From Harvey River (7 page)

My great-grandmother was a Guinea woman. It seemed that, at best, Leanna Sinclair's feelings towards George O'Brian Wilson were mixed. While she was pleased by his attentions, she always felt as if her life's breath was being cut off when he covered her, and so she closed herself off tightly whenever he approached. She bore him two children, my mother's mother, Margaret, and a boy to whom he gave his own name, George, but who died when he was an infant. To capture her heart he tried flattery. “By Christ y'are the loveliest ting I've ever laid eye on.”

“But you hate Jesus Christ, you tell me so youself, how you going swear by him and me believe you?”

He gave her gifts.

“I bought some ting for you, a fine red dress.”

“I don't wear red. Plenty African get catch because them was wearing red and that is how them see them to catch them.”

“Shut your focking mout and just do what I tell you.”

George Wilson never did get to ingest that part of Leanna's soul which he visualized as a rim of light, no matter how hard he tried to make her cry out so that it would detach itself from her soul-case and float through her open throat into his mouth. He never did get to possess Leanna because she could always see far and she knew that George O'Brian Wilson was not her true love. If she appeared to be looking out to sea the first time that George Wilson saw her, it was because she was seeing a ship, perhaps it might even have been the one that was bringing those twin brothers to Jamaica. Leanna was able to recognize other people who could see far in this way, they always looked past you. Mostly they looked up to the sky. If they looked into your eyes, they often looked quickly away because they could see things about you that they did not want to have to see. Who wanted to be seeing people with perfectly good-looking faces change into animals when you looked at them? Or hear greedy people grunting, when to the ears of others they were speaking in dulcet tones?

One night when she was twelve years old, Leanna dreamt that she was one of the Africans packed into the hold of a slaver. In her dream, she was crouched and chained, wedged tightly against the bodies of other Africans squatting in their own excrement. The smell and the thick darkness in the hold was like no other darkness or smell in creation. It was shit and sulphur and the raw and rancid sweat of human fear, and aloes and bitters and the vile essence of degradation. The foul stinking air was rent by the hoarse cries of people calling out to different gods in many different tongues, calling upon ogun and shango and damballah, gods of iron and lightning and war, to fling down ancient curses upon their captors. Curses as old as the world itself. Curses employed by the first man and
the first woman who suffered at the hands of other crazed beings who had flown past their nests, transgressors of the sacred law: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Curses invoked by King David and King Rameses against their enemies. “Tear them from limb to limb, dash them against the rocks, smite them hip and thigh, maim and blind them, may their tongues cleave to the roofs of their mouths. May their own children suck out their eyes, their life breath, may dogs eat their entrails…”

And one or two more pious ones amongst them were praying to more compassionate gods to send mercy rain to soften the hearts of their captors, men who would reduce human beings to beast-state for the sake of gold and silver shekels and Cain's profit. Suddenly, in the midst of this terrible place, the people gradually became conscious of music being played. A music which took its rhythm from the waves on which the ship of darkness rode, a rhythm which rocked out and returned to its centre, conducting in its wake and movements the peace that passeth understanding. And for what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only a few minutes, silence settled over the slaver. In later years, Jamaicans would call this beat Rocksteady.

Leanna had started to see the man who would become the love of her life just about the time that she entered puberty, and in her visions he was always walking towards her. Sometimes she would not see him for months and then she would be doing her domestic work up at the Irish penkeeper's house, polishing a mahogany table, and she would see an image of a young man, not too tall, but with strong legs and big hands, appear up through the wood grain of the table. For years she saw his image. Sometimes he would be walking across high blue mountains with people who looked like his mother and father, another time he would be making his way through cane
fields, and sometimes he was walking by the sea. Once, he was lying down on the cold ground, looking up at the stars, gazing up at the constellation which looked like a big gourd in the sky, wishing for a drink of star water. Sometimes the young man was crouched down with the people who looked like his parents, hiding from someone or something in the bushes. But one thing was certain, he was coming towards her. And because Leanna knew this man was coming, she kept her heart tightly closed whenever George Wilson was near, so that he eventually grew tired of trying to make her yield up her essence to him.

After the trouble,

some with the name Bogle

catch fraid like sickness

and take panic for the cure.

John Bogle's people had found their way to the parish of Westmoreland after the Morant Bay Uprising, in 1865, when John's relative Paul Bogle–to whom he bore a remarkable resemblance–was hanged. Paul Bogle preached and he walked to petition the representatives of the British Colonial government on behalf of the starving people who were turned loose after emancipation and given nothing. No land, no money, no forty acres, not even one mule. The planters were compensated for loss of human property, but the men and women who had worked to build the great wealth of the British ruling class received not one farthing. On August 1, 1838, their first morning of full freedom, many of them had walked away from the estates carrying not even a simple hoe with which to till the ground. The ones who chose to stay worked for the lowest
possible wages, out of which they then had to pay the estate owners for their keep. Then the sugar industry collapsed. Money was scarce and taxes high. Disease and famine, cholera and smallpox, claimed more than fifty thousand lives and then, like an additional Biblical plague, came drought. Domestic food crops began to fail year after year. Add to that a justice system that as a rule dispensed no justice to the majority of Jamaicans, a system administered by the estate owners and managers who were full of vengeance and wrath over the loss of their human property.

Paul Bogle, a child of enslaved parents, was a prosperous small farmer from Stony Gut in the parish of St. Thomas. Deacon Paul could speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but he was also a man of deeds. He led a delegation on a forty-five-mile walk from Stony Gut to Spanish Town to see Governor John Eyre, and draw his attention to the suffering, but the Governor refused to meet with them. George William Gordon was among the men of property who sympathized with the people's suffering. The son of a slave woman and a Scottish planter, he had worked hard to educate himself and had been elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1844. Bogle and Gordon, Baptists both, tried to petition the Colonial government on behalf of the beleaguered people. They tried and tried the peaceful way. They walked, they wrote petitions, even to the Queen herself. For their efforts they got a letter from Queen Victoria, which recommended the starving landless Jamaican people practise industry, thrift, hard work, and obedience.

Governor Eyre ordered Paul Bogle and George William Gordon to be hanged for leading the uprising that we were taught in school was the “Morant Bay Rebellion.” Some four hundred desperate people stormed the courthouse in Morant
Bay and clashed with the local volunteer guards. Twenty-one men, mostly white, were killed. More than six hundred ex-slaves were executed and as many flogged in response to the uprising. A dispatch from Col. J.H.F. Elkington to the commander in the field went as follows. “Hole is doing splendid service all about Manchioneal and shooting every black man who cannot account for himself. Nelson at Port Antonio is hanging like fun by court martial. I hope that you will not send any black prisoners. Do punish the blackguards well.” One month after, the Morant Bay River in St. Thomas was still stinking, polluted from the number of corpses floating in it.

After the Morant Bay Uprising, to say that your name was Bogle was to sign your own death warrant. Some of the surviving Bogles coined protective variations of their great name, such as Bogues, Boggis, and Bogey. John Bogle and his parents had walked across the island from St. Thomas to Hanover, removing themselves as much as was possible from what happened in St. Thomas. As far as the east is from the west, John's family travelled to the parish of Hanover, trying to keep their lives and to keep the great name of Bogle alive. But ironically they ended up being called Buddle instead of Bogle by many Hanover people. And one Sunday in 1875, as sure as fate, Leanna was walking towards the town of Savanna la Mar, and walking towards her on the main road was the same man she had been seeing in her dreams, leading a big grey mule. She began to laugh as she recognized him, and he began to laugh even louder. They met in the middle of the road, and he said to her, “If you was
my
missus, I wouldn't make you walk. I would give you this nice grey mule.” From that day, they never lived apart, until John Bogle died. They lived, farmed, and flourished in Grange, Westmoreland, and Leanna rode her grey mule, wore her money jewellery, necklaces and bracelets
fashioned from silver coins soldered together, and lived a happy, prosperous life. When her mother married John Bogle, Margaret, who was six years old, told him, “You not my father.” He said, “I know, but I am the man who will honour your mother.”

 

“Me meet the man who intend to put him ring pon mi finger.”

That is how Leanna Sinclair announced to George O'Brian Wilson that she was ending their relationship.

George Wilson, who had by then lost all interest in getting Leanna to surrender completely to him, said:

“Fock! So you're to be married then…well, way you go, just you have my Meg dressed, ready and waiting outside every Sattiday morning, for I'll not be setting foot in your goddamn yard ever again. I'll bring her back by nightfall…Oh, don't imagine tis you who's leaving me, truth is, I've no further use for you!” George Wilson never spoke directly to Leanna again. He did not feel any need to. She had given him what he needed to make his way in Jamaica. She had given him Margaret.

 

M
argaret Aberdeen Wilson met David Harvey when they were schoolchildren. The fact that they both had black mothers and white fathers meant that they had a lot in common, and as long as they lived, they never ran out of things to say to each other. Their childhood friendship blossomed into romance, and when they became teenagers, David began to court Margaret. Leanna and her husband, John Bogle, would stay up in the small sitting room to make sure that the couple outside on the verandah “behaved themselves,” so Margaret and David would sit on the verandah, which was lit with a smoky kerosene lamp, and they would talk about their friends, about what was happening in the village. She would tell him what her father had told her about Ireland, and he would tell her what his father had told him about England, all the while aching to fall into each other's arms. When it began to grow late, Leanna would rock her mahogany chair vigorously on the floorboards to signal to David that he should go home. David was a sensitive young man. He always took the hint, and he used this rocking-chair signal as his cue to perform a farewell suite of songs on his harmonica. Out of sheer mischief he would blow, “Nobody's Business but My Own,” the anthem of the “don't-care.”

If me married to a nayga man

turn round change him

fi one coolie man

nobody's business

but me own

Then he would play what became his and Margaret's signature song, “Beautiful Dreamer.” He would raise the silver harmonica to his lips, and it would flash in the half-darkness of the verandah, where the small kerosene lamp rested on a wicker table. He would play “Beautiful Dreamer,” accompanied by the high alto chirping chorus of crickets, the bass calls of bullfrogs, and the croaking lizard's response. His inspired performance was illuminated by stage lights of peenie wallies, or fireflies, and the thick country darkness formed an opaque black fire cloth behind him. He would depart playing that song, which Margaret would hear growing fainter as he rode away on his horse, back to Harvey River, where he took her to live after he married her when she was eighteen and he was nineteen years old.

David's father, William Harvey, had given them twenty acres of land and helped the new marrieds build their first house. Margaret's father, George O'Brian Wilson, handcrafted fine leather shoes for the bride and groom and insisted on giving away his daughter despite the protests from his legal wife and children in Lucea, to whom he was forced to say: “There is not yet born the focking man or woman who is the boss of me.” He and Leanna Bogle did not exchange one word at the wedding of their daughter, and John Bogle stood silently by Leanna's side as the young bride, Margaret, who was dressed in a long satin gown trimmed with wide bands of Irish lace that George Wilson had specially ordered from England, walked
grim-faced–as was the custom of the time–under her sheer veil up the aisle of the Lucea Parish Church.