Wrong on Paper

The family story was four sentences long and had never changed in Delroy’s lifetime.

Old man Nathan walked from the sugar parish to the hills after slavery done. He walk with his mother and two next family. It take them eleven days. When they reach, the land was bush and they cut it.

That is all. Four sentences, told at funerals and at Christmas and once memorably at a christening by an aunt who had been drinking, and every adult in that family could say it the same way, with the same pauses, in the same order.

Delroy started looking for Nathan because his own daughter asked him a question he could not answer, which is how most of these things start.

· · ·

He gave it two years.

He learned the way everybody learns: badly at first, by guessing, and then properly. He learned that you go backward and never forward. He learned that a name is not a name, it is a sound that a clerk wrote down. He learned which registers were filmed and which were not, and that the ones that were not might as well not exist for a man with a job and two weeks of vacation a year.

And at the end of two years he had built a case that the family story was wrong.

There was no Nathan in the baptism registers of the hill parish in the 1840s. There was no Nathan in the parish they said he walked from, not in any spelling he could think of, and he had tried eleven. There was a Nathan in the wrong parish entirely, born too late. The land his people farmed had been bought in 1867, which was thirty-three years after emancipation, by a man whose name was not Nathan.

Thirty-three years is not eleven days.

He sat with that for a month before he told anybody, because the four sentences were not just a story. They were the reason that family believed what it believed about itself: that they were people who walked, and cut bush, and did not ask.

· · ·

He told his Aunt Merle first, because she was the eldest and because she would not cry about it.

“So you saying it never happen,” she said.

“I am saying I cannot find it. And I have looked in every place a thing like that would be.”

“Mm.” She was shelling peas. She did not stop. “And the paper is what you believe.”

“The paper is what there is, Auntie.”

“The paper have your grandmother in it?”

“Yes.”

“Spelled how?”

He did not answer that, because the paper had his grandmother’s name spelled two different ways in two different documents and he had spent an evening working out which was which.

“Delroy,” his aunt said, “you asking a book that never wanted we in it, to tell you if we was there.”

· · ·

What broke it open was a sentence from a different aunt, at a different kitchen table, eight months later, said in passing and not in answer to any question he had asked.

“Well, them come with the church.”

Delroy put down his cup. “What church?”

“The Baptist. That is how them get the land. Mama always say, we is Baptist land people.” She looked at him as though he were slow, which, in fairness. “You never know that?”

Nobody had ever said it in the four sentences. Not once, in forty years, because it was not part of the story. It was the water the story swam in. Everybody in that family had known it the way you know your own address, which is to say too well to mention.

He went home and started again in a different place entirely.

· · ·

The free villages are not in the parish registers, or not only.

After emancipation the mission churches bought up land and cut it into lots and sold it cheap to their members, precisely so that people could get off the estates and out from under the men who had owned them, and their records are mission records. Membership lists. Ticket books. Leaders’ lists, kept by the class leaders, in the churches’ own hands, in their own archives, for their own purposes, and largely never filmed by anybody.

It took him four months and two letters and one very patient woman at a church office, and what came back was a photocopy of a page from a members’ book.

Not Nathan. Nathaniel. First name and no surname, which was normal in those books, with a number beside it and a date of admission in 1841, and in the leader’s column a note that Delroy had to read six times:

Rec’d with his mother and the Fenton people, walked up from the coast, 11 days on the road.

Eleven days.

The clerk who wrote that was not writing history. He was noting why a new member had no ticket from another congregation. He put in the eleven days the way you put in a detail that explains an irregularity, and then he went on to the next name, and the page has eleven other names on it, and nobody in a hundred and eighty-five years had any reason to look at it until a man in Kingston with a daughter who asked him a question wrote a letter to a church office.

· · ·

So the family was right.

They were right about the walk and right about the eleven days and right about the mother and right about the two next family, who turn out to be the Fenton people, a surname that had dropped out of the telling somewhere in the twentieth century.

They were wrong about the land, a little. The lot was bought in 1841 and lost and the 1867 purchase was a grandson buying back ground his grandfather had already cleared once, which is a worse story and a truer one, and which nobody remembered at all.

And the thing Delroy could not get over, the thing he still talks about, is the arithmetic of it. The archive had four documents that said his family was not there. It took one line, written by a clerk who was not interested, to show that the four sentences had carried it correctly, through six generations, in a family where almost nobody could read for the first three of them.

Eleven days. The number survived. It crossed a hundred and eighty-five years by mouth, and it was accurate, and for two years he had believed it was a family exaggeration.

· · ·

He printed the page and took it to Aunt Merle.

She put on her glasses. She read it. She read it again, moving her finger.

“Eleven days,” she said.

“Eleven days, Auntie.”

She handed the paper back to him and picked the bowl of peas back up off the floor, and she said the thing that he has since repeated at two funerals, one christening, and every time anybody asks him about the research:

“I tell you that already.”

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