by Mell P
As Grenada celebrates 52 years of Independence, one mother’s journey from a small Caribbean island to the bustling streets of New York carries an urgent message for the next generation.
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Patricia Williams still remembers the address she arrived to in Brooklyn on July 4th, 1968, when the 18-year-old from rural Grenada stepped into a New York summer that felt nothing like home. People sat on stoops in the morning. The subway rattled beneath the city. Darkness didn’t fall until late into the night.
“It was a serious culture shock,” Williams recalls, her voice carrying the weight of that teenage girl who left everything familiar behind.
Now, nearly six decades later, as the mother of New York Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Patricia has watched her son channel the values she instilled into a career of public service. But her gaze has turned back to Grenada with a concern that transcends politics: the younger generation is forgetting who they are.
Patricia’s path from Grenada to pharmacy wasn’t straightforward. That first winter in America was brutal—short skirts, thin coats, working until 10 p.m. at a Riggs Bank subsidiary. She remembers standing in the cold on Georgia Avenue In Washington DC, her last dime ready for a cab that wouldn’t stop for Black people in those days. So instead she waited for the bus and walked four or five blocks home alone. It was rough.
She built a life anyway. Marriage. A daughter who followed her into pharmacy. And Jumaane, the son who couldn’t stop speaking up for others, even when it got him in trouble.
“He was advocating for students who wouldn’t speak for themselves,” Patricia says of her son’s junior high years. “He had a teacher at the school he attended for the gifted and talented, and it was a problem with his teacher because he spoke up for other kids in the school.”
The diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome came late, around ninth grade, after Patricia watched a 60 Minutes segment and recognized the symptoms. But even before understanding what drove his tics and outbursts, Jumaane couldn’t stay quiet when he saw injustice.
Patricia made sure her children knew where they came from. Every summer they spent back in Grenada. Caribbean meals filled the kitchen with familiar smells. Books and pictures celebrating Black culture scattered throughout their home. TV shows representing the same on repeat as a family affair.
“Respect for your elders. Most of all respect,” she says of the Grenadian values she emphasized. “And kindness I learned from my mother who was a very generous woman. She always gave no matter what it was.”
But when Patricia visits Grenada now—three, four times a year—she sees something that troubles her deeply. The young people are picking up “other people’s culture” their accents are changing, their tastes shifting to match what they see on American television.
“They’re almost ashamed to push what is uniquely theirs,” she says, her voice steady but urgent.
It’s not about rejecting progress or closing off from the world. Patricia herself is proof that Grenadians can thrive anywhere. But there’s a difference between growth and erasure, between evolution and shame.
“We grow a lot of stuff. Young people now don’t want those things,” she observes. “And they’re picking up a lot of the American culture. You don’t have to just pick up everything that you see. You need to filter a little bit.”
As Grenada marks 52 years of Independence this year, Patricia sees hope in the younger leadership taking hold, even as she worries about cultural drift. The country faces real challenges—infrastructure that can’t keep pace with the many cars on roads built for a different era, the complex logistics of development on a small island.
But infrastructure can be rebuilt. Roads can be widened. What concerns Patricia more is the infrastructure of identity, the roads that connect young Grenadians to their heritage.
Her message for this Independence Day is simple but profound: “Higher and higher. We’re moving up.”
It’s the national motto, but in Patricia’s voice, it carries a clarification. Moving up doesn’t mean moving away. Reaching higher doesn’t require forgetting where you planted your feet.
From that culture-shocked 18-year-old who arrived in New York, to the mother who raised a public advocate, Patricia Williams has lived the complexity of the immigrant story. She knows the pull of two worlds, the necessary code-switching, the choices about what to keep and what to release.
But some things, she insists, should never be released. The accent that marks you as Grenadian. The food grown in Grenadian soil. The pride in a small island that produced people capable of thriving anywhere in the world.
“Be proud of what Grenada has to offer,” she urges the young people.
After all, respect, the core value she taught her children, begins with respecting yourself. And that means knowing, truly knowing, where you come from.
