Sitting on a bed in Vero Beach. In a Day’s Inn. On a Wednesday evening in January 1987.

A respectable distance away from each other while she showed me photographs from her wallet.

It was the first week of the Florida Department of Corrections Probation Officer Academy, Class #4. Twenty-five of us straggled in on Sunday from Tallahassee, from Gainesville, from Fort Myers and Sarasota, from Daytona and Homestead and Miami and Orlando. Some of us had been police officers, insurance adjusters, Salvation Army misdemeanor probation officers. There was a car salesman, a priest and an elementary school teacher.

I had been a correctional officer at Florida Correctional Institution and Glades Correctional. FCI (Lowell) was one of two female institutions. Broward was the other. Lowell was the oldest and curiously, I’d been there as a visitor when I was four years old. My mother’s sister, Diana, had stolen a car and sent to the Forest Hills cottages at Lowell as a wayward juvenile. To be fair, she never really had a chance. The reason she stole the car was to escape after finding out she was pregnant. Because she was raped by her father. All the kids were. They never talked about it.

Grandma was a pudgy unpleasant soul with the face of a perpetually premenstrual gorgon. Her cooking ranged from gluey dumplings stuffed with wisps of shredded cabbage or lawn cuttings to uncertain poultry baked to the consistency of woven dental floss. They lived in a tiny metal single wide trailer of 1960’s vintage with an attached room made of aluminum siding, jalousie windows and clear plastic sliding panels. The fishbowl room was where everyone congregated on muggy Sunday afternoons. Contents: Gray Naugahyde Barcalounger, three-person sofa covered in thick yellowing plastic, four wrought iron stands with 75-gallon aquariums in a line against the outer wall of the trailer. A television on a stand. A mynah bird named Mike in a domed metal cage. Mike was also the name of Grandpa’s son/grandson.

There was a bedroom that was always dark on one end of the trailer where Grandpa and Grandma slept. A banquette-style dining area and kitchen were in the front of the trailer. There was a second bedroom that nearly fit a twin bed. It was forced between the kitchen and the bathroom and like Grandma, had neither light nor life.

One weekend my sister had a sleepover there with Diana. When we picked her up the next morning, she told my parents that she woke up and her underpants were gone. Debbie never stayed overnight again.

They say that incest passes down through generations. I can’t imagine where Carlton Scott picked his up: his family tree was filled with incredibly talented artists like Great Aunt Gloria Escoffery of Brown’s Town, Jamaica.

I remember the thrill of talking about Gloria to the desk clerk at the Hilton Garden Inn across from the Sarasota Airport. There was a world-splitting smile as Denis told me that he had gone to the school where Gloria taught. He even knew the orphan boy she had adopted.

Gloria studied in London with Lucien Freud and her last years were spent in a house in the mountains of Jamaica with her bedridden mother and a small backyard planting of ganja. Gloria left most of her paintings and her estate to the University of the West Indies. She left nothing to her adopted son because at the age of 18 she set him free, as a man and in charge of his future. This may be an evil story passed on by those who resented her fame and her independence but Denis chuckled and said that it certainly sounded like something she would do.

Perhaps talent skips a generation or so. I know something that definitely skips several generations. Hell-raising. Aunt Gloria Escoffery and my felonious maternal grandfather forwarded the genes and the blessings of character that were first documented in the legal fights and political fissures booted and spurred by John Escoffery.

The name doesn’t ring any bells? Not even when attached to Jamaica? What about Haiti? Alright, I won’t make you work for it.

Great Great Great Great Uncle John, Luis Celeste Lecesne and John Gonville were free men from mixed-race families who were arrested and arrested and arrested again in Jamaica for their commercial trade with Haiti and for promoting social equality for negroes and mixed-race Jamaicans.

By 1820 Lecesne and Uncle John had built up their fathers’ businesses and were influential in the colored and white communities. Both owned small numbers of slaves, their families intermarried and each year they sponsored the social event of the season: a spectacular ball filled with the wealthy and beautiful on the island. They also founded a beneficial organization to help poor Catholic people of color.

But in 1823 the three men and their popularity were beginning to alarm certain members of the Jamaican administration and West Indian bureaucrats. They were arrested for the first time and deported to Haiti as dangerous aliens. It took five years of constant legal wrangling in Jamaica and Westminster and massive amounts of fundraising to support the fight and their families but at the end of it, the Supreme Court shocked the civil servants and status quo by siding with the deportees. They were declared to be loyal subjects and not dangerous aliens and were given compensation for the illegal forced removal and hardship. Perhaps the first example of reparations.

Perhaps this is why it stings when generations later, John Escoffery’s nephew several times over is verbally whipped during three years of Georgetown University graduate classes and told that he doesn’t deserve an internship or a job because as a noticeably white man he’s had everything given to him.

$96,750 in student loans is not a gift.

One of the guest speakers, an NPR department head from Bangladesh by way of Atlanta earned a roar of delight from the class when he announced that white men had fucked everything up and it was time for everyone else to fix things.

“As long as I’m in charge, we’ll never hire another white male.”

“And by the way, here’s a photo of my Caucasian wife on my phone so you can’t say I’m a racist.”

Your tax dollars at work.