AUDREY ESMERALDA CHAPMAN’S agility, wit and memory belie her 100 years.
The centenarian, originally from Pile Bay, Black Rock, St Michael, is a proud Barbadian who has made the trip home to celebrate Barbados’ 50th anniversary of independence and of even greater significance, to join her family here in the celebration of her own milestone.
Chapman turned 100 on November 12, and last week she walked into the NATION’s offices gingerly and unaided with her grandson Clifton Henry in tow. The smartly dressed, petite grandmother impressed NATION staff as she made her grandson the brunt of her jokes.
“Gran, am I getting conkies?” asked one staffer familiar with Chapman’s expertise at the seasonal favourite and cassava pone. With a chuckle, Chapman replied: “Oh Lord. Let me tell you. I am not in control of things any more. I have some children that are telling me what to do, but they didn’t listen to me when I was telling them, what to do. That isn’t fair. I am forbidden to do things now.”
She still goes into the kitchen. “My children have no choice because they are working and I have to eat. So if I wait until they come home at night, the gas is bothering me now and I would be dead. I have to eat so I cook my own food.”
Listening to the exchange of banter between her and her grandson there was no mistaking who is really in charge. This grandmother’s tongue is humorously sharp.
Chapman migrated to America in the early 1980s following the death of her mother. Consumed by grief, she was persuaded by her daughter to make the move which he had resisted initially, telling her daughter “I ain’t going up in no airplane. I am not a bird.”
Nonetheless she settled down to life in the strange country. But her thoughts were always about “the rock”.
The Barbados she is seeing today is a far cry from what she knew.
She remembers the days when “people did not have that much money. If you able you would buy a pint of lard oil (cooking oil) you had to take a bottle and they poured the oil through a funnel.You used to have butter in tins and if you could afford it you would buy a quarter pound and they used to put it in the lard oil. A pint of rice used to cost about four cents.
“My family did not have much. We were not people that had this, that or the other. You had to go with a bucket to the standpipe to get water. You did not go to sleep except you had water in the house. You had to buy wood or coals to cook with. If you want to iron your clothes you had to heat irons on coals on a coal pot. The young people wouldn’t even know what I am talking about.”
Chapman said her diet of green peas and rice, cou cou and flying fish, potato, dumplings, breadfruit, a “piece of salt fish” and “when ain’t got nothing to buy all of them things, you put a little butter on the rice and you eat it” is largely responsible for the good health she continues to enjoy.
she also counts the “little bush tea” when she was “not feeling good” as a factor.
Chapman tells the story of a doctor’s disbelief once when she went for her medical check-up. “I go to clinic and the female doctor came out and called my name and as I was going, she said ‘You are 99 years old? Somebody made a mistake. I was looking for an old woman in a wheelchair.”
“You got the old woman but not the wheelchair” was Chapman’s quick-witted response.
Barbados had the reputation for making ‘the best rum in the world”, she said. Asked whether she took the occasional drink, she had everyone around her in stiches when she came right back saying: “My country is going to make the best rum in the world and I am not going to taste it?”
Chapman is proud of her education in Barbados, as a former “pupil” at St Stephen’s Girl’s School where she “reached standard seven”.
“We had dictation, arithmetic, transcription . . . transcription is when you used to read; dictation is what you got to remember out of your head when they ask you a question. I learnt decimals. You see Barbados was under the English system so we had to learn what the English taught.”
Her school day began at 10 in the morning with a one-hour lunch break at 1 p.m. and school ended at 4 p.m.
“You had to show your nails; you had to show your teeth to see if they were clean and they pushed a little thing in your hair to see if your hair was combed.”
On leaving school, she was sent to a Mrs Gibbs to learn sewing. The dresses she made for herself attracted customers who paid about two shillings to get an ordinary dress made on her Singer hand- operated sewing machine and later, her Singer treadle (foot-operated) machine.
Now she wears ready-mades but her taste remains impeccable.
On this trip home she is feasting on the sugar apples, dunks and other local fruit consumed in her childhood when she and other children roamed the Cave Hill area where the University of the West Indies campus now stands.
She reckons she may have been six when she found a six cents piece on one of those outings. “I picked it up. That was a lot of money and I started running. I get home out of breath – ‘ma ma I got money’ – I was rich. In those days you had to have four shillings and four cents to make a dollar.”
Her six cents would buy her salt bread or a ‘cut drop’ for a penny, a comfort ball (candy) and a sugar cake.
She likes the development she has seen in Barbados over the decades that she has lived abroad.
“I had to say I like I don’t even know this place now. It is a lot different. Wherever I go, I see some nice houses. To me the country got a lift.”
Coming home is always an exciting experience for the centenarian who travels without the aid of a wheel chair and reads fluently without spectacles.
In the US, the Brooklyn resident has curtailed shopping trips and outings alone. “They are beating up the old people and snatching their bags. But they can’t get mine. Why would I have my money in a bag like this (pointing to the small handbag she was carrying) and be walking with it for somebody to come and snatch it? They would have to strip me naked.”
On that note she mused: “How could I forget the land of my birth. Barbados is sweet.”