No One Knows Until They Have Tried It The Trouble It
Is To Get An African To Do Things Carefully; But It Is A Trouble,
Not An Impossibility.
If you don't go off with fever from sheer
worry and vexation the thing can be done, but in the meantime he is
maddening.
I have had many a day's work on plantations instructing
cheerful, willing, apparently intelligent Ethiopians of various
sexes and sizes on the mortal crime of hoeing up young coffee
plants. They have quite seen it. "Oh, Lor! massa, I no fit to do
dem thing." Aren't they! You go along to-morrow morning, and
you'll find your most promising pupils laying around them with their
hoes, talking about the disgraceful way their dearest friends go on,
and destroying young coffee right and left. They are just as bad,
if not slightly worse, particularly the ladies, when it comes to
picking coffee. As soon as your eye is off them, the bough is off
the tree. I know one planter who leads the life of the Surprise
Captain in W. H. S. Gilbert's ballad, lurking among his groves, and
suddenly appearing among his pickers. This, he says, has given them
a feeling of uncertainty as to when and where he may appear,
kassengo and all, that has done much to preserve his plantation; but
it is a wearying life, not what he expected from his book on coffee-
plantations, which had a frontispiece depicting a planter seated in
his verandah, with a tumblerful of something cool at his right hand,
and a pipe in his mouth, contemplating a large plantation full of
industrious natives picking berries into baskets on all sides.
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