Our Father Died
by
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The Long Day On the morning of May 21, 1909, in Half-Way Tree, an affluent suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, Daisy Humber Turner began packing a small trunk in preparation for an extended visit, with her mother, to her mother’s family in Mandeville, a three-hour bus ride away. Her mother, Isabella Phillpotts, stood nearby holding one-year old James and pleading with Daisy to get some rest before the next day’s trip. “Don’t worry about the baby,” her mother said. “We’ll do just fine. I stocked up on everything he needs and I have nothing to do but watch over him until we leave.” “I know he’s in good hands with you, Mama. I know everything will be all right.” She said this with a pointed look, which she saw her mother hesitate to question. Daisy’s head, bent over the trunk, felt heavy. She could hardly get herself to move. The few items in the trunk seemed distant and unfamiliar. She turned away and sat by a nearby window overlooking the courtyard and driveway below, stared blankly at a large billowy cloud, and sighed. Daisy thought, Mama, if you only knew the pain I feel.
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About the Book
This is the story of a search for the causes of a father’s early death and the consequences for his children. A Jamaican immigrant falls from a window to his death, leaving a wife and four young children grieving and poor in a Chicago slum. Why? When he begins high school the mother asks the youngest son to study the letters and papers his father left behind. He discovers that his father committed suicide but holds this secret for many years. He also uncovers the story of his father’s twenty-year unsuccessful struggle to obtain a legacy his father left him in Jamaica. The son puts the fi les aside but retrieves them twenty years later and travels to Jamaica where he fi nds relatives and uncovers more family secrets. The story that unfolds reaches back to the middle of the nineteenth century and a Native American reservation. The impact of each generation on the next holds the answer to the question “Why?”
About the Author
The author is a retired professor of psychology who taught for forty years in the University of Massachusetts system. He has been thinking and writing about the influences of family for much of that time.