Amy Davis Taylor #2

I can’t believe that almost two months have passed since my last entry. Keep this up and this effort will turn into one of those great start but no follow-through and that is not me. I want to keep this going for a long time but to make it easier I will make each entry shorter, relax the chronological order and write as the spirit moves me.
With that said, I want to go back to Aunt (my grand mother Amy Taylor) for a while.
My last entry was more an introduction but one of the things that I have been rolling around in my head for the last two months was how formidable that woman was.
I can still picture Aunt in her work boots and probably with a basket on her head, a switch in one hand and in the other a rope tied to the donkey before her. The donkey would be loaded; two hampers across its back filled with yams, cocos, dasheens coconuts, bottles of coconut oil, maybe some fruits, a couple of eggs and definitely a couple of bunches of bananas. It would be Saturday morning and she would be on her way to market. There would be one or two of us children in tow to help her. Now someone looking at this picture might think poor woman, how unfortunate her life was, especially knowing that she hardly had an elementary education.
But reflection on it over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that Aunt was pretty well off, at lease compared to her peers. Her house was not a mansion but it was one of the few concrete houses in the district. She might have been cash poor but that was because ever extra penny she could get she would invest it in purchasing land. I don’t have a good count but from memory she had several tracks of land sprinkled all over the district.
One in particular, in an area called Halifax was several acres and was exceptional in the variety of food it produced. She cultivated mostly bananas and coconuts there but it was the first place I saw coffee beans, the only place I ever picked cacao and worked through the whole process of turning it into chocolate (which she sold in the market); she also planted yams, coco, dasheen (which she turned into Bami) as well as a number of fruit trees that just about grew wild. Then there would be one or two cows tied out there, often in calf or getting ready for market. Halifax was a beauty. The only problem with it was that it was a hike to get to. This was tough especially if it was your chore to go there to milk the cow before school. But once in Halifax the pickings were great interms of variety and bounty.
Aunt might have looked like a poor higgler woman eking out a subsistence living but the more I think about it I realize that she was a shred business woman. Until now I always saw her as this basic country woman with a love for wearing men work boots and doing hard manual labor but she could well have been one of the wealthiest of my ancestors! Still, living in Lucky Hill with Aunt was no panacea; it was work, work and more work. I will try and tell you a little about that next time.

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