Barbadian porters loading hogsheads of sugar always take turns riding back to the warehouse
There is an Anglican Church of this style in each of the eleven parishes of Barbados
On week-days the highways of Barbados are as crowded as city streets. Heavy draft horses and mules, auto-trucks large and small, are constantly descending to Bridgetown with the cumbersome hogsheads of sugar and molasses, or returning with supplies for the estates. There is an endless procession of almost toy-like carts, each drawn by a single small donkey, the two wheels habitually wobbly, the name, address, and license number of the owner in crude letters on the front of the diminutive box. The donkey is the invariable beast of burden of the Barbadian of the masses. He carries to town the products of little gardens; he brings the supplies of the innumerable small shops throughout the island; the country youth takes his “girl” riding in his donkey-cart; in later years the whole ebony family packs into it for a jolt across the country. Unlike the rest of tropical America, Barbados does not ride its donkeys or use them as pack-animals; nor, to all appearances, are they abused. Centuries of British training seems to have given the black islanders a compassion rare among their neighbors. Horsemen and pack-mules are likewise unknown along the white highways; oxen are rare; pedestrians are much less numerous than one would expect in so populous a community, while bicycles are as widely in use as in England.
There is a curiously English homelikeness about the landscape, which, if it is seldom rugged, is by no means monotonous. Every acre of ground is utilized; forbidding stone-and-mud walls topped by spikes or broken glass line the roads for long distances; villages, or at least houses, are so continuous that one is almost never out of human sight or sound. Coral is so abundant and wood so expensive that immense limestone steps often lead up to tiny wooden shacks, as out of proportion to their foundations as statues to their pedestals. The majority of the rather well-kept little negro cabins, however, are simply set up on small blocks of coral at the four corners. More than one band of hilarious sailors from visiting battleships have amused themselves by removing one of these props and tumbling a Barbadian family out of their beds in the small hours of the night.
Shopkeeping might almost be called the favorite sport of the “Badeyan”; the lack of jobs enough to go round has led so many to adopt this means of winning a possible livelihood that the island has been called “Over-shopped Barbados.” Everywhere wayside shanties bear the familiar black sign with white letters, varying only in name and number: “Percival Brathwaite—Licensed Seller of Liquors—No. 765.” Inside, perhaps behind a counter contrived from a single precious board, are a few crude shelves stocked mainly with bottles of rum or with cheap “soft drinks,” a few shillings’ worth of uninviting foodstuffs flanking them. The Barbadians have long been known as the “Yankees of the West Indies.” They are far more diligent merchants than most natives of tropical America, so much so that neither the Chinese, Jews, Portuguese, nor Syrians, so numerous in the other islands, can compete with them to advantage. But their knowledge of book-keeping is scanty, and it is often only the visible end of his light resources that convinces the petty shopkeeper that he is losing, rather than gaining at the popular pastime.
Every little way along the island roads other shanties bear the sign of this or that “Friendly Society.” These are a species of local insurance company or mutual benefit association. The negroes pay into them from three pence to a shilling a week,—some of the poorer neighbors nothing at all,—and receive in return sickness or accident benefits, or have their funeral expenses paid in case of death. But they are typically tropical or African in their indifference to a more distant to-morrow, for at the end of each year the remaining funds are divided among those members who have not drawn out more than they paid in, and with perhaps as much as five dollars each in their pockets the society indulges in a hilarious “blow-out.” Equally numerous are the signboards of “agents” of the undertakers of Bridgetown. They do not believe in waiting for the sickle of Father Time, those deathbed functionaries of the capital, but drum up trade with Barbadian energy. The island’s newspaper habitually carries their enticing pleas for clients:
“OUR DEAD MUST BE BURIED,” begins one of these appeals. “In the SAD HOUR why trouble yourself over the Dead when you can see E. T. ARCHER GITTENS, the up-to-date and experienced UNDERTAKER face to face? Look for the Hearse with the GOLDEN ANGEL!” There follows a “poem” of twenty-four verses setting forth the advantages of being buried by Gittens and ending with the touching appeal:
Just take a ride to Tweedside Stable