From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  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.”

  “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.

  How 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 Sen
d, 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.