Opinions
Most Guianese are familiar with Cuffy of Cuffy, Akara, Accabre and Atta fame who had in February 1763 led 2500 slaves and successfully rebelled against their Dutch masters, capturing the colony of Berbice.
However they failed by disunity to consolidate their gains. Cuffy offered the Dutch a partition of Berbice which his partners rejected. Strife among the rebels led to Cuffy’s suicide and gave time for the Dutch to obtain aid from the British which ended the revolt nearly a year after it had begun. President Burnham planted a hero’s statue to Cuffy, ignoring the others, at a park on Vlissingen Road, Georgetown, and February 23 is celebrated as Guyana Republic Day. Historians continue to dispute the role of the four leaders and the real story behind the collapse.
Four years earlier, on Jan 17th, Paul Cuffee was born in Massachusetts, 7th of 11 children, son of Kofi, an Ashanti slave who on being freed in 1740s by the conscience of his Quaker owner John Slocum, adopted the name Cuffee Slocum, and married Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag native of Massachusetts. (Later Paul persuaded his siblings to adopt Cuffee as their surname). Cuffee Slocum was diligent, self-taught and multi-skilled. Carpentry, fishing and farming enabled him in 1766 to acquire a 116-acre farm near Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He raised his children as Quakers. Paul was 13 when Cuffee died and with his brothers ran the farm. Paul developed a liking for the sea, enlisted on a whaling ship at 16, then on cargo ships, learning seamanship. When the American Revolution began the British imprisoned him for three months. On release he increased his study of shipping, and with brother David bought a coastal cargo vessel. Undeterred by losses due to piracy, he began to turn a profit and at 21 made his first political statement by refusing to pay taxes because he had no vote. He lost his petition but his arguments led to the state’s granting voting rights to all free male citizens in 1783. A year and several boats later he married Alice Pequit, a Wampanoag like his mother. They had seven children. He diligently expanded his shipping business, established a shipyard at Westport where he bought 140 acres of waterfront and as the 19th century began had become perhaps the wealthiest Afro-American in the USA, self-made and overcoming many hurdles.
Paul contributed to the first racially integrated school in Westport and to the Quaker church. But he came up against the racial wall of presumed inferiority then popularised by eugenicists and phrenologists and expressed at the highest levels of European and American governments, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay and British lords who advocated African repatriation or resettlement to avoid the issue of constitutional equality. They looked to Haiti whose President Boyer would welcome immigrants.
The British had settled Blacks in Nova Scotia and wishing to place them in a less contentious environment had sent contingents to Sierra Leone since 1787 but had followed the profiteering Company model, which failed. Paul was persuaded by the arguments of London’s influential African Institution and supported the emigration plan for African-Americans and worked diligently to found The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone to help finance the controversial colony. Congress rejected his petition to fund a return to Sierra Leone. He remained wary about the implied racism of the American Colonization Society (ACS) started by Henry Clay, John Randolph and Richard Lee, which founded Liberia for freed Negroes who might otherwise threaten the plantation system of slavery.
Cuffee’s 1810 expedition to Sierra Leone cost him a small fortune when the African Institution in London failed in its obligations which Cuffee honourably discharged; unfazed, he persisted to aid his fellows and returned to Sierra Leone in1811 to assist in establishing mills for agricultural processing. However the War of 1812 halted his efforts and a petition to Madison failed to ease the trade embargo although Madison thenceforth regarded him as the expert on Africa. On his last trip he took 38 Black adults and children, again at high personal cost, which the Governor welcomed. His health thereafter failed and he died on September 7, 1817, leaving a substantial legacy. The Episcopal Church USA honoured him, naming March 4th as his Feast Day on the Calendar of Saints.
Cooking on a fireside in the old days
Ma's fireplace was the hub of all cooking activity that took place in the carat hut we called home. There was one location in the entire country where she trusted to get the dirt to make a new fireside. Cracks developed over time. Ma would watch a crack the way we look at a chip on the windshield of a car today. She would try an ineffective patch with mud. She dreaded the day when her fireside started to fall apart in chunks, perhaps the result of too much 'chunkaying'. When she could bear the anxiety no more that her pot of rice would fall off a broken fireside, she would pick up a dented pitch-oil tin and head for the hills.
When she could bear the anxiety no more that her pot of rice would fall off a broken fireside, she would pick up a dented pitch-oil tin and head for the hills. With this she carried a small spade. It was at the foot of the hill where she found white clay that hardened with heat and was used for firesides. There must have been a spring beneath because digging the wet dirt was backbreaking work. She had to literally chop slabs out with the spade. It was heavy and unwieldy. Ma rolled a wad of cloth into a small crown, which she put on the top of her head. She then kneeled and lifted the heavy pitch-oil tin onto her head, and then stood up carefully with both hands extended. She danced an unsteady jig for two brief seconds as she found her balance. We set off for the hut with me noisily dragging the spade behind on the gravel road.
Ma's fireplace was not like the ones we saw in movies, in the black and white westerns with Audie Murphy and John Wayne entering log houses. It wasn't a bricked hole in a wall, with a pot hanging from a hook, a lazy fire burning beneath, and smoke climbing upwards through a chimney to the outside.
She made the fireside with her own hands, kneading the white mud to the consistency of play dough. She was thorough with the kneading – part of the intensiveness that went into this was to ensure that every pebble was removed from the dirt. She taught me through engagement, allowing me to pick out the offending pebbles. Perhaps she was teaching me the way her mother had taught her – thinking that maybe one day I too would have my own kitchen and fireside. Together we removed all the detritus from the clay – each pebble that stayed behind resided in an air pocket that weakened the fireside and made it vulnerable to cracking with heat.
Ma then slapped and shaped the mud into a large letter 'U', about two feet long and a foot high. She was very gentle, laying it on the side. The top of the ‘U’ was then gently curved down to fit the bottom of a pot. Here the pot sat above the flames, getting its bottom blackened with soot. No doubt it is from these very firesides where we get the saying, "Pot telling kettle he bottom black", our own Caribbean caution to not throw stones when living in a glass house.
Firewood was put into the space between the open legs of the ‘U’. To start the fire, Ma poured a bit of kerosene onto a pile of dried, broken twigs. She lit a match and carefully inserted it into the pile. The flames would explode outwards. She then piled the dried pieces of firewood on the burning sticks.
The best and hottest firewood came from the orange trees in the orchard that grew about a mile from our hut. Starting the fire with this wood became even easier with the dried moss that clung to the branches. Cooking with wet wood was a nightmare. It meant eyes reddened in a smoke-filled kitchen. It meant a runny nose - this exacerbated by the pungent smell of a burnt bird pepper, a massive sneeze the litmus test that the curry was headed in the right direction.
To keep the flames going Ma sometimes blew into the embers with a long, hollow pipe. She called this a ‘pokaninny’. She blew down into this pipe like a virtuoso playing a wind instrument in a symphony orchestra. The sound was majestic, the air flowing down the length of the soot-blackened pipe with a baritone resonance. The embers would come to life as if responding to the music in each heaving puff of air that came from her filled-out, Gillespie pouches. Sometimes black smoke rose up to hang under the galvanised roof. Here soot coated the underside thickly, sometimes hanging down from thin threads like black web. White ash rose up from the embers, filling the air around like snow flurries, settling in her hair, on the dishes and sometimes entering the furiously roiling pot above.
It was from this fireside where Ma created culinary delights of tall curries, yellow dhal, and perfectly boiled grains of rice. It was among the embers where she roasted the edges of rotis until it became distended with steam.
I wonder if firesides are still coating the bottoms of pots back home.