Before Day 'a Mawnin' Growing up in the Enchanted Island of Jamaica

Paul Virtue was born in Kingston Jamaica in 1946, spending his early years on a cattle farm near Spanish Town, the old sixteenth-century Spanish capital and the setting for many of the short stories in this book. He crafts a series of humourous and sometimes serious vignettes of what life was like in the middle of the twentieth century growing up as a free-range child. He and his siblings had an unrivaled ability to get into mischief as they roamed the countryside near the family farm and at their grandparent€s house in Hanover, in Western Jamaica. The teenaged years saw more adventure, exploring the mountains, sea and sky of his glorious island, but not least the unsuccessful quest for girls.
The family farm, Browndale, was where the formative years unwound. It was on the western edge of the St. Catherine plains and was surrounded by a diverse rural society that was largely employed in farming, and in particular, the sugar cane economy. The society was a palette of many different racial groups from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East that had been a virtual melting pot since the early plantation economy. The Jews had arrived as a part of the Spanish settlement of the 16th century; the French as refugees of the early 19th century slave revolution in St. Dominique (Haiti); the Dutch settlers arrived as part of the 1667 land-swap that gave the Dutch the country of Surinam in exchange for what is now Manhattan. European immigration waves starting in the 1840s, with each initially clinging to their culture for a generation or so before being swept up at the edges into the whirlpool of the melting pot, leaving smaller and smaller cores of pure blood migrant groups.
The stores in this book revolve around the interplay between these groups but are not an attempt at anthropological study; more so they are observation of a youngster who struggled to find his place, seeming to fit everywhere, yet nowhere.