Retracing Steps: Memoirs on La Familia do Callender
By:
Onika Nkrumah-Lakhan
One day in 1950, a young man
set off from Trinidad
to seek his fortune in lands unknown. He traveled through the jungles of Venezuela and Guyana before he stopped in
Brazil.
That man was my father’s brother, Hugh Mc Clinton Callender. I never
knew him except from an old dog-earred, sepia photograph and my own fanciful imagination.
But, I often wondered about
dear Uncle Hugh. About what would possess a man to leave his homeland, never
to return. Clearly, he was an ambitious sort, intrepid and adventurous - he did
not know a word of Portuguese when he set sail on his epic journey.
I know bits and pieces of him,
all told to me by my father. How he’d qualified as a ship’s engineer, how he had loved cowboy and Indian movies and how together they had fought off schoolyard thugs during their boyhood.
Then like a fairy tale, Uncle
Hugh left his old life to begin a new one. He settled in Sao Paulo, married a Brazilian woman called Mazia Teixeira Da Silva and had eleven children.
Clearly, not a man that was
disposed to correspondence, his communiqué home was sporadic at best. Many years
passed and Uncle Hugh became, the lost son, talked about occasionally yet never forgotten.
To me, he was my intriguing
Uncle, the one who inspired me to think beyond borders. I pictured him trekking
through the Amazon and over-nighting with the Warahoon Indians. I knew of Brazil only by its clichés: Pele, capoeira, and the ‘Girl
from Ipanema’ song.
I am not sure how he did it
but my sentimentalist father, tracked him down and the sporadic letters resumed, this time with Uncle Hugh’s daughter,
who spoke no English. Keeping in touch was tough because of the language barrier
and the inevitable delays of snail mail.
In 2003, dear Uncle Hugh died. News of his death, as with everything else, reached us late. Then, on April 1st, 2006, his last brother, my father followed him into the afterlife.
My father always hoped to be
reunited with the Brazilian branch of his family. He wrote letters to a niece
that he never knew. One year after he’d passed, his dream became a reality. The niece he never knew, Lillian Callender, came to Trinidad.
Lilian is lovely. Her Callender heritage is unmistakeable, in fact she looks a lot like my sister. The family’s communication with her was limited to hand signals and a few words of Spanish, a relative
of Portuguese. Yet, we understood each other very well. It seems that love is the same in any language.
Uncle Hugh must have waxed
nostalgic from time to time as well. We learnt that he had named some of his
children after his Trinidadian relatives. He even named one of his sons, Kenneth,
my father’s original name.
Along with a ‘Familia
do Callender do Brasil’ (Callender
family of Brazil) photo-album, Lillian had brought with her, the early letters sent to her by
my father. The sight of his handwriting almost moved me to tears.
More Cosmopolitan than Caribbean. My Brazilian family is extensive and beautiful.
We will never know why Uncle
Hugh abandoned his old life so completely. But, the dots are now reconnected. Although, our fathers never got the opportunity to reunite, through us their daughters,
the circle is now complete.
I want to learn Portuguese
and the samba. Lillian will further her English, hopefully we will stay in touch
and one day I can retrace my uncle’s footsteps to the adopted homeland he loved so dearly, to see the rest of my blood
in Brazil.
An anonymous author wrote somewhere
that “Life is not a journey to the grave with intentions of arriving safely in a pretty well-preserved body, but rather
to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ... WOW! What a ride!”
I never had the pleasure of
meeting my dear Uncle Hugh but I am certain that he must have felt the same way!
