Olga - A Daughter's Tale (8 page)

Carlton didn’t say anything for ages but just kept looking at her. Then he shrugged his shoulders a little, as if to say, “ok, you win” and, without a word, left the house. Vivie said she thought he was going to find Freddie to punch him on the nose but she wasn’t worried about Freddie because he could take care of himself.

Carlton and Vivie had a whirlwind romance. Within weeks of meeting they went off to Montego Bay and got married without telling any of the family, except for Cissie and Dyke who were their witnesses at the wedding. Sydney said if Vivie hadn’t been so desperate to marry a white man she’d have saved both families a lot of heartache and realised that charm, good looks and receiving a small allowance from his parents was not enough to support a family.

Sometime during the afternoon on the day following the big row, Carlton’s body was found by some people out walking in a valley in the Blue Mountains. It appears his car went over a precipice just past the army post at Newcastle and his body flung from the car. He’d been dead for hours and to this day no one ever really knew if it was suicide or an accident.

I was grateful that I was asked to look after the children in the family so Chickie, Boysie and Cissie could go to the funeral. Carlton’s coffin was left open for mourners to pay their last respects and I didn’t want my last sight of Carlton to be lying dead in a coffin. I wanted to remember him how I always saw him – full of life and laughing.

If I had been married to Carlton I wouldn’t have minded Carlton being a poor white man because he had other qualities. Tall, fair-haired, very good looking, funny, nice to talk to, always joking. Women were very attracted to him and I think it’s easy to see why Vivie fell in love with him. They met when he was playing tennis at the Myrtle Bank Hotel and Vivie said the first thing she noticed about him was that his legs were better than hers. He was always invited to the best clubs, parties and social events in Kingston and he may not have had much money of his own but people liked him, because he was nice, and he was friends with all sorts of people. What made him different from other white Jamaicans was that he wasn’t prejudice towards coloured or black people in the slightest.

The day of Carlton’s funeral was unusually hot for that time of the year and there was a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind in the air. A black choir sang hymns at his funeral and Dolly told me later that this was Carlton’s “second family”.

As a baby Carlton had a black nurse whose name was Ambrosine Williams and he spent much of his childhood with her and her thirteen children rather than his own white family. When his coffin was being lowered into the ground Ambrosine Williams bent down and picked up a handful of earth and threw it at Vivie. She told Vivie that she was going to set a duppy on her for causing Carlton’s death and that she would be cursed until the day she died.

That night the wind began to pick up and get stronger and continued until well into the evening. Then, according to a report in the paper “the lightening started building up in strength until it lit up the whole sky, dancing in fantastic forms in the night sky, whilst the thunder that followed the lightening seemed to shake the earth as if to say the end of the world is near and then finally in the early hours of the next morning the rain came down.”

******

Thousands of blacks cannot find work so they have no money to buy food or clothes for their families. Smith’s Village is one of the worst areas in the city covered with shacks where conditions of squalor are beyond imagination and made worse by appalling overcrowding.

It makes me furious when I read the Gleaner and they say the reports are exaggerated. I have seen for myself, little children and old men, stark born naked, on the streets begging for money and food. Soup kitchens are springing up over the city to feed these poor people. Is this an exaggeration? Of course, the paper is controlled by the upper white ruling classes – these Jamaicans are a disgrace.

While the Catholic Church is doing what it can, the Protestant Church seems to be trying to conceal the gravity of the painful conditions under which thousands of people are living. Children are running around naked because they have no clothes to go to school and those that do have clothes, have no food at home, nothing in their little stomachs. When they come home from school it is to a hungry and crying mother, brothers and sisters and a father almost demented because he cannot feed his children.

Thank goodness for Bustamante. His constant flow of letters to the Gleaner is making people aware of the problems but I fear for this island’s future.

Letter from Alexander Bustamante, Kingston

to

The Editor, Daily Gleaner, Kingston

“……………
.
shame, and because some have refused to do their duty and they want to minimise that which does not need to be magnified – unemployment.

The mongoose and the rats in certain parts of the island are being disturbed at nights, because the cane-fields, their resting places, have now become the sleeping place of many workers. Many of them rush out at nights so nude they dare not come out in the days, just to buy little necessities to return to their shelter – the canefields.

I have been to St Ann, and the poverty there is something I hate to describe. Neither minister nor politician should try to prevent it being exposed. Visit Newton, Kinowl, Mullings Bush Districts in St Elizabeth; Marlie Hill and Plowden and see the poverty – the misery. But why go to such places when we have them next door to us; go to Trench Pen, Smith’s Village, Ackee Walk and Rose Town and the apostolic Lanes, etc.

Too late it is for anyone through any peculiar reasons to try and cover up the truth of the lamentable conditions. Things were bad a few years gone by; they were no better last year, this year they are getting worse, there must be better days ahead.

I am etc.

Alexander Bustamante
“

******

Vivie:
She is ill and has become withdrawn and quiet., she doesn’t sleep at night and has been vomiting so violently no food stays in her stomach. Sydney says it’s all in her mind, after all, the doctor’s examined Vivie twice and can find nothing wrong with her, but, whether it’s real or imaginary there’s no mistaking that she is wasting away. She and her daughters are spending their last few days in Jamaica with us, here at Mission House, before they sail to America to live with Freddie Howell. Roy Mackenzie’s family now own the Den of Inequity.

Vivie hates Jamaica and talks as if she is never coming back. America sounds an exciting country with lots of opportunities to make money, but I’m not sure I would want to live there and I’m surprised Vivie does really. I’ve read that in the some parts of America they are very prejudice towards coloured and black people.

******

Olga’s Diary

Dear Diary

“
Mon Repose”
: Every Saturday Mammie and I come to Aunt Lucy’s. Aunt Lucy took over running the plantation when Uncle John died because Bobbie and Adam, their sons were already living in America and didn’t want to come back to Jamaica. They want Aunt Lucy to sell up and join them, but she won’t. She says her heart belongs to Jamaica and anyway she wants to be buried at “Mon Repose” with Uncle John.

My Aunt Lucy smokes ganja in a white long handled pipe. She’s been smoking it for years and calls it her “wisdom weed” because it was supposed to have first been found on the grave of King Solomon. The law considers it a dangerous drug because they say if you smoke it you can go mad,

so it’s illegal and you can be sentenced to prison and hard labour if the police catch you with it, but that doesn’t stop people from smoking it.

There was a break in at Kingston Police Station recently and someone broke the padlock of a wooden box that had eight bags of ganja in it which had been found by the police when they raided a house a few days earlier

“
Did you arrange the break in” Boysie asked Aunt Lucy. She roared with laughter.

“
If I’d known the ganja was there I might have done and saved myself the trouble of growing it at the back of the plantation”.

The report said that all day an intensive search of vehicles was carried out. But out of the blue nearly all members of the local force were suddenly transferred to other police stations while the Superintendent carried out an investigation.

Dolly and Pearl are with us today because Aunt Lucy pays us for picking pimentos and we’ve brought Maurice along, Chickie’s son, because small boys are very useful for a job like this.

Pimentos are a very strong spice and a pimento tree is very distinctive because the trunk of the tree is covered with a greenish grey bark which is smooth and shiny. The leaves are a dark and very glossy green and if I crush some in my hands they give out a lovely strong smell. It’s easy to grow pimentos because the birds do all the planting of the seeds. They eat the ripe berries and then drop the seeds onto the ground and that’s how nearly all Aunt Lucy’s pimento trees have been planted. The field workers say that if you plant by hand the trees will not grow, but I think the workers are being very smart saying that it’s hard work planting seeds; they’d rather the birds plant them.

The pimento berry is small like a black currant and grows in clusters on the tree and when there’re ripe for picking they are of a glossy black colour, sweet and very spicy and peppery to taste. The berries have to be collected by young lads going up the tree with long sticks and a crook at the end. They catch the long outer branches and bend them back till they can reach the smaller ones with the pimento berries on and then they’ll break off the small branches so that the grown ups, that’s us, waiting below with baskets can gather up the small branches, pick the berries and put them into our baskets. You have to be very careful not to damage the berries though.

At the end of the day the baskets are all brought to the barbecues, so the berries can be dried and prepared for market, and each person’s basket is weighed. Aunt Lucy enters the weight of each basket into the barbecue book and then pays us depending how much pimento is in our basket.

The barbecue is a large paved area divided into ‘beds’ so that recently picked pimentos are not mixed with previously picked ones. When enough have been thrown on to a ‘bed’ they are spread out and exposed to the sun, and a man with a wooden rake keeps turning them so they dry evenly. You know when the berries are thoroughly dry because if you take some in your hand and rattle them near your ear, you should hear a sharp, dry, rattling sound.

We’d all been working for a couple of hours when Dolly noticed Maurice wasn’t moving. He’d climbed much higher than the other boys who were helping out.

“
He’s frightened, he can’t go on” Dolly said.

I called out to him to come down.

“
I can’t move”

“
Yes. you can Maurice. Aunt Lucy’s made some lemonade. Come down and have a drink”.

“
Olga, go and get him down” Mammie said.

So up the tree I go to help him down. Poor Maurice, by the time I got to him he was so frightened he couldn’t stop crying. Gently I coaxed him down the tree and the nearer we got to the ground the more his confidence returned until he’s on the ground and I’m sitting having a little rest on a thick branch when, my heart leaps because in the distance I can see Boysie’s best friend, Roy McKenzie, walking down the hill towards “Mon Repose”.

As I go to jump on to the ground my knickers get caught on the branch, tear and leave me dangling four foot off the ground, unable to free myself, my backside exposed to all the young boys still up the tree, the old man raking the barbecue, my sisters and worse still, I can see Roy McKenzie getting closer and heading straight for “Mon Repose”.

Dolly and Ruby were laughing themselves silly.

“
Help me quickly, Roy McKenzie’s coming down the hill”.

In a flash Dolly was beside me on the branch and while Mammie lifted me up a few inches, Dolly unhooked my knickers and, with only seconds to spare before Roy McKenzie arrives, I made it into the house all of them still laughing at me.

******

Later
: Roy decided to stay and visit and after a while, with my knickers repaired, I felt composed enough to join him and the rest of the family sitting on the steps of the veranda watching the peenie wallies, little fireflies. They’re about the size of a beetle and give off a brilliant light from two orbs just above their eyes and when you see millions of them fluttering among the trees on a dark night it is a spectacular sight.

My Aunt Lucy is a great Anancy story teller.

Anancy tales are famous in Jamaica and were brought here by the slaves. Anancy is a kind of folk hero because he is a survivor. He is a spider man, clever, intelligent, quick-witted and cunning who likes to trick people for his own benefit. As a special treat, and to make up for my embarrassed hurt feelings earlier today, Aunt Lucy’s promised to tell us a story, so Maurice and I collected lots of peenie wallies and put them into jars, with holes in the top so air gets in, and then we put the jars in a long row in front of the stone barbecue, so they look like footlights.