The House on Hadfield Street
By Ingrid Griffith
The place I once escaped, the one I had sworn off for good, became the place I most needed to feel whole again.
My family hadn’t been back to Guyana in a long time, some of us for 30 years, some 20, and some 10. A reunion trip was scheduled during Easter because of the unique Easter Monday celebration.
Eight of us arrived at Cheddi Jagan International Airport early one April morning. It had just rained and the showers had washed the warm air clean. Cane fields still lined the road from the airport. As a child, I remember the scent of boiling sugar that made me dizzy whenever I went past the Diamond Estate sugar factory on the East Bank of the Demerara River.
As we headed for Hadfield Street, I couldn’t take my eyes off the moments of daily life. Youngsters on bicycles used sticks to steer goats and cows off the street and toward the pasture. Bare-chested, brown-skinned men leaned out windows. Women in house dresses and headwraps swept their yards with pointer brooms made from coconut tree branches.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to return after all these years. Guyana didn’t hold such sweet memories for me. I was seven when my parents left Guyana for America. Those years I lived with my grandmother in Georgetown while my parents were gone left an indelible mark. I remember wishing my homeland good riddance the day the news came in 1974, five years after my parents left, that my siblings and I had been granted visas for America.
In the 1960s, my parents, like many of Guyana’s working class, were disillusioned by the country’s politics. They realized that it didn’t matter whether the candidates running for prime minister were Indian-Guyanese or African-Guyanese or whether they were socialist, communist or capitalist. Once someone got into power, their politics amounted to the same. Corruption in the government was rampant and politicians seemed unconcerned or unable to make life more livable for the people of Guyana. The country was freed from its colonial past. Yet, the future looked dim.
