By Tony Deyal
Have you heard about how much meat pastries cost in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad as well as the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean?
An old sailor in a Port-of-Spain bar told us that in Jamaica, beef pies cost $1.50. Goat pies cost around $2 and apple pies are about $2.50. In Trinidad, the prices are roughly the same. Cheese and onion pies are $1.50, steak and onion pies are $2 and cherry pies are $3. In Barbados, a mushroom pie would cost about $4 and a vegetable pie is about $1.75. When we asked him why he’s telling us all this, he replied, “These are the Pie rates of the Caribbean.”
But it’s not just the pie but the sky. It is the sun of a beach in the Caribbean and the sense of humour wherever we go. It is what our visitors, local or foreign, consider our warmth, hospitality, music, dance and food! We joke and laugh everywhere and every time, even if it is merely to keep our pain, or even anger, in control. This is why I put the people first. Even though I am a son of a beach, the Sand, Sea, Sun and (some say) Sex, are secondary. The people of the entire region are funnier than Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Joan Rivers put together. Here are examples from the three countries of our Caribbean Pie-rate.
We start with Barbados. From the day, 32 years ago when I started my columns, it was not the sea but the cricket where humour and concern were the players in the middle. I had long dreamt of the day when I would sit in the stands of Kensington hearing the “Hoi! Hoi!” of the hoi-polloi, their “Cor Blimeys” and the agonized “Jeez-U” of puzzlement and exasperation. “Give Hooper the ball,” a woman shouted. Her companion told her it is the new ball and Hooper cannot use it. “Why not?” she demanded. “What they have against the boy?” Ambrose twice beat Sohail outside the off stump. “Hoi! How he fishing so? He from Oistins?” Then the game stopped and the lady asked her friend “What happening?” He explained, “The umpire offer them the light.” She was angry, “But how he could come from England and give them we light? Like the man cornfuse!”
I owned a car, a MOKE, a word which the dictionary says is “a donkey or a stupid fellow.” When I took it to a mechanic, he told me, “Mister, is either you or the car. Is better you change the car and keep the oil.” I asked him, “What for? To fry saltfish?” He laughed. Both of us knew that in Barbados especially, “Nothing in the world is sweeter than saltfish.” In fact, here is a joke that I first heard in Barbados. After the first humans were created and made love for the first time, the Lord appeared and asked Adam, “How didst thou like it?” Adam admitted it was incredible.
The Lord asked: “What about Eve?” Adam smiled knowingly and said, “She liked it too.” The Lord then asked for Eve, and Adam replied that she was in the river, washing. Suddenly, the sky darkened, and the winds roared. Adam was alarmed and asked, “What’s the matter, Lord? What’s wrong?” And the Lord boomed in frustration, “Now I’ll never get that smell out of the fish.”
Next was Jamaica where, from the moment I arrived, I learnt that it was “TING country”. When I asked why that name I was told, “no big ting.” What makes it more than a thing apart in the “Jam”, is that the missing “h” is added to words like “egg”, “omelette” and “auspice”. It is true that most Caribbean people say? “Tings bad, boy. Tings brown.” The great Jamaican group, the Merry Men, sang, “All you hear this ting. My girlfriend, promise to give me some ting. And the bells goin’ ring and the birds goin’ sing, Cause she promise to give me some ting, ting, ting.”
This is where I also heard my favourite “ting” joke. In a bar in the country this “bad-john” or “tough man” sat drinking his liquor with his henchmen around him, when suddenly a stranger came up to him, smiled and without warning, touched him on his ear “Ting!” The bad-john was angry and upset and he grabbed the stranger intending to do him grievous bodily harm.
Undaunted, the stranger smiled sweetly and again touched the bad-john on his ear, “Ting!” The bad-john was now so angry that he started to laugh, almost hysterically, demanding an explanation. The stranger, smiling sweetly, said that he was from Mars.
The bad-john said: “Who you trying to fool? You look just like we.” Smiling, the stranger unzipped his outer skin, clothes and all, and stood revealed for what he was. The bad-john was stunned for a moment and then laughed, “You Martians look real funny. What are you? Man or woman, or what?” The stranger grinned and said softly, “Man.” This completely threw the bad-john. He stuttered, “But how you could be a man? You have no.. no.. You don’t look like a man. How you make love on Mars then?” The stranger smirked, looked at the bad-john, and touched him on his ear, “TING!”
As we move into Trinidad, the big “ting” now is crime, and it takes me back to a criminal named “Ghost”. He was what the US would call a “Don” or powerful Mafia leader. Before he came into the picture most of us used to suck our teethes and say loudly, “I Don!” However, this meaning as “finished” or “done” ended when Ghost was around. One Christmas Eve night, Ghost went with his driends into a rum-shop and asked the owner for rum, scotch, wine and beer. Ghost saw me passing on my way to midnight mass where my girlfriend was waiting for me and demanded I take a drink with him. Regardless of how much nerve I had, it was not enough to tell Ghost, “Sorry!”
As I took my beer, the owner of the shop handed “Ghost” a piece of paper. Ghost asked the owner, “What is this? What the so-and-so is this?” “This is the bill,” the owner replied. Ghost, after a long took at the owner, and in a tone which was a mixture of mockery and menace told the frightened man, “Well let me tell you this, and tell everybody what I say, my name is crime and crime don’t pay!” My missing church visit reminded me of the man who went to apologise to his very religious girlfriend for not meeting her in church. However, he still ended up on her bed below a sign which read, “I need thee every day.” The next day the man put up his own sign, “Oh Lord, give me strength.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen asking the Almighty, “Lord, considering the kind of criminals and pie-rates we have in Trinidad, if you give me strength you also have to give me a gun, bullets, and then some bail money too.”
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