TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE.
Courtesy Historisn Angelo Bissessarsingh.
Article being reposted lest we forget the hard work and sacrifices made by our ancestors to educate and take care of their families in the past. In many rural communities today planting crops is still main source of their livelihood for many families.

PAY-WEEK MARKET NEAR WOODFORD LODGE SUGAR ESTATE 1951

In the second chapter of Sir V.S Naipaul’s iconic novel, ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ he describes the scene in the pay-yard of a sugar plantation in Central Trinidad which would have been set in the first decade of the 20th century which was when Sir Vidia’s father, Seepersad Naipaul (the hero of the book in the guise of Mohun Biswas) was born:

“Every Saturday he lined up with the other labourers outside the estate office to collect his pay. The overseer sat at a little table, on which his khaki cork hat rested, wasteful of space, but a symbol of wealth. On his left sat the Indian clerk, important, stern, precise, with small neat hands that wrote small neat figures in black ink and red ink in the tall ledger. As the clerk entered figures and called out names and amounts in his high, precise voice, the overseer selected coins from the columns of silver and the heaps of copper in front of him, and with greater deliberation extracted notes from the blue one-dollar stacks, the smaller red two-dollar stack and the very shallow green five-dollar stack. Few labourers earned five dollars a week; the notes were there to pay those who were collecting their wives’ or husbands’ wages as well as their own. Around the overseer’s cork hat, and seeming to guard it, there were stiffblue paper bags, neatly serrated at the top, printed with large figures, and standing upright from the weight of coin inside them. Clean round perforations gave glimpses of the coin and, Raghu had been told, allowed it to breathe.”

This was a play which could have been staged in any random sugar belt plantation in the Caroni Plain or the Naparimas- Woodford Lodge, Palmiste, Orange Grove, St. Augustine etc. Some of the men’s wages of course were already committed to a spree at the local rumshop and for various ‘grease-hand’ payments to the sirdars or Indian headmen who represented the link between the white overseers and the Indian ‘gangs’ of labourers. The Sirdar would have to be kept happy for he could make their tasks as burdensome as possible if he wished or could make false reports against the labourers which would end in them and their families being kicked off the estate.

On larger plantation combines like Woodford Lodge, Ste. Madeline and Palmiste in particular, there would be a space near the pay-office (usually just an acre of beaten earth) where every fortnight an impromptu market would spring up. These supplied a vital need for procurement of various necessities as well as for socialization for which there was little opportunity in the humdrum work-filled lives of sugar-belt peoples, both of Afro and Indo descent. The local estate shop would provide certain staples such as rice, flour, dried peas and beans, rum, salted meat and fish etc. The market however was where the REAL shopping took place. The late Wilfred D. Best, most well-known for his textbook ‘The Student’s Companion’, also penned a novel called ‘Tikasingh’s Wedding’ which drew heavily for its setting from Best’s early life on Frederick Estate in Caroni where he was born in 1911. Part of the novel describes its title character being introduced to estate life, part of which is a vivid description of the market which could have fit any of the others in the period.

A city of rough wooden trestle tables and improvised stands made of packing crates would spring up. In the rainy season , the ground would be muddy and many patrons would be without shoes, preferring soiled feet and braving ‘jiggers’ to sullying their prized footwear. Firstly, there would be a place where vegetables and fruit would be sold. Sundry types of bhagi, tomatoes, ochroes, watercress, lettuce and cabbage were vended separately from ground provisions (yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes etc.)nearby which were simply laid on the ground or on mats of jute sacking usually bought for a few cents at the shop after they had been used for storing granulated sugar and wet salt. Mangoes, pommeracs, pommecytheres and other fruits (especially watermelons sliced in glass cases to display their juicy redness) would follow next. Another section would be for soft drinks only. At this period in history, there were larger soft drink manufacturers like Cannings and Serrao’s who could distribute their products in vans or by rail, but in almost every village of size there was a small maker of aereated drinks who employed coloured syrups (limited to cola, cream soda and kola champagne- everybody knew Indians only drank this red stuff GIMME LAL WALLAH) and carbonated water, infused with fizz by means of a simple Brateby and Hinchliffe soda water plant which was imported from a dealer in Demerara (later British Guiana) . The bottles were heavy glass ones with a marble stopper in the neck to prevent the gas from escaping. A wooden plunger was used to push the marble down to release the pressure on the liquid- a dangerous process since sometimes the compressed gas would cause the bottle to explode in the hands of the opener.

At every market there would be a dry goods area where clothing and other items were sold. Cheap combs, buttons, laces and ribbons as well as colourful handkerchiefs were in gaudy array. There would be tailors as well, usually Muslim men, who would make up ready-made trousers and shirts during the week and take them to market. The wily Baksh from another of Sir Vidia’s works “The Suffrage of Elvira’ provides a good character sketch of one of these men. Naturally of course, there would be the hardworking Syrian/Lebanese peddlers with their boxes of piece goods- dress and trouser lengths- carried about on their heads and backs from railway stations either by themselves and their sons or else a hired porter. In the shade of a tree they would sit and wait for business and that they had because the cloth and other haberdashery they sold could be had on terms with the payment of a few shillings every week. One wonders at the level of trust between them and their customers, because there are few if any stories of swindling on either side. Indian jewellers or small operations or the agents of larger ones in the towns such as Gokool’s in San Fernando or Y. De Lima and Sultan Khan , would be on hand with velvet lined boxes, displaying rings, coaoa-headed bangles and necklaces for sale on terms as well.

Cooked food would be on hand for those feeling peckish. Usually this was the preserve of Afro-Trinidadian women and their legendary ‘sweet hand’, as they would stand near coalpots set on packing cases turning out accra and floats, fried fish, roast corn, boiled corn (wither plain or seasoned in a broth of pigtail and herbs), corn soup and boiled chataigne which was sold by the pennyworth, being scooped out in an enamel cup and drained before being plunked on a square of brown shop paper. A few would have glass cases stocked with sponge cakes, frosted cupcakes and more earthy favourites like pone, coconut drops and sweetbread. Occasionally, an Indo Trini woman would be there with a wooden tray filled with meetai (kurma, barfi, gulab jamoon, jelibi and ladoo). Only much later did vendors of bara-and-channa appear. Most likely there would be a coconut vendor and his donkey cart too.

Unlike similar markets in Jamaica and British Guiana in the period, there would be no livestock sales as these were usually transacted privately between interested parties and not at market. There would sometimes however, be a woman with some trussed fowls for sale to those who could afford a shilling (24 cents) a pound for the bird for their Sunday lunch. Beef and fresh pork sold off a bloody chopping block by a burly Afro-Trini man with his expert cutlass in hand could be counted on as this was usually 12 cents a pound

Children also had a ball while their mothers did the shopping, impromptu duels of marble pitch or top spinning would be organized out of the way of adults and they could be depended on not to end in trouble. Teen aged boys would be parading in their best shirts and handkerchiefs to see if they could catch they eyes of any of the young girls while their mothers’ backs were turned. The presence of an estate constable or policeman from the nearest station kept the peace though there was little for him to do. The estate markets were a fixture of plantation life well into the 1970s for those who remember them and provided an idyllic setting for the small pleasures which made the arduous life of a cane worker bearable. One may surmise that current recessionary conditions in the nation may have a silver lining if it drives us away from expensive big-box multinationals and superstores , where we push trolleys mindlessly up and down aisles of expensive food, and back to the wholesome goodness of our town and country markets.