My Time At Lucky Hill

My times at Lucky Hill were mostly day trips with an occational summer vacation here and there. But one time I had to spend a whole year there for I remember going to Jeffery Town school there and in fact getting into my first school fight.

I can’t remember the circumstance under which I was sent to Lucky Hill to live but such was the life for myself and my nearest sibling. We both had episodes where we spent a lot of our childhood living away from our parents. His periods in Lucky Hill were much longer, more frequent and emotionally daunting than mine. But none the same I found mine was non the less vexing. Even as a child you realise that Lucky Hill life was not attracting. It was bush; there was no electricity, no running water, only an out door latrine and the kitchen was a shack with dirt floor and only wood fires, no stoves. I think I must have been about the age of 8-9 years old then and in fourth or fifth grade/class. I don't know the exact age I was then or what grades the school covered (it more than likely covred everything that was considered elementary or primary education) I only remembered that I was not old enough to play with the bigger boys but also was not in one of the younger grades.

Life in Lucky Hill meant hard work. A typical school day meant getting up before the sun comes up, and doing your chores around the house. This could mean going to the river to get water, chopping wood for fire for the day, finding the goats or donkeys or whatever animals that were tied out in one of the fields closer to the house and moving them to newer and fresher pasture or helping out in the kitchen to get the morning meal going. These were the chores for the smaller kids, the older ones had to go father and do a lot more. Only when your chores were all done that you could you could then wash up and put on your school clothes and go to school; which was a good three mile walk. When school was over there was no staying back for sports or any extra activities. You expected to hurry home to get your evening chores (planting, picking, weeding, feeding, etc.) done before night fall.

Then on Friday all activities reached a new frenzy as the final preparations were made to get ready to go to market on Saturday. All the stuff that you would be selling had to be gathered from the different fields and the hampers packed and ready for next morning. It was also the night that you did your cooking of coconut oil. This was our main cash crop so all hands were needed. Everyone would be up half the night grating, straining and boiling the extracted coconut milk down into oil. Then early next morning while it was still dark out you would be awaken to get the donkeys loaded and your bundle that you would be carrying on your head ready and then off to market you would go, trudging behind the donkey. And market was no 'round the corner, it was miles away.

Going to market to sell was not a favorite time for me. I was never any good at it and felt totally out of palace. It was not my thing then and is still not today. I am not sure why but I saw no thrill in it nor was I any good at it. Fortunately, either because of my resistance, demeanor, performance or simple ineptitude but I was not frequently selected to go to market. To this day I still find the task of selling very daunting. My wife just has to mention her intention of having a garage sale and I will find every excuse to disappear for the day.

But what I found even uglier than going to market was walking behind the donkey. This felt like the lowliest of the low and this feeling has stuck with me through the years. It became my point of reference for every disappointment. When I was in high school and could not afford football boots or track shoes or just lunch money for that day I always felt that things were still not so bad for at least I was still not walking behind a donkey. And even today when I am passed over for a promotion or endured some perceived slight my knee-jerk reaction is to turn the situation into a positive and commend myself on my accomplishments of how far I have come… from walking behind a donkey.

Do not get me wrong, Lucky Hill was not all that bad. For one, you were never alone. There were five of us kids there, so you were never doing a chore alone and being kids you could make a game out of anything. Even the night before market when you would stay up half the night boiling coconut oil would be fun. We would all be sitting around the fire, husking, grating, straining and cooking; everyone would be working but at the same time we would all be talking and telling stories and before you know it the night went by. We did not know it then but it was quality time, a bonding that cemented the family structure. I guess it is a part of what I am trying to recapture in these bloggs.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about my first fight. I will save that for next time.

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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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My Great Grand Mother

Directly across the street and about a mile away and also on the very peak of an even higher hill lived Aunt’s mother, my great grand mother (Gran Mumma, I think is what we called her). I remembered very little about her and it's only recently that I re-connected the lineage and realized that she was my Great Grand Mother. She was pretty old, frail and very much inside most of the time so I did not see much of her. She must have been pretty old by time I was born and I saw so little of her so nothing significant stands out and now I can't put a picture of her back in my brain as much as I would like to.

The house I remembered though. In the back, that was the side facing the road, we played cricket, with bats made out of coconut bough and a ball from anything you can device. On the other side of the house was the front door. Next to it was a great big wooden barrel or steel drum for catching the run-off rain water from the roof. One time this drum got infected with mosquitoes laying their eggs so a thin layer of kerosene oil was poured on the surface of the water to kill the mosquitoes (it prevents them from breathing). So in order to get to the water below the this film of Kerosene oil you were suppose to dip your container below the surface and full it before bringing it back to the surface. That way you would not get the kerosene oil on the surface in your container. Try as I might, I could never do it right so every drink I took I would get the taste of kerosene oil. That taste have stayed with me all these years and that is what stands out now in my memory when I think of my Great Grand Mother.

You see, at Lucky Hill water was a precious commodity. For everyone in the district, my grand mother and great grand mother included, water had to be carried from a river on your head. So you treasured it. To get water from the river you would take a container (one that would be fitting for your age and size) and you would go down to this river (it must have been more than a mile away) and you would fill it up and get it on your head and trudge all the way back. Heaven help you if you spilled it for you had go all the way back and do it all over again. I remember a particular part of the trail where the soil was a very red clay (much like my now beloved North Carolina soil) which became very slippery when wet. Invariably, someone would loose a load and that made it slippery and before you know you had a domino effect. It was especially treaterous when it rained for then it was not unusual then for several of us kids to loose two or more loads before successfully negotiating all the way home. That was just some of the hardships of Lucky Hill but I have to come back to that later as I am sort of getting ahead of myself.

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Nemiah Taylor (Daddy)

Aunt was married to Nemiah Taylor (my grand father). We all called him Daddy. He had two other children before the marriage (their names I do not remember) but my mother was the only child from the marriage. He was always a quiet man, in the background but hardly ever heard. He was a carpenter by trade in his early years but became more of a cultivator with Aunt later on. I do not know if he built the original house (two rooms) in Lucky Hill but I knew he did all the additions.

The house sits on the very top of this steep hill about a quarter of a mile from the road (the main road running from Jeffery Town to Gayle). The hill was so steep that not even my father who prided himself on his driving expertise with a Land Rover, could ever get a vehicle up there. To get up there you had to negotiate this very curvy and narrow trail that was filled with rocks and roots and stumps and sheer drop-offs that was just plain scary. But as kids we made it up in the middle of the darkest night without a lamp, and in the days you would come flying down at break-neck speed with only a few skinned knees now and again.

The unusual thing about Daddy was how homely and quiet he was. He was not a Jehovah Witness but he never got drunk, never swear, never stayed out late and I never hear him raise his voice, better still, I do not think he ever ventured beyond the parish of St. Mary. As a carpenter he hired people so in the mornings there would be several people waiting on him and they would go to the job site, him carrying a wooden tool box. They would be back before night fall but he would stay home and did not go out until next morning. That was Daddy, quiet and homely. That sounds very much like me today! That is scary!

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Amy Davis Taylor (Aunt).

Aunt was not my real aunt, she was my grandmother, my mother’s mother; but everyone called her as Aunt, even non relatives. How she got the title I do not know, for she was an only child so she could never be a real aunt to anyone. I guess the title was a Jamaican form of showing respect and at the same time showing appreciation or gratuity. But it was in no way a sign of familiarity for Aunt did not allow familiarity from anyone. She was a strict, bible quoting, no nonsense of a woman.

I have no dates on Aunt but I remember her being old from I was a kid. She never seemed to have aged more as I grew older; only her hair, it got a little whiter. She was a strapping woman, big bosomed and round, with strong hands and ample girth, but not fat; she was all muscle I think. She would work from sun-up to sun-down in back breaking man’s work of cultivating and clearing bush and caring for cows and donkeys, and still come home and cook. Although there was never a contest I am sure she could out-work most men. Aunt was a woman, but she was also a farmer, cultivator, ’higgler’and a mother to varying number of children. She was a special woman. She would plant and cut bananas; dig yam, coco and dasheen; and husked, grate and cook coconut into coconut oil; and she could keep going all day. Then on Saturday it was off to market behind a donkey to sell her wares and on Sunday it was to Kingdom Hall. Those were some of my most poignant memories about her. But the most memorable part was her attire.

For the most part she dressed like the typical Jamaican women from thr 'country parts' of her day, cotton dress, often with a apron around the waist or hanging from the neck and a cotton scarf tied around her hair which was always neatly plaited beneath the scarf; a typical attire But on her feet would be a pair of men’s black leather working boots! I all my years I do not remember ever seeing Aunt in a pair of ladies shoes or even slippers, the boots were a constant. If she was going to the fields she would wear the boots but if she was going to Kingdom Hall or to market she would still wear the boots, but then they would be highly polished. At home she would wear the older ones and without laces, that were her slippers. The truth is though; men’s boots never looked out of place on her!

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I Will Always Love My Mother

I will always love my mother
She is my favorite girl…

So the song goes but for me that was not always true or so it would seem for a long long time; but more on that later, now I will just introduce you to my mother and why I will always love her.

Named Zillah Lulleta (Taylor) Davis but called Curly, she was the only child from the marriage of Nemiah Taylor (we called him Daddy) and Amy Davis Taylor (everyone called her Aunt). She was born on January 31, 1927 in the village of Retirement in the town of Lucky Hill in the parish of St. Mary. She had a half sister and a half brother, children of Daddy before the marriage. Knowing Aunt, her early life would have been pretty tough, more so than I came to know it, because at that time there were a lot less people to share the work load. But while Aunt’s house in Lucky Hill might have been tough, for my mother it was her refuge, a place she came back to often, especially in troubled times. It was eventually her final resting place. She died there in 1979 after succumbing to the devastating disease of cancer. She was only 52. But her life was varied and a fulfilling one. I do not remember her expressing much regrets.

She knew my father from Lucky Hill, he was from the district of Endeavour and I think they went to the same school for a while but I do not think they interacted directly while at school but knew similar people for they were always saying to each other ‘Do you remember such and such….”. In any event they made the connection and got married, she at early at age 18 or 19 and he at the mature age of 26 or so; then they had me, she was only 19 years old then.

My mother was always a fun person; happy, outgoing and like to have a conversation (I got none of those genes). She lived the moment, not overly concerned about the future but is always optimistic. At the same time she was strict (I had many a beatings to prove that) and by no means a pushover (I was often embarrassed when she would take me Down Town to Hannah’s store on King Street to buy me clothes or shoes for school for she would argue down the poor clerk to make me want to hide and hope none of my friends showed up then). Today I see most of her personality in Bill and Sharon than in myself or Harry. They have fun, they are outgoing but don’t cross them.

Her other great quality was her ambition and I think all of us got a little bit of that. But that was also the quality that caused my father the greatest anxiety and was the cause of many family disruptions. My father was more old schooled, and expected her to be satisfied with staying home cleaning and cooking, etc. My mother on the other hand was way ahead of her time and wanted to do more. While I think she tried hard to do the stay home Mom stuff it was just not in her blood. From the days in Grove she would take off to go to Kingston to learn nursing (later on it was to work in Browns Emporium in Ocho Rios, and later still to work at Tower Isle hotels). These episodes did not sit well with my father but she was a strong willed, determined woman who wanted more out of life than just being a mother.

Growing up we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, both my mother and father grew up as Witnesses, but my father was much more fervent than she was. She was an active participant in the meetings and traveling to different towns to Witness and to conventions; however, I think she enjoyed the experience more for the opportunity to interact with others than from a religious commitment. What I remembered most from her being a Witness was not her religious commitment but her voice. She had a great voice. I can still hear it rising distinctly from the rest of the congregation, and how proud I felt then standing right next to her.

Going to conventions was real close times with my mother. My father was always away doing manly things and I was left in her charge mostly. Conventions were special for Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was where Witnesses from several district or regions or the whole island would meet for a three day convention of religious convocation and celebration. The meetings were long but the food was something to look forward to (you get a rare chance to sample food not normally available to a poor child growing up in Jamaica. Some of my favorites were doughnuts and American Red Delicious apples) and it was also an opportunity to spend time with old friends and families. This was true for the grown-ups too so it was really something to look forward to. And getting there was always interesting. Our basic transportation was Brother Earnest Douglas’s truck. He would put benches in the back and the whole congregation would pile in. There were no public rest rooms so for long trips we would stop for potty breaks. The women would go one side and the men the other. Still that was fun, it was quality time spent with my mother.

My first experience of school was not at Ocho Rios but in Kingston. She had gone there to study nursing in one of her several tries and I was put in a ‘school’. School was outside in a big yard somewhere off Slipe Pen Road. There were no desks and the benches were pieces of wood held up at the ends by large stones and for punishment you were held under a big stand pipe in the middle of the yard and let the water beat on you. You had a slate to write on and at that time the slates did not even have lines in them and if you broke it you were in real trouble. It was my introduction to schooling but it was also the beginning of the one constant that would exist between me and my mother; she was going to make sure that I get all the schooling that she did not get. It was as if she was on a mission to make sure I did not fall into the entrapments that she found herself. And so this motivation for always learning developed…
Thank You Maa!

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Pimento Picking

The pimento berries were a primary cash crop for Shaw Park Estate. This made it a prime and sometimes the only source of hard currency for many of the women and children living in the surrounding vicinities. I looked forward to pimento picking season, not just for the cash but as an opportunity to picnic in the bush, Jamaica style.

It was once thought that the pimento tree would only grow in Jamaica but now they are grown in Central America too. The tree itself was not particularly tall and has a distinct stark white trunk that evolves into very bushy but brittle branches. It blooms once a year with small white flowers which turns into small berries. These berries are harvested by hand while green then sun dried (which then looked like peppercorns) before being pounded into powder and sold internationally as the alluring spice called allspice. As a child, picking the green berries was my only opportunity to earn cash to buy the many necessities that a growing boy needs (kites, sweets and a Bulla cake or totoe or a gizada once in a while). Earning that money was not work though, it was part picnic, part education and part nurturing. Picking pimento was an occasion that you looked forward to all year.

The normal scenario was that having determined which trees were mature enough to be pick then a male and probably the only male there would climb the tree and break off the branches leaving the tree bare as if dying. The branches would be brought to a selected large shade tree where the women and children (the pickers) would be congregated. Everyone would have a selected spot and so would begin the process to selecting a branch and pulling the berries off the branch into a container. These containers would be emptied into crocus sacks and the number of sacks filled determined how much you would earn. Some of the better pickers had sacks all to them selves but as a child you would contribute to a sack and the amount you earned depended as much on you effort and skill as on the good judgment, memory and integrity of the adult owner of the sack to which you contributed; although I can’t remember ever feeling cheated; but such was the culture then that such a thought was practically unthinkable.

While you were picking a fire would be going and all the fixings brought from home plus available pickings would be cooked so that lunch would be this so special treat. Maybe it was just the atmosphere but those lunches at pimento picking time were special. It was not just what you had at home but a combination of the contribution from all the families and many would indulge in a little extra, on credit I am sure, in anticipation of the extra earnings. It was real basic food but I remembered it as mouth-watering and sumptuous, a pleasure you look forward to all year.

Then throughout the picking and the eating there would be the talking. In a culture where a child was suppose to be seen and not heard, pimento picking was one of the rare opportunities where a child could climb up the social ladder. Maybe because you were a full fledged contributor to the daily earnings it probably made a difference or because there were no adult male around to reestablish the ranking order but I think it was more an atmosphere thing, one that created camaraderie and nurturing rather than disciplining and ranking.. So for the brief period you were almost like an adult. You could add an opinion without meeting the surely eyes of an adult putting you back in your place. It was a chance to practice being a grown-up.

Picking pimento was not work it was more like a festival, a festival village style.

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