From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  After the trouble,

  some with the name Bogle

  catch fraid like sickness

  and take panic for the cure.

  John Bogle’s people had found their way to the parish of Westmoreland after the Morant Bay Uprising, in 1865, when John’s relative Paul Bogle–to whom he bore a remarkable resemblance–was hanged. Paul Bogle preached and he walked to petition the representatives of the British Colonial government on behalf of the starving people who were turned loose after emancipation and given nothing. No land, no money, no forty acres, not even one mule. The planters were compensated for loss of human property, but the men and women who had worked to build the great wealth of the British ruling class received not one farthing. On August 1, 1838, their first morning of full freedom, many of them had walked away from the estates carrying not even a simple hoe with which to till the ground. The ones who chose to stay worked for the lowest possible wages, out of which they then had to pay the estate owners for their keep. Then the sugar industry collapsed. Money was scarce and taxes high. Disease and famine, cholera and smallpox, claimed more than fifty thousand lives and then, like an additional Biblical plague, came drought. Domestic food crops began to fail year after year. Add to that a justice system that as a rule dispensed no justice to the majority of Jamaicans, a system administered by the estate owners and managers who were full of vengeance and wrath over the loss of their human property.

  Paul Bogle, a child of enslaved parents, was a prosperous small farmer from Stony Gut in the parish of St. Thomas. Deacon Paul could speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but he was also a man of deeds. He led a delegation on a forty-five-mile walk from Stony Gut to Spanish Town to see Governor John Eyre, and draw his attention to the suffering, but the Governor refused to meet with them. George William Gordon was among the men of property who sympathized with the people’s suffering. The son of a slave woman and a Scottish planter, he had worked hard to educate himself and had been elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1844. Bogle and Gordon, Baptists both, tried to petition the Colonial government on behalf of the beleaguered people. They tried and tried the peaceful way. They walked, they wrote petitions, even to the Queen herself. For their efforts they got a letter from Queen Victoria, which recommended the starving landless Jamaican people practise industry, thrift, hard work, and obedience.

  Governor Eyre ordered Paul Bogle and George William Gordon to be hanged for leading the uprising that we were taught in school was the “Morant Bay Rebellion.” Some four hundred desperate people stormed the courthouse in Morant Bay and clashed with the local volunteer guards. Twenty-one men, mostly white, were killed. More than six hundred ex-slaves were executed and as many flogged in response to the uprising. A dispatch from Col. J.H.F. Elkington to the commander in the field went as follows. “Hole is doing splendid service all about Manchioneal and shooting every black man who cannot account for himself. Nelson at Port Antonio is hanging like fun by court martial. I hope that you will not send any black prisoners. Do punish the blackguards well.” One month after, the Morant Bay River in St. Thomas was still stinking, polluted from the number of corpses floating in it.

  After the Morant Bay Uprising, to say that your name was Bogle was to sign your own death warrant. Some of the surviving Bogles coined protective variations of their great name, such as Bogues, Boggis, and Bogey. John Bogle and his parents had walked across the island from St. Thomas to Hanover, removing themselves as much as was possible from what happened in St. Thomas. As far as the east is from the west, John’s family travelled to the parish of Hanover, trying to keep their lives and to keep the great name of Bogle alive. But ironically they ended up being called Buddle instead of Bogle by many Hanover people. And one Sunday in 1875, as sure as fate, Leanna was walking towards the town of Savanna la Mar, and walking towards her on the main road was the same man she had been seeing in her dreams, leading a big grey mule. She began to laugh as she recognized him, and he began to laugh even louder. They met in the middle of the road, and he said to her, “If you was my missus, I wouldn’t make you walk. I would give you this nice grey mule.” From that day, they never lived apart, until John Bogle died. They lived, farmed, and flourished in Grange, Westmoreland, and Leanna rode her grey mule, wore her money jewellery, necklaces and bracelets fashioned from silver coins soldered together, and lived a happy, prosperous life. When her mother married John Bogle, Margaret, who was six years old, told him, “You not my father.” He said, “I know, but I am the man who will honour your mother.”

  “Me meet the man who intend to put him ring pon mi finger.”

  That is how Leanna Sinclair announced to George O’Brian Wilson that she was ending their relationship.

  George Wilson, who had by then lost all interest in getting Leanna to surrender completely to him, said:

  “Fock! So you’re to be married then…well, way you go, just you have my Meg dressed, ready and waiting outside every Sattiday morning, for I’ll not be setting foot in your goddamn yard ever again. I’ll bring her back by nightfall…Oh, don’t imagine tis you who’s leaving me, truth is, I’ve no further use for you!” George Wilson never spoke directly to Leanna again. He did not feel any need to. She had given him what he needed to make his way in Jamaica. She had given him Margaret.

  Margaret Aberdeen Wilson met David Harvey when they were schoolchildren. The fact that they both had black mothers and white fathers meant that they had a lot in common, and as long as they lived, they never ran out of things to say to each other. Their childhood friendship blossomed into romance, and when they became teenagers, David began to court Margaret. Leanna and her husband, John Bogle, would stay up in the small sitting room to make sure that the couple outside on the verandah “behaved themselves,” so Margaret and David would sit on the verandah, which was lit with a smoky kerosene lamp, and they would talk about their friends, about what was happening in the village. She would tell him what her father had told her about Ireland, and he would tell her what his father had told him about England, all the while aching to fall into each other’s arms. When it began to grow late, Leanna would rock her mahogany chair vigorously on the floorboards to signal to David that he should go home. David was a sensitive young man. He always took the hint, and he used this rocking-chair signal as his cue to perform a farewell suite of songs on his harmonica. Out of sheer mischief he would blow, “Nobody’s Business but My Own,” the anthem of the “don’t-care.”

  If me married to a nayga man

  turn round change him

  fi one coolie man

  nobody’s business

  but me own

  Then he would play what became his and Margaret’s signature song, “Beautiful Dreamer.” He would raise the silver harmonica to his lips, and it would flash in the half-darkness of the verandah, where the small kerosene lamp rested on a wicker table. He would play “Beautiful Dreamer,” accompanied by the high alto chirping chorus of crickets, the bass calls of bullfrogs, and the croaking lizard’s response. His inspired performance was illuminated by stage lights of peenie wallies, or fireflies, and the thick country darkness formed an opaque black fire cloth behind him. He would depart playing that song, which Margaret would hear growing fainter as he rode away on his horse, back to Harvey River, where he took her to live after he married her when she was eighteen and he was nineteen years old.

  David’s father, William Harvey, had given them twenty acres of land and helped the new marrieds build their first house. Margaret’s father, George O’Brian Wilson, handcrafted fine leather shoes for the bride and groom and insisted on giving away his daughter despite the protests from his legal wife and children in Lucea, to whom he was forced to say: “There is not yet born the focking man or woman who is the boss of me.” He and Leanna Bogle did not exchange one word at the wedding of their daughter, and John Bogle stood silently by Leanna’s side as the young bride, Margaret, who was dressed in a long satin gown trimmed with wide bands of Irish lace that George Wilson had s
pecially ordered from England, walked grim-faced–as was the custom of the time–under her sheer veil up the aisle of the Lucea Parish Church.

  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.”

  Before 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.

  Late 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.