I was fourteen years old by the time my father realized it was time to return to Jamaica. My sister was twelve. Until then, all that two of us had experienced in that country had been extremely rural and very no frills. Quiet, self-sufficient people fashioning their lives out of whatever they found at hand. Nothing less, nothing more.
And here we were, awkward Cuban kids plopped down into the heart of downtown Kingston. It was nothing like Habana Vieja, but at the same time, the heartbeat felt familiar, because the focus of our family life never wavered. My mother tried to have us in church at least three times a week. We attended cultural meetings all the time. Formal education was the ideal, but my sister and I were raised with the groundational understanding that the instruction our parents gave us at home was just as critical.
Upon arrival in Vineyard Town, my mother poked around to see if there were any decent schooling options for me. There really weren't. Back then, formal education was marginally compulsory until age twelve. After that point, you were either a rich kid going to a fancy secondary school Uptown, or you were put to work.
Thanks to the summers I’d spent in Content Gap, my English was good enough. Fair to middling, but not as fluent as I would have liked. But if I wanted to be quick on my feet with the language, I'd have to just plunge myself into day-to-day life on the streets. Spending hours cooped up in a subpar institution of “learning” really wouldn’t do anything for my advancement, educationally or socially. So, my mother worked up an at home curriculum that had me reading serious books in English and working on maths theory and equations. My father went down to Orange Street and found a bunch of used textbooks for children around my age, and between those, the Old Testament and the Dickens novels that my parents made me read, that was my education. To this day, I can recall the entire plot of Little Dorrit.
As soon as I turned sixteen, my father called in a favor from a friend of his through the movement and got me a job in the ports, and through that family, I met my future wife. My first wife, to be precise.
