From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  The woman from Georgia now has tears in her eyes. She blows a long stream of cigarette smoke through the window.

  “When you talk bout beating, my grandmother give me one terrible beating with a tamarind switch the first time I see my period,” says Edith, a cheerful young girl whom my mother was trying to teach to sew–without much success she’d often say–because Edith’s world really revolved around blues dances. She lived for Saturday nights when she would boogie till dawn in various dance halls, dressed in tight blouses and wide swing skirts cinched tight at the waist with a broad belt that showed off her eighteen-inch waistline. Edith was always happily singing the latest Fats Domino song under her breath as she hemmed a dress or serged a seam but today she laughs a harsh, embarrassed laugh when she says, “She say she beat me fi warn me fi no get pregnant.”

  “Damn old-fashioned behind times foolishness,” says the lady from Georgia. “After all, it’s a natural thing that God made to happen to women.” Then she snorts and says, “All the same, God seemed to save some of the worst things for women.”

  “Mind you fly in God face,” says Betsy, who was sitting on the floor near my mother’s feet. Betsy is a “Mother,” a spiritual leader in a revival group. Doris sometimes sews the cobalt blue robes that Betsy wears when she preaches, all full of the spirit, on the street corner.

  I was sitting on a chair in a corner where my mother could not see me. I was willing myself to be invisible, praying that everyone would forget that I was in the room and just keep talking so I could hear, so I could learn about big woman business. On other occasions, if the conversation was becoming too grown up, my mother would say, “just stick a pin right there” to whoever was speaking, and then she’d turn to me and say, “leave, this is not for a little girl’s ears.” But today she says nothing to me, so I just keep still, glad to be in on big woman business.

  “You know, when I see my health,” says Betsy, “my grandfather call everybody in the house and tell them that they were not to treat me like a child any more, for now I could be a mother; and him shake my hand and give me five shillings and tell me to buy anything I want with it because I was now a big young lady!”

  I remember that day when at age ten I was part of the big woman group, how everybody in the sewing room nodded their approval when Betsy told that story, because it seemed like the proper thing to have done.

  “You can learn a lot from old people,” said Edith. “Is a old lady name Edna who always tell me that when things bad with you, when you broke and down-hearted is when you must dress up in you best clothes, for is better you make people envy you and grudge you than make them feel sorry for you.”

  That was the signal for everyone to contribute their own words for the big woman to live by.

  Doris: “My mother, Margaret, tell me, Rose, Miss Jo, Cleodine, and Ann that a woman must always at all times have a good nightgown and a good clean panty put aside in case she have to go to the hospital.”

  Edith: “My grandmother tell me I must always keep at least one good woman friend who I can trust, who I can tell anything to and who won’t turn round and disgrace me.”

  Betsy: “For there is nothing worse than when you friend chat out you private business; even when the friendship done, you mustn’t chat out you friend private business. You see me Betsy, if you tell me a secret, me carry it to the grave, for the Bible say that if you betray you friend secret, that friendship can never in life ever fix again.”

  Doris: “That is true, it’s like when a man stop love you; reconcile yourself to it. Know that it finish and done with, and never you force up on him, for the more you try and make him love you, the more he will hate you.”

  Betsy: “But some woman will do anything to make a man stay with them, you know. You see that American woman Miss Simpson? Me understand say is some a her pum-pum hair she cut and parch and sprinkle like black pepper over King Edward food and that is why him left the throne of England and married to her.”

  The woman from Georgia laughed so hard when Betsy said that, that she choked; and Edith, who was laughing till tears ran down her face, had to slap her on the back.

  My mother frowned and glanced in my direction. Her look said, “you did not hear that.” Then in order to bring the conversation back from the edge of the pit where Betsy’s inside dish on poor Wallis Simpson had taken things, she told a story about her sister Ann to illustrate why a big woman had to be wise in order to protect herself in the world.

  “When my sister Ann got married and went to live in Montego Bay, she had a lovely friend, a Mrs. Doris Melbourne, who lived next door. Well, my sister Ann’s husband was not the best provider, and so when Ann get any money from her sewing she just give it to Mrs. Melbourne–who was separated from her husband–so that she could prepare meals for both families. When dinner was ready, Mrs. Melbourne made her daughter Elaine come to the fence and say to Ann, ‘My mother is inviting you and the children to have dinner with us.’ And Ann just take her children and go next door and have a lovely meal with her friend. When her husband come in late, asking, ‘Where is my dinner?’ Ann just say, ‘There is no dinner because you never gave me any money to buy anything.’”

  “Lord that one good,” says Edith.

  Then, my mother did something she had never done before, she turned in my direction and included me in the big woman circle. “You see Lorna, there? Up to yesterday I send her to go and help Mrs. Percy with something that will prevent her from going to the poorhouse one day.”

  I remembered that the day before my mother had answered the telephone and when she hung it up she said, “Go to Mrs. Percy and she will give you something.” I liked going to Mrs. Percy’s, which was above the grocery and bar run by her and her husband, for there was usually a quadrille group practising in the paved area beside the bar. I loved to see the dance–which I later learned had originated in the courts of Europe–being performed by neighbourhood people like the tall, elegant man known as Cubana and the local hearse driver the children called Bald-head Morty. When Mrs. Percy saw me she’d said: “Oh, your mother send you for the cloth to make my dress. Excuse me, Mr. Percy (she always called him Mr.), I’m just going upstairs to get some cloth to give to Mrs. Goodison.”

  Her husband just turned and scowled at her without saying a word. We went to their rooms above the shop, and she pulled out a drawer and took out a length of cloth. Then she reached into her bosom and extracted some well-creased pound notes, which she then folded into the fabric. She’d put the cloth in a bag marked “The Buzzer,” the name of a store on King Street, and she’d handed it to me. I now knew the reason.

  “Poor woman,” said my mother, “she married to this man and work her fingers to the bone for him. By accident one day she find him will, only to discover that the man intend to leave everything to the children by him first wife. Well, from she find out that she is not in his will, she been taking money out the till and sending it to me to keep for her. Once a week she come here and collect the money and bank it. Imagine the poor woman have to be stealing out her own money because under the law a married woman have no rights.”

  “That is not thief, Miss Goodie. That is take, the woman taking what belong to her by right,” says Edith.

  There is silence in the sewing room after that story. I sit in my corner feeling very grown up to have been included in the big woman business for that day. I look over in my mother’s direction in time to see her switch on the tiny light above the presserfoot of the sewing machine just before she finishes stitching the seven-inch zip into the placket of the hobble skirt.

  “Oh, look at the time,” says the Georgia lady.

  “Here is your skirt, my dear, give it a good press before you wear it.”

  “You see me here swapping laugh for peas soup; I have to go get ready for church tonight,” says Betsy, “so when I must come back to fit my dress, Miss Goodie?”

  “Tomorrow midday,” says my mother, “come and get some dinner and I will fit your dress
afterwards.”

  “All right everybody, God bless and keep you till I see you tomorrow if life spare,” says Betsy.

  “Wait for me and I will walk with you to the bus stop,” says the lady from Georgia as she folds her hobble skirt into a shopping bag marked “Nathan’s Department Store.”

  “You can go now, Edith,” says my mother, “try and come early tomorrow.” And with those words my mother rises from her sewing machine and closes the room for the day.

  “How you put up with Miss Mirry?” Everyone asked my mother that question. Miss Mirry had come to work with our family as a domestic helper shortly after my father started working two jobs, one installing telephones at the Jamaica Telephone Company, and the other, which he did on weekends, as a driver to a doctor. She moved with the family from Orange Street to Studley Park Road and stayed with us for almost fifteen years until she walked off kissing her teeth one day and never came back. Miss Mirry was a short, stout, very dark-skinned woman who always wore a head-tie because her hair was grey and she did not like to look old. She had a face that seemed to be frozen in a permanent “kiss-teeth,” so that her lips were twisted to one side, and her eyes squinched up. She had a large straight nose and sometimes she smoked cigarettes by turning the lit end inside her mouth.

  Miss Mirry hated everybody, including the woman who came once a week on Fridays to iron our clothes because my mother said Miss Mirry needed help. Still Miss Mirry hated the woman and spent every Friday throwing words about “people who come to box bread outta other people mouth.”

  And there was Mrs. Hinsula. Only my mother seemed to feel any sympathy for the woman she once described in this way: “She used to be a real big shot lady, married to a rich man from Cuba, till her husband left her.” And now Mrs. Hinsula–or Señora Hinsula, as she sometimes called herself–was reduced to living off the charity of others. Every Sunday for years she came to visit us exactly at dinnertime, and when she arrived, it was all that Miss Mirry could do to hand her a clean plate. But my mother always welcomed her warmly, and in addition to feeding her she would prepare a parcel with rice, flour, sugar, a tin of condensed milk, and a bar of soap for her to take away with her. One Sunday she added a nice thick slab of salted codfish to the parcel, and Señora Hinsula declared, “No, no, no, I cannot possibly take that saltfish, it would smell me up on the bus.” Miss Mirry exploded and called Mrs. Hinsula “a poor show great” who still behaved like she was somebody when everybody knew that she did not have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it through. Her shoes were so worn out that my brother Keith used to say that Señora Hinsula walked not in, but beside, her shoes. My mother told Miss Mirry to stay out of her business, “I know what she is going through. She is just trying to hold on to her dignity. You have to hold on to your dignity.”

  Mostly Miss Mirry seemed to hate me. The sight of me made her crazy. We must have been enemies in a previous life in West Africa because without a doubt that is where Miss Mirry came from. All I had to do was to pass by her as she bent over our wooden washtub scrubbing our dirty clothes, or as she stood at the cistern washing dishes, and she would begin to fume and hiss like a steaming kettle, muttering words like wutliss, facety gal. I did not like Miss Mirry either, but we were not allowed to be disrespectful to her as my mother believed that children should be respectful to all their elders. That is why we called her Miss Mirry instead of just Mirry. Miss Mirry twisted up everybody’s name, even her own. Her name was Miriam Henry, but she called herself Mirryam Endry. She called my sister Barbara “Baba,” and she said she came from “Ullava,” which was really the town of Old Harbour. Most words in English just refused to obey her tongue, and she did not much care.

  Miss Mirry had a weakness for younger men, and on our grocery list–which my mother filled out and sent to the Chinese grocery every Friday–we sometimes saw added the odd bottle of beer. Between items like twelve tins of condensed milk, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of sugar, there would appear two bottles of Guinness Stout that could not be accounted for by Marcus or Doris nor any of us nine children. But we all knew who it was that had “trusted” or charged these dark bottles of potent brew to offer as blandishments to some younger man. Once the Sunday chicken dinner arrived at the table missing one leg because she had secured the other drumstick for her latest love.

  Miss Mirry did not permit us to eat the fruits that our father brought for us, his own children. The house at Studley Park Road had a long narrow room situated between the kitchen and the bathroom, a room she called the “buttery.” In it, she would hide the bunches of ripe bananas or baskets of mangoes my father would bring home. To get at these fruits, my brothers devised a plan. They would go into the toilet, which was next to the buttery, and climb through the space above the connecting wall. They had to be careful when they jumped that they landed in the piles of laundry that she also stored in the buttery. After their soft landings, they would eat as many of the bananas as they could, stuff their pockets with the mangoes, and climb back over the wall into the toilet. They then pulled hard on the chain and emerged. One after the other they did this whenever they knew that Miss Mirry was hiding a bunch of bananas and a basket of mangoes. The best part came when she discovered that the fruits were gone and that there was just a pile of collapsed empty yellow skins strewn across the floor of the buttery. Then she exploded and called us damn thieves for eating the fruits that our own father had brought to feed his children.

  It was Nigel, the youngest, who came up with an idea to get back at Miss Mirry. She could not read, and he would sit on the top step (where he didn’t have far to run and hide behind my mother when Miss Mirry chased him up the flight of stairs that led up from the yard to our rooms) and spell out his curses at her.

  Y-o-u i-s a d-o-g, a d-i-r-t-y d-o-g, a u-g-l-y d-o-g.

  “Yu think I don’t know what you calling me?”

  “What I calling you?”

  “Yu facety little boy.”

  Y-o-u i-s a d-i-r-t-y D-r-a-n-k-r-o.

  Well it was all over now, because Nigel’s spelling of John Crow, the bald-headed scavenger vulture, was making everyone hysterical. The rest of us were laughing at her, and Miss Mirry was foaming at the mouth, but she couldn’t say exactly what was being done to her. Nigel, as far as I know, was the only person who ever got the better of Miss Mirry. But she once gave me a tamarind leaf bath in her washtub when I had measles, and she told me as she bathed my itching skin that “every sickness in the world have a bush to cure it.”

  Miss Mirry also said of the wedding of Lennie the yam man who married Miss Pinky, who was a hunchback, at our house, that “Every hoe, have a stick a bush.” This agricultural analogy was an appropriate one for Lennie, and it was probably my mother’s love for the great Lucea yams grown in the parish of Hanover that made her so tolerant of Lennie, the yam man who had come to bear a remarkable resemblance to the yams he sold. He was a large, thick man; earthy would be a good word to describe him. Lennie would come two or three times a week and announce his arrival by standing at the foot of the staircase which led up to our house, bawling, “Miss Goodieooooooooh.” Lennie drank john crow batty white rum, a cheap, coarse, dreggy, and extremely potent rum, which was drawn from the bottom of the rum barrel, and he would sometimes burst into fits of loud crying when talking to my mother. Though her dreams of running a fine guest home never did materialize, in her house everyone was treated as an honoured guest. So, rising from her sewing machine, she would direct Miss Mirry to brew Lennie a cup of ginger tea. As she prepared the tea and then handed it ungraciously to Lennie, Miss Mirry would hiss and Lennie would drink in loud slurps, moaning through the cleansing sting of ginger tea, shaking his head from side to side, and muttering that only Gawd alone knew the crawse he bore. My mother would tell him to bear up, then she would buy Lucea yams from him.

  The “crawse” turned out to have something to do with the ill health of his woman, Miss Pinky. But she was really the one with the crawse. When he brought her to meet
my mother, we saw that she was hunchbacked, and looked like one of the last of the Jewish peddlers who walked about the streets of Kingston with a big pack of goods on their backs, a burden that caused them in the approaching distance to appear to be bent almost double. Miss Pinky was almost exactly half the size of Lennie. Her head came to a point just above his belt, and when she smiled she looked like a very young girl. When she took a seat in one of the chairs in our dining room, she swung her legs in circles above the floorboards.

  Doris was pleased to meet Miss Pinky and told Miss Mirry to give her something cool to drink. Miss Mirry, who was undoubtedly the world’s most ill-tempered person and did not like taking orders from anybody, had been making stabbing motions at the floor with the broom, pretending to be sweeping, in the hope of overhearing all about Lennie and Miss Pinky’s business. When my mother sent her to get Miss Pinky something to drink, she shuffed off in my father’s old shoes with the backs folded down, hissing and grumbling, muttering something in which the words “too much excitement” featured.

  The next morning at breakfast, Doris announced her big news. Lennie and Pinky would be getting married in a few weeks. My father, who could not abide Lennie’s coarseness, said he assumed the wedding would be held in the Redemption Ground Market. But my mother said no, she had told them they could have the wedding right here in our house. My father did not laugh. For the next few weeks my mother proceeded to make arrangements for Lennie and Pinky’s wedding, including designing and sewing the wedding dress. She was proud of her reputation for being able to make garments to fit any kind of shape. Unlike her sister Cleodine, she never turned a customer away, and all her customers felt free to enter our house and to sit anywhere they pleased. My mother had sewn for many brides in her life. She was an artist, an artist who created with shining white bolts of slipper satin, crepe de chine, organza, chiffon, guipure lace, Brussels lace, and Venice lace. She hung “tears of joy” pearls, iridescent sequins, and diamond-like rhinestones upon her creations, which turned ordinary women into queens, ethereal bridal beings, their glowing faces framed by mists of illusion tulle flowing veils or fingertip veils. They floated up the aisle followed by cathedral trains. She sewed for many brides who were seven and eight months pregnant. For them, she had devised a cunning apron cum peplum, which artfully camouflaged the offending belly. She never discussed what dressmaking sleight of hand she employed to make Miss Pinky’s dress fit her so well, but everyone agreed that Miss Pinky’s gown suited her perfectly.