By Johnny Coomansingh
Some people allude that ‘money is the root of all evil.’ It is not. The verse found in the Bible is oftentimes misquoted. Found in 1 Timothy 6: 10, the text reads: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” And many are there who love money more than ‘hog love mud.’ This narrative opens a window into the life of Neeta, my godmother, who, as they say in Trinidad, ‘would not spend a black cent to see the world go round.’ Everyone knows that she was tight-fistedly stingy. On her cocoa plantation, I witnessed a few activities. In this spiel I will not hesitate to share some of what I experienced on Neeta’s cocoa estate.
Patience is a virtue, and the day would come for ‘dancing di cocoa;’ the final act in preparation of cocoa beans before bagging. ‘Dohfeh,’ the old man who lived about half-a-mile away up the hill on Kowlessur Road, Sangre Chiquito was an expert at dancing cocoa. Was it a real dance? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it appeared that an individual had to become a sort of a ninja to dance cocoa. After sprinkling the heap of dried cocoa with a mixture of the slimy juice created from bois canot (Cercropia peltata) leaves, fresh coconut oil, and water, Dohfeh would roll up his blue-dock trousers and get into the heap. As though in a trance, literally floating, becoming, as it were, lighter in weight, he polished the beans without crushing one bean for about 15-20 minutes. This was the cocoa dance, and everyone rejoiced.
The hard, menial and trying work of harvesting and ‘cracking’ cocoa was over. After the ‘dance’ Neeta would spread out the beans to dry a little more and then serve up a mouth-watering chicken pelau. Pelau is a brown mixture of rice, pigeon peas, carrots, coconut milk, chicken and seasonings. She used Dohfeh’s chulha (earthen fireside) to cook the pelau. One or two pounds of freshly picked pigeon peas would go into making the pelau in a large iron pot. The smoke of the fireside rendered the pelau exceptionally tasty; a good country taste. To wash down the pelau, Neeta provided freshly squeezed ice-cold orange juice.
When the beans are fully dried, Neeta and Dohfeh would fill the blue-seam crocus bags and stitch them up with a cocoa needle and thick sisal twine. Five or six bags are now ready for the cocoa store. At the cocoa store, the buyer would knock or slap the side of the bags to hear if the beans rattled. If he heard a pleasant dry rattle he knew that the beans were of the quality required for export. It was the same test for the coffee beans, only that coffee did not require ‘dancing’ or polishing. However, to fetch a better price, many coffee producers preferred to hull their coffee before sale. There were two coffee hulling mills in Sangre Grande, one near Goat Hill and the other on Cunaripo Road.
After the sale of the cocoa, Neeta shared not a penny with anyone, nor did she show her gratitude to those who helped her bring in the crop. She hoarded every cent! I knew that my time with Neeta was coming to an end. In due course, I explained the situation with slaving for Neeta to my mother, and not long after, I was prevented from returning to Neeta’s country house. Despite my mother’s regulation, Neeta and her husband still showed up at my Adventist Street home, and even at the close of church service to take me along, but my mother said no. Despite the fact that my family was poor and struggling to survive, Neeta got the message and eventually accepted the fact that I was not someone to be used for her personal gain. Boon, her nephew, remained and slaved for her until he was eighteen.
Many were the experiences that I acquired while staying with Neeta. Neeta believed in obeah and while she denied it openly, covertly she indulged in certain practices that involved some aspect of obeah, for example, making small crosses with cocoyea (coconut palm leaf midribs) tied up with black thread, maintaining a night pot of stale urine under her bed, impaling a blue colored bottle in her garden, walking backward to the door of the house at nighttime and collecting all manner of potions, powders, and weird stuff such as the dried epithelial tissue of chicken gizzards in a jar.
The little cocoyea crosses were stuck up on doors and windows to ward off evil, at least so she believed. At one time, Dohfeh even remarked: “Dat woman eh good nah!” I had no idea why he deduced such an assessment of Neeta. I remembered her saying that Dohfeh was getting more cocoa than her and reasoned that it could have been Neeta’s obsession with Dohfeh’s cocoa plantation; the envy was manifest. Neeta coveted Dohfeh’s plantation because his plantation, although of lesser acreage, produced a much higher volume of cocoa per acre. Neeta was not at all contented with what she had.
For me, gone are the days of bathing in the cold waters of a cocoa canal. Gone are the nights of hunting manicou (opossum). My childhood fun catching the brown manicou crab after a thunderstorm faded. Stomping around in the shallow recesses of the Sangre Chiquito River looking for crayfish hiding in the half-rotted bamboo stems that fell into the river, disappeared. The joy of climbing a sugar apple or cashima (Rollinia mucosa) tree laden with ripened fruit came to an end. Finding a sweetheart on a country road amidst an orchard of grapefruit trees with yellow fruits glowing in the sunshine, dissolved. I could no longer pick up the small table mangoes under the trees that flourished alongside the bridle road on the whiteman’s estate. And then, a little intriguing love story and a man behind the donkey shed.
I recall that early morning while dew still graced the grass when Ramsingh dressed only in boxer shorts and merino, came running up the hill to Neeta’s screaming at the top of his voice, “Mister Frankie, Mister Frankie, Help! Help! O God! Help! Somebody want tuh kill mih!” All that he had in his hand was a small cutlass. Shaking violently with fear, Ramsingh explained in a saccadic manner that there was a man hiding somewhere behind the donkey shed with a long knife. There is more to the story.
According to Neeta, the man with the knife was supposedly a former lover of Ramsingh’s wife. Who knows what he wanted to do that morning? Apparently, the intruder traversed miles of forest and cocoa cultivations overnight to arrive at Ramsingh’s house. Tabanca or unrequited love does many things to people and maybe this man behind the shed just wanted to have a glimpse of his lover.
Ramsingh was the overseer of the whiteman’s property which comprised several hundred acres that bordered Neeta’s land to the north. Ramsingh stayed at Neeta for a while to regain his composure. Dohfeh accompanied him on his way back to his house, and everything seemed to be all right after that encounter. Nothing more was heard about the incident concerning the man with the knife behind the donkey shed.
Not long after, I became too occupied with my studies at Northeastern College to attend to Neeta’s foreboding needs and the toil in her cocoa fields. Although I learnt much about property (cocoa estate) management, for example, how to grow bananas, coffee, cocoa, citrus, and miscellaneous fruit trees, I was no longer ‘excited’ about serving Neeta’s needs as a child slave. I needed to study, to strike out in life, to find a path to follow, to forge a future.
On her ever-present quest to create more wealth, Neeta was not interested in helping me. She hoarded every penny. She was not interested in my welfare and did not buy even a pair of school shoes for me. What she wanted was a little slave, and I reasoned that what she did to Berry, her niece and Boon, she was not going to do to me. I had to find a way to escape from the ‘shackles.’
With regard to Boon, Neeta treated him with utter disrespect. In both patois and the English language, she berated him with expletives of every kind. With all certainty, if “cussing” could have killed anyone, Boon would have died a long time ago. Boon suffered the worst of verbal and physical atrocities that any child could ever withstand. Boon received a little money from Neeta, and one day he showed me his bank book. He had eighteen dollars and a few cents, the money he managed to save over two years. I was shocked and wondered what type of demon was Neeta. How could she be so cruel to children? Why was it so difficult for her to love and understand others? It was all about her and her drive to make money.
After an incident at Warden Road, I went into a silent rebellion against Neeta. This incident was probably the one that broke the camel’s back. Her taxi-driver husband accompanied her on this ‘expedition’ to her brother’s cocoa plantation. Her drive that day was to collect as many plants and ground provisions as she could have transported in his new Ford Zephyr taxi. There were no shops or cafés to buy any snacks or foodstuff, and Neeta brought only a few Crix crackers with the thought that Mamo, her sister-in-law, would have provided her with a meal. Even if her sister-in-law had prepared food, I would not have eaten. The house where Mamo lived was not conducive to human living; filthy! The ramshackle pit latrine was too close for comfort. Hunger overtook me. It was so bad that I fainted from lack of food.
After I regained consciousness, I began vomiting the few ‘tie-tongue’ berries I ate, berries that fell by the roadside from the ‘Lay-lay’ (Cordia sulcata) tree. My system went into reverse. I became sick and weakened. Neeta panicked and went straight to Ma Johnnie’s house. In a flash, Ma Johnnie prepared a cup of hot ginger tea that I sipped for some relief. I was given a piece of bread and margarine to eat, which helped ease my hunger.
Neeta was too busy collecting banana and breadfruit plants and other items for her plantation. Coming back to her roots at Warden Road, she was like a child in a candy store, forgetting what mattered most. She forgot about me and my need for a morsel of food. This experience shook me to my senses, and I decided there and then never to go back to Neeta’s. In these true experiences, I learnt two important lessons. Treat people with dignity, love and compassion, and never make money your God.
- [Adapted from my book titled: Cocoa Woman 2017]
