Hartley NeitaDuring my late teen years, beggars were of all ages and were all men, and their request was "beg you a quattie".
A quattie then was the nickname for a penny ha' penny (a penny plus half a penny, or in a rough comparison to today's currency, about one cent). Then, though, one penny could buy a sugar bun, a circular bun with a sprinkling of sugar on top. It was, of course, a lot of money.
The amount asked for by beggars increased as the cost of living rose. The first increase was to three pence, a small silver coin. That, too, was a lot of money. But the big increase came during the 1950s when no beggar worth his salt asked for anything less than a bob, which was a shilling, or ten pence of today. The one shilling coin was also the subject of a popular mento song, "Gimme back me shilling wid de lion pon it". The lion, of course, was a replica of British royal insignia, denoting the great majesty of Britain's king or queen.
Soon after we converted the currency from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents, the tribute you had to pay to beggars was a dollar. It was then a paper note. But as the Bank of Jamaica stopped printing notes for values less than $50, coins became of no value to mendicants.
Now, some of us are of the view that beggars are lazy people who do not want to work. Let me tell you, however, that it is hard and tiring and sometimes frustrating work.
Beggars begin their day before sun-up. They travel by bus from wherever they live to their "offices" at traffic lights. Some have also studied the flow of traffic in the mornings and know where motorists have to crawl because of traffic congestion. Those beggars have mobile offices. They work in their offices throughout the day, during rain or in the hot sun, and do not leave for home until after dark.
Now, while some are genuinely poor or handicapped, there are quite a number who are what you can call samfie artists. There is one who has one leg bandaged from his foot to above his knee. He walks on crutches. He wears a pained expression on his face and he looks at you with a long and steady stare in a silent rebuke if you do not place a money in the palm of his hand. And don't you ever dare give him less than a $50 note. He will look at a $20 dollar coin for a second or two, then tilt his head and stare at you for what seems like eternity before he hops to his next victim.
There is another man who walks with a stiff leg, dragging it as he walks the road beside the line of cars. He knocks on the window of every car. He begins with the driver, and if he gets a negative nod, he knocks on the widow of the back seat if there are passengers there.
Catch him, however, when he is going home after work, and he is a man in a hurry.
Beggars also hang around the entrances to book stores in plazas. One, who is a regular in the Half-Way Tree area of St. Andrew, has a notebook in his hand. When he stops you, he flips the pages very quickly and tells you as he does this that he is short a hundred dollars which he needs to buy a special school book for his son. During Christmas he tells some of his victims that he wants to buy a Bible to give his son as a Christmas present.
And if you say you are broke, he looks at you accusingly, and you know he is saying to himself: "May you burn in hell!"
