From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  When the day of the wedding arrived, my father announced that he would be working overtime that night. My mother was in her element, grandly directing the proceedings as the mistress of the revels. She installed Miss Pinky in her bedroom, dressed her in bridal finery, and led her forth, transformed into a beautiful bride. Several large ladies, referred to as “eegla ooman” (higgler women) by Miss Mirry, came and took over the kitchen–which caused Miss Mirry to fume and hiss even more and mutter under her breath about never-see-come-see, hurry-come-up people–and soon the aroma of curried goat and chicken wafted about the yard, spicy harbingers of good feasting to come.

  Miss Pinky looked lovely, everyone kept saying so. Everyone also kept saying that my mother had lived up to her reputation for being able to sew to fit any shape. The wedding was attended by scores of other women like the eegla ooman and their male equivalents. These women, who had grown quite well off from selling food in the market, were dressed in rich brocade and lace, “quality cloth” according to Miss Mirry, and the men wore dark suits and felt hats. The guest of honour was a doctor from the University of the West Indies Hospital, Pinky’s doctor, and the guests kept remarking on how Doctor Goldman was just sitting there, laughing and talking like an ordinary man right there in our living room. The table was splendidly decorated, with pink asters and asparagus ferns pinned to its corners, and Doris’s best cut-glass carafes filled with dark red wine. The wine-filled carafes glowed against the white lace of the tablecloth and set off the architecture of the cake, which was a tall four-storied creation, covered in thick, white icing and studded with flat silver discs, like nail heads. Several smaller round cakes branched off independently from the central one. The cake was rich with raisins, currants, prunes, and cherries and redolent of spices, overproof rum, and sweet Puerto Pruno wine. If you ate enough of it, you became deliciously light-headed.

  Over the course of the wedding celebration, almost every single person stood up in my parents’ living room and gave a speech, a toast, or rendered an item. As is the custom in Jamaican weddings, the bride and groom were showered with words to live by. Many of the older guests quoted passages from the Bible about how a man should leave his mother and father and cling to his wife, for in the same Bible, it said that it was not good for man to live alone. Some of the guests wished for Lennie and Pinky to be as well suited to each other’s needs as a “tumpa knife and green banana” and also “like Isaac and Rebecca.” I stood there with my brothers and sisters among the weddings guests and listened as even the eegla ooman and man who sold in the market confidently quoted line after line from poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Claude McKay.

  In thinking back, I realize many of the guests at the wedding that day would probably have taken part in poetry and elocution contests at meetings of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, enabling them to give the gift of poetry to Lennie and Pinky as a “a thing of beauty” to be to them “a joy forever.” The last speech of the evening was made by Doctor Goldman, who spoke about “hope springing eternal in the human breast” and made references to how courageous the bride was and how it was necessary to have faith and be optimistic.

  Afterwards, Lennie and Pinky opened the dance floor to Mickey and Sylvia’s “Dearest.” The dancing ended at about 1 a.m., and Doris got to keep one of the smaller cakes off the big cake and she took it into her bedroom for fear we, her children, would rise in the night and devour it.

  A few months later, Pinky was operated on, but it was too late. She died, and they buried her in her wedding dress. Lennie was drunk for two weeks straight after that, and even Miss Mirry was moved to say that she felt sorry for him.

  “Dear Mrs. Goodison, Would you please sweeten my mouth today with some of your dinner? Love, Teacher Bernard.” Our house at Studley Park Road became a hospitality centre, much of which revolved around my mother’s seemingly bottomless cooking pot. Teachers from All Saints School; our schoolfriends, many of whom became important Jamaican statesmen and entertainers; relatives visiting from the country, many in the process of immigrating to England, who had come to receive a crash course from my mother on how to look and behave stylishly in a new land, all came to eat every day from Doris’s bottomless cooking pot. The main meal of the day, “dinner,” was served at noon, and all the children came back from school to eat it. Marcus and our eldest brother, Howard, would drive up in the telephone company van and as soon as they arrived, the miraculous midday feeding would commence. Many of our schoolfriends who came to eat at our house did so to avoid eating Bullo slush, the free school lunch provided by the government for Jamaican schoolchildren. My mother began running a guest house of sorts after all.

  Bullo slush came by handcart each day, steaming and sloshing from side to side in a big square galvanized tin. It was cooked in a kitchen somewhere in the city and dispersed to primary schools throughout Kingston to provide a hot nutritional meal for the city’s schoolchildren. Bullo slush was a dark brown lumpy stew in which portions of gristly mystery meat moved like the fins of a shark. Many children claimed to get running belly from eating it. Bullo slush gave off a faintly medicinal smell, the same smell given off by the free cheese and milk powder distributed at school. There were rumours that iodine was added to all “government food” so that in case the schoolchildren had any cuts, this food would heal them.

  Like her mother before her, Doris cooked huge amounts of food every day and much of the money she made from sewing went into feeding the multitudes. You could “smell her hand,” as her father once said, from the moment you turned into the gate. She always cooked the midday meal herself. Miss Mirry acted as her assistant, cleaning the seasoning and picking grains from the rice. My mother believed in the culinary power of garlic, always scraped with the edge of a knife; and many white circles of sliced onions, pimento kernels, lengths of escallion were pressed hard to release pungent juices, and were added to with sprigs of fragrant thyme, sliced country pepper, black pepper, and salt. All these were rubbed into the meat with clean, bare hands. And the meat–beef or pork, mutton or chicken–was seasoned then browned in huge iron Dutch pots, then covered with just enough water and left to stew into succulence. To the bubbling gravy she added Marcus’s favourite sauce, Pickapepper Sauce, whose bottles had on the label a rendering of a gaudy plumed parrot picking a red pepper. Then tomatoes and thyme were added to the bubbling brown gravy. She cooked deep pots of rice, steamed verdant leafy bundles of iron-rich calaloo, grated carrots, sliced tomatoes, because she believed in the importance of eating vegetables; and she fed all the children who came, including a few of my brothers’ schoolfriends who had become Rastafarians.

  Below All Saints School, along the gully bank, was a Rasta camp from which the sound of hypnotic drumming and chanting issued night and day. Neighbourhood rumours of dark deeds, from ganja smoking to human sacrifice, ran rife and fuelled my mother’s fear that her sons might be drawn by some compelling, ganja-smoking force, to go down and join the Rastafarians. She prayed night and day to the God of the Church of England, and dispatched all her children to Sunday school at All Saints Anglican Church every week without fail. “The Church of England, all the Harveys were born into the Church of England,” she would say, and she would tell her children again and again how the Anglican religion had brought the Harveys through everything from Uncle Howard’s murder to the robbery by George O’Brian Wilson’s legal family of the property willed to Margaret by her father, and because of their faith, the Harveys were still going strong. Surely, she said, it was the teachings of the Church of England that had kept her going when she and my father had lost their Malvern house. And in her early days in Kingston, what but the Anglican religion had helped her to rise up every morning and read from the Book of Common Prayer and choose a good Anglican hymn to sing to herself over and over as she faced the hostility of Vie and the women in the yard–“God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain”–to help her to make sense of all the changes, the uphe
avals in her life. My mother could not see how an angry God, who had to be worshipped in clouds of ganja smoke, could help her or her children.

  Fireball, thunder ball, earthquake, lightning, fire bun, Babylon, fire fi you, Babylon, fire fi you. On every street corner in Kingston in the 1950s, there had suddenly appeared fierce “Beardmen.” Some of them said that it had been the great Jamaican prophet, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who had announced “Look to Africa for the crowning of a black king. He shall be the redeemer.” And so it was in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen, direct descendant of King Solomon and the black Queen of Sheba, was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and given the title, Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. And thus it was that the descendants of kidnapped and dispossessed Africans found a god who looked more like them.

  My mother said she could understand why they felt this way, for slavery had been a terrible and wicked thing, but she did not want her sons to become Rastafarians. Rastas wore their locks like Samburu warriors. Dread, uncut locks because the Bible that they lived by said that a razor must not touch the hairs of your head. The Dreads, with their wild, red eyes, poured scorn and destruction on Babylon, Babylon being the system of government that Jamaicans as colonial subjects lived under, Babylon being Jamaica, a strange land to those who considered Africa to be their true homes.

  “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” sang the ex-slaves, the ones who celebrated Empire Day, the Queen’s birthday, by going out and lining the streets in town and country, and waving small Union Jacks. When the children went to school on Empire Day, they were rewarded with a penny bun (a kind of coarse lump of the Queen’s birthday cake). Was there a special fund in the coffers of the colonial government to provide penny buns for the black children who sang that Britons would never be slaves? Some Calypsonian sang, “Build me a road make I walk on the sea to see my mother country.” He did not mean Africa. Every New Year, the Queen gave Jamaicans a message. Sometimes she and her family came to visit and everybody lined the streets again and waved small Union Jacks.

  My mother took all of her children to see Her Royal Highness, and when I said that I did not want to see the Queen, she said to me, “So you think that you are your own big woman now?” I remember standing there on King Street, totally miserable as the sun blazed down upon lines of Jamaicans waiting to see the Queen go by. When she finally passed by in a big topless car, we could see that she was a small woman who waved her gloved arm mechanically and smiled. All I kept thinking was that I really did not see why I had to stand up for such a long time to catch a glimpse of the Queen for such a short time.

  The Dreads were capturing land all over Jamaica, seizing Crown land and building settlements and camps and sending smoke signals to young men in clouds of wisdom weed. There was explosive Nyabinghi drumming and chanting, days and nights of endless reasoning, reasoning upon reasoning, to turn Babylon’s logic upon its bald head. But there were things about Rastafarians that fascinated my mother, who loved words, like the strange language they spoke with “I” as the centre of all things. According to Rastafarians, there was no separation between people, so you and me became “I and I” even a great crowd of people became a multitude of “I’s.” “Africa is I father’s home, Africa I want to go,” cried the Dreads on the streets of Jamaica. They said there was no more understanding, for too long had Jamaicans been kept under so Babylon could stand, so henceforth the I and I would “overstand” and “Bungo,” which used to be a curse word signifying black and uneducated, would be a title of honour. Bungo Natty would be a high title because knotty hair offended the aesthetics of Babylon and the texture of black hair was something black people could not do anything about without causing great discomfort to themselves.

  The reason for this subversion was explained to my mother by one of the young men, known as Phantom, whom she used to feed from her bottomless cooking pot. Although he no longer ate her food, because Rastafarians preferred not to eat salt, he always came to visit with her and to be received as an honoured guest, as she was known to receive everyone. Having nine children of her own did not prevent my mother from becoming very attached to other people’s children, and Phantom was one of the many neighbourhood children for whom she cared deeply. He was honest, hopeful, and ambitious–qualities my mother found endearing in combination. “Phantom,” she had asked him, “why a nice young man like you from a decent home, who went to high school and who your mother try with so, go and take up Rasta?”

  “Mother Goodie,” replied Phantom. “Babylon don’t like how I and I talk, Babylon don’t like how I and I walk, for I and I mouth too big and I and I nose too broad and I and I skin too black and as for I and I hair, I and I won’t touch that. Everything about this kidnapped African is like poison to Babylon. So what Rastafari come to is this, block this game, turn over this table. I and I will not play by Babylon rule book, for that book no fair, I and I take I self outta this three-card game, and who want play it can play it, now mum is the word, parapinto is the game. I and I prefer not to eat no salt, and I and I will touch no part of pig, that is why the I cannot partake of that lovely plate of stew peas that the I has offered the I, because I and I foresee that a day will be coming when what sell in a shop will not have buyer, I and I will live close to the ground and grow the green herbs and eat the iron of the quick-springing ilaloo, and build our structure with ground provisions until that bright morning when I and I work being over I and I will fly away or will board the Black Star Liners which will come at last into Kingston Harbour. You know Mother Goodie, them arrest I last year and the first thing that Babylon representative do is to walk scissors through I head. Years now the I cultivate these dreads, no razor walk near these locks. I let them clump together as they see fit, grow like stout vines and hang long down I trunk. They accuse the I of breeding lice, rumour, and propaganda of forty-leg in the dread head. Mother Goodie, Babylonians are Delilah’s descendants. The I watch I locks lying like woolly serpents at I feet, locks which were once woolly serpents alive on the I head, then I turn and see the grinning house slave holding up scissors like a forked spear, claiming him is warrior, him cut I down and conquer I. I drum for him, a funde mental mourning song, for his living death to come. Life set on a wheel and it will wheel, wheel and turn till the I turn come, must come. Come down Babylon, come down, come down offa Black Man shoulder.”

  Years later, we were told by a family friend from Ghana that at the same time Rastafarians were becoming a force to be reckoned with in Jamaica, in parts of West Africa, specifically in Cape Coast, in the town of Oguaa, dreadlocked men had also begun to appear. Wild-eyed men who lived apart from the rest of society, in remote places, by deep lagoons, who dressed in rough, woven crocus-bag garments and carried staffs would appear on street corners and chant.

  “Wona nyi, wegya nyi. I am your mother, I am your father Ahomaka wo mo. There is joy in it, papapahpa. Very well,” cried the Dreads on the streets of Ghana, lending cosmic support to the Dreads of Jamaica.

  Some of the neighbourhood boys began to disappear down the gully bank. You would see them on the street, dreadlocked strangers with red eyes who stared past you because they no longer knew you. For fear that a similar fate would befall her sons, my mother prayed harder and harder to the God of the Church of England to preserve her sons from what she saw as a state of perdition, because once these boys “sighted up” Haile Selassie, it seemed they never again returned to normal life.

  But ironically, it was the same Phantom who became one of the first converts to leave Rastafari and to take refuge in the land of Queen Elizabeth of England.

  Phantom appeared in our yard one day carrying a cardboard grip. He was dressed in a brand new, tight-fitting continental suit made for him by the great Jamaican entertainer and tailor, Clancy Eccles. He was wearing a shiny pair of Three Castle shoes and his shorn head was covered by a “stingy brim” felt hat. This outfit in later years would become de r
igueur for English entertainers, and this is gospel: it was introduced to Britain by Jamaican immigrants. Phantom had come to tell Mother Goodie goodbye and to bid a general farewell to us all, saying:

  People I am leaving, for

  Rasta-ism is “ism”

  Cramp and paralyze all “ism” and “schism”

  Rasta-ism is no ambition “ism”

  Rasta-ism is ganja “ism”

  Rasta-ism is live-like-dog “ism,” Rasta-ism is old

  nayga “ism”

  At that point, a black Zephyr 6 taxi drew up outside and Phantom went out the gate, with my mother wishing him “travelling mercies” and giving him a large slice of cornmeal pudding wrapped in a grease-proof bread bag to sustain him on his journey. He climbed in and departed for the wharf, driving past the ice cream parlour operated by the beautiful Chinese woman named Cynthia, past Miss Dinah’s grocery, and the barbershop operated by Sillo, a man who was proud to be an African, so proud that he called his barbershop Addis Ababa Shop. Phantom boarded an Italian banana boat called the Ascania, having paid a passage of seventy-five pounds, and set sail for England, leaving Rasta behind.

  Everyone expected Phantom’s ship to sink. We waited to hear that it had been swallowed up by the waves because there was a traitor to Rastafari on board. But it did not sink, and years later he came back on a visit and told my mother of his time there.