A CHAT WITH TOBAGO'S 98-YEAR-OLD MATRIARCH
By Sampson Nanton
Tobago Bureau
Newsday
September 30, 2001
Page 64
Down a back road in Canaan is a simple house just off the airport's runway. Therein resides an old woman with a bright future. My guide bellowed "Sister George" as we approached the place. A 98-year-old widow sat on a chair in a quiet verandah. She yelled back "Ooi," gleefully. Her name is Joanna George, born on October 6, 1903, and a lifelong citizen of Tobago.
Instantly, I wondered how such an elderly woman could bear the constant din of jets landing and leaving. Surely, it was an annoyance that would wreck her nerves, I felt. But she had been through it all, and seen it all, from an island-wide epidemic to the first motor car. We sat to chat and when we finished I had rekindled a special love for the aged that I had missed since my last grandparent died two years ago. The following are the tales of Joanna George, someone I likened as an African Griot or an Indian Guru - a living history library.
She remembered that in 1912, nine years after her birth, Tobago was struck with a deadly epidemic. "It was a very bad year. Many people were dying out. They were having trouble in their bellies," she said.
The government of the day could do nothing, she explained, but a Minister from an Anglican Church used to do his best to care for the many. Tobago then, was highly under-developed colony, lightly populated and far more like the pristine home of Robinson Crusoe. Help and health had to come from within its boundaries of 116 square miles. A high rate of death was imminent.
"Donkey carts used to carry the dead people. We used to put them on the carts and take sheets and cover them. Whosoever had to carry the dead had to walk with the donkeys and the carts," she explained. Just how many people died back then, and from what, I couldn't garner. Marriage was the next topic, because I wondered if the Tobago weddings we see during the Heritage Festival were exact replicas.
"When people used to marry," she related, "we used to take tamed horses and the man would put the lady on top of the horse. The, the men would go and take the cannister with the bride's clothes and carry it to the nearest church." Enthralled, I stopped her and begged for an explanation of the 'cannister ritual." She explained: "When someone was getting married you would hear the people saying, 'Cannister coming down ... the wedding is near ... cannister coming down."
That was the signal for the beating of the Tambrin. It is an instrument made of goatskin, shaped like the tambourine but much bigger and without the jingling metal discs. It is still much a part of Tobago's culture. Men would beat the Tambrin ahead of the bridal party. Scores of villagers would follow the bride on the horse to the church for the ceremony, which culminated in dancing and food of all kinds.
The depictions of men in scissors tail coats, silken night-black top hats, waistcoats and bow ties, and women adorned in satin dresses, usually pink or lemon green, with satin hats, are true. "They used to dress that way, but not with the long tails like in the Heritage,' she said. I asked her to speak on without focusing on any real topic. She had long captured my imagination, of anything back then and I didn't mind hearing about it all.
Between the 1930s and 1940s the island began to develop physically and economically, until as she put it, "a man bought a car'. I sat intrigued at what she related and laughed with her. "He bought a car in Tobago and everybody ran and hid below their beds and were saying, "Jesus is coming, Jesus is coming," she said.
The noise was a terror. No one had riven a car though the island before; not until that decade. To get across the island, one literally, caught their ass.
"Now we reach a place where there are too many cars," she reflected. I was fascinated by her recollection. Modern society hardly affords young people the time to sit and chat with old folk, and when it comes, we spurn it. For me, the hour we spoke could well have gone on for the day. It was a history lesson unlike any other. The communities back then were very closely knit, she noted, and "people used to take care of old people."
"They used to help us take baths but now everybody get so selfish and to themselves," she said. In her times, water had to be collected from four wells, across the island. "We used to get a pan and tie a stone at the end of it and dip it down in the well, until God helped me to live and see stove and gas and fridge and nice house and pretty decorations in house and all those things," she said.
Agriculture was the economy. To get "a little money," young people would bake cakes and make ginger beer to sell on the estates. There were four; Friendship Estate, Buccoo Estate, Golden Grove Estate and Kilgrin Estate. The owners grew coconuts and peas. She used to like to go and pick peas at Kilgrin's, which was located where Pennysavers now has its grocery in Canaan. She told me about the gramophone and about the World Wars. She sang a tune Kitchener wrote - something about conquering Germany.
She told me of her travels to Trinidad aboard the Barima and the Billies, the two boats she remembered. She loved her schooldays and still has high regards for her school teacher, Mr. Smart of Mt Pleasant Anglican School, "a brown skin man just like you." But my final question - "What was the best time of your life?" - brought a response that spoke more of her future than of her past. "When I accepted Jesus as my God and Saviour. It makes me feel good because I know there is a man up there who cares for me," she said. It was in 1940 and a visiting evangelist of the Seventh Day Adventist was having a crusade on the island. One day, she sat under a mango tree and a voice told her to go and hear what the evangelist had to say.
"I obeyed the voice. I put on some clothes and went the next day," she said. She recalled seeing a deacon pointing to some sketches of four "beasts" on a screen. She would learn that it was in keeping with the Book of Revelation in the Bible. She was struck with awe, she said. She had never known of those creatures and it made her pay more attention to Evangelist Butterfield. She prayed when she got home and when she slept she said she was told what the beasts represented - the first was Babylon of ancient time; the second the Medes and Persians; the third a Grecian king; and the fourth, Alexander the Great.
The next day she surrendered her life to God.
"I did not turn back, up to today. Look at what God has done for me," she said sitting down and offering praises. At that point nothing else mattered to her. Her voice changed, her mood blossomed. It was then that I understood why the planes in the airport did not annoy her. I understood why she shouted back so gleefully when we approached. And most of all, I knew, that at age 98, she had a wonderful future ahead.
Completed and happy, she hugged me tightly and called me her son. And her last words referred only to her God: "That is all of my life."