From Harvey River (5 page)

“Just allow her, she is a good child, don't break her spirit.”

“What, and make her rule me in my own house?”

People would call out to her, “Come here Ann Rebeker and give me a joke.” And the child would do just that. It seemed as if she had been put on the earth to bring joy and happiness to everyone except Margaret.

“Show off bring disgrace, and high seat kill Miss Thomas' puss,” she'd say.

“Lord, Margaret, just allow the child to prosper.”

Where did this girl get this joy? This uncontainable, bubbling-over merriment that made her laugh and joke and giggle so much?

Unlike Margaret's other children, Ann never, ever appeared to be afraid of her. Once, when Margaret had quoted the Biblical injunction to her about honouring one's mother and father, the girl had reminded her that the same passage also said that parents should not provoke their children to wrath.

 

H
ow Harvey River became Harvey River. For all we know, the village of Harvey River used to have another name, but when my mother's paternal grandfather and his brother founded it in 1840, the old name was lost forever. The Harvey River was the source of life to everyone in the village. It was named by David's father, William Harvey, and his brother John, two of five brothers named Harvey who had come from England, sometime during the early half of the nineteenth century. They were related to one Thomas Harvey, a Quaker who had come to Jamaica in 1837, along with Joseph Sturge, the two men later writing a powerful and moving account of slavery in the British West Indies. The other Harvey brothers split up and went to live in different parishes in Jamaica after their arrival; only William and John stayed together. One version is that the two took up jobs as bookkeepers on the San Flebyn sugar estate, but one day soon after their arrival they witnessed something that made them decide to abandon all ideas about joining the plantocracy.

The estate overseer had hired two new Africans fresh off the boat in Lucea Harbour. Although slavery was officially abolished in 1838, some Africans were now being brought to Jamaica, along with East Indians and Chinese, to work as
indentured labourers on sugar plantations where production was severely affected by the loss of slave labour.

Among the new Africans was a set of twins from Liberia, the great-grandchildren of fighting Maroons who had been transported there from Jamaica after the Maroon War in 1795. These fierce fighters had been banished to Nova Scotia in Canada, and had later settled in Liberia. The twin boys had grown up hearing many tales of Jamaica and of the courage of their ancestors, runaway Africans who refused to accept the yoke of slavery. The twins even claimed to be related to the supreme warrior woman, Nanny of the Maroons. Grandy Nanny, as I have heard some Maroons call her, had led her people in a protracted guerrilla war against the British until they were forced to make peace with her, on her terms.

These two young men had chosen to travel to Jamaica from Liberia on a one-year contract as indentured labourers, mainly to see for themselves the green and mountainous land to which their foreparents always longed to return. Maroon Country, where places had sinister and coded names like “Me No Send, You No Come.”

They stood like twin panthers on the docks at Lucea, with such a fierce, mesmerizing presence that the overseer of the San Flebyn estate, one Grant Elbridge, felt compelled to hire them as a matching pair. He did this partly with his own amusement in mind, for he and his wife often indulged in elaborate sex games with the Africans on the property. One week after he hired them, Elbridge announced that the twins had to be whipped, abolition of slavery or not, for who the hell were these goddamned twin savages to disobey and disrespect him? The night before, when he had summoned them to his overseer's quarters, and he and his wife had indicated to them that they wanted them to take off their clothes, the two, acting as
one, had spit in his face and stalked out into the dark night.

So Elbridge ordered the twins to take off their shirts again, this time in the middle of the cane field, and the twins obeyed at once. They tore off their shirts and bared their chests to him before the other labourers who now worked under conditions that were hardly better than before their emancipation. The huge, dark eyes of the twins locked onto Elbridge.

The Harvey brothers, who had been ordered by Elbridge to leave their bookkeeping and come down into the cane piece to watch him in his words “tan the hide off these heathen savages,” stood close to each other and watched sick to their stomachs as the long, thick strip of cowhide lashed across the backs of the Maroons, raising raw, bloody welts. But they became truly terrified when they saw that it was Elbridge who bawled and bellowed in pain. The whip dropped from his hand and coiled loosely like a harmless yellow snake when he fell, face down, in the cane field. The Maroon twins seemed to have mastered the “bounce back” techniques of Nanny, who was able to make bullets ricochet off her body back at the British soldiers. Just as the bullets had bounced off Nanny's body into the flesh of the soldiers, so too did the twins redirect Elbridge's chastisement onto him. As Elbridge screamed and writhed in pain, the Harveys watched as the Liberian twins walked out of the cane piece and turned their faces in the direction of the Cockpit Country, knowing that no one would ever find them once they disappeared into Maroon territory. After witnessing this, the Harveys resigned their jobs as bookkeeping clerks on the San Flebyn estate and decided to find some land to make a life for themselves.

In the spirit of true conquistadors, William and John Harvey had come across a small clearing up in the Hanover Hills on a Sunday as they combed the area outside the estate in
search of a place to settle themselves. It was not far from a place named Jericho and the entire area was cool and scented by pimento or “allspice” bushes. They did not know it then, but in the years to come, almost all the world's allspice would come from the island of Jamaica.

Tall bamboo trees bowed and bumped their feathery heads together to create flexible, swaying arches, and here and there solid dark blocks of shale jutted up from the ground in strange Stonehenge-like formations. On close examination, they saw that the rocks had bits of seashells embedded in them, so it is fair to say that at some point that area must have been under the sea. The clearing was verdant green and watered by a strong, coursing river. They had reached it by following one of the paths leading away from the estate. These paths had been created by the feet of men and women fleeing from the beatings and torture that was their only payment for making absentee landlords some of the richest men in the world. “Rich as a West Indian Planter” was a common saying when sugar was king during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Some of those paths led to small food plots often set on stony hillsides, which amazingly had been cultivated by the enslaved Africans to feed themselves. At the end of fourteen-hour working days cultivating cane, and on Sundays, their one day off, they had planted vegetables like pumpkins, okras, dasheens, plantains, and yams, the food of their native Africa. For some reason, the soil of the parish of Hanover produced the best yams known to the palate. The moon-white Lucea yam was surely the monarch of all yams, my mother always said. Every time she cooked and served Lucea yam, she would tell us the same story that Jamaica's first prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante, who was himself a native of Hanover and a man who claimed to have been descended from Arawak
Indians, would say that “Lucea yam is such a perfect food that it can be eaten alone, with no fish nor meat.” She too subscribed to the belief that the Lucea yam needed nothing, no accompanying “salt ting,” as the Africans referred to pickled pig or beef parts, dried, salted codfish, shad, and mackerel which was imported by estate owners as protein for their diet.

The clearing, which was later to become the village of Harvey River, was near the hillside plots farmed by some of the formerly enslaved Africans, many of whom now worked as hired labourers on nearby estates. The two Harvey brothers decided to “settle” the land, and, giddy at the prospect of imitating men like Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh, and Francis Drake, they named the river after themselves. They had spent the night sleeping on its banks, having come upon the place towards evening.

“Do you think this river has a name?” said William.

“Aye, it has one now,” said John.

They had bathed in it, and caught fat river mullets and quick dark eels which they roasted on stones. Then they had fallen asleep to the sound of the rush of the waters they now called by their name.

The Harvey brothers built their first small house of wattles and daub. Later they built a larger house of mahogany, cedar, and stone. Then William had sent for his wife, Lily, and his six children whom he had left behind in London when he and his brother had come to Jamaica. Nobody knows where their money came from, but they were able to acquire considerable property in the area, and to live independently for the rest of their days.

In time the village grew. Grocery shops were established, there were at least two rum bars, a church, and a school. But no matter who came to live there, the Harveys were considered to be the first family of the village. And when the government
built a bridge over a section of the Harvey River and tried to name it after some minor colonial flunky, William Harvey himself went and took down the government's sign and erected a sign of his own saying Harvey Bridge.

He was a tall, big-boned man

the earth shuddered under his steps

but the caught-quiet at his centre

pulled peace to him like a magnet.

Whenever she spoke of her paternal grandfather, my mother would say that he was one of the biggest, tallest, quietest men that anybody had ever met. Actually, because she had a love for imagery, she would say something like, “When he walked, the ground would shake, but he was silent as a lamb, a giant of a man with a still spirit.” True or not, there was something remarkable about the character of William Harvey, who was one of the few Englishmen in his time to legally marry a black Jamaican woman. By all accounts he was a very moral man who would not have countenanced living in sin with Frances Duhaney. He took her as his legal wife in the Lucea Parish Church, and none of his English neighbours attended the wedding. Some of them even cautioned him that black women were only fit to be concubines. William's response to that particular piece of advice was that any woman who was good enough to share his bed was good enough for him to marry.

He married her after his English wife died and left him with six children. He went on to have six more children with Frances Duhaney–Tom, Frances, George, James, Martha, and my grandfather David–and from all accounts he cared for
them all, from the blond, blue-eyed Edward born from his first wife to the dark, Indian-looking David and all the others of varying skin shades in between. He gave each of them equal amounts of land, which he surveyed himself, and he encouraged them to read and to love the books he had brought with him from England. He was known on occasion to chase outsiders from Harvey River, and if, as I suspect, those outsiders were dark-skinned like his own wife, then I'm not sure what that says about the very moral character of William Harvey except that he was deeply complicated and flawed like most people.

William had chosen Frances Ann Duhaney as his future wife when he went one day to the village of Jericho to purchase a pig and some chickens from her father. My great-grandfather seemed to have been a man of clear and unequivocal feelings. According to my mother, he identified my great-grandmother as his second wife from the first time that he laid eyes upon her.

Frances Ann Duhaney, called “Nana” as a sign of respect after her marriage, was a fine-featured woman with jet-black skin. Her surname, Duhaney, probably meant that her African grandfather had been owned by the Duhaney family, proprietors of the Point Estate at the eastern end of Hanover. The original form of their name was de Henin, from the descendants of Phillip de Henin of the Netherlands.

William Harvey had spotted the beautiful young girl moving efficiently about her father's yard. In the hour or two that it took William to buy the pig and some chickens from Mr. Duhaney, he noticed how lightly the young girl moved, how effortlessly she performed her tasks, feeding the chickens, sweeping up the yard, building a fire, disappearing and reappearing in no time bearing a pail of water drawn from the river, peeling yams and dasheens and feeding the peels to the pigs. Her face was so serene throughout, her high smooth forehead
never breaking a sweat. It seemed to him that she hummed a low and compelling tune all the time, like a worker bee. Her lips were a shade darker than the rest of her face, as though she had been suckled on the juice of some sweet, energizing black berry. He had asked her father for her hand in marriage.

Soon the young girl was moving swiftly, silently, and efficiently about the Harvey house on bare feet. She rarely wore shoes inside her house. It was as if she needed her soles to always be in touch with the powerful work energy issuing up from the Hanover ground through the floorboards, the same energy that enabled labourers to perform the ferocious, back-breaking tasks involved in the production of sugar cane; an endless cycle of digging, planting, weeding, cutting, grinding, and boiling under the ninety-six-degrees-in-the-shade sun, and the cut of the whip. Nana Frances pulled that same work energy up through the soles of her feet, and that allowed her to work tirelessly. William always said that it was not just her beauty, but her silence, devotion, loyalty, and capacity for hard work that drew him to her.