To Delphina, with love
Photo taken by Sabrina A. Davis on Oct. 7th, 2019 at the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, Jamaica (artist name undocumented).
by Sabrina A. Davis
Delphina would severely reprimand me with her notoriously sharp tongue for referring to her by her first name.
My aunts and uncles call her Sadel. My father calls her mama. I call her Grandma Del.
Grandma Del took her last breath on August 30th, 2019, four days after her 97th birthday. August 30th, 2019 was also the first Friday of my second and final year as a Master of Public Policy candidate at the Sanford School.
As the adage goes, when one chapter ends another begins. Grandma Del’s death sparked a new life – a new life between me and my identity as her granddaughter and as a Jamaican-American.
Death often brings families together. Death within immigrant families can move worlds. When oceans and continents separate families, losing the family matriarch moves mountains.
My family spreads far and wide. From about the late 1970s to early 1990s, many of my relatives left the green pastures of Jamaica for new worlds. My family scattered across the globe with most settling and growing roots across the U.S. East Coast, Canada, and England. My parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and many other Jamaicans left the island behind—some for decades— for different pastures, different opportunities, and hopefully, a better life.
Grandma Del’s death set in motion an intercontinental homecoming. While my classmates embarked on scenic tours of Asheville over Fall Break, I embarked on a transnational voyage to celebrate and lay to rest my Grandma Del. Her funeral amassed an outpouring of attendants, from far and wide – so many attendants that the small Kingdom Hall where the services were held overflowed, so many that the yard of Grandma Del’s home where the funeral reception was held brimmed to capacity with those who came out to celebrate her life and legacy.
Until early October, my father hadn’t been home in nineteen years. Though my father has spent more than half of his life in the U.S., home is still Grandma Del’s house in Clarendon Parish, JA, in the tiny (but mighty) island of roughly 3 million people. Many things change when you haven’t visited home in nineteen years. At the funeral reception, my father reconnected with old high school friends, who had grown from co-conspirators of trouble in the classroom to somewhat more well-behaved professional women and men. He met nieces and nephews who had grown from toddlers to young adults, many with families of their own. He introduced me to family and friends who had forged memories of me in the image of the six-year-old girl they had been introduced to nineteen years ago. My father’s joy was palpable – Grandma Del’s death had reconnected him with a life he had left behind so many years ago.
Grandma Del’s death also introduced me to my father’s childhood. My father’s life was formed around Grandma Del’s house, and he gave me a tour of the land on which my grandmother’s house stands. Land that was acquired by my great-great grandparents. Land that has raised and nourished generations of life. Land that holds the grave sites of Grandma Del and Grandma Del’s mother and father, my great grandparents. My father and I walked around the land that was his childhood playground – land filled with fruit trees galore, cacti, and a small vegetable garden. I slept in the house where my father and Grandma Del had slept. I sat and talked with family in the same living room where my father had fearfully watched Dark Shadows, a late night soap opera, every weeknight with my aunt as a young boy (he didn’t dare watch it alone so he enlisted her company every night). I ate from the same kitchen that nourished my Grandma Del and my father. It was a homecoming in the truest sense.
In the midst of the celebration of my Grandma Del was the sober recognition that the land once known to my father and family is now foreign. The island my father knew is no longer. Two lane roads have become multilane highways. Family shops have been replaced by big box stores. Infrastructural development has changed the island’s landscape. Jamaica’s development is bittersweet, marred with growing concerns of the “buying up” of Jamaica by Chinese developers. The policy choices made by Jamaican policymakers, legislators, and lawmakers to sell portions of Jamaica have a palpable impact for my family, forever changing the island they once knew. My family discussed the prolific purchase of Jamaican land by Chinese developers as we traveled on the very highways created by Chinese developers. Many things change when you leave a land for nearly two decades.
I’m fairly reserved, especially when it comes to my family, and it is completely out of character for me to share this story. I share my story, though I’m not entirely ready for the response it may bring my way, because stories move people. Stories move people in a way that “hard facts,” empirical evidence, and social science simply don’t. The statistics that inform public policy are never truly just numbers and percentages. Behind the numbers and percentages are my Grandma Del and me – grandmothers and granddaughters, mothers and sons, aunts and nieces. The personal is political – my personal story cannot be removed from the politics of immigration, xenophobia, and deservedness. My family immigrated to this land, this American land, in a time when many would say it was easier to gain access to this nation and all that this nation purports to provide – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My story would be different if my family had tried to migrate to the U.S. in the current political climate. I hope my story helps us all think critically and engage in the dialogues, discussions, and debates on immigration and identity happening across our campus, across our nation, and across from our loved ones at kitchen tables.
For my Grandma Del – I love you. Thank you for gifting me my Dad.
Sabrina A. Davis is a second-year Master of Public Policy candidate at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. Sabrina is interested in anti-poverty policies for low-income communities of color in the U.S.
