From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  Phantom said he had landed in London, England, and because he did not want to run into anyone in the Jamaican community who might have known him, he took a train to Wolverhampton, where he had no friends or relatives, and so had no one to show him the ropes. The only thing that he knew about that town was the name of the football team, the Wolverhampton Wanderers, because he bet on them when he used to buy the football pools. Nobody would rent him a room except for an old woman named Miss Dicey O’Riley, who drank glasses of jet-dark porter all the time and kept walking through the house in various stages of undress, crooning “The Rose of Tralee,” thus forcing Phantom to come in late every night and leave early in the morning every cold and lonely day of the year. He got a job in a factory where the first thing that happened to him was an English boy started asking him about his Three Castle shoes. How come a Jamaican like him owned such a good pair of shoes? When the boy found out how much the shoes cost (seven pounds) and knew he couldn’t afford to buy a pair, he threw one of Phantom’s shoes in the lye pit, out of bad mind and spite.

  Phantom had been writing to his woman and sending money home, but had received no reply. No “Dear Phantom…I hope these few lines find you in the best of health, enjoying the maximum capacity of relaxation.” So after a while he took himself to the London dockyard, having calculated when the Ascania would be in port. There he looked for the cockney sailor he had befriended on the voyage coming over. He begged him to go to his yard in Jamaica and to inquire of his woman who was no longer called his queen why she did not write to him. Using Nyabinghi patience, he waited the forty-two days until the ship went to Jamaica and returned to London. The sailor said that Phantom’s woman had said that she had never received a letter, much less a pound note from him since he left for England and she was just getting ready to forget him with another man.

  Phantom told the sailor that every month he had put a letter with money in it in the big blue postbox. “No mate,” the sailor said, “that big blue box is the garbage tip.” And Phantom took that as a sign that he should return to the fold of Selassie I, for under Babylon system he was spending his labour for nought and nothing, selling his birthright for a mess of garbage.

  From that day, Phantom sight up Rastafari once again. When he came back to visit he had regrown his locks and every Christmas for years he would send my mother a Christmas card, sometimes with a white Santa on it; and when we laughed at that, my mother said, “Leave him, it’s the thought that counts.”

  After her last daughter, Ann, married and left Harvey River to go and live in Montego Bay, Margaret found herself alone in the house for the first time in her life. On this day, she got up from the rocking chair by the window and checked in every room to see that the lamps were out and the windows closed. Just to make sure, she called out to the helper Mina, knowing full well that Mina had gone about her business after she’d been paid that afternoon. Mina had gone down to the river to bathe the minute she finished serving Margaret her lunch of Saturday beef soup, then she had come back and dressed herself in the good white jersey dress that Rose and Albertha had sent from Canada in a barrel of clothes for the people of Harvey River.

  “This dress must be worn to church” is what Margaret had told the girl when she had given it to her. And here it was, midday on a Saturday, and Mina had hauled on the good good white dress, pushed her feet into the nice black patent leather shoes that had also come in the barrel from Canada, and dressed to the dickens, had almost run through the gate, shouting behind her that she was going up to Dinalvah to see her mother. Margaret called out to her that she had “better not fly past her nest and come back to work late next morning.” But she knew that Mina was not really going to see her mother; Mina was going to see her boyfriend, who lived in the barracks occupied by workers on the San Flebyn sugar estate.

  Mina’s mother’s name was Delmina. The Harveys always told how all the women in that particular family were called Mina or Delmina or Elmina because Mina’s great-grandmother had been shipped as a slave from the port of Al Mina on the Cape Coast of Ghana. When he was alive, David used to say, “Mina’s people are determined to remember that they were stolen from Africa.” Margaret herself did not see the point in remembering those things. She knew that there were people right there in Hanover who were still fully into their African ways. Right there in the neighbouring parish of Westmoreland, there was even a rocky place named Abeokuta that they said was just like a place named Abeokuta in Nigeria. People from Abeokuta called themselves “nago” people. They talked their Yoruba talk, ate pounded yam, cassava, or breadfruit, which they called “tum tum” or “fu fu,” and they danced their “ettu” dance in a slow shuffling circle to the beat of goatskin drums.

  When her daughter Ann was still living at home, Margaret used to overhear her and Mina giggling away together, and Ann would say to Mina, “All right now, Mina, talk some African talk for me.” And the girl would talk her strange talk for Ann, who would then imitate what Mina had just said. But if they saw Margaret coming, they would stop immediately. Truth be told, Margaret just did not understand her last daughter. What could she possibly find so interesting in Mina’s African business? But that was Ann all over, just so free and easy, taking serious things for a joke.

  Imagine, thought Margaret, after that blessed Baptist minister Thomas Burchell rode up and down all over Hanover, all over Jamaica, preaching to help abolish slavery and to turn these people from their dark ways, you still could not take the tum tum and fu fu business out of them. They said that Thomas Burchell was so zealous in his preaching and abolitionist work that he kept five or six horses which were worn down to shadows from his constant riding across the island, preaching Christianity to people like Mina and her relatives who were still sharing out God’s power. Some of these people still believed in different gods, one god for this, one god for that, one for healing and another one for war. Assistant gods did not appeal to Margaret. What would happen if one day your mouth were to miss, your tongue slip, and you summoned the god of old iron and war instead of the god of softness and peace that you badly needed? The idea of one All-Powerful God who was in charge of everyone and everything appealed more to her nature.

  Now these days with her husband buried out in the front yard and with all her children grown up and gone from the house, Margaret feels the need to call upon that one All-Powerful God more than ever. She feels her own great strength waning, she is exhausted all the time; even the act of pulling off her dress exhausts her. She has to pause with her long pink flannel nightgown bunched halfway across her chest in order to catch her breath.

  I imagine that Margaret never told a soul this, but it is certain that she talked about their children to her dead husband, David. After he had died, she had had to wear red and black underwear for the first time in her life because people said that if a widow did not do this, her husband’s ghost would come back and try to make love to her. But red or black underwear or not, sometimes she senses his presence very strongly in the house; and every night since his death, she’s certain that he gets up from under that white stone slab outside in the yard and comes into their bedroom just to look in on her, and when she feels him about, she talks to him.

  “Your daughter Cleodine is doing well, she and the husband send clear to England to buy an organ for her to play her music at Rose Cottage. Oh and I hear from Doris and Marcus, the big girl Barbara is doing wonders. She get a grade one, one you know, in her Cambridge Senior certificate, and she going to work at the Gleaner Company because she want to be a reporter. I’m so glad that they will have a child working now to help them…I don’t hear a word from Edmund this last few months…I hope everything is all right. Miss Jo and her Barbadian husband seem to be getting on fine but she write to say she is not feeling so well these days. Mmmm. If you ever see the sweet photograph of herself that Rose send, my god D, she have on one lovely fur coat and she just stand up there smiling in the snow like a real Canadian…Flavy him still going from church to churc
h, church to church, and Ann…Ann as I tell you gone to Montego Bay with that man she married. That man that she choose over all the other good good Hanover men who come here to court her. She find fault with everyone, that one foot too big, this one forehead too shine, she turn down all those good responsible men for this stranger man from Montego Bay. This same man who even Ann herself admits is not the most reliable of men, but then she turn round and tell me that he make her feel like the most beautiful woman in Jamaica.

  “From the first time I see that big black car drive up to our gate and this tall big chest man step out, my spirit just grow cross, especially when the man step bold bold into our yard and I ask him, ‘What can I do for you?’ and him say, ‘I have come to see your daughter, Mother Harvey,’ and David, I say, ‘Well, that is between you and my daughter, but don’t call me Mother Harvey, I am not your mother, I did not give birth to you.’ And David, when I say that I just get up and go inside and slam the door. I hear the two of them out there talking and I pay them no mind. From that, almost every Saturday I see him drive up in the big black car, and as I see him step into the yard, I get up and come inside, and little after that you daughter dress up in a new evening gown–she sew a new one for herself every week–with just some little piece of lace or crochet throw cross her shoulder, and she and him gone in the black car. I warn her till I tired, I say, ‘Now that your father gone you think that you are a big woman who can just do as she like, but this is my dead husband house and you cannot rule me in here.’ You know what she tell me? She say, ‘You’–that is me, her mother, you know–‘you and Mrs. Cleodine Campbell think that God give me life just so the two of you can rule over me; well, make tell you, you are not the boss of me!’

  “And is just so it went on, David, till a few months ago, when one day I was sitting down talking to Mina in the dining room. I say to Mina: ‘Today my mind give me for a piece of dry Lucea yam and I want that yam from no other ground except my dead husband ground.’

  Hear Miss Mina she: ‘But Mother Harvey, yam outside in the pantry.’

  ‘Did that yam come from Mas David ground?’

  ‘I don’t tink so, ma’am.’

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Did you not hear me just tell you that my mind don’t give me for any other yam except yam from my dead husband ground?’

  ‘I don’t even know if yam is there.’

  “Well, I tell you, when I hear that I nearly drop down! I stand up on my foot and I say to her, ‘If no yam is there, it must be you and you damn blasted boyfriend fault, for I’m paying him to work my husband ground, and if he is not doing that, it is because you are there dividing his mind, and the two of you are there with your quakoo bush African business!’ And while I’m saying this, in walks you last daughter and the man. And hear him: ‘Mother Harvey, I have come to tell you that your daughter and I are getting married.’”

  Margaret did not attend the wedding of her last daughter although the wedding was held in her house at Harvey River. If her husband, David, were alive, he would surely have prevailed upon her to put on a show of support for their child’s wedding, for as he always said, “Things must be done decently and in good order.” But according to family lore, Margaret Aberdeen Wilson Harvey arose on the day of her last daughter’s wedding and proceeded to go about her business as if that day were just any other ordinary Saturday. She dressed in one of the demoted church dresses which she usually wore around the yard, she put on her husband’s old work boots, and she proceeded to attend to her usual domestic chores, paying no attention to the bride or groom or the assembled guests. Then at some point in the proceedings, she took up her usual seat in her rocking chair in the living room and right in the midst of the assembled guests, she proceeded to puff upon a long chalk pipe, blowing clouds of smoke over the wedding party.

  The union did not turn out to be a success. Maybe it was the sight of swatches of her long silky black hair lying like question marks on her pillow when she raised up her head each morning, and what those swatches of hair told her, that made Ann eventually decide to leave her husband, for her hair was falling out from her grieving over her bad marriage. Whoever heard of reading hair? Well, some people can read cards and some can read tea leaves and coffee grounds. But hair reading? As far as I know, my mother’s sister Ann is one of the only people who knew how to read hair. This gift came to her during the course of her short marriage to a man who claimed that he had fallen in love with her because of her great capacity for happiness, for her bubbling over source of mirth, for her wonderful openness, her clear ringing laugh that summoned everyone who heard it to start laughing too. This man who through his irresponsible ways proceeded to snuff out her joy. But Ann grows able to read the future and to heed warnings sent to her by her guardian angels, who, three years after she married this man, begin to write frantic messages to her with her hair on the white tablet of her pillow.

  Go Home reads hair. Go Home Now. Go Home before this bad marriage kills you. And then, Go Home, Your Mother needs you!

  Margaret is sitting in the rocking chair by the window when the truck rolls up with Ann and the children. She tells Mina to go and help her daughter to bring the children inside. When a weeping Ann tries to explain to her why she has come back home, Margaret, sounding like the daughter of George O’Brian Wilson, cuts her off by saying, “What’s done is done, you have children to raise, stop the damn bawling.”

  After Ann helps her mother to get dressed for bed and assists her up the three steps into her big mahogany four-poster, Margaret says, “Ann Rebeker, do one last thing there for me, just rub my foot with some of that Canadian healing oil that your sister Rose send.” Margaret dozes off while Ann rubs her feet. Ann gets up and makes her way to the other side of the house to her old bedroom, where her children now lie sleeping. Before she leaves she makes sure to close the door of her parents’ bedroom, where her father’s jacket is still hanging in the wardrobe, his felt hat still resting on the bureau.

  And Margaret would have woken up in the middle of the night, feeling blessed that she was no longer alone in the house. Pleased that once again she had children around her, and most of all relieved that her last child was safely back home, away from the dangers of a bad marriage. She would have talked to her dead husband about all this and told him how God moves in a mysterious way, for their youngest daughter is now a big help to her in her old age, that the house is much brighter with children around. How Ann seems more mature and responsible now, that she is a very good mother. “She much more considerate and obedient to me. The other day she just come and say to me, ‘Mummah, I want to thank you.’ I say, ‘For what?’ She say, ‘Because now I realize what you went through to bring me into this world and to raise me,’ and I say, ‘Now you know what it is to be a mother, Ann Rebeker. Now you know what it is to be a mother.’”

  For weeks my mother’s mind had been running on Margaret. As she went about her wife and mother business, it was as if her own mother was beside her, reminding her how things were to be done. “Better you buy a small piece of meat without fat, and stretch it with vegetables than to get a whole heap of fatty meat.” “The first thing that a good woman do as she wake up is to put on water to make tea for her family.” “No child should rule a parent.”

  And at night in dream after dream, she kept seeing her mother with her two long grey-and-white plaits, smoking her chalk pipe. In the most recent dream, the smoke from the pipe curled into her good eye and clouded it, then David’s face appeared in the pupil of the eye.

  Doris woke up washed in a cold sweat and shaking. She told Marcus that they should try to go to Harvey River to visit her mother, but he said he had to wait on his leave. By evening, the news of her mother’s death reached her. It was brought to her in person by her brother Flavius.

  On any other occasion she would have said, “Flavius Harvey, I long to see you till I short,” but when she saw her brother standing in the doorway of her sewing room that day, she knew that this was not a time for ch
ildhood jokes.

  Flavius stood in the doorway, with his hat placed over his heart. “Dor, I have bad news, I come to tell you that our mother is gone,” was what he said.

  “Gone? Oh my Lord, oh my God. When Flavvy, when?”

  “Last night. Ann say she heard her cry out during the night ‘my head, my head,’ and Ann run into the room just in time to see our mother fall back onto her pillow, stone dead.”

  Doris, seated at her sewing machine, drops her head onto her chest; Flavius steps into the sewing room and sits down heavily on the trunk. He and Doris weep like small children.

  Doris and her brother sit at the dining table and talk as if they were the only two people in the world. Every time one of my mother’s children passes through the room, they mutter something like, “Sorry, Mama, sorry Uncle Flavy, sorry your mother dead.”

  Except for the eldest siblings, Barbara and Howard, most of the children had no real memory of Margaret because their visits to Harvey River were so infrequent, but they always felt her presence, for Doris quoted her every day on all domestic matters, including the rearing of children.

  Long into the night, Doris and her brother keep a wake for their mother. Flavius tells her how a few days before she died, their mother had sent to call him to tell him she had heard that he and his wife, Arabella, were quarrelling because she did not want to leave the Seventh-day Adventists and go with him to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “‘Flavius, marriage is a give-and-take business,’ she told me, ‘don’t you expect to find God on earth and don’t expect another human being to understand everything about you.’ Those were the last words she ever spoke to me,” said Flavius.

  It was then that Flavius told her about his recurring dream; the dream in which an angel of the Lord would appear to him as he wandered in the desert, and whenever he was about to sit down at an oasis, the seraph would say, “Keep moving, Flavius, this is not where you should pitch your tent.”