I left Barbados in 1958 on the Surriento, an Italian migrant passenger liner. As I was boarding the ship, my grandmother gave me an embroidered handkerchief with something wrapped inside. She told me not to open it until I arrived in the mother country. I opened the little bundle on the train to Victoria and found this penny inside. I laughed because she had said to me that I would always have money! I’ve kept it in my purse ever since then, and this is the first time it’s left my hands in fifty-eight years.

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