As a child, I heard vivid stories from my father about his fearless mother, a flashing firecracker, who thumped contrite men, foolish enough to interfere with her family and livelihood.
In the then small, close-knit farming community of Ruimzigt on the West Coast of Demerara, she took pride in her five growing children, fertile rice fields and fat herd of cattle. A pioneering parent, she sent all her youngsters off to the tiny school, insisting the three sons and two daughters, learn to read, write and count in proper English, only after they took the cows and other animals out to pasture, helped with the milking and tended to the poultry and kitchen garden.
Fighting the elements and the high tides that threatened the low-lying fertile expanse each glowing full moon, she slowly saved and invested her earnings from working on the estates. She acquired another precious plot of land to erect a small one-storey wooden house on tall pillars, trusting and praying that it would not go the way of crumbling defences and lost plantations, and that the green bulwark of tangled mangroves lining the nearby foreshore would hold against the bristling seas.
