Life in this quiet Jamaican country town passes pleasantly by, notwithstanding its distance from the attractions of the “madding crowd.” One day the shouts of joyous school-children announced the fact of a Sunday School treat. Hundreds of children were entertained in the Rectory fields, in much the same way as similar gatherings in England. Swings and cricket seemed most popular amongst the small blacks, whilst the little girls’ conscious grandeur in well-starched clean frocks was quite apparent.
Another time the unusual ringing of the church bell awakened our curiosity; we learnt that it was for service before the Parochial Board of Manchester held its customary meetings. Mandeville also has its tragedies; whilst I was there we were all shocked to hear that the proprietor of the local hotel had shot himself, owing to embarrassed circumstances. This establishment is very badly situated. The management for some time past has been unsatisfactory, and few visitors have cared to put up there, preferring the boarding-houses in the place. Perhaps it is only in tropical countries that one realises what walking shadows we are—this poor fellow had eaten his breakfast a little after seven o’clock that morning—shot himself at eight, was taken to his grave at a little after five the same afternoon. It happened on a Saturday—Mandeville market day; crowds of people coming in from the country stayed over to witness the funeral. All that afternoon the grave, which was being dug, was surrounded by onlookers who, squatting round, watched the progress with a curious expression of fascinated and morbid interest on their dusky faces, reminding us forcibly of the way their ghoulish scavengers, the John Crows, large black native buzzards, sit upon the house-tops surveying from that elevated vantage-spot the ground below, where haply some spicy breakfast awaits them in the garbage line.
Nothing appeals so much to the “duppy”-ridden imagination of the black as everything connected with our transit from this world to the next. The correct thing is to be laid out in a suit of clean white ducks and white gloves; whilst the women, if they have it, are similarly arrayed in clean white attire, also with the needful gloves. I asked the reason of this almost universal practice amongst them, and was told it was to “rise up tidy on de reburrection mornin,” and also that they should appear fitly dressed to “sit down at de marriage supper of de Lamb.” They are quite familiar with this phraseology, which is current in the chapels, which are numerous all over Jamaica; and as their mental powers of assimilation and digestion scarcely touch the spiritual plane, the crudity and grotesqueness of their ideas of another life, mixed up as they are with their hereditary Obeah-worship and dread of “duppies,” produces curious results. They mostly celebrate a death with a wake, especially in the country parts. A clergyman’s wife living in the Blue Mountains told me of a man who was ill, and expected quite confidently to die. His wife bought provisions for the burial wake. The chickens, with their legs tied together, were hung upon the bough of a tree, plenty of yams were in readiness, and the savings of weeks past were represented in the shape of a bottle of rum; the white duck clothes waved in the breeze in the backyard, having been duly washed. Strange to say, the man recovered. “It was in de middle of de night, missus,” he explained to the lady. “I got hungry, and I felt under de bed wher dey put a box of sweet biscuits; I eat one, and den I ate up de rest and got well.”
This was a box of Huntley & Palmer’s sweet biscuits, carefully stowed away for the wake, which had resuscitated the invalid. “No man can dead before his time,” they say in the country parts, and evidently this man’s time had not yet come.
It was with feelings of regret that I turned my back on this pretty English-looking spot, although I looked forward with interest to staying a short time on a pen with friends not very far away from Mandeville.
CHAPTER XIII
MY VISIT TO A PEN—ARAWAK REMAINS—LEGEND OF THE COTTON-TREE
Kingston, March 1903.—After passing Kendal, a place well known for its yearly agricultural shows, I stopped at a station called Balaclava, where my friend in her buggy met me. A drive of about two miles through very hilly country and across one or two bridges spanning one of the many rivers, or springs, which abound in this island, brought me to their property. A gate stood open, and we drove over a grassy track up to the house, which is one of the oldest in Jamaica, and called a “storm-house,” because it was built after the great hurricane of 1722. I was afterwards introduced to an ancient black lady of some eighty summers, who remembered slave times. She had been on the estate, and had never lived elsewhere. The house, she said, had always been “just de same, missus,” when she was a “picaninny and lived in de big niggah houses ovar dar,” pointing towards the wooded hills which lay on my right. My hostess, Mrs M——, said their property had been bought some years before from a coloured family, a death having caused the estate to be sold. It comprised 1600 acres, and besides coffee, which was chiefly grown, logwood, pimento and bananas were cultivated. A river ran through it, and they had on the estate a very interesting cave, about a mile in length, if I cared to visit it. I naturally accepted the latter proposal, and as we could not drive anywhere the next day, the horses and carriage having been promised to some friends for the purposes of a funeral, it was arranged we should visit the cave. Mrs M—— I found to be a most charming hostess, desirous that I should see all there was to be seen in the neighbourhood.