Teenie, weenie, beenie cotton seeds

Hartley Neita, Contributor

WHEN I was a child a cotton tree grew about 100 yards from my home. It rose high in the sky and seemed to be a thousand feet tall. Its limbs spread in all directions and to my childhood eyes spanned a thousand feet, too, covering the earth at noon with its wide and cool shade.

At the end of each summer the wind blew off its tiny (or as we said then) "beenie, weenie" seeds from its stems. These were clothed with a white fluff and floated gently through the air. Some of these seeds fell on the leaves of other trees and grass, and died. Others fell on housetops. Those also died. Some fell in a nearby pond and became gorged with water and also died. A few fell to the earth which in my village was dry and hard.

Very, very few ever found fertile soil and tried to live and with luck could have grown into thousand-foot-tall cotton trees. From a little teenie, weenie, beenie seed. For years in Jamaica, teenie, weenie, beenie seeds have been growing into mighty trees in my country.

There is the parson, with his strong and resonant voice who preaches for four hours straight without stopping on a sound system half a mile away from my home every Sunday. There are other churches in his neighbourhood. So the seed he has sown will grow and multiply and one day God is going to be hearing multiple prayers and sermons of praise overlapping each other. I will be living then in the shade of a Tower of Babel towering as tall as the cotton tree of my youth.

Lessons

Young men and women today do not care how they dress in public. There was a time when no one went out without being "properly attired". One of the lessons my mother, bless her departed soul, taught me, was never to go out without clean underpants.

"You never can tell you won't meet in an accident and embarrass me when they strip you at the hospital," she said.

I was in my bank recently when two young men and a young woman walked in. The men had caps on with the peaks covering the cubitch hole at the back of their necks. They wore heavy-corded vests and three-quarter-length shorts with shredded cuffs. On their feet were dirty, unlaced sneakers. The woman had her hair in curlers. Her skirt rode high above her steatopygous buttocks and her feet slid on a pair of slippers.

For a moment I was stunned as I knew that had I seen them there 20 years ago I would have fled from the bank believing they were armed robbers.

This mode of today's shabby dress started when secondary schoolgirls stopped wearing hats and schoolboys stopped wearing ties to school. Started, too, when ladies stopped wearing stockings to work and hats in church, when men no longer had to wear jackets to office, and when teachers stopped the practice of examining children's fingernails for dirt in the mornings.

Ron Bitter, a former manager of the Carib Theatre in Cross Roads, St. Andrew, once personally hauled out two boys who were sprawling in their seats and shouting remarks to their friends during the playing of the National Anthem. There were cheers for his action. Today, he would be the one dragged out of the cinema by the patrons.

Tram car

There was the conductor on a tram car who told the driver to stop the car, came off and grabbed two boys who were hopping on and off and abusing the passengers. When he came back on the tram the passengers applauded him.

Today, they would abuse him, take away his tickets and money and throw him into the road.

So, why are we blaming the Beenie Mans and other "entertainers" for warring with each other on stage and tracing threats of blood for blood and fire for fire at each other?

The fact is that this behaviour started with teenie, weenie, beenie cotton seeds. We are all to blame for watering, fertilising, mulching and pruning the trees as they grew.

And it was not so long ago the first green leaves peeped out of the earth.

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