Hartley Neita, Contributor
MY MOTHER was Mama all through my early years. Adults who were family friends called her Abbie. To others she was Miss Abbie.
The first time I called her Abbie, she glared at me. Long, long after, I started calling her Mama Abbie, which she tolerated. And years later I began calling her Abbie, and it was with much love and nuff respect.
She was born in a district called Ham Walk near Pear Tree Grove in St. Catherine and named Abigail Hamilton. Her father was a small farmer. She therefore knew the soil. However, she wanted to be a teacher. Until she met my father. They were married and she never entered the formal working world.
Instead, she became the Manager of our Home, working 24/7. She made our childhood clothes, short pants with pee-pee holes for my brothers and I, and dresses and middy-and-blouse outfits for our sister. She darned them by Home-Sweet-Home lamplight at nights and sewed on the buttons we lost by romping among ourselves and with other children.
The yard in front of our house was her domain. There she planted rambling roses, a jasmine plant, night-blooming cereus, hibiscus, crotons, periwinkle reds and yellows, a coffee rose and other plants, as well as ferns and wild lilies. There were also medicinal plants like leaf of life for colds, and a black mint shrub to belch our gas. She also helped our father with his vegetable plot at the back of the yard, and to raise the fowls which roosted at nights in a cashew tree which spread its limbs from fence to fence behind the house.
We had no electricity and therefore no refrigerator and so she organised our meals for each day of the week. One such was the day the fish man rode his bicycle into the village from Rocky Point in south Clarendon. Another was the day the butcher killed pigs or goats or cows. On other days we had vegetable soup. On another there were "fritters, fry dumplings and chocolate tea".
She it was who ordered the flour and rice and bread in the notebook from Mr. Shimm's grocery shop in the village and reconciled the amount to be paid each week.
We helped her to bake a monthly cake for Sunday, and potato, bread and cornmeal puddings at other weekends. We had to rub the sugar and butter and flour in a pudding pan until it was almost liquid. Her cake was the best and very special. So, too was the bread pudding with the sweet froth on top. Long into my adult life after I left home to raise my own family I looked forward to the cake she gave me every Christmas. And during the year whenever I went to look for her, I always knew I would leave with her bread pudding.
Mama was our doctor and nurse. Her medicine chest had Benjamin's Healing Oil, iodine, thermogene, quinine tablets which she bought from the Post Office, and Buckley's cough mixture. It was she who sat on the edge of our beds and placed sliced toonah cactus leaves on our foreheads to cool the malaria fever. She rubbed our chests with thermogene when coughs threatened to tear our lungs to shreds. And it was she who purged us at the end of every Christmas and summer holidays with herb tea, castor oil and salt physic.
She taught us to play patience - which some of you call solitaire - and snakes and ladders, tee-taw-toe and bagatelle. She also taught my sister and I to play the organ, a pedal-pumping five-octave instrument in our home.
She played cricket, too. She was the wicket keeper for the women's cricket team of our village. My sister grew to join the team and to be a star bowler with Daisy and Edna Waddell who became Jamaica's first female umpires.
Our Mama and the other women of our village travelled each day to Kingston to watch Jamaica play the inter-colonial cricket matches at Melbourne Park with Trinidad (before Tobago), British Guiana (before Guyana) and Barbados. Antigua and the other Leeward and Windward islands were not yet in the class of the Big Four. They also went to Sabina Park to the Test matches between the West Indies and England, Australia and New Zealand. She also was one of the "hostesses-with-the mostesess" who provided food and drink for George Headley, Ken Weekes, Neville and Arthur Bonitto, Aston Powe, Vin Valentine and Hines Johnson when they came to our village to play cricket matches with their menfolk.
She was a slim woman all her life, and tripped the light fantastic with effortless ease to the waltz, mento and fox trot at the dances held by our district's Literary and Social club.
She nursed our father during his declining months and called me at 3.00 o'clock one morning.
"Teacher gone!" she said softly.
I was at her home within an hour to find her priest Canon Gordon and family friend Percy Broderick. She had already selected who would give the Remembrance, who would read the lessons and who would be his pall-bearers.
Years later, she also died, and while on my way to her funeral I suddenly realised that my sister and our brothers were now orphans. No longer would we fan the fire or rub sugar and butter and flour and eggs for the baste of her cakes. No longer would she show us how to roast cashew nuts. Or new card games. I searched the family home before it was sold to see if I could find our bagatelle board, stored, maybe, in a cupboard. Without luck. I have since searched many countries for a bagatelle board. Without luck too.
So, today, especially, I remember my Mama Abbie. I also remember Miss Abbie the cricketer wearing her wicket keeping pads which were almost as tall as she was, stumping careless batsmen stretching their back feet beyond the batting crease. And I remember Abbie the dancer swinging and swaying to the beat of the drums. I remember, too, the doctor and nurse, and home maker and the baker of Christmas cakes. Above all, though, I remember with love, Mama, my Mother.
