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.