The Plantation
Arabella main source of income was from her ginger, coffee
and banana plantation. Also, on a smaller scale, they planted coco and dashine.
Craighead was a community where most people farm yam which involved a lot of
hard manual labor. Rosa her sister was asthmatic and being that they were both
women, they could not handle much hard work. They took up planting ginger. The
coffee and banana were easy to maintain as once planted, they would just reap
crops from year to year. For yam, they depended on Eddie’s crops. Financial
support came from Rosa's seamstress profession.
Another thing that helped was
the fruitfulness of the land in Sodom. There were a lot of breadfruits,
coconuts, star apples, rose apples, red apples and mangoes. These were all
seasonal food and as soon as one crop of fruit was out, another one came in.
After the children grew up and
Esmie got married to Mercel. Her husband took over all the farming and Arabella
and Rosa stopped farming. Eddie was able to focus more on his
carpentry/contractor profession and was able to move on and settle with his own
family.
Roderick and Clarence migrated
to England and provided the financial support that their mother and aunt
needed.
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