Paradise (village)

Tina smiled at the memory. ‘Not Paradise, like heaven. Paradise the plantation. Me aunt never let me leave. I only ever eat her cooking.’
Chapter 9
The only other truck in the village was wrecked and rusted and lying on its side in the dried-up stream. The small river was used as the village dump, relying on the rainy-season floods to eventually wash it all into the Berbice River. Any occasional breeze would lift some of the rank air from the streambed and remind everyone that lived nearby of the shameful state of its banks.
The village was dirty and ramshackle. There had been some proper brick-built houses here at one time, but now it was all brightly painted wooden clapboard shacks sat together apparently at random on the red earth of the jungle clearing. This whole area was lightly forested, it lacked the foreboding menace of the jungle to the north, but any comfort from that was lost by being under the direct glare of the impossibly hot sun. There was nowhere to cool down, the river was dry, and the shops no longer sold ice cream or cold drinks. The best the people here could hope for was a spot of shade a midday and the brief cool period before dawn. Willaim Nimite didn’t know it, but this was where Tina Harris was from. Paradise was a plantation, or it had been before the reditus. Now it was the last stop on a road to nowhere. Nimite could see that the people here suffered, cut off as they were from the rest of what was left of civilisation. There was no doctor, there was a pharmacy but no one to work it. No food was brought in from outside now, they had to grow everything themselves. Their clothes were worn and patched; the people here were having to re-learn the old skills of surviving in the jungle.
There were many houses lying empty, people had gone north if they were able or had been taken away by the Committee or slavecatchers. The old, the young, the lame and the sick were all that remained, a collection of people that no one had a use for. For the people that lived there, it was not considered safe to leave, at any time of day or night. The nearest thing to law or civic protection in the village was a few old men with hunting rifles who patrolled the main street to no set pattern, simply shifting themselves from their front porches to stretch their legs as the mood took them.
Willaim had been given one of the empty houses near the church to live in. He was the first priest to be seen in Paradise in a year so the services he gave in the small, whitewashed church were well attended.
Category:Paradise
Category:Paradise Locations