Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Strictly speaking, there are two color-lines in the British West Indies. Unlike the United States, where “black” and “colored” are synonymous terms when applied to the negro race, there is a middle class of “colored people,” as there are Eurasians in India, though actual membership in it implies a certain degree of education, culture, wealth, or influence. There are “colored” men who rank themselves and are ranked as negroes, working shoulder to shoulder with them in the fields; there are others who sit side by side with their white brethren on the judicial bench and reach high rank in church, politics, medicine, law, and commerce. Color may almost be said to be no bar to promotion in official life, within limits. This middle set is extremely assertive in its pride and, on the whole, is more disliked by the negroes than are the whites themselves.

On a Jamaican train one day I fell into conversation with an octoroon school-teacher. He was a forcible fellow who had evidently retained most of the qualities of his white ancestors. For some time I avoided any reference to the matter of human complexions, having no desire to offend him. Before long, however, he began to expatiate on the necessity of keeping the “niggers” in their place.

“Hoho,” said I to myself, “so you consider yourself a white man?”

But he did not, for soon he began to explain the position of “us colored people.” He often met fellow-teachers who were negroes, he said, but no negro ever entered his house, nor had he ever introduced his daughter to one of them.

“The nigger,” he went on, “always gets cocky when he is given either authority or encouragement. If I invite a negro to my house, the next thing I know he is proposing to my daughter and I have to kick him out, for in Jamaica the colored girl forever loses caste by marrying a black man. I would rather die than marry a negro woman, yet I would no sooner marry a white woman, because it would be hell in a few years. At the same time I know that a white man would have the same fear, if I were his guest. So I do not go to his house, even if I am asked, for he would be patronizing; and I do not invite a white man to my house because I know he would feel he was doing me a favor and an honor.

“By the way,” he asked later, “how would I get on in the United States? How did you know I am colored? My hair is pretty good.” He smiled rather pathetically, passing a hand over it.

It was straight as my own, and his skin was no darker than that of many a Spaniard. Yet, though he might not have been suspected in Paris, or possibly even in London, any American would have recognized him as a negro at a glance. I told him so frankly, and he accepted the statement with consummate good sense. Thanks to the point of view he had expressed, there is little further mixture of races going on in the British West Indies, with the possible exception of Trinidad, and the three castes will probably remain intact and will each have to work out its own destiny.

Included in the government of Jamaica are the Turks and Caicos Islands, which belong geographically to the Bahamas, as they once did officially. Transportation between them and the mother island is worse than uncertain, and they depend chiefly on their salt beds and emigration for their livelihood. There are a few small islands scattered close along the coast of Jamaica, but none of them is of any importance.

The Jamaica Government Railway is one of the oldest in the world, having been first opened to traffic in 1845. It is almost two hundred miles long, running diagonally across the island from Kingston to Montego Bay, and north and eastward to Port Antonio, with two small branches. The fares are high, being about seven cents a mile first-class and half as much for second. The latter is really third-class in all but name, with hard wooden benches and scanty accommodations, and carries virtually all the traveling population. In it one will find the poorer whites, such as ministers with their thin, hungry-looking wives, and other poverty-stricken mortals, contrasting strongly with the “husky,” broad-shouldered negroes with their velvety black skins, beautiful as mere types of the animal kingdom. Here and there, perhaps, sits a young Chinaman, inscrutable, seeing and thinking of it all, no doubt, yet never giving a hint of his thoughts, a Celestial still though born on the island. Then there is a scattering of all grades of yellow, some of them so much so that they try to smile one into the belief that they are white. In a corner of one of these coaches is a negro in a wire cage, the railway post-office. First-class consists of a little eight-seat compartment in the end of one, or at most two, coaches, stiff-backed, hot, dusty, commonly filled with tobacco-smoke and scarcely a fit place for a white woman. Occasionally it is crowded with Chinese shopkeepers and the bundles of wares they would not find room for in the other class, but more often it, too, is distinctly African in tinge. For like the island, the “J. G. R.” is overwhelmingly negro. All the trainmen are full blacks, as are virtually all the passengers. The “trainboy” is a haughty negro woman in near-silk garb, enormous earrings, and a white, nurse-like cap, who sells chiefly beer and never calls out her wares. In the island dialect a local train is a “walkin’ train,” and all Jamaican trains fall into this category, as do all those in the West Indies except in Cuba and, to a slight degree, Trinidad. There are no train manners. In a Spanish country if you put so much as a cane in a seat your possession of it is assured and respected to the end of the journey. Put all your baggage, and your coat and hat in addition, into a Jamaican train-seat and you will probably come back to find your possessions tossed on the floor and some impudent black wench occupying your place. Why the “J. G. R.” is so ungodly as to run Sunday trains on its Port Antonio branch, I do not know. They are about the only things that do move in the British West Indies on the Sabbath.

From Kingston the train jolts away through the swirling dust across a flat, Arizona-like plain studded with cactus, though moderately green. Soon come broad stretches of banana fields, bananas planted in endless rows down which one can look as through archways, many of the plants heavy with their bunches nearing maturity, others showing little more than the big purple flower shaped like a swollen, unhusked ear of corn, along the stem of which a miniature bunch is just starting. Between these are other fields, with trees girdled and blackened where some forest is being killed to make way for more bananas. Negro women with oval market baskets on their heads tramp energetically along the white highway; now and then the refined features of a Hindu break the monotony of brutal negro faces, though he has lost his distinctive garb. Then comes the prison farm of St. Catherine’s Parish, with its green gardens, its irrigation ditches filled with clear water, and its horde of prison laborers. But the train is already coming to a screeching halt in the former capital of the island, twelve miles from Kingston.