Lloyd G Francis

It was March 2002. September 11th was still raw in everyone's mind, and I was just returning from six months overseas: working for Newsweek in Iraq, freelancing in Kashmir, and working the war in Afghanistan. Only hours after going through customs, I found myself in a small bar in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn with my cousin and a good friend. I had an overnight layover and stayed with my cousin. I spoke with my wife and said hi to my one year old son, who hardly knew me. Hearing their voices I could not wait to get to California.

We were having a drink together. My cousin was relieved to have me home.

While having this drink, my cousin told me a story that would change my life, and planted the very first seed that 11 years later became the novel From Rum To Roots.

The story was about another cousin who had come to the United States and started a company making a Jamaican drink called roots. He had done well for himself becoming wealthy. The story captured my imagination.

But I was unable to make anything of it. I was not a writer by trade. I was a daily news photographer, a person who wrote, at the most, thirty word captions for photographs used in magazines and newspapers. A man interested in hotspot journalism. Not an artist seeking to write literary fiction.

I soon forgot about it. There were more news assignments, I had a family to support. But only two years later, my parents fell ill and finally passed away. They were Jamaican immigrants, people who came to the United States during the second great wave of Caribbean immigration between 1941 and 1952. They came with nothing, and in living their life as Americans grew wealthy after starting a civil engineering firm. But despite their success, as they grew older they were not happy.

Their unhappiness drove me to ask questions that no one had the answers for. And so in 2007 I returned to the story that I first heard in 2002 and after seven years of writing and re-writing I have completed this book. The questions remain but my search has been rewarding. I hope From Rum To Roots is a rewarding read for you, indeed, I hope you enjoy it.