On September 9, 1931, a young woman named Daisy Nation gave birth to twin girls. She and her husband, Donald, were schoolteachers in a tiny village called Harewood, in the central Jamaican parish of Saint Catherine's. They named their daughters Faith and Joyce. When Donald was told that he had fathered twins, he sank down on his knees and surrendered responsibility for their lives over to God.

The Nations lived in a small cottage on the grounds of Harewood's Anglican church. The schoolhouse was next door, a long, single-room barn of a building raised on concrete stilts. On some days, there might be as many as three hundred children in the room, and on others, less than two dozen. The children would read out loud or recite their times tables. Writing was done on slates. Whenever possible, the classes would move outside, under the mango trees. If the children were out of control, Donald Nation would walk from one end of the room to the other, waving a strap from left to right as the children scrambled back to their places.

He was an imposing man, quiet and dignified, and a great lover of books. In his small library were works of poetry and philosophy and novels by such writers as Somerset Maugham. Every day he would read the newspaper closely, following the course of the events around the world. In the evening, his best friend, Archdeacon Hay, the Anglican pastor who lived on the other side of the hill, would come over and sit on Donald's veranda, and together they would expound on the problems of Jamaica. Donald's wife, Daisy, was from the parish of Saint Elizabeth. Her maiden name was Ford, and her father had owned a small grocery store. She was one of three sisters, and she was renowned for her beauty.

At the age of eleven, the twins won scholarships to a boarding school called Saint Hilda's near the north coast. It was an old Anglican private school, established for the daughters of English clergy, property owners, and overseers. From Saint Hilda's they applied and were accepted to University College, in London. Not long afterward, Joyce went to a twenty-first-birthday party for a young English mathematician named Graham. He stood up to recite a poem and forgot his lines, and Joyce became embarrassed for him-even though it made no sense for her to feel embarrassed, because she did not know him at all. Joyce and Graham fell in love and got married. They moved to Canada. Graham was a math professor. Joyce became a successful writer and a family therapist. They had three sons and built a beautiful house on a hill, off in the countryside. Graham's last name is Gladwell. He is my father, and Joyce Gladwell is my mother.

2.

That is the story of my mother's path to success-and it isn't true. It's not a lie in the sense that the facts were made up. But it is false in the way that telling the story of Bill Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.

In 1935, for example, when my mother and her sister were four, a historian named William M. MacMillan visited Jamaica. He was a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. MacMillan was a man before his time: he was deeply concerned with the social problems of South Africa's black population, and he came to the Caribbean to make the same argument he had made back home in South Africa.

Chief among MacMillan's concerns was Jamaica's educational system. Formal schooling-if you could call what happened in the wooden barn next door to my grandparents' house "formal schooling"-went only to fourteen years of age. Jamaica had no public high schools or universities. Those with academic inclinations took extra classes with the head teacher in their teenage years and with luck made it into teachers' college. Those with broader ambitions had to somehow find their way into a private school, and from there to a university in the United States or England.

But scholarships were few and far between, and the cost of private schooling was prohibitive for all but a privileged few. The "bridge from the primary schools" to high school, MacMillan later wrote, in a blistering critique of England's treatment of its colonies entitled Warning from the West Indies, "is narrow and insecure." The school system did nothing for the "humblest" classes. He went on: "If anything these schools are a factor deepening and sharpening social distinctions." If the government did not give its people opportunities, he warned, there would be trouble.

A year after MacMillan published his book, a wave of riots and unrest swept the Caribbean. Fourteen people were killed and fifty-nine injured in Trinidad. Fourteen were killed and forty-seven injured in Barbados. In Jamaica, a series of violent strikes shut down the country, and a state of emergency was declared. Panicked, the British government took MacMillan's prescriptions to heart and, among other reforms, proposed a series of "all-island" scholarships for academically minded students to go to private high schools. The scholarships began in 1941. My mother and her twin sister sat for the exam the following year. That is how they got a high school education; had they been born two or three or four years earlier, they might never have gotten a full education. My mother owes the course her life took to the timing of her birth, to the rioters of 1937, and to W. M. MacMillan.

I described Daisy Nation, my grandmother, as "renowned for her beauty." But the truth is that was a careless and condescending way to describe her. She was a force. The fact that my mother and her sister left Harewood for Saint Hilda's was my grandmother's doing. My grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer. He buried himself in his books. If he had ambitions for his daughters, he did not have the foresight and energy to make them real. My grandmother did. Saint Hilda's was her idea: some of the wealthier families in the area sent their daughters there, and she saw what a good school meant. Her daughters did not play with the other children of the village. They read. Latin and algebra were necessary for high school, so she had her daughters tutored by Archdeacon Hay.

"If you'd asked her about her goals for her children, she would have said she wanted us out of there," my mother recalls. "She didn't feel that the Jamaican context offered enough. And if the opportunity was there to go on, and you were able to take it, then to her the sky was the limit."

When the results came back from the scholarship exam, only my aunt was awarded a scholarship. My mother was not. That's another fact that my first history was careless about. My mother remembers her parents standing in the doorway, talking to each other. "We have no more money." They had paid the tuition for the first term and bought the uniforms and had exhausted their savings. What would they do when the second-term fees for my mother came due? But then again, they couldn't send one daughter and not the other. My grandmother was steadfast. She sent both-and prayed-and at the end of the first term, it turned out that one of the other girls at the school had won two scholarships, so the second was given to my mother.

When it came time to go to university, my aunt, the academic twin, won what was called a Centenary Scholarship. The "Centenary" was a reference to the fact that the scholarship was established one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It was reserved for the graduates of public elementary schools, and, in a measure of how deeply the British felt about honoring the memory of abolition, there was a total of one Centenary scholarship awarded every year for the whole island, with the prize going to the top girl and the top boy in alternating years. The year my aunt applied was one of the "girl" years. She was lucky. My mother was not. My mother was faced with the cost of passage to England, room and board and living expenses, and tuition at the University of London. To get a sense of how daunting that figure was, the value of the Centenary scholarship my aunt won was probably as much as the sum of my grandparents' annual salaries. There were no student loan programs, no banks with lines of credit for schoolteachers out in the countryside. "If I'd asked my father," my mother says, "he would have replied, 'We have no money.' "

What did Daisy do? She went to the Chinese shopkeeper in a neighboring town. Jamaica has a very large Chinese population that since the nineteenth century has dominated the commercial life of the island. In Jamaican parlance, a store is not a store, it is a "Chinee-shop." Daisy went to the "Chinee-shop," to Mr. Chance, and borrowed the money. No one knows how much she borrowed, although it must have been an enormous sum. And no one knows why Mr. Chance lent it to Daisy, except of course that she was Daisy Nation, and she paid her bills promptly and had taught the Chance children at Harewood School. It was not always easy to be a Chinese child in a Jamaican schoolyard. The Jamaican children would taunt the Chinese children. "Chinee nyan [eat] dog." Daisy was a kindly and beloved figure, an oasis amid that hostility. Mr. Chance may have felt in her debt.

"Did she tell me what she was doing? I didn't even ask her," my mother remembers. "It just occurred. I just applied to university and got in. I acted completely on faith that I could rely on my mother, without even realizing that I was relying on my mother."

Joyce Gladwell owes her college education first to W. M. MacMillan, and then to the student at Saint Hilda's who gave up her scholarship, and then to Mr. Chance, and then, most of all, to Daisy Nation.

3.

Daisy Nation was from the northwestern end of Jamaica. Her great-grandfather was William Ford. He was from Ireland, and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784 having bought a coffee plantation. Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine. He noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the south coast. She was an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa. They had a son, whom they named John. He was, in the language of the day, a "mulatto"; he was colored-and all of the Fords from that point on fell into Jamaica's colored class.

In the American South during that same period, it would have been highly unusual for a white landowner to have such a public relationship with a slave. Sexual relations between whites and blacks were considered morally repugnant. Laws were passed prohibiting miscegenation, the last of which were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967. A plantation owner who lived openly with a slave woman would have been socially ostracized, and any offspring from the union of black and white would have been left in slavery.

In Jamaica, attitudes were very different. The Caribbean in those years was little more than a massive slave colony. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of more than ten to one. There were few, if any, marriageable white women, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of white men in the West Indies had black or brown mistresses. One British plantation owner in Jamaica who famously kept a precise diary of his sexual exploits slept with 138 different women in his thirty-seven years on the island, almost all of them slaves and, one suspects, not all of them willing partners. And whites saw mulattoes-the children of those relationships-as potential allies, a buffer between them and the enormous numbers of slaves on the island. Mulatto women were prized as mistresses, and their children, one shade lighter in turn, moved still further up the social and economic ladder. Mulattoes rarely worked in the fields. They lived the much easier life of working in the "house." They were the ones most likely to be freed. So many mulatto mistresses were left substantial fortunes in the wills of white property owners that the Jamaica legislature once passed a law capping bequests at two thousand pounds (which, at the time, was an enormous sum).

"When a European arrives in the West Indies and gets settled or set down for any length of time, he finds it necessary to provide himself with a housekeeper or mistress," one eighteenth-century observer wrote. "The choice he has an opportunity of making is various, a black, a tawney, a mulatto or a mestee, one of which can be purchased for 100 or 150 sterling.... If a progeny of young colored children is brought forth, these are emancipated, and mostly sent by those fathers who can afford it, at the age of three or four years, to be educated in England."

This is the world Daisy's grandfather John was born into. He was one generation removed from a slave ship, living in a country best described as an African penal colony, and he was a free man, with every benefit of education. He married another mulatto, a woman who was half European and half Arawak, which is the Indian tribe indigenous to Jamaica, and had seven children.

"These people-the coloreds-had a lot of status," the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson says. "By eighteen twenty-six, they had full civil liberties. In fact, they achieve full civil liberties at the same time as the Jews do in Jamaica. They could vote. Do anything a white person could do-and this is within the context of what was still a slave society.

"Ideally, they would try to be artisans. Remember, Jamaica has sugar plantations, which are very different from the cotton plantations you find in the American South. Cotton is a predominantly agricultural pursuit. You are picking this stuff, and almost all of the processing was done in Lancashire, or the North. Sugar is an agro-industrial complex. You have to have the factory right there, because sugar starts losing sucrose within hours of being picked. You had no choice but to have the sugar mill right there, and sugar mills require a wide range of occupations. The coopers. The boiler men. The carpenters-and a lot of those jobs were filled by colored people."

It was also the case that Jamaica's English elite, unlike their counterparts in the United States, had little interest in the grand project of nation building. They wanted to make their money and go back to England. They had no desire to stay in what they considered a hostile land. So the task of building a new society-with the many opportunities it embodied-fell to the coloreds as well.

"By eighteen fifty, the mayor of Kingston [the Jamaican capital] was a colored person," Patterson went on. "And so was the founder of the Daily Gleaner [Jamaica's major newspaper]. These were colored people, and from very early on, they came to dominate the professional classes. The whites were involved in business or the plantation. The people who became doctors and lawyers were these colored people. These were the people running the schools. The bishop of Kingston was a classic brown man. They weren't the economic elite. But they were the cultural elite."

The chart below shows a breakdown of two categories of Jamaican professionals-lawyers and members of parliament-in the early 1950s. The categorization is by skin tone. "White and light" refers to people who are either entirely white or, more likely, who have some black heritage that is no longer readily apparent. "Olive" is one step below that, and "light brown" one step below olive (although the difference between those two shades might not be readily apparent to anyone but a Jamaican). The fact to keep in mind is that in the 1950s "blacks" made up about 80 percent of the Jamaican population, outnumbering coloreds five to one.

Ethnicity Lawyers (percentage) Members of Parliament (percentage)

Chinese 3.1

East Indians -

Jews 7.1

Syrians -

White and light 38.8 10

Olive 10.2 13

Light brown 17.3 19

Dark brown 10.2 39

Black 5.1 10

Unknown 8.2

Look at the extraordinary advantage that their little bit of whiteness gave the colored minority. Having an ancestor who worked in the house and not in the fields, who got full civil rights in 1826, who was valued instead of enslaved, who got a shot at meaningful work instead of being consigned to the sugarcane fields, made all the difference in occupational success two and three generations later.

Daisy Ford's ambition for her daughters did not come from nowhere, in other words. She was the inheritor of a legacy of privilege. Her older brother Rufus, with whom she went to live as a child, was a teacher and a man of learning. Her brother Carlos went to Cuba and then came back to Jamaica and opened a garment factory. Her father, Charles Ford, was a produce wholesaler. Her mother, Ann, was a Powell, another educated, upwardly mobile colored family-and the same Powells who would two generations later produce Colin Powell. Her uncle Henry owned property. Her grandfather John-the son of William Ford and his African concubine-became a preacher. No less than three members of the extended Ford family ended up winning Rhodes Scholarships. If my mother owed W. M. MacMillan and the rioters of 1937 and Mr. Chance and her mother, Daisy Ford, then Daisy owed Rufus and Carlos and Ann and Charles and John.

4.