From Harvey River (17 page)

The parish of St. Elizabeth was supposedly named for Elizabeth, Lady Modyford, wife of the Governor of Jamaica from 1664 to 1671. On old maps of Jamaica the area was marked as “Elizabeth,” and it is not certain exactly when Elizabeth became a saint. Before Columbus encountered the island of Jamaica, the parish was the site of significant Arawak and Taino settlements, where the peaceful native inhabitants
lived planting cassava and corn and going far out in the Caribbean sea to fish in large, long canoes hollowed out from the trunks of tall trees.

Apart from shopping expeditions into Lucea, and one or two visits to Montego Bay and Savanna la Mar, my mother had not travelled far from Harvey River before she married and moved to Malvern. Whenever Marcus, who was referred to as “Doris's intended” after their engagement, described Malvern to her, she would try to picture the place that was said to have one of the most salubrious climates in the world. A place that was almost always cool and where the air was clear and clean. She took to reading any story in the
Gleaner
newspaper that had anything at all to do with her intended's place of birth. “Shakespeare donates silver pattern and chalice to Black River Parish Church” ran the caption under a photograph of a man handing over an ornate box to another man dressed in a bishop's robes. But even if it turned out that the donor of the pattern and chalice was only a very distant relative of the great William Shakespeare, the newspaper report was proof that Malvern could not be an ordinary place if one of Shakespeare's relatives lived there.

Over time my mother collected a great number of odd facts about the parish of St. Elizabeth, facts that she would feed to her children for the rest of her life. “Santa Cruz,” she would say if she saw or heard the name of that town mentioned anywhere, “Santa Cruz is a Spanish name meaning Holy Cross.” Other Spanish names that intrigued her were “Hato De Pereda,” which was what the Spaniards called the Pedro Plains; and “Lacoban,” what they first called the Black River.

“When I moved to Malvern, in St. Elizabeth, I really missed the Harvey River,” she would say, “for it is a parish that sometimes suffers from drought. Still, there are rivers and
ponds there, and the Spaniards called one of those ponds ‘Laguno Suco,' which means ‘dirty lagoon,' but St. Elizabeth people call it ‘Wallywash.'”

Cockpit Country, Accompong, Cuffie Pen, and the Land of Look Behind. This was Maroon land, bush domain of Maroon leaders like Captain Cudjoe, who along with Accompong signed a peace treaty with the British in 1738. German Town, called “Jahman town,” is where blond, blue-eyed men and women, the descendants of German immigrants, many of whom came to join the constabulary force, live and talk deeply dyed Jamaican patois.

Any mention of pirates would cause my mother to relate how southeast St. Elizabeth used to be home to many buccaneers. “Yes,” she would say, “when Henry Morgan, who was a wicked old pirate, converted from his sinful ways and became Governor of Jamaica, he laid down the law to all the other buccaneers that they were to follow his example and settle down too. He gave them a lot of land in St. Elizabeth for them to turn ‘gentleman farmers.' Some people say the Goodisons were descended from such men.”

“‘Labour in Vain Savannah' is what St. Elizabeth people called a place where the red soil was so tough and water so scarce that no cultivation could possibly thrive. Speaking of farmers,” she would continue, “St. Elizabeth farmers are some of the most hard-working and industrious people in the world, for dry as that parish is, they still manage to grow so much of the food that feeds Jamaica. You know those people will even set down straw at the root of the plants to catch dew water when rain is scarce! They grow the nicest Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes in Jamaica and the best peas, pumpkin, and cassava.

“The Arawaks were the ones who first cultivated cassava,
you know, and there were Arawaks living in St. Elizabeth before Columbus came,” she would say. “People who saw your father Marcus's mother always said she had Arawak blood in her. She resembled your father's cousin Estelle, the two of them had that same copper-coloured skin and that jet-black hair.”

It was the arrival of her sister Ann that completely cured Doris of her homesickness. “Doris, I long to see you till I short.” “Ann, you was always short,” replied my mother, as they hugged and giggled in the front yard of the house in Malvern. Ann's talent as a mimic immediately found fresh material in the miserly character of Dorcas and the vicious troublemaking of Patsy and Ramona, whom she christened the cerassee sisters, cerassee being a local bitter herb. It was Marcus who had suggested that they invite Ann to come and spend time with them in Malvern when their own house was ready, for he knew that there was no one who could make my mother laugh like Ann. “Doris,” she would say, “you remember ‘Steevin, yu see mi drawers?'” and my mother would begin to laugh till long eyewater ran down her face, until she began to gasp for air, and her laughter and lack of breath became a series of whoops. Ann did not even have to finish the rest of that “Steevin, yu see mi drawers,” a joke they had laughed about from the time they were small children, when on their way to church one day they overheard an exchange between an elderly couple who lived in a little house right on the main road:

Old woman: “Steevin, yu see mi drawers, the one with the crochet round the foot?”

Old man: “But now now Jemima, yu no tink yu damn fast, wha me know bout yu drawers?”

The compelling presence of the fabulous Ann drew all the eligible bachelors of Malvern to their house like a magnet. Suddenly all the young men in St. Elizabeth seemed to be “just passing by” the Goodison house from the time that Ann arrived. She flirted with, and made fun of, the best of them and she and my mother giggled like Don't-Care girls as they fixed up the newly renovated house. In between the giggling, Ann confided in Doris about the difficulties of being the last child left at home, how Margaret and herself were now always at war, especially since their father, David, was now confined to bed. He had nearly drowned when the small boat that was ferrying people from Havana, Cuba, to Lucea, capsized one Saturday night a mile outside the Lucea Harbour. David was a skilled swimmer and would have easily made it to shore but for one of the passengers, a large, loud-mouthed woman who could not swim. She kept holding on to him, and David just could not leave her to drown as all the other passengers had done, but laboured with her clinging to him like a massive remora that long water mile, giving her his strength, hauling her great weight through the dark Caribbean sea.

 

Most people agreed that my mother and father were not, as her father, David, would have said, “unevenly yoked.” That they were a good match. That she was lucky to find such a kind and charming husband who was a good provider, and that he was lucky to find such a caring, industrious, and gifted wife. Her siblings all seemed to be happy to welcome Marcus into the Harvey clan. Everyone with maybe the exception of Cleodine. For if any one of David and Margaret's children was going to have an outstanding marriage surely it would have to be her, no, she could not, would not cede that honour to Doris.

Ann, in her later years, once referred to Cleodine as “Cleopatra Queen of Denial.” For Cleodine had found that the way to cope with the disappointments in her own life was to simply deny that they existed. She solved the problem of ever witnessing my mother's happiness first-hand by never paying her a visit in her new home in Malvern. She would sometimes write to my parents, usually to inform them of some new piece of property her husband had acquired or of some important addition they had made to his place of business or to Rose Cottage, but she never came to visit. Ann and Flavius, however, would often over the years come and stay with their sister Doris in Malvern, and would always keep her abreast of the latest news in Harvey River. Once, Rose and Albertha came back on a visit from Canada, and they all had a big happy family gathering up in Malvern, without their older sister Cleodine.

 

Shortly after they were married, my mother had gone with my father to visit the capital city of Kingston, where he often went to the Kingston Industrial Garage on Darling Street, to buy parts for his garage business. He had taken her with him, because he said he wanted to show her something. He had driven past
KIG
down to a squatter settlement near the garage. “I know how you like an unusual sight, Doris, so look there.”

My father pointed at a sprawling village built entirely from wooden packing crates. Everywhere as far as the eyes could see was the word
FORD FORD FORD FORD FORD FORD FORD
stencilled on the sides of the little wooden shacks.

“Ford ship the Model T in parts in one big wooden packing crate, and when the dealers assemble it, they use one side of the crate to form the floorboard of the car, and the
rest of it the Henriqueses give away to whoever asks for it.” My mother's eyes filled with tears when she thought of their nice comfortable house in Malvern and her family home in Harvey River. “Oh Marcus, God bless them,” she said. “You have to give our people credit for being enterprising.”

It was on that occasion that he had taken her to the Ward Theatre, where my mother for the first time in her life saw a moving picture. As she sat in a plush, velvet-covered seat in the balcony of the cool, dark theatre, sipping a cream soda that tasted like water from some sweet invisible fountain, she was as happy as she had ever been in her twenty-six years on earth. There in the dark, she kept glancing over at the profile of her handsome husband. Even in the dark, she was aware of his distinctive profile, his high forehead, his “Roman” nose, his smile, oh his wonderful smile. She still experienced that little shiver of excitement when she saw him smile. His smile and the smell of his 4711 cologne. She was immensely proud of the way he sat there perfectly groomed, wearing a white shirt that she herself had ironed. She admired the way his fingernails and toenails were always clean and well-trimmed. “A clean man,” she always said to her children, “your father is such a clean man.” There in the Ward Theatre, looking by turns at the screen where the grainy black-and-white film rolled, then back at her husband, her future, without a doubt, was bright. A woman with a high upsweep hairdo that trembled when she struck the keys sat in the orchestra pit and pounded out accompaniment to the movie on an upright piano. My mother leaned over close to my father and whispered that the woman was good at her job, for she knew how to play fast when one of the actors was running for a train, and to play slow and soft when the lovers on the screen were kissing. When she said that, my father kissed her.

My Lord, if only everybody in Harvey River could see her now. “What a token,” her father, David, would have said about moving pictures, using the word that the King James Bible used to describe signs and wonders. That day in the theatre she felt certain that she could live happily anywhere on this earth as long as she had her husband beside her. She, who had frowned and wept all throughout their wedding ceremony because, as she always used to say, “It was a brazen bride in those days who smiled,” was freely returning her husband's love, there in the dark.

The next day as she dressed, she changed her outfits over and over, asking him, “How you like this?” “How about these shoes with this dress?” and unlike her sisters, he never lost his temper with her, he just sat on the bed in the guest house and smiled and smiled and told her naughty things like, “Yes I like that blue dress, it shows off your nice bosom, and every man on King Street is going to grudge me if you wear it.” She had changed outfits until she had come up with the perfect look to go shopping with him on King Street, with its rows of sophisticated department stores, stocked with every imported luxury item imaginable. “Cleo, Miss Jo, Rose, and Ann should be here today,” she kept saying, when she saw the top-quality fabrics, shoes, hats, handbags, housewares, and toiletries sold by elegantly turned-out salesmen and women over genuine marble counters. On the arm of her handsome husband she had ascended the wide staircases to the upper level of Issa's department store and had lunched on the balcony of what was then probably the finest department store in the Caribbean. This outing had made her shopping trips into the town of Lucea seem small. The streets of the bustling big city had made my country-girl mother nervous. Although she had stepped jauntily in her fine wine-coloured pumps, which complemented
her cream-coloured linen dress with just a touch of hand-embroidery in the form of a wine-red rose on her left shoulder, she was happy to cling tightly to my father's arm on that visit as the great crowds swept them along, up and down King Street, happy that he was such a fine and reliable husband who would always protect her from any harm.