“Oh yes, mem, dat’s our pride; we all dress ’spectable on Sunday to go to church. Work ebbery day, but live for Sunday.” She looked radiant at the mere thought of it.
On my return I was told that the desire to cut a fine figure every Sabbath day is the key to the labour question in Jamaica.
The negroes can live on yams, which grow in their gardens and require no trouble to cultivate, but they must work to buy the dresses good enough to wear on Sunday. On week-days they go barefoot. On Sunday they screw themselves into tight-fitting garments and into new, squeaking boots, which, if the way be long, they take off, and put on just before going into church or chapel. To be dressed smartly and go to church once a week is the highest aim of the black’s life.
The fact that any white woman can ride or walk in any part of the island, either by day or by night, in perfect safety, is in itself testimony of the highest worth to the civilising agencies at work, let them be Moravian, Wesleyan, Roman or Anglican. The black under British rule is not an unworthy subject of the Empire; but left to himself, and to the workings of his own sweet will, he might perhaps revert to a state of savagery. One has only to consider the condition of the island of Hayti to see the probability of such a contingency.
I had read Chevalier St John’s book on “The Black Republic,” in which he mentions the cannibalistic habits of these islanders, before I left home. On two separate occasions I have since been told that the killing and eating of small children is quite a common thing, although still denied by better-class Haytians. Each of my informers were officers of ships bound for Haytian ports. There they had seen human flesh exposed for sale in the public markets. The buyers of this horrible commodity significantly ask for “salt pork.” One man told me he had been taken by a Haytian of the better class to a spot at night, within forty yards of a grove, where children were being sacrificed according to the Voodhoo rites, which their ancestors practised centuries ago in the forest fastnesses of Western Africa. It was at the risk of his life. He had been unable to see the horrid rites which take place before the child was actually tomahawked, but he heard its shrieks when tortured. Great mystery surrounds the Voodhoo worship, and never, so far, has an European been known to be present at the ceremonies which take place before a human sacrifice. My informer told me that instead of dreading this fate for their children, the mothers were proud that their particular offspring should be chosen for the sacrifice.
In connection with the Haytian Voodhoo worship, I was lent an old French manuscript by an American. It had been written about one hundred and fifty years ago, and professed to be the confessions under compulsion of a Haytian negress as to the practice of the most degrading and loathsome black magic which then prevailed in the island. Whether this continues at present I am unable to say, but they still have the custom of smearing the blood of freshly-killed infants over the bodies of childless women to make them bear children. Every savage race, doubtless, at one particular stage of its development dabbled in mystic and bloody rites, just as every land, where prehistoric traces of man’s existence have been found, has had its Stone Age, its kitchen-middens, etc. There is a wonderful similarity in the doings in their infancy of the world’s different races, just in the same way as all children, black, brown, and white, learn to walk before they run; but to my mind it is an interesting study to see what two hundred years more or less of that which we call civilisation has produced upon a race very low down upon the evolutionary ladder. Possibly the Tierra del Fuegans and the Mincopies of the Andamans are upon the lowest rung, but I do not think an anthropologist would put the negroid races much higher up.
CHAPTER IV
THE BLACK UNDER BRITISH RULE—THE GOVERNOR OF JAMAICA AND SUITE