- Ian Allen/Staff Photographer
Curdell Brown, community stalwart in Bohemia, St. Ann.
Avia Ustanny, Freelance Writer
IF YOU'RE addicted to apartment living, the sound of traffic and beauty contrived from electric lighting, then you may not understand a woman like Curdell Brown, who lives in the island's hinterland and has no intention of leaving.
Last week, we set out to find her, this woman who has lived in a valley all her life and who thinks that a backyard garden and the sound of cocks crowing at dawn are indispensable to a good life.
To find her, we travelled past Christiana, through Coleyville, Lorrimers, and onwards. To reach there, you will have to enter Trelawny before making your way back into St. Ann where this rural, valley community is located.
Curdell Brown lives in Bohemia, St. Ann.
Curdell Brown is principal of the Bohemia Basic School and self-styled community activist. Her school is located on a hill, as is every institution in this sloping land whose sides curve gently upwards.
We sped past a forest of yam sticks, dusty roads, and church after church, each on their own hillside. The valley is pretty, a garden laid out by a mysterious hand. We admire the scenery until we find the specific hill on which Curdell Brown has her fiefdom.
Mrs. Brown, as small as bird in the trees around, and as brown as a berry, is standing in front of her small office, which is just large enough to hold a desk and a chair.
Peeping out from their classroom one large room trisected into classes are small children who eye us curiously, struggling against their desire to leave their seats and come to give the strangers a closer inspection.
Over the heads of those nearest to us a chart declares.
"Here is a bee hive
Where are the bees
Hidden away here
Nobody sees
Here they come flying out
Each one alive
One, two, three, four, five"
Fortunate bees! The students are not so lucky as to be let out. They stay seated, though all chanting is suspended as all tune into the greeting from their principal who is clearly happy to see us. We receive immediate offers of yam and banana, which later in the morning we receive from her backyard garden. This is the way of the valley. Curiosity and kindness mixed all together.
Curdell is an institution in Bohemia, a woman who has been teaching tiny tots for over five decades. "I started school from in the 1950s on my veranda," she recalls. "When I said it to my father (he was sick then and my mother had died from I was seven) he did not agree, but I started. When he heard the children reading and singing he could not believe."
Today, of his eight children, Curdell is one of five left. Her father owned the largest shop in Bohemia and, perhaps, would have hoped that his children would have followed in his footsteps. She remembers this man as a strict person who preferred if you asked him for his breadfruit and oranges before helping yourself to them. He was set in his ways. But, so was Curdell.
She had passed her scholarship examination for Melrose High School, she said, but her step-mother said, 'big people can't go to school'.
"People then were not interested in the education of their children," Curdell comments.
Well, she started her own school, at age 18.
When the young teacher moved from the veranda to her church she had over 80 children under her tutelage.
Bohemia Basic, the school on the hill, was built over two decades ago by an EEC grant. Although the number of students has fallen, Mrs. Smith and two other teachers are still in command of a group numbering just under 50. Today, we are introduced to Principal Brown's class. "Students, say good morning." The children respond cheerily, happy to have finally got a word in edgewise. The topic of discussion for her class is 'transportation'.
We meet also fellow teacher, Michele Brown, who has been at the school for the last 12 years and who comments, "Mrs. Brown is a nice person; she cares about her students and she cares about us."
Now the principal is near to retirement age and promises that even when she leaves Bohemia Basic she will go back to teaching children at home. "I just love the children. The parents ask me not to give up yet ."
She says, "They (the students) are doing well, they attend well."
The parents are, by and large, supportive. "Their parents assist with the cleaning. Right now, the school needs painting and we are planning to put on a concert. The parents will provide the chicken and make soup."
Not all parents are co-operative, but life is about taking the good with the bad. "I have a lot of trouble with the younger parents. They pass remarks against the teachers. We try to motivate them and tell them what is good, but..."
Not even this change in attitude on the part of parents is enough to convince Principal Brown to leave the classroom.
Curdell is in her sixties, but she does not feel that old, she says. She loves her work, and life, as if, like her young charges, she was only born 'yesterday'.
From dawn to sunset, the rhythms of the valley are a source of deep happiness. "Every morning I get up at 6:00 o'clock and put on my kettle. By seven o' clock breakfast is ready and I have that with my grandson, Odene." Odene is now the only child in her home.
After breakfast on weekdays, she takes the long walk to Bohemia school. Yes, she is older now and would like to take the weight off her legs, but the taxis refuse her twenty-dollar fare in favour of the longer $50 fare to Christiana. But, the walk keeps her fit, she says. "I love it. I walk slowly."
School is dismissed at 2 p.m., after which she teaches music and conduct private classes for older children at her red-roofed home. On Sundays, she is the organist at Bohemia Moravian Church. "I was christened there and now I am still playing there." She was taught music by an older sister and has passed the love of music to at least one daughter. Although only one of her five children and her grandson are at home, between all that she does there is not time for loneliness.
Curdell's husband, a mechanic and a farmer, died two years ago. She remembers him with great love. "My husband was from Fraser. I married him in 1964. He was an excellent person. I never had a problem with him. If I am not at home, he wash the clothes, tidy the house and cook the dinner. He never give me any trouble with woman business."
Four of their five children, three girls and two boys, have drifted away from the valley. One is a bank manager in Brown's Town, one a teacher at Christiana High School, two accountants in Kingston and the last one a mechanic who has decided to stay in the valley with his mother.
"Bohemia is not on the map!" Mrs. Brown says with a hint of lament. The young people who live in the community are very poor, just like their forebears, she says. "They need something to motivate them," she insists, again and again. Farming is the main occupation for those who live in Bohemia. Others have skills in the areas of sewing, etc.
But, Curdell is happy that most of the children of the community are in school. Even the young girls, instead of staying at home as she did in her day, continue their education by going to evening school at Holmwood Technical High and Knox College.
Teacher Brown has lived all her life in Bohemia and has never travelled, never had the desire to. Her home, her valley, her children, are the centre of her world.
