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In Brooklyn Woman's Path, a Story of Caribbean Striving
June 28, 2003
By JANNY SCOTT
It all began in the Glamor Girl lingerie factory back in
Trinidad, where friendships formed amid the ceaseless
procession of nighties and negligees. A young checker,
Beulah Reid, began dreaming of a house of her own. And a
web of personal connections wove itself around her.
It was a friend from the factory who invited Mrs. Reid to
the United States a decade later. Another helped her find a
furnished room in Brooklyn for $18 a week. Another helped
her move up from housekeeping jobs into a clerk's job at
Bankers Trust, where she then worked for 18 years.
Meanwhile, she raised three children; earned a general
equivalency diploma; became a nurse's aide and worked as
one on weekends; studied real estate; and, when her Bankers
Trust job ended in 1991, became a licensed day care
provider.
Along the way, she bought her long-dreamed-of house.
"I
can't tell you when I last didn't work seven days a week,"
said Mrs. Reid, a statuesque 62-year-old woman, during a
recent conversation in the immaculate dining room of her
East Flatbush home. The statement is neither boastful nor
self-pitying, but simply a matter of fact.
Beulah Reid's story is in many ways the story of New York
City's Caribbean community, a group that has grown over the
last decade to become one-fourth of the city's black
population. Disproportionately female, West Indian New
Yorkers have thrived in the job and housing markets, even
while working in relatively low-paying jobs.
Women make up 57 percent of the city's Caribbean
population, an analysis of new data from the 2000 census
shows. There is a much higher rate of female labor force
participation among West Indians than in the city at large,
and they are more likely to be working full time.
Though Caribbean New Yorkers have lower median earnings
than African immigrants and African-Americans, they are
less likely to be living in poverty, the data show. They
are more likely to live in owner-occupied housing and in
single-family homes. And the average value of the homes is
relatively high.
The percentage of households headed by women is higher for
West Indians than for Africans and is not far below that
for African-Americans, but in those West Indian households
there are more people working. Among those groups, West
Indians have the highest percentage of families headed by
women with two and three workers, and the lowest percentage
with none.
Many New Yorkers, especially those who have spent time in a
hospital or contemplated hiring a domestic worker, have
probably sensed what the data illuminate in detail: In the
successes of the city's West Indian population and in the
economic vitality of neighborhoods like Mrs. Reid's, women
play a pivotal role.
"That epitomizes the Caribbean community," said Basil
Wilson, the Jamaican-born son of a linotypist and a
secretary, who is provost of John Jay College of Criminal
Justice. He called Mrs. Reid a pioneer, saying, "She came
before her husband, she moved up, then found her niche.
"It gives us an insight into our society. It tells us about
how a particular gender found ways to navigate the
turbulent waters of New York City. Often people know these
stories on a one-to-one basis or anecdotally, but they
don't understand it in toto."
The society in which Mrs. Reid grew up was one in which
women worked. Her grandmother, who raised her, was a cook
who worked into her 80's. "Nothing comes easy, Patsy," she
would tell her granddaughter, using a pet name. "You've got
to work to get whatever you want."
What Mrs. Reid wanted, like many West Indians, was to own a
home. The original vision was simple: something
free-standing with a yard. In her late teens, working at
the factory, she married and started a family. She set
about, as she recently put it, "achieving a home."
At first, she and her husband could not find the right
spot. Then the price was too high. So when her friend from
Glamor Girl invited her to the United States in 1971, Mrs.
Reid left her two school-age children in Trinidad with her
husband and his mother. They would join her later.
"I had to come and establish myself here and get
permanent," she said. "I wouldn't want to bring them in and
they weren't permanent. Because if you're not permanent, it
would be hard for schooling. In those days, I think they
were checking on people and sending them back. I didn't
want to go underground."
Caribbean immigration to the United States has been heavily
female at least since the mid-1960's. That is not the case
with all immigrant groups. While the census data show that
61 percent of all foreign-born Filipinos in New York City
are women, 61 percent of foreign-born Mexicans in the city
are men.
The predominance of women in Caribbean immigration can be
traced in part to the pull of professions like nursing and
domestic service, and to the networks of women who fill
that niche. Some sociologists say that West Indian women
also enjoy the change in roles and the independence that
they experience with migration.
West Indian men are "fairly patriarchal, quite frankly,"
said Milton Vickerman, a sociologist at the University of
Virginia who specializes in race and immigration. "So you
can see how that would lead to problems. Why would a woman,
having been independent for a few years, want to go back to
that?"
When Mrs. Reid arrived here, she moved in with a
great-uncle in Brooklyn. Then, wanting greater freedom, she
moved to a furnished room with a shared bathroom and
kitchen. Through a friend, she found a job as a live-in
housekeeper in Saddle River, N.J., working for a family
that had agreed to sponsor her for permanent residency.
The pay was $60 a week, $18 of which she spent for the
furnished room in Brooklyn she returned to on weekends. Her
immigration lawyer took another chunk. Most of the
remainder went back to Trinidad for her children, minus the
cost of some winter clothing and necessities.
After two years, she moved on, in search of better money.
She would report weekdays at 8 to a domestic employment
agency in Harlem and wait to be sent out on jobs. The pay
was $12 a half day, $25 a full day.
Next came Bankers Trust, where she started at $98 a week
and worked up to $600. Her husband and teenage son joined
her from Trinidad, then her daughter, who was younger. She
and her husband separated and he later died. With her
daughter and a third child, she moved to a two-bedroom
apartment in Crown Heights.
"I wouldn't say it was hard," Mrs. Reid said. "Money was
small, but the rent was cheap. And I knew it was a
sacrifice I was making for one day to have my family with
me and life would be better. So I went along with it."
This spring, the United States Census Bureau released data
on income, occupation, education and other details about
the population. For the first time, the bureau created
ancestry groups for each race and tabulated the data
according to those groups.
"This is the first time the Census Bureau has compiled and
reported data themselves on these groups," said Andrew A.
Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College who analyzed the
data for The Times. "It gives us the first look at the
differential situation among the ancestry groups of
African-Americans."
The data show that 63.8 percent of West Indian women age 16
and over in New York City were in the workforce at the time
the census was taken. The figure for New York City women in
general was 51.9 percent; the figures for Africans and
African-Americans were 59.6 percent and 51.6 percent
respectively.
The median earnings of West Indian women working full time
were $29,791 - less than the median for African-Americans
and African immigrants. But West Indian households were
more likely than the two other groups to have not just two,
but three people working.
Apparently at least in part for that reason, the median
household income for West Indians was $38,635 - higher than
the $27,358 median for African-Americans and the $36,111
median for Africans - and a smaller percentage of West
Indians were living below the poverty line.
Professor Beveridge's analysis showed that nearly 34
percent of West Indian homes were owner-occupied, compared
with 24.6 percent of black households in general. More than
40 percent of West Indians were living in single-family or
two-unit housing, compared with less than 30 percent of all
New Yorkers.
"For West Indians, owning a house is sort of like the
epitome of having made it," Professor Vickerman said. As
Dr. Wilson put it, "The notion of living in a huge
apartment building is quite alien to the Caribbean
community. So what one really seeks is to acquire one's
castle."
Mrs. Reid's castle, as she imagined it, would be a
single-family house in a racially mixed neighborhood. She
decided against looking in Queens because she did not have
a car. She wanted her house to be detached, with three
bedrooms, "a beautiful living room, a nice kitchen" and a
formal dining room.
"I just like beautiful and luxurious things," she
explained. "That's just me."
At first, the prices were right but interest rates were too
high. Then the interest rates dropped but prices went up.
Her real estate broker (who Mrs. Reid discovered had sold
her husband their first television set back in Trinidad)
began to ask, "Beulah, how much longer are you going to
look?"
So in 1987 Mrs. Reid bought her house, on a leafy street in
East Flatbush. It was a two-family house, but her daughter
and her family could live downstairs and help with the
mortgage. The house was not detached, but it was on a
corner, and though the dining room was not formal it was
close enough.
Mrs. Reid used her annual profit-sharing money from her
banking job, which she had kept in a savings account, for
the $35,000 down payment. One of her children helped out by
giving her $7,000 that had been saved to buy a first car.
These days, Mrs. Reid runs a child care center in her home
from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and works as a home health aide on
weekends. She is a grandmother of four, on the board of her
local civic association, a past president of the Clinton
Hill Lions Club, and an assistant secretary of her church.
And her Glamor Girl friends? How many is she still in
touch with?
"Barbara, Sheila, Janet, Daphne," Mrs. Reid murmured to
herself, counting first on one hand, then the other.
"Another Daphne, Monica, Olive. Who else did I forget?
Wallace, Lynette, Audrey. . . ."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/nyregion/28CARI.html?ex=1057814877&ei=1&en=a8f94fd57f4a6383
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