From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  “What happen, Mama?” they kept asking until she had become irritable and told them to shut up and keep quiet. She could not tell them that she was crying because she never in her life had lived under such rough conditions and that she never in her life had ever had to stoop so low as to slap somebody just to be able to live in peace. No wonder country people called Kingston, “Killsome.” As far as she was concerned they could not pass through quickly enough. But strangely, after she slapped Vie, the rest of the women began to be quite civil to her, especially after the business about the one-pound note.

  It was a one-pound note, it was definitely a one-pound note. The reason my mother was so sure of this was that it was the only money she had to her name and it was all that stood between her and my father’s next payday. She had sent one of my brothers with it to the shop to buy a loaf of bread, a tin of condensed milk, and a tin of cocoa for supper. He came back with the change short. My mother sent him back to tell the shopkeeper that there had been a mistake, but he returned from the shopkeeper with a message that said it was not one pound that my brother had brought to the shop, but ten shillings. She hardly ever left her house in those early days, mostly because she was still getting used to her surroundings. Sometimes as she carried her wooden bathboard, which my father had bought for them to use whenever they used the communal shower, she wondered to herself how and when did she go from being a Harvey of Harvey River, to wife of Marcus Goodison, living in their wonderful open house in Malvern, to sharing the same kitchen and bathroom with jaze-ears Vie? Could be worse, could always be worse, but while there is life, there is hope, because God is working his purpose out. But this time she was forced to work it out herself. She just could not afford to lose that much money, so she tidied herself and ventured out to explain to the shopkeeper that he had made a mistake. So there she was, this tall, shapely, attractive woman in a flowered navy blue crepe dress, worn with soft black leather pumps, walking quickly along with her children trooping behind her as she went to confront a thieving shopkeeper who had robbed her of the money she needed to send her children to school the next day. But when she got there, the shopkeeper insisted that it was ten shillings that my brother had tendered. My mother insisted that it was one pound, and the shopkeeper said that perhaps my brother had taken the money. My mother said she was sure that he had not. “If some people so great how come them have to be living right there on Orange Street, mixing up with poor nayga?” asked the shopkeeper to his wife, who stood silently supporting him. He began to make more and more really offensive remarks about people who thought that they were better than other people.

  “Don’t let them haul you down to their level. Walk away from them.” It was strange how at times like these she relied on the queenly ways of Cleodine. So thinking about what her sister would have said and done, my mother turned to leave the shop, conceding victory to the shopkeeper, who was undoubtedly about to haul her down, but then she turned back and faced him: “You know, you should not do this to me. I am a mother, and that was my children’s lunch money.” As she said this, tears rolled down her face.

  In later years she would always half-seriously tell people that whatever they did they should try not to make her cry because her tears would bring down grief on whoever caused them to fall. Maybe she was not really joking because a few mornings later there was a loud knocking at the door of their three rooms. It turned out to be one of the women she’d seen in the yard who was going from door to door to tell everyone that the shopkeeper’s place had caught fire. My mother did not say a word. She just walked with the woman down the street to where a crowd had assembled to watch the large wooden shop burning down to charcoal. Some of the people were still wearing their nightclothes. There were little children in their father’s old shirts, even a few small boys wearing their mother’s old dresses, looking like short kings in tattered robes; men in merinos and underpants; and one or two daring younger women wearing only slips, who had jumped out of bed when they heard the alarm. As my mother stood in the crowd, she heard people saying what a thief the shopkeeper was, how for years he had overcharged them, and how the fire was pure retribution. As she stood there, no doubt telling people around her how just a few days before he had cheated her out of her children’s lunch money, the shopkeeper walked over to her in the crowd and without a word, he handed her a one-pound note.

  When my mother awoke from one of her dreams, a dream in which she saw herself and her husband and children firmly planted like banana trees growing from the brick courtyard of the tenement, she said to Marcus, “We will never leave here if only you alone work.” This is what she said, “Don’t believe that I’m not grateful, but we can’t live and save enough to move to a better place on just your wages.” My father had said nothing. He had just folded up the newspaper and left for work. And every morning my mother rose early and made him his breakfast before he went off.

  In those days she would buy a fresh loaf of bread from the Huntingtons Bakery’s horse-drawn cart and a newspaper from the vendor for my father to read as he ate his breakfast. Later, after he left for work, she would sit and read for half an hour or so before she began the housework. She always read the obituary columns and she always read the want ads. “In yesterday’s Gleaner, there was a notice for nurses out at Bellevue,” she says. “We’re just passing through, Dor, just passing through” is what he would say when he came home to find that she or his children had suffered some indignity from one of the other tenants, “We’re just passing through.” But her dreams never lied. Her dream showed them stuck, planted right there, rooted, never to move.

  “There was a notice in yesterday’s Gleaner, they need nurses out at Bellevue Asylum. I will get somebody to keep Betty and the twins for me in the days. Barbara, Howard, and Bunny will be at school,” she said later about the ad.

  “You? Go to work at the Asylum? Doris, that place is a living hell, you can’t manage a situation like that. How can a woman like you ever manage a situation like that? Your father would kill me if he ever found out that I take you out of his house to make you go and work at the Asylum.”

  “I’m going out there on Monday morning. We will never make it on your paycheque alone.” My father is silent. When my mother got like that, she looked exactly like her mother, Margaret, as if her face was carved from granite. He knew better than to try and talk her out of it.

  The Lunatic Asylum (Bellevue) had been established in 1862, through the compassionate efforts of men such as Dr. Edward Bancroft and Dr. Louis Q. Bowerbank, to replace the old Lunatic Asylum, which was part of the Kingston Public Hospital and was described in a report to the Jamaican Assembly in 1851 as “nothing less than a chamber of horrors.” In the years before Bellevue, new patients were stripped of their clothing, had their heads shaved, and were issued with short, tattered gowns marked front and back with either MLA (Male Lunatic Asylum) or FLA (Female Lunatic Asylum). Sometimes one small bug-infested cell would house as many as fourteen patients at night. They slept on bare wooden platforms without covering, or on cold stone floors. Male and female patients were often flung together in these cells, resulting in everything from pregnancies to murder. Two large tanks were provided for the inmates, with patients of both sexes bathing in the same water in the tanks.

  Patients were fed rotting food and dirty water. The staff were generally unprincipled, uncaring, and indifferent. One matron was found guilty of using patients as her personal servants, and many of the nurses spent only a quarter of their working day on the premises. The patients were abused and ill-treated by all categories of staff, including washerwomen and labourers who beat them and forced them to do manual work and other labour both inside and outside the institution. The report described inhumane forms of punishment such as “tanking” that is, holding down a person by force under water until he or she gasped for breath, sank unconscious, or sometimes even died.

  Great care had been taken with the selection of the site of the new Lunatic Asylum, to be located a
long the Windward Road, and although it took more than ten years to complete, mainly because of the indifference of the then colonial government, the new facility was designed for patients to benefit from the sea breezes and from a more efficient and humane system of asylum management that sought to provide inmates with occupational and recreational facilities. In 1862, conditions at the new Lunatic Asylum stood in striking contrast to those at the old one; but by the 1940s, when my mother worked there for a short time, conditions had again begun to deteriorate.

  As they rode together on the tram that first morning, my father kept asking her, “My God, Doris, you sure that you can handle this? I hear that place is a living hell, you know? I will try to get more overtime, you don’t have to do this.” She just said, “Don’t make it any worse.” And he had looked as miserable and downcast as the day they had driven away in the truck loaded with their worldly possessions from the house they had lost in Malvern and headed for Kingston. So they had ridden to the Asylum in silence, for try as she might, my mother could not find the right words to say to him to make him feel not so small, not so inadequate. Because to tell the truth, she was frightened at the thought of going to work at Bellevue, and bad as she felt for her husband, she needed to be silent and to pray for herself, to ask the Lord who was her shepherd to walk with her through the valley of the shadow of the madhouse.

  And so my father went with her through the massive iron gates and stood with her outside the door of the matron’s office, where about two hundred waiting women were applying for the twenty or so positions as psychiatric nurses who would be trained on the job.

  “Are you sure you will be all right, Dor?” He looked wretched.

  “Go,” she said, “I will see you at home this evening.”

  But before he left he made one attempt to cheer her up, to make her laugh. He could always make her laugh. “Dor,” he whispered. “Look at that woman over there in the red dress,” and my mother looked over and saw a very tall, thin woman dressed in a tight red dress wearing a close-fitting green hat. “She don’t look like a bird pepper to you?” asked my father. “Maybe she should go down to Spur Tree and apply for a job at the pickapepper factory.” And that made my mother laugh and say, “Marcus, you are too out of order,” and then she said, “You don’t have to wait with me, I will see you at home later.”

  “To subdue the lunatics, you have to be very strong,” said the Matron, a big, tall woman whom my father would later say always looked like she was carrying a spear and a shield. “Very strong, I am looking for very strong women to train as nurses, so if you are weak you won’t make it here.”

  My mother was trained as a teacher of young children, but she probably was taken because she was physically so strong. And yet nothing could have prepared her for the sight of rows of prison-like cells, in each of which was a sick man or woman, their bodies barely covered by short gowns made from flour bags. Sometimes more than one person was locked in a cell; some were lying in their own filth. Her pet goat, her Grandmother Leanna’s mule, her mother’s donkey, her father’s horse, Nana Frances’s pigs. Any one of those animals in Harvey River seemed better off, better cared for than these poor so-called lunatics. As the matron had told the ten women she employed on the spot, the role of an Asylum nurse really was similar to that of a penkeeper. And nothing could have prepared her for the truly terrifying sight of the superintendent of the facility who, convinced that lunatics were dangerous criminals, was to be seen patrolling the premises armed with a gun.

  “You not up to this my dear, you might as well go home now,” said the matron to one of the new nurses who had vomited at the sight of the caged patients. This time it was not Cleodine’s backboard that helped my mother, it was not George O’Brian Wilson’s rage, it was the compassion of her father, David, telling her to “treat them as sick children, that is what these poor people are, they are like sick children.” “Sick children,” she said later, “I made myself think of them as sick children, and those who mess themselves, I cleaned. Those who needed a bath, I bathed. And I mash the food and spoon-fed those who could not feed themselves.” The rest of the time she spent trying to unknot and delouse the heads of women whose hair had not been combed for weeks and she pared toenails that had grown into claws.

  “What is your story, little miss?” my mother said to a girl who was about thirteen years old, who, though she was dressed in the short ragged gown of a mental patient, seemed to be behaving quite normally. If it were not for her age and her dress, she could have been a nurse, so caring was she of the other patients. “What is your story, little miss?” she asked as the girl helped her to spoon-feed an old woman who was convinced that the asylum was really a brothel.

  “I am not living any whoring life, you think I don’t know why you have me in here?” said the old woman. “You want me to sell myself to those sailors over there in the white clothes, and you are trying to bribe me with cornmeal porridge, but I am not eating it, and I’m not selling my good, good pumpum to any nasty dirty sailor.”

  “No, dear,” my mother explained, “the men in the white clothes are doctors, not sailors, and you are too old to be talking like that.”

  “Oh yes,” said the old woman who was bony and haggard as a yard broom, “Oh yes? It’s because you don’t know how the men dem go crazy for me.”

  The young girl was the only one who could get her to calm down. “Come Grandma. I won’t make them do you anything,” she said, and the deranged old woman, who had come to see the young girl as her granddaughter Beatrice, would say: “I am so glad you have come, Beatrice, these godless, worthless people want to come and turn me into a prostitute.”

  “Drink your porridge and don’t pay them any mind,” the young girl would say, and the old lady would quietly obey her. Once, the girl had even changed out of her flour bag uniform into a short dress that was too tight for her, and had gone off the premises, but she had come back before evening to help feed the older patients.

  “What is your story, little miss?” my mother asked her.

  “My mother get a new boyfriend after my father leave, she start to send me to where him live to carry dinner for him sometimes when she have to work late. One evening I carry the dinner and him say I must come inside him room and wait till him finish eat and then him would give me back the carrier. When I was waiting on him, him start to look at me funny and ask me if I have boyfriend, and I say no, I am still a child, and him say I look big for my age. But when I go home and start to tell my mother what him ask me, she say she don’t want to hear nothing from me. The next time she send me to carry dinner for him, I say I was not going, but she beat me and force me to go and him hold me down, and after that, I bawl and bawl till them say I was mad, and my mother boyfriend say is lie I tell on him, and my mother call police and lock me up. Matron say I can go home now, but my mother don’t want me to come back. I wasn’t mad you know, I wasn’t really mad.”

  My mother persuaded the Matron to release the girl into her care, and she brought her home with her one evening, where she sat quietly on the verandah, touching everybody who passed by and whispering the same words over and over, “I wasn’t mad you know, I wasn’t mad.” The young girl looked like a different person once she started to wear the dresses my mother sewed for her; and as soon as she could, my mother sent her down to Harvey River, where she lived among the Harveys for years, telling everyone who heard her story, “I wasn’t mad you know, I wasn’t really mad.”

  “There but for the grace of God,” my mother would say. “There but for the grace of God, go I. You know how many of those people come to Kingston just to find work and hard life mashed them up?” Some of the patients who were collected enough to give her a name and address got my mother to write letters to their families telling them where they were, and how they were doing.

  However, her job at the Asylum did not last very long. One day she came home from work to find that in her absence my sister Betty, who had been plagued by epileptic fits fr
om the time she was a baby, had begun to have full-fledged grand mal seizures.

  “I never knew hard life until I came to Kingston,” my mother would say as she gazed at her hands. “I used to have the most beautiful hands.” Hard Life. When she sounded those words they became a fierce giant, a merciless enemy whom you had to struggle against. Hard Life was the hurry-come-up, ex-slave landlord who, now that he owned some property in the form of a tenement yard, wanted his turn to play busha, or slave master, to delight in lording his owner status over you, to extract exorbitant sums of money from you for the privilege of living in his dry-weather premises. To inform you loudly that he normally did not rent to people with children and that he would be coming every Sunday morning at 6:00 a.m. to beat upon your door and demand his rent, which you had better have or he would turn you out onto the street.

  Hard Life was a levelling teacher, anxious that no pupil should ever outstrip him, who liked to shame you before your class, to expose your errors and mistakes and poor judgment to the mocking scourgings of those you thought were your friends before you got marked down. Hard Life was an ill-mannered visitor who came to call on you in order to search up your cupboards when your back was turned, so that they could go and tell everyone how things were bad with you. To lie about you, that you had no sugar for your tea and that you had to trust or credit food. It was a vicious old hige who liked to suck out the secrets of your broken heart and regurgitate them before your enemies. Hard Life was a pyaka, a cantankerous flying spirit who fed on the bitter seeds of the bad-mind tree, who lived only to fly about and broadcast to others that you mash up, mash up, mash up. Hard Life was a gravalitous grudgeful John Crow who kept pressing its black suit for the day when it would attend your funeral and give a eulogy which picked at your remains. A lamentation over poor you. Hard Life was a Cyclops whose cast-eye you had to blind with psalms in order to escape from the dark cave in which it wanted you trapped, and he would have trapped you were it not for your own strength and for the ties of blood, the generosity of some of your relatives, who as soon as they heard that you were now living hard life in Kingston, began to send you regular food baskets. Country baskets filled with ground provisions, yams, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, corned beef and pork, bottles of coconut oil, baked goods, peas, cassava, plantains. These baskets were the Jamaican equivalent of the manna fed to the Israelites by Yahweh as they wandered in the wilderness.