Our baggage following us ashore in one of the French islands
But we had long since left it, to drive by “buggy”—our American term for a country carriage has somehow become acclimated in Jamaica—into the Manchester hills. The trip from Kingston to Mandeville, 2200 feet above the sea, is like one from downtown New York to the Berkshires in July. Indeed the visitor to Manchester Parish might almost fancy himself in Connecticut, in spite of the prevalence of negroes. The gray stone fences, with big horses ankle-deep in the grassy pastures behind them, the rolling stretches of corn, the very birds bear out the illusion. Even the clumps of bamboo seem to be growing on Connecticut hillsides; the orchids and tree-ferns contrast strangely with a weather and landscape of the temperate zone; Mandeville itself, long famous as a health resort for the residents of the sweltering coast lands, has that air of calm repose of some old New England village.
Carriage driving has more nearly survived modern invention in Jamaica than in any other of the West Indies, perhaps for the double reason of the high price of “gas” and the existence of good horses. The Jamaican horses are famed throughout the Caribbean for their size and endurance—also for their hard gait as riding animals. They are not handsome, being usually lank and goose-rumped, but they are so docile they may sometimes be driven without being broken and they retain the size of their English ancestors instead of degenerating into the runts of most tropical America, and they are unusually free from disease. Breeders claim that they remain so sound in spite of the enervating climate largely because of the limestone formation of the island and the recuperative effects of its high altitudes. At any rate there are few places where a negro-driven buggy and pair cannot be had on short notice. Many splendid draft mules are also bred on the island.
I preferred, however, to set out on foot from Mandeville for a jaunt diagonally across the island. Walking is not a favorite recreation among either the white or the “colored” castes, though there is no good reason other than inertia why it should not be in the temperate highlands. Jamaica has more than two thousand miles of good roads, far outdoing those of Porto Rico in extent, though they are narrower and sometimes poorly kept, partly because many of them are parochial roads, unknown in the neighboring island. “Finger-boards” point the way everywhere. The high altitudes of Manchester, as of several other parishes, lack only the shade-grown tobacco fields and the variegated tints of intensive cultivation to rival in beauty our own West Indian colony. Birds are always singing, scattered little white houses speckle the immense green hillsides, the road banks are often carpeted with “wandering Jew” enough to make the fortune of an American florist, or they are hung with tapestries of what look like daisies, while other flowers bloom on every hand. In a climate pleasant even at noonday one would scarcely recognize the Berkshire landscape as tropical but for a banana, a giant fern, or a palm tree here and there in the foreground.
Little stone and brick coffee floors, called “barbecues” in Jamaica, frequently flank the roadway. Manchester parish grows much coffee, though it rarely reaches the American market, for England consumes all the island produces. Here the bushes are usually unshaded, protecting trees being unnecessary, if not harmful, at such an altitude. Instead of the little toy donkey-carts of Barbados there are big rattling mule wagons. Donkeys are sometimes ridden, occasionally used as pack-animals. The peasants have little of the insolence of the towns, but greet the traveler with a kind of military salute and a gentle “Good day, sah.” Most of them wear caps, as in Barbados, though the similar headgear of the women in that island is here replaced by bandannas, usually red and never topped off with a hat as in Haiti. The men, and many of the women, smoke home-made pipes with long curved stems, buying their tobacco in long coils called “jackass rope,” which the war forced to the painful price of a shilling a yard, though it was once but two pence. Fully developed girls of twelve eye the passer-by with crudely coquettish airs. Information as to distance is given in “chains” if at all, the customary answer being a non-committal “not too far, sah.” The great bulk of the country population is jet black, though in the towns there are all grades of yellow, from the impudent slight-cast down to mulattoes.
It was in the cabin of one of the latter that I took shelter from the afternoon shower, in a region rejoicing in the name of Split Virgin. He was perhaps two thirds Irish and one third negro, but always referred to his black neighbors as “niggers.” On the walls of his unpainted board parlor hung framed chromo portraits of his white ancestors. The inevitable topic of conversation of course was the high cost of living—where can one escape it? A “head” of sugar had advanced from a “gill” (three farthings) to six pence; corn cost more than the chickens to which it was fed increased in worth; wild nuts were more expensive than the flesh they added to his hogs. Calico, put in his wife, all cloth in fact, was getting impossible. Soon they would have to go naked—which reminded me that one never sees naked children in Jamaica, unlike most of the Caribbean islands. A man could not even grow his own food any more; three fourths of his yam holes were robbed at night by the thieving “niggers.” The war and the travel and experience that went with it had debauched even the better class of them, until they were slothful, proud, insolent, and wasteful.
I stopped that night in a mulatto house that took in lodgers, the only point of interest being the dug-out log that served as bath-tub. The invariable Jamaican question in making new acquaintances is “Please, sah, who you is; y’u’ name, please sah?” Once they know your name they seem to feel that everything is all right. But you must have a name, with a mister in front of it. You never say your name is Smith. Your name is Mr. Smith. I tremble to think what might befall a stranger in rural Jamaica who did not happen to have a name, and a mister to prefix to it.
Over the top of the island range at Coleyville, with its wireless station, I passed a Jamaica sugar-mill with a daily capacity of one gross “heads.” It consisted of two upright wooden rollers turned by a donkey, an oval iron kettle set into the top of a mud furnace, and a score of little tin cups in which are hardened the one-pound dark-brown lumps of crude sugar that are called “heads” and which form a principal article of diet among the country people. Long-tailed humming-birds shimmered among the flowers at the roadside. Broad green vistas of banana plants, their broad leaves whipped to ribbons by the trade wind, filled many a valley, sometimes climbing part way up the surrounding slopes. Road gangs, usually of two men, were frequent; negro women young and old, sometimes in long groups, sometimes quite alone, were to be found in every mile, sitting on stone piles and wielding their hammers. They are paid a shilling a “box” for breaking up the stones, which they must hunt for in the fields and carry to the roadside, earning an average, if they told the truth, of nine pence a day. It was planting time for ginger, which grows in little patches on the steep red hillsides. The plant, which is pulled in February or March, somewhat resembles a currant-bush and only the root is valuable, the bushes being broken up and used in the following May or June as seed. With good luck a Jamaica peasant may get 2000 pounds of cured ginger to the acre. Wages varied in this region from “one and six” to “two and six,” one of the workmen told me, adding regretfully “de cultivators in de hills can’t afford de dollar” (four shillings) “dat am payin’ now de sugar estates.” Shingle and wood houses were the rule here, and they were better than the rural hovels of Porto Rico, perhaps because the material is more plentiful.