When we lived at the Hyde, the mongrel dogs belonging to the “Busha” and some of the labourers were the plague of our lives. They were always ranging the place in search of scraps. On one occasion we did remonstrate as forcibly as we dared with a black man who owned an unfortunate starving puppy whose bones stood out of its skin, and the next day the poor brute arrived, starved as ever, with a bleeding stump where its tail should have been. On its heels came its angry master. And we were also angry.
“I dun all me can, missus,” he explained. “He will come. Me cut off him tail an' burry him an' tie him on top. It sure ting him stay wid him tail but him bruck de 'tring.”
Poor things! Poor things! The sufferings of the dogs and indeed of all animals in Jamaica at the hands of unthinking black men!
A self-contained establishment is the Jamaican shack. Sometimes it is built of wattle, as the huts to-day are built on the Gambia, whence came the Mandingo slaves, sometimes mud is daubed on the wattle, as it is on the Gold Coast, sometimes it is built of rough logs and it is thatched with palm leaves, or, as the family rises in the social scale, with shingle. In it apparently dwell a large family, ranging from the old granny whose age no man knoweth, to the new-born baby of her great grand-daughter, a baby born into a new world where life I know will be easier for it and hold more advantages than it did for the old woman who sits nodding in the shade. Perhaps the hut belongs to her. It often seemed to me that the hut did belong to the women, even as they do in the country from which they came.
All the cultivator, man or woman, need buy is the scanty household furnishing, and a very limited supply of clothing for the elders and the younger children. The older boys and girls soon learn to provide for themselves. It is quite easy to live off the land, and if more money is wanted there is always a cattle pen or a sugar estate handy where wages can be earned. When the emancipation came, the angry planter declared he wanted no idle vagabonds upon his estate, and did his best to break up the old slave villages. Now as the manager of a sugar estate told me he likes to have his labour close, and he at least was encouraging the negroes once more to build upon his plantation. Not that the negro works very hard as yet. The hard-working toiler of the north would be surprised at the easy-going ways of these children of the sun. A man will work I am told four days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but he has his wages on Friday night, so he does no work on Saturday, it is market day. Sunday of course is a day of rest, everyone knows it would be wicked to work on Sunday, and Monday is banana day—the day when the bananas are taken down to the port. All the roads down from the mountains, the roads that those in authority have decreed shall be as far as is possible without shade, are lined with people mostly women and girls bearing on their heads great bunches of green bananas, which are sold to the fruit companies or at their collecting depots about the country. A fruitful land! It strikes me forcibly, for I am fresh from reading the wails of the slave owners—“the negroes will not increase.” Will any wild things kept in captivity increase? But put those same wild things in suitable environment. Miss Maxwell Hall has a story about this increase.
She interested herself to get a pen boy of hers into one of the contingents going to the war. He wanted to serve the Empire—his Empire. He was a stalwart young fellow, but enquiries had to be made about those dependent upon him. Then she found that he was the father of eleven children, five by one woman and six by two other women! They were all alive and there was every probability of more! He had already served the Empire so well that the Government felt he had better stay at home and see to the proper upbringing of the hostages he had given to fortune.
No wonder there are thronged roads, but there should be more cultivated patches. The cultivation should be like that of Provence, for this is a fruitful country, although people talk of its being so poor. Miss Maxwell Hall, that most capable young pen-keeper, says—“For years everyone has been engaged in taking money out of Jamaica. No one ever seems to have thought of putting money into the land, of working the country for itself.” Exactly what Madden said ninety years before.
Does this explain the desolate looking towns set amidst such fertile lands? There are poor. I saw them every day, but why they are so poor I do not know. All the civilised world is crying out for just such small products as the negro can supply, cold storage is the order of the day, why then are there any poor in Jamaica? Possibly a discreet knowledge of the growing powers of the soil is lacking, and also there is no doubt manual labour is despised.
With whip and chain the white man taught the black—drove the thought into him with the branding iron—that manual labour was a despicable thing, something only to be undertaken by those who could do no better, and we cannot undo that teaching in a few years. Indeed it is only in the last few years, only since the cruel war which has made us all so wise, that Britain herself learned the lesson.
I have always been keenly interested in openings for women, and inclined to be wrathful when other women talk as if matrimony were the only career for a woman. Of course matrimony is good for a woman, exactly as it is for a man, but I have always felt strongly that it is for the nation's good that every woman should go down into the arena and work for her living as a man does. If she marry—well—she will know better how to bring up her own sons and daughters, and if she do not marry—also well. She will have made a place for herself in the world, and can hold up her head as a valuable citizen.