“These Jamaica servants speak very English English—you can’t call it Cockney, for they don’t drop their h’s, but it differs greatly from our American English. They are very fond of big words, which they usually use incorrectly, especially the men. A Commissary salesman, to whom I sent a note asking for five pounds of salt meat, sent back the child who carried it to ‘ask her mother to differentiate’, meaning what kind of salt meat. A cook asked me once ‘the potatoes to crush, ma’am’? meaning to ask if they were to be mashed. Another after seizing time to air a blanket between showers reported exultantly, ‘the rain did let it sun, mum’. And always when they wish to know if you want hot water they inquire, ‘the water to hot, mum’?
PURE PANAMA, PURE INDIAN AND ALL BETWEEN
“Their names are usually elaborate. Celeste, Geraldine, Katherine, Eugenie, are some that I recall. My own maid is Susannah, which reminds me—without reflecting on this particular one—that as a class they are hopelessly unmoral, though extremely religious withal. I have known them to be clean and efficient, but as a rule they are quite the reverse. Some are woefully ignorant of modern utensils. One for example, being new to kitchen ranges, built a fire in the oven on the first day of her service. Another, having been carefully instructed always to take a visitor’s card on a tray, neglected the trim salver provided for that purpose and extended to the astonished caller a huge lacquered tin tray used for carrying dishes from the kitchen.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT
OLD LANDING AT TABOGA
The concrete walls leading from the beach up to the level of the street were built as a memorial of the successful revolution of 1905.
“I’ll never forget”, concluded my hostess between smiles, and sorrow, “how I felt when I saw that lonesome little card reposing on the broad black and battered expanse of that nasty old tray”!
Photo by Underwood & Underwood