Hartley Neita

The road on which I lived as a child was a bed of marl and stones. Every quarter of a mile, there were groups of women wearing dark blue and thick overdresses, who broke stones for a living.

They were skilled at it, breaking rocks taken to them by cartmen into one-inch and two-inch sized stones. These were purchased by the Public Works Department and the parochial board to repair roads from time to time.

It looked easy, and being 'nuff' at the age of 10, I decided to join them one morning. I borrowed a spare hammer and hit the stone as I saw being done. The hammer slid on the surface and hit my thumb. It was crushed, bleeding, and I was screaming. One of the women took me to my home across the road where my mother bathed the trembling thumb, pasted it with iodine and wrapped it with a piece of cloth. I subsequently lost the nail.

Eight years later I was in my first job as a daily-paid temporary clerk in the Public Works Department in May Pen when I came in contact with these stone breakers again. My job was to prepare the weekly pay bills for these women who worked on the Pleasant Valley, Mocho, Parnassus and York Pen and other marl and stone roadways, as well as other men and women engaged in working for the department.

I discovered these women were paid the princely sum of three shillings and six pence per cubic yard for these broken stones. This sum was the equivalent of today's 35 cents, not taking into account inflation, devaluation and other economic triggers which have degraded our currency.

It took each one almost two days to produce this cubic yard of stones. This, of course, was a vast improvement to what it was in 1938 when the price was one shilling (10 cents) per cubic yard! They also paid the cartmen out of this price.

Received circular

A year later, the May Pen office received a circular from the Public Works head office in Kingston stating that "because of representations which have been made by stone breakers islandwide", it had been decided to increase the price paid to four shillings per cubic yard. About three years later, I was transferred to the department's head office in Kingston. There, to my surprise, I came across the file with the representations made by the stone breakers and which led to the increase being approved. One letter which was published in the Daily Gleaner at the time read:

"We stone breakers and taxpayers of this stone-producing district of Galina (St Mary) hereby respectfully crave your patient consideration, and speedy assistance in connection with the sale of our stones here. The price of three shillings and six pence per cubic yard which your department has been offering us for years now, has grown through the years to become greatly inadequate and unsatisfactory.

In our extreme loyalty to your department, we and especially those who assist us to gather the stones have been endeavouring, all these years, to eke out a miserable existence, trying to subsist on this meagre fare, all to the benefit of your department, but to our certain and definite detriment; for thereby we have gradually been forced into the slur of abject pauperism and into the dungeon of lowered vitality and impoverished health.

"We definitely cannot carry on in this state any longer, hence we are asking you to increase the price to four shillings per cubic yard. We desire four shillings and six pence, but in our effort to meet you halfway we have asked for only four shillings and so no offer below that will satisfy us.

"An important factor that has been militating against us is that easier conditions under which the stones were formerly gathered no longer exist.

Difficult conditions

The conditions have become much more difficult, arduous and hazardous. Stones have to be carried from far more distant points. In addition, all the easier surface rocks have been already removed and we are having now to gather from hard embedded rocks, which renders the task of sledging far more dangerous.

"We have advanced these facts that you may readily see that our demand is genuine, being the outcome of real hardships and suffering which we have been enduring for a long time now."

There were no demonstrations. Roads were not blocked. Tyres were not burnt. No demands for justice now.

Stone breakers were women and ladies.

"Mash dem one by one

Mash dem two by two.

Member a-play we-a play ...

Mash dem one by one.