The Caijan Rastaman
‘I’ve never seen butterflies anywhere in Jamaica like you get at Treasure Beach,’ John Deer told me. ‘You see, I grew up in Mandeville, only an hour or so away in the hills, and we always came to Treasure Beach when I was small. I’ve never forgotten the butterflies… and now I’m back, living here.’
I’d had butterflies in my stomach when trying to reach John’s home, which is also the Caijan Museum and Art Gallery, way out beyond Billy’s Bay on the coast road from Treasure Beach to Parottee in this quiet corner of south-west Jamaica. Two hours from Montego Bay, it’s two light-years from the all-inclusive tourist resorts like Sandals and Hedonism II.
John not only designed the house but built it himself, setting it into the rock and cactus landscape like a Greek monastery. High in the hills, the house was built before there was a road, so everything had to be hauled up by hand. Now there is a road to it – and what a road. We bounced up to the first bend, which turns back on itself at 180-degrees while simultaneously rearing up into the sky, so steep I thought the truck was going to do a back-somersault into the Caribbean. ‘You do need a four-wheel drive,’ John admitted, ‘but if you don’t have one you can ring beforehand and I’ll meet you at the bottom.’
John’s home is no ordinary house, and John no ordinary man. His Rasta dreads flap around a kind and gentle face, the face of a man who would not even harm a rock: ‘There were some huge boulders in the way of the road to the house,’ he said, ‘and the easy way would have been to blow them up but I didn’t want to destroy them, as they’re part of the landscape, so we had to slowly and laboriously lever them out of the way.’
John trained as an architect and practiced with a firm in Kingston but his Rastafarian religion was a problem. This was in the late 1970s and to be a Rastaman was not compatible with holding down a smart office job. Natty dreads didn’t mix with natty suits. ‘It’s still not easy,’ he told me, ‘but it was far worse then. After a time I decided I wanted my own place and my own independence. I’d always been interested in antiques, I’d been collecting them all my life, and I thought I’d try to do something with that rather than architecture. It was like I was called to this area when I found this land was for sale. I want to collect some things from the area and display them together, have a little Treasure Beach museum section. Even everyday objects have their own beauty. People throw them out but they’re of interest to future generations, and I want to preserve them.’
Many of the objects are far from everyday, though. His most prized possession is a sword which he thinks dates back to roughly 300BC. It’s about a foot long and turquoise-green from its time in the depths of the sea. ‘It was found in the St Thomas area in eastern Jamaica but nobody knows how it got there as it certainly isn’t Jamaican. It may have been through the pirates who came to the Caribbean, like Captain Morgan. It could have been something that happened to be on board a sunken ship or it could even have come from South America and been washed ashore eventually by the tides. It had certainly been in the sea a long time.’
There are jars that were used by Arawak Indians, the original Jamaicans, Amerindians who settled here from South America and gave the island its name, Xaymaca, ‘land of wood and water’. They used to keep water in these large bulbous jars which reminded me of Greek pithoi, and had what is called a drip stone, which filtered and purified the contents. ‘I’ve got the stone but it needs cleaning up and putting back into place,’ John says. ‘There’s so much to do. That’s why I haven’t had time to find out more about the sword. Most of the things I know something about, but I haven’t had time to study the sword and make enquiries.’
The national tree of the land of wood and water is the lignum vitae, the hardest wood in the world, and John shows me a carving depicting an Arawak woman. ‘It was found in Manchester, in a grave,’ he says, ‘and there was a lot of controversy over whether to take it out or rebury it. They decided to keep it, and I bought it. It was done at the time so you’re looking at the face of an Arawak woman, there, just as she was.’ Another simple wooden carving of a head is thought to be 400 years old and John’s bathroom has a 300-year-old black cauldron in it, once used for boiling cane on a sugar plantation. ‘Someone was staying in the cottage recently – we’ve got a cottage to rent in the grounds – and though it has its own bathroom she took one look at this and said, “I have to have a bath in there!”‘
The Museum is an eclectic mix reflecting John’s own tastes, and his eye for design. A horse’s skull sits on a table, surrounded by manacles from the slavery days. Plants grow beside wooden sculptures, paintings line the walls, an old petrol pump stands near the stairs and a chopping board says: Good bread, good meat, good gosh, let’s eat!
It was time to eat, too, so John gave me a lift back to Treasure Beach and the Trans-Love bakery and café, the hub of Treasure Beach life where I’d first heard about the Caijan Museum. Caijan, I’m told, is simply the Spanish name for the plot of land on which John’s house stands. ‘The area is called Fort Charles,’ John says as he has a fruit juice and I tuck into a tuna baguette. ‘It was once a look out point for the south side of the island, a defence fort for the port of Black River which was once a more important place than it is today – once the richest town on the island. The fort itself is just over the ridge from the house, though you can only see the foundations now. I’ve found some bronze cannonballs in the hills and an old bronze cannon.’
Does John get any help from the Government for the Museum? ‘No. They said we’d have to asphalt the road. We said that it’s a country road, it’s against the whole idea of the rural nature of the place to have an asphalt road. We offered to asphalt the most dangerous bits, but they wanted it all done. Besides, if you asphalt the whole road then you’ll get cars coming up where maybe the driver can’t make it. It’s very steep and at the moment you know you need four-wheel drive. If it’s asphalt, everyone will think they must be able to get up, and that’ll be more dangerous. People will try going up and down in the dark and won’t be able to make it.’
A precarious road but also a precarious existence, I say to John. Much tougher than having a regular pay-cheque from a firm of architects in Kingston. ‘Yes,’ he agrees, and adds with the quiet confidence of a man with true faith, ‘but I always believe that Jah will provide. He knows my needs.’
