From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  The children are all asleep. As always Doris watches by the window for Marcus to come home. It is the rainy season, time of hurricanes, June too soon, July stand by, August look out you must, September remember, October all over. It is a rainy August night, and Marcus has not yet come home. He has been out putting up the telephone lines that have been torn down by the high winds and the heavy rains, so that important people can communicate with each other again. In those days most people did not have telephones in their homes. Sometimes at night she falls asleep before he comes home. Sometimes he comes in and wakes up her and the children to feed them ice cream. Royal Cremo’s Neapolitan Brick ice cream, vanilla-cherry, and chocolate-striped ice cream. These sleepy late-night celebrations took place unexpectedly, for no particular reason except for the fact that Marcus, like Doris, always loved celebrations and rituals.

  Then as always she hears his footsteps coming up the stairs, and when he appears in the darkened doorway he looks like the logo on the bottle of Spanish sherry that one of his friends gave him for Christmas, featuring a silhouette of a man in a wide-rimmed hat and a flowing cape. She feels great relief. Only after he takes off his hat and raincoat and galoshes does he look like Marcus. The mysterious black-cloaked, hatted figure has disappeared, and he says something like, “This is not a night for man nor beast to be outside.” “I worry about you out there in Kingston at night,” says my mother. “You worry too much,” he says. “I promised your father that I would not make you worry.” He had promised her that she would never have to worry, that they would have a nice life. “I have certain dreams and plans,” he had told her when he was courting her. “I want to have my own garage business and I’d like me and my wife”–when he said the words my wife, he had looked meaningfully at her, then repeated the phrase–“me and my wife, to run a first-class guest house up in Malvern,” and then he had asked her if she had ever been to Malvern. She said, no, she had been only to Montego Bay and Savanna la Mar, but that she never stopped hoping one day to go to Montreal to visit her sisters and see snow for herself.

  One evening Marcus arrived home from work and came in the door saying, “I brought somebody to see you,” and lo and behold it was her brother Edmund, whom my mother had not seen since he had run away from Harvey River before my mother met my father. “I saw this man standing with one foot on the running board of a taxi on East Queen Street, a man wearing a felt hat pushed to the back of his head, just like in that photograph on your bureau, and I said to myself, my god that must be Edmund Harvey. So I went up to him and said, ‘Hi, brother-in-law.’” My mother can’t quite believe her eyes that after all these years she has met up with her runaway brother. They can’t stop hugging each other. She immediately offers him some dinner, and he says, “Thanks, just as long as there is no yam in that dinner.”

  Uncle Edmund pushed back his chair from the dining table and lit a Four Aces cigarette. He recommended to my mother an iron tonic that he says all taxi men are taking. Taxi men exchange information that is vital to their business. They are always concerned about their health because they work long hard hours. They read the newspaper every day because they have to have good conversation with the passengers, especially tourists, who always have an endless list of questions to ask the taxi driver. “It’s as if when they take your taxi they expect you to be the Minister of Information,” said Edmund. “And although you don’t want to be telling them any foolishness, then again, you can’t tell them everything, especially when it comes to Jamaican politics. So when one of those tourist ask you something like, ‘So don’t you think that Jamaicans are lucky to be governed by England and have a Parliament and a British Governor,’ you just say Oh yes and drop off the damn idiot at the Myrtle Bank Hotel and take the tip that he give you.

  “‘You are one smart Jamaican fellow, don’t listen to all this crazy talk about Independence.’

  “‘You are right boss,’ said the taxi man.

  “I just make him go on none the wiser that I don’t care a blast about England and Missus Queen and that I agree with Norman Manley that Jamaica should be an independent country,” says Edmund.

  “Taxi man have to know what is what,” he tells my mother. “Taxi man have to know every bar and brothel in Kingston, every bank, government building, theatre, night club, statue, and monument. Taxi man have to know how to give the tourists what they want, and that is why I always said taxi man don’t make good husband. We are always on the move. Morant Bay one day, Montego Bay by the same night, Port Royal next morning. Taxi man mostly live alone, we live cowboy life, so taxi man stay.” Edmund draws hard on his Four Aces cigarette.

  “So you going home to rest now, Edmund?”

  “No sir, the night is young, I am going to catch a midnight show out at Majestic Theatre. Doris, you brother is a real Kingstonian.”

  After that, Uncle Edmund came to visit at least once a week and he was always telling stories to illustrate why Kingston was a more exciting place than Harvey River, where he swore he would never return, neither in life nor death. Kingston to him was the place where the most fantastic and fascinating things happened. Take, for example, the story of the old man in the yard where he lived, an old man called Tata, who had a bosun growing inside his pants, a swollen giant testicle the size of a yellow heart breadfruit. You could see the shape of it when he walked his rolling off-centre walk. Everybody said he should get it cut, but he believed that if they cut it, he would surely die. All the boys in the area claimed to have seen this terrible thing that grew underneath the old man’s trousers. They gathered in packs and stormed the toilet when Tata used it. They peeped under the door, and the old man became hysterical. He threatened to kill them for their insolent out-of-order behaviour, their outrageous lack of respect for an old man. It was a kind of rite of passage. The boys would not be men until they had seen Tata’s bosun, until they had stared at this awful, unnatural ball, and had walked away still seeing, not struck blind or dead. “The other day they give him one whole bottle of white rum to drink,” says Edmund, “and two grandsons lift him up and carry him down to public hospital. The doctors gave him gas and cut off the bosun. They said it is the biggest one anybody ever see in Jamaica, maybe in the whole world, and them send it gone to England for the doctors over there to examine it.”

  My mother had a story of her own for her brother, one to illustrate how bad people from Kingston could be. She told him of a situation right there in the yard next door to where we were living, which had to do with a young woman named Lizzie who had come from the country to help her sister Bernice after Bernice had had three babies in two years and ten months. Lizzie looked like a baby duck, a dill-dill, because she had big wide lips and wicked bandy legs; and she spoke so badly that everybody laughed at her. She would say “guddung” instead of “go down” and “gittup” for “get up” and “tandey” for “stay there,” and she called her sister “Sta Bernice.” All the other women in the yard she addressed as “ma’am”…yes ma’am, no ma’am. Lizzie was always working. She washed line upon line of birdseye nappies gleaming white. She made “tie-leaf” or “blue-drawers,” delicious portions of grated sweet potato, dark sugar, and coconut milk, spiced with nutmeg then wrapped in banana-leaf parcels and steamed. Lizzie cooked a fine mackerel rundown, flaked salted mackerel cooked in a spicy, savoury lick-you-finger coconut custard, causing Mr. Vincent, Bernice’s husband, to joke that Lizzie was such a good cook that he should have married her instead of her sister. After a time, Lizzie stopped calling the other women “ma’am” so much. She also began to grumble, saying that her sister could help herself a little more instead of just lying down all day and complaining about how weak she felt.

  Then one day Bernice said that she was going to the country to see about herself because she couldn’t understand how she still felt so weak even after she got so much rest. She knew a man in the country who would give her a good bush bath and a read-up. She left Lizzie in charge while she was gone. Lizzie said that she heard f
rom the country that the obeah man said that Bernice’s case was a hard one. That somebody was working hard to keep her down because the obeah man said he kept getting a vision of somebody driving two long ten-penny nails into Bernice’s right calf. “When Bernice came back from the country, nobody in the yard want to face her,” said Doris, “because if the obeah man did not tell her that Lizzie and Mr. Vincent were now along with each other right out, then Bernice lose all around. But Vincent tell her himself. Tell her openly that Lizzie was a better woman than her any day and advise her to go back to the obeah man in the country. Bernice leave that same evening, but she come back the next morning when Vincent gone to work, and beat Lizzie till she soft. I guess she rest enough, and she was not feeling so weak any more.”

  “Edmund, you better take care, you hear. Kingston is not an easy place,” said my mother, “a place where it is not easy to raise up yourself if you fall.”

  My mother found out first-hand that it is sometimes hard to raise yourself up because God knows there are always people who are eager to see you stay down. Like her oldest sister who hadn’t come to visit her because she was not sure that her chairs were good enough. When she finally did come to see her, she came in a dream, shaking her head, saying, “Poor unfortunate you, you have no luck.” This was Cleodine’s greeting to her from the gateway of the Harvey home because in the dream my mother has been forced to return to her parents’ house with all her children. “Poor unfortunate you,” she repeats, but that is just the warm part of her greeting. “My dear, you are like a pipe, everybody just comes, turns you on and uses you and then walks off and leaves you,” says Cleodine as she strides up the stone path leading to the Harvey house. Even the flowers in the yard seem to fold in on themselves as they hear these words. The bold-faced hibiscus shrink their red-and-gold petals and roll themselves into tubes, displaying only their pale undersides. The loud chirping cling-cling and grass-quit birds abruptly shut up, and a flurry of April butterflies who were flightily making the most of their short lives settle nervously on branches. Cleodine must have risen before dawn to put herself together for this visitation. She was wearing a gorgeous silk dress of cocoa brown, awash with gold-and-orange blossoms. Her dark brown leather pumps had been polished and shined by the yardboy, her brown leather handbag with its shining clasp looked positively plump with prosperity, her hair was styled in an upsweep, and her gold-rimmed glasses gleamed on her straight nose bridge. She decided against wearing a hat but carried instead an umbrella trimmed with ochre lace held high above her head.

  Even in a dream it is hard to recover from somebody likening you to a standpipe. It is harder to gather yourself when they quickly repeat it. “Just like a pipe, everybody just come, use you and then walk away, you meet it my dear, you really meet it.” And my mother wants to ask her what is this “it” that she has met and to remind Cleodine that she herself has met her “it.” But she is doubled over by that lethal repeat, that vicious one-two jab.

  But if Cleodine came to her in dreams to liken her to a standpipe, others came too, and for the rest of her life my mother lived by these visitations.

  At first Doris had thought that it was the clip-clop of the breadman or the milkman’s horse coming down Orange Street in the before-day morning. She thought to herself that maybe she should struggle up out of sleep, get out of bed, and wake one of the boys to go out into the street and buy fresh milk or a warm harddough bread. But the sound of the hooves kept coming, right up to the gate and then she heard them inside the yard. The hoofbeats then sounded as if they were climbing all the way up the steps and into the room and then she saw her grandmother Leanna sitting astride her grey mule right next to her bed, her long necklaces of silver coins soldered together, tinkling like bells. Just like she did when she was a young girl, Doris jumped onto the back of the mule and Leanna guided it out of the room, down the steps into the brick-paved courtyard, where all the tenants were standing looking in amazement at the tall flanked grey mule ridden by the jet-black old woman in a dress the colour of laundry blue, her silver money jewellery shining in early light.

  Doris clung to her grandmother’s waist, pressing her cheek to the woman’s bony back, inhaling her strong body scent of cinnamon and escallions. She closed her eyes and time slowed down so that the short ride across the courtyard felt as if they were riding forever over the green pastures of Hanover and Westmoreland. As they rode, the guinea grass soaked with dew water flashed and bathed the soles of their feet and the nightblooming jasmine sprayed their faces with her last ounce of essence before closing her white vials. The early morning air carried the potential sweetness of green sugar cane before it hardened into iron stalks at the sun’s urging, stalks so hard that a man could break his back trying to cut them down. They rode past men and women asleep in small huts and long barracks-type dwellings. This was the grace hour when they existed in dreams as ordinary men and women, free to lie down or get up whenever they wanted. This was the hour before they rose to meet cane. To seed and weed, to cut and harvest it. The hour before some would run away or stay and undermine it, withdraw their enthusiasm from it, throw words and sing bantering songs, and meet in secret at night to plot bloody overthrow of it. They rode past the time, before cane, when Jamaican people planted mainly corn and cassava, hunted wild boar and coneys, and went to sea in magnificent boats they had fashioned from trees; when their artists made sacred wood carvings that would survive for hundreds of years; when their scientists discovered how to extract poison from the roots of cassava; when they played an early form of soccer and lived mostly in peace, till three leaking ships filled with lost men came towards them bearing Hard Life.

  Doris and her grandmother rode past all the amazed tenants straight into the kitchen where Leanna dismounted and used her riding crop to clear away a space for her granddaughter’s stove on the firewall. “Patience, you are going to have to study patience and take what you get till you get what you want,” she had said, and then she had mounted her mule and ridden away, clearing the gate effortlessly. But not before she removed one of her money necklaces and draped it around my mother’s neck. “Control the silver,” she’d said. “You will never get any big money in this life. Massa will always hold that, so learn to control the silver.”

  Doris always said that it was after her grandmother Leanna came and made a space for her on the firewall that the women in the yard all started to befriend her.

  “Doris, Doris, take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground which thou standest on is not holy ground but hard work ground.” Nana Frances Duhaney had come one night and told her that, paraphrasing the words of Yahweh to Moses. She had bent down and removed Doris’s soft pumps from her feet because Doris, in a determined effort not to let herself go, had been wearing her leather pumps around the house like her sister Cleodine. Nana Frances had come, bent down, taken the shoes off her feet, and told her that the only way that she was going to be able to manage all the hard work she would now have to do to raise nine children was to go barefoot around the house. She told her to uncover her feet in order to draw up strong energy through the wooden floorboards and through the metal pedal of the sewing machine.

  “You don’t have to go to school today,” Doris would say to one of the children or “be very careful how you play with such and such a child,” or “give me that slingshot, somebody could lose an eye today.” Her own mother, Margaret, had come the night before, serious and unsmiling. Invariably she came only when she had to warn her about some possible danger to one of the children.

  Doris’s father, David, had appeared, fully dressed except for his shirt, and stood right there in the yard, under the beheaded breadfruit tree, and had said to her: “Remember your confirmation promise, my daughter, don’t forget your promise that was given you from Isaiah 43: Fear not for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by name, thou art mine, when thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm thee, when thou walkest throug
h the fire thou shall not be burnt.” And then he had turned to go, but before he left, he looked over at the men playing the seemingly unending game of dominoes and said, “How is this different from what rich men do up at the Liguanea Club, where black people can only pass through those gates as maids and waiters? This is a poor man social club,” and then he pointed to the old white-haired man who seemed to be in charge of the ongoing domino game, and whom my mother heard everyone call Papacita. David said, “You see Papacita there, he worked more than ten strong men when he was young, cutting cane all over Jamaica, and then he spent years more in Cuba cutting hectares and hectares of cane. Nobody in the history of the world ever cut as much cane as Papacita. Let him play domino now, God knows he shouldn’t do any more hard work.” And David goes through the gate saying, “These people are no better or no worse than people anywhere, anything that you can do to help them, help them and you will be surprised to know how they will help you.”

  For weeks Doris puzzled over what exactly her grandmother Leanna had meant when she advised her to “control the silver.” One Saturday she was buying food in the Redemption Ground Market and she found herself telling an old woman, from whom she was buying escallion, about the dream of her grandmother riding into the yard to see her. And the woman explained to her that there was a time in the history of Jamaica when all the silver coinage on the island had found its way into the hands of enslaved men and women, enterprising Africans who cultivated their food plots and sold their produce in the Sunday markets around the island. “Them had was to send away a England go make more silver money,” the woman had said. She also said that many Jamaicans had bought their freedom and their own land by saving these small sums of silver money and that her great-grandmother had been one such Jamaican.