If you travel back and forth between Guyana and North America, one of the things that strikes you is the almost complete absence in Canada and the USA of what I call “the roadside artisans” so common here. I say “artisan” deliberately because I’m not talking about just folks on the parapet; I’m talking about what are essentially people running a very small mobile business and, more particularly, how very skillful many of these folks are at what they do.
Most of these operations are small, even tiny, some of them doing business in a space 4 feet square, and it’s often one, maximum two, people involved. If you drive by at night they’re not there – most of them simply pack up and move away at sundown – but during the day, they’re back in their determined spots, and to slow down and watch them is to find that among the crowd there are, truly, some artisans.
One of them is a young man named Dwayne who operates a vehicle-sign business on the edge of Croal Street under a tree. I had gone there to get the licence plate for my vehicle. I was in no rush, and so I decided to wait for the job to be done. It was a revelation.
Dwayne’s arsenal is compact. He has a small table, and a poly sheet strung overhead to deal with the sun and rain. He has a few cans of spray paint, some of that two-sided sticky paper, a couple of metal rulers, and a few of those industrial razor blades with one edge and a stiff back. That’s the lot.
I stood there watching Dwayne work. He ignored me completely, talking softly to a friend, or to the lady who was assisting him, and after you watch Dwayne for a few minutes you realise he’s an artisan. He measures stuff quickly, makes tiny marks, cuts with his blade, sprays, moves back for the paint to dry, cuts again, peels back, and he often has several jobs going at the same time.
Most of our mini-buses display neatly-painted route signs; you would think some talented dude with tiny paint brushes created those. Not so. Dwayne did it completely free-hand. I couldn’t believe it. With no template to guide him, no overlay, no outlines, he manouevred his little razor blade, as an artist would, carefully carving the letters on the two-sided paper he had stuck on the front of the bus. He sprayed the paint, peeled off the waste, and there was the route information – pretty curved letters, all in line, no rough edges, no mistakes; all from a good eye and a sharp blade. I asked him if he didn’t use a template; he said, “I just do it just suh.” He may be under a tree on Croal Street, but he’s an artisan. (Driving away, I had the crazy thought to slip Dwayne a couple dollars so when the minibus guy wasn’t watching, he would paint “SLOW DOWN, BANNA” on the dashboard.)
Some of our coconut vendors, many of them with mobile gear, are pretty skillful folks, too. On North Road, outside Bourda, there are a couple of them, side by side – one black, one Indian – doing a healthy business with customers, like me, who have brought bottles to fill. They have the trade down pat with those razor sharp cutlasses (I have never caught them sharpening one) that they swing effortlessly; sometimes in one slice the coconut is open. Try that sometime, if you think it’s easy.
There’s a small hardware store in town on, I think, Regent Street. Outside, on the sidewalk, a young lady is writing in chalk, on a blackboard, special items for sale. I watched her do it. Stooping down, completely free-hand, she whips across, producing nicely-shaped letters, easy to read, perfectly aligned. She doesn’t erase and go back. She does it one time, bang. It looks like printing. I asked her if she had been trained to do that. She laughed. “Na man, dat easy.” Easy for her; she’s an artisan.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. As a youngster going to Main Street School, I remember a short, chubby, black fellow named Preep who used to sell “shave ice” under a tree on Carmichael Street. Apparently the police didn’t want Preep on Main Street so he moved to Carmichael, but the business followed him because – here’s the key – Preep’s syrup tasted better than the other vendors around there. He laughed when asked about the ingredients, but with his syrup Preep had graduated from run-of-the-mill shave-ice vendor to artisan.
Another one was an Indian fellow named Garamai (I’m not sure about the spelling) who used to pedal around town selling various Indian delicacies from a basket perched on his bicycle handle. Of course there were other vendors around, selling similar fare, but Garamai had them all beat with his potato balls. Anybody liming town in those days who engaged a Garamai potato ball, with a touch of sour, will attest that the thing was simply heavenly. I have not eaten one since that comes close. Although I must admit that I was sometimes a bit leery about Garamai’s hygiene, particularly on hot days, I have to tell you that the pull of the potato ball triumphed; that’s how good the thing was. To be headed for a potato ball and to be told by Garamai “Potato ball done.” was like a blow to the solar plexus.
In my days at Saints, too, there was another. Her name was Jordan. She could be found parked with her tray at the back of the school, and most of her items were okay, but there was a particular soft sugar cake (you know the kind), dark-brown and gooey, that was a winner. Jordan was not big on organization, however, and there were days when she would show up minus the soft sugar cake and offer you the hard one – whereupon you would just steups and walk away.
Maybe it has to do with their location, but many of our roadside artisans, past and present, are casual about what they do; they don’t know how good they are.
