Black Material Geographies
Episode 3
The Lacebark Tree, Pt. 1
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Two years ago, I was asked to write about my personal relationship to knitting and crafting. I automatically thought of my grandmother who did all things, crochet, knitting, needle point. So, many of us with Jamaican mothers and grandmothers grew up around these crafting practices that are thought of as mundane, but actually come from a rich tradition of Caribbean women's ingenuity and resourcefulness. As I explored these Caribbean crafting traditions further, I discovered a tree that I had never heard about before and yet seemed to be an important part of this story.
This is Black Material Geographies, a show that explores the stories behind forgotten fibers and the fabrics you think you know all too well. I'm your host, Teju Adisa Farrar, speaking to you from the unseated territory of the Ohlone people. Jamaica is known as the land of wood and water for its rainforests full of trees, its many rivers and streams connecting to miles of coastlines with black and white sand beaches
Cockpit Country is in Trelawny in Northwestern, Jamaica. It is a hilly and dense area with the highest diversity of plants and limestone deposits. It is home to the largest remaining forest in the country as well as bauxite, a sedimentary rock that is the main source of the world's aluminum. For this reason, Cockpit Country is crucial to Jamaica's ecosystem and also under threat of deforestation due to mining. Cockpit Country is also home to the Acopum Maroons who are the stewards of the biodiversity there and have retained many West African traditions. Among the thousands of species and plants in Cockpit Country is the lacebark tree. But what does this have to do with crafting or my grandmother?
Steeve Buckridge:
I was in the archive and I came across this reference. The story goes, so there was this European man who was traveling in Jamaica and he saw this black woman, beautiful woman, she was gorgeous. you know, from looking at her from a distance. He said, wow, there's something interesting about this woman and she was traveling, she was riding a donkey and she had a veil over her face and he was intrigued by that.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Steeve Buckridge is a professor of African Caribbean history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His work focuses on material culture. How and why certain cultural characteristics were maintained, nurtured and passed down to descendants.
Steeve Buckridge:
And so then he got closer to her and then as he got closer, he realized this is not a typical lace veil. It's an unusual kind of veil. And so then he realized after talking to her that this is something that came from the bark of a tree. When I read that I was stunned because growing up in Jamaica I've never heard of lacebark. My parents had never heard of it, it's not taught in schools, nobody had heard of lacebark. It wasn't even in Google, you couldn't look it up. It was nothing about lacebark.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Like Steeve, as a proud Jamaican American I had never heard about lacebark either until I sat down to write an essay about my grandmother and the legacy of Jamaican women being so crafty. I didn't find much information on it besides a book by Steeve and a couple of articles. But as I was doing research, it seemed apparent this tree was the beginning of Jamaican women's crafting traditions.
Steeve Buckridge:
It's a lost art form. It's part of Jamaica's history which sadly no one knows about and the thing is for so many years, everyone was under the impression that the tree had become extinct.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
The Taínos, part of the Arawak tribes, were the first inhabitants of the island now known as Jamaica. For centuries, the Taínos harvested plants for medicine, caught fish, picked fruits, slept in hammocks and used canoes to traverse Jamaica's many rivers and streams. When Columbus set foot on Jamaica in 1494 searching for gold, there were about 60,000 Taínos. The Spanish enslaved the Taínos as well as gave them European diseases leading to the decimation of the population within a couple of centuries. The first capital of Jamaica was called Spanish Town in St. Catherine's Parish. Spanish Town is where my grandmother's house is where I spent so much time as a child chasing chickens, eating mangoes from the tree in the yard and getting into all kinds of shenanigans with my brother. As the Taíno population dwindled, the Spanish began importing West Africans and enslaving them. In 1655, the British captured Jamaica from the Spanish and it remained a British colony until 1962. The British also continued to import slaves and enslaved them on plantations across the island.
Steeve Buckridge:
When slaves were brought to Jamaica, during the early days you had slave owners who would distribute clothing to the slaves. And at first they would give them ready made clothing that's taught in schools that are very typical. But that over time or through the British Caribbean, as the slave population grew, then they realized that they could no longer give out just ready made clothes, it was too expensive. So, then slave owners started to distribute textile and the number one textile that gave was called ascheberg, which comes from Ashbrook a place in Germany as a coarse kind of fabric that you put it on and it makes your skin scratch. You have to work it out. So anyway, what happens that they would distribute this, but this was the problem. The thing was that if you think about the plantation concept, the idea was that men made better slaves.
And so men's labor was more valued than women's labor. And so men were oftentimes rewarded more than women and so men received generally speaking, more clothing and more textiles. So, it meant that women had a great need and overall slaves only got about enough fabric to make two suits per year. And if you can imagine you're working in the fields, that's not enough. It meant that women had a couple options. They could either steal to have extra clothes, which some did. It meant that they could obtain extra clothing exchange for sexual favors within slavers, with white men and some women would save up money from selling their produce.
So, there'd be their yams and whatever they could grow in their little pot and they would take it to market when they got permission and they would sell it and then the money they got, they would save it and they would buy some textiles. But the other option, which is what I focus on is that some women turn to their environment, they turn to the rainforest and they look for trees and some of them got the knowledge of trees from the indigenous people from the Taínos and they built on it by a process of trial and error, that's how we have lacebark emerging.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Generations later, it is Jamaican women who have continued building on this knowledge, like my grandmother as well as the mother and grandmother of artists, Nadine Hall.
Nadine Hall:
My influence started with my mother who was a dressmaker and I would see her full yards of fabric, put them on the table and then in the morning I would get up and I see a garment and I thought that was just magical as a five year old growing up. I did not know that the garment was actually in the plain piece of fabric and I decided that I wanted to do what she was doing and I wanted to make magic just like her with fibers and textiles and create clothes.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Nadine's grandmother followed the legacy of many Jamaican women whose livelihoods are directly intertwined with their environment.
Nadine Hall:
With my great-grandmother, who was this force of nature. She was a farmer and an entrepreneur, but it wasn't even considered as entrepreneurship. What she did, she grew tobacco and turmeric and cash crops and she rolled her tobacco, she smoked it and she rode an ass to her farm and she had a shop where she got pastries from a famous bakery in Portland, and she sold those pastries. We have this wonderful foundation of strength and resilience and ingenuity that you know how dare me not to continue this legacy. That's not just be working class women's work, it's about how they're able to mentor and families and still keep an identity. And they did these things as means of survival not knowing that these were art forms and they were pioneers.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
In the history of lacebark, we can see the thread of resilience and innovation despite the violence and trauma of enslavement and colonization. It is women who turned survival into beauty through intimate interactions with the plants around them.
Steeve Buckridge:
I like to say that our ancestors dared to survive in spite of the brutality of enslavement. And so in the midst of all of this, lacebark was a key component of this whole process especially in the lives of black women, slave women in Jamaica. In my own work when I talk about material culture, I talk about this but I focus a lot on women and I was just stunned.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Just as Caribbean women are often forgotten as pioneers of material culture and aesthetics, the lacebark tree was forgotten in the rich history of Jamaican crafting traditions. Luckily for me, Steeve was on a mission to learn as much as he could about this tree.
Steeve Buckridge:
Now, when I started the research in the 1990s, I went to Hispaniola. There, scientists told me the tree was wiped out, that's what they claim. I don't believe them. I think we might still have a few trees left. But government scientists-they believe the tree was wiped out. When I did research on this in Cuba, the records were very scanty. In Cuba, they believe that they might have a few trees left but they don't know, it's not clear.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Huge numbers of lacebark trees were lost to deforestation, urban sprawl and overuse due to a lack of government regulation and environmental protections. In 1906, the colonial Jamaican government believed there were only 12 lacebark trees left.
Steeve Buckridge:
And I was determined that I was going to prove them wrong. What makes Jamaica stand out is that Jamaica had entire forests, huge forests of lacebark trees and Jamaica was the place where a vibrant clothing industry developed in lacebark where it was most vibrant.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Jamaican women have always loved fashion and made this a quintessential part of Caribbean cultural expression, even in the midst of trauma and struggle. My grandmother was no exception. While I was back in Jamaica for the holidays, my mom showed me several doilies, tablecloths and other things my grandma made over the years
Opal Palmer Adisa
Growing up, I always knew that beauty was important to woo me. And she sold some of her clothes forget that too.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
And she had a lot of clothes that she had made as well because I have some of those clothes.
Opal Palmer Adisa
Right, so we always had a dressmaker because she was very clear she didn't want to look like anybody else. She didn't like these mass produced clothes where everybody had the same thing. So, we always had a dressmaker and our good church clothes or going out clothes were never store bought, was always a dress maker who made them to fit us and the style that she came up with or that she saw and like and had made. So, that was who she was.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Did you think of mommy as an artist when you were growing up?
Opal Palmer Adisa:
I think I knew because here's the thing I remember this is so vivid in my memory. Mommy didn't believe in cutting down Christmas tree, she used to kiss our cheeks and set that's a waste of time, why are we doing that? And I remember because we lived in Cayman where there was forest area. One Christmas all of us trekking in the woods with her and she finding what she thought was the perfect tree that was dead or limb. And then she took it home and she sprayed it silver. It had branches on it and she put it in a nice pot and then she put the curtain, the Christmas bones on its some of which she made from crochet. Your auntie have some of those and your auntie made some of those and some of the regular glass bulbs that we bought. So, I think in those instances that I thought of her as an artist, I remember people always admire. She used to make wine before Jamaicans were making local wine, she would make rice wine, Seesaw orange made wine. She was just creative and inventive.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
Jamaican women are central to the cultural production on the island even though people often think of male reggae singers when thinking of Jamaica. The women have always passed down creativity even in the midst of immense struggle. It seems that Jamaicans in general, and Jamaican women in particular, go through a great deal of trauma and suffering. There's a word in Jamaican Patois called sufferation. This word tries to capture the sense of living in continuous struggle. Hopefully, over generations we can find ways to heal from this trauma and allow it to propel us. Nadine's art is the epitome of this.
Nadine Hall:
My mother, just a quintessential narrative of so many of us, teenage pregnancy and then for some people they get some form of reprieve, but for some it's just a continuous life of hardship and that continuous cycle. And so I thought that my mother was so special and she was so beautiful and she was so talented that I was like, wow, nobody was praising her for this work that she was doing because she was just a dress maker but I was like, wow, this is great. And then as a child, I used to watch a lot of TV and I would see fashion shows and costumes and these musicals and those were garments. And I was like, I can learn the gift, the skill from my mother and then elevate to that status. I must elevate her gift. I've given myself the mandate that I will reach places that they were not able to reach, but I'm you using those tools that they provided to get to that place.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
As black people, we have been and are often stripped of our value. So, we use creativity and some might say other worldly ways of reclaiming our value. As black people in the diaspora, sometimes we cannot pinpoint specifically where our ancestral knowledge comes from or why certain art and culture is important to our identity. However, in this case, lacebark gives us a glimpse into one of the many legacies that make us who we are. So, we owe it to ourselves to find out as much as possible about this tree that somehow feels sacred.
Steeve Buckridge:
So, basically what I did was that I got an expedition together. We went to Maroon town, spoke with the Maroons. Even the Maroons, the generation there now, but they weren't even sure how many lacebark trees or even if the lacebark trees still existed. And so in the 1990s, I interviewed a group of Maroon elders in Accompong town. And these were elderly women who remembered their grandmothers and great-grandmothers who used to make lacebark and told you I was stunned by that. I just said, how come we're not talking about this?
Teju Adisa Farrar:
The lacebark tree and the natural lace Jamaican woman crafted from it is one of the fiber stories that we have forgotten or have forgotten to tell. In my mother's home in Jamaica, she has an alter to my grandmother, Catherine Palmer, so that we never forget what she's done and we never forget to tell the stories of her either.
Opal Palmer Adisa:
So, when I was growing up, my mother was always doing something with her hands, baking, cooking, crochet, knitting you name it, she did it and she taught us. I remember teaching us how to hem, how to sew on a button, how to embroider our names on our handkerchiefs because back then we had the handkerchiefs. And a lot of the artwork in our house she made in front and we're looking at this peacock and I remember she even needle point our initials, not our names, our initials and our pillow cases, so it was everywhere. And then every structure had on one of mommy's crochet and she made different colors for different seasons and she crochet. She had many different crochet books with different patterns and she also taught my sister and I and many people in the neighborhood. Many of the women would come over in the evening and sit under veranda and mommy would teach them the crochet, she would teach them to bake, she would teach them the needle points, she would teach them the knit, she would knit sweaters and booties and little things for babies and all of that.
So look at this one, this one is like an oval shape and then there's a square. The pattern and intricacy you can see it is just snow that I think about it and I'm looking at it so amazing. These are like lace crochet makes the effect of the lace here. Mommy was very particular. She crocheted these and that then they would use starch. They make starch from cassava and they would be starch and press. You would never just wash it, it was a whole ritual that's why I think they were bothered with this stuff because it took so much effort and then they would starch it and press it or iron it.
We used to make rugs from discarded fabric and when we used to make them and they were in front of our beds, before you could buy all of these stupid little rugs that don't last, mommy made all of the rugs that we had in the house from discarded stuff that she would get from the dress maker or that she had kept from making something herself, but she didn't waste of things. She was definitely resourceful, definitely into beauty.
Teju Adisa Farrar:
I didn't know when I agreed to write an essay on my grandma a couple years ago that it would lead me into an ecological adventure searching for a magical tree from which enslaved women made lace. But actually it makes sense. Whenever we look back far enough into the origins of what makes up our material life, we find plants, trees and rocks because everything starts with the earth, the dirt, the ocean, the plants. So, whatever happened to the lacebark tree, well next time we'll find out.
It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body, release tension in your shoulders, jaw, neck, taking a moment to reflect on and process our journey today to Jamaica. Our journey of finding a sacred tree, our journey of honoring the brilliance of enslaved African women and the Jamaican women who follow in their footsteps today, we took a journey so let's just sit in that feeling for a few moments.
I invite you to take a deep breath and thank yourself for listening to something new today. I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine being in a forest in the Cockpit Country, surrounded by thousands of species of trees, millions of shades of green, listening to a cacophony of birds with an ocean breeze. Just take it all in. Thank you for spending time in Jamaica with me. Thank you for caring about a magical tree. Thank you for listening, learning and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.
You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcast. Black Material Geographies is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team. My producer, Tiffany Rozier, audio editor, Ray Royal, music by Philip Colletchi Nnamdi Iro, researcher, Haven Ogbaselase, and intern Kai Stone. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective head of podcast, Céline Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Amalissa Uytingco and sound intern Simon Lavender. You can learn more about this podcast at whetstoneradio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @whetstoneradio, subscribe to our YouTube channel Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast, video content. You could learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.