Her great-grandfather was William Ford. 他伟大的祖父是威廉·福特，

　　He was from Island, and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784, having bought a coffee plantation. 来自爱尔兰，他在1784年来到牙买加并买下了一片咖啡种植园，

　　Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine. 不久就买了一个奴隶，并娶她为妻。

　　He noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the south coast. 他是在南海岸那个叫做短吻鳄池塘村的码头上看见她的，

　　She was an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa. They had a son, whom they named John. 她是一个东非南端伊博部落的女人，他们生了个叫约翰的男孩，

　　He was, in the language of the day, a "mulatto"; 在当时来说，他就是一个“黑白混血儿。”

　　he was colored-and all of the Fords from that point on fell into Jamaica's colored class. 从那以后，福特家族就烙上了牙买加血统的印记。

　　In the American South during the same period,it would be highly unusual for a white landowner to have had so public relationship with a slave. 在那个时代的美国南部，一个白人地主和一个奴隶成为夫妻是很不寻常的。

　　Sexual relations between blacks and whites were considered morally repugnant. 白人和黑人的男女关系不但在道德上不被允许，

　　Laws were past prohibiting miscegenation, the last of which were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967. 而且还被法律禁止通婚，这个法律一直到1967年才被最高法院废除。

　　A plantation owner who lived openly with a slave woman would have been socially ostracized, 一个种植园地主和一个奴隶女人生活在一起是被社会摈弃的，

　　and any offspring from the union of black and white would have been left in slavery. 他们所有的后代也将都会是奴隶身份。

　　In Jamaica, attitudes were very different. 但在牙买加，这种态度就很不一样。

　　The Caribbean in those years was little more than a massive slave colony. 在那些年里，加勒比海就是大量奴隶的聚居地。

　　Blacks outnumbered whites by a factor of more than ten to one. 黑人多于白人，数量达到了10比1。

　　There were few, if any, marriageable white women on the island, and as a result, 岛上几乎没有可以结婚的白人女性，

　　the overwhelming majority of white men on the island had black or brown mistresses. 这就导致了岛上大量成年白人男人娶了黑人或者棕色皮肤的女性。

　　One British plantation owner in Jamaica who famously kept a precise diary of his sexual exploits 在牙买加有一个英国种植园主，因为一本日记而被世人所知。

　　slept with 138 different women in his 37 years on the island, almost all of them slaves and, one imagines, not all of them willing partners. 在那本日记里，他详细地记录了在岛上37年间同138个不同女人发生关系的过程，可以想象，她们几乎都只是奴隶，而她们也并不是都希望成为他的情人。

　　And whites saw mulattoes—the children of those relationships—as potential allies, a buffer between them and the enormous number of slaves on the island. 白人将那些混血儿看成一个潜在的同盟，可以调解他们同岛上奴隶之间的关系。

　　Mulatto women were prized as mistresses, and their children, one shade lighter in turn,  作为女主人的混血妇女很受珍重，她们的孩子，皮肤会淡些,

　　moved still further of the social and economic ladder. Mulattos rarely worked in the fields. 而且社会地位和经济阶层也会相应提高。混血妇女很少在田间劳作。