Of course George O’Brian Wilson had appeared to her from her earliest days in Kingston, and she always maintained that it was he who had instructed her to slap Vie. Whenever the Irishman appeared to her, she would wake up in a no-nonsense mood and woe betide the man, woman, or child who crossed her that day. “Take your damn cloth and go if you can’t wait for me to finish sewing it,” she would say to an impatient customer. And like her mother, she would remind any of her children in no uncertain terms, “No child of mine will ever rule me.” It was a foolish, foolish child who would challenge that statement.
One of the women in the yard came to Doris and said, “I wake up this morning and drop and break my eyeglasses, Miss Goodie, you think that you could just read this letter for me that my son write me from England?” Of course the letter needed a reply and her glasses still had not been fixed, so my mother wrote a reply. And so it went, with both women agreeing to blame the woman’s illiteracy on her broken glasses. The woman began to do small favours for my mother, like buying food at the market for her and taking her clothes off the wash line, and she never did get her glasses fixed. Once it was known that my mother would read letters and never, ever mention the contents to others, and write replies to letters, again without mentioning the contents, and fill out forms and write letters of recommendation and give good advice, more and more people in the yard began to stand outside the door saying, “Hello Miss Goodie, I have a little favour to ask you.” When their children came and stood outside the door and called to her, she began to invite them in and taught them what she taught her own children. Soon, even Vie’s son knew that a T was like a telephone pole, and a G was like a water goblet that would pour forth fresh water if you tilted it.
I was seven years old when I first saw the place that had produced my mother’s people and which was to shape my imagination for the rest of my life. In July 1954, I joined the great exodus of Kingston children sent to visit with relatives in the country during the summer holidays. I remember being wedged in the back seat of a small, black Morris Minor motor car with three adults all related to my mother and going on the longest journey of my life up till that point–fourteen hours from Kingston to the parish of Hanover. Stops were made along the way: for gas; for me to be sick; to put water in the radiator; for us to pee in the bushes; to fix flat tires; for them to wrap my chest in newspaper to seal my motion sickness; for food and drink, including a mandatory fish and bammy stop at Old Harbour. We finally got to the town of Lucea in the parish of Hanover late at night, and I slept at the home of my mother’s cousin, whose name was Tamar. “Palm tree,” my mother said, that was the meaning of her name. Tamar had four children, Wesley, Vivian, Joyce, and Lyn, but she still looked like a young girl. She was not tall and slender like a palm tree, she was short and neat-looking, dressed as she was when I saw her for the first time in a pink floral dress. I guess she was more like a flowering shrub.
Later that next day I was taken by car to the village of Harvey River, five miles from Lucea. Harvey River is set in the interior of Hanover, under the Dolphin Head Mountains. My mother’s family home was a large wood-and-stone house set right off the village square. As we approached, I noticed that there was a beautiful flower garden flourishing in the front yard. The house was occupied by Aunt Ann and her children, Myrna, Colin, and Joan, now that David and Margaret Harvey were dead.
It was not a manicured yard like the gardens that I had seen in the suburbs of St. Andrew when my father took us on Sunday afternoons for drives from where we lived on Orange Street in downtown Kingston. This garden was thick with pink June roses and oleanders and red flowering hibiscus, and foaming white “rice and peas” bushes that stretched out and brushed against you when you walked up the short stone-paved path to the front door. I did not know the names of flowers then, but the first one I learned was “jasmine,” the tiny starry white flowers which proceeded to perfume the evening with a lovely scent that was activated once it grew dark. Also, there was a large field of white lilies that grew behind the house, giving off a honey-and-spice perfume so fragrant that clothes which were hung on the wash line came in dry and sweet-smelling. When night fell and nobody made a move to turn on the lights, I became anxious. Tamar’s house in Lucea, where I’d slept the night before, had electric lights, so I thought that all of Hanover was similarly lit. Instead, my Aunt Ann called her son, Colin, to bring the lamps. Several fat-bellied, glass-shaded kerosene oil lamps with the words Home Sweet Home picked out in white script between two lacy borders were brought. They were the source of light for the entire house. The lamps threw up tall, macabre shadows on the walls of the house that I had imagined as a fairy-tale dwelling in the golden afternoon light. Now this same enchanted house seemed sinister and frightening, and I suddenly wanted to go home, back to Kingston, where there was no such garden but where there were bright electric lights. I started to cry softly, then I began to cry loudly, then I added a refrain to my crying. I want to go home, I want to go home. My aunt never said a word. She just told my three cousins to go to bed and leave us alone.
She let me weep for what seemed like a long time. Even when I drooled all over the front of my good pink-and-white dress, she said nothing to me. We just sat there at the dining-room table–she, who looked like a woman in a Gauguin painting, and I, a younger version of her, sat in the gathering darkness with the Home Sweet Home lamp casting a water-wash yellow light between us, arranged in a composition that could have been painted on velvet and titled “Crying for the Light.” She said nothing, she just let me cry. When I sobbed myself into silence, she lifted me up and put me into bed with my cousin Joan, where I fell asleep at once. Early next morning Joan shook me awake, saying that it was time for us to have our morning bath in the river. For the first time I saw the river that was named for my mother’s people. Then, it seemed like a huge wide green sea with the cleanest swift-moving water. My cousins could swim, they just ran down the riverbank and leapt into the water. And I jumped right in after them; but because I could not swim, I nearly drowned. So I quickly learned to stay in the shallows and watch them swim the river, bank to bank. But I was so happy. I felt somehow that I would never come to any harm as long as I was immersed in that water named for my family. I felt that I should allow the currents to sweep me along and whenever I sensed that I was out too deep, I would just wade back to where my feet could touch ground. When my cousins were ready to leave, I did not want to get out of the water. They laughed and said, “Think it’s you wanted to go back to Kingston last night!”
For breakfast Aunt Ann had given us big mugs of chocolate tea with coconut milk. The chocolate was made from the cacao trees in Grandfather David’s cacao walk. Rich, dark-brown like sweet mud, the chocolate fat floated on top, painting an oily moustache on your upper lip every time you put the mug to your mouth. There were hot toasted cassava bammies spread with yellow salt butter–cocoa like rich wine, and bammy like fresh host, a pure country communion after my river baptism. After breakfast, I joined the band of village children roaming all over the countryside, stoning fruit trees and eating fruit in various stages of fitness. Green common mangoes that you sliced and ate with salt (you always walked with some salt twisted in a piece of brown paper for just this reason), ripe common mangoes with names like blackie, stringy, number eleven, and beefy, and sometimes even good mangoes like Hayden, Bombay, and Julie, which were mostly cultivated in people’s yards and did not grow wild in the bush. Common mangoes grew in the bush, and you ate as many of them as you wished, until you got a running belly, which would mean a visit to the pit latrine, which I dreaded as much as I did the lack of electric lights.
That summer I tasted fruit I had never eaten before. Small tart green jimbelins, fragrant rose apples that grew by the river, pods of musky stinking toe and slick mackafat. We heard stories, such stories. Under the shadow of the Dolphin Head Mountains is a cave. They said that there used to be a young man in a nearby village who disappeared one day as he walked home from school. T
he villagers searched for him for days and had almost given him up for dead when someone who had gone to gather firewood found him sleeping near the mouth of the cave. The story he told was that he had been walking home from school when he heard what sounded like singing coming from inside the cave. He went deep inside, following the sound of the singing, and there he found a pool, so he drank some water from it and promptly fell asleep. He was not sure whether he was awake or dreaming, when he sensed that the cave was filled with people in bright robes. They told him that the water in the pool was really palm wine. They sung to him and told him they were sorry because they had helped to sell his ancestors to the slave traders. They said that they wished to repay him for the terrible wrong they had done, and this is how they would make amends to him. From henceforward he would be very lucky: they said he was never to answer to the name Cyril again and that he was to insist from now on that everyone call him Lucky. After that the boy really became very lucky. He won every bingo and raffle held at church and school functions and he bought one cow from which he got seven calves. He went to Montego Bay and some tourists took a liking to him and sent for him to come and live with them in England. He went to London and, years later, married one of the Queen’s relatives. All the children in the village kept going to the cave in the hope that they would see the apologizing Africans again, for all of them wanted to have Lucky’s good fortune to travel and be loved by a relative of the Queen.
There was also a house there which they said was haunted. They said that a very wicked woman used to live there. She was an obeah woman and she had harmed a lot of people. Wicked, vengeful people would pay her money to do bad things to their enemies and to innocent people whom they wanted to “keep down.” Before she died she asked that she be buried with her face turned down to the ground as she was too ashamed to meet the gaze of her Maker on Judgment Day. We were advised to run by that house while chanting the Lord’s Prayer for protection, throwing pebbles behind us.
About noon we would return home for lunch, where we roasted breadfruits and big pieces of salted codfish over a wood fire. Then we would mix big mugs of “lemonade,” made with sour Seville oranges, sugar, and water. We ate al fresco, sitting without shoes on the tombstones of the dead Harveys. At first I was frightened by this, but all my cousins did it. And my cousin Joan, who had been very close to our grandmother Margaret, convinced me that it was all right. She had played in the family plot for a long time and no harm had ever befallen her. It was true. She was very beautiful, slim, and graceful, so one day I sat beside her on our grandparents’ tombstones; and though like any Kingston-born child I was frightened of duppies, after I sat there a while and nothing happened I became quite used to going to the family plot and sitting on the tombstones of all my Harvey relatives.
Soon after I returned to Kingston, we moved to no. 30 Studley Park Road, a move made possible by the fact that my two eldest siblings, Barbara and Howard, were now working and contributing to our family’s finances. Barbara was at the Gleaner Company, where she would eventually become the editor of the evening newspaper, and my brother Howard went to work at the Jamaica Telephone Company. Everyone in our family was happy because, except for a nurse and her sister who shared the apartment downstairs, we were the only other occupants of our new home, which had three large bedrooms, a wide living and dining room, and a long enclosed verandah. The house was situated almost opposite the gates of All Saints Government School, which my brothers Kingsley, Karl, Keith, Nigel, and I attended. Even if it was not the prettiest of houses, no. 30 Studley Park Road provided the answer to our family’s prayers, for there we had our very own kitchen, bathroom, and toilets. And there was the sewing room.
I took to sitting in the sewing room although I had no real interest in sewing, assuming as I did then that my mother would always be alive to make me fabulous dresses, and asking questions of my mother about the Harveys, those who were living and those who were buried under the stones on which my cousins and I used to sit.
When you came up the long flight of stairs which led up from the yard, you stepped into the living and dining room where a massive wooden table with turned legs occupied a good one third of the room’s space. The table is where we ate all our meals, the older children seated on a variety of chairs, the younger ones on a long wooden bench. If you passed the table and turned left, you’d enter the room which was my mother’s domain, the sewing room. It was here that the women for whom she made dresses sat and discussed “big woman business” as they waited for my mother to fit or finish their garments. This was also the room where my mother taught neighbourhood girls to sew, free of charge, so that they could as she always said “earn a bread and be independent.” This large room had a high ceiling and one window which looked out onto the street. Under the window was my favourite seat, a huge brass-tipped trunk that was used to store fabric. It was one of the few things left over from my parents’ earlier life. Two beds, three or four chairs for the women to sit on, and my mother’s Singer sewing machine completed the furnishings.
My mother always sat with her back to the door, so that the light from the south fell across the cloth she was sewing. Sometimes for as much as seven hours a day, every day except Sunday, she could be found in that room, her long bare feet tilting at the wide wrought-iron pedal, her right hand spinning the wooden handle, bobbin, shuttle, presserfoot, many miles of fabric passing under her hands, arriving as cloth and leaving as fine garments. She sometimes ran the sewing machine like a racing car driver, bending her head way down, her long grey-and-white plaits curled around her face like slow smoke.
There is a constant stream of people, mostly women, coming through the sewing room to see her. They are not all customers, some come to ask her to read or write letters, to ask her advice, for her help, her opinion. She mediates in disputes too, sometimes saying, “A soft answer turneth away wrath” but at other times: “Don’t allow people to take any liberty with you.”
That is what she must have told the woman whom she helped to run away from my father’s friend Beadle, because one day, just like in those blues songs my father, Marcus, loves, Beadle woke up and found his woman gone. “Gone, Mrs. Goodison,” he comes to the sewing room to tell my mother. “The woman pack up and gone.” The sight of a grown man who has only recently moved to Kingston from Malvern, St. Elizabeth, openly crying like a baby renders all the women speechless. Even the flint-hearted Miss Mirry, our helper, who always had a bitter proverb to suit any occasion, is silent as everyone stares at the man whose workman’s khaki uniform makes him look like a whipped schoolboy. Strangely enough, Doris, who is usually so sympathetic, says only, “This is all very unfortunate.”
“Whatever happens between you and your husband is nobody else’s business, except if he is ill-treating you, and God knows that wretch was ill-treating that poor woman,” says my mother after Beadle has left. “Of course she is gone. I packed her suitcase for her early this morning, and I call my brother Edmund to come in his taxi and take her to the wharf. That ship has sailed by now.”
She roughly turns the handle of the sewing machine and pumps furiously for a few minutes. Everyone in the room rides the waves of her indignation as my mother drives the sewing machine forward. Suddenly she stops. “He treats her like a dog. All his money goes to the rum bar, and when she has her period he orders her to sleep on the floor as if he was not born of woman. I am glad that I helped her to escape.”
The other women are silent, gazing in admiration at her. They have never seen this freedom-fighter side of her before, the fearless Doris who has just a few hours before helped to spirit away a battered woman to safety. Then a slender pale-skinned woman who chain-smokes, wears matching red lipstick and nail polish, and speaks with an American accent says: “I was with a man like that once. I met him on the fourth of July at a picnic when I lived in Georgia, and talk about a hot love! I believed I’d die if I didn’t marry him…” and here she switches into Jamaican patois, “but see me, and come live wi
th me”–and, as if in a chorus, all the other women finish the proverb with her–“is two different things.”
“Every time he beat me, he sent me flowers, or perfume, as if he was trying to cover up his stinking behaviour. Every time he black-up my eye, he would swear up and down how he would never hit me again. Till the next time.” And then she suddenly stood and lifted up her dress to reveal a deep keloid scar running down her right thigh. The women make loud sympathetic noises and glance quickly away from the horrible sight. The woman from Georgia lets her skirt hem fall and then turns around and picks up her cigarette, which she had carefully rested on the windowsill before she stood up. When she lifts the cigarette to her lips to take a deep draw of tobacco and menthol, her hand shakes and so does her voice.
“I knew I had to leave the son-of-a-bitch after he did that. So you know what I did? I got my sister to send me a telegram from Jamaica to say, ‘Come quick, Mother is dying.’ I bawled non-stop for two days until he said that he, he was giving me permission to come to Jamaica but only for two weeks. Well, I bid him one tender farewell at the airport, and I never went back. I left a house full of clothes, jewellery, and furniture, but what use would they be to me if I’d let him kill me?”
“I could never stand up and make a man just beat me so, me and him would haffi fight, after him not me father or me mother,” says Betsy, who is jet-black and has a wonderful open face. Her gums are dark, almost purple, and she has perfect white teeth. Betsy is also almost six feet tall.
From Harvey River Page 18