A Caribbean Boyhood in Herbs and Dreams

The image is seared into my memory: I am a boy of eight or nine. I am wearing khaki shorts and a t-shirt. I am accompanying my grandmother and her old, stumped-tail dog, Bingo. We are on our way to her ground – a plot of leased land on what was then Amersham Estate.

My grandmother cultivated sea island cotton. We used some of her harvest to stuff our mattresses. Most of the cotton she reaped, however, was destined for sale to the government for export. If we removed the seed before weighing, she earned more per pound for the clean cotton.

Amersham was a former slave plantation that sat at the foot of the mountains. From my grandmother’s cotton field, I could see much of the capital Plymouth, ships laying at anchor in the harbor, and dream about the world beyond.

Years later, when I risked being kicked out of high school for failing a grade, “Mama” didn’t chastise me.

Instead, she warned me, “I have an acre of land and a hoe for you.”

The memory of those hot summer days accompanying my grandmother to her farm plot came flooding back the minute I opened Jason Allen-Paisant’s book, The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams.

Allen-Paisant was talking about my boyhood; his scenery was Jamaica, mine was Montserrat. He spoke about “going to the ground.” Connecting with herbalists, those who had acquired the ancestral knowledge about the power of plants to cleanse and heal.

The author and I shared a common history of being raised in neo-colonial societies, a few generations removed from enslavement and the poverty of peasantry.

Subsistence farming paid for our school fees; hard work fueled our educational ambition.

Like Allen-Paisant, I was heavily influenced by my maternal grandmother. My “Mama” was the disciplinarian, the dreamer, the healer.

She believed in the validity of her dreams. It was not uncommon for her to prevent me from going on a school outing to the beach the morning after she had what she called “a bad dream” because she believed the dream to be an omen of danger. When her purse was empty, she often dreamed of money arriving in the mail. It usually did.

Whenever I became sick, she bathed me in bay leaves or put me to sleep on a bed of leaves to cut the fever or to ease my affliction from measles. 

(Photo: Courtesy of Andrew J. Skerritt)

I feasted on avocado, sugar apple, and soursop in my sister’s garden and enjoyed hot soursop tea for breakfast.

One Sunday afternoon last November, I spent several hours touring the herbal garden of Dr. Clarice Barnes, the author of Balm in Gilead: Botanical Conversations from Montserrat. She schooled me on the medicinal plant heritage of our Eastern Caribbean island.

Like the herbalists Allen-Paisant describes in his book, Barnes spoke to and about the plants as if they were her intimate friends. I learned that weeds and herbs not only feed and heal, relieve pain and cleanse the systems of the body; they also provide spiritual wellness.

“The elders say anything the goats don’t eat is poisonous. In the plant world, everything has its purpose, and our people know. At least, they have known. So much of that knowledge is vanishing,” Allen-Paisant writes.

The Possibility of Tenderness and my interview with Allen-Paisant, hopefully, will help that ancestral knowledge endure. 

Andrew J. Skerritt

Living On Earth producer and senior project director of the Center for Climate and Environmental Justice Media (CEJM)