A Checkered Path to Destiny

CHAPTER 1

Early Childhood

I WAS BORN TO BERYL

Mae Howell and Joseph Flynn, the second of two sons. My parents, both now deceased, weren’t married to each other, and my birth was never registered, as was the requirement for newborns. I only became aware of this profound neglect when I was in my teens. I could not imagine why my parents would have been so careless; their oversight meant I was not counted among the citizens of our country.

I later found out that, during the time when I was born, the common practice among people in the rural parts of our country was to ask a neighbor or family member to register the birth at the post office if they happened to be going there. The post office might have been as far as five miles away. My parents did not follow through with the responsibility of verifying the registration of my birth.

The actual month and year of my birth has always been doubtful in my mind. Once I was told that my birth month was October, I actually selected the date and year of my birth myself. I chose October 27, 1941, perhaps because I wanted to be a Scorpio. I had observed acts of kindness by people who, according to them, were scorpions, and I wanted to emulate them. I remember seeing people, mostly adults, going to great lengths every day just to read their horoscopes in our most popular national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner. In those days, people believed in the dreams they had at night; the signs of the zodiac were always the precursor of what tomorrow would bring. If your horoscope said you would find true love, you would pursue that endeavor, believing what was forecast. So if a young man had an interest in a young lady but hadn’t previously done anything other than say hello to her, he would go full throttle to pursue her because of what his horoscope had said!

I believe that there might be some truth to those beliefs, even though it could very well be just a state of mind that we inherited via our African roots. For many people these beliefs translated into what Jamaicans call obeah, or voodoo. If the palm of our right hand was itchy, we believed we would receive money; the right elbow meant a letter would soon arrive. If we felt the need to scratch the bottom of our feet, travel was imminent, while if it was our knee, we were surely going to sleep in a different bed—at least temporarily!

My mother took me from Eight Miles District in St. Ann, Jamaica, to Jeffery Town, St. Mary, when I was a young child. By then, my brother Gerald had been given away to the Worme family of Hessen Castle in St. Ann. The Wormes had no children, and their financial status placed them in a better position to raise a child than that of my mother. She and I lived with several different families until she met Cleveland Cunningham, whom she later married.

Neither my mother nor her husband could read or write, so they would both hold onto the very first words they heard and take them as facts that should never be disputed, regardless of how outlandish the newly discovered information appeared to sound. For example, my mother told me on many occasions that there was a man who was so rich that even the banks refused to accept any more deposits from him! As I grew older, I began to believe that reading and writing are two of the greatest of all freedoms that a human being could ever share with others. However, sadly enough, there are millions of people who are deprived of this knowledge because their governments desire to control their minds and bodies. Reading and writing is power, giving us the ability to understand, to share, to express desires, and to initiate changes that affect lives and communities. I am positive that my mother and stepfather would have had a better life together had they been literate.

My sister Catherine was my mother and stepfather’s first child; she was born in 1943. Next came three brothers, Alphonso, Herbert, Victor, and then sister Blossom, all born within eight years. Suddenly I became Big Brother Lloyd to the five youngest of my mother’s seven children.

My chores consisted of everything from collecting firewood to fetching water from a nearby spring for drinking, cooking, and bathing, as well as doing small amounts of laundry. I estimate that I carried hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on my head during my lifetime. Even at seventy years old, I can still carry a ten- to fifteen-gallon bucket on my head with one or both hands in my pockets.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to carry water to do large loads of laundry. When we had a lot of laundry to wash, my mom or stepdad would lug it to the nearby river along with the soap. The laundry soap, made of lye and other ingredients, consisted of bars about four inches long and two inches thick. Sometimes, for very dirty loads, we’d use the washboard or even a rock to help beat out the stains. Our clothes were dried in the sun, hanging from the clothes line.

I never heard the word toys until I was nine or ten years old. None of us children ever got a toy—old or new. However, I did have a little fun throwing rocks at whatever tempted me while going about my errands. I particularly enjoyed throwing rocks people’s cattle. Unfortunately, I never knew that my actions could inflict serious pain on animals. Twice, I got whippings when the owner of a donkey complained to my mom and stepdad. After that, I was no longer allowed to run errands or to go to the grocery store by myself; my sister Catherine was designated as a chaperone to tell on me if I threw rocks at anything. So I had to turn over a new leaf in my life, and I did: I discovered that I could skip a rock across the pond on my way to the grocery store. Trying to get four or more skips was much more fun than throwing rocks at cattle, and of course, I’d started to learn that even animals had feelings.

As mentioned, my chores also included going to the village grocery stores and buying what my parents told me we needed. That often included kerosene oil to fuel the lamps that illuminated the house at night. I also bought commodities like flour, cooking oil, bread—whatever else we needed and had enough money to buy. I never took a list to the grocery store, because no one in the household could read or write; I shopped for everything by memory, and if I forgot something, I’d simply go back for it later.

The grocery stores were owned and operated by Chinese people from Hong Kong. At that time in the 1950s, Chinese people made up a small portion of the Jamaican population even though, they owned and operated most of the bakeries, grocery stores, and supermarkets on the island, but there was never any resentment that I can remember against our Chinese citizens. This was truly a representation of the Jamaican motto, Out of Many, One People.

I experienced sadness in my young life for the first time when my baby brother Herbert died from pneumonia. He was about six years old. My heart ached for a very long time. Even worse, I wasn’t living with my family then; apparently Herbert had left home (about a mile away from where I was living) to find his big brother. When he could not, he went into the garage to sit in an old car, where I later found him asleep. I was very cross with him and chased him home in a slight drizzle. Looking back, I realize he must have felt sick, and was trying to reach out to me, but I’d misunderstood. A few days later he was dead, and the pain of that heartbreak still hurts.

Although I didn’t have a lot of emotional pain in my youth, I was no stranger to other hurts. Home was not a safe place for us. We grew up with a lot of physical abuse; I still have two scars, one on my temple and one on my forearm, made with my stepdad’s machete, which are proof of his violent rages. He also beat my mother on many occasions. Many times we would be awakened in the middle of the night to hear them fighting. Now that I am older, I often wonder if they really loved each other, or if for some reason they thrived on fighting and making up later? I know one thing for sure: my stepdad was a sex maniac. I remember one night I overheard my mother asking him to wait until she got some rest. All hell broke loose with his fury at her response. This was not unusual behavior for my stepdad, especially when my mom would return after a visit to my grandmother or to sell products in the market in Kingston.

My mother was always trying to do whatever she could to help the family financially. Stepdad was never a lazy man; he would work in the field planting crops like sweet potato, yam, and cocoa, as well as other vegetable products for market and for our own consumption. My mom would take the products to market to sell. I remember, as if it were yesterday, the time when she arrived home from the Coronation Market in Kingston and we all went with my stepdad to meet her at the bus stop. Mom was crying; of course, my stepdad wanted to know what was wrong.

They thief all the money, she sobbed.

What happen? he asked. She explained how she had been robbed just after she’d finished selling everything. A thief had grabbed my mom’s apron along with all the money she’d earned. She had no money left but was able to ride the bus home for free because of the sympathy of the bus operator.

At first my stepdad wasn’t upset. But with the money she’d earned from selling her vegetables, she was supposed to buy us sugar, flour, rice, and other items. When my stepdad realized that she hadn’t been able to bring these supplies home, he accused her of lying.

You give me money to man! Me no believe people took you stuff. You give it to man! He was accusing her of giving the money to an imaginary lover. His jealousy, irrationality, and abusive nature took over. For a little while, my mom went to Kingston to work as a domestic servant. My stepdad would complain about how much he missed mom—so much so that he took an old dress from us that she had left hanging on a nail in the one-room house that we shared. We wanted the old dress to use as a blanket at night when it was chilly, but my stepdad said, Mi want B frock to kip mi heart—insisting that he needed it to keep close to his heart. I guessed that was his way of telling us how much he really loved our mom (whom he always called B) and that beating her up was beyond his control.

Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of these contradictions among couples. It seems like some men are always making excuses for the physical abuse they inflict on their wife or girlfriend.

Many years ago, a very dear coworker of mine said, Ivan, I love my husband, but he beats the s…out of me. Perhaps in our next lifetime, we men will realize that God gave us more than we deserved in women and that we should cherish them as though they are a part of our own body rather than our possessions.

As I grew older, I pledged never to put what I had learned from my stepdad into practice. Abusive men: and women of low self-esteem are not exclusive to any region, or groups of people. As observed through the media, this is true in other societies and across cultural and economic boundaries".

We often tend to emulate the things we see at home between our parents, but I vowed, I would not, because I wanted to be better. It may start with a mother telling her daughters that the beating she just got from her loving husband, their dad, was her fault rather than his, and not because of the whisky in him or because he had a bad day at work. And she may even add that his love for her is immeasurable, until the next time when perhaps, his dinner might not have been ready as was the case five of the last six days when he got home.

Unfortunately, victims of abuse are often forced to endure this terrible human behavior, because a way out, is sometimes more dreaded than the actual abuse itself. Therefore, they find ways to ignore or forget about the abuses just to have a place to live, especially when there are children involved.

Our house was made using bamboo trees for posts with coconut limbs as rafters and shingles. Our beds were also made from bamboo: about three feet by six feet for the adults and about four feet by five feet for us. There wasn’t a separate bedroom for my parents. We never had anything other than the earth to step on when we got out of bed. Back then only my mother owned a pair of shoes—because she had to travel and would not do so barefoot. At night we would wash our feet outside or inside the kitchen, which was a separate building. We then had to sit, and wait until they were dry before we went inside the house because if our feet were wet, some of the earth on which we had to walk would adhere to them.

Whenever it rained, my stepdad would pick up my half-siblings; he would tell me, Lloyd, hook your toe as you walk so you don’t fall. That meant that I was to walk with my toe nails pointing toward the ground whenever I moved my feet. But that meant that my feet would’ve been just as dirty in the end as they’d been before I’d washed them! As a result of walking barefoot, too, I often got chiggers—little blood-sucking parasites that burrow into the skin, mainly between the toes, and cause infections. They were a common affliction among people who went barefooted back then. However, chiggers, as well as other diseases were eradicated by the mid 1950’s.

CHAPTER 2

A New Home a New Dad

MY MOTHER SPOKE OFTEN ABOUT

my father, Joseph Flynn, especially when I was being abused by my stepdad. She’d say. Your father, have lots of land: he have cows, and goats, she made it sound as though he was rich and would care for me. So finally in 1949, my mother decided that she would take me to him.

In those days, I had khaki short pants that my mother made; my shirts were hand-sewn from hemp flour sacks. I didn’t own a pair of shoes. We went by foot from Spring Garden to Claremont, St. Ann, approximately fourteen miles away. The plan was for us to meet my dad at the farmers’ market, where he, as well as dozens of other small farmers, brought their agricultural products to be sold, usually on Thursday of each week.

Everything went as planned and I met my dad for the first time, and he agreed to take me home with him. My dad was a practicing Seventh-Day Adventist and he would leave his home at Prickly Pole, about eight miles from Claremont, on Thursday mornings so he could be back home by Friday night. I couldn’t walk another eight miles that day since I had already walked fourteen miles, so my dad let me ride one of the donkeys.

There were several people in the group going home from the farmers market at Claremont to Prickly Pole District where they lived. I was ahead of everyone in the group because the donkey I rode seemed as if it was in a hurry to get home. The road surface was made of marl and gravel, and it was very hilly however, the donkey was surefooted and knew exactly how to walk on the road.

I later learned that donkeys and mules were vital to the farming community. In my dad’s case, he owned cows that were pastured deep in the mountains, and they needed water at least every other day. The water had to be transported from home by my dad’s mule. I usually drove the mule, while my dad rode the donkey, with dad’s feet touching the ground.

A male donkey and a female horse produced a mule. Mules are infertile, and cannot reproduce. Mules are larger in statue and stronger than their father who is lower to the ground