The fifties made my Yesterday. They built momentum to override my father’s veto, to drive me into schooling previously unknown in Trinidad and Tobago. 

The sixties made the seventies a dream for me.

Not only did I leave home, to live on my own. Four years of travel helped to clarify my father’s veto. Speakers of French in Quebec, of Portuguese in Bermuda, Portuguese in Brazil and above all, Spanish speakers sharpened my perspective on schooling. 

The result of travel-study in the third year of a course in Latin American Studies was ironic. It took decades to digest what foreign language speakers were saying. It took even more time to appreciate what six generations of women who made my life were trying to teach me. 

Nine years of tertiary education left me, at age forty-one, in the same position on schooling as where my father found himself at age fifty-one, though he had none of my advantages.

He could not see the 2020s, a landmark in provision of schools. This decade brings the fourth centenary of Mossi African and Scottish Scobie presence in British West Indian colonies.

It is unclear how the Mooré-speaking Mossi managed to learn English. They had no schooling. Yet, they mastered a language  "masters" took for granted.

Awareness of language and its relation to schooling brought a degree of clarity on how Yesterday made me what I am today.

That sense of clarity drives this autobiography-by-blog.