Olga - A Daughter's Tale by Marie-Therese Browne (Marie Campbell) Read Free Book Online

bad, so for now we’re staying put.
    We have two servants, our maid Cassie who’s nearly the same age as me and I like a lot, and cook who gives me the creeps. No one calls her by her name, I don’t even know what it is - we just call her cook. One day Sydney decided that Mammie needed help so off he went to find someone and came back with her. But she’s a crazy woman. She believes in Obeah and comes to work some mornings and tells me about great big peacocks that come to her front door and talk to her. Mammie says to ignore her and not upset her because she’s the best cook we’ve ever had.
    When we were little, Mammie used to take in lodgers and we still have one, Mr Delgado who has one of the rooms downstairs. He is a salesman, from the Cockpit Country and a direct descendent of the Maroons, who, by the way, hate the British. Mr Delgado loves to tell stories, and always the same one, how years ago the Maroons defeated the British when they tried to recapture the slaves that the Spanish set free after the British had taken Jamaica from Spain. The slaves headed up the mountains and forests into the remote Cockpit Country area of Jamaica and set up communities there.
    The British soldiers tried to re-capture them several times but the Maroons, led by a woman called Nanny, outsmarted them. Eventually a truce was called and the Maroons won the right to virtually govern themselves. And every year, Mr Delgado tells us how they celebrate the fact that they were the first black people in the West Indies to gain their freedom nearly 100 years before Emancipation.
    Miss Wedderburn, who was my history teacher when I was at Alpha School, was very impressed the day I told the whole class the history of the Maroons – I didn’t tell her I’d heard the story so many times I could repeat it in my sleep and, no doubt, I’ll hear it again. Another lodger was a salesman called Victor Condell, a coloured Jamaican who came from Canada He used to sell tractors and other kinds of farm machinery.
    Well, Victor Condell lived with us for over a year and one day, out of the blue, he said he was returning to Canada at the end of the month. My sister, Chickie, was heart broken and cried for days. Eventually she stopped crying long enough to tell us that she and Victor had been courting and she’d fallen in love with him. It came as a big shock to me, I can tell you, I never suspected anything.
    To stop Chickie crying cook took her to see Annie Harvey, an Obeah woman, to get a love potion to secretly give to Victor to make him stay with her. Annie called it “come to me sauce” and it was in a little blue bottle which Chickie had to mix into Victor’s food, and then wait for the potion to work. Once it works, Annie told Chickie, you can then give Victor another potion called “stay at home sauce” and that keeps him from looking at other women.
    Unfortunately, the second potion wasn’t needed because the first one didn’t work. Victor left. So cook, who has a big collection of voodoo dolls, then asked Chickie if she’d like to choose one and she could stick pins in it so Victor would get sick, but Chickie said no.
    One day, long after Victor Condell had left, I heard screams coming from Chickie’s bedroom. Mammie told me Chickie was fine, not to worry and to stay right away from her room. But curiosity always got the better of me, so I went up to peek through the keyhole of her bedroom door. Before I could see anything, Sydney had come up behind me, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to my bedroom and gave me a good whipping. “That’s for not doing what you were told” he said. Two days later Pearl, Ruby, Dolly and me were shown Maurice and Mammie told us that Chickie had a little baby boy.
    “ A gift from God” she said.

    ******

Chapter NINE



Olga’s Diary

    Dear Diary

    Viviana: She’s my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie. Vivie’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against