I told him Englishwomen were able to endure much greater hardships than West Indian ladies.
“Did I not want a coachman to take back with me?” he asked. He would so much like to go to England. A little further conversation, and I elicited from him he had a weak lung. That, I said, put that matter completely out of the question. If in Jamaica his lungs were weak, he would not live a month in our colder climate. That seemed to upset his calculations.
“Besides, you would not like the food,” I told him. “We have not half the good things at home you have here.” And we fell to discussing foods.
“Give a man out yar salt-fish and akee and roasted bread-fruit far breakfast, and he trow away all de ham and eggs into de street,” said he.
We met some desperately poor, ill-clad negroes, and I asked if they were not very idle.
“No, missus; they can’t get work to do. They don’t know how to do any ting properly for to get any money. Some of dem don’t earn eight dollars in a whole year,” he added.
I reckoned up eight dollars as not quite two pounds, and felt aghast at that for a living wage. The driver had all unwittingly put his finger upon a sore spot in the educational policy of Jamaica. The present generation are mostly too grand to work with their hands as their parents did before them. They connect domestic service and work with slavery, and every girl who has a smattering of knowledge wants to be a school-teacher or a dressmaker. The next generation, it is to be hoped, will not be educated above their position in life, then existence in Jamaica for white women may cease to be the harrowing anxiety it seems to be at present. We are not ignorant of the difficulties of housekeeping at home, with a class of women-servants who are not trained to work, and who are neither reliable or conscientious, but, with the thickheadedness of the black thrown in, the case is much worse out here.
COCOA-NUT GROVE.