It’s 1958. My mother is walking down a Birmingham street, her first daughter in the brand new navy blue Silver Cross pram, the Rolls-Royce of baby carriages with suspension to match. She’s as proud as any new mother, nodding at the other women on the street, until one catches her eye.
“Oooh, let’s have a look,” says the woman, who peers into the pram and peels back the blanket.
“Jesus Christ!” she says and recoils in horror at the brown-skinned, black-haired child, weeks old, sweet as Christmas. “You dirty bitch!”
My mother used to tell us this story and many others and end with, “You have no idea. It was different then.” But is it?
The first section of Nanny, Ma, & Me, by Kathleen, Dominique and Jade Jordan, is a story not unlike my mother’s, set in Dublin and London in the late 1950s, and features Jade Jordan’s grandmother Kathleen, who met and fell in love with a black man and had children. Years later, she tells Jade that she can’t remember the racism, the name-calling and prejudice but nevertheless leaves London to bring her children up in Ireland.
The next section is written from Kathleen’s daughter Dominique’s point of view, the feisty girl from England who lands on Sean McDermott Street and has to make her way in a tough community where she and her brothers stand out, where she can’t possibly be Irish, where she’s accused of having Aids, where you can’t be black and Irish at the same time. It’s 1979, Dominque is walking home from Parnell Tech when a man tells her to “Go back where you come from.”
Dominque’s daughter Jade tells the final section of this family saga, part of another generation of black Irish women who tries her hand in London only to be pulled home again to be among her own people.
The book is a testament to Jade’s desire to record and explain her family story and her place in black Irish history from the 1500s to today – Rachel Baptiste, Pablo Paddington, Phil Lynott, the peculiarities of the Irish diaspora on the island of Monserrat.
It’s rich in detail, too much sometimes as it threatens to overwhelm the narrative. But this is a family history, an unpretentious record of what happened and why, written for friends (as close as blood), for family and for a community that remains unacknowledged and largely undocumented despite the great changes and hard-won freedoms of modern Ireland.
It’s also the story of three strong women and their individual yet similar journeys through life. It’s a story of emigration and return, of displacement, racism and not fitting in, of the absent father and the sustaining value of friendship. It’s about the search for home in a changing society.
And some things don’t change. It’s 2021. Jade is walking towards the Abbey Theatre at rush hour when a middle-aged man calls her a “stupid f**king n***er”. Like her mother before her, Jade calls the man out and stands up for herself, but the sorrow is that she and others like us should still have to make such a defence. Resilience comes at a cost.
As the author says herself, “for the next generation of children, we need to change things. We can choose to be activists and help make a better world.” Nanny, Ma, & Me is Jade’s “protest, my small bit of resistance” in response to the “modern-day lynching” of George Floyd.
Telling the story of her family and search for identity, she is claiming her rightful place in Ireland and contributing to the ongoing conversation on race and belonging.
Kit de Waal’s latest work is Supporting Cast
