FIFTEEN QUESTIONS

Orlando Patterson is a Sociology professor who studies race, freedom, and slavery. He served as a special adviser for Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley from 1972 to 1979 and has written several novels.

Fifteen Minutes: You were born in Jamaica in 1940 and spent much of your upbringing in the town of May Pen. What was it like to grow up in Jamaica in that time?

Orlando Patterson: There was an extraordinary degree of freedom, which I had as a child growing up.

When you’re growing up in basically a rural area, especially in a poor country, kids are largely on their own. They go to school, come home, and then, I meet my parents and then I’m off. I go visit my friends, I roam around the bush, I go to the river.

The idea of a little kid going by themselves to the river would horrify the typical American par ent. I mean, “What?” There are no lifeguards or anything, this is a river. This is my favorite spot, actually going to the river. And so there’s the kind of extreme freedom that you had as a child, which can be dangerous, but if you survive it, it can also be a good thing. It only builds inde pendence.

There’s the kind of extreme freedom that you had as a child, which can be dangerous, but if you survive it, it can also be a good thing.

I had a kind of mischievous sort of childhood. I would raid the mango trees of wealthier people who had these very fancy mangoes, not the common man goes. Kind of a Huckleberry Finn sort of background.

The schooling was extremely limited. My school was just one lawn shed in which the classes were separated by an easel with a big blackboard. And each class size would have been about be tween 60 and 70 kids divided by an aisle.

Looking back, I don’t know how they got any teaching done, quite frankly.

But one way in which the teachers kept order was every teacher had a strap, a leather strap, and they were very lib eral in whacking the kids if they talked too much.

FM: You have written extensively about the influence of cricket in Ja maica and other former British colonies. How would you describe cricket’s cultural and political significance?

OP:It was very powerful. Jamaica, we also were very much involved with cricket more so then when I was growing up, than the situation now, where the sporting world in Jamaica, the focus has shifted from cricket to sprinting. Jamaica has become a world class country in sprinting. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up. Jamaica is one of the few countries in which the preeminent sporting events are athletes running. All the schools compete and so on. The whole country turns up. It’s similar to the Super Bowl. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a great cricketer. That was every schoolboy’s dream. Not so anymore. Now, every schoolboy wants to be Usain Bolt.

FM: Have you ever picked up a bat?

OP: Oh, everybody played.

Of course, it depends on what you call a bat. We had to make our own bat because cricket gear is very expensive. You made your own bat. You’d cut it out of wood or sometimes we use the ball of the coconut tree or dry ball. You knitted your own cricket ball. You played obsessively during the holidays, on weekends. At