From Harvey River (25 page)

“You don't have to go to school today,” Doris would say to one of the children or “be very careful how you play with such and such a child,” or “give me that slingshot, somebody could lose an eye today.” Her own mother, Margaret, had come the night before, serious and unsmiling. Invariably she came only when she had to warn her about some possible danger to one of the children.

Doris's father, David, had appeared, fully dressed except for his shirt, and stood right there in the yard, under the beheaded breadfruit tree, and had said to her: “Remember your confirmation promise, my daughter, don't forget your promise that was given you from Isaiah 43: Fear not for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by name, thou art mine, when thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm thee, when thou walkest through the fire thou shall not be burnt.” And then he had turned to go, but before he left, he looked over at the men playing the seemingly unending game of dominoes and said, “How is this different from what rich men do up at the Liguanea Club, where black people can only pass through those gates as maids and waiters? This is a poor man social club,” and then he pointed to the old white-haired man who seemed to be in charge of the ongoing domino game, and whom my mother heard everyone call Papacita. David said, “You see Papacita there, he worked more than ten strong men when he was young, cutting cane all over Jamaica, and then he spent years more in Cuba cutting hectares and hectares of cane. Nobody in the history of the world ever cut as much cane as Papacita. Let him play domino now, God
knows he shouldn't do any more hard work.” And David goes through the gate saying, “These people are no better or no worse than people anywhere, anything that you can do to help them, help them and you will be surprised to know how they will help you.”

For weeks Doris puzzled over what exactly her grandmother Leanna had meant when she advised her to “control the silver.” One Saturday she was buying food in the Redemption Ground Market and she found herself telling an old woman, from whom she was buying escallion, about the dream of her grandmother riding into the yard to see her. And the woman explained to her that there was a time in the history of Jamaica when all the silver coinage on the island had found its way into the hands of enslaved men and women, enterprising Africans who cultivated their food plots and sold their produce in the Sunday markets around the island. “Them had was to send away a England go make more silver money,” the woman had said. She also said that many Jamaicans had bought their freedom and their own land by saving these small sums of silver money and that her great-grandmother had been one such Jamaican.

Of course George O'Brian Wilson had appeared to her from her earliest days in Kingston, and she always maintained that it was he who had instructed her to slap Vie. Whenever the Irishman appeared to her, she would wake up in a no-nonsense mood and woe betide the man, woman, or child who crossed her that day. “Take your damn cloth and go if you can't wait for me to finish sewing it,” she would say to an impatient customer. And like her mother, she would remind any of her children in no uncertain terms, “No child of mine will ever rule me.” It was a foolish, foolish child who would challenge that statement.

One of the women in the yard came to Doris and said, “I wake up this morning and drop and break my eyeglasses, Miss
Goodie, you think that you could just read this letter for me that my son write me from England?” Of course the letter needed a reply and her glasses still had not been fixed, so my mother wrote a reply. And so it went, with both women agreeing to blame the woman's illiteracy on her broken glasses. The woman began to do small favours for my mother, like buying food at the market for her and taking her clothes off the wash line, and she never did get her glasses fixed. Once it was known that my mother would read letters and never, ever mention the contents to others, and write replies to letters, again without mentioning the contents, and fill out forms and write letters of recommendation and give good advice, more and more people in the yard began to stand outside the door saying, “Hello Miss Goodie, I have a little favour to ask you.” When their children came and stood outside the door and called to her, she began to invite them in and taught them what she taught her own children. Soon, even Vie's son knew that a T was like a telephone pole, and a G was like a water goblet that would pour forth fresh water if you tilted it.

 

I
was seven years old when I first saw the place that had produced my mother's people and which was to shape my imagination for the rest of my life. In July 1954, I joined the great exodus of Kingston children sent to visit with relatives in the country during the summer holidays. I remember being wedged in the back seat of a small, black Morris Minor motor car with three adults all related to my mother and going on the longest journey of my life up till that point–fourteen hours from Kingston to the parish of Hanover. Stops were made along the way: for gas; for me to be sick; to put water in the radiator; for us to pee in the bushes; to fix flat tires; for them to wrap my chest in newspaper to seal my motion sickness; for food and drink, including a mandatory fish and bammy stop at Old Harbour. We finally got to the town of Lucea in the parish of Hanover late at night, and I slept at the home of my mother's cousin, whose name was Tamar. “Palm tree,” my mother said, that was the meaning of her name. Tamar had four children, Wesley, Vivian, Joyce, and Lyn, but she still looked like a young girl. She was not tall and slender like a palm tree, she was short and neat-looking, dressed as she was when I saw her for the first time in a pink floral dress. I guess she was more like a flowering shrub.

Later that next day I was taken by car to the village of Harvey River, five miles from Lucea. Harvey River is set in the interior of Hanover, under the Dolphin Head Mountains. My mother's family home was a large wood-and-stone house set right off the village square. As we approached, I noticed that there was a beautiful flower garden flourishing in the front yard. The house was occupied by Aunt Ann and her children, Myrna, Colin, and Joan, now that David and Margaret Harvey were dead.

It was not a manicured yard like the gardens that I had seen in the suburbs of St. Andrew when my father took us on Sunday afternoons for drives from where we lived on Orange Street in downtown Kingston. This garden was thick with pink June roses and oleanders and red flowering hibiscus, and foaming white “rice and peas” bushes that stretched out and brushed against you when you walked up the short stone-paved path to the front door. I did not know the names of flowers then, but the first one I learned was “jasmine,” the tiny starry white flowers which proceeded to perfume the evening with a lovely scent that was activated once it grew dark. Also, there was a large field of white lilies that grew behind the house, giving off a honey-and-spice perfume so fragrant that clothes which were hung on the wash line came in dry and sweet-smelling. When night fell and nobody made a move to turn on the lights, I became anxious. Tamar's house in Lucea, where I'd slept the night before, had electric lights, so I thought that all of Hanover was similarly lit. Instead, my Aunt Ann called her son, Colin, to bring the lamps. Several fat-bellied, glass-shaded kerosene oil lamps with the words Home Sweet Home picked out in white script between two lacy borders were brought. They were the source of light for the entire house. The lamps threw up tall, macabre shadows on the walls of the house that
I had imagined as a fairy-tale dwelling in the golden afternoon light. Now this same enchanted house seemed sinister and frightening, and I suddenly wanted to go home, back to Kingston, where there was no such garden but where there were bright electric lights. I started to cry softly, then I began to cry loudly, then I added a refrain to my crying. I want to go home, I want to go home. My aunt never said a word. She just told my three cousins to go to bed and leave us alone.

She let me weep for what seemed like a long time. Even when I drooled all over the front of my good pink-and-white dress, she said nothing to me. We just sat there at the dining-room table–she, who looked like a woman in a Gauguin painting, and I, a younger version of her, sat in the gathering darkness with the Home Sweet Home lamp casting a water-wash yellow light between us, arranged in a composition that could have been painted on velvet and titled “Crying for the Light.” She said nothing, she just let me cry. When I sobbed myself into silence, she lifted me up and put me into bed with my cousin Joan, where I fell asleep at once. Early next morning Joan shook me awake, saying that it was time for us to have our morning bath in the river. For the first time I saw the river that was named for my mother's people. Then, it seemed like a huge wide green sea with the cleanest swift-moving water. My cousins could swim, they just ran down the riverbank and leapt into the water. And I jumped right in after them; but because I could not swim, I nearly drowned. So I quickly learned to stay in the shallows and watch them swim the river, bank to bank. But I was so happy. I felt somehow that I would never come to any harm as long as I was immersed in that water named for my family. I felt that I should allow the currents to sweep me along and whenever I sensed that I was out too deep, I would just wade back to where my feet could touch ground. When my
cousins were ready to leave, I did not want to get out of the water. They laughed and said, “Think it's you wanted to go back to Kingston last night!”

For breakfast Aunt Ann had given us big mugs of chocolate tea with coconut milk. The chocolate was made from the cacao trees in Grandfather David's cacao walk. Rich, dark-brown like sweet mud, the chocolate fat floated on top, painting an oily moustache on your upper lip every time you put the mug to your mouth. There were hot toasted cassava bammies spread with yellow salt butter–cocoa like rich wine, and bammy like fresh host, a pure country communion after my river baptism. After breakfast, I joined the band of village children roaming all over the countryside, stoning fruit trees and eating fruit in various stages of fitness. Green common mangoes that you sliced and ate with salt (you always walked with some salt twisted in a piece of brown paper for just this reason), ripe common mangoes with names like blackie, stringy, number eleven, and beefy, and sometimes even good mangoes like Hayden, Bombay, and Julie, which were mostly cultivated in people's yards and did not grow wild in the bush. Common mangoes grew in the bush, and you ate as many of them as you wished, until you got a running belly, which would mean a visit to the pit latrine, which I dreaded as much as I did the lack of electric lights.

That summer I tasted fruit I had never eaten before. Small tart green jimbelins, fragrant rose apples that grew by the river, pods of musky stinking toe and slick mackafat. We heard stories, such stories. Under the shadow of the Dolphin Head Mountains is a cave. They said that there used to be a young man in a nearby village who disappeared one day as he walked home from school. The villagers searched for him for days and had almost given him up for dead when someone who had
gone to gather firewood found him sleeping near the mouth of the cave. The story he told was that he had been walking home from school when he heard what sounded like singing coming from inside the cave. He went deep inside, following the sound of the singing, and there he found a pool, so he drank some water from it and promptly fell asleep. He was not sure whether he was awake or dreaming, when he sensed that the cave was filled with people in bright robes. They told him that the water in the pool was really palm wine. They sung to him and told him they were sorry because they had helped to sell his ancestors to the slave traders. They said that they wished to repay him for the terrible wrong they had done, and this is how they would make amends to him. From henceforward he would be very lucky: they said he was never to answer to the name Cyril again and that he was to insist from now on that everyone call him Lucky. After that the boy really became very lucky. He won every bingo and raffle held at church and school functions and he bought one cow from which he got seven calves. He went to Montego Bay and some tourists took a liking to him and sent for him to come and live with them in England. He went to London and, years later, married one of the Queen's relatives. All the children in the village kept going to the cave in the hope that they would see the apologizing Africans again, for all of them wanted to have Lucky's good fortune to travel and be loved by a relative of the Queen.

There was also a house there which they said was haunted. They said that a very wicked woman used to live there. She was an obeah woman and she had harmed a lot of people. Wicked, vengeful people would pay her money to do bad things to their enemies and to innocent people whom they wanted to “keep down.” Before she died she asked that she be buried with her face turned down to the ground as she was too ashamed to
meet the gaze of her Maker on Judgment Day. We were advised to run by that house while chanting the Lord's Prayer for protection, throwing pebbles behind us.

About noon we would return home for lunch, where we roasted breadfruits and big pieces of salted codfish over a wood fire. Then we would mix big mugs of “lemonade,” made with sour Seville oranges, sugar, and water. We ate al fresco, sitting without shoes on the tombstones of the dead Harveys. At first I was frightened by this, but all my cousins did it. And my cousin Joan, who had been very close to our grandmother Margaret, convinced me that it was all right. She had played in the family plot for a long time and no harm had ever befallen her. It was true. She was very beautiful, slim, and graceful, so one day I sat beside her on our grandparents' tombstones; and though like any Kingston-born child I was frightened of duppies, after I sat there a while and nothing happened I became quite used to going to the family plot and sitting on the tombstones of all my Harvey relatives.