The Polished Hoe Read Online Free

gave him a jimmy-john full of the strongest Mount Gay dark rum. But never a Sunday pass that you didn’t see Pounce stanning-up at the same church window, outside ; but in full view of the pulpit, for Passover, for Easter and for Christmas. And there Pounce would be; listening to every word that drop from the lips of Revern James, Pastor of the Church of the Nazarene, just down Reservoir Lane, by the West Field.
    “Pounce came from a poor family, but decent. And it was only for a few sweet potatoes, and pulp-eddoes, you hear me, Constable? Not even a whole hole of potatoes, then. I counted them myself. Cause Mr. Bellfeels had the lack of decency to bring the same pulp-eddoes and sweet potatoes that he shoot Pounce for, injuring him with a gun loaded with course-salt, to Ma; and ask Ma to cook them in the pigeon-pea soup she was making for his dinner. That son-of-a-bitch! Pardon my French, Constable . . .”
    “I didn’t hear you use no bad-words, ma’am. My two ears close!”
    “Ma was working inside the Plantation Main House, by this time, as nursemaid, following the consequences to Golbourne’s former girlfriend, who died all of a sudden, one Monday night. From the pining and a broken heart, appears. There were three sweet potatoes and four pulp-eddoes Pounce tried to steal. I counted them myself. One, two, three. Three. And one, two, three, four. Four. They didn’t even weigh much more than one pound! From the North Field. I was now leading a gang of slightly older women, weeding the sweet potato slips, of that North Field . . .
    “Constable, I am rambling again! I don’t know what got-me-off on this topic, talking about the history of this place. But this Plantation touch all of we. All our lives was branded by this Plantation. You see it there, with its tall chimney belching smoke from the Factory grinding canes at this time of year, Crop-Season; and with the smell of cane-juice boiling; and the noise of the Factory itself, the machineries that is always brekking-down. And this sweet, sickening smell, a smell that sticks to your clothes, and to your mind, like the rawness and the scales from fish, from a piece of shark that many a evening I watched Ma scale in the kitchen of that same Plantation Main House, when she was promoted from being a field hand, to combination nursemaid; later, to Chief Maid. The position was nothing more than chief-cook-and-bottlewasher! I am talking now about the War-days, the First World War, Ma’s days. Nevertheless, the times I am now talking about is World War Two, when it look as if a real World War was taking place right-here-in-Bimshire. We didn’t have no concentration camps. The people living in this Village wasn’t put behind no barbed wire, such as what Wilberforce tell me was the treatment of many, Jews and non-Jews, and people called Gypsies . . . Constable, I always thought that a Gypsy was the name for a woman with a lovely voice! Those bad things happened in the outside-world; in Europe. But in this part of the universe, the Wessindies, nobody didn’t torture nobody, nor squeeze nobody balls, by applying pliers, or lectricity to anybody testicles to pull the truth from outta him. Nobody down here suffer-so. Nor behave brutal-so. But, according to the ironies of life, as Wilberforce would say, it was the same suffering, historically speaking, between living on this Plantation and living-through the War in Europe. Much of a muchness. When you think of it. The same War. The same taking of prisoners. The same bloodshed. And the same not taking of no prisoners. So, in the eyes of Europe, we couldda been the same as Jews. It was war, and the ironies of war. It was war , Constable.
    “Lord, I remember these things as if it was yesterday. The Friday evening before the Sunday in the Church Yard, when Mr. Bellfeels passed his riding-crop, as if it was his hand, all over my body . . . round four or five the Friday evening . . .
    “A lorry had just crawl-over the hill, in low