Olga’s Diary Continued : Siblings, Lodgers and a Gift from God

<—Olga’s Diary                                     Vivie, Sydney & the Den of Inequity—>

 

Dear Diary

 

When we were little, Mammie used to take in lodgers and we still have one, Mr Delgado who has one of the rooms downstairs.  He is a salesman, from the Cockpit Country and a direct descendent of the Maroons, who, by the way, hate the British.  Mr Delgado loves to tell stories, and always the same one, how years ago the Maroons defeated the British when they tried to recapture the slaves that the Spanish set free after the British had taken Jamaica from Spain.  The slaves headed up the mountains and forests into the remote Cockpit Country area of Jamaica and set up communities there.

 

The British soldiers tried to re-capture them several times but the Maroons, led by a woman called Nanny, outsmarted them.    Eventually a truce was called and the Maroons won the right to virtually govern themselves.  And every year, Mr Delgado tells us how they celebrate the fact that they were the first black people in the West Indies to gain their freedom nearly 100 years before Emancipation.  

 

Miss Wedderburn, who was my history teacher when I was at Alpha School, was very impressed the day I told the whole class the history of the Maroons – I didn’t tell her I’d heard the story so many times I could repeat it in my sleep and, no doubt, I’ll hear it again. 

 

Viviana is my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie.  Vivie’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against Sydney, for the “tots” which is the pet name the family use when they’re talking about Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and me. 

 

At one time we had a lodger called Alfred Moncrieff, a coloured man from Clarendon.  I didn’t like Mr Moncrieff one little bit and one day he told me to collect his dirty laundry from his room and give it to Cassie to wash.  Well, I turned my back on him, tossed my head in the air and at the same time flicked the back of my skirt in a haughty manner (I saw Jean Harlow do this once in a film) and told him I wasn’t a servant. 

 

That night, when Ruby and I were in bed asleep, Sydney came into our bedroom and dragged me out of bed and gave me a whipping.  Mr Moncrieff had told him I had lifted my skirt right up and shown him my knickers.  It was a lie. 

 

When Vivie heard what had happened she tore into Sydney something terrible.  She was fearless and told him that there was something unnatural about a brother giving his sister a whipping on the bottom and that he should be ashamed of himself. 

 

“You’re too free with your hands on the tots” she told Sydney.

 

 “How could you believe that nasty little man with his dirty little mind and not even ask Olga her side of the story before you dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night”. 

 

          She called him cruel, a bully and said “you’re just as bad as Moncrieff”.

 

I can tell you Sydney’s not used to being spoken to like that. As a matter of fact the whole family was very angry about what Sydney did to me but he’s taken over the role of head of the family now and that’s that.   I don’t know whether Mammie ever said anything to Sydney about the whipping he gave me, but the next day she told Moncrieff to get out.

 

Another lodger was a salesman called Victor Condell, a coloured Jamaican who came from Canada.   He used to sell tractors and other kinds of farm machinery.    Well, Victor Condell lived with us for over a year and one day, out of the blue, he said he was returning to Canada at the end of the month.  My sister, Chickie, was heart broken and cried for days.  Eventually she stopped crying long enough to tell us that she and Victor had been courting and she’d fallen in love with him.  It came as a big shock to me, I can tell you, I never suspected anything.

 

To stop Chickie crying, our cook, Aggie Burns, took her to see Annie Harvey, an Obeah woman, to get a love potion to secretly give to Victor to make him stay with her.  Annie called it “come to me sauce” and it was in a little blue bottle which Chickie had to mix into Victor’s food, and then wait for the potion to work.  Once it works, Annie told Chickie, you can then give Victor another potion called “stay at home sauce” and that keeps him from looking at other women. 

 

Unfortunately, the second potion wasn’t needed because the first one didn’t work.  Victor left.   So, Aggie Burns, who has a big collection of voodoo dolls, then asked Chickie if she’d like to choose one and she could stick pins in it so Victor would get sick, but Chickie said no.

 

One day, long after Victor Condell had left, I heard screams coming from Chickie’s bedroom.  Mammie told me Chickie was fine, not to worry and to stay right away from her room.  But curiosity always got the better of me, so I went up to peek through the keyhole of her bedroom door.  Before I could see anything, Sydney had come up behind me, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to my bedroom and gave me a good whipping.  “That’s for not doing what you were told” he said.  A few days later Pearl, Ruby, Dolly and me were shown Maurice and Mammie told us that Chickie had a little baby boy.

 

“A gift from God” she said.

<—Olga’s Diary                             Vivie, Sydney & the Den of Inequity—>

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But First – The History Bit

<—How It All Began                                                         London 1900 –>

 

Christopher Columbus, the explorer, had been so mesmerized by Jamaica’s beauty he had described it in 1494 as “…the fairest land my eyes have ever seen” and had been greeted by a kind, friendly, gentle people known as the Arawaks who gave the island its name Xaymaca – meaning “land of wood and water”. But the Arawaks suffered great ill-treatment at the hands of their Spanish conquerors and by the time Britain took Jamaica from Spain in 1655 they had all died. 

Staggering Statistic

Throughout the entire period of British rule and, not including the huge numbers born into slavery, it was estimated that upwards of 1,000,000 Africans were imported against their will into Jamaica. People forced to work as slaves on plantations owned by rich white men and women and subjected to extreme cruel and brutal treatment.

Social and Class Distinction

During slavery the plantation remained the most important unit and a rigid class system existed. You were judged to be important according to the type of work you did, the colour of your skin and how much money and land you owned. There were three groups of people – the whites, the coloureds and the slaves who were black. 

Among the whites, the most important in society were the planters who were very rich from the sale of sugar and owned vast areas of land on which they built great houses usually on a hill overlooking the plantations and slave houses.

                    

Built by expert slave labour, they were manorial, with fine wood panelling, vast rooms, and opening one into another, windows that reached to the floor and wide staircases modelled on the Georgian style. Below these ample living-rooms gleaming with their shining smooth wood polished floors, were the quarters of the slaves who lived in cramped airless conditions behind stout iron bars at small windows.

Next in importance were the traders who sold merchandise to the people; tools for the estates, food items such as flour, fish, salt beef, cheese, wine, clothing and candles. They were very wealthy people but because they didn’t own any land they were considered less important than the planters.

After the traders, came the coloureds, half white and half black – ‘mulatto’ the result of a white man having a child by a black woman, although it was against the law for white women to have children with a black man. The coloureds thought they were better than the slaves mainly because they were not fully black, their reasoning being that the closer they came to being white, the more important they were. But some planters did free their mulatto children and in this way a large number of coloureds were free to start their own businesses.

Then there were skilled slaves. Among these people were midwifes, wheelwrights, masons and carpenters.

Next came the house slaves, the Blacks who worked as butlers, cooks, nurses, ladies’ maids, and coachmen in the kitchen, stable or garden. They worked close to their master and were frequently beaten particularly if he or she was upset about something. Punishment was often brutal, for example when a little girl was beaten and nailed through her ears to a tree for having broken a special cup belonging to her master.

The lowliest, and these amounted to more than half the slaves in Jamaica, were field slaves and it was primarily on their backs Jamaica became a jewel in the British Empire. They prepared the land, planted, cut and carried the canes to the mills, then ground it, made the sugar and carried it to the ships.

 After Emancipation

Jamaica reinvented itself when slavery ended in 1838. The workers legally had their freedom and now the owners of the sugar plantations had to pay the men who had once been their slaves. But many refused to work for the planters. Because they were free the black workers went into the hills and either squatted on Government property or bought small pieces of land from the missionarieswho bought land from the Government specially for the purpose of selling it back to the freed blacks and coloureds at a fair price so they could become independent and grow their own crops.

They established themselves as free settlers and grew coconuts, spices, tobacco, coco, pimentos and, of course, bananas.

 

Peasant Banana Cultivation

They formed hardworking, independent small businesses, selling their produce to local markets and, not only were they financially successful themselves, their efforts went some considerable way to making Jamaica solvent again after the demise of the sugar market/economy.

The planters needed workers so now free, but poor, immigrants arrived from Africa, Portugal, China, India, Syria and the Lebanon to work. The new immigrants were neither black nor white and many didn’t adapt to plantation work so some, like the Chinese, started their own businesses. These people brought with them their religion, language and cultures and enriched an already complicated society.

New shipping routes opened up between London and the West Indies and there was a lot of commercial activity in Jamaica. The British Government and the Institute of Jamaica encouraged men and women from Great Britain to move to Jamaica. Together they instigated a scheme whereby young men could pay a premium to plantation owners in exchange for instruction in the cultivation of crops indigenous to Jamaica.

Once they had served an apprenticeship they would be able to buy government land well below the market price.

 

<—How It All Began                                                          London 1900 —> 

 

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