“Like the Irish,” as one English Jamaican puts it, “he does himself more credit abroad than at home; like them he is quite ready to emigrate and goes where the dollar calls, rather than aping the Englishman, who prefers a competency under the Union Jack to possible riches under another flag. If there is one thing he dislikes more than another,” continues this authority, “it is sarcasm. He will stand any amount of ‘cussing,’ but he keenly resents ridicule of any kind.” What this critic does not add is that the sarcasm must be extremely broad if the average Jamaican is to recognize it as such.
The lower classes are much given to “teefing” small articles, particularly food. One might almost say that the chief curse of the island is “praedial larceny,” as they still spell it in Jamaica, which means the stealing of growing crops. Newspapers, public reports, and private conversations contain constant references to this crime, prosecutions for which nearly doubled in the year following the war. Many people no longer take the trouble to plant a crop of ground provisions, knowing that they will almost certainly be stolen by black loafers before the owners themselves can gather them. The main faults of the masses,—insolence, lying, illegitimacy, slackness in work, and thieving,—can scarcely be laid to drink; for though Jamaica rum is famous and drunkenness is on the increase, the women, who drink comparatively little, are as bad as the men in all these matters.
Prisons and penal institutions are more in evidence in Jamaica than schools. While the latter are small and inconspicuous, the prison in Kingston is larger than Sing Sing, in Spanish Town there is another almost as large, and many more scattered throughout the island. The police, who are virtually all jet black, are poorly disciplined and much inclined to look misdemeanors, indecency, and even crime in the face without being moved to action. Pompously proud and inclined to insolence, also, they seldom fail to take advantage of their power over white men whenever it seems safe to do so. For there is little color-line in legal matters, and not only can whites be arrested by black officers, but they run a splendid chance of being tried by colored magistrates. The tendency to give the higher positions of responsibility in the police force to young Englishmen who have been decorated in the war or who have influential friends, yet who are more noted for their card playing and dancing than for ability or diligence in their new calling, has enhanced a situation which the better class of Jamaicans view with alarm. There are one hundred and sixteen constabulary stations on the island and a force of a thousand regular constables, supplemented by almost as many district deputies, yet Jamaica is by no means so well policed as Porto Rico with its insular force of scarcely eight hundred.
Even the friendly critic already quoted finds little to praise in the Jamaican except his cheerfulness, his loyalty, within limits, to those he serves, and his kindness to his own people, and he admits that the first of these qualities is often based on lack of ambition, “though it is nevertheless pleasant to live with.” On the other hand, lack of equal opportunity is not without its effect on the negro character. Jamaica suffers from the same big estate and primogeniture troubles that hamper the masses in England. Slightly larger than Porto Rico, with five hundred thousand acres still held by the crown and with only half of the remainder under cultivation, the rest being wooded or “ruinate,” as they call it in Jamaica, the island is principally in the hands of the whites. These strive to keep their estates intact and hold the negro in economic subjection.
“Negroes who come back from Panama or Cuba with in some cases hundreds of pounds are seldom able to buy property,” complained one of their sponsors. “It is only when the white man becomes very poor or the negro very rich that he can get a chunk of some big estate. The big owners too often pasture, rather than plant, their best land and rent out the worst to the small peasants, at one pound an acre a year. If the rented land turns out to be too stony or otherwise useless, that is the peasant’s loss and the owner’s gain.” One difficulty in bettering this condition, however, is the disinclination of the peasantry to pay regularly. On the whole, the planters show little generosity toward their laborers, thereby increasing the feeling between the two races.
Though it is the most populous of the British West Indies, and the largest, unless one follows the English habit of including British Guiana, Jamaica is much less densely inhabited than Porto Rico, for it is natural that two islands so nearly alike in size, situation, and formation should constantly suggest comparison. When the British took Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655, it had but 4200 inhabitants. Half a century later the population was more than two thirds negro. In 1842, four years after the abolition of slavery, the first shipload of indentured East Indians arrived, but this practice had almost ceased long before the Indian Government recently put a legal end to it. The Chinese coolies were tried for a time, but only in small numbers, and their descendants now confine themselves almost entirely to keeping what we would call “grocery stores.” Both the Hindus and the Chinese, and for that matter the native whites, speak the slovenly Jamaican dialect, and there remains little of the Oriental garb and racial mixture so conspicuous in Trinidad.
“On my arrival in Jamaica in 1795,” says one of its governors, “I found a vast assembly of French emigrants of all ranks, qualities and colors, who had fled from the horrors of Santo Domingo”—by which, of course, he meant Haiti. Many Cubans came also when their island was under Spanish rule. But all these elements scarcely moderate Jamaica’s distinctly African complexion. The visitor is apt to be astounded by the blackness of the great bulk of the population. The percentage of full blacks is in striking contrast to the mulatto majority in the French islands, where the mixture of races is not very sternly frowned upon, and still more so to the Spanish-American tropics, where miscegenation is so common that nearly everyone is a “colored person.” By her last census, which is nearly ten years old, Jamaica claims 831,383 inhabitants, of whom 15,605 were white, 17,380 Hindus, and 2,111 Chinese. The fact that she has barely two hundred to the square mile, as compared to twelve hundred in Barbados, is probably not without its bearing in the visible difference of energy between the two islands.
The color-line in Jamaica, and it is more or less typical of that in all the British West Indies, falls somewhere between our own and the rather hazy one in vogue in the French islands.
“I think the English individually,” said a Jamaican sambo, that is a three fourths negro, who had worked on the Canal Zone, “like us black people still less than you Americans do; but governmentally they treat us as equals, and you do not. Yet in some ways I prefer the American system. An Englishman says you are his equal, but you had better not act as if you were. The American says, ‘You’re a damned nigger and you know it,’ and there is no hypocrisy in the matter.”