From Harvey River (4 page)

“Jamaica is a blessed country, there are no fierce animals or poisonous snakes here, and Harvey River is like the Garden of Eden.” David was always saying that. Edmund used to kiss his teeth when he heard it. Yes, but what about all those blasted insects, what about the thick darkness? He particularly hated the peenie wallies, fireflies, damn stupid little flies with that weak on and off light coming out of their backsides. He craved real lights. Street lights. He had heard that in Montego Bay and Kingston the streets were lit by tall gas lights. “Moon pan stick” country people called those lights.

And then there was the darkness of the people. Country people, always telling each other “mawning Miss this or Mas that.” Who the hell wanted any mawning from them, thought Edmund. And the worst part was, if he did not answer them they would run and report him to his parents, who would chastise him for not having good manners. Good manners be damned. When he was thirteen years old he had actually asked his father one day where good manners ever got any black man and had his father ever noticed that backra and backra pickney, who were famous for not having good manners, always seemed to reach very far. David had been appalled by that statement, and called Edmund a savage.

Edmund could not understand how he was so unlucky as to have been born in the country. From the first time that his father took him to Kingston when he was ten years old, he knew that the city was the place for him. There the streets had names, King Street and East and West Queen Street and Port Royal Street and Rum Lane. Not “outta road,” like in the country.

Town had milk shops where he could go and order as much liver and light (light being what Jamaicans called the lungs of
the cow or goat) for breakfast as he wanted. Eat, belch, pay his money, and walk out like a big man. Also rum bars where a man could order his rum by the
QQ
(a quarter quart), by the flask or the tot, put a question to the barmaid, who was probably called Fattie, and take her home to his room that he had rented. His room where he could turn his own key and come in at any hour of the day or night he pleased because he was his own man. Town, where cars drive up and down day and night. Cars and buses and trucks and tramcars ran all the time. Not like this back-a-bush place with only donkey, mule, and horse. Who the hell said country nice? Not Edmund.

He considered it God's make mistake why he was born in Harvey River. He was Moses among the bulrushes. If only Pharaoh's daughter would just appear and carry him to town. As a child he would run outside to stare at any motor vehicle that managed to fight its way up to the village. He fashioned a steering wheel from an old pot cover and “drove” wherever he went, going “brrrum, brrruum” in imitation of the noise of motor vehicle engines, and he made hissing, screeching sounds whenever he stopped, like the boiling over hissing brakes of trucks.

David rode a horse and Margaret had a pretty, dainty-stepping donkey, but nobody who lived in the village owned a motor car. Edmund had been taken to Montego Bay as a child and had seen the taxi men driving tourists around. Even as a boy, he had been struck by the elite corps of smartly dressed men in starched white shirts and black pants, who all spoke “Yankee” and smoked cigarettes and had the prettiest women, because girls just loved a man who drove a car. Later, he would hear that tourist women–mostly rich Americans and English-women–would sometimes fall in love with a taxi man.

While Howard was being taught to become a saddler by his grandfather George Wilson, and his younger brother Flavius had expressed a desire to be apprenticed to the tailor in the next village, Edmund was expected to help his father with the cultivation of the coffee, cocoa, and yams, and if ever there was a man who hated agriculture that would be Edmund. As he explained to Flavius, who was a born farmer, what the hell would he, Edmund, be digging, digging in the ground for? The only thing he ever wanted to dig for was gold. Gold to make ring and chain and decorate his teeth and give as earring and brooch to women as presents. As far as he knew there was no gold to be found in Jamaica. He would much rather buy rice and bread from a shop than eat yam. As a matter of fact he refused to eat yams once he left Harvey River.

“Why the baby looking at me so?” said everyone who ever held my uncle Flavius in their arms when he was an infant. “Hey boy, if you see me again you will know me?” is what the children at the village school would ask him when he began to attend classes there at age seven. David and Margaret used to wonder when and if their sixth child ever slept because it seemed that no matter what hour of the night they checked on the children in their beds, the light of the Home Sweet Home lamp would reveal Flavius to be awake, alert, and staring hard into the darkness. Soon after he learned to walk, he armed himself with an old cooking spoon for a shovel and took to digging in the ground around the Harvey house. Then one day Flavius stopped staring so hard into people's faces and took to walking with his head held down, a habit which greatly
upset his parents. “Hold your head up, what do you have to be ashamed of, why you holding down your head so?” said his father, who had named him after a Roman nobleman in one of the books he had read. But Flavius was not ashamed; he was searching for something. Sometimes in his digs he found coins, and once somebody's gold ring which must have been very old because the gold was so thin it was almost translucent. Another time he found a pewter spoon and the head of a china doll. He kept his “treasures” in a pile beneath the house, and he always said that when he built his own house in Harvey River, he intended to transfer his things there because, unlike his brother Edmund, Flavius had no desire to leave Harvey River. He was sure that whatever he was searching for was to be found right there in the parish of Hanover–and that included a wife. But before he identified a prospective helpmate and mother for their children–he intended to have a large family–he decided that he should be sent to learn tailoring, for he was not one to put all his eggs in one basket. Everybody said the boy had a good hand for planting, and in his time he reaped quite a few prize yams. Flavius reasoned that while the yams were growing, he could just as well be stitching somebody's wedding suit. And as only madmen walked around without trousers, the men of Hanover would always need the services of a tailor. So he was sent off to learn how to “build” suits and trousers from tailor May of Grange, Westmoreland, whose father and grandfather before him had all been fine tailors. After being apprenticed to tailor May for a year, Flavius came back to Harvey River and began to sew for the men in the area. He grew to be quite proud of the fact that almost any man, even a struggling, ordinary-looking man from the country, could be mistaken for an important person when he put on one of Flavius's well-constructed suits. When he finally proposed to a young woman
named Arabella with whom he had gone to school in Chambers Pen, a petite girl with large soulful eyes and a still spirit, Flavius had his ducks all in a row.

Ann Rebeker Harvey was the last child or “washbelly” born to David and Margaret. The late pregnancy had come as a complete surprise to Margaret, who had naturally assumed that her child-bearing days were over after she gave birth to my mother, Doris, at age forty. Margaret was stunned when she discovered that she was going to be a mother for the eighth time, for frankly, she was tired of the whole giving birth business. The sickness, the bigness, the breast-feeding, the constant careful watching over the child till it was old enough to walk and talk. The never feeling tidy, the constant mother's perfume smell of baby powder and puke outweighed the heartstopping beautiful moments, the sheer joy and pure delight that babies bring. She therefore elected to go through her last pregnancy with a fatalistic, what-is-to-be-must-be, woman-must-have-out-her-lot, we-are-the-vessels-of-the-world kind of attitude.

Ann emerged into the world one June morning, looking like a chubby Hindu goddess made from milk chocolate. Her round little “head-cup,” as Jamaican people call the skull, was covered by a cap of shiny blue-black hair, and instead of letting out a loud cry when the midwife gave her a welcome-to-the-world slap, the first sound that the baby Ann made was a cross between a laugh and a shout. She promptly proceeded to charm everyone around her when she opened her wide, heavily fringed dark eyes and proceeded to wink! Everyone instantly fell under her spell, everyone except her exhausted mother. Her siblings, even Cleodine, always treated her as if she was a
pretty doll who was born to amuse and delight them, and they all vied to take care of her, which suited Margaret just fine.

“One of you come and take this baby little, make me get to sleep, she is one fiery little thing, just want to laugh and play day and night. I'm a old woman I can't manage her.” Her brothers and sisters were happy to oblige and from early on she developed into a very sociable being. Ann walked and talked before any of her siblings, and from the time she was small she was able to keep a roomful of people in stitches by doing her solemn wink and pulling ridiculous faces.

As soon as she could talk in sentences, she began to do funny, wicked imitations of everyone in the village, including the local Anglican minister. Her brothers and sisters would often put her to stand on a chair in the dining room of the Harvey house and say, “Go on Ann, preach like parson now,” and the little girl would say, “Peeeple of Hawvy Rivah, heed the wohords of the a-passil Pawll…” catching the minister's affected preaching voice exactly. It was the same minister who had told her father, David, when he went to call upon him to welcome him to the parish, “Oh, I already met your half-brother Edward, whose mother was from England. Surely he is the king of the Harveys.” “King to you,” David had replied, “but not to me.”

This same minister loved to preach from Ephesians 6:5, about how masters should be kind to their slaves and slaves were to be obedient to their masters. David had finally told the Englishman one morning after church that he would appreciate it if he stopped quoting from that passage in the Bible because slavery was fully abolished in Jamaica in 1838, and as the natives had it to say, “Massa day done!”

People soon began to beg the little girl Ann to do her imitations, especially the one of the village mendicant, who always
came by the Harvey house at the same time every day saying the same thing. “Morning mi massa, morning mi missus, beggin' you something to help poor me one.” The “poor me one” was a bird whose low plaintive cry sounded to the ears of the Jamaicans as “Poor me one,” and this man had adopted its name to aid him in his solicitation of alms. Everybody had forgotten his real name anyway, so they all called him “Poor me one.”

But the man was not poor. He was a miser, and some people said that when he died they would probably find crocus bags of gold hidden under his banana trash mattress. The small child Ann had waited for him one morning, and as he drew up to the gate to sound his alms-begging request, the young girl borrowed the man's own voice and pre-empted him, calling out, “Morning mi kind massa, morning mi kind missus, beggin' you something to help poor me one.” He never stopped at their gate ever again.

Unlike her siblings, Ann–the baby of the family, eighth child of David and Margaret, Ann with the blue-black hair, who grew to look like a girl in a Gauguin painting–did not fear her mother, Margaret. All the Harvey children humbled themselves under their mother's stern, often unsmiling gaze, and they tried to respect her oft-quoted edict, “No child of mine will ever rule me.” No child, except Ann. It wasn't so much that the girl wanted to rule her mother, it was just that she was born free. The girl looked like a Gypsy. It was amazing how all the mixing of bloods produced people who looked like Indians and Gypsies. People who, if they were flowers, would be birds of paradise and Cataleya orchids. Ann, the last child of David and Margaret Harvey, looked like a bird of paradise. She radiated a kind of energy that was hard on her mother. “David, tell her that she cannot back-answer me.”