Read Online Olga - A Daughter's Tale by Marie-Therese Browne (Marie Campbell) - Free Book Online Page A

but people liked him, because he was nice, and he was friends with all sorts of people. What made him different from other white Jamaicans was that he wasn’t prejudice towards coloured or black people in the slightest.
    The day of Carlton’s funeral was unusually hot for that time of the year and there was a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind in the air. A black choir sang hymns at his funeral and Dolly told me later that this was Carlton’s “second family”.
    As a baby Carlton had a black nurse whose name was Ambrosine Williams and he spent much of his childhood with her and her thirteen children rather than his own white family. When his coffin was being lowered into the ground Ambrosine Williams bent down and picked up a handful of earth and threw it at Vivie. She told Vivie that she was going to set a duppy on her for causing Carlton’s death and that she would be cursed until the day she died.
    That night the wind began to pick up and get stronger and continued until well into the evening. Then, according to a report in the paper “the lightening started building up in strength until it lit up the whole sky, dancing in fantastic forms in the night sky, whilst the thunder that followed the lightening seemed to shake the earth as if to say the end of the world is near and then finally in the early hours of the next morning the rain came down.”

    ******

Chapter ELEVEN

Becky’s (Mammie) Diary

    Thousands of blacks cannot find work so they have no money to buy food or clothes for their families. Smith’s Village is one of the worst areas in the city covered with shacks where conditions of squalor are beyond imagination and made worse by appalling overcrowding.
    It makes me furious when I read the Gleaner and they say the reports are exaggerated. I have seen for myself, little children and old men, stark born naked, on the streets begging for money and food. Soup kitchens are springing up over the city to feed these poor people. Is this an exaggeration? Of course, the paper is controlled by the upper white ruling classes – these Jamaicans are a disgrace.
    While the Catholic Church is doing what it can, the Protestant Church seems to be trying to conceal the gravity of the painful conditions under which thousands of people are living. Children are running around naked because they have no clothes to go to school and those that do have clothes, have no food at home, nothing in their little stomachs. When they come home from school it is to a hungry and crying mother, brothers and sisters and a father almost demented because he cannot feed his children.
    Thank goodness for Bustamante. His constant flow of letters to the Gleaner is making people aware of the problems but I fear for this island’s future.

    Letter from Alexander Bustamante, Kingston
    to
    The Editor, Daily Gleaner, Kingston

    “…………… . shame, and because some have refused to do their duty and they want to minimise that which does not need to be magnified – unemployment.

    The mongoose and the rats in certain parts of the island are being disturbed at nights, because the cane-fields, their resting places, have now become the sleeping place of many workers. Many of them rush out at nights so nude they dare not come out in the days, just to buy little necessities to return to their shelter – the canefields.

    I have been to St Ann, and the poverty there is something I hate to describe. Neither minister nor politician should try to prevent it being exposed. Visit Newton, Kinowl, Mullings Bush Districts in St Elizabeth; Marlie Hill and Plowden and see the poverty – the misery. But why go to such places when we have them next door to us; go to Trench Pen, Smith’s Village, Ackee Walk and Rose Town and the apostolic Lanes, etc.

    Too late it is for anyone through any peculiar reasons to try and cover up the truth of the lamentable conditions. Things were bad a few years gone by; they were no better last year, this year they are