The white residents of Kingston seem to live in fear of the black multitude that make up the great bulk of the population. When hoodlums and rowdies jostle them on the street, they shift aside with a slinking air; even when black hooligans cling to the outside of street-cars pouring out obscene language, the white men do not shield their wives and daughters beside them by so much as raising their voices in protest. When cursing, filthy market women pile their baskets and unwashed produce in upon them and crowd their own women out of their places, they bear it all with humble resignation, as if they were the last survivors of the civilized race wholly disheartened by an invasion of barbarian tribes. The visitor who flees all this and retires is lucky to catch half an hour of unbroken sleep amid the endless uproar of shouting negroes, the barking of innumerable dogs, and the crowing of more cocks than even a Latin-American city can muster. It would be difficult, indeed, to say anything bad enough of Kingston to give the full, hot, dusty, insolent, half-ruined picture. The traveler will see all he wants and more of the capital in the time he is forced to remain there on the way to or from his ship without including a stay in his itinerary. Port au Prince is clean and gentlemanly in comparison.
The electric street-cars, manned by ill-mannered crews and rocking like ships in a storm over the earthquake-undulated ground, run far out of town. They must, in order to reach anywhere worth going. Beyond Half Way Tree the sloping Liguanea plain grows green and the rain that seems never to descend to Kingston gives the vegetation a fresher coat, yet the way is still lined for a long distance by negro shacks. Only when one reaches the open meadows of Constant Spring or the residence section served by another branch of the line does anything approaching comfort, cleanliness, and peace appear. Yet even the boasted Hope Gardens, set far back at the base of the Blue Mountain range, have little of the open, breezy beauty of the Queen’s Park in Trinidad. Until he has drifted farther afield, the stranger will not cease to wonder what charms bring Jamaica its large colony of winter tourists. Even then he must conclude that the prevalence of a tongue closely enough resembling English to be sometimes comprehensible and the legal existence of John Barleycorn give the island its handicap over Porto Rico.
Unlike the other British West Indies, Jamaica clings to the English monetary system. The two colonial banks issue pound notes and higher, which are easily mistaken for those in dollars from the other islands, as more than one new cashier has discovered too late to rescue his first month’s salary. The word “dollar” is frequently heard, but it is merely a popular euphonism for four shillings. Then there are local pennies and half-pennies of nickel alloy that are not readily distinguished from the English shilling and two-shilling pieces. Jamaica belongs to the postal union, but, unlike the other colonies of the empire, she does not subscribe to the British postal convention with the United States, with the result that visitors commonly find their letters taxed three pence extra postage, to the continual advantage of the local government.
This latter gives the impression of being both backward and clumsy. A governor and a privy council of not more than eight members are appointed by the crown. The legislative body is presided over by the former and consists of five of the latter, ten other crown appointees, and a custos, elected by the people, from each of the fourteen parishes. British male subjects of twenty-one who occupy house property and pay taxes of thirty shillings, or who receive a nominal salary of fifty shillings a year, are qualified voters. A recent enactment gives the few women possessing certain qualifications a limited right to vote. Parish boards can recommend legislation, but only the high colonial officials can actually make laws or pay out money. No bills involving questions of finance are passed if opposed by nine elective members, yet those same custodes cannot initiate legislation. Moreover, the king may disallow any law within two years of its passing. The result is a division of responsibility from power and frequent deadlocks that make the apparent autonomy of the island a continual process of “standing pat.”
The few white officials are slow, antiquated, precedence-ridden, in striking contrast to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly informed rulers of our own dependencies. Indeed, a journey to the West Indies is apt to cause the American to rearrange his notions of the relative efficiency of the English, and the French or ourselves, as colonizers. We are sadly in need of a Colonial Office and a corps of trained officials to administer what we dislike to call our colonies, but even our deserving Democrats, or Republicans, as the case may be, scarcely hamper the development of our dependencies as thoroughly as do its medieval-minded rulers that of Jamaica. An example or two will suffice to illustrate the point. The government railway was lifted out of its slough of despond and rehabilitated by an experienced administrator. When he found, however, that his £1000 a year did not suffice to keep him in shoes, the insular powers let him go rather than increase his pittance. Back in the Middle Ages that was a generous stipend for railway managers. By a recent law the Government of Jamaica has decided to take over the making, and later the distribution, of rum. At the time of our departure it was advertising for “an experienced superintendent” at the breath-taking salary of £2000 a year! No doubt there was a rush of managers of Cuban sugar centrals contending for this noble prize.
It may be of interest to know that Jamaica is livid with fear that she, too, may be struck by prohibition, and is hastily erecting all manner of protective lightning-rods. Her newspapers carry columns of arguments pro and con, most of them clinched with quotations from the Bible, as if that had anything to do with the case. Reading the impassioned utterances of the “wets,” one might suppose that the United States is in the act of organizing a great army of grape-juicers to descend upon Jamaica and wrest from her all bottled joy in life, while the casual observer gets the impression that the great majority of the islanders would rather die at the doors of their rum distilleries and liquor shops than suffer that ignominious fate.
With the exception of Barbados, where special conditions exist, Jamaica has remained a possession of the British crown longer than any other land, and the influence of the English on the African race can perhaps nowhere be better studied. It is not particularly flattering. The Jamaican has all the faults of his rulers and his own negro delinquencies to boot. He is slow-witted, inhospitable, arrogant when he dares to be, cringing when he feels that to be to his advantage. The illegitimate birth-rate is exceedingly high, sexual morality extremely shaky among the masses. Though the country people are sometimes pleasing in their simplicity, they quickly take on the unpleasant characteristics of the town dwellers when they come in contact with them, the most conspicuous being an unbridled insolence and a constant desire to annoy what may quite justly be called their betters. Part of this rudeness is due, no doubt, to the same cause as that of our laboring classes—a misguided attempt to prove their equality by scorning the amenities of social intercourse. A large percentage of it, however, is easily recognizable as native African barbarism, which increases by leaps and bounds as the suppression of former days weakens. If he is working for you or selling you something, the Jamaican can be softly courteous; when he has no such reasons to repress his natural brutality his impudence is colossal.
Even more than in the other British islands the masses of Jamaica have been “spoiled” by the war. Official reports credit the “B. W. I.” regiments with “excelling in many acts of bravery”; private information, even from some of the very men who dictated the official reports, has a different tenor. According to this they were useless in actual warfare, not a man of them having died facing the enemy; even as labor battalions they were not worth their keep, and their conduct was such that both the French and the Italians protested against their being stationed within reach of the civil population. Whichever of these reports is more trustworthy, there is no doubt that the hospitality shown these crude-minded blacks by a certain class of European women, and the fuss made over them upon their return, have given their rulers a problem which will scarcely be solved during the present generation.
Those who have spent their lives with the Jamaica negro—and to a certain extent he is typical of his race in all the British West Indies—agree in the main with the casual observer in the summing up of his characteristics. He is apt to take little pride in his work and to meet any criticism with “Cho, too much boderation; can’t do better.” He sees little immorality in lying, and the man who expects truth from him according to the Anglo-Saxon standard will be grievously disappointed. Exactness in such matters as age, distance, names, and the like means nothing to him. His answer to a roadside inquiry is almost certain to be “not too far,” and his age may change by ten years or more within the space of two sentences. He has the child’s tendency to exaggeration and the building up of stories out of whole cloth, yet he can scarcely plead the same excuse as the child, for his imagination is, at best, in a comatose state. Gratitude seems to have been completely left out of his make-up. He dearly loves a bargain or a dispute; the shop-keeper who has only one price arouses his hostility, and to appear in court either as plaintiff, defendant, or witness is one of his favorite forms of amusement.