Folk lore shows evidence of English and African mixture. Here is a story as it was told by our son’s Jamaican nursemaid, without the inimitable pronunciation:
“One day a gentleman and lady have two girl. And they sent them out to look for them granny. When them got in the thick wood and them meet with a orangootang. The orangootang axed them where are them going to. ‘I am going to look for my granny.’ And said, ‘Here is my granny.’ And them said, ‘No, you is not my granny. My granny got a mark right on her mout’.’ And he went in the thick wood took a knife scrape off his mout’ and come out and said, ‘Here is your granny now.’ And he took dem and carry dem in his house and just half cook de food dat carry for dem granny. And when night come him eat off de middle of de biggest one and lef’ only de hand and de head and de feet. And de little one said, ‘Granny, let I go outside.’ And he said go and de smallest one run home and can’t talk till three days. And de father get twelve men and gone look for de orangootang. And when he going six mont’ he catch de orangootang and put him into de cage and when six mont’ come he throw kerosene oil on him and light him a fire.”
Tenses mean nothing to the uneducated Jamaican, and the subjective and objective pronouns are more likely to be reversed than not. Between the plural and singular of either verb or noun he shows an engaging impartiality, while the double negative is to him a form of emphasis.
Beyond Ulster Spring, a scattered town in a kind of cockpit so full of mist in the early morning as to seem a lake, my road dropped rapidly down a beautiful narrow valley, the high, ragged hills on both sides tree-clothed in all but the barest white sheer spots. Little wooden houses were pitched on wooded knolls and jutting places that seemed almost inaccessible. Here and there the ancient stone road-parapet had fallen away, giving splendid opportunities for far swifter descent on a dark night. Through the canyon echoed the voice of a negro woman, singing hymns as she walked. Birds sang continually; from the inaccessible little houses came the occasional bleating of goats. Dry River Lake, evidently in the bottom of a prehistoric crater, shimmered far below me, surrounded by the densest vegetation, and utter silence. Jamaica has many rivers that disappear and reappear at random throughout their course. Negro men on their way to work on the jungled hillsides carried their machetes in one hand and a smouldering block of wood in the other, to smoke out the mosquitos. Some bore in addition a blackened five-gallon oil tin of water on their heads. The day did not grow unpleasantly warm until I had passed Sawyer’s Market and entered a long fertile plain, completely uncultivated, almost uninhabited, studded with great clumps of bamboo. Dolphin Head, the highest peak in western Jamaica, peered above the landscape to the left. Then bit by bit the negroes grew numerous and impudent again, and I knew that the sugar-bearing coastlands were at hand.
Negroes so black and ox-like that they seemed scarcely human plodded past, never giving greeting as in the hills, though sometimes shouting an obscene jest. Children ran at sight of me, as those of Italy, for instance, do at sight of a negro. Ragged old women were hoeing cane in the fields. They earned five shillings a week; the strongest men three a day, at “task-work,” laboring from Monday to Friday. Here and there was an old-fashioned rum-mill, recognizable by its stench as well as by its old brick chimney and the heaps of rotting cane-pulp about it. The cane-carts were hauled by three or four pairs of oxen, a dozen men shrieking about them to urge them up the slopes of the soft fields. Like most of those in Jamaica they were crosses between English and East Indian cattle, particularly the Mysore breed. Though inferior from the butcher’s point of view, these cross-breeds are noted for their quickness and endurance under the yoke, and they have a black, sun-resistant skin even when outwardly light-colored or white. Once I passed a ruined old windmill tower, capped with ivy, but they are rare in Jamaica. The thick, hot air hung motionless after the afternoon shower. Rocky, bush-grown hills intruded again where one expected flat, fertile coastlands, sugar-cane died out once more, and with it the negroes.
Then suddenly the Caribbean appeared through a break in the hills, so high and dark-blue that it seemed at first a new mountain range, and on the edge of it I caught a glimpse of Falmouth, not to be seen again until I was treading its very streets. Many old stone ruins, especially the foundations and steps of what had evidently been big plantation houses, peered forth from the bush. There were other signs that large estates had once flourished where all was not “ruinate.” Dreary, silent, dismal, swarming with mosquitoes, the last few miles led through an unbroken mangrove swamp. Myriads of land-crabs of all sizes and colors, some huge as small turtles, others no larger than flies, with green, red, cream-colored, and multi-colored backs, scuttled into their holes as I passed. Falmouth had little to recommend it, either as a place of abode or of sojourn. Sweltering even at midnight, its streets impudent with lounging negroes, it recalled by contrast the cool and simple little villages in the hills. I found lodging in a room strewn with the greasy paraphernalia of a negro dentist and which had not known the luxury of a broom or a dust-cloth in weeks, though the mulatto house-owner complained that she “can’t get no work to do.” A Salvation Army street meeting which erupted a few doors away was the nearest replica of a Central African tomtom dance, with clothes on and smeared with a thin English veneer, that it has ever been my luck to behold in an ostensibly civilized country.
I had not intended to walk the twenty-two miles along the coast from Falmouth to Montego Bay, but as the mail bus left at three in the morning and private automobiles demanded three shillings a mile, I changed my plans. Groups of ragged negro women came down out of the hills singing, their dinner in a rag or a pail on their heads, and fell to work in newly cleared cane-fields. Pedestrians were constantly beating off the mosquitoes with leafy branches. Once there had been big stone houses here also, now there were only miserable negro shacks scattered among the cocoanut groves. The sea breeze was nearly always cut off by these or mangrove jungles. The only noise except occasional shrieking negroes was the cry of mourning doves and the equally mournful “sough” of the slow breakers on the reefs far out from shore. Fishermen were rare. Now and then the swamps disappeared and the road plodded endlessly onward at the very edge of the unruffled inner lagoons. I passed only one shop on the journey, kept of course by a Jamaica-born Chinaman. Drinking water was not to be had; the June sun beat down like a red-hot ingot; the incredibly stupid watchmen, most of whom were females, could not be induced to sell a single one of the green cocoanuts under their charge. I adopted the Jamaican custom of praedial larceny and, picking a plump green nut now and then from the low young trees, jabbed a hole in it on a sharp fencepost and quenched a raging thirst that returned again within a half mile. Noisome carrion crows, with red heads instead of black, unlike those of Trinidad, and called “johncrow” by the natives, moved lazily aside as I advanced.
Midway between the two towns I passed a three-story mansion set somewhat back from the sea on what was once one of the finest estates in Jamaica. To-day it is closed and abandoned, yet needs no watchman, for the negroes are convinced that it is haunted. Rose Hall it is called, and its story has long been familiar throughout Jamaica. Here, runs the yarn, lived a pretty Mrs. Palmer, who was so eccentric that she caused the house to be built according to the divisions of time,—365 windows, 52 doors, 24 rooms, 12 of this, 7 of that, and so on. But eccentricity seems to have been the least of her faults, for in this very house, the tale goes on, she killed four husbands and was on the point of sending the fifth to join them when he turned the tables.
At length the featureless road swung inland along the edge of an immense bay, across which stood forth the wooded hills of Hanover parish. Its waters were glass-smooth, but the sea-wall smashed for long distances recalled that the Caribbean does not always lie so peaceful and enticing. Cottages with bathing-suits hung over the veranda rails began to appear, then white men, of whom I had seen but one in three days, and he with a negro wife. Montego Bay aspires to be a tourists’ winter paradise, but unfortunately the town lies around behind a hill that cuts off that life-saving trade wind which Jamaicans call “the doctor” and in its place comes only the fitful land breeze known as “the undertaker.” Then, too, it is short of water. Most of Jamaica is, for unlike Barbados, which has not a tithe as many sources of supply, the island depends chiefly on what it can catch from the rains. The result is frequently to deprive the perspiring visitor of his bath. Tourist literature would have us believe that “the band of the Montego Bay Citizens’ Association performs in the Parade”—most Jamaican towns have a dusty central square known by that name—“in the evenings, and greatly adds to the pleasure of the visitor.” “Perform” it does indeed, and none can deny that it adds to the risibility of nations; but let no music lover be misled by this particular abuse of the maltreated word “pleasure.”
Of the many other beauties of Jamaica space precludes anything more than brief mention. There are the cane-fields of Westmoreland parish, for instance, the tobacco growing hills of St. Elizabeth, the journey up the gorge to Bog Walk, St. Ann’s parish with its newly born lake of Moneague, its many pimento trees, its beguiling Fern Gully, where are to be found innumerable species of the plants that give the ravine its name, from the maidenhair to the tree-fern, known locally as the “rattadrum.” Here, too, are Roaring River Falls and the scene of Columbus’ longest residence in the West Indies, for he lay a twelve-month with his worm-eaten vessels in what is now called Dry Harbor.