From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  part two

  It was a cricket match that first brought Vivian Marcus Goodison to Harvey River, where he fell instantly in love with my mother, Doris Louise Harvey.

  All important events that occurred in the village of Harvey River took place at the Harvey home, and on this Sunday my mother’s parents were hosts to a visiting cricket team. Slim and of medium height with rich copper-coloured skin, Marcus Goodison had a movie-star smile and a wonderfully engaging manner. He had driven the cricket team from Malvern in the parish of St. Elizabeth to Harvey River, where he immediately took note of the fact that in the Harvey household there were some very attractive young women. Upon seeing this, he surrendered his place on the team and never played the cricket match. He just gave up his turn as the star batsman to some aspiring hanger-on who would never ordinarily get a turn at bat, a reserve member of the team who was only chosen to make up numbers, a batsman prone to making “agricultural” strokes, a “yamlikker” who used the fine linseed-oiled willow like a crude hoe. Unlike Marcus, who did everything with finesse, whose strokes were poetry in motion. On that fateful day in 1930, Marcus had no time for cricket, for he had sighted Doris.

  He had begun at first to sweet talk Ann. Then he looked to the far side of the yard and saw Doris, who was watering some of Margaret’s special plants with cold tea left over from their breakfast. He had gone up to her and asked her for a drink of water, then he had set about charming her and her parents, and by the time he was due to drive back to St. Elizabeth he had succeeded. He explained to them that he was employed as chauffeur to the manager of Barclays Dominion Colonial and Overseas Bank just so they would know he was a responsible man; and to make sure that Doris wouldn’t forget him when he was gone, he left behind his maroon-coloured beret, which completed his outfit. That outfit consisted of cream serge pants and a maroon blazer, worn with a white shirt and a pair of two-tone brown and white shoes. The next Sunday he drove from St. Elizabeth to Harvey River ostensibly to collect his beret, and maybe he left something else that day too because he soon became a regular visitor. In between visits he wrote her passionate letters.

  I went to town last week and I stood up on King Street and looked, Dor, but not one woman in the whole Kingston was lovely as you.

  Dor, I hope and pray that you will consent to be my bride. If you say no, I don’t know what I will do. Please don’t hand me a left hand ticket.

  Marcus, as always appropriately dressed, arrived one Sunday to formally ask for Doris’s hand in marriage. David and Margaret had been expecting this day for months. The young man was so obviously in love with their daughter. I mean you had to be in love to drive from Malvern, St. Elizabeth, to Harvey River, Hanover, almost every two weeks for a year. Driving over those rough, mostly unpaved roads, just to come and see a girl who was so shy that she never looked in your face when her parents were around for fear they might think her too bold.

  David sees the car drive up and when he sees Marcus step out fully dressed in a navy blue suit and white shirt and tie, he tells Margaret,

  “Mr. Man is here for your daughter’s hand.”

  “Then she is just my daughter all of a sudden?”

  David goes to the door to meet him. He stands in the doorway and calls out to Marcus, whom he has never seen look nervous before.

  “Mr. Man, where are you going so dressed up today?”

  He loved the young man. He was a well put-together person, he made a good living, he was charming and possessed of a deep self-assurance, but at the same time kind-hearted. He was always trying to make the people around him happy. He would do his best to make his daughter happy, David felt that. But he couldn’t just allow him to come in here and walk off so easily with his Clarabelle.

  Marcus hears the serious tone in David’s “Mr. Man” question. He is a little surprised because he has come to regard him as a friend and ally. He has become deeply attached to this man he hopes will become his father-in-law, because he never grew up with his own father.

  Marcus dressed like a dandy because all he knew of his own father were the stories of the young man who changed his shirts two or three times a day, who always smelled of “4711” gentleman’s cologne, and who favoured two-tone “John White” shoes, imported specially for his size nine feet. Marcus played the guitar like his father, Uriel; from him he got the gift of music. My nightingale-throat father could sing too, and all wind and stringed instruments obeyed him. He was able to play virtually any musical instrument. He was glad of that gift from his father. So this is the Marcus who stands on the first of the three steps at the front door of the Harvey house.

  “I have come to ask you an important question, Mr. Harvey.”

  “Yes, what kind of important question you have to ask me, Mr. Marcus Goodison?”

  Marcus takes one step up and says, “I would like to have your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

  “Which daughter would that be, Mr. Man. I have many daughters, you know.”

  “Your daughter Doris, sir. Doris is who I want to be my wife.”

  “You think that she will want you as a husband?”

  “I hope and pray so, sir, because I…,” and here he almost breaks down crying, “because I have never met a nicer, kinder young lady in all my life, and my life will be worth nothing if she won’t consent to be my wife, sir.”

  And these last words he says in a low hoarse voice, looking up into David’s face, begging with his brown eyes for him to accept him, to intercede for him to Doris, because for a man who lost his mother when he was a teenager, his heart tells him that this is the woman he needs to show him what kindness and caring are. He knows that if and when he lays down to sleep beside her he will rest as he has never rested before, that his absent father, who was named for one of the archangels, will come to him in dreams and say, “My own boy, you have chosen well.”

  “Just know one thing, Mr. Man. If you form the fool you will have me to deal with.”

  “I would take my own life before I hurt her.”

  Marcus climbs up onto the top step and stands next to David, who then says, “Come my son, let us sit inside and talk.”

  Marcus’s own father, Uriel, was the second son of the wealthy Goodison family, who owned acres and acres of red lands in St. Elizabeth, lands that were eventually sold to bauxite mining companies. Some say the first Goodisons were two English buccaneers who settled in Jamaica and married Creole women, so Marcus’s father was one of the playboy sons descended from a line of retired buccaneers. Some say that the Goodisons were Jewish merchants and that the family name means “Son of God.”

  Marcus’s mother, Hannah, had copper-coloured skin, blue-black hair, and deep tranquility. She looked like a painting of an Arawak Indian. She, like the Arawak Indians, had died early. Uriel, his father, also died young, and St. Elizabeth people said that his entire estate was meant to go to Marcus, who as far as anybody knew was his only child. But people also said it was squandered by Uriel’s brother, an even bigger playboy than him, who hurried on his own end through riotous living in night clubs and brothels from London to Kingston and Havana. My father had received just enough money from his father’s estate to buy himself a house in Malvern and a secondhand Model T Ford car. He was considered by the women of St. Elizabeth to be a good catch.

  With her parents’ consent, Marcus presented Doris with a diamond ring. My mother told me that for days after her engagement, all the young women in the village would come to the house and ask to see her diamond ring. However, not all of them were happy for her. At least one woman in Harvey River was overcome by jealousy, and envied the love that had found Doris. This woman was a distant cousin who wanted to be married more than she wanted anything else in life. Someone swore that they once heard her say that she would give her life to be married just for one day. Well this young woman had looked at the engagement ring and had not been able to say anything except to ask how did they know if the diamond was real. She was overheard saying how unfair life was, t
hat imagine, instead of herself “this little gal” was going to be the one to become a married woman.

  My mother says that she fell asleep one afternoon wearing her ring, which did not fit tightly. When she awoke, the ring was gone. Such a commotion followed, with her bawling like a baby at the loss of her brilliant diamond engagement ring. Memories of her “bad luck” persona came back to her, the Clarabelle persona who cursed expressions and embarrassed herself, the girl whose long hair was chopped off had now lost her diamond engagement ring, she had come back to displace lucky, happy Doris, who was in love with and loved by a handsome young man named Marcus. Everyone searched the house and the yard, to see if it had slipped off while she did her chores. My mother kept crying, and insisting that she was wearing the ring up to when she fell asleep. She was sure of this because she had been staring into its centre, and had dreamt that she was bathing in a crystalline pool of water. But the ring was nowhere to be found. Doris was inconsolable. What kind of cross was this, what kind of sign, for sure this was a terrible omen!

  But Margaret told her that she was not to think such thoughts. “What this is, is envy and bad mind,” she said, “and my dead father is going to see about it.” That was all she said; but she said it loudly enough for everyone who had come to help search for the ring to hear, and those who heard told those who had not heard. Doris found her ring at her front door the next morning. They say that the woman who was possessed by envy flung the ring, knotted in the corner of a handkerchief, onto the verandah of the Harvey house that night. Somebody said they saw her run past the house at great speed and throw something that arced like a white bird across the night sky, as she ran without stopping out of the village.

  The task of preparing Doris for life as a refined married woman had been given over to Cleodine at Rose Cottage, where white damask tablecloths, bone-handled knives and forks, and monogrammed sheets were in everyday use. My mother had approached her sister’s house with a very heavy heart. Once before, she had been sent to Rose Cottage to undergo “finishing” by Cleodine. That earlier visit had ended with Doris packing her bags after one week, and walking back to Harvey River in tears. When she reached home, tired, miserable, and covered with dust, she had entered the Harvey house sobbing. “She want to kill me. She make me wake up at five o’clock every morning, she make me knead dough till my hand want to drop off, because she have to have fresh bread every day. She make me draw her a hot bath every evening, because cold water cannot touch her skin. She make me iron about a thousand crochet doily to put on her chair and tables. ‘Antimacassars, Doris, have you ironed the antimacassars?’ Then she have to tell me again that an antimacassar is to keep hair oil from rubbing off on the chair upholstery, as if I care.

  “Every time I try to sit down she say, ‘There is nothing worse than a slothful woman,’ and she find something else for me to do. ‘Make me a cup of tea. The water must be boiling, and you must rinse the teapot in hot water before you put in the tea leaves. Not more than three minutes, the tea must not steep for more than three minutes and then you are to pour it through a strainer, I am not a tea-leaf reader, so don’t bring any cup full of tea leaves to me.’ Stew guava and orange to make jam and marmalade. Learn to steam fish just the way she like it, because she don’t eat meat. She read in some book that she have, how people who don’t eat red meat live long, so every day all she cook is fresh fish, fresh fish and so-so fresh fish and stew peas without meat. She say that white bread is like poison. ‘Brown bread has roughage, Doris, roughage!’ Every day she telling me how I must eat roughage, so she ordering me to cut up cabbage and eat it like rabbit. But is when she order me to iron one of her husband drill suits that I pack my bag and come back home. I tell her, ‘He is your husband, you should iron his clothes,’ and she box me, so I leave, Mummah and Puppah, please, don’t make me go back to Rose Cottage.”

  But it was there that my mother was sent to stay before she married my father.

  Rose Cottage was set on five acres of land in a rolling valley in the village of King’s Vale. “Castle Rose Cottage,” as George O’Brian Wilson often referred to his granddaughter’s house, could not be seen from the main road, and visitors had to make their way down a set of steps cut neatly into the hillside, until they came to the large white-painted, three-bedroom house built high on stilts. The house was called Rose Cottage because the entire garden was planted with fragrant pink, white, and cream rose bushes which bloomed in profusion from their neat, rectangular beds. Along the verandah, in special round clay pots made by a woman in the district called Congo Lou, Cleodine cultivated African violets. Indigo and purple and scarlet, brooding intense violets that were so strongly coloured you could stain your fingers by touching one of the petals. Cleodine tended these herself, and all the brides-to-be were given strict orders by the yardman, as they sat there on the side verandah waiting to be shown into Cleodine’s presence, never to “touch Miss Cleo’s roses,” meaning the violets. Like many Jamaicans, he called all flowers roses.

  By the time of my mother’s marriage, Cleodine had become one of the most famous makers of brides in western Jamaica. Women came from as far as Montego Bay, Savanna la Mar, and Falmouth to be transformed into fabulous brides by Cleodine. The brides-to-be were rarely young. By the time they made their way to Rose Cottage they were usually “big women,” grown women who had lived for years with a man or with a series of men and had raised their children (who would then become attendants at the wedding) and worked and worked, and saved and made a life, all the time looking forward to their glorious wedding day. While they planted ground provisions and vegetables in a field, they would sometimes pause and look tenderly at bright potato flowers or garlands of yam vines and imagine their own bridal bouquets. As they slept on mats in the market, they imagined honeymoon beds, where all things would be made new again. When they put up with a man’s wandering ways, wearing his hats and his shoes to show his other women who was the woman-a-yard, they heard themselves saying, “I have the talk, for I have the ring.” Every Sunday when they cooked rice and peas and chicken and watched family and friends gather round to eat and enjoy the taste of a good woman’s hand, they visioned the day when friends and family, bearing presents, would come to raise a glass to “Mrs. Bride and Mr. Bridegroom.” And thereafter they would wave with their left hand to all, and watch their ring finger grow proud and stick out from the others on the left hand, for it was now weighted with gold. When the time finally came for the women to make their way to Rose Cottage, they were ready to be born again into beautiful virginal brides, and there was nothing that Cleodine liked more than being completely in charge of a wedding.

  “Take a seat on the side verandah” the brides-to-be were told by Cleodine or by one of her maids. Never the front, for only specially invited guests were ever allowed in through her front door. “No, I will not be making that dress for you, that style is utterly unsuitable for you,” she would say to some woman who had the temerity to come to her bearing a picture of a dress she had torn from a magazine. “All right Miss Cleo, anything you say, mam.” “You are not trying on this dress until you go and take a bath,” she was known to say to women come hot from the market to try on their wedding dress. “Here is a piece of soap and a towel, go and take a bath in the river before you try on this bridal gown,” she would say. And surprisingly, big, independent women who were older than Cleodine, who ran their own households like tyrants, would go meekly to the river and cleanse themselves just as Cleodine had ordered them to do. Once or twice she was heard to say, “I don’t cast my pearls before swine” or “I will not waste powder on a blackbird,” as some rejected and dejected woman made her way from Rose Cottage, never to know the magic of being transformed by one of Cleodine’s creations, for Cleodine on occasion would flatly refuse to take the custom of someone and she never would give any further explanation other than the one about the swine and blackbirds.

  The centre of Rose Cottage was a large, high-ceilinged drawing room furnished wit
h the elaborate furniture Cleodine had designed herself, and in pride of place, a pipe organ that she had ordered and had had shipped from England. Above the organ, just where she could raise her eyes to it as she pumped away, was a large gilt-framed photograph of John Wesley. Cleodine, in a gesture of modernity and independence, had upon her marriage formally embraced the Wesleyan Church, forsaking the Anglican religion of her forefathers.

  “Well, Doris, I hope you realize that a married woman’s life is not just a bed of roses,” said Cleodine. They were sitting together in the gathering dusk on the front verandah of Rose Cottage. This time around, Cleodine had not ordered my mother about as she did on that disastrous first visit. She instead invited Doris to observe what she, the perfect example of a married woman, did with her days. “Everything must be done decently and in good order,” Cleodine lived by these words. She rose early, because the Bible said that is what good women did. She washed herself in warm water which was brought to her by the maid, applied cold cream to her face and neck in upward strokes, dressed herself in garments that were demoted church dresses, and put on her high-heeled pumps. She was always the tallest person in her house, always. Thus prepared, she would emerge from her room and order everyone under her roof to participate in morning prayers and the singing of hymns before partaking of a healthy breakfast. None of those oily saltfish and hard food, morning-dinner type breakfasts were ever served in her house, ever. Only fresh brown bread baked the day before, new-laid brown eggs, New Zealand butter, wholewheat or oats porridge, homemade preserves and tea, lots of good black tea brewed in a warmed pot and served with milk and brown sugar.