RE: Wey you from, who is you fadder some thoughts..

2013-Sep-06-1321Hrs

Friends:

Theodore Lewis's comment about people not admitting where they are from, was not only a Mausica problem, but a worldwide problem.

It stems from the traditional arrogance of city folk, which caused country folk, unless you were the landed gentry, to fumble the information about where they were from.

The Romans were the first, I found who looked down at the presumably unlettered folks from the hinterland.

The hinterland, the countryside, the bush was where people lived whose business was to feed the city folks who knew "Book larnin" but nothing else, presumably.

When I was a student at the Government Teachers' College, 1961-62, we had a brilliant sociologist named deWilton Rogers, who had crossed back into who he was, long before it was fashionable. One day, he asked who knew how to make bake. I put my hand up. I was in a front area seat. I heard some tittering. I looked around, mine was the only hand up. The Tobago delegation, that included people named Gibbs, Caesar, Nicholson and Gittens, not a hand went up. The Sangre Grande people, the Chaguanas people, the Point and Sando people did not know how to make bake. I lowered my hand to Mr. Rogers' saying there was one  honest person in the house.

Today bake has been rehablitated. It took a while.

On the east coast of the US we had some friends with whom we went to the annual Kappa dance. They were from Tennessee. In making conversation, since the woman was my school colleague, and our husbands were going along, George  asked where Bill was from. He said Memphis. His wife chipped in "Just a short mule ride from Memphis". He husband was irate. Memphis was the closest town. The short mule ride indicated a one horse town, where the poor blacks rode mules. With his PhD and DuPont job, Bill was not going to admit that he was from some one-horse town that was off the map.

Trinis also love to ask"who is your father again?" My response has always been "A country farmer. You would not know him."When we moved to Arima, I was fourteen, there was the family of Vincent Edwards living in a well to do house near the Catholic church. People wanted to associate me with them.

I later began saying"I am a Williams from Williamsville on my father's side, and an Eccles from Ecclesvillage on my mother's side." if we were well enough known to have two villages bearing our family names, people thought it was ok to be from the country.

My mother stayed in a miserable marriage, because she repeatedly said she did not want to be like those women who point to a man passing in the street, who did not even say hello, and say "Look you father passing dey, yes."

Dr. Eric Williams, of blessed memory, abolished illigitimate as a statement on a child's birth certifcate,and gave all offspring equal inheritance rights, but he could not eliminate the stigma of being considered a country bookie, or the child hearing his father say "She say you is mine, but I ent seeing no traces of me anywhere. I still looking."

Keep well, and preserve the memories.

Linda Edwards

Lecturer, MAusica 67-69.