In North Amerikkkan Blues, written in 1971, I tried to explain what had happened to me in America to change my perspective on life in the winter of 1967.

Blessed with a university scholarship from the United States Consulate here in 1965, I did my best to stay out of the American socio-political ferment of the time. To me, African Americans have a different perspective on life from Caribbean people, and black people, generally speaking, from other parts of the world. I think African Americans, for various reasons, are American before they are African (or black).

I was the only student of color in a Dartmouth College fraternity named Zeta Psi. There was one white “brother” in the fraternity who, I could see, disliked black people, but overall things were pretty cool in Zeta Psi.

One night, however, I woke up, having fallen asleep drunk on the Zete floor/carpet, and I heard my white “brothers” criticizing some African American students who had demonstrated that night against the visit to Dartmouth of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who was campaigning for the 1968 presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

I realized that I had to support my African American brothers who had demonstrated against Wallace, and from there one thing began to lead to another. So that, I ended up basically roots in my life instead of becoming a member of the black bourgeoisie. 

From the age of 7, I grew up on West Canal across the street from the family home of the respectable Barrow family, whose patriarch was Ebenezer Oliver Bunting (E. O. B.) Barrow, a high-ranking civil servant who was grandfather to Dean, Denys, and Denise Barrow, who have become multimillionaire members of Belize’s black oligarchy. 

But the Southside of Belize City was a strange place up until the 1970s and 1980s, in that roots people lived right next to the black bourgeoisie. So, next to the Barrow family home lived a brother named Godwin Gordon, whom we called “Dino.” His common-law was June Stanford, whom I had taught at Belize Technical College in 1968/69, and I believe it was June’s family who owned or rented the house where Dino and June lived upstairs.

Anyway, in the 1970s, Dino used to lead me and a couple of my younger brothers to the open space at the Newtown Barracks to play “pick side” football. We walked from Bolton Bridge to Newtown, which had been, historically speaking, a place of recreation for roots black people.

The Belizeans who opposed Right Hon. George Price and the PUP, claimed that he was “Latinizing” the country, and that they, led by the NIP, stood for black Belizeans’ interests. But when Mr. Price was finally voted out in 1984, it was not the NIP which replaced the PUP, but a new entity called the UDP, which had been formed in 1973 as an amalgamation of the PDM, the NIP, and a so-called Liberal Party.

And one of the first things the newly empowered UDP did, under the leadership of Hon. Manuel Esquivel, was sell the Newtown Barracks space to the Ramada Hotel group. After that, the PUP, when they returned to power in 1989, grabbed the rest of the Barracks, which had been iconic recreational space for Southside people for many, many decades. The symbolism involved here is stunning. But it is only a few people, like yours truly, who talk about this.      

Whatever the case, for maybe five years I’ve been working on land at a site called Lake Garden just north of Ladyville. It’s been a lonely ride, and it is clear that the elitist neighborhood is suspicious of my intentions. I have enough enemies to last a lifetime, so all I have done is try to keep the 7 acres as clean as I can.

This week I ran into a brother in Ladyville who used to participate in our “pick side” games on the Barracks. I hadn’t seen this roots brother for several decades. We were happy to see each other, and the first person’s name he brought up was that of Dino, who had been shot and killed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Roots brother and I reminisced about “The Mongolians.”

The sacred Newtown Barracks Club had stood across the street (Princess Margaret Drive) from the Barracks space, which had featured cricket, football, track and field, gymnastics, swimming, and even horse racing. I believe the famed mahogany contractor named Ben Stuart had been a big part of the building of the Newtown Barracks clubhouse. But when Hurricane Greta struck in 1978, as relatively mild as Greta was, Ben Stuart was dead, and the badly damaged clubhouse, for some reason(s), was never repaired. This apparently created the opening for Ramada in the consciousness of all those black UDP Cabinet members who sold the Barracks in 1985 or so.

I remember in those “pick side” football games in the 70s, sometimes MCC superstars like the late Rungu Glynn would show up, but there were also participants in the games who were underworld figures, so to speak. So sometimes we would say to each other, when a regular player was missing: where is so and so? “New York” would be the answer. You would have to read between the lines.

Those were fun days. If Greta is responsible for Ramada, then Greta was worse than we ever believed. Just some food for thought in 2024 Belize.