LINEAGE

A debut memoir traces the painful trajectory of a dysfunctional Jamaican family as generation after generation endures physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and political strife, leading to migration to the United States.

In 1905, teenagers Margaret Hall and Alon Adamson met, fell in love, and conceived a child who would be known as the Lion. Margaret was a Jamaican Maroon; Alon was a Jamaican White. His family threatened to disinherit him if he married Margaret. Without much regret, he abandoned mother and child. When the Lion was 3 months old, Margaret’s parents forced her to marry a local farmer named Oswald. He was a hard-drinking, abusive brute with whom she would have more than 20 children. But the Lion was special. Margaret had given him his father’s surname, and in spite of his stepfather’s cruelty, the Lion knew he was meant for a better life. He fortuitously landed a job as a chauffeur to Jamaica’s prestigious Anglican bishop when he was 15. Over the following 20 years, the Lion made connections that would lead him into politics. At 36 and still unmarried, he began to court the beautiful Saraphina Codner, who was only 17. Like the Lion, Saraphina was the child of a Maroon mother and a White father. They married in August 1941 and had five children. Thompson’s chronicle follows the lives of the Adamson family—the Lion, Saraphina, their troubled offspring, and their granddaughter Jeddah, who ultimately found a path that freed her from the family’s cycle of turmoil. It is all recounted through the dispassionate voice of a third-person narrator who sounds more like a scholar than a memoirist. Still, the author has an ear for the music of language—most evident in her descriptions of the warmth and colors of Jamaica—and she peppers her prose with atmospheric Jamaican patois. In addition to the family’s travails—including multiple rapes, mental illness, and financial reversals—she vividly depicts Jamaica’s traditional societal/religious underpinnings, which were torn apart during the violently chaotic political, social, and economic upheavals of the 1970s.

Although lacking emotional immediacy, a compelling, historically intriguing account of personal salvation.