Mixed Race Studies

Black & White: Search for roots uncovers forgotten family secret

National Post
Toronto, Canada
2012-02-17

Sarah Boesveld, General Assignment Writer

About 20 years ago, David Dossett watched his grandfather politely shut down a woman who called to say she was a relative and that their family had come to Canada from Jamaica and that they were black. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Mr. Dossett said to his granddad, businessman John B. Sampson, who seemed amused by this idea. Their family — Mr. Dossett’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side — had come to Canada from Scotland in 1907 and settled in Toronto. No one disputed that. But while doing some casual family tree sleuthing online a few years ago, Mr. Dossett, an IT manager and father of four, stumbled upon a tree that looked a lot like his. As it turns out, it belonged to the woman who called his grandfather that day — Jenny Sampson from Illinois. And so began Mr. Dossett’s “obsessive” hunt for a family’s past that had remained a secret for over 100 years. In the end, he discovered his family is not Protestant and Scottish, but Jamaican and Jewish. Not everyone is pleased about the discovery — much of which was broadcast last week on an episode of The Generations Project on Brigham Young University TV. Mr. Dossett spoke with the Post’s Sarah Boesveld from his hometown of Kingston, Ont.:

Q Jenny Sampson had been doing research independently before you began to question your family’s roots and identity. What had she found?

A When I was looking at her family tree, it was describing my family, it was describing me. And the tree said the family was Jewish, that they lived on an estate in Jamaica called Gaza. The name “Gaza” sounds very Jewish, so I’m thinking “Wow.” I contacted the person whose name was on the website — it ended up being her husband — and Jenny emailed back, explained the whole thing — that her family had come to Toronto in 1907, that they came as mulatto Hebrews. When it really sank into me that this was true I started thinking “What are the odds that my family is from Jamaica?” The odds turned out to be pretty good…

…Q Why do you think your family kept their heritage a secret even years after they immigrated?

A Deep down inside I think people [in my family] are concerned about having Jewish or black heritage. My mother’s cousin was concerned her father, my great-uncle the decorated war hero [and top-ranked army official] Franklin Augustus Sampson, would be looked down on if it was revealed our family lied about their heritage. But what are they going to do? Yank medals away from people? He’s dead. My grandfather lied about his heritage because he said he was born in Toronto, not Jamaica. A lot of people lied when they enlisted in WWI, lied about their age, lied about their ethnicity. One of my cousins found out many years ago through a blood test that there was either Asian or African blood in her system. When she took the blood test, she went into grandfather’s office, she threw it down on his desk in front of him and said “Explain this.”

Q How did your mother react?

A She doesn’t believe it. She says we’re from Scotland, but doesn’t provide details. She’s going through stages of dementia, but even without that she wouldn’t believe it. Jenny told me her mother is no longer speaking to her. If this had happened maybe 20 years earlier, I could have been a little concerned about it too.

Q Did you feel betrayed at all that your family kept this from you?

A Initially I was, but then I became aware of why this was done. I think what I find most discouraging is the way people were treated when they came to the country, if they weren’t from this white background. We have a past we don’t like to talk about. It’s too bad that Canada wasn’t as open a country as it could have been…

…Q You say there are likely thousands of other families out there who may actually be of black heritage despite their families’ white complexions.

A In the late 1800s there was a mass exodus of Jews from Jamaica. The perception was that they were becoming too powerful, so laws were passed to limit what they could own and how much they could acquire. I bet there are a lot of people out there that aren’t searching because they just don’t know. Maybe they just assume they’re from Scotland. Other than myself going to Queen’s University, no one in my family has a kilt, I don’t like bagpipes, I don’t eat oatmeal, I don’t like haggis. Nothing about me would indicate I’m Scottish except for my appearance — I have reddish hair because my grandfather married an Irish woman. They were very pale and I burn quite easily…

Read the entire article here.

Hitting the Right Rhythm to Tell Marley’s Story

The New York Times
2012-04-06

John Anderson

Of all the friends, lovers, relatives and Rastas that the director Kevin Macdonald wrangled into his new documentary, “Marley,” one of his favorite finds was Dudley Sibley, a onetime recording artist and the janitor at the Jamaican recording studio where Bob Marley cut his musical teeth.

“He lived with Bob for 18 months in the back of Studio 1,” Mr. Macdonald said recently over breakfast in Manhattan. “No one ever thought to talk to this guy. My researcher in Jamaica said to me, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s this guy I’ve met who says he lived with Bob.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I don’t believe that.’ But I met him. And he was for real.”

Making a definitive biographical film about Marley, the reggae superstar, who died of cancer in 1981, has always been problematic, plagued by a shortage of archival footage, disagreements over music publishing, and the fact that Marley had 11 children by seven women and never wrote a will…

…The people Mr. Macdonald set out to interview included “everyone who’s alive and was intimate with Bob,” he said. They included Neville Livingston, a k a Bunny Wailer of the original Wailers (later Bob Marley and the Wailers) and Marley’s relatives, black and white. (His absentee mixed-race father, Norval Marley, who was considered a white Jamaican, is a ghostly presence.) Anyone familiar with Bob Marley would assume that, if anything, the difficulties inherent in getting his inner circle to sign off on the same film would keep the full story from getting on screen for 31 years. But Mr. Macdonald said he got total cooperation. Ziggy Marley, Bob’s eldest son, said the family is happy with the result.

 “This is what we wanted it to be,” Ziggy Marley, a successful pop performer, said by phone. “I’ve never read one book about my father,” he said. “Who are they? They don’t know him.”

Rita Marley, Ziggy’s mother and Bob’s widow, concurred…

Read the entire article here.

Bob Marley: the regret that haunted his life

The Guardian
2012-04-07

Tim Adams, Staff Writer

Director Kevin Macdonald explains how he pieced together his new film about reggae legend Bob Marley, from troubled early years in Jamaica to worldwide adulation – even after death

In 2005, the director Kevin Macdonald was working in Uganda on his film The Last King of Scotland. In the slums of Kampala he was struck by a curious fact. There seemed to be images of Bob Marley and “Get up, stand up” slogans and dreadlocks wherever he went.

Marley had been on Macdonald’s mind anyway: he had been asked by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, if he would be interested in getting involved in a film project about the Jamaican musician’s enduring legacy.

The original plan had been to follow a group of rastafarians on their journey from Kingston to their spiritual homeland of Ethiopia, to attend a celebration of the 60th anniversary of Marley’s birth. As it worked out, that film was never made, but, when the opportunity arose for Macdonald to make a more ambitious documentary about Marley, he jumped at the chance…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Jamaicans in England

A Parcel of Ribbons: Eighteenth century Jamaica viewed throught family stories and documents
2012-01-28

Ann Powers

The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England. A case in point are two of the children of Scudamore Winde.

Ambrose Scudamore Winde (he seems to have dropped the Ambrose early on) was born about 1732 at Kentchurch in Herefordshire, son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore.  The beautiful Kentchurch Court is still in the hands of the Scudamore family as it has been for the last thousand years or so. In 1759, following the suicide of his father, he and his brother Robert went to Jamaica where Scudamore Winde became an extremely successful merchant.  He was also Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court of the Judicature and a member of the Assembly.

Like many white colonists of the island he had relationships with several women but did not marry.  When he died in late September 1775 he left generous legacies to his various children. His business had prospered and a large part of his assets were in the form of debts owed to him. According to Trevor Burnard[1] he had  personal assets of £94,273, of which £82,233 were in the form of debts. This would be equivalent to about £9.3 million relative to current retail prices or £135 million in relation to average wages today.

Scudamore Winde freed his negro slave Patty who was baptised as Patty Winde in 1778 at Kingston when her age was given as about 50.  Patty and her daughter Mary were left land that he had bought from Richard Ormonde in Saint Catherine’s with the buildings on it, and £100 Jamaican currency together with two slaves called Suki and little Polly.  It is not clear whether Mary was Scudamore Winde’s daughter for although her name is given as Mary Winde she is referred to as a negro rather than mulatto.

Scudamore Winde had a mulatto son called Robert, possibly the son of Patty, who was born about 1759, and three children with Sarah Cox herself a free negro or mulatto (records vary).  Her children were Penelope, John and Thomas born between 1768 and 1774.  John may have died young and Thomas elected to remain in Jamaica where he had a successful career as a merchant in Kingston.  Robert and Penelope travelled to England under the eye of Robert Cooper Lee who was trustee and executor of his close friend Scudamore Winde’s Will…

Read the entire article here.

Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

University of Illinois Press
1995
288 pages
ISBN-10: 0252021134; ISBN-13: 978-0252021138

Annette White-Parks, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

Foreword by Roger Daniels

Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies.

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times.

The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914.

Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” literature in vogue at the time but with an insider’s sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Roger Daniels
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Bird on the Wing
• 2. Montreal: The Early Writings
• 3. Pacific Coast Chinatown Stories
• 4. Boston: The Mature Voice and Its Art
• 5. Mrs. Spring Fragrance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

The decline of Jamaica’s interracial households and the fall of the planter class, 1733–1823

Atlantic Studies
Volume 9, Issue 1, (January, 2012)  (Special Issue: Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class)
pages 107-123
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2012.637002

Daniel Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

The theory of planter decline traditionally implied that social and sexual chaos in the West Indies produced a middle caste of mixed-race individuals who destabilized colonial life. This article contends that for most of the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were normative unions that did not undercut the central function of the sugar and slave economy. In Jamaica, colonial regulations against free people of color came with individual exemptions that allowed mixed-race elites to skirt the very laws intended to keep them marginalized. Despite differences of color, these personal and familial connections between free coloreds and white fathers helped to maintain strong social hierarchies among the island’s wealthiest ranks. Abolitionist attacks against these family units, however, along with the ever present threat of enslaved revolt, changed conceptions of the Jamaican household at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as Jamaica’s mixed-race population grew and became more endogamous, personal connections to whites dwindled, escalating political conflict on the island. Interracial relationships, therefore, did not herald planter decline, but rather forestalled it.

In the opening chapter of The Fall of the Planter Class, Lowell Ragatz recited a liturgy of social, economic, and cultural issues which had predestined West Indian elites to failure. An outdated agricultural system, regressive economic policies, and political changes brought about by incessant warfare constituted the core of these problems. Ragatz could not ignore, however, the general sense of dissipation and lecherousness frequently associated with Caribbean planters. Echoing many eighteenth-century observers, he viewed island society as backward and unstable:

The white man in tropical America was out of his habitat. Constant association with an inferior subject race blunted his moral fibre and he suffered marked demoralization… Miscegenation, so contrary to Anglo-Saxon nature, resulted in the rapid rise of a race of human hybrids.

Indeed, it was this very “growth of a mixed blood element [that] offered concrete evidence of the Anglo-Saxon’s moral break-down in the torrid zone.” If the avowed goal of island life was to keep blacks separate from whites, then interracial relationships signified a clear disruption in social order.” Cross-racial pairings, according to this retelling, gave an added push to the crumbling pillars of white planter control…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed-race People and Emancipation-Era Jamaica

Emancipation: The Caribbean Experience
Bulding Communities
University of Miami
Fall 2001

Kiara Bell

This website was created by the students of History 300: Caribbean History: Emancipation and Freedom, in Fall 2001 at the University of Miami, with the assistance of the staff of Richter Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

Following the emancipation of all enslaved Africans in 1834, the island of Jamaica was left in a stage of rebuilding.  Religion, education, and family structure were all in disarray and were in need of reconstruction.  With their new-found freedom, people also had the task of establishing a new way of life that would allow them prosperity and fulfillment.  However, the group that faced the most complex rebuilding process was the so-called “people of color.”  People of color, who were a result of “miscegenation,” or sexual relationships between people of African and European descent, faced the challenge of readjusting in the midst of distinct color lines on the island.  They faced particular challenges in the areas of politics, marriage and family, and child education. 

During slavery, white slave owners fathered numerous children with black slaves, and generations of children of mixed race heritage were the result.  White observers tried to subdivide these people of color into various categories.  Mulattos were one half-black and one half-white.  Samboes were black and mulatto (three fourths black and one fourth white).  Quadroons were the offspring of whites and mulattos (three fourths white and one fourth black).  Mestees were the offspring of whites and quadroons (one eight black).  After the Mestees few could perceive a color distinction because it is unlikely that one could detect “black” characteristics if an individual had less than one eighth African ancestry.  Observers also believed that one could detect the differences between the various subdivisions of people of color based on particular qualities, in addition to physical appearance.  The Sambo, although three-fourths black and one fourth white, was still seen differently from the “Negro” in various manners and habits.  Generally, people believed that people of color were less subject to disease than whites or “Negro.”  White observers also firmly adhered to the idea that most people of color felt a distinct advantage and pride in being slightly removed from the “Negro race” and attempted to take on manners and customs of whites…

Read the entire essay here.

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.

Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 80, Numbers 1&2 (2006)
pages 5-43
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002486

Cecilla A. Green, Associate Professor, Sociology
Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.

…Even here there are important qualifications. Thistlewood is not a candidate for the dual marriage system who decides to forego the benefits of a White wife in part because of the assurance of other conditions of reproduction that guarantee full maintenance of class status. This is true, for example, of George Goodin Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great-uncle, discussed below, who mates exclusively (at least, in self-acknowledged terms) with a mulatto slave, Elissa Peters. Their children suffer a fate not untypical of the offspring of such couplings: they are not given the Barrett name, but they are sent to England to be schooled and domiciled according to the terms of their father’s will, and they receive secondary (and inevitably contestable) bequests. Thistlewood, in contrast, gives his son John his name. He does not have the economic wherewithal or the genealogical amplitude and latitude to school him in England, and evinces no aspirations or plans to that effect. John is schooled locally and is later apprenticed to a master carpenter, William Hornby.

It should be pointed out here that not all large planter names were so closely guarded (outside of the widespread process of giving estate slaves the surnames of their owners). Another strategy, pursued by Martin or Martyn Williams, the dually married husband of George’s properly pedigreed first cousin (who later becomes the widowed mistress of George’s brother), was to both pass on the name and petition the courts to declare his illegitimate mixed-race children, whose mother was a free Black woman, legally White. To complicate matters, there is a third option that both Williams’s “dual marriage” obligations and the changed inheritance laws of his and George’s time preclude him from pursuing (whatever his personal inclinations): bequeathing his main properties to Colored heirs. His properties are passed on to his legitimate White heirs. The case of Molly or Mary Cope (née Dorill), the fully endowed illegitimate quadroon daughter of Thistlewood’s late employer (now his employer, under coverture of her White husband) is different, but in part only because of the absence of competing claims from a “legitimate” White family. She appears to us, through the admittedly limited medium of Thistlewood’s cryptic daily log, as the tragic dupe of a strategy to re-inscribe and recover a proper plantocratic and racial destiny for the at-risk property and lineage of her paternal ancestry. Once she has fulfilled all the right conditions she becomes practically dispensable. She confides to Thistlewood that her husband “wants her to cut the entail off and settle upon him for life” (Hall 1999:70). She is being pressed to transfer title to the estate to her abusive and incompetent White husband…

Read the entire article here.

Bob Marley ‘blacked up’ to blend in

The Independent
2010-12-04

Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Reggae superstar Bob Marley suffered due to his mixed-race background

Bob Marley preached inner peace and serenity to the masses, but was so racked by angst over his race that he used shoe polish to blacken his hair, according to a new book.

Such insecurities, during Marley’s teenage years in Kingston, Jamaica, contrast strongly with the reggae superstar’s image around the world.

…Marley’s widow, Rita, is quoted in the book—entitled I and I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Wailer—as saying that her husband was so racially sensitised and aware of bullying for having a fairer complexion that he asked her to “rub shoe polish in his hair to make it more black; make it more African.”

The author, Colin Grant, has interviewed members of Marley’s inner circle for the book, released in January [2011]. These include Marley’s late mother Cedella Booker and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.

Grant explained: “When Marley moved to Trench Town in Kingston aged 13 he was thought of as a white man and would have got a lot of grief for that.”…

Read the entire article here.