art-work produced by the West Indian negroes. The baskets are really good. You can buy one of any shape, any size, and any and every design. Coloured grass is let into snow-white reed with fine cunning, and without regard for any canon of conventionality. The character of the casual negroes is shown in the patterns of their basket-work. All the younger women are told off to superintend the stalls which cater to the weaknesses of tourists. The women are given silver ornaments to wear on their coal black wrists, and frequently their ears are hung with heavy Eastern rings. This is a fashion copied from the coolie women. All the woman’s personal jewellery is offered for sale. She will explain the meaning of the most complicated article of native manufactures with cheerful languor. She assumes an air of indifference so long as she knows you intend to buy. When you begin to show indifference, the instinct of the saleswoman springs to life in her, and she is all entreaty. She offers wonderful whips made from the lace bark tree, whips whose butt and long plaited lash are both made from one piece of wood. She offers walking sticks of ebony, groo groo palm, pimento, bamboo, or cinnamon. Or if you prefer it, you can purchase a shark’s backbone mounted on a steel rod and fitted with a handle of scented sandal wood. This, the lady will tell you, is in England a great novelty, and surely worth five little dollars. Of course there is basket-work, and some pottery shaped out of red Caribbean clay. There are strings of coloured seeds and flower-pots made from wide bamboos. Gourds are carved and coloured and cut into useless shapes alleged to be ornamental, and cocoa-nuts are carved into men’s heads, the red hair left to make a frizzy beard. These, the lady says, are very fine. There are little gourds set on wooden skewers, and so formed into babies’ rattles. These the arch maiden sells to young men and maidens. Last of all, she produces dainty d’oyleys and table-centres and fine ornaments made from the lace bark-tree, and fashioned with ferns and pressed blossoms. These things cost a great deal of money, but as a rule they are very decorative. When you leave her stall, the lady pursues you for many yards with a mammoth lamp-shade, which, she assures you, will be greatly appreciated by your home folks.
But the stall of the tourist caterer suggests artificiality. After all, the real market is under the vestibule of the great square building. Here are the native people with their pepper-pods and cocoa, their live fowls and jackass rope. The latter, be it understood, is tobacco. Sold in rope form at one penny or twopence per yard, the tobacco is called jackass rope, for what reason I could not discover. It is in this corner of the market-place that one meets the negro only. The woman minds the stall and does the selling, while the husband gossips with his fellows, or sips strong liquids at the rum bars. The anxious wife squats, nigger fashion, beside her heap of pepper-pods, and her hands play with them listlessly, just as we imagine a miser plays with his gold, until the heap is sold. She is patient and ladylike. The white man walks along her strip of market land, and she voices no light banter. If you ask questions as to her wares she answers with modesty and with intelligence. This is the country-woman, polite and unsophisticated. Beyond the department devoted to the sale of spices and pepper-pods and tobacco, we come to the chicken saleroom. Jamaican market-women nurse captive fowls just in the same manner as Englishwomen fondle lap-dogs. They stroke them and play with their feathers, open a wing to show the strength and youth of a bird, and hold the beak towards their face as if pleading with the doomed fowls for farewell kisses.
Fronting the poultry-women are the sellers of native vegetables and fruits. These wares are heaped on strips of torn sacking spread upon the stone floor of the market. Each woman sits next her piece of sacking and noisily shouts the merits of her own particular goods. When no customers are about, these women are content to wrangle among themselves as to the comparative merits of rival heaps of fruit; from commercial squabbles of this description it is easy for the conversation to descend to the level of vulgar personalities and strong abuse.
The meat market is the only selling place which offers no attraction to the idle lounger. For myself I was content to smell it afar off and pass quickly by. Opposite the main entrance to the principal building is the market courtyard, a square patch of grey dust enclosed by an iron railing, and containing a drinking fountain for the people and a long water-filled trough for the donkeys. This is the resting-place for the workers and idling-place for the idlers. Littered about the dust are groups of children, and donkeys, and adults. The children are playing their games, the donkeys are munching at heaps of half-dried green grass, and the adults, stretched at full length on the dust, or on the grass heaps at which the donkeys are taking their meal, are for the most part sleeping the sleep of the tired negro. A few there are who have chosen to lie in the shadow of empty market carts, but more are to be found sleeping in the full glare of the sun.
The fountain in the centre of the courtyard is the drawing-room of the market place. Here come the youth and the maiden to gossip and flirt over the midday cup of water, and here lounge the matrons to discuss prices, and costumes, and husbands. The men for the most part have found the rum bars, but the women and the striplings congregate round the drinking fountain, drink cups of water, and bathe their hands and faces in the donkey’s drinking trough. The noise of the laughter and talking is louder than the sound of a
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