The Filipino skirt is a wonder. It is made by sewing together the ends of a straight piece of cloth about three yards long. To hold it in place on the body, a plait is laid in the top edge at the right, and a tuck at the left, and there it stays—till it loosens. One often sees them stop to give the right or left a twist. The fullness in the front is absolutely essential for them to squat as they are so accustomed to do while performing all sorts of work, such as washing, ironing, or, in the market place, selling all conceivable kinds of wares. The waist for the rich and poor alike is of one pattern, the only variation being in the quality. It has a plain piece loose at the waist line for the body, a round hole for the rather low neck, the sleeves straight and extending to the wrist, about three-fourths of a yard wide. These sleeves are gathered on the shoulder to fit the individual. A square handkerchief folded three times in the center is placed round the neck and completes the costume. As fast as riches are amassed, trains are assumed. All clothing is starched with rice and stands out rigidly.
The materials are largely woven by the people themselves, and the finer fabrics are beautiful in texture and fineness, some of the strands being so fine that several are used to make one thread. By weaving one whole day from dawn to dark, only a quarter of a yard of material is produced. The looms, the cost of which is about fifty cents, are all made by hand from bamboo; the reels and bobbins, which complete the outfit, raise the value of the whole to about a dollar. There is rarely a house that does not keep from one to a dozen looms. The jusi, made from the jusi that comes in the thread from China, is colored to suit the fancy of the individual, but is not extensively used by the natives, who usually prefer the abuka, piña, or sinamay, which are products of the abuka tree, or pineapple fibre. The quality of these depends on the fineness of the threads. It is very delicate, yet durable, and—what is most essential—can be washed.
The common natives seem to have no fixed hours for their meals, nor do they have any idea of gathering around the family board. After they began to use knives and forks one woman said she would rather not use her knife, it cut her mouth so. Even the best of them prefer to squat on the floor, make a little round ball of half cooked rice with the tips of their fingers and throw it into the mouth.
My next door neighbor was considered one of the better class of citizens, and through my window I could not help, in the two years of my stay, seeing much of the working part of her household. There were pigs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys, either running freely about the kitchen or tied by the leg to the kitchen stove. The floors of these kitchens are never tight; they allow the greater part of the accumulated filth of all these animals to sift through to the ground below. There were about fifteen in the family; this meant fifteen or twenty servants, but as there are few so poor in the islands as to be unable to command a poorer still, these chief servants had a crowd of underlings responsible to themselves alone. The head cook had a wife, two children and two servants that got into their quarters by crawling up an old ladder. I climbed up one day to see how much space they had. I put my head in at the the opening that served them for door and window, but could not get my shoulders in. The whole garret was about eight feet long and six feet wide. One end of it was partitioned off for their fighting cocks.
All the time I was there this family of the cook occupied that loft, and the two youngest ones squalled night and day, one or other, or both of them. There was not a single thing in that miserable hole for those naked children to lie on or to sit on. The screams or the wails of the wretched babies, the fighting of the rats under foot, the thud of the bullets at one’s head, the constant fear of being burned out,—these things are not conducive to peaceful slumbers, but to frightful dreams, to nightmare, to hasty wakenings from uneasy sleep.
As soon as there is the slightest streak of dawn, the natives begin to work and clatter and chatter. No time is lost bathing or dressing. They wear to bed, or rather to floor or mat, the little that they have worn through the day, and rise and go to work next day without change of clothing. It never occurs to them to wash their hands except when they go to the well, once a day perhaps. While at the well they will pour water from a cocoanut shell held above the head and let it run down over the body, never using soap or towels. They rub their bodies sometimes with a stone. It does not matter which way you turn you see hundreds of natives at their toilet. One does not mind them more than the carabao in some muddy pond, and one is just about as cleanly as the other. They make little noise going to and fro, all being barefoot; but it was not long until I learned to know whether there were three, fifty, or one hundred passing by the swish of their bare feet.
The fathers seem to lavish more affection on the children than the mothers, and no wonder. Even President Roosevelt would be satisfied with the size of families that vary from fifteen to thirty. They do not seem to make any great ado if one or more die. Such little bits of humanity, such wasted corpses; it hardly seems that the shrunken form could ever have breathed, it looks so little and pinched and starved. There was a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, which were said to be twenty-five years old, that were the most hideous looking things I ever saw. They were two feet high, with huge heads out of all proportion to their bodies. They used to go about the streets begging and giving concerts to get money. I understand that they are now somewhere in America.
I became very much interested in a man with only one leg. I wanted to get him a wooden mate for it, but he said he didn’t want it; that he could get around faster with one leg, and he certainly could take longer leaps than any two legged creature. Even when talking he never sat down. He had admirable control of his muscles. A little above the average height, his one leggedness made him seem over six feet.
It was out of the question to take the census of any town or province, because of the shifting population. It is nothing for a family to move many times in the course of the year; they can make thirty or forty miles a day. They have absolutely nothing to move unless it might be the family cooking “sow-sow” pot, which is hung over the shoulder on a string, or carried on top of the head. I used often to see a family straggling along with anywhere from ten to twenty children, seemingly all of a size, going to locate at some other place. One family came to Jaro the night before market day. They had about six dozen of eggs. I said I would buy all of them; the woman cried and said she was sorry, as she would have nothing to sell in the market place the next day. At night the whole family cuddled down in a corner of the stable and slept.
The native cook we employed proved to be a good one, and was willing to learn American ways of cooking. We did not know he had a family. One morning while attending to my duties there appeared a woman about five feet tall, with one shoulder about four inches higher than the other, one hip dislocated, one eye crossed, a harelip, which made the teeth part in the middle, mouth and lips stained blood red with betel juice, clothes—a rag or two. I screamed at her to run away, which she did instantly. I supposed she was some tramp who wanted to get a look at a white woman. She proved to be the wife of our cook, and after I had become accustomed to her dreadful looks, she became invaluable to me. Hardly anyone would have recognized her the day that she accompanied me to the dock. The little money that she had earned she had immediately put into an embroidered waist and long black satin train; and as I bade her good-bye she left an impression quite different from the first, and I am sure that the tears she shed were not of the crocodile kind.