From Harvey River (8 page)

At the wedding reception, held at William and Frances Harvey's home in Harvey River, George Wilson played the fiddle and sang “Peg O My Heart,” changing the words to “Meg O My Heart,” for Meg was what he sometimes called his beloved Margaret. She and David danced while her father fiddled, and she blushed and tried to pull away when David danced up close to her. But he had smiled and insisted, saying, “We are now husband and wife, we can do whatever we please.”

 

B
efore the children came into their lives, days in Margaret and David Harvey's household always began well before daybreak in the cool Hanover mornings. “Before night take off him black trousers, before cock crow, before the sun show it clean face behind the Dolphin Head Mountain.” Margaret, like her mother, Leanna, was always the first person up in her household. She would put on one of David's old jackets over her long nightgown and walk barefoot through the sleeping house. When she reached the back door, she would slip her feet into a pair of his old boots and step out into the backyard and rap loudly on the window of the small outroom where the domestic helper slept. “Wake from thy slumber, Miss Lazy, arise and shine and catch up the fire.” The fire that the sleepy-eyed girl would wake and start at 5 a.m. in the big iron stove would not be put out until evening. “The first thing that a good woman do when she wake up in the morning is to put on a kettle of water to make coffee for her husband and tea for her children.” Margaret, like her mother, Leanna, lived by that rule. She always brought a cup of hot coffee to David first thing in the morning. He would drink it and then set off for his field. If it was a day when he conducted his village lawyer practice, he would rise with Margaret and study from his law
books by lamplight before he set off to meet his brother, Tom, outside the town of Lucea.

Each day, David Harvey headed off into the world fuelled by large mugs of coffee, fried bammies or dumplings with codfish and ackee, cornmeal or hominy porridge, and thick white slabs of harddough bread. By mid-morning, a second breakfast was prepared and packed in straw baskets called “cutacu,” and sent to him as he worked in the fields. Other men in surrounding villages took the remains of their first breakfast to the fields with them to eat at mid-morning, but in Margaret Harvey's household, second breakfasts were always delivered to David in the fields by a young boy from the village who ran errands for them. He was told to “run, run quick before the food cold, Mr. Harvey don't like cold food.”

At midday when David returned from the fields, or in the afternoon if he had gone to his village lawyer practice, there was “dinner,” the main meal of the day. From the start of their married life, David and Margaret's kitchen boasted some of the largest pots in Hanover, and as there were always relatives and friends visiting, the deep-bottomed pots swelled with rice, the smoke-stained pots boiled “junks” of yams, sweet potatoes, and dozens of green bananas with pieces of salt pork. There were huge cast-iron dutch pots in which slabs of mutton, beef, or pork, fresh from slaughter, were fried or stewed with garlic, onions, peppers, and salt. Midday dinners often lasted until early afternoon and filled the belly till supper, which was served at sundown, always with mugs of hot cocoa or “chocolate tea” and harddough bread and fried fish, or sardines and big, thick, sweet cornmeal puddings. A place was always set at the table for David as head of the house, and Margaret usually sat with him when he ate.

As more and more children were born to David and
Margaret, they ate in shifts, or they ate anytime they wanted to, using a variety of mismatched dishes. Fine china left over from Margaret's wedding set, pieces of which were broken by various helpers and children, were set out alongside ordinary “ware” plates, bought in Lucea. They used an assortment of cutlery. Some heavy, ornate silver knives and forks brought back from Cuba by David, bone-handled knives and forks brought from England by William Harvey, and more ordinary tin knives and forks bought from merchants in Lucea at various times. Except for Sundays after church, when the entire family always sat down to eat their Sunday dinner of rice and peas and chicken together, Margaret had no time for “frippery” like damask tablecloths. Raising eight children and feeding a steady stream of visitors did not make for “dainty living.” “My children eat good food, plenty good food, as much as they want, no child of mine ever know hungry,” Margaret would say. This no-frippery attitude was endorsed by her father, George O'Brian Wilson, when he came to live at Harvey River. He would tell Margaret about his days as a boy growing up in County Galway, where his family shared their small thatched stone cottage with the animals, and how the window taxes meant that his parents could only afford to have one small window and a half-door in their dark little house. Because of these conditions, one of his siblings had died of typhus.

Later in life, Cleodine tried to impose more “refined” ways of dining on the Harvey household. She would cook at home dishes that Mrs. Marston, the Englishwoman who ran a small private school for Hanover girls, had taught to her pupils as part of their training in the domestic sciences. Cleodine's attempts to improve the Harvey family cuisine was, however, not a success. “Look how she take the good piece a beef and stew it down to nothing, then cover it up with crush pitata as
if she shame a it,” was the verdict on her shepherd's pie from her brothers. “Country bumpkins, bungoes, you will never amount to anything,” Cleodine said. Margaret and David, who usually let their first-born have her way, pretended that they liked the shepherd's pie, but they made no move to incorporate it and other English-style fare into their lives. “When I have my own house,” Cleodine would say, “I will not be serving any of this coarse hard food.” And Margaret, who drew the line at being “ruled” by any of her children, would answer, “When you get your own house you can do any damn thing you want, but don't forget that this is my house and I am the only big woman under this roof.”

Margaret liked to think of herself as the undisputed boss of her house, and David made very few decisions without consulting her. The ones he did manage to make without her approval all had to do with him lending money or standing surety for some poor person, who invariably did not repay him. Margaret never let him forget these lapses. “If you did ask me, I could tell you that that man is a liar and a thief, and that any money you lend him would be a dead story, but no, you and you soft heart, you make everybody take you for a fool.”

Her area of special concern, however, was the welfare of her daughters. Whenever some story of an unfortunate girl who had “fallen” reached her ears, Margaret would immediately blame the mother of the girl. “You see me? I watch my girl children like hawk! There is nothing that any of them do that I don't know about. I don't understand how a woman could say that her own daughter fall and she never know for months! I know how every one of my girl children stay at all times.” When the Harvey girls reached puberty, they all received the same lecture from her, a lecture that was really a short threat: “What this means is that you can have baby now, and God see and
know I will kill you if…” Margaret did not even have to finish her threat. The Harvey girls referred to the region below a woman's waistline as their “Bottoms.”

Apart from witnessing the rough mating of farm animals, and blushing at the little rude jokes and songs of schoolchildren who were not above converting a hymn into a dirty ditty–“At the cross at the cross where I first met my boy and the burden of my drawers rolled away”–and the whispering about some village girl who “fall,” the Harvey girls did not talk about sex. They were charged to remain virgins till they married, and to defend their virtues to the death. A charge which they all took very, very seriously.

 

L
ate one afternoon Doris had gone to bathe in the river by herself. The riverbed was deserted of all the village women by the time she got there. Some had come early, after dispatching the men to the fields, bearing their dirty clothes in big bundles on their heads. Some went to the fields themselves and then did their laundry later in the day, but they all washed their clothes in the same way. Soaping them with iron-hard wedges of brown soap, making loud, strong rubbing sounds with their knuckles as they scrubbed the clothes clean. Young girls were told: “You have to rub the collar, the armholes, and the sleeves and make sure you turn the clothes wrongside, wash it clean, and rinse it at least two time.”

White clothes were spread on rocks to bleach in the morning sun, while the coloured clothes were being rinsed in the swift moving water, then laid out on the rocks to dry. After doing the laundry, the women bathed themselves and bathed the children, often using the same wedges of brown soap on their skin, along with slippery green aloes to wash and condition their hair. That was the more open washing of clothes. There was a more secret “small clothes” washing that took place there too, small clothes being the term for menstrual cloths. This washing was done in pails of water drawn from
the river, off to the side, under the shade of the bamboo which screened the river. Young women were told not to pour this “small clothes” water back into the river, so they used it to water the roots of the flowers growing on the riverbank. The bright red hibiscus and the red water grass seemed to benefit from this, and in turn they became useful, nurturing plants. The pulp of the hibiscus can be used to blacken shoes and to make ink for poor schoolchildren. The red water grass became a medicinal herb, good for bad fresh colds.

My mother never did say why she went to bathe alone in the river that day; maybe she wanted to do her own private washing in private and as it happened there was no one else there when she reached the river, so she took off her dress under which she was wearing her bathing costume and dived into the river. She was a beautiful diver, who never made a splash when she entered the water although she was a tall, plump girl. The water just seemed to part for her and to let her in. She swam bank to bank and dived deep once or twice to investigate what was under the rocks in her family river. She came up with a small crayfish but she threw it back. “Grow some more,” she said aloud to the underweight crayfish.

“Who you talking to?” said a voice, and Doris looked up to see a strange boy standing across from her on the riverbank. He had to be a stranger, for normal river protocol dictated that if a village boy came across a Harvey girl bathing, he would leave immediately. Instead, this one stood on the riverbank, big and bold, staring at my mother, who had buried herself in the water up to her neck the moment that she realized that she was not alone. “Go away,” she said. But the boy just stood there, grinning and staring. “You don't hear me say you must move, go' on, go 'way from here?” she said. The bold-faced boy, who was from Kingston and was visiting with relatives in nearby
Chambers Pen, had never seen a river before, much less a river with a pretty young girl bathing in it. He stood his ground, looking right at her, smiling an impudent, pleased-puss smile and refused to budge an inch.

The news reached Margaret and David before Doris got home. How she had been overheard cursing terrible badwords down by the river, “expressions” as she and her sisters called them. For my mother, taking the charge to defend her virtue seriously, had summoned up every curse word she had ever heard used by anybody in Harvey River, or on the streets of the seaport town of Lucea, and had flung them across the water at the leering town boy, who was so surprised by the stream of invective issuing from the mouth of the sweet-faced bather that he did exactly what my mother had been trying to get him to do, he fled.

“That's right, my daughter, I am proud of you.” To her surprise, instead of scolding her for cursing badwords, that is what her father, David, said to her as he held her in his arms when she reached home.

“You do well, Doris,” said Margaret.

“She did not have to stoop so low as to curse expressions,” said Cleodine.

“Any port in a storm,” said David, who then sent his sons to find the visiting town boy and to explain to him just how men were expected to behave when Harvey women were swimming in their river.

 

“Doris is not the prettiest one, but she is the one that everyone loves,” her brother Flavius would say. “Dear Dor” they called her, for if Cleodine was pristine and as perfectly designed as an anthurium, Albertha a lily above reproach, Rose a fragrant damask rose by name and nature, and Ann gorgeous and intense
as a bird of paradise, my mother could be described as a mixed bouquet. She was a little of all those flowers, with a good spray of common wildflowers like buttercups and ramgoat roses bundled in with hardy perennials and quick-growing impatiens, and she learned how to send her roots down deep when storm-time came.

Storm-time was the furthest thing from Doris's mind while she grew up as a daughter of the first family of Harvey River. She was an easy-going child who from an early age displayed signs of a quick intelligence and a love of hyperbole. Once, when her brother Edmund hid in a bush and jumped out at her, a frightened Doris declared: “Only Almighty God alone knows how my poor, poor, trembling, fearful little heart could stand such a great fright…” This she said with her eyes raised to heaven and one small hand covering her little palpitating heart. She had a way with words, words being one of the things she learned from her village lawyer father, David, from the vituperative Irish eloquence of her maternal grandfather, George O'Brian Wilson, and from the West African Guinea woman griot-style of her grandmother Leanna.

 

“Doris is really Mas David daughter.” In the same way that her father literally gave the shirt off his back to people going to Court, and constantly loaned them money to pay fines, my mother was known as a “come to help us.” Much as she loved her dresses, she would give them away to her cousins who admired them. She was the one you went to if you wanted to borrow anything. If you needed somebody to keep your baby while you went on an errand or if you were feeling sick, she was an excellent nurse. Once her sister Albertha's fingers had become so swollen and infected from excessive embroidering that she could do nothing for herself. It was my mother who
bathed her and dressed her until her hands healed, and Albertha always spoke about her sister's ministrations with tears in her eyes. Everybody in Harvey River loved Doris; so on that September morning in 1920, after Margaret Wilson Harvey's husband and children had left the house, and she noticed a line of red ants marching along her clothesline–a sure portent of trouble–she did not expect trouble to do with Doris. In the late morning, she glanced across the valley, up to the hilltop, in the direction of the village school and saw what looked like a group of school girls in navy blue uniforms fluttering down the hillside like a flock of grass quits. Minutes later, when she heard the girls burst into the village with a great warbling commotion, Margaret hurried out into the square only to behold her daughter Doris at the head of the crowd bearing her long black plait in her clenched fist.