Hartley NeitaThe closest neighbours to my family in the district in which I spent my early years were Mr. and Mrs. George Edwards.
To him, my father was Teacher and my mother was Miss Abbie. To them he was Sir George. In our home they referred to him, affectionately, as Old Man Edwards. To us children, he was just Sir.
Looking back in time as I write this, I suddenly realise I never met Mrs. Edwards. Her memory is a voice coming from a room inside her house when I shouted goodbye to her.
"So long, Son. Give me love to Miss Abbie."
Every Saturday morning and every day during the school holidays, I walked across the border between our homes and walked and worked his land with him. My immediate reward at the time was the pretty red-pink mangoes, which always bore high at the top of the trees, and the red and yellow plums, which ripened at the end of the brittle limbs, two joints which he peeled of sugar cane, and two or three fingers of ripe bananas from his buttery. The long-term rewards were the lessons he taught me about the hard work slaved by farmers.
Like cutting the trunk of a breadfruit tree or soursop or mango if it refused to bear fruit. Like when to plant gungo peas. Like throwing ashes at the roots of tomatoes, and now I do not remember why.
drought
Our part of the country suffered drought for 10 months each year. Except for May and December. The only times it rained in other months was when a storm was near. The soil was therefore tough and hard to plough. So instead of a fork, his favourite tool was a hoe. In the early morning, I walked behind him with a pan of corn grain. He had strung a line with cord already, then he chopped the earth with the hoe and stirred the soil around it. As he went to dig the next hole I threw two grains of corn in the hole and covered them loosely.
When we were finished planting he stopped in the shade of one of the many trees on the farm.
The sun by then was rising towards noon and it was getting hot. So we went to the area in which he grew vegetables. In this area the sun's heat was softened with the cover of fishing nets. He showed me how to use a hand fork to tease up the earth around each plant. Later, I went to the large drum at the corner of his house where rain-water poured from the gutter which rimmed his roof, dipped a pan in it and carried water to sprinkle the vegetables.
cart with three drums
During the dry months he pushed a cart with three drums to the schoolyard in the late afternoons after school was closed. My father often joined him. I stood nearby, hearing but never commenting. Old Man Edwards did not depend on the red flag to be hoisted at the Post Office to tell him a hurricane was near. He would sniff the air with his face tilted to the sky.
"Batten down, Teacher," he warned. "It going rain, heavy-heavy." In another of the dry months, he looked at the new moon and said, "It going rain this month." And it always did. My father being a Mico man dismissed these warnings, at first, but later became an apostle.
"For when the horns of the New Moon are parallel to the horizon
The following month would be dry.
When they tilt,
The moon will be pouring water from the sky".
It was not old wives talk. It was the wisdom of centuries of African history which his ancestors had brought to Jamaica and never forgotten.
farming advice
Sometimes, when my father wanted farming advice the two men walked across the schoolyard to the school garden.
They walked through the garden, stopping now and then to pick gormandisers which grew between the stems of the tomatoes and which if left to grow would drain the strength of the plant. They ground the little stragglers in their palms as they walked and talked and then threw them on the heap of leaves and horse and cow manure which fermented in one corner of the garden.
"You need to mulch the vegetable beds," he said. "That's why the plants look weak. I'll bring some guinea grass tomorrow."
So said. So done. Next evening, the two men were on their knees laying out the leaves of the guinea grass between the plants. Old Man Edwards said you must kneel on Mother Earth when you were seeking help from Mother Nature and God.
