value of the Centenary scholarship my aunt won was probably as much as the sum of my grandparents' annual salaries. There were no student loan programs, no banks with lines of credit for schoolteachers out in the countryside. "If I'd asked my father," my mother says, "he would have replied, 'We have no money/ "
What did Daisy do? She went to the Chinese shopkeeper in a neighboring town. Jamaica has a very large Chinese population that since the nineteenth century has dominated the commercial life of the island. In Jamaican parlance, a store is not a store, it is a "Chinee-shop." Daisy went to the "Chinee-shop," to Mr. Chance, and borrowed the money. No one knows how much she borrowed, although it must have been an enormous sum. And no one knows why Mr. Chance lent it to Daisy, except of course that she was Daisy Nation, and she paid her bills promptly and had taught the Chance children at Harewood School. It was not always easy to be a Chinese child in a Jamaican schoolyard. The Jamaican children would taunt the Chinese children. "Chinee nyan [eat] dog." Daisy was a kindly and beloved figure, an oasis amid that hostility. Mr. Chance may have felt in her debt.
"Did she tell me what she was doing? I didn't even ask her," my mother remembers. "It just occurred. I just applied to university and got in. I acted completely on faith that I could rely on my mother, without even realizing that I was relying on my mother."
Joyce Gladwell owes her college education first to W.M. MacMillan, and then to the student at Saint Hilda's who gave up her scholarship, and then to Mr. Chance, and then, most of all, to Daisy Nation.
3.
Daisy Nation was from the northwestern end of Jamaica. Her great-grandfather was William Ford. He was from Ireland, and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784 having bought a coffee plantation. Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine. He noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the south coast. She was an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa. They had a son, whom they named John. He was, in the language of the day, a "mulatto"; he was colored—and all of the Fords from that point on fell into Jamaica's colored class.
In the American South during that same period, it would have been highly unusual for a white landowner to have such a public relationship with a slave. Sexual relations between whites and blacks were considered morally repugnant. Laws were passed prohibiting miscegenation, the last of which were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967. A plantation owner who lived openly with a slave woman would have been socially ostracized, and any offspring from the union of black and white would have been left in slavery.
In Jamaica, attitudes were very different. The Caribbean in those years was little more than a massive slave colony. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of more than ten to one. There were few, if any, marriageable white women, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of white men in the West Indies had black or brown mistresses. One British plantation owner in Jamaica who famously kept a precise diary of his sexual exploits slept with 138 different women in his thirty-seven years on the island, almost all of them slaves and, one suspects, not all of them willing partners. And whites saw mulattoes—the children of those relationships—as potential allies, a buffer between them and the enormous numbers of slaves on the island. Mulatto women were prized as mistresses, and their children, one shade lighter in turn, moved still further up the social and economic ladder. Mulattoes rarely worked in the fields. They lived the much easier life of working in the "house." They were the ones most likely to be freed. So many mulatto mistresses were left substantial fortunes in the wills of white property owners that the Jamaica legislature once passed a law capping bequests at two thousand pounds (which, at the time, was an enormous sum).
"When a European arrives in the West Indies and gets settled or set down for any length of time, he finds it necessary to provide himself with a housekeeper or mistress," one eighteenth-century observer wrote. "The choice he has an opportunity of making is various, a black, a tawney, a mulatto or a mestee, one of which can be purchased for ioo