Table Of ContentBLACK ROADWAYS
A STUDY OF
JAMAICAN FOLK LIFE
BY
MARTHA WARREN BECKWITH
K 8
w 1! C
LIBtfeTAS*
£.
CHAPEL HILL
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
1929
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
THE BAKER AND TAYLOR CO.
NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO
MAMMY FORBES, THE HEALER
COPYRIGHT, BY
1929,
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY EDWARDS & BROUGHTON COMPANY, RALEIGH, N. C.
FOREWORD
B,
I
between the summers of 1919 and 1924 made
four visits to the island of Jamaica in the British West
Indies with the purpose of coming into direct contact
with the life and thought of the Negro peasant popula
tion of the country districts. With this aim in view I
spent long hours in peasant homes listening to songs
and stories; made several expeditions to the free Ma-
,. roon settlements of Accompong and Moore Town at-
;
\> tended Sunday School picnics where ring-games were
in progress, John Canoe performances at Christmas
time, a revival meeting and a wake at Lacovia, a morn-
^* ing service at Mammy Forbes 's balm-yard ; and sought
an interview with the healer, Bedward, during the ex-
}
^* cited period of the Christmas holidays preceding his
^ predicted ascent into heaven and the ending of white
^ rule in Jamaica.
At first little was to be had besides the actual literary
—
art of the folk their stories, games, riddles, songs, and
—
proverbs but these in very rich abundance. The chil
dren used to offer them by the roadside hopeful of the
penny eventually offered for a new riddle or the three
pence for a song. Later, when the confidence of the peo
I
ple had been won and my own knowledge widened,
could question them about beliefs and customs. To three
I —
such informants am especially indebted to Wilfrid
Bonito of Richmond, St. Mary (but brought up in Man-
deville), Simon Falconer in the Santa Cruz Mountains
in St. Elizabeth, and George Parkes, also of Mandeville
in Manchester. All three were intelligent small settlers
who owned or managed a piece of land, brought up a
FOREWORD
viii
family, and took an active but skeptical interest in the
wisdom of the "bush people," at the same time admit
ting firm belief in the spirit world. They recognized
some hocus-pocus among men but respected the ghosts.
Parkes, the blind man, used to look forward to my vis
its. As a sailor he had traveled even as far as the African
coast and later had served ably as sheriff in Mandeville.
Even now he made his way daily alone to his "cultiva
tion" some three miles out of town, where he once
showed me the proper method of planting a yam hill.
All three men knew my purpose and talked freely,
Wilfrid introducing me as a lady who "want to know
about bush medicine and old-time story and duppy and
—
all such kind a t'ing not to do any harm; so you got
anyt'ing for her?"
The approach to the confidence of the Negro peasant
is won through the ruling class, to whom the folk look
for initiative and whose introduction they always re
spect. To all those who made my way easy by their
courtesy and hospitality let me here record thanks.
That I leave them unnamed is due not to forgetfulness,
but to the host of such indebtednesses to no one of which
I would seem inattentive. To them is due whatever in
sight I have gained into the inner life of the folk, and it
is for them to solve the problems arising out of the facts
here described.
I
From my predecessors in the field have tried to de
rive every possible benefit and in each case to acknowl
edge such indebtedness. Local authorities like Belisario,
Banbury, Palache, are accessible in the excellent library
for the West Indies brought together under the direction
of Professor Frank Cundall, and housed in the building
of the Jamaica Institute in Kingston. Others have been
FOREWORD
ix
found in the libraries of Harvard University and of the
City of New York. For the courtesies extended to me by
I
the officers of these institutions here record grateful
I
thanks. Hickeringill is the only authority have listed
without myself weighing the value of his account. Prob
I
ably other names could be added to advantage. have
intentionally omitted merely disputative writers and
those who describe Jamaica as known to the ruling class
alone. Of modern books I have not mentioned books of
travel, however delightful and informing in themselves,
although including some of the best from older sources.
Two books of fiction, Montagnac's little-known book
I
of sketches and De Lisser's Jane, have thought worth
including because of the true picture they give of the
folk life of today. Among local authorities, Professor
Cundall and Mr. Walter Jekyll have made scientific
contributions to Jamaican folklore, and all of Mr. De
Lisser's books are valuable for their sympathetic insight
into the life of the people. Among old writers, Long,
Edwards, and the admirable Dr. Sloane are indispen
sable, and there are many lesser writers like Leslie whose
special interest lies in depicting the folk life. Monk
Lewis's journal from his own plantation in Westmore
land presents a truthful picture of life in the early nine
teenth century before emancipation, from the pen of a
trained writer genuinely interested in the people he
wrote about. Beckford is far too ornate, but his direct
observations are excellently lucid. Of later writers Ram-
pini is an interested, Gosse a trained and competent ob
server. To all these writers I am incalculably indebted
for the light they throw upon folk custom.
It is necessary to deny here any effort to make a com
plete study of social life and religious thought among the
i
FOREWORD
I
whole colored population ofJamaica. What have gath
ered is emphatically exclusive of the sophisticated col
ored people who ridicule or censure the superstitions of
the blacks and move among the better classes on the
island theoretically upon an equality with the whites.
Their children attend the same private schools, their
younger set the same social functions, the more intelli
gent take an active part in the judicial, legislative, and
administrative machinery of the island. The British
have an admirable quality of working side by side with
the colored man and at the same time preserving their
class and racial distinction. The material here gathered
—
represents the peasant class the great majority of the
folk, although hardly the most ignorant, whose poverty
prevents their adoption of British standards. It is em
phatically folklore, not the lore of the colored man. But
its rhythmic melancholy or rollic, its shrewd wisdom,
as even its superstition, penetrate the life and thought
of white and colored alike of the literate classes, and
leave an impress upon their speech, attitude, emotion.
The Jamaica Negro is superstitious. He believes with
all his might in the spirit world, sometimes to his degra
dation but at times also to his supreme exaltation.
Hence the effect of a record like this may be to over
whelm the mind with a mass of irrelevancies under
which is lost any true view of the Negro's generally
quite practical wisdom. Even superstition may, in the
spirit of play and in lack of other emotional outlet,
flower into forms rendered grotesque by a hunger for
aesthetic excitement. Much descends to the African
through Mohammedan contacts, and all lore in Jamaica
today is colored by the social and religious teaching of
the white race which has ruled the island for almost
FOREWORD
xi
three hundred years.
It is this very island isolation and the opportunity it
gives for study of the influence upon a backward race of
contact with more developed peoples that lends such
interest to a close knowledge of folk life in Jamaica as
it exists today. Not African or Indian, east or west;
not Spanish or British, it is a blend of all these into a
fresh product reflecting the material background of
the sunny fertile island itself and the mixed culture
of those alien races who have come to call it home. Dis
tinguishable, too, from every other American group
—
in each particular art speech, song, life itself, and the
complex emotional life of the spirit world in which it
—
moves all this is individually Jamaican, so that our
own Negroes hold themselves a little aloof from the
Jamaican as "more awesome" than their countrymen.
This is not the whole story of acculturation. But with
the more difficult and in many ways more important
analysis of the sophisticated Negro blend in Jamaica
this study is not concerned. In every case where a so
phisticated and a backward race meet, the problem lies
not with the folk who absorb and re-create but with
the upper classes who absorb and imitate.
1
I
*•
