COMMENTARY: BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 26, 2020 — I got out of bed after 10 this morning and was late in going through my regular routine of thanking my Lord and Savior for granting me another day on His Earth, which includes a period of meditation. I recently added to my morning routine an ACT OF CONTRICTION, a prayer said during Mass that I leant when I was an altar boy, starting at St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church in Stanyard Creek, Andros, and later at Our Lady’s Church through Deveaux Street in Nassau, after my grandparents – Ben and Mabel Elliott, with whom I grew up at Stanyard Creek during my boyhood years – moved to New Providence in 1952.
My routine also includes viewing and listening to some selected videos of religious songs, and two days ago I “stumbled across” an uplifting video of HE LIFTED ME UP/HERE MY CRY OH LORD by a Jamaican group that really, really uplifts me and puts me in the right frame of mind to face whatever challenges I may encounter during the remainder of the day.
This morning, this spiritually intoxicating video nostalgically transported me back to my boyhood years and how important my grandparents were in my life, a story I have told on more than one occasion in articles I have written. The deaths of my grandparents — first Mama and then Papa, when I was a little boy — were my first experiences with the debilitating nature of really excruciating pain, the level of which I also felt when my saintly mother, Violet Corinne Elliott Brown, the eldest of Papa and Mama’s three daughters, died in March of 1991.
I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time and had just seen my mother a couple months earlier during my annual Christmas visit to The Bahamas and she seemed to be in very good health. So when I received the call from my Aunt Maria informing me that my mother had died, I became limp and incoherent and simply lost all composure.
I felt this same level of gut-wrenching pain when I heard about the death of my Aunt Sylvia Elliott Ross in April of 2012. Aunt Sylvia along with my late Aunt Maria, who died in August of 2019, were very instrumental in steering my life in the right direction during those formative years when young minds are so impressionable and vulnerable to inculcating life-long bad habits.
Aunt Sylvia was actually my first cousin. Her father was my uncle Clarence Elliott, the oldest of Ben and Mabel Elliott’s eight children; my mother Violet was the oldest of the three daughters. Cousin Sylvia was around the same age as Papa and Mama’s youngest daughter, Aunt Maria, and they grew up like sisters. Consequently, all of the other grandchildren who were left in the care of Papa and Mama while our parents were on “The Contract” in the United States or working somewhere else in The Bahamas grew up calling her Aunt Sylvia.
In addition to myself, the five other grandchildren were cousins Agnes, Beryl and John, children of Uncle Lee; my late sister Elthreada Brown McPhee; and my cousin Alphonso “Boogaloo” Elliott, a son of my late Uncle Audley.
The grandchildren of Ben and Mabel Elliott were fortunate to have two very gifted and imaginative persons like Cousin Sylvia and Aunt Maria as mentors and guiding lights growing up on the Western Ridge of Stanyard Creek, in the 1940s and early 1950s. Both were “monitors” at Stanyard Creek All-Age School, which meant that us younger grandchildren had the benefit of two “teachers” living in the same house with us. They both ended up choosing teaching as their life-long careers, and there are unquestionably many of their former students in The Bahamas who can vouch, as I certainly can, for the fact that Maria Elliott Forbes and Sylvia Elliott Ross were two excellent teachers.
Both were also staunch disciplinarians, a trait they no doubt picked up from Papa, a no-nonsense deeply religious man whose influence in the community was probably not matched by any other individual in Stanyard Creek. Papa owned the “major” grocery store, small though it was, on the Western Ridge and our family compound also consisted of a “big” and “small” house as well as a separate structure that was used as a kitchen. Papa had a very liberal policy with regard to regular customers of the grocery store. They could “trust” things they needed if they didn’t have the money at the time and pay whenever they got it.
Whatever influence Papa had as a grocer paled in comparison to when he donned his cassock as a catechist at Stanyard Creek’s St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church. The priest assigned to Andros generally made his rounds of the various settlements once a month, so Papa was responsible for conducting Mass most of the time. Therefore, we all grew up as very devout and committed Roman Catholics. Indeed, attending church three times on Sundays—morning Mass, Sunday School and Evening Mass—was the norm for the Elliott household.
I have written on more than one occasion about how closely knit we were as a family. Cousin Sylvia was the daughter of my late uncle Clarence Elliott Sr. He moved from Stanyard Creek as a young man to work in Nassau and built a house through Paul Meeres Corner, now known as Fleming Street, which became the Elliott family homestead when members of the family relocated to Nassau. It still exists as a rental unit opposite what used to be Keith’s Chicken in the Bag take-out restaurant.
Uncle Clarence subsequently moved to New York —I think at some point during the 1940s – where my cousins the late Clarence Jr., the late Sandra Elliott Coleman, Patricia Elliott Horsford, Mabel Elliott Moultrie, Alfred Elliott and Norma Elliott were born.
Norma and Alfred were brought up in Nassau by Aunt Maria, and Clarence, Jr., Sandra, Patricia and Mabel attended high school in Miami while living with my late Aunt Amanda Elliott Fox and her husband Lawrence Fox. They all eventually moved back to New York when they graduated from high school.
When they both retired from teaching, every year Aunt Maria and Cousin Sylvia went on a cruise. After they had seen virtually all of the islands of the Caribbean, for a couple years they took cruises to Mediterranean destinations, and I still have a t-shirt from Greece that Aunt Maria brought back for me from one of those trips.
When Aunt Maria’s health started to deteriorate, she moved in with Aunt Sylvia, through Murphyville in Palmdale, where Cousin Sylvia’s daughter Leonardette Ross King, who was then teaching in Nassau, was able to assist in taking care of both Aunt Maria and her mother.
After Cousin Sylvia’s death, Norma, who called Aunt Maria “Mommy,” subsequently arranged for Aunt Maria to live with her in Brooklyn, New York, where she died last August. Her body was subsequently taken back to Nassau, where her funeral was held in September of 2019 at Our Lady’s Roman Catholic Church on Deveaux Street, which became the family’s parish church when we moved to New Providence in 1952.
Memories of those wonderful, wonderful years growing up in Stanyard Creek and my youthful years in Nassau flooded my mind as I watched and listened to the video HE LIFTED ME UP/HERE MY CRY OH LORD following my meditation this morning. Listen to it and see if it has the same effect on you as it does on me: https://youtu.be/HyFXoLn01ao
