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There is much head work in Jamaica, even if there be little brain work. The negroes carry everything on their heads. The only hat I saw on a man’s kinky poll was an old derby, reversed, filled with yams and thus borne steadily along. A negro given a letter to deliver will usually seek a stone to weight it down, deposit it thus ballasted amidst his wool and do the errand. In Panama an engineer told me of ordering a group of Jamaicans to load a wheel-barrow with stones and take it to a certain spot.

“Would you believe it,” he said, “when they had filled that wheel-barrow, two of the niggers lifted it to their companion’s head, balanced it and he walked off with it as contented as you please.”

The huts in which the negroes live are as a rule inconceivably small. They are just a trifle larger than a billiard table, built of wattled cane, and plastered over with clay. The roof is usually a thatch of palm branches, though sometimes ragged strips of corrugated iron are employed with much less artistic effect. In what corresponds to our tenements, the rooming places of day laborers, the yard rather than the house is the unit. So you will see on a tiny shack about the size of a playhouse for children the sign, “Rooms for Rent,” which applies not to the pigmy edifice bearing it, but to the cluster of huts set down helter skelter in the yard. The people sleep in the huts, incidentally barring them so far as the flimsy construction permits against any possible entrance of fresh air. All the other activities of life are conducted in the open—cooking, eating, sewing, gossiping. A yard is the most social place imaginable, and the system not only contributes to health by keeping people in the open air, adds to the gayety of life by grouping so many black families in one corral, reduces the high cost of living as our model tenements never can hope to, but makes one black landlord independent, for the possession of a yard with its rooms all rented leaves nothing needed for enjoyment except a phonograph and an ample supply of the rum for which the island is famous.