A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native headdress
A lady of Paramaribo
The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen. The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men, though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day.
Though their original cost is somewhat less, East Indian coolies, whom the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth, as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits, but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels, or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked.
I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots. They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese, however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help, but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful housekeepers.
When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow, his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more, receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away!
Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China. The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom worthy of the least confidence.
There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility, even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of “pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it, or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of its soil in time proved permanently injurious.