A Brooklynite Returns to Jamaica to Solve a Long-Hidden Family Mystery

Across her three books, Donna Hemans’ characters range from Jamaica to America and back again, often in the same story; the men and women who populate her novels, taking children with them or leaving them behind, are immigrants simply trying to make a better life. But there’s always a cost, and many make mistakes along the way.

In River Woman, her first novel, a mother leaves her child behind when she moves to New York; when she returns to Jamaica years later, she doesn’t know whether to trust her own daughter, accused of drowning her own child by jealous villagers. In Hemans’ next book, Tea by the Sea, a father steals away with his infant on some notion that he’s giving the young mother a second chance, instead of leaving her desperate and longing even fifteen years later. 

In The House of Plain Truth, Hemans goes back into family history even further. Pearline, its protagonist, leaves New York to retire to Jamaica, both to care for her ailing father and, finally, to return home. Instead, she discovers she needs to go as far back as Cuba, where long-lost siblings may still be living, to unearth family secrets she hadn’t known existed in the first place.

In this way, Hemans, in her third novel, deepens her investigations into the roots of the Jamaican immigrant story—or actually, given the similarities in the immigrant experience among any group not already wealthy, the immigrant story.

Pearline’s father, Rupert, was desperate to make a better life for himself and his family when he moved them to Cuba in 1917. Instead, he returns to Jamaica penniless, and is forced to leave half their children behind. 

The book also clarifies a theme that lies beneath all her stories. The House of Plain Truth demonstrates most boldly how blatant capitalism is to blame for the troubles her characters grapple with and sometimes—too often—aren’t able to overcome. 

I talked to Hemans about how the personal and political intertwines in fiction in our Zoom interview about this third novel, The House of Plain Truth.

Carole Burns: A key part of this novel comes from your own family history: two of your grandparents moved to Cuba at around the same time Pearline’s father, Rupert, does the same. What made you want to write this novel, and retell your grandparents’ story in some way? 

Donna Hemans: On my father’s side of the family, my grandparents both went to Cuba in 1919 to work. They didn’t know each other at that point, but they met and got married there and had several of their children in Cuba before coming back to Jamaica in 1931. As a child, I just knew that they had gone to Cuba. I didn’t know any of the details, any of the history, what their experiences were like. My grandmother died when I was 16 and my grandfather when I was about 19 or 20—at an age when I wasn’t ready to ask the kinds of questions that I would ask now as an adult, and as a writer. And so I wanted to try to understand their experiences and their story. 

CB: One of the tragedies in this novel is that the main character Pearline’s parents are forced to leave half their children behind in Cuba because they don’t have the money for everyone to return. Did something like that happen to your family? 

DH: No, but there’s a second part of the story: I had also heard that one of my grandmother’s brothers went to Cuba, and never came back to Jamaica. And so I was thinking about what that felt like, just completely losing touch with a family member and especially a sibling without knowing whether they were alive or dead or what their circumstances were. So I wanted to put those two things together and try to build a story around those two ideas.

CB: And then you intensified the story by changing the circumstances from a brother left behind, to three children. 

DG: And I needed to figure out why my character wanted to go back to find her siblings. That really was the driving force of the story.

CB: This is your third novel. Why do you suppose you are telling this story now? 

DH: Well, I started this story in 2006 or 2007. Throughout the years, I was just trying to find the right way to tell the story. As I started researching and looking at what the experience of Jamaican migrants in Cuba was like, I was really surprised, I had not learned any of that in school. I began to see that people were shipped back, some of them to countries they didn’t originate from. People who were invited in to come and work were then made to feel they were unwanted and they were sent back home. And then the story became clearer. One, why my grandparents left. And also, what could possibly have happened to my grandmother’s brother. He could have gotten caught up in so many things. It’s possible he was killed early on. I don’t know. 

CB: It’s a vastly complicated history, of which I was also unaware – some 100,000 Jamaicans migrated to Cuba in the decade starting 1914, and they’re really at the mercy of capitalistic forces. It makes your story completely relevant to today. 

DH: Exactly. The funny thing about it is that I had set this book aside and come back to it so many times, but when I picked it up again it was around 2016, right after the election.

CB: After Trump won.

DH: Yes. And this anti-immigrant rhetoric was coming up. What was very clear to me was that every argument being made around 2016 about immigrants and the jobs that they were stealing, certain language being used about the immigrants and the countries that they come from—it was exactly the same as I was seeing in the research from 100 years before. There was nothing any different, nothing original about the arguments that you’re hearing today. It really brings home the point that there are certain groups of people who are always, always trying to find a home in the world. They are moving from one place to another to try to find that place where they belong. And so that’s what I really wanted to hone in on in this story. 

CB: That comes across powerfully. And it feels to me that fiction often can tell that story in a much more human way than nonfiction does. 

DH: Absolutely. I think the best books are the books that talk about politics or social issues without talking about them—the ones that don’t hit you over the head with it, that undermine the story. You have to do it through the characters. 

CB: At the same time, though, I thought that you did editorialize in certain sections of the story — but quite effectively. So, for example, you have Rupert, Pearline’s father, remembering his younger self leaving for Cuba in 1917: “The young man he describes doesn’t understand American economic imperialism, the vast ways in which the United States expands its territories, or how American companies come to dominate the sugar cane estates to the northern coast of Oriente Province. But he knows the companies are advertising for labor, black men from Jamaica and Haiti and Barbados and the small Antillean islands who can cut cane. What Rupert knows is simple. There is work and money.” It’s masterful. 

DH: There are things that I knew that Rupert would not have known and even Pearline herself would not have known. And I needed to find a way to say that kind of stuff and to hint at it without it coming directly from them. Though I don’t think of it as editorializing. 

CB: It’s providing context. 

DH: Right. 

CB: Can I ask you about the title? It comes from the name of the Jamaican house that Pauline is hoping to save in Spanish, La Casa de la Pura Verdad. Obviously, she’s trying to uncover the pure truth. But I kept kind of wondering, is there such a thing as plain truth? 

DH: I hope so. 

CB: Yet the truth is complicated. So what did you mean by “plain truth”? 

DH: The unvarnished truth. In probably all of my books so far is this question of, What is truth? There are multiple perspectives to any story, but at the heart of each, there is some kernel of truth. And there is a certain truth at the heart of this story that the children don’t know, that Pearline doesn’t know, and that Rupert just absolutely doesn’t or didn’t want anybody to know. The children grew up with this idea that when they came back to Jamaica, their parents bought this land and built this house. 

CB: The House of Plain Truth.

DH: Yes. Whereas there is a completely different side to the story. What Pearline has to do is to uncover what is the actual truth of her family’s history in Jamaica. And then, what do you preserve of your history and your heritage? Do you preserve what is the true story? Are you preserving the story that makes you as a family look better or sound better? Do you know? What are the stories that we tell ourselves? And do we always tell the truth, the true story? Or do we tell the stories that will make us look good to our friends and our family? So that’s a part of what I wanted to do here, was get at what do we tell and what do we show. What do we keep to ourselves? And are we really, indeed, telling the truth? 

CB: I suppose an important reason Rupert hid the “plain truth” of that family story for so long had to do with his pride. His pride is a really interesting element to the novel. Almost a fatal flaw in a way. 

DH: Somewhere in the book, either Pauline or one of her siblings says he was a hard man. And I think that that kind of sums up exactly what he was. He was trying to do his best for his family, but there is doing your best, and then there is taking a stance that doesn’t help everybody else and refusing to budge from that. He’s stubborn. Yet at the very end, he makes the decision to reach out to his children left in Cuba—to find them. That suggests that there was some regret there all along. 

CB: Though Rupert dies in the first chapter… 

DH: Yeah, I would like to write a book where nobody dies. I haven’t quite gotten there yet. 

CB: Yes!  And yet the book is infused with him. Rupert haunts the book—both literally, as a guppie, but also through his history. It’s a very sneaky third person. It’s limited to Pearline’s point of view, but you have her imagine Rupert’s memories.  We get a lot more of his story than she could technically know. 

DH: That was a tricky part. In the initial draft the story was told partly from his perspective after he was dead. Whereas in this version in just Pearline’s point of view, I still wanted to tell a lot of that back story, Pearline was three years old when they left Cuba. This felt like the easiest way to do it, where it was both in and through this haunting where her father is just simply not going to rest until she does what he wants her to do. To her, it’s like she is reliving his experience because her father is so present in her life. And what she knows she has to do is also present in her mind. 

CB: Did you look to any particular authors or books as inspiration for that? 

DH: Beloved is the closest. That’s one of the things that Toni Morrison did, where the ghost of a child is present throughout the entire book. 

CB: That fabulous first line: “124 was spiteful.”

DH: You’re reading Beloved and it’s like this child is living with this family and in this family. You don’t make any distinction between the fact that she is a ghost and the real people.

CB: Can you talk about other influences? 

DH: The biggest influence on my career in general is Zora Neale Hurston. As an undergrad, I took an independent study class and a professor had me read Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the things that I pulled from that book was the way in which she described community and the way she used dialect. Growing up in Jamaica, we were always encouraged not to talk in dialect. You grew up with the sense that, if you used dialect, you were not speaking proper English—it’s tied up with class and education. But here I was reading this book where the dialect just sounded so familiar to me—I felt like I was home. It was a different country, a different place, but it just felt like home. I loved what she had done in that book, the way she had built the community, explained a community. And I hadn’t really been thinking about being a fiction writer, but then, that’s what I wanted to do. 

CB: The dialect in your book is terrific. It gives us the characters, it gives us the flavor of the place. And the language itself — the phrases unfamiliar to my ear, but how specifically and imaginatively they capture the world. 

DH: One of the things that I keep trying to do when I refer to places in Jamaica is to build that sense of community in the way Hurston does. The places I write about are either the community I grew up in, or communities around that community. In this book, Mount Pleasant, where the House of Plain Truth is located, is maybe four or five miles away from where I grew up. So I keep coming back to that home, to that sense of this community and place that that I knew. 

CB: This is your third novel set at least partly in Jamaica. Do you think you’ll ever write a book that isn’t somehow about Jamaica, even if it’s not set there? 

DH:  I don’t know. I’ve thought about that. Some years ago I read that it’s easier to write about a place after you have left it. 

CB: A la James Joyce. 

DH: I think if I write a story that is set primarily outside of Jamaica, then it probably means that I have left that place. I have tried and every book comes back to Jamaica. 

CB: I live in the U.K., but I can’t imagine not setting a novel in America. 

DH: Also, so many of the novels from a certain period of time about the Caribbean were about the Caribbean immigrant in another country. One of the things I want to do is write about either the people who were left behind, or the people who returned home. And so with this particular book, I have written about the aspect of returning home. And my first book really was about the child who was left behind. I want to tell a different story, not just talk about immigration from the perspective of the new immigrant in the new country. Who are the people who are left behind? What happens when you return to a country? Can you really go back home? 

CB: I also find Rupert and his family are haunted by what you describe as a “legacy of failure.” The family, Pearline especially, is trying to overcome that. And yet I feel frustrated for them, too — it wasn’t Rupert’s fault that he failed, but the fault of the capitalistic system.

DH: I think it’s just a part of the immigrant story. When you go off somewhere to a new country or a new place, you are you’re expected to do well and you’re expected to come back and lift up the next generation. And so Rupert was looking at the men who went to Panama and came back to Jamaica with gold and silk shirts. And he came back to Jamaica from Cuba with not even enough money to book their passage back home and to take all the children. So it wasn’t his fault at all. But it really marked him and he carried with him throughout his entire life this sense of failure. How do they see you back home? Have you achieved something? Have you taken this opportunity and done something with it or have you come to America and failed? I think even today for many immigrants, that’s what it really is about.