Rooms Without Doors

Sometime after this, two of my children came home from school and said that their homework involved the tracing of their ancestral lineage to the farthest point. This set off my intellectual machine into forward drive. I knew all my ancestors back to the fourth generation, but with their requests, I wanted to go much further. I knew that my great-grandmothers maiden name was Barrett, and I always like to read poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so I went to my library and looked her up but did not get anywhere, so I told them of all my great-grandparents down to them from four different angles. This satisfied the school for the homework assignment, but it did not satisfy my ego. The following week, I went to Strand Book Store on Broadway, in New York City, where my friend Mr. Bass was quite helpful. He sent me to an aged collection of books, and after one hours search, I found a book that contained the diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the years 183031. I paid for it and went back to work at the bank where I worked for many years. Before I left that bank, I made sure to look at certain dates and occurrences, and bingo, I came to December 1831, during the slave rebellion in Jamaica under the leadership of Samuel Sharpe, now one of Jamaicas national heroes. When I read that her fathers estate was not destroyed, I almost went ballistic. I did not know that her father was a Jamaican, born on the hillside overlooking the city of Montego Bay in the parish of St. James. My grandfather always said to me that all the Barrett family are one, and that most of them lived in St. James and Trelawny Parishes. Those in St. Elizabeth always go to visit the other families all over the island because they always like to keep in touch from the days of slavery down to the present time. Putting everything in perspective, it was an eye-opener to me.