A haunting, evocative history of British Empire, told through one
woman’s family story
“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a
girl in post-war London. One of the so-called brown babies of the
Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother,
Carby’s place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of
birth was always in doubt.
Emerging from this
setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family
in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet
Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged
by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the
cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade
profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican
delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white
Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” including Mary Ivey, a free
woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a
British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into
the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of
Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle
Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.
Moving between
Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol,
Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London,
Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a
sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In
charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies,
public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself
reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she
can bear to know.