There are shops of every kind in Kingston, but never the one I want when I need it.
There is an increase in motorcars now but I find them a nuisance because their motor horns are so loud and drivers use them constantly. And they are dangerous because of the “Blow and Go” war-cry of the drivers. If two cars are at a cross roads and both blow their horns simultaneously, each one hears only the sound of his own horn and if both “go”, which usually happens, there’s a crash. The utter and complete disregard of the speed limit by car drivers is only equalled by the utter and complete disregard of the police to enforce the speed limit in the city.
The side streets of Kingston are where the blacks live. Women wearing brightly coloured turbans gossip from the windows with neighbours on the pavement below and men standing in the shade discussing something in patois, a language I never learnt. Mangy dogs wandering the streets, full of fleas and with prominent ribs sticking out worry me as well as goats with their kids which amble through the city in search of grass. But my heart breaks for the poor little donkeys with their big gentle eyes, long ears and delicate tiny feet, heavily ladened down with goods strapped across their back and the owner perched on top smoking ganja and half asleep.
My marriage to Henry didn’t last but it did produce 11 beautiful children. Before we married I knew of his reputation for living a reckless life. Too much drinking, gambling and he had known plenty of women. But I loved him and I thought he would change, in fact, I thought I could change him. But the habits he had before we married continued during our marriage and caused me great pain. I would have put up with his peccadilloes, but not his drinking and gambling. When he drank, he gambled, when he gambled he usually lost all his money and then we had no food. I would have to go to the priest and beg for money to feed our children. That was too much. I couldn’t stand begging.
******
Report
Fr Frank Butler, Holy Trinity Cathedral, Kingston,
to
His Lordship Bishop Robert Collins, London
Your Holiness
I, too, have seen the recent articles in the English Times, and share your concerns that Obeah is flourishing unchecked in Jamaica and that it would appear that the people are choosing it as their religion rather than Christianity.
It is an interesting view that The Times puts forward, that “Obeah is a spiritual disorder” but I tend to disagree and think that it is a “psychological disorder” as it seems to me to be based on suggestion. Startling effects can be produced by suggestion and drastic changes in personality. Two persons quarrel over some difference they might have. One throws out the suggestion that he is going to Obeah the other and, whether consciously or subconsciously, the victim accepts the evil threat planted into his mind. Obeah’s power lies in an Obeah man or woman working on the fears of people who are fundamentally superstitious to start with.
Most Jamaicans are Christian and are certainly aware that Obeah goes against the teachings of the Catholic Church; yet, you couldn’t miss seeing how important religion is to the people simply because of all the many churches and chapels of different denominations there are. Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, a few Anglican as well as the Catholic Church.
In Jamaica it is believed by most that when a man dies, his body goes to the ground and his soul goes to God, but his spirit, is known as a duppy and stays for a while or even permanently. There are good duppies and bad ones, but all are feared because, apparently, one doesn’t know how they’re going to behave. They are deemed to be the instrument of the Obeah man or woman and do revengeful and malicious things.
Just about everywhere on this island any accident, misfortune, illness or death is attributed to the malign influence of the spirits of the dead either initiated by the duppy’s own wicked purpose or carried out through envy, or else by someone bent on revenge towards a perceived enemy of the sufferer. Here superstitious rites and practices are observed with regard to every phase of life from birth to death.
Is Obeah a sort of religion with Jamaicans? Instead of offering a prayer to heaven, a man will give three pounds to an Obeah man and then pray to heaven that the Obeah man is successful in what has been asked of him. The man says that Heaven keeps him waiting. The Obeah man does not because he settles matters satisfactorily and quickly.
Every parish in this island has its corners where the art of Obeah is practised and some localities have a particular reputation for it. An Obeah man’s influence is strong because the people believe that he cannot not be harmed by the law or any white person.
It seems to me that people of every calling in life, including well educated men and women, white, coloured or black depend upon it in some shape or form and there are certain people who openly condemn Obeah and yet, to my astonishment, I find them rushing at the first opportunity to consult with an Obeah man to fix something or other.
I realise that my report may sound pessimistic, but I am optimistic that the continued teaching of religious instruction and an essential understanding of the psychology of the people, is the answer to eradicating the belief in and practice of Obeah.
******
Chapter Eight
Olga’s Diary
Isn’t this beautiful? A lovely rich green leather 5-year diary that must have cost Vivie a fortune. I love the smell of the leather which is so soft touch to touch and it has the tiniest key to lock it. I’ll tie the key on some yellow ribbon and wear it round my neck so I don’t lose it. It is my most favourite possession and I shall take it with me everywhere I go.
I haven’t kept a diary before so I’m not sure what to write. Mammie and Aunt Lucy both like to write and they say, write from your heart, talk to your diary as if it’s your best friend, so here goes.
******
Dear Diary
My First Entry: Jamaicans love big families and the Browneys are no exception. There are thirteen of us including Mammie and Pops. Now only my mother, Mammie, my brother Sydney, me and my sisters Ruby, Dolly and Pearl live in Mission House.
That’s what our house is called and it’s in the same grounds as the Wesleyan Church. It’s quite grand, imposing and very big. At the front of the house there’s a huge old cotton tree which always looks to me as if it is standing guard over us. But the tree does more than that, it keeps the house cool and dry protecting us from the heat and humidity in the summer. The house is red bricked and square, with green shutters at all the windows, which are kept open all the time, except when a hurricane is due.
Upstairs there are three very large bedrooms, one smaller one and a drawing room. I share one of the bedrooms with my sister, Ruby. Ruby is the most studious and brightest of the younger sisters and loves reading and writing. In secret she writes short stories which she reads to me when we are in bed. I feel very honoured because Ruby doesn’t read her stories to anyone else in the family, just me. Quite often they’re romances where the heroine is a simple country girl who falls in love with the son of a rich landowner and he loves her but his father forbids him to have anything to do with her because she’s not good enough for him, so they don’t see each other any more. But the son can’t bear it and they run off together, get married and live happily every after. That’s why I like Ruby’s stories, they always have a happy ending.
My two other sisters, Dolly and Pearl, share another bedroom. Dolly and Pearl couldn’t be more different. Pearl is quiet and thoughtful and very sweet, so is Dolly, but she is a younger version of my older sister, Vivie, lively and outspoken.
Sometimes I think Dolly is jealous of me. She says I’m Mammie’s favourite. Maybe. Then there’s my older brother, Sydney. Sydney is married but he and his wife, Janetha, have been separated for years and he lives with us now.
Everyone says the best thing about our house is the upstairs verandas at the front and back because from the front you can see the Caribbean Sea and from the back you can see the Blue Mountains.
Downstairs there is another drawing roo
m, three more bedrooms, a dining room, the kitchen, a pantry and a storeroom. Outside a veranda made from cedar wood surrounds the entire ground floor of the house and out the back is a yard with a big cooking range under a lean to, a bath house, a water closet and, of course, our lovely garden.
I have another brother, Boysie, whom I adore because he is always laughing and is so much fun to be with. He’s happily married to Minah and even though he has his own family he still finds time to visit us. We all go to Boysie with our problems, never Sydney. I like Minah, she’s nice, but I must admit some of the family don’t like her because she’s Jewish. She’s very pretty with long black straight hair and is quite dark skinned. They have four children and have a very nice house nearby in Duke Street and we’re always in and out of each other’s homes.
One of my older sisters, Birdie, is in London at the moment studying dancing at Madame Verschuka’s School of Dance. This is her second trip to London and Vivie’s been as well and I’m hoping to go soon too. Mammie has a sister, Martha, who lives in Paddington and whenever any of the family goes to England, we stay with Aunt Martha. Birdie says she’s an old trout and doesn’t like her.
I have another older sister, Cissie, who is married to Dyke and they too have four children. They have a coffee plantation in Montego Bay and have been married for about five years. Dyke is lovely. Mammie calls him a gentle giant because he towers over everyone including Sydney. We don’t see much of them at all really, except at family gatherings at Christmas time, or when there’s an occasion, like a wedding or a funeral, or a family crisis.
My Pops doesn’t live with us now, so Sydney is head of the house and supports the family financially. At school I was always top of my class in arithmetic, and when I left school Sydney told Mammie he wanted me to work for him in the shop and keep the books in order. I didn’t want the job; what I wanted to do was go to England but Mammie asked me to take the job, so I did.
Sydney says Mission House is far too big to maintain and now there are not so many people living here we should move to a smaller house. Mammie says he’s right but it’s difficult for her to make the move. Too many memories she says, good ones and some bad, so for now we’re staying put.
We have two servants, our maid Cassie who’s nearly the same age as me and I like a lot, and cook who gives me the creeps. No one calls her by her name, I don’t even know what it is - we just call her cook. One day Sydney decided that Mammie needed help so off he went to find someone and came back with her. But she’s a crazy woman. She believes in Obeah and comes to work some mornings and tells me about great big peacocks that come to her front door and talk to her. Mammie says to ignore her and not upset her because she’s the best cook we’ve ever had.
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. 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 cook 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 cook, 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. Two 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.
******
Chapter NINE
Olga’s Diary
Dear Diary
Viviana: She’s 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, our maid, 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.
******
Freddie Howell: Vivie is going out with Freddie Howell even though she’s still married to Carlton Puyatt. Freddie is a very rich white man who, by the way, is also married and has two children. Vivie wants
a divorce from Carlton because she is in love with Freddie who owns a gambling club on Harbour Street. Freddie’s partner is Roy Mackenzie who is also white and comes from a very rich prom
inent, family who own three plantations, one of which is near Aunt Lucy’s. Roy’s really nice looking, a bit of a rogue but the ladies love him. I like him quite a lot myself but he doesn’t even know I exist. Boysie says one day Roy will be even richer than his father because he never misses an opportunity to make money and no matter how much money he earns, it’s never enough.
Gambling is very popular in Kingston, particularly the Chinese numbers game, peaka pow although it’s illegal, but, as with everything else that‘s illegal in Jamaica, everyone does it in secret.
Every now and again the Gleaner newspaper and the Church elders get all hot and bothered about the gambling that goes on and Freddie’s club always comes in for a lot of attention.
The Church elders call it a den of inequity and Freddie thought the description amusing so that’s what he named his club.
The Den of Inequity
The elders wanted the police to close it down, but Freddie has friends in high places and the police tip him off when they’re going to raid the club. Then he closes it down for a while and re-opens three or four weeks later.
Every Saturday night Vivie cooks a special meal for the gamblers, something like chicken with rice and peas or cod fish and ackee and I often go there during the day to help her with the cooking.
Olga - A Daughter's Tale Page 4