[4] It is known that he was descended from Africans brought from the Congo to Jamaica, where they escaped from enslavement to live as free people in the island's mountainous Cockpit Country.
[2][6] Roy's grandfather was his village's traditional master carver, which role was passed on from father to son in subsequent generations.
[12] In a tribute after his death, his widow Yvonne Roy wrote: "His most tender subject, the mother and her child, he portrayed over and over again, always finding something new and more wonderful as the image took shape, either from beneath his chisel, or appearing in all the vivid colours of his birthplace, from his brush.
"[2] Roy himself noted in an article in The Guardian: "It was Sir Jacob Epstein himself who pointed out to me the similarity of the head and torso of the ivory-carved Christ in my 'Crucifixion' to his colossal and magnificent 'Ecce Homo.'
[1] While Black Albino has primarily been discussed only in relation to evidence of Africa in the Caribbean, and has received limited and variable critical attention (including from O. R. Dathorne and Kamau Brathwaite), Mervyn Morris in a 1984 article in Jamaica Journal concluded: "But the success, the value, of this book does not primarily reside in its fidelity to history, its recording of African culture in the Caribbean, nor in such patterns, meanings, literary effects as may be less than obvious.