By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 16, 2019 — My uncle Audley Elliott was one of my mother Violet Elliott Brown’s younger brothers and he was as much a father to me as my natural father, Samuel Brown. Like many young men in The Bahamas in the late 1940s and 1950s, he went on “The Contract” several times, and I can well recall the joy and jubilation among the seven grandchildren who grew up at Stanyard Creek, Andros, with our grandparents, Benjamin and Mabel Elliott, whenever Uncle Audley returned from one of his stints on The Contract.
Uncle Audley traditionally bought several outfits of clothes for all the grandchildren – beautiful dresses for the girls and shirts, pants and new tennis shoes for the boys – and we were unquestionably some of the best-dressed children at Stanyard Creek whenever he returned from The Contract.
Of course, we were all devout Roman Catholics, and my male cousins – Alphonso “Boogaloo” Elliott, who is Uncle Audley’s son, and the late John Elliott, son of my late uncle Israel “Lee” Elliott – and I could not wait for Sundays to come to dress up in our new clothes to attend Mass at St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church.
Our grandfather, Benjamin Elliott, was the catechist at St. Rita’s, so we actually attended church three times on Sundays – morning Mass, Sunday school during the afternoon and evening Mass. Customarily, we did not eat before morning Mass, and it was a family tradition after Mass to sit around a long table in the kitchen — a separate building on our family compound, which also had a main house and a smaller one — and enjoy a breakfast of stewed fish, with a choice of potato bread or cassava bread.
After breakfast, my grandmother Mabel Elliott invariably used to invite each of the grandchildren to take a sip of her coffee from huge “mug” crafted from a used peaches can. Children were not served coffee because it was superstitiously thought that it gave them “hard head” and made them stubborn.
Whenever Uncle Audley was back home from The Contract, he used to regale us during breakfast with stories about his experiences in the United States working on farms in Florida and some northern states that imported farm workers to harvest their crops.
Back then, whenever Bahamian young men returned from the contract, one of the first purchases they made was a bicycle. Under an agreement signed by the then government of The Bahamas with whatever agency in the United States was responsible for the legal importation of farm workers, a percentage of the salary paid to the workers was sent to the government to “save” for them when they returned home. So, when they did eventually returned home after a two-or-three-year stint on The Contract, they had quite a sizeable “nest egg” waiting for them.
Although some of them squandered their contract savings over a period of time on having a good time, my grandfather insisted that Uncle Audley and his other two sons who spent time on the contract – uncle Lee and uncle Ashton – use their money wisely. Uncle Audley, for example, bought a piece of property in Nassau through what is now known as John Street, where in later years he built a house. No doubt, he was encouraged to buy property in Nassau by his older brother, Clarence Elliott, who had moved to Nassau years earlier.
I have told the story on more than one occasion about how Uncle Clarence, the eldest of Papa and Mama’s seven children, paved the way for the eventual move by the Elliott family to Nassau when he built a house through Paul Meeres Corner, now known as Fleming Street, prior to moving to New York to live in the late 1940s. That house is still standing opposite the now-closed Keith’s Chicken Shack that was a popular take-out, late-night restaurant in the 1950s and 1960s.
I remember that uncle Audley also bought a new Raleigh bicycle on one of his trips back home, and if my memory serves me correctly that’s how I learned to ride a bicycle. On one of those trips back home, he also met a young lady in Mastic Point, the late Corine Newton, who was the mother of uncle Audley’s eldest son, Alphonso “Boogaloo” Elliott.
Several years later, he met and married a lovely young lady, Edith Woodside, whose family lived very near to St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church on the East Ridge of Stanyard Creek, and that marital union produced my cousins Bruce, George, Verona, Lorna, Norbert, Jerome, Martin and Nicola.
As I have said on numerous occasions, we are a very close family, and uncle Audley was as much a father to me as he was to his own children, so on this Fathers’ Day I join his children in wishing him a Happy Father’s Day in Heaven. May his soul continue to rest in peace.
