Melissa Bailey Photo
When it came time to bury a pillar of New Haven’s Jamaican community, Mama Lue got out a goat’s head, a machete, and a bottle of white rum — and kicked off a goodbye party that kept a homeland tradition alive.
Mama Lue, whose given name is Elsada Watt, commandeered two crock pots, a pressure cooker, an oven and several giant sauce pans Wednesday night for a special celebration on the eve of the funeral services for Garfield Reid.
Reid, who made headlines in December for calling the cops to report that someone had stolen his communal stash of ganja, was a much-loved member of New Haven’s tight-knit Jamaican community. A first-class mechanic, he became the first black man to own his own business in North Haven. He passed away on Monday of last week from a heart attack at the age of 80.
Garfield Reid in undated photo.
Reid’s party-loving spirit lived on Wednesday as friends and families gathered for the ninth night of a traditional Jamaican wake. Just as Jews sit shiva for seven days after a loved one dies, Jamaicans hold “nine nights” (or “ni-nite,” in Patois, or Jamaican Creole). They gather to honor the deceased for nine nights in a row leading up to the funeral. The final night typically features music, folk songs, stories, white rum, lots of food, and domino games.
Wednesday’s capstone to the nine nights was more like a party than a wake. It brought stories of a generous, life-loving immigrant who helped other Jamaicans find a way to the U.S., land jobs, fix their cars, and unwind with a smoke or two in pleasant company.
And it brought together a big family with African, Jewish, Scottish and Irish roots to share a tradition embodying the Jamaican motto: “out of many, one people.”
Constance Tapper, the second-youngest of nine children in the family, fired up her stove around 5 o’clock at her home at the corner of Ellsworth and Edgewood. The house was quiet save for the sound of Soul Train playing on a small TV. A pot of “red peas,” or kidney beans, simmered in the pressure cooker.
She said she had hoped to start cooking in the morning, but she got swept up with funeral arrangements. And her top chef, Mama Lue, was still at work at Home Depot.
Mama Lue, a neighbor who was born and raised in Clarendon, Jamaica, arrived around 5:30. She got right to work. She commanded the kitchen with authority — no texting while cooking! — and quick laughter. She outlined an ambitious menu for the next six hours: curried goat, curried chicken, curried pork, oxtail, turkey, red peas and rice, white rice, and her specialty: goat’s head soup.
Widow Ovril Reid, her granddaughter Jae’ana, and a young friend.
The smell of browning meat began to drift into the living room, where Constance’s mom, Ovril Reid, sat down on a couch. The widow broke into a grin several times as she recounted her six decades with her husband.
Garfield Reid was born on March 10, 1932 in St. Catherine, Jamaica. He and Ovril met in Jamaica when she was 5 and he was 10. Garfield worked as a mechanic on tractors and bulldozers.
The couple didn’t start out together; both had kids of their own. They fell in love and became one family.
The result was an unusual mix of cultures. Ovril’s mom was born to a Jewish father and a Scottish mother. Garfield’s mom hailed from England.
Ovril Reid was first to arrive to New Haven, landing a job as a garment worker and then for Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she would work for four decades. Garfield followed later, finding work as a mechanic for Chrysler-Plymouth, then opening his own Arco service station in North Haven in the 1970s.
Garfield Reid holds a younger Jae’ana.
She remembered her husband as “a first-class mechanic, a troubleshooter” who would fix his friends’ cars outside their home in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. “Anyone with car trouble came to him.”
“He liked to work in the mechanic field, he liked to go to the beach — and him liked to party,” she said.
Every year, she would throw him a big birthday bash.
“I miss him,” she said, looking down and shedding a tear. For 60 years, they were never apart for more than a couple of months.
Lately, Garfield Reid had been growing a long beard, inspired by a recent trip to Jamaica. (He’s pictured in a December interview with the Independent.) Ovril Reid said she never liked his beard that long. Right after he passed away, “I cut it off,” she admitted with a smile.
Back in the kitchen, more extensive cutting was getting under way.
“You’re lucky my dad is a butcher,” Mama Lue’s sous-chef, who gave his name as Kes, said as he set to work slicing up 10 pounds of chicken.
Mama Lue moved forward to the next dish.
“Where’s my goat head?” she asked. Goat’s head soup, or mannish water, is her specialty, she explained.
She was dismayed when she opened a plastic bag containing the first goat head.
“They didn’t cut it?”
She began to try to cut out the eyes and slice up the skull.
“Could somebody give me a good knife, please?”
Noting a dearth of sharp knives, Mama Lue washed her hands, got her coat, and left instructions for no one to touch the goat head.
“I’m going to get my machete!”
On second thought, she wondered if she might get in trouble for carrying an enormous knife down the street.
“I walk with my machete all the time, just not long-distance,” offered Ennever Jean-Reid, another of Garfield Reid’s daughters. Mama Lue lives just a few houses away. She decided to risk it.
Ennever, who’s taken an interest in genealogy, said her family has a history rich enough to fill several books. The singer Dennis Brown is a cousin. Her own siblings come from three mothers and two dads, each from their own lineage, producing a rainbow of progeny.
Ennever picked up a keepsake from the funeral of her great-aunt Dorothy (pictured). She looks Caucasian, Ennever remarked.
Do you know the Jamaican motto “out of many, one people”? Ennever asked. “That’s us.”
Ennever said her dad had a practice of helping Jamaicans immigrate to the U.S. That includes the Mullings family, which now runs a low-profile Jamaican social club on George Street.
She said after her dad died, she started to realize just how many lives he had touched. Even the postman asked when her dad’s funeral would be.
In a December interview, Reid described doing people favors again and again, putting his own interests last. He said he broke the law to help Jamaicans come to the U.S. He told of hiring a recent Jamaican immigrant for a construction job, and meeting frustration when the man just wouldn’t do the work, despite the extra chances he gave him. Every time he went to pick up a pack of Marlboros, Reid said, he would always buy Newport menthol cigarettes, even though he never smoked them. Someone might want one, he explained.
He described himself as generous to a fault: He said would invite many guests into his Vernon Street home to smoke his weed, because he enjoyed the company. One of those guests, he suspected, broke into his house and stole $2,800 of cash and 1 or 2 ounces of marijuana.
“He would give his last” for anyone else, his son, Dirk, said Wednesday.
When the ice cream truck rolled through the Hill, Reid would buy ice cream for the neighborhood kids who couldn’t afford it, Dirk said.
Every year, Ovril would throw her husband a big birthday party, complete with traditional curries. The family brought in Mama Lue Wednesday to make sure those dishes were carried out in the proper Jamaican way.
Mama Lue came back with her machete double-concealed in a sheath and a shopping bag.
Sous-chef Kes set to work hacking at the goat head. He used a hammer to hit the machete. Because there was no cutting board, he had to slam the machete onto a metal pan, letting out tremendous bangs that competed with the Kanye tunes now blaring from stereos upstairs.
Meanwhile, Mama Lue unscrewed the pressure cooker and poured the peas into the rice along with some coconut milk.
Another of Garfield’s sons, Kironde, stopped by and asked if he could help. He began to recount a story about his dad, then trailed off.
“I miss my father,” he said, breaking into tears. He stepped out of the kitchen.
When he came back, Mama Lue, who’s 53, told him how she discovered her own father’s death: She had found his body in the backyard after he stepped out to do a morning chore.
After all the pain, she told Kironde, “I came back stronger.”
“Come now, let me give you something to do,” Mama Lue said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
She set to work coordinating the chopping of Jamaican root vegetables — coco, breadfruit and yam — for the mannish water.
It was 7:30. People were getting hungry. Mama Lue put some oil, garlic and thyme into a large pot. Kes added the chicken he chopped up, which had been seasoned with curry.
Mama Lue threw the oxtail into the pressure cooker. There were now two pans of meat in the oven, two slow-cookers in use, and two pots bubbling on the stove.
“I’m having Thanksgiving with you guys this year!” remarked one of Constance’s co-workers who stopped by.
Constance took a break from cutting carrots to say goodbye to another co-worker. Like her mom and most of her eight siblings, she works in a helping profession. Constance works at the Advanced Nursing and Rehabilitation Center of New Haven, LLC, which is better known as the former Jewish Home for the Aged.
At 8:35, Mama Lue pronounced the first dish of food, the curried goat, done. It was good timing — a crew of young men had just returned from the store with cases of Guinness and Heineken.
The neighborhood alderwoman, Evette Hamilton, walked in, too. A native of Jamaica, she moved to the U.S. in 1975. She said she knew Garfield Reid since she was in high school.
“Mr. Reid was very well respected in this community,” Hamilton said. “Everybody knows him and he will be missed. He leaves a legacy of love and care and family.”
Hamilton stopped by to honor Reid and help keep a tradition alive.
“When we say ‘nine night,’ a lot of folks don’t understand what we mean, but it’s part of the culture,” she said as she opened a Guinness with a house key — “in honor of Mr. Reid.”
“The tradition must continue,” she said.
By 9 o’clock, a crowd had formed, with five siblings and their offspring now present, and more family on the way from London.
In the kitchen, Kironde poured out cups of “devil’s soup,” a cocktail of white rum and milk. They raised glasses for a toast.
Dinner’s ready!
Constance (pictured) doled out portions of curried chicken and rice.
Ovril Reid, who’s 75, had said she would go to bed early before Thursday’s funeral. Instead, she remained there for five hours, past 10:30 p.m., as the crowd shared memories of her husband over beers and plates of food. The party was just getting started. The hours ahead promised games of dominoes, Jamaican folk songs, and more Guinness.
“In most cultures, they cry and mourn,” said Hamilton. “For us, it’s more like a party.”
By honoring a person over nine nights, “you turn them out,” Ovril Reid said.
“You set them free.”