From Harvey River (29 page)

But ironically, it was the same Phantom who became one of the first converts to leave Rastafari and to take refuge in the land of Queen Elizabeth of England.

Phantom appeared in our yard one day carrying a cardboard grip. He was dressed in a brand new, tight-fitting continental suit made for him by the great Jamaican entertainer and tailor, Clancy Eccles. He was wearing a shiny pair of Three Castle shoes and his shorn head was covered by a “stingy brim” felt hat. This outfit in later years would become de rigueur for English entertainers, and this is gospel: it was introduced to Britain by Jamaican immigrants. Phantom had come to tell Mother Goodie goodbye and to bid a general farewell to us all, saying:

People I am leaving, for

Rasta-ism is “ism”

Cramp and paralyze all “ism” and “schism”

Rasta-ism is no ambition “ism”

Rasta-ism is ganja “ism”

Rasta-ism is live-like-dog “ism,” Rasta-ism is old
nayga “ism”

At that point, a black Zephyr 6 taxi drew up outside and Phantom went out the gate, with my mother wishing him “travelling mercies” and giving him a large slice of cornmeal pudding wrapped in a grease-proof bread bag to sustain him on his journey. He climbed in and departed for the wharf, driving past the ice cream parlour operated by the beautiful Chinese woman named Cynthia, past Miss Dinah's grocery, and the barbershop operated by Sillo, a man who was proud to be an African, so proud that he called his barbershop Addis Ababa Shop. Phantom boarded an Italian banana boat called the
Ascania
, having paid a passage of seventy-five pounds, and set sail for England, leaving Rasta behind.

Everyone expected Phantom's ship to sink. We waited to hear that it had been swallowed up by the waves because there was a traitor to Rastafari on board. But it did not sink, and years later he came back on a visit and told my mother of his time there.

Phantom said he had landed in London, England, and because he did not want to run into anyone in the Jamaican community who might have known him, he took a train to Wolverhampton, where he had no friends or relatives, and so had no one to show him the ropes. The only thing that he knew about that town was the name of the football team, the Wolverhampton Wanderers, because he bet on them when he used to buy the football pools. Nobody would rent him a room except for an old woman named Miss Dicey O'Riley, who drank glasses of jet-dark porter all the time and kept
walking through the house in various stages of undress, crooning “The Rose of Tralee,” thus forcing Phantom to come in late every night and leave early in the morning every cold and lonely day of the year. He got a job in a factory where the first thing that happened to him was an English boy started asking him about his Three Castle shoes. How come a Jamaican like him owned such a good pair of shoes? When the boy found out how much the shoes cost (seven pounds) and knew he couldn't afford to buy a pair, he threw one of Phantom's shoes in the lye pit, out of bad mind and spite.

Phantom had been writing to his woman and sending money home, but had received no reply. No “Dear Phantom…I hope these few lines find you in the best of health, enjoying the maximum capacity of relaxation.” So after a while he took himself to the London dockyard, having calculated when the
Ascania
would be in port. There he looked for the cockney sailor he had befriended on the voyage coming over. He begged him to go to his yard in Jamaica and to inquire of his woman who was no longer called his queen why she did not write to him. Using Nyabinghi patience, he waited the forty-two days until the ship went to Jamaica and returned to London. The sailor said that Phantom's woman had said that she had never received a letter, much less a pound note from him since he left for England and she was just getting ready to forget him with another man.

Phantom told the sailor that every month he had put a letter with money in it in the big blue postbox. “No mate,” the sailor said, “that big blue box is the garbage tip.” And Phantom took that as a sign that he should return to the fold of Selassie I, for under Babylon system he was spending his labour for nought and nothing, selling his birthright for a mess of garbage.

From that day, Phantom sight up Rastafari once again. When he came back to visit he had regrown his locks and every Christmas for years he would send my mother a Christmas card, sometimes with a white Santa on it; and when we laughed at that, my mother said, “Leave him, it's the thought that counts.”

 

A
fter her last daughter, Ann, married and left Harvey River to go and live in Montego Bay, Margaret found herself alone in the house for the first time in her life. On this day, she got up from the rocking chair by the window and checked in every room to see that the lamps were out and the windows closed. Just to make sure, she called out to the helper Mina, knowing full well that Mina had gone about her business after she'd been paid that afternoon. Mina had gone down to the river to bathe the minute she finished serving Margaret her lunch of Saturday beef soup, then she had come back and dressed herself in the good white jersey dress that Rose and Albertha had sent from Canada in a barrel of clothes for the people of Harvey River.

“This dress must be worn to church” is what Margaret had told the girl when she had given it to her. And here it was, midday on a Saturday, and Mina had hauled on the good good white dress, pushed her feet into the nice black patent leather shoes that had also come in the barrel from Canada, and dressed to the dickens, had almost run through the gate, shouting behind her that she was going up to Dinalvah to see her mother. Margaret called out to her that she had “better not fly past her nest and come back to work late next morning.” But
she knew that Mina was not really going to see her mother; Mina was going to see her boyfriend, who lived in the barracks occupied by workers on the San Flebyn sugar estate.

Mina's mother's name was Delmina. The Harveys always told how all the women in that particular family were called Mina or Delmina or Elmina because Mina's great-grandmother had been shipped as a slave from the port of Al Mina on the Cape Coast of Ghana. When he was alive, David used to say, “Mina's people are determined to remember that they were stolen from Africa.” Margaret herself did not see the point in remembering those things. She knew that there were people right there in Hanover who were still fully into their African ways. Right there in the neighbouring parish of Westmoreland, there was even a rocky place named Abeokuta that they said was just like a place named Abeokuta in Nigeria. People from Abeokuta called themselves “nago” people. They talked their Yoruba talk, ate pounded yam, cassava, or breadfruit, which they called “tum tum” or “fu fu,” and they danced their “ettu” dance in a slow shuffling circle to the beat of goatskin drums.

When her daughter Ann was still living at home, Margaret used to overhear her and Mina giggling away together, and Ann would say to Mina, “All right now, Mina, talk some African talk for me.” And the girl would talk her strange talk for Ann, who would then imitate what Mina had just said. But if they saw Margaret coming, they would stop immediately. Truth be told, Margaret just did not understand her last daughter. What could she possibly find so interesting in Mina's African business? But that was Ann all over, just so free and easy, taking serious things for a joke.

Imagine, thought Margaret, after that blessed Baptist minister Thomas Burchell rode up and down all over Hanover, all over Jamaica, preaching to help abolish slavery and to turn
these people from their dark ways, you still could not take the tum tum and fu fu business out of them. They said that Thomas Burchell was so zealous in his preaching and abolitionist work that he kept five or six horses which were worn down to shadows from his constant riding across the island, preaching Christianity to people like Mina and her relatives who were still sharing out God's power. Some of these people still believed in different gods, one god for this, one god for that, one for healing and another one for war. Assistant gods did not appeal to Margaret. What would happen if one day your mouth were to miss, your tongue slip, and you summoned the god of old iron and war instead of the god of softness and peace that you badly needed? The idea of one All-Powerful God who was in charge of everyone and everything appealed more to her nature.

Now these days with her husband buried out in the front yard and with all her children grown up and gone from the house, Margaret feels the need to call upon that one All-Powerful God more than ever. She feels her own great strength waning, she is exhausted all the time; even the act of pulling off her dress exhausts her. She has to pause with her long pink flannel nightgown bunched halfway across her chest in order to catch her breath.

I imagine that Margaret never told a soul this, but it is certain that she talked about their children to her dead husband, David. After he had died, she had had to wear red and black underwear for the first time in her life because people said that if a widow did not do this, her husband's ghost would come back and try to make love to her. But red or black underwear or not, sometimes she senses his presence very strongly in the house; and every night since his death, she's certain that he gets up from under that white stone slab outside in the yard
and comes into their bedroom just to look in on her, and when she feels him about, she talks to him.

“Your daughter Cleodine is doing well, she and the husband send clear to England to buy an organ for her to play her music at Rose Cottage. Oh and I hear from Doris and Marcus, the big girl Barbara is doing wonders. She get a grade one, one you know, in her Cambridge Senior certificate, and she going to work at the Gleaner Company because she want to be a reporter. I'm so glad that they will have a child working now to help them…I don't hear a word from Edmund this last few months…I hope everything is all right. Miss Jo and her Barbadian husband seem to be getting on fine but she write to say she is not feeling so well these days. Mmmm. If you ever see the sweet photograph of herself that Rose send, my god D, she have on one lovely fur coat and she just stand up there smiling in the snow like a real Canadian…Flavy him still going from church to church, church to church, and Ann…Ann as I tell you gone to Montego Bay with that man she married. That man that she choose over all the other good good Hanover men who come here to court her. She find fault with everyone, that one foot too big, this one forehead too shine, she turn down all those good responsible men for this stranger man from Montego Bay. This same man who even Ann herself admits is not the most reliable of men, but then she turn round and tell me that he make her feel like the most beautiful woman in Jamaica.

“From the first time I see that big black car drive up to our gate and this tall big chest man step out, my spirit just grow cross, especially when the man step bold bold into our yard and I ask him, ‘What can I do for you?' and him say, ‘I have come to see your daughter, Mother Harvey,' and David, I say, ‘Well, that is between you and my daughter, but don't call me
Mother Harvey, I am not your mother, I did not give birth to you.' And David, when I say that I just get up and go inside and slam the door. I hear the two of them out there talking and I pay them no mind. From that, almost every Saturday I see him drive up in the big black car, and as I see him step into the yard, I get up and come inside, and little after that you daughter dress up in a new evening gown–she sew a new one for herself every week–with just some little piece of lace or crochet throw cross her shoulder, and she and him gone in the black car. I warn her till I tired, I say, ‘Now that your father gone you think that you are a big woman who can just do as she like, but this is my dead husband house and you cannot rule me in here.' You know what she tell me? She say, ‘You'–that is me, her mother, you know–‘you and Mrs. Cleodine Campbell think that God give me life just so the two of you can rule over
me
; well, make tell you, you are not the boss of me!'

“And is just so it went on, David, till a few months ago, when one day I was sitting down talking to Mina in the dining room. I say to Mina: ‘Today my mind give me for a piece of dry Lucea yam and I want that yam from no other ground except my dead husband ground.'

Hear Miss Mina she: ‘But Mother Harvey, yam outside in the pantry.'

‘Did that yam come from Mas David ground?'

‘I don't tink so, ma'am.'

‘Well,' I say. ‘Did you not hear me just tell you that my mind don't give me for any other yam except yam from my dead husband ground?'

‘I don't even know if yam is there.'

“Well, I tell you, when I hear that I nearly drop down! I stand up on my foot and I say to her, ‘If no yam is there, it must be you and you damn blasted boyfriend fault, for I'm paying
him to work my husband ground, and if he is not doing that, it is because you are there dividing his mind, and the two of you are there with your quakoo bush African business!' And while I'm saying this, in walks you last daughter and the man. And hear him: ‘Mother Harvey, I have come to tell you that your daughter and I are getting married.'”