Bahamians, We Are Magic
The Commencement Address to the Inaugural Class of the University of The Bahamas, Northern Campus
By: Crystal A. deGregory, Ph.D.
Commencement Day is the most grand of all days in the life of a university. As members of the University of The Bahamas’ inaugural class, you are its Crown Jewels. And today you shine bright!
President Smith, members of the board of trust, administrators, faculty, staff, distinguished guests those anointed and those appointed, proud parents, family and friends, and graduates of the University of the Bahamas class of 2017, it is so incredibly good to be home in the greatest little country in the world. It is especially good to be on Grand Bahama because it is only on Grand Bahama that:
…everyone who lives beyond the Fishing Hole Road knows that folks don’t drive all the way to West End’s World-Famous Chicken Nest for chicken;
…everyone from East End knows that anyone who says they are headed for Bishop’s ain’ headed for church;
…and everyone from West End to East End knows that Freeport has some of the best Kentucky Fried Chicken in the world.
It’s been 18 years since I, bound for college, first left Freeport. But Freeport has never left me. No matter where I go, what I do, or who I meet, I still think that this island is quite grand a place. I mean I still can’t understand why Jimmy Sands didn’t make his brewery’s motto “Truly Grand Bahamian Beer.”
I love memories of Borden’s on Saturdays — they had the best rum raisin. And who didn’t like to stop and watch wedding parties take their photos on the Princess’s lawn at the famous “P.” I loved doing the conch style with Kristen Penn in Port Lucaya, and skating at Goombayland. And let me tell you: it is no exaggeration to say I was crazy for Decision’s “Jump fa Jesus one time.”
But I’m not just a child of Freeport. I spent lots of time roaming the streets of my mother Wendy Saunders and maternal grandmother’s native Eight Mile Rock. My grandmother Pamela Martin Saunders was a proud Martin of Martin Town. This woman took being a Grand Bahamian as a point of personal privilege. Mama, we called her, lived across the street from Eight Mile Rock’s Public Cemetery — you would not believe how many times I counted the R.I.P.s on every headstone in that cemetery — for fun! And early every Saturday morning, Mama could be counted on wake us up as soon as God sent morning — to bathe, to eat breakfast, and clean her bathroom because funeral processions would be coming — as many as four in one day — and Mama’s house was a favorite and sometimes necessary pit stop of passersby.
Now that I think about it, Mama’s door was always open during daylight. If she wasn’t cooking in the kitchen, she was sitting in the chair facing the front door endlessly calling out back-and-forth to those walking by.
Those were the good ole days. We didn’t have everything we wanted, but we had everything we needed.
And we’d certainly had more than the generation before us; and even more than the generation before them.
Today, Graduates of the Class of 2017, we are gathered here, at your graduation, to celebrate the end of deciding class schedules; the end of registration; and the end of figuring how in the world it was all going to be paid for.
You each came here as one, but the 67 of you leave here as many. First, you were strangers, and then classmates; now many of you are friends. And all of you, [and because of you, all of us too] now belong to the family that is University of The Bahamas.
As family, we belong to each other, to this grand island, to this great little nation, and indeed, to this glorious, yet deeply flawed world.
It is a world…
…where crime rates are too high and literacy rates are too low;
…where too many brown-skinned boys underachieve in the classroom, and not enough brown-skinned women sit in economic and political seats of power;
…where far too many people are poor and indigent, and not enough people have access to quality education and healthcare as a right;
…and it is a world, where greed and ineptitude, racism and essentialism, and patriarchy too, drives these inequities, deepening the ever-growing chasm between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots, the well to do and the just trying do to.
If it seems as if I’m taking issue with poverty — I am. Because I believe that until we eradicate unacceptable sub-standards of living, we demean the dignity of our people, we shirk our collective responsibility, and we deny each other as well as ourselves, the kind of world we deserve — a world in which each, and every one of us has the opportunity to fulfill our God-given potential and the opportunity to live out our God-given destiny.
I’m taking issue with poverty because my Mama and those for her generation were right when they said: “Being poor ain’t no disgrace, but it sure is a put back.”
Mama and other elder Grand Bahamians, like most Bahamians of her era no matter where they lived across this archipelago, were well-acquainted with poverty; but by the time of Majority Rule, they were also bursting with pride. Education to them, was a way up, and out of poverty. It had the power to transform lives. And that is why Nassau-born (but West End-claimed) poet Susan Wallace wrote:
Stress on education / All gattie go to school / ’Cause dey can’ ‘ford de new Bahamian / Ta be nobody fool.
And ‘das ‘de new Bahamian / He head he could hol’ up high / ’Cause vict-ry make it possible / Fa him to reach de’ sky.
Graduates of the University of The Bahamas, do you know how many of your mother’s, mother’s, mothers, and father’s, father’s, fathers walked some unimaginable distance, labored endlessly in some menial job, and endured countless indignities they didn’t deserve so that we could be here, in this place, celebrating you, today?
That, that is the power of perseverance!
It is the same perseverant power that a little more than 50 years ago pushed Grand Bahamian schoolchildren to walk to and from school — I believe we call it “Taxi 11.” Immediately you think: well that’s no big deal, Bahamian schoolchildren still do that today, right? Well, imagine this. There is just one school for all children in your district, maybe one your entire island. It is just one room, and no matter where you live, you must walk to get there. In the case of children living in Hunters, Lewis Yard, and Pinder’s Point, that meant walking along the bay to Hepburn Town, Eight Mile Rock each day. When tide was high, you had to cross a narrow, treacherous bridge just to get to the other side.
Now whether you lived in Bartlett Hill, Martin Town or even in Jones Town, that meant as much as a two-hour walk by the bay for you to attend the same Hepburn Town School. Oh, and don’t forget — you’d have to make the walk home in the opposite direction too.
They knew well the African proverb popularized by Spelman and Bennett College for Women President Emeritus Johnnetta B. Cole that says: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
And guess what that is — that is the power of perseverance.
Graduates of the Class of 2017, I want you to know that, that power lives inside of you. It is the power to make something out of virtually nothing. It is a determination to go to school, that is more than a half-century old…when hard times forced Bahamian schoolchildren out o school in as little as the first, third, or sixth grades…when the British colonial government only paid the schoolmaster half his wages and made Bahamian communities of poor spongers, domestic workers, fisherman, and subsistence farmers pay the remaining half — that is the power of perseverance.
Know that those schools were kept alive not just by the financial support of your Bahamian foremothers and forefathers, but also by the exceedingly high expectations of schoolmasters like Urban Gibbs at Eight Mile Rock, Walter P. Parker in Holmes Rock, Sister Mary Patricia at Lewis Yard, and Rawle Dean in East End.
Know that while the landmark signing of the 1955 Hawksbill Creek Agreement may have signaled the creation of the city of Freeport, this city, the nation’s second city, was built on the backs of ordinary Bahamians.
Bahamians like Nurse Amanda Adderley and Nurse Lorraine Richards, who at the height of their careers, almost single-handedly delivered every Bahamian baby born on the island of Grand Bahama.
Bahamians like the future Bishop Michael Eldon who was the priest-in-charge for every Anglican church and every Anglican parishioner on Grand Bahama not just from West to East End, but to Sweeting’s Cay.
Bahamians like the Reverend Wellington Pinder and Ralph Russell, the cousins who established the island’s first funeral home with the motto: “None too big, none too small.”
Bahamians like Seagrapge’s Fairlane Lightborne Smith and Holmes Rock’s Orrie Rolle who baked enough bread and tart to feed not 5,000, but the 50,000.
Bahamians like High Rock’s Arnold Pinder Sr. and Pelican Point’s Teston Laing whose big yellow bus sheperded countless East Enders back and forth between Freeport and their homes — and two generations later, they continue to do so up to this day.
Bahamians like John Rolle and my father Harold DeGregory Sr. who owned stores where Bahamians could “pay down” on a dependable appliance or a descent piece of furniture.
Bahamians like my uncle Pete DeGregory, a pilot who notoriously flew a DC3 — a plane that was as slow, as it was big — and while you might have had an empty crate for a seat, and have a rolling coconut for a seatmate, but Pete flew thousands of flights to get people affordably and safely where they needed to be.
And by the 1970s and 80s, Grand Bahama’s Magic City was the place anybody, who was anybody, wanted to be.
As Eric Minnis famously sung in his 1981 hit: “When you can’t find your friends in Nassau, dey in Freeport, or dey in jail.”
If you were hungry and had a couple hundred dollars to spend, you could enjoy the finest dinning in all the world at Xanadu’s Escoffier, El Casino’s Crown Room, Jar Tar’s Turtle Walk or Princess Towers’ Le Cotillion.
The Rib Room at King’s Inn wasn’t as pricey, but the service was still first class. And even if you traveled all across the world, rumor has it that you couldn’t find a better lobster bisque.
If you wanted a night out on the town, you could catch a show at any hotel in town. Because everywhere, I mean everywhere, featured a native show with top-notch Bahamian talent.
The Princess Towers featured Boss and the Conch Shells in the lobby at the pool and Jay Mitchell and the Mitchellites in the Sultan’s Tent. [Mitchell used to sing: “It’s a hard world we’re living in…”] The Country Club featured Sonny Johnson and the Sunglows. Holiday Inn offered the jazz of Apple Elliott’s Quartet in the lobby, with John Boy and the Mustangs at the pool. And downstairs? Downstairs featured Lester Adderley’s Average Age at club Panache. Freeport Inn’s Safari featured Swain and the Citations. And you could be the talk of the town at the Shalamar’s Top of the Town; or drive all the way to West End for the chance to party at Jack Tar’s Set and Be Damned Lounge.
The International Bazaar was not merely international in name. It featured world-class stores, representing 180 countries from every corner of the earth.
Among them were the restaurants Café Michel and Japanese Steakhouse, as well as a lingerie store named Play Girl, the first-ever retail space rented to a black Bahamian, a woman entrepreneur in the then-white business district of Freeport.
That woman was Eva Bailey Schaffner and she was the “Queen of the Bazaar.”
She first arrived in Freeport on a free promotional flight from Nassau in 1966 wearing an outfit replete with an eel briefcase and matching eel shoes — she’d want me to tell you that.
When she met with the Bazaar’s all-white, all-male Canadian management team to secure retail space, she was told that everything had been rented with the exception of the broom closet.
“I’ll take it,” she said. The room, they chided, only had a tiny door and did not have a single window. Schaffner rose to the challenge.
Not only would she make the door bigger and put in windows, she’d pay for it too.
Eva knew what the poet Maya Angelou said to be true: You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.
Eva had the power of perseverance.
And you do too. University of The Bahamas class of 2017, you’ve proved that by surviving every trial you have endured, and by virtue of every challenge you have overcome.
We know your generation has inherited a Freeport that some laughingly say has lost its magic.
Freeport’s detractors will tell you that the Bahama Princess and its Country Club are no more and that Xanadu is all but gone.
They’ll ask you what could you possibly know about Freeport Inn or the Shalamar which were all gone long before your birth.
“Look around,” they’ll say. Gone along with them are those pricey restaurants and the live entertainment that went hand-in-hand with their fine dining.
Don’t mind people. Dog don’t bark at park car; no, no way! I, am here, to tell you that you, that you are the magic in Magic City.
Only a magical people endure — no strike that, have endured — the devastation of not one, or two, not three or four, not five, six, or seven, but eight hurricanes since 1999.
Floyd’s storm surge flooded you — but you are still here.
Frances hovered over you for two days — and you did not crumble.
Just weeks later, Jeanne was on her way. All you could do was sit and pray and wait. You were so happy when she passed over — but then you sat powerless, as she doubled back.
Katrina was a breeze, but then came Wilma, with a storm surge that destroyed 200 homes and left 1,500 people homeless — yet, you built again.
And now, just eight months ago came Matthew, with its interior tornadoes that leveled entire communities, leaving few homes without the shelter of those blue tarps. And while they are still present, we have begun to trade-in the blue of those roof tarps for the blue of the University of The Bahamas.
For many, courage is a mere intellectual concept. But not for you Grand Bahama. Grand Bahama you are still here, we are still standing, and because of today’s graduates, we are still strong!
Grand Bahama was forced to bend, but Grand Bahamians did not break; and graduates, with you as testaments to the power of perseverance, we stand, at dawn of a new era, confident that you too, shall not be broken.
Graduates we stand at the dawn of this new era, needing you. We need you now more than ever to believe in the transformative power of your education. We need you to put to use you heads, your hands, and your hearts to build a stronger Grand Bahama and more united Bahamas. You may do that as a teacher or a preacher, as a painter, photographer, or as a poet, or you may do it as a chef, as a doctor or a nurse or lawyer. You may do it as a business owner, or as a college professor, or as the University of The Bahamas’ president. You may do it serving on the PTA, City Council, as a senator, member of parliament, or even as this nation’s prime minister. But, whatever it is that each of you, and all of us can do, we must to it, and we must do it together.
And as we do, I’d like us to keep in mind just three things:
The first, is that time and distance does break every tie. Bahamians living abroad all across this world are still your sisters and brothers. We still love you and we still love our Bahamaland. Root for us because we are rooting for you!
The second, is to be mindful, intentional, and deliberate in forming opinions about people who wish to make the Bahamas their home. Every brown-skinned migrant seeking to make a life for themselves and for their children here on our beautiful shores is not a foe. And likewise, every land-seeking, money-waving, big plan-having investor is not a friend.
And finally, Class of 2017, members of the University of The Bahamas family, Grand Bahamians, my fellow Bahamians, never forget that it is you and me, who are magic. We always were, and with the help of God, we always will be.
Watch the address online by clicking here.
