From Harvey River (24 page)

 

O
ne evening Marcus arrived home from work and came in the door saying, “I brought somebody to see you,” and lo and behold it was her brother Edmund, whom my mother had not seen since he had run away from Harvey River before my mother met my father. “I saw this man standing with one foot on the running board of a taxi on East Queen Street, a man wearing a felt hat pushed to the back of his head, just like in that photograph on your bureau, and I said to myself, my god that must be Edmund Harvey. So I went up to him and said, ‘Hi, brother-in-law.'” My mother can't quite believe her eyes that after all these years she has met up with her runaway brother. They can't stop hugging each other. She immediately offers him some dinner, and he says, “Thanks, just as long as there is no yam in that dinner.”

Uncle Edmund pushed back his chair from the dining table and lit a Four Aces cigarette. He recommended to my mother an iron tonic that he says all taxi men are taking. Taxi men exchange information that is vital to their business. They are always concerned about their health because they work long hard hours. They read the newspaper every day because they have to have good conversation with the passengers, especially tourists, who always have an endless list of questions to
ask the taxi driver. “It's as if when they take your taxi they expect you to be the Minister of Information,” said Edmund. “And although you don't want to be telling them any foolishness, then again, you can't tell them everything, especially when it comes to Jamaican politics. So when one of those tourist ask you something like, ‘So don't you think that Jamaicans are lucky to be governed by England and have a Parliament and a British Governor,' you just say Oh yes and drop off the damn idiot at the Myrtle Bank Hotel and take the tip that he give you.

“‘You are one smart Jamaican fellow, don't listen to all this crazy talk about Independence.'

“‘You are right boss,' said the taxi man.

“I just make him go on none the wiser that I don't care a blast about England and Missus Queen and that I agree with Norman Manley that Jamaica should be an independent country,” says Edmund.

“Taxi man have to know what is what,” he tells my mother. “Taxi man have to know every bar and brothel in Kingston, every bank, government building, theatre, night club, statue, and monument. Taxi man have to know how to give the tourists what they want, and that is why I always said taxi man don't make good husband. We are always on the move. Morant Bay one day, Montego Bay by the same night, Port Royal next morning. Taxi man mostly live alone, we live cowboy life, so taxi man stay.” Edmund draws hard on his Four Aces cigarette.

“So you going home to rest now, Edmund?”

“No sir, the night is young, I am going to catch a midnight show out at Majestic Theatre. Doris, you brother is a real Kingstonian.”

After that, Uncle Edmund came to visit at least once a week and he was always telling stories to illustrate why Kingston was a more exciting place than Harvey River, where
he swore he would never return, neither in life nor death. Kingston to him was the place where the most fantastic and fascinating things happened. Take, for example, the story of the old man in the yard where he lived, an old man called Tata, who had a bosun growing inside his pants, a swollen giant testicle the size of a yellow heart breadfruit. You could see the shape of it when he walked his rolling off-centre walk. Everybody said he should get it cut, but he believed that if they cut it, he would surely die. All the boys in the area claimed to have seen this terrible thing that grew underneath the old man's trousers. They gathered in packs and stormed the toilet when Tata used it. They peeped under the door, and the old man became hysterical. He threatened to kill them for their insolent out-of-order behaviour, their outrageous lack of respect for an old man. It was a kind of rite of passage. The boys would not be men until they had seen Tata's bosun, until they had stared at this awful, unnatural ball, and had walked away still seeing, not struck blind or dead. “The other day they give him one whole bottle of white rum to drink,” says Edmund, “and two grandsons lift him up and carry him down to public hospital. The doctors gave him gas and cut off the bosun. They said it is the biggest one anybody ever see in Jamaica, maybe in the whole world, and them send it gone to England for the doctors over there to examine it.”

My mother had a story of her own for her brother, one to illustrate how bad people from Kingston could be. She told him of a situation right there in the yard next door to where we were living, which had to do with a young woman named Lizzie who had come from the country to help her sister Bernice after Bernice had had three babies in two years and ten months. Lizzie looked like a baby duck, a dill-dill, because she had big wide lips and wicked bandy legs; and she spoke so
badly that everybody laughed at her. She would say “guddung” instead of “go down” and “gittup” for “get up” and “tandey” for “stay there,” and she called her sister “Sta Bernice.” All the other women in the yard she addressed as “ma'am”…yes ma'am, no ma'am. Lizzie was always working. She washed line upon line of birdseye nappies gleaming white. She made “tie-leaf” or “blue-drawers,” delicious portions of grated sweet potato, dark sugar, and coconut milk, spiced with nutmeg then wrapped in banana-leaf parcels and steamed. Lizzie cooked a fine mackerel rundown, flaked salted mackerel cooked in a spicy, savoury lick-you-finger coconut custard, causing Mr. Vincent, Bernice's husband, to joke that Lizzie was such a good cook that he should have married her instead of her sister. After a time, Lizzie stopped calling the other women “ma'am” so much. She also began to grumble, saying that her sister could help herself a little more instead of just lying down all day and complaining about how weak she felt.

Then one day Bernice said that she was going to the country to see about herself because she couldn't understand how she still felt so weak even after she got so much rest. She knew a man in the country who would give her a good bush bath and a read-up. She left Lizzie in charge while she was gone. Lizzie said that she heard from the country that the obeah man said that Bernice's case was a hard one. That somebody was working hard to keep her down because the obeah man said he kept getting a vision of somebody driving two long ten-penny nails into Bernice's right calf. “When Bernice came back from the country, nobody in the yard want to face her,” said Doris, “because if the obeah man did not tell her that Lizzie and Mr. Vincent were now along with each other right out, then Bernice lose all around. But Vincent tell her himself. Tell her openly that Lizzie was a better woman than
her any day and advise her to go back to the obeah man in the country. Bernice leave that same evening, but she come back the next morning when Vincent gone to work, and beat Lizzie till she soft. I guess she rest enough, and she was not feeling so weak any more.”

“Edmund, you better take care, you hear. Kingston is not an easy place,” said my mother, “a place where it is not easy to raise up yourself if you fall.”

My mother found out first-hand that it is sometimes hard to raise yourself up because God knows there are always people who are eager to see you stay down. Like her oldest sister who hadn't come to visit her because she was not sure that her chairs were good enough. When she finally did come to see her, she came in a dream, shaking her head, saying, “Poor unfortunate you, you have no luck.” This was Cleodine's greeting to her from the gateway of the Harvey home because in the dream my mother has been forced to return to her parents' house with all her children. “Poor unfortunate you,” she repeats, but that is just the warm part of her greeting. “My dear, you are like a pipe, everybody just comes, turns you on and uses you and then walks off and leaves you,” says Cleodine as she strides up the stone path leading to the Harvey house. Even the flowers in the yard seem to fold in on themselves as they hear these words. The bold-faced hibiscus shrink their red-and-gold petals and roll themselves into tubes, displaying only their pale undersides. The loud chirping cling-cling and grass-quit birds abruptly shut up, and a flurry of April butterflies who were flightily making the most of their short lives settle nervously on branches. Cleodine must have risen before dawn to
put herself together for this visitation. She was wearing a gorgeous silk dress of cocoa brown, awash with gold-and-orange blossoms. Her dark brown leather pumps had been polished and shined by the yardboy, her brown leather handbag with its shining clasp looked positively plump with prosperity, her hair was styled in an upsweep, and her gold-rimmed glasses gleamed on her straight nose bridge. She decided against wearing a hat but carried instead an umbrella trimmed with ochre lace held high above her head.

Even in a dream it is hard to recover from somebody likening you to a standpipe. It is harder to gather yourself when they quickly repeat it. “Just like a pipe, everybody just come, use you and then walk away, you meet it my dear, you really meet it.” And my mother wants to ask her what is this “it” that she has met and to remind Cleodine that she herself has met her “it.” But she is doubled over by that lethal repeat, that vicious one-two jab.

But if Cleodine came to her in dreams to liken her to a standpipe, others came too, and for the rest of her life my mother lived by these visitations.

 

At first Doris had thought that it was the clip-clop of the breadman or the milkman's horse coming down Orange Street in the before-day morning. She thought to herself that maybe she should struggle up out of sleep, get out of bed, and wake one of the boys to go out into the street and buy fresh milk or a warm harddough bread. But the sound of the hooves kept coming, right up to the gate and then she heard them inside the yard. The hoofbeats then sounded as if they were climbing all the way up the steps and into the room and then she saw her grandmother Leanna sitting astride her grey mule right next to her bed, her long necklaces of silver coins soldered together,
tinkling like bells. Just like she did when she was a young girl, Doris jumped onto the back of the mule and Leanna guided it out of the room, down the steps into the brick-paved courtyard, where all the tenants were standing looking in amazement at the tall flanked grey mule ridden by the jet-black old woman in a dress the colour of laundry blue, her silver money jewellery shining in early light.

Doris clung to her grandmother's waist, pressing her cheek to the woman's bony back, inhaling her strong body scent of cinnamon and escallions. She closed her eyes and time slowed down so that the short ride across the courtyard felt as if they were riding forever over the green pastures of Hanover and Westmoreland. As they rode, the guinea grass soaked with dew water flashed and bathed the soles of their feet and the night-blooming jasmine sprayed their faces with her last ounce of essence before closing her white vials. The early morning air carried the potential sweetness of green sugar cane before it hardened into iron stalks at the sun's urging, stalks so hard that a man could break his back trying to cut them down. They rode past men and women asleep in small huts and long barracks-type dwellings. This was the grace hour when they existed in dreams as ordinary men and women, free to lie down or get up whenever they wanted. This was the hour before they rose to meet cane. To seed and weed, to cut and harvest it. The hour before some would run away or stay and undermine it, withdraw their enthusiasm from it, throw words and sing bantering songs, and meet in secret at night to plot bloody overthrow of it. They rode past the time, before cane, when Jamaican people planted mainly corn and cassava, hunted wild boar and coneys, and went to sea in magnificent boats they had fashioned from trees; when their artists made sacred wood
carvings that would survive for hundreds of years; when their scientists discovered how to extract poison from the roots of cassava; when they played an early form of soccer and lived mostly in peace, till three leaking ships filled with lost men came towards them bearing Hard Life.

Doris and her grandmother rode past all the amazed tenants straight into the kitchen where Leanna dismounted and used her riding crop to clear away a space for her granddaughter's stove on the firewall. “Patience, you are going to have to study patience and take what you get till you get what you want,” she had said, and then she had mounted her mule and ridden away, clearing the gate effortlessly. But not before she removed one of her money necklaces and draped it around my mother's neck. “Control the silver,” she'd said. “You will never get any big money in this life. Massa will always hold that, so learn to control the silver.”

Doris always said that it was after her grandmother Leanna came and made a space for her on the firewall that the women in the yard all started to befriend her.

 

“Doris, Doris, take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground which thou standest on is not holy ground but hard work ground.” Nana Frances Duhaney had come one night and told her that, paraphrasing the words of Yahweh to Moses. She had bent down and removed Doris's soft pumps from her feet because Doris, in a determined effort not to let herself go, had been wearing her leather pumps around the house like her sister Cleodine. Nana Frances had come, bent down, taken the shoes off her feet, and told her that the only way that she was going to be able to manage all the hard work she would now have to do to raise nine children was to go barefoot around the
house. She told her to uncover her feet in order to draw up strong energy through the wooden floorboards and through the metal pedal of the sewing machine.