My very tangled roots (slightly corrected)

I keep thinking I have to take a day off from blogging then ideas spring into my head and I have to write them before they spring back out again.

That happens a lot and is an excellent reason why I should take the personal recording gizmo out of the drawer, replace the batteries, and carry it around with me at all times.

The sermon at the First Parish Church and the talk about Rev. Wright resulted in a lot of thoughts whirling around (after they had sprung into) my head.

I have mentioned on here before that I am, like Barack Obama, of mixed-race parentage. My mother is English-Irish and my (biological) father is West Indian. The other day a woman from Commonwealth Health asked me what my racial heritage is.

This is a huge question for me since West Indians, of course, do not consider themselves 'African-American' (not being Americans at all, you see).

Anyway, that's not my point.

I have lived always with the understanding that some of my paternal ancestors were black slaves and some were white Europeans.

Despite what you may think, it's not easy knowing that even some of your ancestors were enslaved.

Apart from the obvious dismay, also we can't trace my grandmother's ancestors at all. I have no idea who they were until we get to my great-grandfather, Charles Miller Austin, who was of my complexion (light) and was the result, we always believed, of some kind a relationship between a European planter and what probably by then was a freed slave.

All we know about his father is that his name was William Agard Austin and his wife was Harriet Fields. William's mother was called, "Baba." Sounds a lot Irish to me, but that may be because of the song by the Who, "Baba O'Riley."

BUT - lately I found out that, before Africans were rounded off and shipped 'in bulk' to work the plantations on Barbados, Irish 'rebels' were rounded up by the British government and shipped off wholesale to the island (there is a book about it, called "To Hell or Barbados," which I have yet to buy). How this fact escaped my notice for this long is beyond me.

No record was made of their names and they were given to the planters. Most of them died from heat exhaustion. A brief write-up on being "Barbadosed" can be found here.

This probably is what led to the 'brilliant' idea of importing even more people who were used to heat. I'm sure it was a huge irritant to the English planters that the Irish kept dying on them.

In any case, the Irish and the black slaves, seeing as how they had so much in common at this point, banded together, rebelled together and inter-married. In fact, the patois spoken in Barbados, called Bajan, is said to be a mix of Irish and African speech patterns. Few of these Irish were left to be identified as such by an 1880 census.

What did remain was a small population of poor whites, often called 'redlegs', who may be the descendants of the Barbadosed Irish. Since my great-grandfather, Charles Miller Austin, is referred to in some historical documents as a "redleg,"I can only conclude he was one of these.

He was the first "mulatto" to break the monopoly of white plantocracy in the parish of St. John - he bought Eastmont plantation in 1895 and Malvern plantation in 1910. My brother Miller now owns Eastmont, which is where my grandmother was born, and every member of the family has stock in the plantation land at Malvern. Malvern House was sold off years ago, to the Moravian Church.

So, you see, I realized that not only one part of my ancestry involves slavery - but perhaps ALL of it (on my father's side) does. Which might explain why we also can't trace our St. John ancestors earlier than 1723, when one Charles St. John married Isabella Clarke.

(My grandmother, born Lucy Austin, married Albert St. John. I never knew him; he died when my father was young.)

In stark contrast to my St. John relatives, who want to believe Charles St. John was part of the noble English St. John family - even though we can find no evidence of this in the well-documented St. John family line - I believe he either adopted the name or that was the name given to him (or possibly his father) by the English colonial government in Barbados. They probably worked a plantation in St. John parish.

It's a point of contention.