With much of Guyana undeveloped, and not even fully explored, the conditions of daily living in some of the country, particularly the interior, have produced some very tough individuals, with both the physical and mental strength to overcome adversity. Most of us who live here can attest to knowing of persons like that from time to time who leave you astonished at their ability to operate effectively in extremely difficult situations. Essentially, these are persons with a strong inner core that they draw on when the going gets tough.
As a youngster growing up in Vreed-en-Hoop, I was distantly aware of a fisherman named Tunus who lived in Pouderoyen as a tough-as-nails character known for his hard-drinking and rough and tumble existence. Altercation was a way of life for Tunus, who would be seen in the village some days, in a dingy white singlet, often with cigarette in mouth, grumbling about something or berating somebody. Truth to tell, I was scared of the guy. Tunus was a contentious sort, always ready for a fight, and often in one. In one famous story I heard, Tunus had been in a scramble with another fisherman in the village that left his opponent dazed and bleeding on the parapet. On the following Saturday, seeking revenge, the fisherman came through the village in the late afternoon, a full rum bottle in his hand, looking for Tunus who happened to be standing alone on a middle walk bridge. The fisherman slipped through the crowd, ran up behind Tunus, swung the rum bottle in a wide arc and hit Tunus flush on his head. The bottle shattered. Tunus staggered, brushed off the broken glass, turned around facing the fisherman and said, “You again, boy?” The fisherman dropped the neck of the bottle still in his hand and took off running.
In my time at BG Airways at Atkinson Field, we flew a variety of cargo to and from the interior – everything from dredge parts to balata – and the men loading those planes were strong, tough individuals proud of their ability to move heavy items around with ease. Once or twice while I was there, with no flights scheduled for that day, the loaders would amuse themselves with a simple game: with $5 from every man put into a pot, they would put a couple bags of sugar on the tray of a cargo truck, and whoever walked the farthest with the sugar on his back, won the pot. My memory is that these bags weighed close to 300 pounds; there was no way to grip them, and they were very unwieldy. Each loader competing would back up to the truck, two guys in the tray would set the sugar on his back, and off he would go. It was hard enough just to stand there with 300 pounds on your shoulders; to walk with it for any distance was a feat. These men were in shape from the daily lifting, but I remember one guy, short and powerful, nicknamed Chatto for his talkative nature, who walked about 50 yards with his bag, suddenly stopped, let the bag fall, and just lay down on it, panting in the hot sun, and calling, “Water, water.”
I was to remember that incident years later when on a visit to Haiti I took a trip by taxi up in the hills to a shop selling local craft. On the way up, from the hillsides bordering the road, I kept seeing Haitian women, barefoot, coming down the trails, carrying on their heads large bags of ground provisions to leave on the roadside for pickup. The sun was baking hot, and the bags were clearly heavy. As they walked down the trails, you could see the legs of these peasant women, few of them young, literally bowing under the weight; how they managed that burden, on those treacherous slopes, in their bare feet, was a mystery to me. I asked the taxi driver why only women were doing this grinding work. He laughed once and said, “De men plant an’ dey reap; de women fetch.” And he laughed again. Somehow it reminded me of Chatto and Atkinson Field – same brute strength.
Another example of fortitude was contained in a story I heard from my brother-in-law, Joe Gonsalves, the Fire Chief at Atkinson Field when I worked there. This one involved a villager in Ann’s Grove, where Joe came from. The villager, let’s call him Tom, was in his house one day watching his daughter who was feeding her daughter some fried fish, when the three-year-old child, the apple of Tom’s eye, suddenly began choking on a fish bone in her throat. The mother began slapping the child’s back, but the bone was stuck fast. The mother was in hysterics. Tom jumped up and stuck his hand down the child’s throat to grab the bone. “Ah touchin it,” he said, “but it far down an ah can’t grip it.” With the child now red in the face, continuing to retch and cough, Tom calmly reached for his pocket knife and cut the web between the first and second fingers of his hand; with the greater reach that gave him, he pulled the bone free from his grand-daughter’s throat. It must have been an horrendous scene – the child’s agony, Tom’s bleeding hand, the mother’s screams. But as Joe recalled it, Tom, squeezing his cut hand, simply said, “I had to do it; the child woulda died.”
The hard lives many of us face in the Caribbean, often produce this strain of ordinary people showing remarkable courage and strength. Another example is the episode involving a shipwrecked sailor, Andrew Powery, of the Cayman Islands, who walked for two days across coral reefs to get help for his shipmates – but that’s another story for another time.
