KINGSTON, JAMAICA
I.
Had he not come aboard, it is doubtful if even the "kirk-ganging habit"
inherited from a long line of devout ancestors could have dragged us to
the service. But there was an unforgettable something in his face which
compelled us, in spite of the intense heat, to leave ship by a
shore-boat on Sunday morning and inquire the way to the Parish Church.
[Illustration: KINGSTON, JAMAICA, FROM THE BAY]
Shortly after we had dropped anchor in Kingston Harbour, early on
Saturday, we saw the rector of the English Church being rowed through
the crowd of fruit-boats, which were bobbing about us like so many
brilliant birds; but it was with considerable difficulty that he was
finally enabled to reach the ship, so strenuous were the black
fruiterers to give their wares the best possible showing. They were
well worth the showing, too, for such masses and varieties and colours
were a marvel indeed, even in the tropics. The shaddocks were as big as
melons, and the tangerines, measuring some fifteen inches in
circumference, were dyed as deep a yellow as the colour sense could
grasp, and piled in great, heaping baskets, were watched over by
beflowered negresses, who sat motionless in the boats, except for their
great rolling eyes.
The oranges of Mandeville, Jamaica, were well known to us through the
accounts of former travellers, but no description had ever brought a
suggestion of the true radiance of the Jamaican fruit as it shone forth
that brilliant morning. After one look, the little girls ran down to the
stateroom for the St. Thomas basket, to fill it to the very handle-tip
with luscious tangerines. And while they scampered off with the basket
brimful, the lid pressed back by piles of tender, yellow beauties, a
strange boat-load of new passengers blocked the way once more for the
good priest, and he leaned patiently back in his boat, as if he knew
that to protest would be of no avail.
The newcomers were two enormous live sea-turtles which the fishermen
hauled up the gangway by a stout cable. The turtles groaned and puffed
and flapped, and the little girls wanted them turned on their legs just
to see what would happen; it would be such fun to ride a-turtle-back.
And Wee One says, "Why, Mother! They are just like 'John the Baptist,'
our pet turtle at home, only lots and lots bigger. I wish they'd turn
over." But the sailors had evidently handled turtles before, for they
were left on their backs and were--after having been duly wondered
at--dragged down the deck out of sight, to reappear again in stew and
_fricassee_, not in steak as the Jamaicans serve them. But Sister
laments. She and Little Blue Ribbons wanted to see the turtles run.
"Mother, if they had only been right side up we could have helped turn
them on their backs just like the 'Foreign Children' Stevenson tells
about,--
"'You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtles off their legs.'"
[Illustration: RIO COBRE, NEAR SPANISH TOWN
Jamaica
Copyright, 1901, by Detroit Photographic Co.]
Meanwhile, as the way clears, the priest reaches the ship, and is soon
lost among the crowd of passengers who are waiting for the first boat
ashore.
All of Saturday, we wandered about the dusty, uninteresting streets of
Kingston, waiting for the great impression. But it didn't come. We were
ready and willing to admire the beautiful, but it did not appear.
Kingston was even more unattractive than Port of Spain, Trinidad;
dirtier, hotter, and in every way dull and uninteresting. Had it not
been for the Blue Mountains, against which Kingston leans, and the
glorious old Northeast Trades which fan her wayworn features, and for
the sea at her feet, we could not have forgiven her frowsy appearance.
The whole place had a "has been" air, with unkempt streets, and low,
square, dumpy-looking houses, facing each other like tired old tramps.
II.
In order to form a just estimate of the Englishman's work and methods in
Jamaica, one must leave Kingston, and take to the roads outside, for
example that one along the Rio Cobre which winds in and out among the
mountains in a most enchanting course. This particular drive of eleven
miles, called the "Bog Walk Drive," leads to a little settlement called
"Bog Walk." It is to be hoped that there was at one time some excuse for
this name, but as bogs do not disappear in a day, it must have been in
quite a distant past that the name had any real significance. We saw no
suggestion of a Bog Walk, although actively on the alert for it. We had
uncertain anticipations of having to scramble over wet and oozing turf,
and one of us, without saying a word to any one else, tucked a pair of
rubbers into a capacious basket. But the rubbers stayed right there, for
there was no bog, nor any suggestion of one,--funny way these English
have of naming things!
And speaking of names,--well, there never was a place--except other
English colonial towns--where the good old British custom of naming
houses is more rampant than in Kingston. Had the houses of some
pretension been so labelled, it might not have seemed so strange; but,
no, every little cottage had a name painted somewhere on its gate-post,
and very grandiloquent ones they were, I assure you. No two-penny
affairs for them! There was "Ivy Lodge" and "Myrtle Villa" and
"Ferndale" and "Oakmere" and "The Hall," tacked on to the wobblety
fence-posts of the merest shanties. And yet, in spite of their apparent
incongruity, there was a sort of pitiful fitness in those names. It was
a holding-on, in a crude way, to some half-forgotten ideal of the old
English life. It might have been a memory of the far-away mother
country, left as the only legacy to a Creole generation; it might have
been the last reaching for gentility; who can tell what "The Hall" meant
to the inmates of that shambling roof. But for the "Bog Walk" there was
no reason apparent, and we did not waste a bit of sympathy on the
supposititious man who first sank to his armpits in what may have been a
bog.
The Bog Walk road is wide enough for the passing of vehicles, and as
solid as a rock. The English in the West Indies--as elsewhere--have ever
been great road-builders. Now this bit of road--eleven miles long, as
smooth as a floor, as firmly built as the ancient roads of Rome--is part
of a great system of roads which extends for hundreds of miles
throughout the island, and these roads have been constructed with so
much care that, in spite of the torrents of tropical rain which must at
times flood them, they remain as firm and enduring as the mountains
themselves, seemingly the only man-made device in the West Indies which
has been able to withstand the ravages of the tropical elements.
Jamaica is one hundred and forty-four miles long and fifty miles wide,
and its entire area is a network of these wonderful roads. Roads which
would grace a Roman Empire, here wind through vast lonely forests and
plantations of coffee and cacao, past towns whose ramshackle houses are
giving the last gasps of dissolution. Jamaica has evidently suffered
under the affliction of road-making governors, whose single purpose has
been to build roads though all else go untouched, and they have held to
that ambition with bulldog pertinacity. No one can deny the wonder of
the Jamaican highway. But whither, and to what, does it lead? Good roads
are truly civilisers, and essential to the good of a country, but there
must be a reason for their existence which is mightier than the way
itself. Had there been half as many forest roads in Jamaica as there are
now, and the money which has been buried in practically unused paths
put into good schools and the encouragement of agriculture, Jamaica
might to-day show a very different face. The most casual observation
tells us of vast, unreasoning waste of money on the beautiful island,
and one cannot but pity the patient blacks who have suffered so much
from the poor administration of their white brothers.
[Illustration: A NATIVE HUT
Jamaica
Copyright, 1901, by Detroit Photographic Co.]
It was our pleasure to drive some distance on these hard turnpikes, and
in miles we met but one conveyance of any kind, and that was a rickety
old box on wheels, carrying a family of coolies to Spanish Town.
This place out-Spanished any Spanish town we had ever seen in filth and
general dilapidation. It was simply a lot of rambling old shacks,
huddled together under the long-suffering palms--dirty, forlorn,
forsaken, never good for much when young, and beyond redemption in its
puerile old age. Down through these haunts of the half-naked blacks,
there sweeps a road fit for a chariot and four. Diamond necklaces are
queenly prerogatives, and the proper setting for a royal feast; but,
thrown about the neck of a starving child, they are, to say the least,
out of place. Nothing can be more entrancing, when perfect of its kind,
than either diamonds or children, but they do not belong together. It
may be, that, when the child is grown, circumstances will make the
wearing of such a necklace a graceful adornment, but, until that time
does come, the child's belongings should be those of simple necessity,
all else being sacrificed to the normal growth of body and mind; let
this be once well under way and adornments may follow. Jamaica has given
her children a diamond necklace, and, although magnificent and
wonderful, it is out of place, and the worst of it is, the children have
had to pay dearly for it.
What Jamaica would have been under wise and prudent management, and with
a different racial problem, no one can say. She has certainly never been
lacking in resources, nor has she lacked amenable--though not always
desirable--subjects. But there is a hitch somewhere, and to find that
hitch would take a long unravelling of a torn and broken skein, the kind
of work few care to undertake; but it is the work which must be done if
Jamaica is ever to have a future.
[Illustration: THE BOG WALK ROAD, NEAR SPANISH TOWN
Jamaica]
Dusty and hot and still wondering where the "Bog Walk" would appear, we
left the carriages for an inn which stood close to the road. It was
somewhat--no, I should say much--above the average Jamaican house,
passably clean, just passably, and in a way rather inviting to the
traveller who is glad enough to go anywhere, where he can be satisfied,
if he is hungry and tired. But the house was not what I wanted to tell
you about; it was the _grande dame_ within, who played the indifferent
hostess. We did not see her as we ran up-stairs to the upper balcony; it
was well after we had sipped our rum and lemonade--for we did sip it; we
not only sipped it, but we drank it, and it was fine, and we felt so
comfortable that, when she--_la grande dame_--appeared, it never
occurred to us to express our disappointment over the Bog Walk; we just
agreed with her in everything she said, and felt beatific. I think we
would have agreed with her even without the rum and lemonade, for she
had an air about her that made one feel acquiescent. She was tall and
angular. Her features were as clean-cut as though chiselled in marble;
she was clearly Caucasian in type. Her lips were thin, her nose was
aquiline, and her mouth had a haughty, indifferent curve, suggesting a
race of masters, not slaves. But her skin was like a smoke-browned pipe,
and her hair was glossy, and waved in quick little curves in spite of
the tightly drawn coil at the back of her stately neck. She was dressed
in the fashion of long ago, with a full flounced skirt and a silk shawl.
She sent her menials to wait upon us, although I noticed that, in spite
of herself, she was taking an interest in the strangers.
The Madame went before, and we followed, through the ever-open door of
the West Indian home. The Madame's skirts swept over the uneven
threshold, over the bare, creaky floors, and her noiseless feet led the
way into a past, rich in romance and disaster. The Madame had little to
say; she just glided on before us like a black memory. Here on the bare,
untidy floors were the Madame's treasures; treasures she used daily, for
the table was spread (the Madame served dinner there just the hour
before). Here was a table of Dominican mahogany with carved legs and
oval top, and there on the sideboard was rare old plate, and quaintest
pieces of Dresden china and Italian glass glistened as it once had done
near the lips of its lordly master. The side-table of mahogany gave out
a dull, rich lustre of venerable age, and there was a punch-bowl--silver,
and much used--and curious candlesticks with glass shades. Ah! The
Madame was rich. What a place, I thought, for a lover of the antique!
In her bedroom hard-by, a massive four-poster reached to the ceiling,
and off in a dark corner there was an old chest, richly ornamented with
brass. In every room there were chairs and davenports in quaintest
fashion, all dull and worn and beautiful, while the billiard-room
outside was well filled by a massive old-fashioned rosewood
billiard-table whose woodwork, undermined by the extensive ravages of
ants, was fast falling in pieces. "Where has it come from?" we ask; and
she replies, with a lofty air, that her grandfather brought all these
over from England long, long ago. No doubt the Madame would have sold
any and all of it, and we caught ourselves wondering how we could get
one of those old pieces home. It really seemed as if we ought to buy
something, for the black Madame, towering above us, certainly expected
to make a sale. But we didn't buy; we just admired it all, and
particularly the Madame, and then we began again to try and think out
the dreary tangle.
There was just one thing the Madame had which she would not sell, and
that was the one thing we wanted most: the story of that grandfather.
She was the _grande dame_; his history was sealed behind those
unfathomable eyes. She admitted only the patrician in her blood, not the
savage. The grandfather had left his stamp upon that face, but there was
that other stamp! Alas, the Englishman has sold his birthright in
Jamaica; he is selling it to-day, and what more hopeless future could
rest over a people than does this day over the island of Jamaica?
III.
And now we are back in Kingston, the city. "How would it be for us to
leave Daddy here--he wants to be measured at the military tailor's for
some khaki suits--and run off down the street on the shady side, to what
seems to be a 'Woman's Exchange?'" The little girls, always ready for a
new expedition, take the lead, and for once we found a sign which was
not misleading. It proved to be a veritable Woman's Exchange, filled
with no end of curious specimens of native workmanship which had been
brought there for sale. Among the natural curios--to us the most
wonderful--was a branch of what is known as the lacebark-tree. The
botanist will have to tell you its real unpronounceable name. For us
"lacebark" answers very well, because we don't know the other, and have
no way of finding it out just now. Who ever thought of carrying an
encyclopedia in a steamer-trunk? I am sadly conscious that we even
forgot the pocket-dictionary. Please forgive us this time! But it was
the tree that interested us, not its name. Its fibrous inner bark (much
like the bark of our Northern moosewood) is made of endless layers of
lacelike network, which can be opened and stretched a great width, even
in the bark of a bit of wood an inch and a half in diameter. These
layers of lace are separated and opened into flowerlike cups, with rim
upon rim of lacy edge, all coming from the one solid stick of wood, or
carefully unrolled into filmy sheets of net-like tissue. The native
whips are made by taking long branches of this tree, scraping off the
brittle outer bark, opening the inner fibrous bark, and braiding the
ends into a tapering lash as long as one wishes. Hats are trimmed with
scarfs of this dainty woodland lace, and even dresses are said to be
made from this cloth of the forest, which rivals in loveliness the
fairest weaving of Penelope.
The gracious woman in charge told us that, while the Exchange was
self-supporting, it owed its existence to the liberality of an American
girl, who had many years ago married an English nobleman. And it made me
glad to think that our glorious American women had, with all their
foolish love for titles, a generous hand for woman the world over, and
that, wherever they wandered, their ways could be followed by the light
of their liberality. In a way, the Exchange--founded by an American
woman--made us forgive much in Kingston; so, when we took the street up
to the Myrtle Bank Hotel, expecting from its name to find a sweet,
delicious caravansary, embowered in myrtle green and magnolia, and
found the "Myrtle Bank" an arid sand beach, with a large,
self-sufficient modern hotel built therein, we still forgave, because we
said we would for the sake of that dear American girl who couldn't quite
forget.
And then, too, the Doctor met us straight in the doorway; not the newly
made Philadelphia doctor. No, not that one; it was the other one, the
Northeast Trade, the million-year-old West Indian Doctor. Do you suppose
he is as old as that? Yes, even older. But, for all that, he's as
faithful to his trust as though but yesterday he had slipped from out
the wrangling of chaos. So we kiss the Doctor, and run up after him into
the big, spacious parlour of the Myrtle Bank Hotel, drop down into a
delightful rocker, and think it all over.
Here we are in Kingston, owned by the English, governed by the English,
bullyragged by the English,--but where is he, the Englishman, where the
Englishwoman? To be sure, we found some white faces in the shops, and we
remembered seeing a few fair-haired, sallow little girls. And we saw on
the street, just as we left the Exchange, an Englishman with a golf-bag
on his shoulder; but these were the landmarks only--the exception. The
people we saw were of all shades of a negro admixture, and some very
black ones at that.
But the Myrtle Bank Hotel was not the place for such reflections. At
least, so the good Doctor seemed to think, for he had no sooner brought
us under the magic of his presence, than we were carried into the most
affable state of contentment with all things visible, and it was not
until the next morning that the question fully dawned upon us in its
true significance.
IV.
[Illustration: WHERE WE LANDED
Kingston, Jamaica
Copyright, 1901, by Detroit Photographic Co.]
I suppose we might have walked from the boat-landing to the Parish
Church embowered in its palms a few blocks away, but even that short
distance was exaggerated by the early hot glare of the sun. The
Northeast Trade was taking his morning nap, and the air was utterly
motionless. So Daddy hails a cab, and we rumble off in the direction of
some ringing bells. The town, as we drove along, had the dead look of an
English Sunday morning; there were few people visible, and those we
saw were evidently following the bells, as we were. Back of our desire
to go where the face of the priest was leading us, there was a hope
that, in attending an English church, presided over by a white, English
priest, we should there see the representative people of Kingston, the
white owners of the island. This church was one of the few beautiful
sights in Kingston. Truly, some good priest of the olden time must have
planned with lingering touch the graceful garden which so lovingly
enshrined the venerable spot. An avenue of palms, singing their silvery
song all the long day, skirted on either side the wide stone walk to the
entrance, and bent their long, waving arms very close to our heads as we
stepped within the doorway. The church, as an ancient tablet indicated,
was built in the latter part of the seventeenth century. It followed the
sweet lines of the English cathedral, built from time to time, as one
could readily observe from the varying indications of age in the
structure itself.
We were early for the service, for the second bell had not rung. The
priest met us at the door. He was a man of ripe years, with close-cut
whitening hair, and a face that one would always remember. It was framed
in strength and moulded by the love of God. There was in it that
indefinable beauty which comes from a sacrificial life, from a life
breathed upon by the spirit of holiness and quiet. There were no lines
of unrest there; the poise of divine equilibrium was his living
benediction, and we followed him down the stone aisle, over the memorial
slabs of the departed great buried beneath, to a seat just the other
side of a massive white pillar, midway between open windows on one side
and an open door on the other, where the grateful breeze, now faintly
rustling the palms without, swept in upon us in delicious waves.
We were placed quite well in front of the transept, and as we waited
there in the quiet old building, I began to make a mental estimate of
just where the different classes of Jamaican society would find
themselves. Here, where we were, would be the whites, and back beyond
the transept, the negroes, and in the choir, of course, the fair-haired
English boys. Then the old bell began to ring again, and a few of our
fellow voyagers came in and took seats in front of us,--notably Mr. and
Mrs. F----, who had been the guests of the priest the day before. The
church was filling. The owners of the seat in which the priest had
placed us arrived, and we were requested by a silent language, which
speaks more forcibly than words, to move along and make room. In the
meantime, the pew was also filled from the other side, and in the same
dumb language we were requested to move back the other way. Thus we were
wedged in closely between the two respective owners of the seat. And
they were not white owners,--they were black, brown, yellow--but not
white. The church filled rapidly. It filled to the uttermost. Mr. and
Mrs. F----, in front of us, were obliged to separate, for, when the
owners of their seat arrived, they simply stood there until Mr. F----
was forced to leave his wife and crowd in somewhere else. The pew-owners
were the rightful possessors, and the white man or the stranger
apparently of little consequence. There was every conceivable shade of
the African mixture. The choir was made up partially of black negresses,
partially of yellow girls, with men of all hues besides, and the whole
congregation in this Church of England was similarly mixed, with the
black blood strongly predominant. I saw, outside of our party, only one
Englishwoman and one Englishman, and a few about whom I was doubtful,
and those were all. The blacks were very far from being the true type of
African. In some cases, there would be the negro face in all its
characteristics, with one exception, and that would be the oblique eyes
of the Chinese. There were Japanese negroes, and Chinese negroes, and
English and French negroes. It was a horrible mixture of negro with
every other people found in the island, with the negro in the ascendant.
I saw no marks of deference paid to the white strangers; they were
placed in the same position in which a negro would find himself in a
Mississippi gathering of white people. If you have ever witnessed the
enthusiasm with which the negro is welcomed in such places, you can
understand our position that day in Jamaica. We had been told of the
contempt in which the white man is held in Haïti, and, not having
experienced it, were disinclined to believe such an abnormal state of
things. But, here in Jamaica, without ever having been informed of
the state of society, we felt it as plainly as if it had been emblazoned
on the sign-boards. We were not welcome and we felt it. We were out of
our element.
[Illustration: EL MORRO, ENTRANCE TO HARBOUR
Santiago de Cuba
Copyright, 1901, by Detroit Photographic Co.]
The people were all well clothed,--many in elegance. The most of them in
white and black; court mourning for the queen.
And then the grand old service began,--that wonderful world-encircling
service of our old English Mother Church--always the same and always
sufficient--and it was all so strange,--the feeling I had about that
word "we." There was a slow dawning in my soul that never before had the
word "humanity" meant anything but a white humanity to me--a universal
love for black, yellow, chocolate, brown, saffron humanity had never
come fully into my consciousness. And, while I sat there in that vast,
black assemblage, the long, terrible past of Jamaica arose before me,
and, too, the doubtful future loomed up in gloomy outlines, and I
wondered what would be the outcome of it all. Where would the Englishman
be in another century in Jamaica? Would Jamaica revert back to the
Haïtien type, or is some hand coming to uphold the island? It is far
from my intention to touch upon the political situation in
Jamaica,--especially as I don't know anything about it. I can only tell
you what I saw, and you can draw your own conclusions. All I can say is,
where is the white man in Jamaica? What is his position, and what has
brought him into his present deplorable condition? Has the white blood
after all so little potency?
One needs but to glance at James Anthony Froude's masterful book, "The
English in the West Indies," in order to see the why and wherefore of it
all. His words have greater force to-day than even at the time of his
writing, for the course of events has more than justified his
predictions.
Our opinions of the situation were wholly unbiased, for we did not read
Froude's account until long after, so that our sensations, our
surprises, at the Jamaican English Church service, were wholly original.
[Illustration: THE PLAZA
Cienfuegos, Cuba]
The service proceeded through the prayers--our prayers--and then came
the sermon. I shall never forget the text. It was taken from that
masterpiece of Biblical literature, the thirteenth chapter of First
Corinthians: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and
have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."
The priest had been there for over thirty years, and he began:
"Beloved in the Lord, my children!" And we, white and black, were all
his children. We were in a strangely reversed situation, for even the
good priest had the tawny hue of Africa faintly shining in his fine
face. No mention of colour distinction was made: but which of us was to
have the charity? Did it not seem that he pleaded for the white
man--that the stronger black should have more charity? Or was it for us
as well? And it seemed to me I realised for the first time the position
of our well-bred Southerner; and everything was jumbled and queer in my
mind as the priest spoke. And his beautiful strong face shone over the
people, and his voice quivered with a deep love, touching the raiment of
one who said, "Come unto me all ye"--all--all--all! The white arches
echoed back the pleadings, the commands, the love, while in quiet
eloquence he told of One who set his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem.
The church emptied itself, and we were left with the priest, and the old
sunken tombs, and the sleeping organ, and the white light streaming
through the windows. And we wondered if we had yet learned what the
Master meant when he said:
"Come unto me all ye--"
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF CERVERA'S FLEET
West of Santiago de Cuba]