From Harvey River (32 page)

As I stood there with Peggy and her friends in the market, I remembered how just two days ago, the day before my mother died, I had gone to look after her and I'd noticed that her face was glowing. I swear she looked like a bride. I remembered with great shame how sometimes I had been downright ungracious about going to take care of my mother in her last days because she could be very demanding. Some days the twelve-year-old girl who resented being the one who had to go and buy trimmings would rise up in me as my mother would telephone me at 6 a.m. and issue me orders to cook her Sunday dinner and bring it to her before midday, or insist that I take her to three different doctors in the span of two days because she did not like what the first two had told her, which was essentially that her mighty heart was giving out, and that there was very little
that could be done for her at age eighty-five. But the day before she died, I felt blessed and privileged that I had been able to do something for her.

“Who sent you here?” she had asked after I told her I was leaving. I had no answer for that question so she answered it for me. “God sent you,” she said. We both laughed. “Is there anything else that you want me to do for you today?” I'd asked her, and she had said that she could not think of anything more that I could do.

I was standing in Papine Market thinking of how I'd spoken on the telephone to Aunt Ann and her daughters Joan and Myrna in Montreal the night before, and at the end of our tear-filled conversation they had said that they wanted to send special fabric to make my mother's shroud. I remembered how my mother had shown such strength after my father died. How she had sewed appropriate dark dresses for me and my sisters and how she had walked with such dignity down the long path from the church to the burial site in the Half Way Tree cemetery. How after the funeral she had received visitors, feeding all who came and treating them like honoured guests, and how for weeks she did not break down before her children. If she cried, it would have been in the privacy of her bedroom at night, where she now slept alone after so many years of marriage. Then one Sunday morning, she got up early and went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and as she stood by the stove, peeling green bananas from their skin before she dropped them into the pot of boiling water, she broke down and began to bawl. I will never forget the sound of her crying as long as I live, for in between those wrenching sobs that were being hauled up from her belly-bottom, she was saying, “O my Marcus. My Marcus Goodison, there will never be another man like you.”

“My friend, you look shaky, you better sit down,” says Peggy. “Yes, yes, make her sit down,” the women say as they break up the circle to lead me to an upended wooden crate next to Peggy's stool. I gratefully sit down and one of the women says, “What you want is a water coconut to wash off your heart.” She goes over to her stall and selects a green coconut which she expertly cuts open with one swift sweep of a machete, then she comes back and hands it to me. “Drink this, it good for you. Just sit down there and drink the coconut till you feel better, my friend.”

“Yes, thank you. Thank you very much,” I say, nodding.

Then all the women return to their respective stalls, leaving me to sit on the wooden crate, drinking the water coconut, and thinking about how my mother came to know happier days, such as when she would go to visit her sisters Rose and Ann in Montreal. In the years after my father died, my mother made several visits to Canada to see her sisters, and she was finally able to see snow for herself.

“Doris, the taxi is waiting outside,” Rose said. “She change her clothes ten times already,” said Ann.

“The two of you just leave me, for I am not going to Expo 67 to hear Tom Jones sing in these stockings that are too light-coloured for this dress.”

My mother must have found the appropriate stockings, for she and her sisters did go to see Tom Jones, and she did have wonderful times visiting with them in the city of Montreal. When she came back to Jamaica, she told us:

“Every Sunday we would go up to see Miss Jo at the Mount Royal Cemetery. She has a lovely view of the city from where she is.”

In the decade after my mother lost her husband, and with some of her children still living at home, she became a caretaker
again as her brothers and sisters, recognizing her strength and compassion, turned to her as their own lives became diminished by age, illness, and fears. My mother nursed both Cleodine and Edmund in their old age, and they both died in her house.

It was with great reluctance that Cleodine had made the decision to spend her last days in my mother's humble house at Harbour View. After Clement's death, she had continued to live as mistress of Rose Cottage for more than fifteen years; but by 1975 the lifestyle she had been accustomed to was becoming too difficult for her to maintain. For one thing, full-time domestic help was now hard to come by since the passing in 1974 of the minimum-wage law, which stipulated that domestic helpers should have a five-day work week and be paid double for work done on weekends. Cleodine began to find herself more and more alone in Rose Cottage as newly liberated helpers–who were no longer to be referred to as maids–refused to do her bidding. Besides, as she got older, she did not become easier to get along with. She finally consented to go and live with my mother after she suffered a mild stroke. Before she left Rose Cottage, she locked away her prized African violets in an empty room where they gave up their intense colour to the darkness and died.

Doris finally persuaded her to come to Kingston so she could take care of her. And take care of her sister she did, drawing her hot baths and cooking her healthy foods so that Cleodine was able to recover quickly from the stroke, at which point, as she had when they were children living in David and Margaret's house, she proceeded to order about her younger sister, who by then was in her sixties. This went on for three years until one Sunday morning Cleodine arose and got dressed in all her finery to go and attend services at St. Boniface Anglican Church in Harbour View. She stood before the mirror of the
mahogany bureau that she had brought with her from Rose Cottage and secured her hat with a pearl-tipped pin, then turned and picked up her handbag and fell forward, managing before she landed to snap the shining clasp on her handbag shut. My brothers drove her to the hospital, where she died before evening.

In accordance with the clear and specific directions in her will, her body was returned to Kingsvale, Hanover, where she was buried in the churchyard. In his sermon, the minister said that her disciplined, industrious, and dignified life had been an example to everyone who had ever met her.

About a year after Cleodine's death, Edmund arrived. Though he had enjoyed his taxi-man cowboy life, he had grown increasingly lonely and frail, and he feared dying alone. Doris nursed him for the last years of his life until he peacefully passed away in his sleep.

The one request he had before dying was that his body should not, under any condition, be taken back to Harvey River for burial. He hinted that his duppy would make things very uncomfortable for anyone who should try to take him back there. The family granted him his request by burying him in the May Pen Cemetery in Kingston, in a spot facing Spanish Town Road. As we stood in the cemetery watching the mason sealing Uncle Edmund's grave, my mother addressed him for the last time. “Edmund,” she said, “you rest in peace now, I know you don't want to go back to Harvey River, so you just lie down right here where you can see your taxi man friends driving by.”

Later, when Flavius became ill, he had wanted to come and spend his last days with his sister Doris too, but by then her mighty heart had begun to give out and she herself was in need of nursing.

It had been her beloved sister Rose's death years before that had begun to weaken my mother. Accompanied by my brother Keith, she had made her own straight-backed way across the tarmac at Norman Manley Airport and boarded an airplane to Montreal for the funeral of her beautiful sister. She had come back an old woman, leaning heavily on the arm of her son.

After my mother's death, her sister Ann would swear that all the Harvey girls came regularly to visit with her in her Montreal apartment, and she often dreamt that they were all dressed up in their finery and walking into the town of Lucea. Ann died ten years after my mother, following the tragic death of her youngest child, my cousin Joan.

My mother loved her people, her “generations” as Jamaicans call their blood relations. Every one of them meant something to her. The night before she died, I dreamt that my father had driven up to my mother's house in Harbour View in a big black limousine. He had driven straight through the locked gate and up onto the verandah, and even in the dream I knew that he had come to take Doris to where her people were congregated, waiting for her to join them and to enter into her rest. The day she died, she sat up in bed and began to say her husband Marcus's name and then the names of her parents, Margaret and David. Then one by one, she called out the names of her brothers and sisters.

I was sitting on a wooden crate in Papine Market with long eyewater running down my face when I remembered my mother's last request. “When you come again,” she had said, “bring me an onion.” And then she said, “Don't forget me.”

And so I wiped my eyes and walked over to the food stalls, where I thanked the women who had stood in a circle and comforted me. I bought onions and Lucea yams from Peggy, and from the other women, balls of hard cocoa paste to make
chocolate tea as Jamaicans call hot cocoa, and cassava bammies and a dozen limes. Then I walked across the market to Fishy the fishman, who once told me how he had fasted for seven days and seven nights, until on the last day Jesus Christ himself appeared to him at the eastern gate of the market.

“Eight pounds of butterfish please, Fishy.”

“What you doing with so much fish today, Miss Lorna?”

“Fishy, my mother dead.”

He looked up at me as he scraped the iridescent scales off a butterfish and said, “She is resting with the angels now.”

 

My mother's hands always smelled of onions. My mother had a bottomless cooking pot. She could sew clothes to fit any shape and the first word that all her children learned to read was
SINGER
. My mother was one of the fabulous Harvey girls. She was the seventh child of Margaret and David Harvey, and the wife of Vivian Marcus Goodison. Her nine children are alive today and drawing on the blessings she earned for us. She dipped her finger in sugar when I was born and rubbed it under my tongue to give me the gift of words.

 

Epilogue

I
have no idea where I am. I have woken in pure panic in a place solid with darkness which smells like the rusting interior of a brass trunk. The bed I'm lying in is not my own, for it does not face an east window. I cannot locate the door by which I entered here and my frantic scrabbling along the walls on either side of this narrow bed does not summon up a light switch.

“Say the Lord's Prayer, say the words ‘Our father' over and over, if you can't remember the whole prayer, shorten it,” my mother would say. This is urgent, chant Our father, our father, our father, our mother, our mother, our father. Mother, where am I?

And so I sing slow enough to do what I need to do next, to identify myself, to myself. Here is what I say to myself in that tomb place. My name is Lorna Goodison. I was born on the first of August, which is celebrated as Emancipation Day in Jamaica. I was born at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning after my mother took a cold shower. My father's name is Vivian Marcus
Goodison; he died when I was fifteen years old. My mother's name is Doris Louise Goodison; she was born a Harvey, of Harvey River. Harvey River is in Hanover; Hanover is the smallest of the fourteen parishes of Jamaica, which is 345 square miles. Jamaica was first named Xamayca, which we were taught means land of wood and water. The Blue Mountains rise up to seven thousand feet. The Dolphin Head Mountains contain the headwaters of the Harvey River. My son's name is Miles. I am a writer. I can turn this darkness into the river at night. My mind like the riverbed will become cool and still. I dive and under the surface of the water, I know what I'll find. The evidence of my generations. The small schools of fish will flutter by like my mother and her sisters and brothers. Cleodine, Albertha, Howard, Rose, Edmund, Flavius, Doris, and Ann on their way to school. A pair of old mullets who rule the river will come too, representing David and Margaret, my grandparents. The wild-haired water grass and tenacious weeds will wave and bow, respect due. But I'm alert too, under this dark water, watching out for the pincers of the crabs that can bite. Under this river there are shocking eels, quick and slippery, and there are secrets hidden in the holes where they coil. The don't-care girl is still dancing there under the river. There are lost pearls and hopeless cases and the bones of runaway Africans down there as well as wedges of iron-hard brown soap which the women of Harvey River used to wash acres of clothes in this same river. As long as I swim in it, I will be borne to safety. And so I swim until morning comes and reveals that I'm sleeping in a small baroque hotel room, with the heavy velvet curtains drawn, after giving a poetry reading in Hanover, Germany, and immersing myself in the waters of the river named for the Harveys calmed my night fears.