Each morning I met flocks of black children, carrying their slates and their few books on their heads, hurrying to school, usually in the church, from which a chorus of hymns invariably arose as soon as the pupils were gathered. In the early days the government of Jamaica did little toward educating the populace, but left it to the denominational schools. Only a few years ago was the penny a week, still required of pupils in most of the British West Indies, abolished, and though there are public schools now in every parish, the Moravians, Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, the Church of Scotland, the Baptists, the Wesleyans, and the Church of Jamaica get government subsidies for educational purposes. England’s school record in Jamaica is as low as our own in Porto Rico. Slightly more than half the children of school age are enrolled, and the attendance of these is fitful. There is compulsory attendance only in Kingston and two or three other towns. Only three out of every hundred pupils reach the sixth grade, and in all the island fewer than three thousand continue in school after the age of fourteen. School inspectors play an important part in the social life, each having about seventy schools in his charge, which he must visit twice a year. The Jamaica government has often been warned against the danger of teaching her democracy to read unless she also taught it to think, but the warning has never been taken very seriously.
The country churches of Jamaica are small and unimposing compared with those of Barbados, though they are more numerous and often conspicuous in their prominent settings on the green hillsides. The sects seem to run in streaks. In this ginger region—most fittingly perhaps—the Church of Scotland holds sway, the ministers receiving their stipends and their instructions from the land of heather. Farther on the Baptists prevailed, and every little negro urchin I questioned announced himself a faithful follower of that sect. On a high hilltop they had built a stone church as high as the eaves, then suddenly abandoned it, apparently because it had occurred to them that there was no water available at that height. The Jamaicans are much given to religious expression. It is nothing rare to hear them “callin’ on de Lawd” as they tramp along the roads, and their antics sometimes reach the height of religious insanity. Such seemed to be the case of a ragged old woman I passed during my second day’s tramp, or else she was pretending the power of prophecy for the benefit of the score of wide-eyed negroes squatting on the ground about her as she marched back and forth preaching with all the inflections of a negro minister and ending each exhortation with a “Bless de Lawd, Oh, mah soul!” which echoed back from the neighboring hills. Tombstones are less numerous in Jamaican churchyards than one would expect, perhaps because of the custom of burying people on their own property. One often comes upon a little cluster of graves in a lonely bit of woods, or beside a country hut, some of them dating from the slave days. Most of them are covered by a mound of stone and cement, without crosses or other upright monument, some are large vaults, all are well kept and usually freshly whitewashed. Strangely enough the negroes do not seem to be in any way superstitious about them.
Annotto and pimento are two important products of the Jamaican hills that are sure to draw the pedestrian’s attention. The former is a reddish berry in a kind of chestnut-burr pod, which grows on a spreading bush and, being boiled, gives an oily extract that is used as a dye. Pimento is what we know as allspice, and is the only Jamaican export indigenous to the island. The tree grows some thirty feet high and its greenish-gray bark and glossy green leaves cause it to stand out conspicuously from the surrounding forest. When crushed in the hand the leaves emit a strong aromatic odor, but they have no commercial value. The berry, of the size of a currant, grows in clusters, is glossy black when ripe and very pleasant to the taste. But it must be gathered before that, and has then a peppery, astringent quality. They are picked by sending a small boy up the tree to break off the ends of all the branches he can reach and throw them to the ground, where the berries are gathered by women and children and carried to the “barbecues,” where they are dried like coffee.
Irish potatoes can be grown in the highlands of Jamaica; there are some nutmegs; the oranges are green in color and of poor quality; there are sapotes (which are here called naseberries, a corruption of the West Indian Spanish níspero), grapefruit, shadducks (a pear-shaped grapefruit with a reddish pulp), the chocho, and a dozen other purely tropical fruits and vegetables. But with the single exception of the pimento all these products have been imported, though many of them have fervently adopted their new home. In 1793, for instance, when a famine was ravaging the island, William Bligh brought the breadfruit tree from the South Seas, and to-day it is as familiar a sight as African faces.
A furzy, almost treeless, red soil region surrounded me on my second afternoon. I was flanking the famous cockpit country, made up of numerous basins in close proximity and densely wooded from top to bottom, wilder forms of what are known in Minnesota as “sink-holes.” In these the Maroons took refuge in their wars with the English. The Maroons (an abbreviation of cimaroon, said to be derived from the Spanish cima, or mountain top) were originally slaves of the Spanish, who took to the cockpit country after England captured Jamaica, where they were joined from time to time by runaway slaves of the newcomers. England won her title to the island almost without a struggle, but it took two regiments to keep the Maroons from recapturing it. For nearly two hundred years they lived in wild freedom in the mountain recesses, frequently descending to harry the lowlands and carry off the cattle. The government at length entered into a treaty with them, granting them 2500 acres of land, and getting in turn their assistance in quelling uprisings of the slaves or repelling foreign invasion. They were a bold, hardy lot of men, holding the servile peasant population in great contempt, knowing every inch of the hills and forests, and were great hunters, either of human or four-footed game. In warfare they dressed themselves in green leaves which caused them to blend invisibly into the landscape. It has always been the policy of the Government to keep the Maroons at odds with the rest of the population, England’s familiar old scheme for dominion, like the accentuation of caste lines in India. To-day, though there are several so-called Maroon towns in the cockpit country and another in the northeastern parish, there are said to be almost no “pure blooded” Maroons left. They still exist in name, however, and have their own chiefs, churches, and schools, and once a year they are paid an official visit by the custos of the parish, when they “dress up in leaves and similar rubbish and go through a lot of childish hocuspocus.” In theory at least they are more independent than the other negroes—which is strong language indeed—but though every little while some black countryman bullies his neighbors by claiming to be a Maroon, there is nothing by which to distinguish the present descendants of the warlike slaves from those whose ancestors peacefully awaited emancipation.
Wayside shops are somewhat less numerous in Jamaica than in Barbados, and it is significant of a larger American influence here that they are called stores. The best of them, virtually all the provision shops in fact, are kept by Chinamen, unknown in “Little England.” Even in the most remote corners of the mountainous interior one comes upon Celestials plying their chosen trade, most of them of the younger generation, born in Jamaica and speaking the same slovenly tongue as their negro clients, yet retaining all their native attributes, sphinx-like, taciturn, unflaggingly diligent, apparently wholly devoid of curiosity, only rarely succumbing to the native influence to the extent of mumbling an indifferent “Where y’u go?” or “What y’u name?” In striking contrast to Barbados, too, are the stocks of imported canned and salt fish, even in stores on the edge of the sea. Every scattered collection of huts has its post office, always bearing the blue sign “Quinine for Sale.” Single pills of the febrifuge are sold in printed envelopes at a farthing each, though there are few coins of that size in circulation, and he who buys a penny-worth gets his four pills in as many separate envelopes. The favorite native occupation seems to be the patching of shoes. It is a rare mile that does not have at least one “shoemaker” seated in the door of his tiny shanty or single room, striving to make both ends meet with a few scraps of leather and a handful of nails. Almost the only native manufacture, however, is the weaving of “jippi jappa” hats, a very coarse, poor imitation of the Panama, though the country people make all shapes and sizes of baskets.
The language of Jamaica is at best curious; that spoken in the hills seems almost a foreign dialect, and the stranger must listen attentively and usually have phrases repeated before he understands them. He is unlikely to catch more than the general drift of a conversation between the natives. Yet few African words remain; what seem such to the stranger turn out upon inquiry to be mutilated forms of English. “No, please” and “Oh, yes, please, sah” are the habitual negative and affirmative of the rural districts when addressing white persons. Now and then the greeting of the older people is “Good mawnin’, dear massa,” or “I tell you good evenin’, mistress.” It is always “I couldn’t tell you,” never “I don’t know.” A white baby is a “bukra pickney” to the country people; smile at any of their childish antics and they are flattered into confiding to one another “De bukra him laugh.” African languages consist largely of gesture. With the learning of English from the stolid Anglo-Saxon this has in great measure disappeared. It is much more prevalent in the country than in the towns, and much more marked when they are talking to one another than when addressing a white man. The negro-English of the masses is no more intelligible to the newcomer than real English is to the rural population, and most planters save themselves time and trouble by addressing their laborers in their own dialect. The Jamaican negro is much given to talking things over with himself, his brain evidently refusing to work silently, and it is the rule rather than the exception to hear those one meets along the roads engaged in a soliloquy. In slavery days queer terms were used for money and they are still heard in the rural districts and in town markets. I found a Chinaman spending his spare time between customers in wrapping up tiny packages of sugar and asked him if they were a penny-worth, which seemed small enough indeed at present prices. No, they are sold at a “gill,” or three farthings. Two “gills,” or three “ha’p’nnies,” is a “quattie.” A shilling used to be a “macaroni,” three pence was for some reason called “fippence,” and to this day one occasionally hears the equivalent of thirty West Indian cents referred to as “a mac an’ fippence.” The ejaculatory “I mean to say” is as frequent in the speech of even the peasants as it is in England.
What may be called proverbs for lack of a more exact name are numerous among the masses of Jamaica. Let me quote a few, leaving the reader to catch what meaning he can out of them:
“Better fe water trow ’way dan gourd fe bruck.”