60 years of marriage and going stronger
AFTER 60 years of being married, 84-year-old Percival Alexander Newell and his wife Elitha Myfantie Newell, 78, readily admitted that they still kiss, walk with and hold hands, cuddle and love each other.
The couple, who celebrated 60 years of marriage on Valentine’s Day, is living proof that marriage can indeed withstand the challenges and bloom into something even more beautiful with each passing day.
“She wasn’t the first love, but she was the true love,” Newell said as he sat with his arm draped around his wife in their Ewarton, St Catherine, home on Friday. “From the moment I saw her I saw a future in this woman,” he said.
Newell said that he met his wife one day while he was doing construction on a school in Old Harbour where she was living.
“This woman’s mother always cooks for us, so one day I was on the job and I saw this young miss came up and she was beautiful. She was like an emerald, that’s a precious stone,” Newell said. “So I said to her mom, whose daughter is this? She said ‘my daughter’ and I said ‘mom, could you give her to me’? She said no, she’s going to school. She was about 18. But I fell in love with her, but you know you young ladies don’t love old men, but there is something you have to do, you have to butter the claw of the cat,” he said.
“So I take time talk with her. I had to leave and come back home in Mount Rosser, so when I was at home one day I felt I should write her. So I wrote her a letter and it took long for her to respond but she did respond. So I said to my old man when he was alive, ‘I have a friend in Old Harbour Bay, I’m going to look for her. So I went and came back probably about two to three days later, but you know new broom sweep clean so all I could think about is the new broom,” Newell recalled with a broad smile.
As a government contractor who built schools, Newell would travel around the country. And so, after making another visit to Old Habour to see his ‘new broom’, he left for Manchester.
“And then her mother got pregnant and her mother said she can’t stay in the yard because there was going to be two pregnant women in the yard, because ‘Mom’ was pregnant. So I said to my dad ‘man I have a girl and I would like to bring her home.’ But the old man said to me ‘Man you mek trouble!’ I said ‘No’.
“But my old man knew before I did that she was pregnant, because he had a dream. So when I came back from Manchester my old man said, you not staying wid that young women pregnant you know sah, you haffi marry. He said ‘when you would like to get married?’ I didn’t even know a day named Valentine’s Day because it was not recognised in those days. So I said about the second Saturday in February. He said no sah you mother born the 12th of February and you going to marry the 14th of February and on the 14th of February we were married.”
But two days after his Sunday wedding, Newell had to leave for work in Kingston a week at a time, leaving his young wife with in-laws whom she was not accustomed to, and returning home every weekend.
“The joke is this, she was married the 14th of February and on March 5th, she produced her first child … just about three weeks, so we have been moving from then until today, of which we are grateful,” said Newell, who is now a bishop of the Holy Temple Church of the Lord Jesus Christ with nine branches in Jamaica and head office in Bronx, New York.
“When a woman begins to have children, many of them lose their beauty. She was a young girl with a little pregnant belly, oh my God it was more than attractive. And I maintained my love towards her. She has 11 children and she has maintained her beauty!” he said as he looked his wife in the eye.
But despite the challenges and the number of women whom Newell declared loved him, he never once strayed outside his marriage.
“You know how they talk about ‘bun’, I never think about that yet. So I’m saying to you that there are so many women that love me. I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about natural love, because I have a kind and affectionate attitude, many girls love me. But I know how far to go. That is why my marriage last until now. I leave her for three years. I worked in America doing construction. And I was working one day while the snow was falling and a man said to me ‘boy you don’t fraid a bun?’ and I said what you talking about, it sell in the shop.
“He said you are the first Jamaican man I hear tell me that. But I don’t think about bun. When you have a woman like this, believe me, is a specially-made woman. When I came back she said you not going to leave me again,” Newell stated.
His wife Elitha, who originates from Clarendon, said that when they first met she was not in love with him, but as time went by and his determination was evident, she began to fall in love.
“I was passing where he was working and he gazed at me, but at first I wasn’t so much into him. I just laughed at him and go where I was going,” the soft-spoken Elitha said with a smile.
“But he went around and come around and I just decided that okay. My spirit just blended with him there. Then we got married, and thank God here we are. So my love was not strong when I met my husband but getting to know him, the love grew stronger. He is a man who loves to help me to do things. If I’m in the kitchen he will be in the room tidying up and if we are going to church he will bathe the children and put on their clothes and we work together,” she said.
“If he comes in and see that I am outside washing, because I didn’t have a helper to help me, he will just put down his bag and come out to help me. And I would say to him, no dear, your dinner is on the table go and eat first, and he would say ‘no sah two hands make work light and done quick’.
“I would be washing and he would be under the pipe rinsing out the clothes. He tried to help me a lot with the children, so whenever we are doing anything, both of us work together. And that is what made me love him more, because I realised that this man was a good man. Sometimes I try to hit him and play with him rough just to see if he would retaliate and he never did, so I see that he is a good man. So that draws my love more and more every day to him. And if Christ is in the family, it is much stronger,” she said.
Elitha said that understanding and belief in God are two of the main ingredients that have kept them together for 60 years.
“I know his ways, I know his weaknesses and he knows my weaknesses, so we don’t try to hit at each another. More than all, we accept the Lord and we serve him. And we obey the word of the Lord and that is what carried us through,” she said. “And so we try to grow these kids in the fear of the Lord. So that is why our marriage last so long,” she said.
She explained, too, that whenever there was disagreement between the two, the children would not know of it, but the couple would instead wait until they were in the confines of their bedroom to work things out.
The couple’s eldest child, Cleopatra Newell Scott, attested to this.
“I have never, ever seen my parents quarrel, never!” Scott, who journeyed from the United States for her parents’ anniversary, told the Sunday Observer. “It was a few years ago that they came to spend some time with me and my husband and I had to ask Mom if she and Dad never argued. And she told me that they did, but they would work it out in the bedroom. Every day you see my parents they seem more and more in love. You know how you have some couples married for long, but their relationship is on and off? Not with my parents! They are always in love,” she said.
Percival Newell said that the remedy is simple.
“The thing that rekindles our love is the word of God. If you look at Paul’s writing in Ephesians 5:19 it says ‘husbands love your wives even as Christ loves the Church and gave himself for it, that he may present it to himself, a glorious church, having neither spot nor wrinkle’,” the 59-year Christian said.
“Therefore, if you need to enjoy all the dainties and beauties that God set out, you have to obey the word. If you don’t keep the word of God that is written, you can’t keep the marriage, because the word of God ties you to marriage,” he added.
“That’s what has kept us,” his wife chipped in as she gently stroked his thigh in agreement.
“That’s what kept me,” her husband continued. “I do construction all the years of my life and I met so many women. And believe me, I never got involved with any of them. I am so tight with ladies, as a matter of fact any man rule under my sign – Gemini – women love them.
“When we were much younger, when I come home on weekends and I had to leave back to work, I left with sorrow. But as a man providing for family, I had to go. But those weekends we go to church and come back home and had our relationship and our fun and whatever. You must imagine coming home and your desire is your wife, and her desire is her husband. So when the kids all retire to bed we had fun, man. Maybe that is why we have so many children! And Mom always leave something nice for her husband. My love towards my wife is measureless. I love my wife dearly, man.
“There is nobody I have seen that I love like this woman. I would marry her 10 times over,” he said.
Elitha said that while a number of women love her husband, she does not get jealous, simply because she knows who he is, and where his heart lies.
Though the couple has 11 children, they also raised eight others as
their own.
Today they also have 26 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.