Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica
Chapter 2
For some time longer the girls continued sitting near the road and discussing the future. Then Jane heard her mother calling, and rose to go. The others did likewise, Celestina going into her hut to attend to some little matter she had neglected, while Mary and Elizabeth went towards a small coffee plantation where they had engaged to spend the rest of the afternoon in cleaning coffee, thus earning threepence each.
When Jane presented herself at the door of her mother’s house, she was asked by the latter to go and assist her brother, who was just then attending to the “ground.” She nodded and turned away in the direction of what appeared to be a gully, and began clambering down the rather steep sides of it in a manner that would have meant a broken limb to anyone not well accustomed to such exercises. At the bottom of the declivity she found her brother, who was digging yam holes with a hoe, and he directed her to plant the yams as soon as he had finished each hole. This she proceeded to do, squatting herself on the ground, covering up the yam roots with her bare hands (into which a splinter of wood would endeavour, not successfully, to force itself every now and then), dragging herself from hole to hole, and enduring the sun—most terrible at this hour—as though it did not exist.
“Whoy!” exclaimed her brother, after the last hole had been dug, “it hot, sah!” He wiped the perspiration from his brow with the dirty shirt sleeve of his right arm, and, leaning on his hoe, watched his sister as she heaped earth upon the last of the roots. Presently he produced a crushed cigarette from the inner recesses of his shirt bosom, struck a light, puffed the weed, and waited for Jane to get up.
“You gwine to Kingston,’ to-morrow,” he observed stolidly, “an’ I are soon going to go away meself. Just as cheap,[1] for dere is not much for a man to do here. Dis little field is stuppidness for a man like me, an’ it’s no use learnin’ trade, fo’ y’u can’t meck a livin’ by it. Jamaica is a dyamn poor country, an’ everybody teck an’ advantage of a man! In fac’, even ef I could get a good job here I doan’t t’ink I would stop. Y’u finish?”
She struck her hands against one another to brush off the particles of earth that stuck to them, then, with her brother, began to toil up the side of the declivity towards the house.
“I hope the dyamn tiefs in dis place won’t rob me yam before dem is even ripe,” the young man grumbled. “Y’u can’t plant noten but somebody come at night-time an’ rob it fram y’u! Well, when y’u go to Kingston, Jane, y’u mustn’t forget we up here.”
“No,” she answered briefly; then the hut reached, her brother flung himself down on the ground in front of it and stretched himself out to sleep, drawing his tattered cap over his face, his day’s work being entirely over. Jane sauntered towards a little thatched bamboo structure with three sides and no door, the sides themselves being full of holes, and, entering, bega