I learnt how to pull weeds and hold a cutlass, from my father and he learnt from his father. I assume, the pattern continues like this, through time. Generations of males in my family, teachings their sons how to work with the earth to bring forth food, and so life.
My grandfather came to Trinidad from Grenada to work as a rigman for Apex Oil Company. Oil was a new king in Trinidad, and many people from the other Caribbean islands came here searching for employment and oil money. Gramps was one, and soon sent for my Grandmother, who at the time was pregnant with my father, and my two uncles who were already toddlers at the time.
Gramps wasn't a strapping man by all accounts. He was tall, wiry, and bad mind. Two stories in particular, that I've been told since my childhood standout and both revolve around his gardening rather than his rig work. He died before I was born so I never got to meet the man, only know the myth.
Gramps made the oil money, but my grandmother was the one who proved to be a business brain. All the oil money did not go into the bank. My grandfather kept a limited, but decent kitchen garden on a parcel of land not too far from their home. He taught his sons about gardening in maybe a round about way. From the sound of it, their presence in the garden was more chore than lesson. They also raised ducks, chickens, turkeys and geese, which were kept under the house, again, all in a limited sense. And a couple cows, that were out in the garden. All this was due to my grandmother's vision and tenacity. At different points when they faced hardships, he would want to sell and she would advise against it.
One day, while my grandfather was in the garden, a cow bolted. I don't know what startled it, but it pulled up stake and rope, and took off! So Gramps took off right after it in his garden boots and ran the cow down, keeping pace with the bovine until it tired. Real bad mind ting. Then pulled the now tired and stubborn cow all the way back to the garden.
In the other story, my father is a teenager. It is late evening, and my grandfather is a bit late coming back from the garden. They hear his footsteps approaching, but instead of the usual, almost hollow doop-doop sound of his even pace in boots, they hear something like doop-bloosh, doop-bloosh. My grandfather makes his way up the short flight of stairs, doop-bloosh, doop-bloosh, and sits at the top of the porch. He takes one boot off, and drops it. Then slowly, he takes the other boot off, and drains it. He was cutting down a tree and at some point, the blade glanced off the tree and caught him behind a calf. He kind of tied it off and continued chopping, until the tree was cut down, then made his way home, with a boot half filled with his blood.
So yeah, bad mind and I find my bad mind boots. In choosing to maroon myself, to begin the break with capitalism, bad mind has come in handy. A stubbornness, a grindstone for the blade. Gramps was bad mind. He was a man too, who understood that you can't depend on this system to supply all your needs. Society has come a long way, since it first start trying to be social. But, we exist in a system that often falls short of meeting our needs. Sometimes, what benefits one group, tends to put another at disadvantage. Maybe this struggle is inevitable, due to limited resources and over population, etc. Or maybe we need to learn a thing or two about balance. Rather than have bad mind about 'getting what is mine' in an individual sense, we could start being bad mind in a collective sense. The response then isn't about being individualistic, but rather about understanding the individual's role in contributing to something greater than society, the vibration of the universe and existence itself!
