Literature

The wood was thick and wild with tangled weed racing over and along the swollen black roots of the mahogany trees. Patrolling the land at all hours of the day were the village overseers. They were themselves villagers who were granted special favours like attending on the landlady, or owning after twenty years' tenure the spot of land on which their house was built. They were fierce, aggressive and strict. Theft was not unusual, and the landlords depended entirely on the overseers to scare away the more dangerous villagers. The overseers carried bunches of keys strung on wire which they chimed continually, partly to warn the villagers of their approach, and partly to satisfy themselves with the feel of authority. This seemed necessary since the average villager showed little respect for the overseer unless threatened or actually bullied. Many a day poverty, adventure of the threat of boredom would drive them into the woods where the landlady's hens lay and the rabbits nibbled the green weed. They would collect the eggs and set snares for the birds and animals. The landlord made a perennial complaint, and the overseers were given a full-time job. Occasionally the landlord would accuse the overseers of conniving, of slackening on the job, and the overseers who never risked defending themselves gave vent to their feelings on the villagers who they thought were envious and jealous and mean. Low-down nigger people was a special phrase the overseers had coined. The villagers were low-down nigger people since they couldn't bear to see one of their kind get along without feeling envy and hate. This had created a tense relationship between the overseer and the ordinary villager. Each represented of the other an image of the enemy. And the enemy was to be destroyed or placated. The overseer was either authoritarian or shrewd. The villager hostile or obsequious. The landlord's complaint heightened the image, gave it an edge that cut sharp and deep through every layer of the land. And this image by continual assertion had become a myth which like a rumour drifted far beyond the village. Even the better educated who had one way