A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE
CHAPTER X
A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE
A square room painted white and fitted with dull red benches and a raised platform; on the platform the magistrate, a weary-looking man with faded hair and wrinkled face, and eyes screened by gold-rimmed spectacles. As he sits, listlessly playing with his papers, apparently indifferent to the pleadings of the prisoners, or the garrulous stormings of nervous witnesses, he seems to suggest a tired speculator reading the first official details of his own bankruptcy. Occasionally he raises his voice and a hushed court hears, “All right, get down now,” and a witness, only just sufficiently recovered from nervousness to have reached the period of unintelligible verbosity, gets down with a sulky jerk and proud bearing. All Jamaican negroes speak a language officially known as English. From the fact that it is alleged that he can understand the unbroken flow of their fearful eloquence, the magistrate must be counted a man of consummate linguistic ability. In front of the platform is a huge table, at which all the whites and yellow-whites of the district are foregathered to witness the administration of justice. At the head of the table, and at the feet of the magistrate, is the clerk; an ancient man with the remains of a weak voice, and a habit of looking over his steel eye-glasses in the approved scholastic style. He is an important, if not a picturesque personage. The decorative touch is afforded to the court by the appearance of the inspector of police. He sits at another corner of the large table behind a great white helmet carefully placed on the summit of a large pile of important blue papers, in the proper crown and cushion fashion. The helmet is the police inspector’s shield and guard, and badge of office. It is an inflexible example of the power and nobility of the law; it is an object on which the prisoners may fasten their eyes, should they be unable to gaze for ever into the inscrutable depths of the spectacles of the presiding magistrate. Compared with the magistrate, the clerk and the inspector of police, the other whites and yellow-whites are unimportant. Planters and tradesmen, and commission agents, they lounge gracelessly round the table, fingering their riding whips or pulling at the ends of their scrubby beards. The table marks the boundary line of the charmed circle, into which only the whites, and the not very yellow-whites, may enter with impunity. Beyond, in the public benches, grouped carelessly in picturesque disorder, are the natives. A sweltering crowd it is, throbbing with silence, just as the tropical midday throbs with heat. The prisoner at the bar, a ragged, unkempt negro, whose cleaner father must have come from the malarial swamps behind the Gold Coast, is answering to a charge of stealing, feloniously and with malicious intent, one and a half pairs of meat known and described (in Jamaica and elsewhere) as pig’s trotters. As we entered, the prisoner at the bar was tearing at the mangy patches of his mud-coloured hair, and pleading “I no took them master, sir, yer honor, I no took them; I ask to be set free. I no see them, I no eat them, ’fore God in ’eaven.”
It was interesting to watch the varied emotions playing over the expressive faces of the watching crowd of the man’s enemies and friends. Enemies first, because the natives seemed as cruelly thoughtless, and quite as vicious, as the ladies in any balcony at a Spanish bull-ring. When the monotonous mumble of the magistrate has finished, only the pleased smile of the prisoner told us the news of his acquittal. To the unexperienced ear, the magistrate’s mumble was just as incomprehensible as any of the jargon of the witnesses themselves.
The next two or three cases were concerned with the question of paternity, and in each instance the plaintive lady received the consolation of eighteen-pence a week for a period of years. Then followed a charge of assault. One lady had beaten another with an implement remotely resembling a carpenter’s stool. On each side there were many witnesses and, apparently, many liars. One coquette in a West Indian gown of yellow, green, blue, and pink, ventured to repeat to the court some of the vulgar abuse which, in her opinion, contributed to, and completely justified, the assault referred to. Hers was an eloquent and ingenious pleading. First, she swore before God and Heaven that the assault was not an assault at all, “Ester did not lay a finger on the woman”; then she justified the assault in language which stirred even the lethargic magistrate. “Such language will do your friend no good; it only serves to show that you are a low abandoned woman"—he ventured to remark in a low, even monotone.
“So’s she, she is low and abandoned too; she is ... and she said".... The woman was on her metal, and desired above all things to incriminate the enemy of her friend.
In the end someone was fined eight shillings and costs. Who it was I never knew; but my impression is that it was either a witness or the police constable.