Yard Culture: A Lost Way of Life. A Guest Post by Bish Denham + Giveaway

Thanks for letting me come and play in your yard, Barbara! Today I’m going to share a little something about yard culture, which plays a part in my novel, The Bowl and the Stone: A Haunting Tale from the Virgin Islands.

Yard culture has nothing to do with flora or fauna. It’s about people. In the Virgin Islands, and probably throughout the Caribbean, yard culture was a way of life. Until its rapid decline in the mid-1960s, it was a way for the village to take care of the children.

After school or on week-ends children congregated in the yards of different homes. Groups of friends who hung out at school usually hung out together after school.

The yards were large, an acre or two, or more. Often times there was more than one home on the property housing extended family members: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. There might be kitchen garden or fruit trees on the property. For most there was no electricity and no running water. The homes were small and made of wood. By today’s standard they would be considered shacks.

Two typical wooden homes.

Overseeing the yard and the children was a matron, who would be the mother, aunt, or grandmother of one or more of the children. She kept an eye on the kids as they ran around and played in the yard. It was a kind of baby-sitting or after school day-care. A snack might even be provided, a johnny cake or a paté (a pastry fill with beef, salt fish, or pork, then deep fried) fruit, or a simple sandwich. It was also a place for kids to play if they lived in a home without a large yard. Everybody knew everybody and the kids knew which yard they “belonged” to. If they weren’t in school or at home they were expected to at a particular yard. It was difficult for children to get into trouble, but if they did, it was certain word of their misbehaviour would mysteriously reach their parents before they got home.

Each yard had its own culture, its own feel, smell, and energy dependent upon the children who played there and the matron who oversaw them.

This lignum vitae tree, over 100 years old, is in the corner of what used to be a large yard in Cruz Bay, a yard where I spent many hours playing with my sister and a number of other children.

In my book, The Bowl and the Stone: A Haunting Tale from the Virgin Islands, Sam and her best friend Nick, often pass through or explore a yard very like it. In this brief excerpt Sam gives a description of Miss LuAnne’s yard.

Excerpt

We have a picnic under the lignum vitae tree, sitting on the smooth, swept dirt. The air is alive with different smells: Miss LuAnne’s cooking, damp chicken feathers, rotting leaves, the perfume of oleander flowers, the ocean, the mangrove swamp. It’s a mysterious soupy mix particular to this yard and nowhere else. I love the smell of Miss LuAnne’s yard; it’s comfortable, familiar, and safe. It’s the smell of home, of friendship.

Book Blurb

Pirates. Explorers. And spooky ghost hunters.

It’s 1962. Sam and her best friend, Nick, have the whole island of St. John, in the U. S. Virgin Islands, as their playground. They’ve got 240 year-old sugar plantation ruins to explore, beaches to swim, and trails to hike.

But when a man disappears like a vapor right in front of them, they must confront a scary new reality. They’re being haunted. By whom? And why? He’s even creeping into Nick’s dreams.

They need help, but the one who might be able to give it is Trumps, a reclusive hunchback who doesn’t like people, especially kids. Are Sam and Nick brave enough to face him? And if they do, will he listen to them? 

As carefree summer games turn into eerie hauntings, Sam and Nick learn more about themselves and life than they could ever have imagined.

Available now at:

Amazon

Smashwords

About the Author

Bish Denham, whose mother’s side of the family has been in the Caribbean for over one hundred years, was raised in the U. S. Virgin Islands. She still has lots of family living there whom she visits regularly.

She says, “Growing up in the islands was like living inside a history book. Columbus named the islands, Sir Francis Drake sailed through the area, and Alexander Hamilton was raised on St. Croix. The ruins of hundreds of sugar plantations, built with the sweat and blood of slave labor, litter the islands. Then there were the pirates who plied the waters. It is within this atmosphere of wonder and mystery, that I grew up. Life for me was magical, and through my writing I hope to pass on some of that magic.”

The Bowl and the Stone: A Haunting Tale from the Virgin Islands, is her third book and second novel. You can find Anansi and Company: Retold Jamaican Tales and A Lizard’s Tail, at Amazon.com.

To learn more about Bish, 
you can visit her blog, at Random Thoughts

She can also be found on Facebook
on Twitter @BishDenham 

and Goodreads

To be in with a chance of winning an autographed copy of the bowl and the stone (ship within U.S.A only) click here, and don’t forget you still have time to enter my moment in time giveaway here.

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