CHAPTER IV
THE BLACK UNDER BRITISH RULE—THE GOVERNOR OF JAMAICA AND SUITE
Without unduly congratulating ourselves as first-class colonists, I think we can fairly say that the black is at his best under British rule. He has learnt industrial arts. The best of his race are mechanics, policemen, soldiers, sailors, shopkeepers, and domestic servants. They may not be brilliant, but in this hot climate, where it is an impossibility for the European to do field labour, they serve their purpose. In Jamaica the trains and the electric trams in and round Kingston are driven by natives, your clothes are washed by negresses, and very well done too; occasionally you suffer from their excessive professional zeal, when they send home your stockings stiff with starch. The waiters, chambermaids, domestic servants, farm labourers, are all black. In the hotels it is noticeable how well they speak English.
The harmless, courteous country folk one meets in one’s drives over the island are, from all accounts, very different to their dusky brethren in the United States of America, where life is none too safe, and lynch law apparently a necessary evil.
GROUP OF NATIVES.
So far as I can see, their worst fault is laziness. It is a most irritating fault to the man who wants labour; but if the pay of three days’ work suffices to keep a negro in what he considers comfort, it is hard to see that he should be compelled to work six days out of seven to suit his employer’s crops. And if his or her highest ambition is to cut a fine figure on Sunday, I should be inclined, whilst inculcating thrift, to encourage that amiable weakness to the uttermost. One reads sometimes of the poor negro, but in a country like Jamaica, where anything once planted in the soil grows in the most prolific manner, and where such nourishing food as yams and sweet potatoes form the chief nutriment of the black, to say nothing of the beautiful climate necessitating only the very lightest of clothing, real poverty, such as we are unfortunately acquainted with in England, does not exist.
Probably in a few years’ time, the problem of an enormous black population will confront the government of these islands. We know that in the United States such is the case. Barbadoes, too, has an immense population. If one thinks seriously of it, what else can be expected of a people severed from their natural state, and placed in the happiest of circumstances, where the increase of population has no such checks operating upon it, as it must have had in the wild and pristine condition of savage life amongst African forests, where a thousand petty warfares thinned the ranks of the warriors, and where cannibalism and disease would probably account for quite half the yearly tribal babies. Now, Jamaica’s best crop is picaninnies. Nor are there epidemics severe enough, or earthquakes bad enough, to carry off the superfluous nigger babies.
A story which had its comical side was told me by a captain of the R.M.S. He knew a negro in Kingston who had long courted the lady of his affections. She had responded, but not to the degree demanded of her by her impassioned lover. In the captain’s presence he begged her on his knees to marry him, and “make an honest man” of him.
Strangers to the West Indies are often surprised at the use of slang and funny expressions by the natives. On landing at Trinidad, we wished to be driven up to the Queen’s Park Hotel for lunch. There were three of us, a lady and gentleman and myself. To our enquiry as to how much our driver would charge for taking us there, the ready answer came, “a bob each.” We preserved serious faces, the driver evidently being unconscious of having said anything out of the ordinary, and paid our shillings.
I was driving one day in Kingston, when my coachman turned a sharp corner at a furious rate. In so doing, a woman was nearly run over. “Out of de way, my lub, for God’s sake!” exclaimed he, not attempting to slacken his horse’s pace.
There were other passengers whose eccentricities afforded the passengers of the Port Antonio some amusement and much subject-matter for conversation. We had the Governor of Jamaica and, according to the London newspapers, “suite” on board. In what the “suite” consisted, I am still at a loss to divine. They were the last to come on board at Avonmouth Dock, and as the rest of us who had come by an earlier train watched the small steamer, which brought them alongside the Port Antonio, plunging and rolling in the heavy seas which even then were racing up the Bristol Channel, we congratulated ourselves that we had walked straight on to the vessel from the quay an hour before. When their Excellencies “and suite” came on board, the ship was standing out some distance from the shore. I counted five adults, three babies, and three women-servants. The party consisted of Sir Augustus and Lady Hemming, their secretary, a married daughter with her husband, a coffee planter in Jamaica, three small children belonging to the latter, two nurses and a maid.
The present Governor of Jamaica was formerly a clerk in the office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1884 he was sent as a delegate to the West African Conference at Berlin, and later, on special service to Paris in 1890, in connection with the delimitation of French and English possessions on the west coast of Africa. He became the Governor of British Guiana, 1896, and succeeded Sir Henry Norman as Governor of Jamaica in 1898. The term of office is for five years, and this is consequently his last year in Jamaica, unless a special application is made for an extension; but one can scarcely imagine that that will be the case with Sir Augustus and Lady Hemming. Not but what it is conceded on all hands that His Excellency is a most amiable man; if not brilliant, at least he has shown conspicuous talent in the fiscal department. Owing to his clever financial administration, the island budget for the first time this year shows a surplus, although the best that can be said of the condition of Jamaica is that which Mr Chamberlain declared in the House of Commons, to the effect that up to the present the local government had been able to do little more than bring about an equipoise between revenue and expenditure.
The social relations between the chief people in the island and the reigning lady at the gubernatorial residence did not strike me as being particularly happy or satisfactory. One felt sorry that striving colonists such as the Jamaicans should lack that sympathy and consideration which, whether they be white or coloured, they certainly have a right to expect from the wives of those officials who govern them in the King’s name, and who are paid very handsomely out of the island revenues for doing so.
An elderly lady who was present at a ball given last month at King’s House, which is situated in lovely grounds about three miles out of Kingston, remarked to me that it was unlike entertainments of the kind given in times past, in that it lacked “grace, dignity, and refinement.” I was sorry to miss this ball, but, being absent amongst the Windward Islands at the time it took place, I returned to find my invitation awaiting me at my hotel.