cozy bungalow shrink around us. We went househunting again. Sally wanted to stay in the District, but desirable properties were out of reach. Like thousands before us, we headed to the suburbs. My first ten years in America were transformational. I completed my formal education, earning the Ph.D. degree in economics; got married; changed jobs twice; published one book; and traveled fairly extensively. During that time, major civil rights laws were enacted that would influence the tenor of American society for the years to come. I had brought with me to America a certain sense of self-reliance that was nourished by the environment in which I grew up. This self-reliance meshed well with the do-it-yourself ethos of American culture and the “pull-yourself-upby your-bootstraps” philosophy which underlay the American Dream.

Later as I became a suburban homeowner, my do-it-yourself skills continued to serve me well. I was able to finish off the basement of the homes I bought into livable space in a professional manner. In my last house, I built a bar which stands as a testament to my carpentry and design skills.

6

A Happy Return to Jamaica

I n 1969, America landed a man on the moon. It was a heady moment for the American space program during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In that same year, Sally became pregnant with our first child. On August 17, when she was three months into the pregnancy, we went back to Jamaica. My book, The Jamaican Economy, had just been published and had gotten some notice in the local press. We were welcomed home in a column dated August 27 by the Personal Mention columnist of The Gleaner, writing under the pseudonym, Kitty Kingston:

Author on Holiday

Dr. Ransford Palmer, Jamaican economist and author of a recent book, The Jamaican Economy, is currently on a two-week holiday in the island. Dr. Palmer, who is associate professor of economics at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., is accompanied by his wife. They arrived here on August 17 and are due to return to Washington on September 2. The Jamaican Economy, a sectoral analysis of the growth of the economy between 1950 and 1968, was published by Frederick Praeger of New York last year. In an interview with the Gleaner yesterday, Dr. Palmer said he was currently engaged in research on the role of public finance in the development process. Specifically, he will examine the impact of public debt on the economies of a selected number of former British colonial countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Speaking of his impressions of Jamaica since his last visit in 1966, Dr. Palmer said there were many signs of development, including development in housing. However, he believed there was a serious housing problem in of the quality

and cost of housing, especially in the Kingston area. Dr. Palmer said he also noticed a “distinct” rise in the cost of living, and this has led him to wonder whether real income or the purchasing power of the people was increasing enough. Another impression he had was that government was moving too slowly in the construction of major arterial roads leading into the city. He said the present roads would give the impression that Kingston was a small town instead of a rapidly expanding metropolis. A former student of Beckford and Smith’s (now St. Jago High School) Dr. Palmer first left Jamaica in 1958. He received his doctorate from Clark University, Massachusetts, in June 1966. His parents are Mr. and Mrs. James C. Palmer of Braeton, St. Catherine.

The date of our arrival in Jamaica was the eighteenth anniversary of Hurricane Charlie when my family and I—along with the rest of the country—weathered the wrath of hurricane Charlie. This time everything was pleasant. We stayed with my sister Hazel and her husband George in the Half Way Tree suburb of Kingston. I was determined to show Sally parts of Jamaica she missed on her first trip in 1964 so we took the train from Kingston to Montego Bay for a few days of cross-country sightseeing. The train trip was a special cultural experience for Sally, for as the train moved across the country, market women hawking their wares circulated through the coaches, some boarding at one station and leaving at another. There was also a preacher with Bible in hand going from coach to coach vigorously shouting the word of God. I watched the countryside slide by as the train slowly wended its way through the mountainous terrain. About halfway to Montego Bay, we stopped at the town of Kendall, where the worst train crash in the history of Jamaica occurred in 1957. The engine of an excursion train returning from Montego Bay disconnected from the rest of the train on a slope with a bend in the track at the foot of a hill. Reports said that as the engine sped away, the disconnected coaches were unable to negotiate the bend and crashed, killing hundreds of holiday engers. I quickly erased this tragedy from my mind and imbibed the cool clean country air as we neared our Montego Bay destination.

In Montego Bay, we stayed at a little hotel on the side of a hill that provided a clear view of the sea and planes approaching for a landing at the airport. In one of our walks through the city, we came upon the public library. I stopped and inquired of the librarian if the library had acquired my new book, The Jamaican Economy. To my disappointment, she said it hadn’t, so I gave her a friendly lecture about the need for the library to fill such a serious gap in its collection. I had made prior arrangement with my brother Skipper, who worked at the Kaiser Bauxite Company in Ocho Rios some sixty miles east of Montego Bay, to pick us up at our hotel on Friday after work. Along the way back to Kingston, we stopped in the town of Linstead where my father had a grocery store and bar. Since it was Friday evening, the shop was buzzing with customers. My father welcomed us and offered us drinks. The following day, Hazel and George took us to horse racing at Caymanas Park. George was a turf man, and I was a novice. I bet on a horse to win. With a name like Endurance, how could it fail? Alas, Endurance finished dead last. Even so, the enjoyment of watching the races was far greater than the measly sum I lost. Over the course of a week, I took Sally to the national botanical garden at Hope Gardens, the mineral bath in the parish of St. Thomas (she refused to go near the waters), and the old city of Port Royal, once the hangout of pirates, the most famous being Henry Morgan, a future governor of the island. The visit to Port Royal brought back memories of a time when as a teenager I paddled a canoe across the choppy three-mile-wide harbor from the fishing village of Port Henderson with my older brother Lloyd and his girlfriend Joan aboard. In retrospect, we took a great risk because we had no safety equipment, nothing to cling to in case the canoe capsized in rough water. Good fortune was with us. The sea was relatively calm, and we made the round trip safely.

7

Our Children Begin to Arrive

S ally and I returned to Washington to prepare for the birth of our first child, Geoffrey. After a fair amount of searching, we settled on a house in the Maryland suburb of Lanham-Seabrook, a few miles outside the famous Beltway (US Routes 495 and 95) which, according to local humor, separates the politicians from the rest of the country. Our new home was a three-bedroom split level with a carport on a huge corner lot. We paid $29,900 for it. (A friend asked what we were going to do with “all that space.” “Fill it up!” Sally answered.) Our good luck in finding the house rode on the back of another couple’s misfortune: their financing fell through, making the place available to us, complete with their choices in appliances and kitchen linoleum—copper-toned and a small brick pattern, respectively. We took possession in mid-December 1969 and, as soon as we could, filled the living room with an avocado green couch and harvest gold chairs, the most fashionable colors of the day. Shortly thereafter, my brother Terrence had his fatal bicycle accident, and I flew to Jamaica for the funeral, leaving Sally (crying those world-champion tears) and Cat to fend for themselves. She re walking the one-mile round trip to the local supermarket and slipping on the ice within sight of our home. The incident, when she was eight months pregnant, gave her a lifelong sympathy for up-side-down turtles. While I worked diligently to further my career at Catholic, Sally had kept in touch with friends and managers who remained at the truncated American Aviation Publications. On a visit to the old office, she was offered immediate reemployment for as long as she wished, on her own . She could wander in at 10:00 a.m. and leave at 4:00 p.m., if she wanted. With the baby not due until the end of February, she returned to work. A touch superstitious, Sal had bought nothing for the baby. I began to worry that the heir to my meager fortune would have only an empty room to come home to. On a Saturday in early February, I convinced my wife that we should at least acquire a crib. While I assembled the crib on Sunday evening, Sally stuck her Monday lunch—a cheese sandwich and an apple—in the fridge. At 6:00 a.m. on Monday, however, I rushed her to Georgetown University Hospital in

Washington. Geoffrey James was born on February 9, 1970. Teaching assignments prevented me from being at the hospital for the birth. When I called to check on her, Sally put the phone close to the baby’s mouth, and I heard the little fellow cry. I was overcome with joy, and I rushed to the hospital to see them. It fell to me to buy all the accouterments which follow in a newborn’s wake. There I was, loaded up with Pampers, tiny shirts, and a chest of drawers to keep everything in. I was now a suburban dad in America! When the baby was two months old, I made arrangements for my mother to visit us. It was Cud’s first trip out of Jamaica and her first flight. I had many places to show her. I took her to the International Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C., which she thoroughly enjoyed. In New York City, she marveled at the Statue of Liberty, and we climbed halfway up the narrow steps inside. Her visit was scheduled for two weeks, and she stayed two months. With grandmother as a part-time babysitter, Sal went back to work. In the summer of 1970, I wondered how the baby would take to our planned car trip to Quebec by way of Toronto. Sally said, “He’ll just have to come.” At six months, that was Geoffrey’s first trip outside the United States, not counting the one to Jamaica in his mother’s womb. Our first major stop was the Toronto City Centre, where I spotted a library. Of course, I had to slip in and see if they had my book. As I recall, they did. The City Centre was the low point of the trip for Geoffrey. Tourists were allowed to pose for pictures with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer on horseback. The Mountie grinned when we hoisted the baby up to the saddle, but the little guy was terrified and screamed to get down. The photo I took is one of the family’s favorites. In 1971, I was promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure at Catholic University and the following year an opportunity arose for an economic policy fellowship at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The fellowship required the recipient to spend time at an agency of the federal government or at an international institution working on a policy issue. I was placed in the Maritime istration of the US Department of Commerce where I worked on subsidies to the U.S. Merchant Marine. My year in the Department of Commerce exposed me to a wealth of information from numerous studies sitting on shelves gathering dust; it also made me more aware of the inner workings of

a large government bureaucracy. It also took me awhile to get used to the nineto-five government workday schedule and the hassle of fighting the daily traffic into downtown Washington. During this time, I kept in touch with my mother on a regular basis, sending funds for her and my father as well as photographs of baby Geoff. She was the only person who called me Ranny. In her letter of January 21, 1972, she writes:

Hello Ranny, Glad to hear from you and thanks very much for what you sent me. I hope you all are keeping fine. For the moment we are well. I guess Geoffrey is ruling the house now as he is getting to be a big fellow. We hope one day you may be able to bring him to Jamaica. I guess Lincoln is keeping fine. Mr. P. was saying you promised to write to him but you did not. I know you don’t have the time because of so many things you have to do anyway. I told him you will soon drop him a line. Well, this is all for now and take care until I hear from you again. Give my love to Sally and Geoffrey. All the best. Cud.

Later, after I had written to my father, he replied on June 26, 1972:

Dear Ransford, Your card and contents arrived safely, for which you will please receive thanks for same. I have been wondering why for such a long time I never get a line from you, as if I had been forgotten. But now as there is a step up, it won’t be so long again. I am glad to hear of your upward trend in life and that you will enjoy the fruits of your labor.

I am still at the old place here not doing anything other than a little home work. But such is life. I am glad to learn that Geoffrey James has got company [our second son, Christopher, was born in March, 1972] and we hope to meet at no distant date. Give my kind regards to Sally and the boys and same for yourself. From your Dad, J.C.

In June of 1971, Sally and I were selected as Danforth Associates by the Danforth Foundation. Catholic University issued the following press release:

ECONOMICS PROFESSOR NAMED BROOKINGS FELLOW AND DANFORTH ASSOCIATE

Dr. Ransford W. Palmer, Associate Professor of Economics at The Catholic University of America has recently been awarded both a Brookings Institute Economic Policy Fellowship and a Danforth Foundation Fellowship. A native of Kingston, Jamaica, Dr. Palmer received a B.S. in 1961 and an M.A. in 1962 from Marquette University. Four years later he was awarded a Ph.D. from Clark University. As a Brookings Institute Fellow Dr. Palmer will have the opportunity to become familiar with the actual governmental policy-making process. During his fellowship tenure, Dr. Palmer will work with the Department of Commerce where he will examine the effectiveness of federal government expenditures on the United States Merchant Marine. On June 2, the Danforth Foundation named Palmer and his wife, Sally W. Palmer, among one hundred seventy-five persons in colleges and universities throughout the United States who have been selected as Danforth Associates. The purpose of the Danforth Fellowship Program is to recognize and encourage good teaching and to assist in humanizing the educational process. It places an

emphasis on the role of the teacher-scholar who has a strong concern for students as individuals, competence in his discipline, and who is a man of faith with an awareness of the relevance of that faith to the problems of our age. As a Danforth Associate, Dr. Palmer will have lifetime access to funds for innovative programs to improve teaching methods and teacher/student relationships.

Courtesy of the Danforth Foundation, we attended an unforgettable conference in the Rocky Mountain National Park, just outside of Estes Park, Colorado, in August, 1971. Sessions ranged across the spectrum of both social and natural sciences and some rather nebulously grounded, such as out-of-body experiences. Needless to say, the mountain scenery was spectacular. And there was snow in August. We were able to attend the conference through the kindness of friends in State College, Pennsylvania, Mary Ann and John Spychalski. Mary Ann (nee Humelsheim) had been Sally’s roommate at Marquette and she’d married her hometown sweetheart as soon as he’d received his Ph.D. in business istration; after that he became a fixture at Penn State University. They immediately agreed to keep our sixteen-month old son, Geoffrey, while we were in Colorado. At the end of my one-year Brookings fellowship, I returned to Catholic University. It was a time of social and political upheaval across the country: the anti-war movement was strong; the United States was pushed out of Vietnam; and beleaguered president Richard Nixon won a second term, only to be ousted from office. Against this background, Christopher Martin was born in March, a St. Patrick’s Day arrival, with deep brown eyes and red hair.

My mother, Cud, with our first child, Geoffrey, 1970

With Geoffrey, 1970

Our youngest, daughter Laura, shows off her proud parents, 1973

Sally, Laura, and Geoffrey, 1973

Sally and the children in the backyard of our second home, Lanham, MD, Easter 1978

Christopher finds practicing easier with a friend, our cat, Silver, Lanham, MD, 1980

With Geoffrey and Christopher at Geoffrey’s Ph.D. graduation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 2009

Christopher hugs Laura after she received her second B.A. degree, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2005

I receive an award from Dr. James Donaldson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 1993

End of Commencement ceremony at Howard University, 1998

Laura with her son, Andrew, 2003

Laura with her husband R.J. Rockefeller at their daughter Elizabeth’s pre-school graduation, 2012

A Call from a Friend

I n the fall of 1972, I received a telephone call from a fellow Jamaican, Dr. Vincent McDonald at Howard University, inquiring if I would be interested in chairing the economics department there. I was tenured and comfortable at Catholic University—and looking forward to many more years there. But Howard was willing to hire me at the rank of full professor and at a higher salary. The higher salary was attractive because my family was growing and expenses were mounting. Even more attractive was the challenge of developing the first Ph.D. program in economics at an historical black university. I agonized over how smoothly the transition might be if I took the job and how I might fit in after having studied and taught only at predominantly white institutions. I had had some peripheral with Howard as an adjunct faculty member teaching a course in fiscal policy but never had to interact extensively with the faculty and staff. After much soul-searching, I decided to take the job, and I assumed the chairmanship of the economics department in August of 1973. A month later, our third child, Laura Katherine, was born on September 12. Three turned out to be a definite crowd, and Sally swore she was going to tear down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room so we could all eat together. It seemed we would again be house-hunting in the near future. I hated to leave the Lanham house. I had built a wood rail fence around the whole spacious yard and in the back added a patio with a six-foot high privacy fence (and planters for Sal to grow flowers) plus a six-by-eight-foot shed. In the house itself, I finished the half basement as a playroom for the kids and added a sort of bar on which I could spread my papers when the little ones were tucked in bed. (This project was begun when Sally was pregnant with Christopher; this time she found herself at a bulky eight months toting Sheetrock into the house, in the snow, of course.) On the inside, Howard seemed like another country. It was far more bureaucratic than Catholic University, and there was less collegiality. In the economics department, one senior faculty member resented the fact that he was ed over for the chairmanship. I couldn’t allow this to distract me from my main mission

—to spearhead the development of a proposal for the Ph.D. program for submission to the Ford Foundation for funding. After many faculty meetings, the proposal was completed at the end of the 1973-74 academic year and I submitted it to the provost for transmission to the Ford Foundation. Ford funded the Ph.D. program for the first three years with the understanding that the university would pick up the funding after that. The department itted its first Ph.D. student, Everson Hull, in the fall of 1975. The development of new graduate programs was meant to place the university on a path to becoming a research university. Prior to that time, the university did not provide much in the way of incentives for scholarly research. A tenured faculty member could coast along with little research productivity until retirement. And, for a long time, whenever university officials cited research achievement at Howard, they tended to tout the decades old work of E. Franklin Frazier on race as if nobody had done any significant research at the university since. Unfortunately, this implicitly portrayed the university as a kind of museum or, perhaps, even a mausoleum. But even as scholarship grew with the introduction of new graduate programs, there was a lag in the recognition of it by the university istration. The task of turning the university around was not easy because many of the existing faculty had been atrophied by years of nonproduction, and the new graduate programs would not suddenly invigorate their dormant scholarship. It would therefore require a cadre of new faculty to lead the charge as nonproducing faculty either retired or were not reappointed. But there was another problem: the reward system at the university had to be restructured to encourage scholarship. This would be a slow process as long as tenured nonproductive faculty sat on important committees that influenced salary increases. My base at Howard University as a professor and my own research on the Caribbean provided the impetus for organizing conferences on Caribbean. In 1994, I organized a major conference on United States-Caribbean relations at the Ralph Bunche Center on the campus featuring scholars from major American universities and from the Caribbean. It attracted a large audience but disappointingly no African Americans, although it was widely d. This might be attributed to the fact that for African Americans the problems of U.S.Caribbean relations ranked way below such long-standing domestic issues of race and income inequality, which loomed large in their daily lives. This

difference in focus is in part the result of the difference in the history of the two groups. For the largely immigrant Caribbean population, interest in the relationship between their countries of origin and the United States is always high. For African Americans, domestic issues trump everything else. At a university, increase in faculty compensation is typically the result of promotion or annual increases for merit and inflation. I arrived at Howard as a full professor, so the growth of my salary depended exclusively on annual merit increases. Since my arrival in 1973, I maintained a steady pace of research productivity, publishing a total of six books and several journal articles. But the annual merit increases were miniscule for a university trying to enhance its image as a research institution. One of the issues in this change of image was the struggle between two desirable objectives: the preservation of the university’s historical identity and the drive for research excellence. All institutions try to maintain their identity by bringing people aboard who share their goals and aspirations. This is true of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in general and of Howard University, in particular, as the leading black university. But the mission of the university to achieve excellence in a wide range of research fields tends to transcend its historical identity, especially when the achievement of such excellence has come to depend increasingly upon the efforts of a racially diverse population of scholars. This reality was sharpened by the civil rights movement, which opened up employment opportunities for black scholars at predominantly white institutions, forcing Howard to cast a wider net for the best scholars. As globalization further eliminated barriers to the mobility of scholars around the world, the goal of research excellence at the university attracted more nonAfrican Americans scholars. This is particularly evident in the natural sciences. In this more diverse environment, the question that arises is the following: How long can history continue to dictate the institution’s ethnic identity as the drive for excellence slowly transforms it?

9

Travels with the Family

T he year 1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo and the gathering of storm clouds over the presidency of Richard Nixon as a result of the Watergate scandal. Oil prices went sky high, slowing the growth of the economy and creating what economists call “stagflation.” Lines at gasoline pumps stretched for blocks. There were even incidents of thieves stealing gasoline from neighborhood cars as I discovered one night when someone stealthily unscrewed the gas cap at the back of my car parked in my carport. It was also a time of intellectual upheaval in the economics profession when the Keynesian doctrine of stimulating aggregate demand with public spending came into disrepute and theories of rational expectation and efficient markets by neoclassical economists from the University of Chicago swooped in to fill the vacuum. In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford succeeded him, and we took the children to Jamaica for the first time. Geoffrey was four, Christopher two, and Laura eleven months. Their grandparents were delighted to see them, and so was their grandaunt Rose whom we visited in Kingston. We stayed in one of the cottages of a new beach hotel in Port More, a rapidly growing suburban township southwest of Kingston, conveniently close to my parents’ home, Braeton. The children loved the beach and the cottage. For Sally and me, traveling with three small children was a challenge as we constantly had to keep an eye on them in places where conditions were unfamiliar to them. On the whole, they reveled in the new environment. In December 1975, I took the family along with me to the American Economic Association Meetings in San Diego where we visited Sally’s cousin, Lea Bolwerk. Lea was married to Jim, a former Navy carrier pilot who’d flown 192 missions over Vietnam. At the time, he was working as a civilian employee of the Navy; the couple and their four children lived in a ranch-style house in El Cajon. We had visited them when Geoffrey was six months old and Jim was stationed in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Now we each had two new children to show off. While in San Diego, I took Sally and the boys across the border to Tijuana, Mexico. Sally insisted that we have lunch in a hole-in-the-wall called “Nueva

Kentucky Café.” Fortunately, we didn’t regret it. Of course, we didn’t miss the famed San Diego Zoo and its Wildlife Safari. The year 1976 was a pivotal—and busy—one for the family. In April, we moved about three miles to a new house with an eat-in kitchen, four bedrooms, and an oversized two-car garage on Wren Lane in another Lanham development. Once again I got my tools out and enclosed the mostly downhill backyard with a sixfoot privacy fence. (I felt as if I’d dug a million post holes in the signature Lanham red clay.) Not long after we moved in, Sally bought tickets to Jamaica for me and the boys mostly, I suspect, for a chance at peace and quiet. On July 4, we rang bells in the front yard to celebrate the bicentennial of the United States. And in August, we embarked on what turned out to be a long road trip to Wisconsin so the kids could meet relatives on both sides of Sally’s family. She hadn’t been back since her father’s funeral in January 1965, so she was more than eager to go. We spent two days in Milwaukee, wandering through the Marquette University campus recollecting our student days, watching our kids walk where we once walked. On our last day, we went to the splendid beaches where the city fronts Lake Michigan. Geoffrey frolicked in the water with other kids as Sally coaxed a reluctant Christopher to in. We then drove north one hundred miles to Appleton and Sally’s ancestral homeland. Our first stop was in the village of Combined Locks, where Sally had grown up, to see her Aunt Antionette. Aunt Nettie, the youngest of Sally’s father’s siblings, lived in the much modernized house in which Sal’s dad had grown up. Nettie had carefully kept for many years a tea set which Sally had received from another aunt. Nettie put the sturdy, taped box on Sally’s lap and Laura, with one swipe of her three-year-old fist, sent the treasure tumbling to the ground amid the tinkling of broken stoneware. It was one of those parental moments in which you don’t know whether to laugh or swat the offending child. We took the kids to Green Bay, and though there was no frozen tundra in sight, we had a close-up look at the famed Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers. Not far from this icon, we found the National Railroad Museum where the boys eagerly climbed on the front of the old locomotives on display. A short ride on a one-coach train pulled by an old steam engine took us back into the era of early train travel. Later at Bay Beach, a little amusement park, the children

had fun riding in a much smaller train. The climax of our visit was a cookout hosted by Sally’s Aunt Alice, Lea Bolwerk’s mom. Sal was able to reunite with aunts, uncles, and cousins, including the whole San Diego branch of the Bolwerk clan. Our kids blended in as if they were in their own backyard. From Wisconsin, we headed north to Sault Ste. Marie where we took a boat tour through the Soo locks, which connect Lake Ontario to Lake Superior. Sally and the children were thrilled to be so close to the big freighters as they ed through the locks. After a night at a motel, we crossed the picturesque Mackinac Bridge and headed toward the outskirts of Detroit where we spent another night. From there we drove straight home. The entire trip took ten days, and the children seemed to enjoy every minute of it. The year 1977 was an important turning point in my life when I became an American citizen at a swearing-in ceremony in Baltimore with my family watching. It was a happy moment for me, and I lost no time applying for a US port. During the next two years, I worked diligently on my new book, Caribbean Dependence on the United States Economy, which was published in 1979, after Sally spent many hours typing and retyping the manuscript on a rented Smith-Corona Selectric typewriter. (Note from Sal: Until computers came into general use, behind every successful academician stood a woman who could type.) In the summer of 1980, we took the children to New York City by train. There we took the Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan. At the north end of the island, we watched young men risk their lives jumping off a high cliff into the East River. The next day, we took the subway to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The elevator whisked us up to the observation deck of the North Tower in no time. The weather was clear, and the view of Manhattan and the bridges connecting the neighboring boroughs was spectacular. Laura accidentally bumped her head on the observation telescope. She cried loudly not so much from the hurt but because she’d suddenly become the center of attention from a group of strangers. After two days in the Big Apple, we headed to Penn Station to catch our train home. The Sunday evening crowd was large and the escalator down to the train was packed, so we made sure the children were standing close to us. At the bottom of the escalator, our train was on the left track, and we turned left into the nearest coach. When we got on the train Geoffrey was missing; he did not turn

with us. He was swept along with the crowd. All kinds of dreadful scenarios came into our minds as we tried to figure out where he was. We left the two children in the train crying and afraid while we sought out a uniformed train conductor and told him that our ten-year-old son was missing and asked him to hold the train until we found him. In the meantime, Geoffrey, recognizing that he was separated from us, had gone to another conductor to report his situation. That conductor took him upstairs where a train official made an announcement on the public address system that a little boy named Geoffrey Palmer was lost. We rescued him and boarded the train. The other two children were still crying but regained their composure when we were all together again. Later that summer, we took the children to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, where the eastern shore meets the Atlantic Ocean, to watch the annual pony swim. We positioned ourselves in a strategic spot to get a good view of the horses as they came ashore. The crowd of onlookers was large, and as the first horse came ashore, it stopped and looked around, probably wondering what all the fuss was about. After the swim, the horses were auctioned off by the Chincoteague Fire Department. From Chincoteague, we stopped by Crisfield, the crab capital of Maryland. To complete the summer, I took the two boys to Washington, D.C., where they watched the annual regatta on the Potomac as planes overhead headed for a landing at National Airport. We also toured the Aquatic Gardens in southeast D.C. where blooming water lilies and various aquatic plants provided excellent cover for frogs and other aquatic denizens. The boys were thrilled. As the children grew up, traveling to new places with them became an integral part of our annual summer vacations. In July of 1981, we went to Toronto by way of Cooperstown and Niagara Falls. The boys were excited about the Baseball Hall of Fame exhibits, even though they were too young to recognize the players. After touring the museum, we settled in a Cooperstown park for a picnic before we headed to Niagara Falls. There we boarded the Maid of the Mist tour boat for the awesome experience of a close-up view of Horseshoe Falls. We donned rain coats to protect us from the drenching spray. As the boat crept closer to the falls, the roar of the water became deafening. At the end of the tour, we traveled across the international bridge spanning the Niagara River to the Canadian side where we lingered at the Horseshoe Falls overlook and watched people looking like ants in yellow slickers climb their way behind the falling water. From Niagara Falls, it was on to Toronto. Our first destination was the CN

Tower. We rode the elevator to the top to view the spectacular urban landscape. Our blue Nissan station wagon in the parking lot below appeared like a little toy car. We spent a full day at the entertainment complex called Ontario Place, taking in a performance by jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, a movie on Canadian history, and many activities in which the children reveled. Sally topped things off with a sightseeing helicopter ride around downtown Toronto. The following day, we took the ferry to Centre Island Amusement Park and treated the children to a variety of rides. On our return to the hotel in Toronto, we got a fright. When we came out of the elevator at our floor, Geoffrey was missing again. The door of the crowded elevator closed before he could get out. Like our experience in New York City, we imagined all kinds of frightening scenarios as we waited anxiously for the elevator to come back down. We breathed a sigh of relief when he walked out calmly and without panic. From Toronto, we went north to Barrie and then onto nearby Orillia, the hometown of Sally’s favorite singer/songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot. A county fair was in progress on the shore of Lake Couchiching, and we strolled around, watching a man skillfully make carvings with a chainsaw and a group of people inflating a hot air balloon. We felt welcome and at home in the small Canadian community. In the summer of 1982, we drove to Disney World in Orlando. Our first stop was Wilmington, North Carolina, where we spent several hours at the beach as the kids frolicked in the gentle waves. As an academic, I couldn’t resist a quick tour of the Wilmington campus of the University of North Carolina. But easily the highlight of our Wilmington stop, especially for the children, was our visit to the battleship USS North Carolina. Geoff and Chris maneuvered the ship’s antiaircraft guns, but they were outdone by their little sister. Laura seemed ready to take down any plane foolish enough to head her way. From Wilmington, we headed to Waycross, Georgia, and the Okefenokee Swamp Park. There we took a slow boat ride through the indigo waters of the swamp. Along the way, we got a mild scare as an alligator bumped the bottom of the boat. After the boat ride, we walked on the winding raised wooden path through the primeval setting of large cypress trees and climbed to the top of a lookout tower to see the vast expanse of the swamp. Back at the park entrance, the children were fascinated by baby alligators scampering around behind a fence as their large mother snoozed nearby in the afternoon. From Waycross we drove to Orlando, Florida, to look for adventure at Disney World. It was a magical place for the children. Geoff was twelve, Chris ten, and Laura eight. We did many of the rides, including cable cars and merry-go-

rounds. We also relaxed on the paddle boat for a slow sail through parts of the park. The musical parade of Disney characters was a highlight for the kids as they watched some of their favorite characters march by at close range. Laura was thrilled to have one of them shake her hand. As we toured the park, I tried to capture as much of the family as I could with my video camera, occasionally handing the camera to Sally or Geoffrey to record my own presence. Later that year in November, we got permission to take the kids out of school, and we flew to Orlando again to celebrate my fiftieth birthday at Epcot Center. A huge water fountain in the center of the park with water leaping from one spot to another was a big hit with everyone. We rode the monorail train, watched African dancers, toured the major pavilions, and ed the crowds wherever there was outdoor entertainment. In the summer of 1983, our travels took us north to the Catskills Game Farm in upstate New York. The children mingled with deer, llamas, and other animals and fed them by hand with food bought at a conveniently located animal food dispensary. They delighted in touching the antlers of deer and ing their hands over the backs of llamas and sheep as if they were all pets. There were also giraffes and rhinos, kept at a distance in secure areas. On a rainy day, we toured the Howe Caverns, squeezing through the claustrophobic rock corridors gouged out by water eons ago. In August of 1984, Sally and I left the children in the care of friends and flew to Vancouver, Canada, to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. We found Vancouver to be beautiful and laid back; the food was good and the atmosphere generally friendly. At Stanley Park, we saw immigrants playing cricket, a testament to the cosmopolitan character of the city. We were on the road again in 1985, this time to Vermont. On the way, we made a pilgrimage to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. This was particularly exciting for Christopher who was developing his skills as a basketball player. In New Hampshire, we gazed at the rock formation of the Old Man of the Mountain, which has since fallen down onto the roadway. We ired the quaint covered bridges and lingered in small towns where I photographed the scenery with white steeples of churches peeking above the woods. The year 1986 was an important turning point in our travels. Geoffrey had turned

sixteen, and we made our last summer trip with the children, this time to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. We flew into Denver and rented a car for the drive to Cody, named, of course, for Buffalo Bill Cody. That was our base camp for exploring Yellowstone. On the way, we spent a night in Cheyenne where we visited a pioneer museum and the Spirit of Wyoming statues of the Indian and the Mountain Man. As we drove along the highway through the vast openness of that thinly populated state, it was easy to feel like we were in the middle of nowhere. After a brief stop at Ayres Natural Bridge Park, where centuries of wind and rain carved the rock into a bridge, we crossed the Bighorn National Forest and arrived at Cody. After our first night in Cody, we headed for the park, full of anticipation. Once there, we ed the crowd at Yellowstone’s signature attraction, the Old Faithful geyser, and gazed at the eruption of plumes of white steam. From there, we moved on to the lesser geysers and bubbling mud pits and onto the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone where the Yellowstone River tumbles into the valley of the canyon over one hundred feet below. As we moved through the park, we came upon a herd of buffalos feeding, unbothered by the people watching them. As the afternoon waned, we drove by the huge Yellowstone Lake and made our way back to Cody. We capped off the evening in Cody with a visit to a night rodeo where some of Wyoming’s lesser bull riders were in action. The next day, we headed for resort town of Thermopolis and marveled at the largest hot spring in the world with its pools of hot water encrusted at their rims with sulfur deposits. From there we followed the Wind River Canyon through an abandoned town to Hells Half Acre with its amazing rock sculptures, some in the shape of animals. We spent a night in Casper and moved on to Laramie for a brief tour of the University of Wyoming campus. We left Laramie for Denver and after a visit to the mile high state capitol, we flew home with the satisfaction that we had seen some of the most stunning landscape in the world. (Sally commented that the car rental agency had given us unlimited mileage, and we exceeded it.) Our trip to Wyoming in 1986 whetted our appetite for more of the American West and in the summer of 1988 Sally and I left the children in the care of a neighbor and flew to Billings, Montana. Our aim was to cover as many points of interest as possible within a week. We headed west through Bear Tooth , an elevation of nearly eleven thousand feet, and through Cooke City, an old gold mining town, to Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone, we were able to

spend more time at the Steamboat and Norris Basin Geysers before we moved on to the 8,800—foot high Heaven’s Peak in Glacier National Park. We explored the head waters of the Missouri River (discovered by Lewis and Clark) and at Helena, we took a boat through the Gates of the Mountain Recreation Area and ed through a steep canyon with spectacular rock formations, some with the shape of a human face. Along the way, we were fascinated by the prairie dog town as numerous prairie dogs intermittently emerged from their burrows to survey the territory. At Custer Battlefield National Monument, we walked through the field where Custer was defeated by the Indians. We also visited the Pictograph Cave where cave dwellers made carvings long before the white man arrived. At the end of our tour we returned to Billings and flew back home with great reverence for the wide open spaces of the American West. In 1989, Sally and I celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a trip to Alberta, Canada. We flew to Calgary and drove to the resort town of Banff. After touring the immediate area of Banff, we headed for Lake Louise, drinking in the spectacular scenery. Along the way, we took a tour of a glacier and walked on ice, possibly over a hundred feet thick, staying clear of any crevasse that seemed dangerous. We traveled north to Edmonton, staying for a night and touring a historical museum. Leaving the city, we came upon a vast indoor shopping center—the West Edmonton Mall, at the time the largest one in the world. We promised ourselves we would stay an hour. We stayed five. Flying home, I thought to myself that the trip was therapeutic, and I returned to Maryland feeling energized for the semester ahead.

Sally and the kids in Toronto, Canada, 1974

Geoffrey and his grandfather, Mr. P., Braeton, Jamaica, 1974

Chris and Geoff at Dunn’s River Falls, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, 1975

Cookout with Sally’s family in Kimberly, Wisconsin, 1976

Chris, Laura, and Geoff at the Statue of Liberty, New York, 1979

Geoff and Chris on the Circle Line boat for a trip around Manhattan, 1979

The Palmer family at the Washington, D.C. Arboretum, 1980

Sally, Geoff, Chris, and Laura aboard the battleship, The U.S.S. North Carolina, Wilmington, 1982

10

The Reagan Years

M y third decade in America began in 1980 with the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan in the presidential election. The economy was in a deep recession, and people saw Reagan as a strong leader who could bring relief from the affliction of double-digit inflation and unemployment. That year, I ventured into the world of entrepreneurship and incorporated the North-South Publishing Company with a view to publishing selected scholarly research on the Caribbean. The venture required more effort and money than I had anticipated, but I persisted and published several volumes, including The Jewish Community of Jamaica: Minority and Power in a Black Society by Carol Holzberg and Big Revolution, Small Country: The Rise and Fall of the Grenada Revolution by Jay Mandle. The most labor-intensive parts of the enterprise were the editing and marketing. The big lesson I learned was that it was easier to attract manuscripts than to make money off the ones that were published. In June of 1979, shortly after I presented a paper at the Western Economic Association Meetings in Las Vegas, I was approached by a U.S. State Department official who asked me if I would be willing to go on a speaking tour of the Caribbean. I agreed, and in February 1980, I traveled to Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, the Bahamas, and Jamaica on my first lecture tour for the United States Information Agency. The tour allowed me to interact with the officials and academics in every country along the way. This opportunity further enhanced my perspective of the region in which I grew up and had devoted much time studying. In 1982, President Reagan unilaterally established the Caribbean Basin Initiative by removing tariff barriers against imports from the Caribbean. In a letter to the Washington Post, March 6, 1982, I hailed the move:

With one bold stroke the Reagan istration has created a Caribbean Common Market in the United States. The value of this market to the Caribbean will depend on the amount of foreign private capital it can attract to produce manufactured goods for export.

In the face of substantial tax benefits bestowed on US corporations, Caribbean governments may have to offer particularly attractive tax incentives to offset even the slightest risk of investing in the region. As in the past, these incentives will artificially lower the price of capital, thus encouraging the use of laborsaving production methods in countries with surplus labor. This means that the ultimate success of the Caribbean Basin Initiative will require private investment inflows of Marshall Plan proportions to absorb significant numbers of workers in manufacturing. In Jamaica, for example, manufacturing now employs only 80,000 workers, less than 10 percent of the labor force. By 1994, when the duty-free entry into the United States is scheduled to expire, the Jamaican labor force will be roughly 1.4 million. If manufacturing is to absorb, say, 20 percent of that, it will have to create an additional 200,000 jobs. If we assume a modest investment requirement of $2,000 to create a job place, then $400 million would have to be attracted into the manufacturing sector alone. Multiply that by a factor of four for the region and we get a more realistic picture of the magnitude of the private investment required. Nevertheless, the Caribbean Basin Initiative is a most welcome step. Together with the trade concessions provided by the European Economic Community under the Lomé Convention, it will provide Caribbean countries with unprecedented access to the richest markets of the world. It should be ed, however, that the elimination of tariffs does not mean the elimination of competition. To stake out their share of the US market, Caribbean countries will have to move quickly to develop comparative advantage in a whole new range of exports. They only have 12 years to do it: in 1994, duty-free entry into the United States is scheduled to expire. Ransford W. Palmer Professor of Economics, Howard University

In 1993, when Bill Clinton became president, there was a desire on the part of the U.S. government to establish better relations with the Caribbean in the wake of Reagan’s squashing the revolution in Grenada. I believe this was what motivated the State Department to ask me to go on a second Caribbean lecture tour. I distinctly my bumpy flight from Bridgetown, Barbados, to

Paramaribo, Suriname, in a small plane with three people: the two pilots and myself. I was cold to the point of freezing for the entire forty-five-minute flight. In Suriname, the theme of my presentation was forward looking. I exhorted my audience to look ahead to a time when nontraditional exports would replace traditional natural resource exports as engines of Caribbean growth. My presentations to various groups received wide coverage in the local newspaper with such headlines as Suriname moet twenty jaar verder kijken, zegt Amerikaanse ekonoom and Volledige integratie in Caribisch Gebied belangrijk voor Suriname. From Suriname, it was a hop skip and a jump to Guyana, where I met with government and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) officials over a four-day period ending on June 16. The coverage of my presentations in the Guyana Chronicle was extensive. On June 16, it ran two articles on my lecture with the following captions: Visiting USIS lecturer backs privatization, and US expert plugs NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) advantages for CARICOM. On June 17, the Stabroek News ran an article with the caption: Economist advises privatization, infrastructural repair. And on the same day, two more articles appeared in the Guyana Chronicle with the following captions: CARICOM should press CET case—Professor and US economist says NAFTA would not seriously affect sugar. Although the lecture tour was exhausting, the experience was rewarding. At every stop along the way, the U.S. embassy had a reception for me that brought together leading academic, political, and business figures. The interaction with these people and with the audiences at my lectures provided me with a fuller sense of Caribbean aspirations at a time when the world was experiencing a serious recession.

11

A New Home

I n 1991, Sally and I toured a new housing development in Glenn Dale, Maryland, about fifteen minutes from our current home. We were attracted to the new homes with their large wooded lots. Images of a garden with spectacular flowers and shrubs danced in my head. After a serious examination of our finances, we decided to buy one of the new homes and put our current home on the market. In December of 1991, we moved into the new house, our third in twenty-two years, and each one triple the price of the previous one. I suppose it could be argued that we were demonstrating typical American middle-class upward mobility, in sharp contrast to the situation in the village in which I grew up where many people lived on ancestral lands from birth to death. And upon death, they were buried on their own land, ensuring an unbroken link between the living and their ancestors. Whenever I return to Jamaica, I visit my brother Conway and his wife Monica, who live near my father’s house, with the graves of my parents in a corner of the front yard. This is an integral part of my ritual of remembrance. Our new home in Glenn Dale was built on a heavily wooded lot almost an acre in size. As the years ed, I was obsessed with realizing the potential for a garden in the woods with flowering bushes and trees and a place to hide away and meditate. It required hard work and good planning. But there were other objectives on my agenda competing with my obsession. The basement of the new house had to be finished to provide another bedroom for one of the boys, a second recreation area where the children could entertain their friends, and a study for myself. The years after we moved into our new house were difficult ones financially because the new mortgage was roughly twice that for the previous house, and my university salary was not growing fast enough. An opportunity arose for a higher salary as the associate director of the Ralph Bunche International Affairs Center at the university, and I took it. During the year at the Bunche Center, I organized a major conference on the Caribbean, which brought together scholars from across the United States and the Caribbean. Out of proceedings of the conference, I edited two books: The Repositioning of US-Caribbean Relations in the New World Order and U.S.—Caribbean Relations: Their Impact on Peoples

and Culture, both published by Praeger Publishers in 1997 and 1998, respectively. The conference attracted many of what could be called the Caribbean community in the Washington area. This community is not as well defined as one would find in Brooklyn or Hartford, Connecticut. In the Washington area, immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean seem to melt away into the larger population, surfacing as a community only around organized social occasions. Although they are better educated than Caribbean immigrants in other parts of the country, their communal voice is barely audible among the political din of Washington. Many are international civil servants representing their countries; others are long-settled academics; but most of them are first-generation immigrants who devote most of their energies to making a living and financing the education of their children. A few organize social activities to promote the culture and music of their homelands. And upon retirement, those who can afford it tend to go south to live in largely Caribbean communities in Florida. After a year at the Bunche Center, I returned to the Economics Department to serve as its chair for the second time. For ten years, between 1998 and 2008, I was a founding member and chairman of the board of a group called The National Coalition on Caribbean Affairs (NCOCA). I worked closely with another founding member and long-time U.S. resident, Leo Edwards, whose home address was the headquarters of the organization. Principal among NCOCA’s objectives was the education of the United States policy makers on critical issues affecting U.S.-Caribbean relationship. Toward this end, of the organization’s board had important interactions with agencies of the federal government. These meetings included useful discussion sessions. But, as in most Caribbean organizations, the ingredient that held the organization together was its social component, which took the form of an annual banquet and award ceremony. This event gave the organization much recognition as news of the annual event spread throughout the Caribbean. But the annual banquet and award ceremony alone could not sustain the organization. To survive it needed ongoing programming to give it substance. Since our mission was to educate Washington policy makers about certain issues of importance to U.S.-Caribbean relations, it was difficult to include the leaders of organizations in the rest of the country in our delegations to government agencies. As a consequence, the organization relied totally on its leadership resident in or near the Washington area. Thus, although in theory the

organization was a coalition of Caribbean groups, in practice its Washington focus placed the burden of carrying out its mission on the leadership who lived in or near Washington. As a consequence, when the Washington-based founding began to relinquish their leadership positions, a vacuum was created into which no one rushed to fill and the vitality of the organization faded away along with its mission. A similar fate befell the Washington chapter of the Jamaica Progressive League, which was headed by my friend, Hugh Thomas.

12

The Education of Our Children

W e traveled extensively with our children, allowing them to see as much of the United States as possible to broaden their perspective of the country. Their formal education began in private pre-schools and from there to Magnolia Elementary, the Lanham public school a few blocks from our Wren Lane home, and later to St. Hugh’s Elementary School in Greenbelt, Maryland, where we hoped they would be held to higher standards. Sally, who kept in close touch with the teachers and principal, discovered that many parents had the same hope, and the classes were dotted with youngsters who lacked both discipline and a commitment to academic excellence. When the assignment of a new pastor caused a serious uproar in parish life, we—along with many other parents—took the kids out of St. Hugh’s. From then on, their schooling was entirely in public institutions. Chris and Laura went to middle school together, and Geoff enrolled at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, also in Greenbelt. ER specializes in science and technology. While students throughout the county competed for entrance, the children from our neighborhood qualified simply because of their address. We lived then (and still do) in Prince George’s County, which has one of the largest school systems in the country. Although we found homes in friendly, well-integrated neighborhoods, PG (as it is popularly known) has a large population of mostly low-income blacks clustered together close to the Washington, D.C. line. In an effort to achieve the major social (and political) policy goal of school integration, bussing was instituted. The desirable objective was, of course, to provide disadvantaged black students from poor neighborhoods the opportunity for a better education. In addition, bussing was an attempt to bridge the divide between students from different socio-economic backgrounds. Kids on both sides could read the message between the lines: the black youngsters were taken from their inferior families, schools, and neighborhoods and placed in with whites who were, ipso facto, superior. (The families in the proximate Magnolia neighborhood were white, black, and Asian, with professional fathers and stay-at-home mothers.) The nearby apartment houses were a mix of races as well; many of the occupants were professionals.

Sally volunteered at Magnolia and saw firsthand the unintended consequences of bussing: rather than influencing the minority kids to study harder, the Magnolia majority was only too happy to become disruptive slackers themselves. As an immigrant who had put in many difficult hours climbing the American Dream ladder, I was particularly sensitive to the spillover effect. Sally, raised in a family whose valued education even if they were unable to attain it and accepted hard work as a matter of course, just got mad at the children’s nonchalance. We tried to do all the right things to nudge them along the path to excellence. Sometimes I think they had too many opportunities: perhaps if they had grown up in a poor island nation and had to scratch their way past an array of obstacles, they would have been more eager to seize the day, as it were. They were hard workers, however. Geoff, even as a skinny ten-year-old, was ever ready to help out a neighbor, sometimes for a few coins, sometimes not. He was, one neighbor told Sally, “a hustler, but in a good way.” When he was old enough to cut our lawn, he started a lawn-mowing business; he quickly became the employer of a number of his peers and was fast to criticize any job not measuring up to his standards. At eighteen, he went to work at a pizza place and both siblings followed. There they met many immigrants and people who were holding their lives together with the money they made from delivering pies. It was, on the whole, a good—and eye-opening—experience for all of them. The boys also put their energies into BMX (bicycle motocross) racing, which is done on a small track with sharp turns and large jumps and a series or two of smaller jumps. Geoffrey designed a bike from the ground up; he took his specifications to a bicycle shop, where a young employee built it as we watched. Geoff paid for the bike with savings from his lawn-cutting business. (The teenager who assembled the bike became a well-known Hollywood movie director—only in America.) Knowing the importance of sports, I encouraged my children to participate in the track-and-field program offered by St. Hugh’s. They weren’t particularly good at it, but I was pleased that they made the effort. (Laura was a speedy runner, and she might have become good at the high jump if she’d been able to keep at it.) Of course, as a proud father, I tried to capture every moment with my Super-8 movie camera.

Chris started playing basketball in the seventh grade at St. Hugh’s, out of boredom, he once confessed to his mother. While Geoff and Laura went to Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Chris took a different route. Seeing that bussing was not the problem-solver it was touted to be, the county instituted a new policy: it would turn schools in minority neighborhoods into “magnet” schools. The idea was that specialized programs in those schools would “attract” white students from their own neighborhoods, a sort of integration in reverse. Students were chosen by lottery; Sal stood in a long line to enter his name for the International Baccalaureate program at Central High School in Capital Heights, Maryland, not far from the line separating Maryland and D.C. She was excited when he was chosen. Technically, Chris had an interracial heritage, but she figured his white half and his red hair were grounds enough to stretch the truth. Chris was less than pleased. We knew he was intensely competitive and hoped that being with high achievers would spur him to perform. Unfortunately, the I.B. program was new, and the instructors did not seem certain what to do. Central, however, did point Chris toward his future. Measuring six foot three inches, he is the tallest of our children, and he continued to play basketball. In his senior year, the nucleus of the Central team had been together for two years, and they won the Maryland State 2A-3A championship. Chris received a basketball scholarship from Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. (As an adult, he confided to Sal that the greatest lesson Central taught him was that although he came from a comfortable background, there was another side to life: there were kids who only had one decent shirt, who went home to sleep on their grandparents’ sofa.) After a year at Bloomsburg, Chris decided to return home and transferred to Howard University to major in journalism. At the end of his senior year, he won an internship at USA Today, a national newspaper; before that ended, he received a summer internship sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists at Sports Illustrated in New York City. There he worked on books meant for a juvenile audience, published by SIKids. After that internship ended, he returned home to wonder what to do next. He didn’t wonder long. The editor of the kids’ books called to say they’d created a brand-new position for him. He went back to New York. Then an interesting tangle arose. ESPN THE MAGAZINE offered him a job.

The Magazine, as it calls itself, had not been in existence that long, and many of its founding editors had been lured away from Sports Illustrated. The hard feelings in the SI offices had not abated. Plus Chris felt indebted to SI for its previous . After much thought and weighing the pros and cons, Chris defected: ESPN offered him more money and a greater opportunity for advancement, plus he would be writing for adults. He is still with The Magazine and also writes for its website, ESPN.com. Now based in Los Angeles, he covers the National Basketball Association and extreme sports. He has also written five sportsrelated books. Geoffrey began his college career as a bummed-out student at Howard. (The kids all knew that not attending college was not an option.) He finished at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, a ten-minute commute from our home, with a B.S. in psychology. (Bowie is also one of the historically black colleges and universities and part of the University of Maryland’s statewide system.) Then, again proving that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, he heard of a very temporary position as the international purchasing agent in the D.C. office of the Secretary-Treasurer of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). The temporary position lasted seven years, and when Geoff, suddenly serious about his education, decided to get his master’s degree in counseling at Bowie, the union picked up the cost. Then it was on to the Ph.D. degree. He enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and received a degree in counselor education. He is now an assistant professor at Bloomsburg. Laura, our youngest, has always been called “Babe,” a nickname bestowed upon her by her big brothers. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Maryland—College Park. She received a B.A. degree in philosophy with a minor in English. Later she returned to do another undergraduate degree with a major in English. She is now married to R. J. Rockefeller, a professor at Anne Arundel [Md.] Community College and has given us two grandchildren, Andrew Tyler and Elizabeth Christina. She is a published poet and recently came out with her first novel. In addition, she is a skilled jewelry designer.

She demonstrated her talent as a poet in a poem she wrote for my birthday in November 2005 entitled “A Song for November.”

After all of that, And through all of this, If I didn’t thank you I might be thought remiss. But please know my trials Have made me stronger, Though others are quick To linger longer On my humanity, Most notably my flaws, Not seeing the triumph, Withholding applause. Please don’t mistake my silence For careless ingratitude; My reticent nature Flashes out to just a few. My most earnest desire Is that you

I do indeed love you From November to November. Babe ’05.

As Geoffrey grew older, he showed an interest in learning about foreign cultures. He went to England and accompanied only by his bicycle and recently attended a conference in Hong Kong. We have been to many foreign conferences together, including several in Britain. On each trip, we would take the tours of historic places such as Stonehenge, Shakespeare’s birthplace, the city of Bath, and Westminster. On one occasion, we took the train on a tour to Paris where we visited, but did not climb, the Eiffel Tower, sailed on a tour boat on the River Seine, and toured the Louvre. On one of our trips to Britain, we visited my younger brother Alvin and his wife, Monica, in Sheffield. Both had migrated from Jamaica many years before, and our reunions were happy ones.

13

The Death of My Parents

M y father lived for 92 years and my mother for 86. I don’t recall that my father ever went to see a doctor. He ran a business that certainly generated stress from time to time, but he never seemed to have been laid up by sickness for any long period. He liked to take a drink with friends who came to his bar and that may have kept his arteries clear. I spent many summers helping my father in his shop in Alston in the parish of Clarendon. Every morning, he read the newspaper, The Daily Gleaner , making him a source of information for those who came into the shop and no doubt kept his mind sharp. I received news around Christmastime in 1978 that my father had ed away. When I arrived in Jamaica, I went with my brother Skipper to the funeral home in Spanish Town to pay the bills. We followed the hearse with the body on the five-mile trip to the Methodist Church in Braeton. My father had returned to his home in Braeton after decades of managing grocery shops in Alston (in the parish of Clarendon) and in Linstead (in parish of St. Catherine). During his later years he became a member of the Braeton Methodist Church. As a boy growing up in the town of Moneague in the parish of St. Ann, he attended the local Anglican Church. But during the summers I spent at the shop in Alston, I don’t him attending any church. This could have been due partly to the absence of a nearby Anglican church and partly to the difficulty of arranging transportation in the mountainous terrain since he did not own a car or any other means of transportation. My father was buried in his own yard in Braeton beside his children—the twins Rexford and Minerva, who died as toddlers from measles, and Terrence, the youngest of the remaining siblings, who died in the terrible accident I described earlier. In his younger days, my father bought several acres of property on which he built a house. He planted coconut trees, lime trees, sugar cane, and a variety of fruit trees, including mangoes, custard apple, sweet sop, and tropical plums. He dug a well and equipped it with a mechanical pump to irrigate his crops. He also grew guinea grass for the cattle he raised on the property. I one of his cows, Hilda, which over the years produced several calves along with gallons of

milk, enough to sell some to the neighbors. My father had a gramophone with an extensive collection of 78—rpm records. He also had a BSA bicycle that he rode in his younger days and which I later rode to high school. He was head and shoulders above most of the people in the village, and he commanded their respect, as Sally sensed upon meeting him. After my father’s death, my mother spent much of her time surrounded by her grandchildren and other relatives in Braeton. I sent her money on a regular basis to allow her to live comfortably. I when we were little how generous she was to her neighbors. She regularly sent us with packages of food to distribute whenever she returned from a stay at the shop in the country. People in the village called her Miss Cuddy, a corruption of the name Cordella. For many, she was the matriarchal aunt, and they called her Aunt Cud, whether they were relatives or not. We called her Cud. Cud died at 86. Again I followed the hearse from the mortuary in Spanish Town to the church in Braeton. Along the way, a tape player in the hearse played somber music as people along the side of the road stopped dutifully to pay their respects. After the hearse delivered the coffin to the church, I sat there alone for a while pondering my own mortality and praying quietly. At the funeral service the following day, I did one of the readings and walked along with the procession to the Palmer homestead where we buried my mother next to my father and the children Terrence and the twins, Rexford and Minerva. As I returned to the United States, I realized that an important chapter in my life had begun: for the first time, there were no parents between me and the past. Whatever my subsequent achievements might be, I could not share it with them. I years before how proud my father was when I wrote to him and told him that I was appointed an assistant professor at Catholic University. For some reason, he interpreted that to mean that I was assistant to the professor, which is what he went around telling his friends. On a subsequent visit, I did try to explain the academic rank, but in the end, it really didn’t matter.

14

The Deaths of Siblings

W hen my brother Alvin died, Geoffrey and I made a sad trip to Sheffield to attend his funeral. Alvin had lived in Sheffield ever since he migrated to Britain in the 1960s. During his long sojourn there, he made only one trip back home to Jamaica to visit relatives and friends. He worked as a metallurgist at one of the steel mills in Sheffield until his retirement. But retirement for him was a great challenge because during his work life, he had not developed any other interest. Moreover, his wife was ill with an advanced case of cancer, which made life at home difficult. He had no close friends and, as a result, he took to drinking. When his wife died and left him alone, the loneliness made his drinking worse. Not long after, he died. On the trip to Sheffield, we were ed by my brother Lincoln who came from Fort Lauderdale to meet us in Baltimore. We caught a flight to Manchester and took the train to Sheffield. Alvin’s only child, his daughter Collair, came from Edmonton, Canada, to make the arrangements. He was buried in the same grave as his wife in the public cemetery. Over the years, I have had the sad experience of attending the funerals of my younger siblings. It began as far back as when I was a teenager, when the twins, Rexford and Minerva, died days apart from measles. From those early days, I was handy with tools, and I made their little coffins. Then later after I had left for America, Terrence died. At the funeral, I was overcome with emotion as I looked at him wearing a tie embroidered with a horse that I had given to him many years earlier. In May of 2009, I received word from one of Lincoln’s daughters that her father was gravely ill. At the time, my plan was to attend the Caribbean Studies Association meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, but I hurriedly adjusted my arrangements to include a stop in Fort Lauderdale to visit Lincoln. Geoffrey accompanied me. As we entered his apartment, we saw his daughter Althea kneeling by his bed weeping uncontrollably as the pastor of his church said a prayer. Lincoln had died just a few seconds before we arrived. The pastor explained that my brother was waiting for us, and he knew we were on our way. We went on to the conference in Jamaica as we had planned and returned to Fort Lauderdale a few days later for the funeral. I was asked to give the eulogy:

Good morning everyone.

I never expected to be standing here giving the eulogy for my younger brother, Lincoln. But neither did he expect to be called upon to give the eulogy for his younger brother, Alvin, in Sheffield, England six years ago. Life often calls us to do unexpected things.

He was christened Lorenz Lincoln Palmer. Our father was in the habit of naming us after famous people, and he named him Lorenz after an Australian aviator. When he arrived in America an “o” was added to his first name, and people started calling him Lorenzo, but we always called him Lincoln.

As a boy, everybody loved him for his pleasant demeanor, and as a man, he infected the people around him with his optimism. That outlook took him to America where he studied and where he got married, back to Jamaica where he worked with the government for a while, and then back to America.

The years between 1977 and 1987 were perhaps the most critical time in his life. During that period, we corresponded by letter. I would like to share with you brief excerpts from a few of the letters he wrote from his home on Birdsucker Drive in Kingston:

February 10, 1977

By now you must have heard of the economic measures which were imposed on us last month. The government is making things harder for us the working

people. The price of petrol is now two dollars a gallon plus an increase in license fees. How can people survive under such measures? Then come April we will be faced with more taxation and tighter restrictions. I will be taking my vacation in May and if all goes well I should be coming that side.

June 25, 1977

He went to London for a two-week course: I certainly enjoyed being in London for the two weeks. I was able to see some historical places in between my observation course.

He also went to see his brother Alvin in Sheffield: Do you know he has not saved a penny in the bank for all the years he’s been in England? What if anything happens and he has to come home? Anyway, I tried to talk a little sense into him and he promised to turn a new leaf.

October 27, 1978

He was concerned about the fact the Jamaica government had set a deadline for replacing the existing paper money with new notes: I don’t know if this will solve our economic woes, but whoever is behind this better know what they are doing.

February 9, 1979

He continued to agonize over the economic situation in Jamaica:

I am totally fed up with the government and everything, and I am seriously contemplating making a move back to New York or some other state. This is a hard decision to make especially when you know that you have to pull up roots again to start life all over. Anyway, I am watching the situation closely and if conditions remain the same or worsen, then I will have no choice but to make a move.

May 31, 1980

Rona [his wife] is still in New York. The children may be going there over the summer holidays. I will have to travel with them, so whatever happens I’ll let you know.

He also added:

Skipper [his brother] is in Chicago for a week or two and Hazel [his sister] is in New York for [her daughter] Grace’s graduation.

December 7, 1983

I am looking forward to spending Christmas in New York after all these years. The children can’t wait to see me.

September 28, 1987

Althea is now at Binghampton College in upstate New York. She complains of being lonely and homesick. And then, he added what must be his most life changing sentence: I will be applying for long leave from my job in order to come up to New York or down to Florida where I can find a job to help with her finances.

He came to Florida and never left.

His initials LLP is often used in business to mean limited liability partnership, but there was nothing limited about his devotion to his four daughters, Thea, Denise, Lorelei, and Gail. He showered them with love and brought them up to be responsible women. This I believe is his greatest legacy.

Throughout his last years when his health was failing, his manner remained optimistic. I him at the weddings of his daughters Althea and Lorelei in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. And I watched him as his pride as the father of the bride triumphed over his failing health.

I shall long his indomitable spirit, his commitment to his children and his church, and the optimism which gave him strength. May he rest in peace, and may he sing with the angels.

15

Traveling the World

South Africa

I n the 1990s, I went on two tours of South Africa with a group of Howard University colleagues. For me, the tours were most educational because South Africa was my first with the African continent. The purpose of our trip was to develop a linkage between Howard University and South African universities. The tours covered the major cities: Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Petermaritzburg, and Durban. In each city, we had meetings with university officials. In addition to these official meetings, we took the opportunity to see some of South Africa’s spectacular and historic sites, including Kruger National Park, the Shamwari Wildlife Park, and the suburban city of Soweto. We also chartered a small plane for a flight to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe where we spent three days. Early one morning, we went on a boat ride on the Zambezi River several miles above the falls. As the boat drifted slowly downstream, we could see hippos lounging on the river banks. Later in the day, we walked across the bridge connecting Zimbabwe and Zambia and watched bungee divers preparing to jump off the bridge with a rope tied around their ankles. Below in the river, several people braved the rapids in small boats while further down the river the Zambezi fell spectacularly hundreds of feet in a constant roar into the valley below. Back in South Africa on the way to Kruger National Park, we ed huge termite mounds scattered over the landscape. In the park itself, the vegetation looked eerily similar to vegetation I had grown up with on the arid plains of the parish of St. Catherine. In fact, I remarking to someone that it felt like I was here before. But the wildlife was much different. As we progressed into the park, large elephants and a herd of antelope began to appear as a jackal walked nonchalantly across the road in front of our bus. I tried to capture as much of the scene as I could with my video camera as the necks of giraffes seem to sprout above the acasia trees.

In Johannesburg, we went on a tour of Soweto, the black suburban township. The place seemed densely populated, and in some places, small groups of children solicited money from visitors. I made the mistake of offering some coins to one of them, and they simultaneously grabbed my hand as if to take it off. We drove by Winnie Mandela’s house and pondered the unmistakable message of the high brick wall surrounding it that security was paramount. In Cape Town, I signed up for another sightseeing tour. I was picked up at my hotel by an Afrikaner white woman about sixty years old. It turned out that I was the only person on that tour. She was very friendly, and she treated me like a long lost relative. We lingered at all the points of interest, including a winery. She did not drink anything, but she patiently waited until I sampled several of South Africa’s best. At a wildlife display area, two young animal keepers sat beside a cheetah, and visitors could have their pictures taken with the animal. I handed my camera to my driver, and she dutifully snapped my picture. All in all, it was a pleasant trip. But I couldn’t help wondering about the policy of apartheid that crippled the country for so many years. I wondered whether the fact that she was running a business exposed her natural friendliness to a client she saw as an attractive foreigner? In Durban, I had a lengthy conversation with the chair of the economics department at the university there. She had gotten her Ph.D. from an American university so she was familiar with some of the issues I raised about graduate education and was amenable to establishing an informal relationship between Howard and her university. At the end of our conversation, she walked me to the entrance of the university where I caught a taxi back to my hotel. The next day, I took a tour up into the mountains near the border with Lesotho and marveled at the spectacular landscape. At the end of our stay in Durban, we flew back to Cape Town. In Pretoria, the capital, we visited the United States embassy and were warmly greeted by the ambassador, an African American. We visited a museum which showed the history of the apartheid period. Some of my colleagues refused to come as a sign of their opposition to past apartheid policies. I did not agree with them. I wanted to see and learn as much as I could about the history of the country in the limited amount of time I had. And some of that history was spectacular, especially the rise and fall of the Zulu nation. Back in Cape Town, we rode the cable car to Table Mountain. The view of the

city and surrounding areas from atop Table Mountain made me want to linger there for a long while to absorb the spectacular topography. It is a special place for an amateur photographer like me. Needless to say, I took numerous pictures. From atop Table Mountain I could see Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner by the apartheid regime. Later we boarded a boat in Cape Town harbor for Robben Island. A tour guide, who at one time was himself a prisoner there, guided us through the complex to Mandela’s cell, which has been carefully maintained as a tourist attraction since he was freed. Robben Island evokes Alcatraz in California, both situated off the mainland and presenting a serious challenge to any potential escapee, no matter how good a swimmer he might be. It was difficult to visit South Africa without wanting to take back a piece of it with you. On the day before I left Cape Town, I bought several pieces of handicraft, including a wall hanging depicting in vivid colors symbols of South African life. On our return to Washington, we stopped in the Azores where all the engers were allowed to get off the plane to shop at an airport store owned by South African Airways.

Russia

In 2004, Geoffrey and I ed a group for a trip to the Global Awareness Society International (GASI) conference in Russia. We landed at Domededova airport in Moscow and transferred to another airport for our flight to St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg was as beautiful as I had imagined it. After we settled into our hotel, we ventured out to visit the spectacular Hermitage museum with its green façade and white columns topped by statues of famous people. We were asked to take off our shoes and replace them with plastic footwear (provided for a nominal fee) by the museum attendants. Inside, the dramatic arches adorned with elaborate chandeliers announced that we were in a setting of great cultural and historical significance. Geoff and I shared a comfortable room at the hotel. In the evening at dinner, we struck up a conversation with a young waitress who spoke English well. I was

curious to know if she owned a dacha since my impression was that everybody in Russia did. She said her parents owned one and that she spent her summers there. As we moved around that picturesque city, we were impressed with the wide avenues and the elaborately decorated spires of the churches, among them the Cathedral of the Resurrection which seemed to bloom against the bright sky. At the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where Tsars are buried, we listened to chants by a choir of monks. From St. Petersburg, we flew to Moscow for our conference. The venue for the conference was the University of Moscow, and the sleeping accommodations had the feel of a student dormitory. We toured Red Square as the sun shone brightly on St. Basil’s Cathedral and the cupolas of the Cathedral of the Annunciation. It was a bit hard to believe that in a place with such a high concentration of religious buildings, the Communist Party held sway for over eighty years. One of the highlights of our visit to Moscow was the evening Geoff and I decided to explore Red Square on our own. Neither of us spoke Russian, and we had to depend on visual markers to find our way. Our hotel or dorm was about ten blocks from Red Square, and the nearest subway station was a block away. When we arrived at the station, we studied the signs carefully and made sure we knew the number of stops to Red Square. We rode the escalator down to the subway station, which seemed deeper than those in Washington, D.C. We boarded the next train and got off at the Red Square stop. We walked around for a while, took some pictures, and as the light faded, we went to an open-air bar where we sat and drank a few beers. As the evening ebbed away, we decided to head back to our hotel with a picture of the name of our destination station clearly etched in our heads. We arrived at the station, debarked like regular travelers, and walked back to our hotel in the cool of the Moscow night. One evening, we watched Swan Lake performed by the world famous Bolshoi Ballet at the Bolshoi Theater. The dancing and the set decorations were superb. On another evening, we were treated to folk dancing by Russian folk dancers, and to our great surprise after one of the dance pieces, two of the female dancers came down into the audience and escorted Geoffrey and me to the stage to the dancing. We put on a brave act and enjoyed the moment. The audience was ecstatic.

Italy

We arrived at Leonardo DaVinci airport in Rome to attend the 2005 annual GASI meeting in a small town on the outskirts of Rome. After the two-day conference, we took the train to Rome to explore that ancient city. Our first stop was the Coliseum, the iconic structure where early Christians were thrown to the lions for sport. I had seen so many movies of ancient Rome in which gladiators fought for their lives that I had come to regard the image of the place as familiar. But as I walked through the reality of this crumbling structure and surveyed its exposed underpinnings, I knew I was seeing more than an old arena. I was looking at the symbol of the fall of a great empire. Outside the Coliseum, we walked through the remnants of that empire, which stand as a stark reminder that change is inevitable. We toured the Vatican and marveled at its museum. We were humbled by the Sistine Chapel where once Michelangelo labored to paint his magnificent frescoes on the ceiling. As we looked up at his masterpiece, it was not hard to appreciate the immense skill and patience he exercised. In St. Peter’s Basilica, there was a line of tourists waiting to visit the crypt of the late Pope, John Paul II. Because our time was limited, we did not it, opting instead to make our way toward the Basilica’s famous altar. On the right side of the church, there is a statue of St. Peter with toes made shiny by the touch of all who ed by, including me. Out in the great courtyard, the crowd was thin, but I have seen it crowded so many times on television; with my camera, I tried valiantly to capture the drama of the panorama. At the subway station in Rome, we had to be on our guard against pickpockets. We had to secure our wallets or run the risk of losing them by a slight brush by a stranger. A member of our group had the unpleasant experience of losing his wallet with all his money and credit cards. Another felt a hand in his pocket and screamed before the pickpocket got hold of his wallet. Despite these unpleasant events, Rome was a great experience. There were memorable moments such as the journey through the countryside to Lake Gondolfo, near the Pope’s summer residence, and lounging by the Fountain of the Broken Boat in the Piazza di Spagna watching people climb the Spanish Steps.

South Korea

My 2007 trip to the GASI meetings in Seoul was my first across the Pacific. With Geoff by my side, I looked forward to experience South Korea, a country I often cited in my research as leaving the Caribbean behind in the development race. The modern airport in Seoul was an unmistakable symbol of a country on the move, and as we entered the city, shiny skyscrapers displayed its commercial vitality. A must-visit for every visitor is the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the north and the south at Panmunjam where telescopes allow one to peer into the hermit kingdom. A museum keeps the hope of reunification alive in the form of an incomplete railroad track with a locomotive ready to roll if the track is ever completed. A sculpture in the area hints at unity with the two halves of a sphere being pushed together by figures on both sides. A tour on a small train took us under the DMZ through tunnels dug by North Koreans attempting to escape to the south. Later a high-speed train ride from Seoul to Pusan at the southern end of the country was a special experience. At about 150 miles per hour, the ride was smooth and comfortable. It represented part of a modern infrastructure that has allowed the Korean economy to achieve high rates of growth over the past decade. In Seoul itself, the streets were filled with Korean cars, many of them looking like copies of European and Japanese models. Amid all this modernization, the culture of the country was on exhibition in places like the Korean Folk Village in Yong-in. There a musical band in colorful historical head gear and dress performing Korean music and dance. In other parts of the village, various aspects of the history and culture of the Korean people intrigued the visitor.

Collapse in Chicago

At the dinner at the end of the GASI conference in Chicago in 2008, I became ill. I had a couple sips of red wine and walked to the buffet table to select my dinner. I felt slightly dizzy, but I considered it a temporary phenomenon. But the dizziness persisted, so I returned to my seat in the hope that I would feel better. My head began to spin, and I felt as if I was fading away. I leaned toward Geoffrey and told him to call for an ambulance. By the time the ambulance arrived I was almost unconscious, though I could hear the medical personnel asking me questions. The ambulance took me to the Northwestern University Hospital where they ran a series of tests on me. They kept me for two nights, taking blood samples every two hours, until they felt I was well enough to leave. Geoffrey stayed with me all through this time and adjusted our hotel and airplane reservations to accommodate the emergency situation, proving that if you are having an emergency, there’s no one better than Geoff to have beside you. On the second day, when I was feeling better, I became the subject of what appeared to be the final examination for a medical student as his professor stood by and observed. As the student went through the procedures, the professor took notes. I watched the face of the student to detect any sign of nervousness, but he appeared calm. I think that he ed the exam because his professor looked pleased. The following day, I was deemed well enough to be released. This incident came a year after a similar one occurred while I attended a conference at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. At the end of that conference, I was sipping red wine with some colleagues at an outdoor party when I felt a fainting spell overcoming me. I must have blacked out for a minute or more. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to find small crowd of people around me trying to assess the situation. One woman, a university physician, recommended that I be taken to the hospital so I could be observed overnight. During that night, I heard the constant moaning of patients in pain. I could not sleep a wink. The following morning, I was released and I went back to my hotel to carry on. These two episodes were similar because I started to drink wine on an empty stomach. There was, however, a vast difference in the cost of my treatment. The University of the West Indies hospital charged me nothing while the bill from the Northwestern University hospital was over a thousand U.S. dollars. I did express my appreciation to the UWI hospital by sending the director a money order for three hundred dollars.

The Global Awareness Society International (GASI) Conference in Washington, D.C

The year 2009 was the first year of my presidency of GASI, and I organized that year’s conference in Washington, D.C., at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The dean of the Howard University Graduate School, Orlando Taylor, gave the opening presentation to an audience which included a sizable delegation of Howard faculty and students. One of the highlights of the conference was the launching of my newest book, The Caribbean Economy in the Age of Globalization, with a presentation by Texas Christian University professor Dawn Elliott. After the conference, the participants gathered at my home in suburban Maryland for a picnic with music performed by a lone calypso singer, Andy Higgins, with keyboard and drums. My son-in-law R. J. Rockefeller, then a professor of colonial American history at Loyola University in Baltimore, entertained the guests with a demonstration of his sword-fighting skills. Other guests relaxed in my garden amid the flowering rhododendrons and evergreen shrubs.

Poland

The following year, the GASI conference was held in Krakow, Poland. It was the second conference of my presidency. We were fortunate to have Anna Lubecka of the University of Krakow as the chair of the local organizing committee. Anna prepared an extensive post-conference tour that allowed us to see many of the historic sights of Poland. We visited salt mines where decades of mining excavated the precious mineral from more than a hundred feet below the surface. In the cavern at the bottom of the mine are a small church and monuments carved by miners. In Warsaw, we visited Auschwitz, a monument to human cruelty where Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. In the center of Warsaw, the Palace of Culture stood boldly against the Polish sky as a reminder of the country’s communist past. In Chestohova, we toured the monastery of the Black

Madonna and attended a mass in English for visiting tourists. I had the honor to do the readings. On a bright sunny day, we rafted on the Danujec River, which separates Poland from the Czech Republic. The quiet trip took us through pleasant rural landscapes with forests occasionally fading into farms and ri into steep mountains. The post-conference touring culminated in a dinner with dancers performing to polka music. The fun escalated when of our group, after a few drinks, began to in the dance, pairing off with costumed dancers of the opposite sex.

At a game park in Cape Town, South Africa, 2001

Surrounded by school children in Pusan, South Korea, 2005

At the throne room at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2004

Lunch in Lisbon, Portugal, 2005

Checking out a bridge in Stratford-on-Avon, England, 2004

Sightseeing in London, 2004

In Paris at the Eiffel Tower, 2004

With former president Jimmy Carter and his election monitoring team, Georgetown, Guyana, 2001

Receiving an award from Dr. Chang Roh, GASI conference, Krakow, Poland, 2010

16

Reflections

W hen I left Jamaica to study in the United States, I did not envisage a career as an academic. In fact, I had hoped to return to a position with the Jamaican government. As time went on, things became complicated. I had gotten married, and I had to consider the wishes of my American wife. I had written to the Jamaica government, inquiring about a position in the Ministry of Finance, but the response was lukewarm, and the salary quoted of two thousand pounds sterling was not attractive. Professionally, an academic position in the United States became more attractive because it offered opportunities for pursuing research and writing. As time went by and as my American family grew, it became clear that my professional future was in the United States, where my base in academia offered me perspectives which would allow me to contribute to a better understanding of Caribbean issues. To a young man growing up in the Caribbean, everything seemed to be influenced by the colossus to the north. But the longer I stayed in the United States, the greater was my realization that Caribbean matters occupied only a small corner of U.S. foreign policy interest. It was my hope that my research and writing could inform this policy interest. Some of my American colleagues viewed this emphasis as a too-narrow area of research. Yet research on the Caribbean offers more challenges than research on larger regions, for the simple reason that these small countries are scattered over a large area and the availability of reliable data is highly uneven. Much of my work has examined the movements of people and trade between the Caribbean and the United States —movements that have important implications for the growth of the region. I have had the good fortune to present my ideas in various forums in the U.S. and the Caribbean. I , particularly, the invitation of the US ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago to deliver a graduation speech to a group of students who were awarded scholarships to study in the United States. I was pleased that my lecture was published in the Trinidad Guardian, making it available to a larger audience. I felt I was making a contribution to the discourse on Caribbean development. Not all my time was involved with academic research. The year 1987 was

important for a significant change in my life: I became a Roman Catholic. The journey to this point was long. I went to a Methodist elementary school, an Anglican high school, and a Catholic university. I married a woman who is a cradle Catholic, and all my children were baptized as Catholic. As we went to Mass together, I increasingly felt that I was the odd man out because I could not fully participate. I had for years toyed with the thought of becoming a Catholic but never took any action. In the first week of Advent of 1986, I signed up in the program called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) for the purpose of exploring the faith but not necessarily to go all the way. But my history to date had been one of going all the way to the end in my academic and personal pursuits, and I was only kidding myself that I was merely exploring. The fact is that I stayed the course and was received into the church at Easter 1987. I was not the odd man out anymore. I later became active in church affairs. The tenor of my life over the last forty years has been shaped by the demands of suburban living and the growth of my children. When Sally and I first moved to suburban Maryland, we were part of a new wave of people moving out of the city of Washington. In fact, we were among strangers. The real engine behind this community development was the children of these new suburbanites who played together and went to the same schools and were in and out of each other’s homes. But there was something else at work. As a professor, I had a more flexible work schedule than most people who worked from nine to five. It seemed as if the neighbors were always at work with little time for getting to know each other. Even with the effort of the local homeowners’ association to bring people together, many people persisted to live in cocoons on their one-acre lots. In many respects, the self-reliance I acquired growing up in that small village in Jamaica has served me well in the American suburban environment. It allowed me to develop an interest in satisfying creative activities such as gardening and photography. In fact, when Sally and I bought our last home, I was influenced by the potential for an arboretum-type garden on the new property. In the years that followed, and with a lot of hard work, I turned that potential into reality. I later spent a considerable amount of time in contemplation among the trees and flowering shrubs. I often shared my creation with friends who almost always never expected to find an arboretum behind my house. My hobby as an amateur photographer has been a perfect complement to my gardening; I was never short of subject matter to photograph. The pictures on the walls of my study are

testament to some of my best efforts, along, of course, with photos of my kids and Sally. In an advanced and complex society like the United States, self-reliance often comes up against limits imposed by the authorities, presumably for the good of the larger society. There are rules and regulations that mandate certain things be done only by those who are duly licensed to do them, which put a limit on drawing on one’s resources. Yet drawing on one’s own resources is the essence of self-reliance. In a modern society, it is the accumulation of these resources through education and investment that enhances self-reliance and reduces dependence on others. But in a complicated society, one is never truly independent of the vagaries of the market place. A sharp decline in the stock market can wipe out years of savings as the Great Recession of 2008 demonstrated all too clearly, forcing many to fall back on the largesse of the state at a time when the state itself must wrestle with declining resources. I have lived through many recessions and recoveries since I arrived in the United States, and the expectation has always been that the wealth of the nation and its people will continue to grow. Over the years, economic data have ed this expectation, and the population has grown richer. However, the great fear in America is that the time may come when this expectation is not realized, when the children will not do as well as their parents, and the great American middle class will shrink. Immigrants do not believe this doomsday scenario, for they continue to come with their own high expectations of accumulating wealth and making a better life for themselves and their children. But the reality is that the path to wealth has become more difficult, especially for the unskilled. And even for the highly skilled, globalization has taken the off the wages in many professions, mandating two earners to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. As I look at the young faces in my introductory economics class, I can sense their expectation of making it big. Every day in the media they are regaled with people who have made it to the top in sports, entertainment, and occasionally in business. And often these successful people are depicted as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But against all this optimism is the evidence of growing income inequality throughout the country.

This growing income inequality will have serious social and political implications. The growth of prisons has been greater than the growth of the gross domestic product. This could be interpreted to mean that America is prepared to isolate from the rest of society the large numbers of people who break the law. Statistics show that America has the largest prison population in world and will not tolerate those who seek to undermine the American social order. But the fact is that changes in the structure of the American economy brought about by globalization are undermining the comfortable way of life for many. At the same time, the share of illegal immigrants in the total immigrant population has grown as people from the developing world seek to escape the limitations for advancement in their own countries. Many of these people bring valuable skills, which allow them to fill shortages in highly technical fields. For many immigrants like me, the journey begins as a student and evolves along a path with opportunities for professional development. As these opportunities are exploited, one’s connection with the environment deepens professionally and socially. In other words, one grows roots. Yet the connection with the homeland is not easily severed. In my case, the focus for much of my academic research as an economist has been on the growth and development of the Caribbean. The thought that often presents itself is whether that growth and development could have benefited more from my return than from my writing about it. I take some consolation from the fact that the contributions of Nobel Laureate W. Arthur Lewis to the field of development economics far outweighed whatever he could have contributed had he returned home early in his professional life. A Caribbean person writing about the Caribbean from outside the Caribbean is not truly writing as an outsider. The experience of growing up in a developing environment cannot be learned from a textbook and cannot be unlearned by becoming an immigrant. This experience shapes expectations which fuel one’s ambition to achieve success. Hence by the standard measures of achievement, a disproportionate share of immigrants has achieved success through hard work, not only for themselves but also for their children. American media tend to disguise the element of hard work, preferring instead to regale the success of so-called role models and not their path to it. On the one hand, this dangles before the impressionable something to reach for. On the other hand, this reaching can lead to a life of frustration for many as they compete for dwindling low hanging fruits. In the classroom where I see the future of the

American workforce, many are not eager to enter this competition, preferring instead to extend as long as possible the halcyon days of their student life. Looking back, my own student days seemed to have rushed by as I tried to accomplish as much as I could in as short a time as possible. This was necessary because I was on my own with no family resources to fall back on. I had to shape my own destiny. Along the way, I was fortunate to receive the encouragement of people who ired my fortitude and persistence. How much of this fortitude and persistence my wife and I were able to instill in our own children is hard to say. But I do know that as they grew up they became more dedicated to their goals with a mix of the immigrant intensity of their father and the relaxed confidence of their mother.