My maternal great-grandmother, Olga Carew, was born in Tobago in 1902. At the tender age of one, her father, Conrad Carew, a successful pharmacist, was poisoned and died. Soon after, her mother died as well and Olga was left with her eight brothers and sisters. She was passed from relative to relative during her childhood and attended school in Wales and then in Trinidad. At eighteen, Olga boarded a ship to the United States and set sail for Boston to live with her sister Irma and to finally feel at home.
After a short stay in Boston, Olga moved to New York City with her sister where she got a job dancing the Charleston on Broadway. She immediately met my great-grandfather, Bruce Iles, who was a handsome man from a good family in Trinidad, and after a brief courtship, they married.
Olga and Bruce had three children: Gloria (my grandmother) in 1924, Grace in 1926, and Horatio in 1928. They raised their children in Washington Heights. When my grandmother, or my Lala, talks of her childhood she says, “Alexis, those people had the nerve to ask me where I came from.” Lala replied and asserted that she was born in America. In her mind, the city rejected her and her identity as a West Indian woman. Today, Lala wonders if I struggle with the challenges she faced growing up. It is true that all my life, people have asked me about my heritage, but unlike my grandmother, I encourage the questions she detested.
In 1954, Lala married my grandfather, Edward Allen. Eddie was a childhood friend who grew up in the same building as her. His family is of purely Irish decent. Eddie was an intelligent, loving man who dedicated his life to teaching 8th grade English in Harlem. He was beloved by all. I am proud to say that my grandparents married outside their ethnicity. They married for love and not for what society said was right. Lala and Poppa had my mother, Diane, in 1956. Two years later they had my uncle Frank and another two years later, they had my uncle Tony.
In 1961, Eddie and Gloria left Washington Heights with their three children and moved to Hicksville, Long Island. Their primary reason for leaving the city was to find a better school system for their children. My mother and uncles spent most of their childhood in suburbia, a town mostly inhabited by Italians, Irish, and Jews. Again, people would ask my grandmother what country she came from: “The neighbors would stare at me and your mother, Alexis.” It was true, my family looked different than the rest of the people in Hicksville, but the discrimination didn’t prevent my mother from marrying the person she loved. Just like my grandparents, my mother disregarded the opinions of her neighbors and married my father, Thomas Romano, a man from Maspeth, Queens who had an Italian father and an Irish and German mother.
My parents eventually moved to one of the only two cities on Long Island, a place called Long Beach, on the south shore. Long Beach is an incredibly diverse community in which me and my older brother Sean spent our whole lives.
“All crab fine dey hole,” is what my Lala’s cousin, Gordon, told me on my recent trip to Trinidad. The saying means that everyone finds their place in life. My mother and I went back to Port of Spain, Trinidad this passed January. We felt at home.
