Provision Ground

About the book

The stakes were new pine, and there were nine of them.

Merline counts them from the taxi, then again at the gate with her shoes in her hand, then a third time standing in the yard, as though the number were the thing that mattered. Orange tape at the head of each one. They begin at the guango tree on the corner of her mother’s yard, run down through the yam hills in a line straighter than anything else on that hillside, and stop where the ground gives way to the gully.

Somebody walked that line with an instrument. Somebody stood in her mother’s yam, sighted through a lens, wrote a figure in a book, and drove back to Lucea for their dinner.

She has been in the country a little over two weeks. She buried her mother on the ninth day.

What follows is the thing every Jamaican family with land and no title eventually finds out: that living somewhere for a hundred years and being able to prove it are two entirely different propositions, and only one of them is admissible.

…containing by estimation Four hundred and nine acres be the same more or less…Conveyance of Askenish Estate, 1894

The record, and the other record

The novel moves between the hillside now and the paper trail behind it — a declaration of 1801, a survey and its endorsement, a Chief Clerk’s report, conveyances, a certificate of title, an agreement for sale. All of them invented, and all written to the pattern of real ones.

It also goes to Ross-shire, where a boy of eighteen left for the coach at Dingwall in September 1790 because the tack had gone and there was nothing for him. His sister waved twice on the road. She asked in every letter for eighteen years when he was coming home, and stopped asking in 1808.

What she never read, because the attorney saw no reason to write it out for a bereaved woman in Scotland, was the clause naming the children of a woman belonging to the estate.

That is the whole architecture of the book: two families, one surname, and a document that says everything by leaving one sentence out. How Scottish names reached Jamaica, and why so many Scots were there to leave them.

A note on Askenish

Askenish is a real district in the parish of Hanover, in the hills inland of Lucea, and the people there grow yam.

That is the only true thing in the book. There was never an Askenish Estate. Every family on that track is invented, every document is invented, and no land there is in dispute on account of anything written in these pages.