Pepper Power by Veronica Blake Carnegie.

Nearly every morning, the eldest one of five retired professionals, 93 year old Freddie, eats a bowl of baked beans with cayenne pepper. She does the driving for the group and is preparing to take us safely to the up-coming Literary Fair in Trelawny in her SUV. We never really paid much attention to the tasty pepper-pot soup; served on Saturdays, nor to the special treat of Bruce’s hot patties in old Cross Roads.

Now some of us go to the Pepper House where ‘Doc’ will give us pepper tea or strap poultice of steaming pepper leaves on our painful parts. Others, I know, go to the well known obeah man who feeds them the red hot pepper, minus the seeds, gives them cooling coconut water for nothing else can quench the fiery fumes in the mouth. He urges them to drink all they can till the discomfort ceases. Finally, he advises the patrons not to pass any urine for the next 24 hours to ensure the effectiveness of`his treatment. To pee or not to pee depends on the urgency triggered by the pepper and the coconut water intake.

Then there are the ever burning issues of human relations development and problems solutions where pepper becomes the means to the end. Twenty years ago my neighbour in Plum Acres asked me for a couple of hot peppers we grew in our garden. No Problem. She rubbed them in her husband’s name-brand brief as he whistled and showered, preparing to go out again with his young girlfriend. He’d pulled up his trousers when the pepper penetrated his private parts and he howled in pain, rubbing frantically as he ran out of the room.  The pepper affected him physically; his tender loins being swollen for weeks and mentally because he didn’t dare accuse his wife. But this is not an old remedy, for just last month, a modern executive managed to get pepper in the toilet tissue of her husband’s lover.

The shamed young lady is planning to leave the island and the husband may follow. Such are the joys of human relations and attempted solutions.  There is the old power of love. There is the un-explainable power of the spoken word.  Scholars now need to find time to examine the silent potency and hidden power of the hot pepper.

Veronica Blake Carnegie.