Postive and negative memories
Moving to Canada, Marie Clarke Walker and family experienced adventure and racism
Marie Clarke Walker, 52, says there is nothing she can get back home in Jamaica that she cannot find in the local supermarket in Toronto.
“Now, I can go to the store just across the street and get otaheiti apples, get all different kinds of mangoes, get tambrin, get guava, get naseberries — that’s my mother’s favourite fruit — everything,” she says.
“When you come into Canada, there is no sign that says leave your language, your culture, your ethnicity at the door,” she says.
She did not want to come here, though, when she arrived in 1972 at the age of eight, leaving her house and the warm weather of Jamaica behind for an apartment crowded with relatives she barely knew.
Her mother, Beverley Johnson, decided it would be best to bring Clarke Walker and her six-year-old brother, Robert Clarke Johnson, to live with family in Toronto while she returned to Jamaica for her job, with a plan to eventually bring her children back home.
“I considered what was in their best interests and the education system, the opportunities that were presenting themselves for them, made the decision,” says Johnson, 77, who had come to Canada as a student years earlier but decided not to stay. “For me, it was a difficult decision to take.”
Clarke Walker does have sweet memories of making ice cream and jackass corn — a thin and crisp traditional Jamaican biscuit — with her grandmother, but there were also negative memories much deeper than the snow.
“There were some kids that wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t play with us,” says Clarke Walker.
“The first time I heard the N-word was three weeks after I landed in this country,” she says, noting this experience helped shape her life as a human rights activist and leader in the labour movement. “The first time didn’t come from another child.”
Robert Clarke Johnson, 51, says he remembers the move to Canada as a big adventure, but he also grew up experiencing racism, including from police, and still does today, even though he has seen, especially through the eyes of his children, his city become more diverse.
“The underlying current — at times it’s a whisper, at times it’s a loud voice — of racism still exists.”