A JAMAICAN CHILDHOOD - PT.3 : A JOURNEY THROUGH HILLSIDE TO THE HILLS

In this the third part of A Jamaican Childhood, Shaka recalls a journey he and some of his brothers made through their village, to the hills overlooking it, in order to find food. During his childhood the family had to find ways of making ends meet, as it were, and this required the family to find ways of supplementing the regular remittance of money which Shaka's and his siblings father would send to them from England. On way of doing this was for the young men to go into the hills and mountains overlooking the village, to try and find ground provisions from long abandoned plots of land which had been cultivated by peasant farmers, and, probably, even slaves or former slaves.

Just as how the mango season was a welcomed source of food, so Shaka knew that the fruits from the fruit trees and the ground provisions would help the family to subsist and eke out a living by combining them with remittance they would later received from Shaka’s father, who emigrated to England when shaka was about 4 years old. He remembered that there was a time when his older brothers and their friends would travel a long distance upto the hills overlooking the district, to look for yams, dasheen, coco and other ground provisions from abandoned peasant holdings. 

These provision grounds were now wild and might have been originally planted by slaves, and, later, tended by the freed slaves, before being abandoned. It was the common custom that after digging out the jams, the people doing so would leave sufficient yam seeds and head to replaced the reaped crop, and provide an harvest for the following year.

A man eating a mango on the land formerly owned by Shaka's family

Shaka would later join his brothers on later expeditions to these abandoned yam fields, and he remembered vividly, even now, how he terrified he was that the strong winds he encountered high up in the mountainous hills, would blow him off the mountain track, and how he held tightly to trees, as he tentatively made his way along the narrow trail on the exposed mountain side, to safer and less exposed areas where the winds were not as strong, or had subsided.  

This might indeed have been the origin or one of the origins  of Shaka’s later recurring  dreams of him being able to fly, while others lacked the power to do so. Shaka remembered how, in preparation for the journey into the hills, he and his brothers, G and N, would, the night before, make and fried dumplings and salt fish, and how they would wake up before dawn the following day and take their food and water, and crocus bags, and leave the house when it was still dark.

He remembered how they would make their way along the track leading from the bottom of their house, past the Porters’ house about 200 yards along the way, with Poppy’s property to their left, as they made their way and turned left to bypass Mass Asie’s property on the left – where they would scrub tangerines, oranges and avocado pears, in their seasons – before turning right and then left, to bypass the local school teachers’ residence, on the left, and Mass Edgar’s nice home on the right, then continuing along the lane and bearing right to bypass the front of Mass Edgar’s house, and then the Bailey’s property on the right, and that of another villager on their left, before bearing right, as the track merged into the main road into the village.

As Shaka remembered it Mass Asie and Poppy were villagers who were amongst those with more and better cultivated lands. The Poters, on the other hand, did not have a lot of land, but their children, although poorer, were more educationally gifted. Shaka counted one of the Porter children, E, as his best friend, although he and E would have a number of fights, some of which were instigated by bigger boys who enjoyed seeing others fighting. It is a matter of record that Shaka used to come of worse when he and E fought. E's sister, M, was the first girl that Shaka has a crush on, was also a very bright and ambitious person.

The now abandoned school which Shaka and his siblings attended

Poppy had a number of jack fruit trees on his land, as well as many orange trees, and Shaka and other people would be watching them from they were young and waiting for them to become ripe. Sometimes people would steal the jack fruit before they were ripe and hide them away for them to finish ripening, in case somebody steal them before them. As for the oranges, group of boys, sometimes including Shaka and his older brothers, would go to Poppy's property during the night and steal his oranges. At the time when Shaka knew Poppy, he was already an old man, as far as his concept of an old man was at the time. Poppy would die when Shaka was still at an age when he found death very frightening.

The Baileys, like the Porters, were also considered as being among the poorer of the villagers, but, like the Porters, were also amongst the more gifted of them. The family on one or more occasions took to breeding pigeons.

To be continued