From Harvey River (26 page)

Soon after I returned to Kingston, we moved to no. 30 Studley Park Road, a move made possible by the fact that my two eldest siblings, Barbara and Howard, were now working and contributing to our family's finances. Barbara was at the Gleaner Company, where she would eventually become the editor of the evening newspaper, and my brother Howard went to work at the Jamaica Telephone Company. Everyone in our family was happy because, except for a nurse and her sister who shared the apartment downstairs, we were the only other occupants of our new home, which had three large bedrooms, a wide living and dining room, and a long enclosed verandah. The house was situated almost opposite the gates of All Saints Government School, which my brothers Kingsley, Karl, Keith, Nigel, and I attended. Even if it was not the prettiest of
houses, no. 30 Studley Park Road provided the answer to our family's prayers, for there we had our very own kitchen, bathroom, and toilets. And there was the sewing room.

I took to sitting in the sewing room although I had no real interest in sewing, assuming as I did then that my mother would always be alive to make me fabulous dresses, and asking questions of my mother about the Harveys, those who were living and those who were buried under the stones on which my cousins and I used to sit.

 

W
hen you came up the long flight of stairs which led up from the yard, you stepped into the living and dining room where a massive wooden table with turned legs occupied a good one third of the room's space. The table is where we ate all our meals, the older children seated on a variety of chairs, the younger ones on a long wooden bench. If you passed the table and turned left, you'd enter the room which was my mother's domain, the sewing room. It was here that the women for whom she made dresses sat and discussed “big woman business” as they waited for my mother to fit or finish their garments. This was also the room where my mother taught neighbourhood girls to sew, free of charge, so that they could as she always said “earn a bread and be independent.” This large room had a high ceiling and one window which looked out onto the street. Under the window was my favourite seat, a huge brass-tipped trunk that was used to store fabric. It was one of the few things left over from my parents' earlier life. Two beds, three or four chairs for the women to sit on, and my mother's Singer sewing machine completed the furnishings.

My mother always sat with her back to the door, so that the light from the south fell across the cloth she was sewing. Sometimes for as much as seven hours a day, every day except
Sunday, she could be found in that room, her long bare feet tilting at the wide wrought-iron pedal, her right hand spinning the wooden handle, bobbin, shuttle, presserfoot, many miles of fabric passing under her hands, arriving as cloth and leaving as fine garments. She sometimes ran the sewing machine like a racing car driver, bending her head way down, her long grey-and-white plaits curled around her face like slow smoke.

 

There is a constant stream of people, mostly women, coming through the sewing room to see her. They are not all customers, some come to ask her to read or write letters, to ask her advice, for her help, her opinion. She mediates in disputes too, sometimes saying, “A soft answer turneth away wrath” but at other times: “Don't allow people to take any liberty with you.”

That is what she must have told the woman whom she helped to run away from my father's friend Beadle, because one day, just like in those blues songs my father, Marcus, loves, Beadle woke up and found his woman gone. “Gone, Mrs. Goodison,” he comes to the sewing room to tell my mother. “The woman pack up and gone.” The sight of a grown man who has only recently moved to Kingston from Malvern, St. Elizabeth, openly crying like a baby renders all the women speechless. Even the flint-hearted Miss Mirry, our helper, who always had a bitter proverb to suit any occasion, is silent as everyone stares at the man whose workman's khaki uniform makes him look like a whipped schoolboy. Strangely enough, Doris, who is usually so sympathetic, says only, “This is all very unfortunate.”

“Whatever happens between you and your husband is nobody else's business, except if he is ill-treating you, and God knows that wretch was ill-treating that poor woman,” says my mother after Beadle has left. “Of course she is gone. I packed
her suitcase for her early this morning, and I call my brother Edmund to come in his taxi and take her to the wharf. That ship has sailed by now.”

She roughly turns the handle of the sewing machine and pumps furiously for a few minutes. Everyone in the room rides the waves of her indignation as my mother drives the sewing machine forward. Suddenly she stops. “He treats her like a dog. All his money goes to the rum bar, and when she has her period he orders her to sleep on the floor as if he was not born of woman. I am glad that I helped her to escape.”

The other women are silent, gazing in admiration at her. They have never seen this freedom-fighter side of her before, the fearless Doris who has just a few hours before helped to spirit away a battered woman to safety. Then a slender pale-skinned woman who chain-smokes, wears matching red lipstick and nail polish, and speaks with an American accent says: “I was with a man like that once. I met him on the fourth of July at a picnic when I lived in Georgia, and talk about a hot love! I believed I'd die if I didn't marry him…” and here she switches into Jamaican patois, “but see me, and come live with me”–and, as if in a chorus, all the other women finish the proverb with her–“is two different things.”

“Every time he beat me, he sent me flowers, or perfume, as if he was trying to cover up his stinking behaviour. Every time he black-up my eye, he would swear up and down how he would never hit me again. Till the next time.” And then she suddenly stood and lifted up her dress to reveal a deep keloid scar running down her right thigh. The women make loud sympathetic noises and glance quickly away from the horrible sight. The woman from Georgia lets her skirt hem fall and then turns around and picks up her cigarette, which she had carefully rested on the windowsill before she stood up. When she
lifts the cigarette to her lips to take a deep draw of tobacco and menthol, her hand shakes and so does her voice.

“I knew I had to leave the son-of-a-bitch after he did that. So you know what I did? I got my sister to send me a telegram from Jamaica to say, ‘Come quick, Mother is dying.' I bawled non-stop for two days until he said that he,
he
was giving me permission to come to Jamaica but only for two weeks. Well, I bid him one tender farewell at the airport, and I never went back. I left a house full of clothes, jewellery, and furniture, but what use would they be to me if I'd let him kill me?”

“I could never stand up and make a man just beat me so, me and him would haffi fight, after him not me father or me mother,” says Betsy, who is jet-black and has a wonderful open face. Her gums are dark, almost purple, and she has perfect white teeth. Betsy is also almost six feet tall.

The woman from Georgia now has tears in her eyes. She blows a long stream of cigarette smoke through the window.

“When you talk bout beating, my grandmother give me one terrible beating with a tamarind switch the first time I see my period,” says Edith, a cheerful young girl whom my mother was trying to teach to sew–without much success she'd often say–because Edith's world really revolved around blues dances. She lived for Saturday nights when she would boogie till dawn in various dance halls, dressed in tight blouses and wide swing skirts cinched tight at the waist with a broad belt that showed off her eighteen-inch waistline. Edith was always happily singing the latest Fats Domino song under her breath as she hemmed a dress or serged a seam but today she laughs a harsh, embarrassed laugh when she says, “She say she beat me fi warn me fi no get pregnant.”

“Damn old-fashioned behind times foolishness,” says the lady from Georgia. “After all, it's a natural thing that God made
to happen to women.” Then she snorts and says, “All the same, God seemed to save some of the worst things for women.”

“Mind you fly in God face,” says Betsy, who was sitting on the floor near my mother's feet. Betsy is a “Mother,” a spiritual leader in a revival group. Doris sometimes sews the cobalt blue robes that Betsy wears when she preaches, all full of the spirit, on the street corner.

I was sitting on a chair in a corner where my mother could not see me. I was willing myself to be invisible, praying that everyone would forget that I was in the room and just keep talking so I could hear, so I could learn about big woman business. On other occasions, if the conversation was becoming too grown up, my mother would say, “just stick a pin right there” to whoever was speaking, and then she'd turn to me and say, “leave, this is not for a little girl's ears.” But today she says nothing to me, so I just keep still, glad to be in on big woman business.

“You know, when I see my health,” says Betsy, “my grandfather call everybody in the house and tell them that they were not to treat me like a child any more, for now I could be a mother; and him shake my hand and give me five shillings and tell me to buy anything I want with it because I was now a big young lady!”

I remember that day when at age ten I was part of the big woman group, how everybody in the sewing room nodded their approval when Betsy told that story, because it seemed like the proper thing to have done.

“You can learn a lot from old people,” said Edith. “Is a old lady name Edna who always tell me that when things bad with you, when you broke and down-hearted is when you must dress up in you best clothes, for is better you make people envy you and grudge you than make them feel sorry for you.”

That was the signal for everyone to contribute their own words for the big woman to live by.

Doris: “My mother, Margaret, tell me, Rose, Miss Jo, Cleodine, and Ann that a woman must always at all times have a good nightgown and a good clean panty put aside in case she have to go to the hospital.”

Edith: “My grandmother tell me I must always keep at least one good woman friend who I can trust, who I can tell anything to and who won't turn round and disgrace me.”

Betsy: “For there is nothing worse than when you friend chat out you private business; even when the friendship done, you mustn't chat out you friend private business. You see me Betsy, if you tell me a secret, me carry it to the grave, for the Bible say that if you betray you friend secret, that friendship can never in life ever fix again.”

Doris: “That is true, it's like when a man stop love you; reconcile yourself to it. Know that it finish and done with, and never you force up on him, for the more you try and make him love you, the more he will hate you.”

Betsy: “But some woman will do anything to make a man stay with them, you know. You see that American woman Miss Simpson? Me understand say is some a her pum-pum hair she cut and parch and sprinkle like black pepper over King Edward food and that is why him left the throne of England and married to her.”

The woman from Georgia laughed so hard when Betsy said that, that she choked; and Edith, who was laughing till tears ran down her face, had to slap her on the back.

My mother frowned and glanced in my direction. Her look said, “you did not hear that.” Then in order to bring the conversation back from the edge of the pit where Betsy's inside dish on poor Wallis Simpson had taken things, she told a story
about her sister Ann to illustrate why a big woman had to be wise in order to protect herself in the world.

“When my sister Ann got married and went to live in Montego Bay, she had a lovely friend, a Mrs. Doris Melbourne, who lived next door. Well, my sister Ann's husband was not the best provider, and so when Ann get any money from her sewing she just give it to Mrs. Melbourne–who was separated from her husband–so that she could prepare meals for both families. When dinner was ready, Mrs. Melbourne made her daughter Elaine come to the fence and say to Ann, ‘My mother is inviting you and the children to have dinner with us.' And Ann just take her children and go next door and have a lovely meal with her friend. When her husband come in late, asking, ‘Where is my dinner?' Ann just say, ‘There is no dinner because you never gave me any money to buy anything.'”

“Lord that one good,” says Edith.

Then, my mother did something she had never done before, she turned in my direction and included me in the big woman circle. “You see Lorna, there? Up to yesterday I send her to go and help Mrs. Percy with something that will prevent her from going to the poorhouse one day.”

I remembered that the day before my mother had answered the telephone and when she hung it up she said, “Go to Mrs. Percy and she will give you something.” I liked going to Mrs. Percy's, which was above the grocery and bar run by her and her husband, for there was usually a quadrille group practising in the paved area beside the bar. I loved to see the dance–which I later learned had originated in the courts of Europe–being performed by neighbourhood people like the tall, elegant man known as Cubana and the local hearse driver the children called Bald-head Morty. When Mrs. Percy saw me
she'd said: “Oh, your mother send you for the cloth to make my dress. Excuse me, Mr. Percy (she always called him Mr.), I'm just going upstairs to get some cloth to give to Mrs. Goodison.”

Her husband just turned and scowled at her without saying a word. We went to their rooms above the shop, and she pulled out a drawer and took out a length of cloth. Then she reached into her bosom and extracted some well-creased pound notes, which she then folded into the fabric. She'd put the cloth in a bag marked “The Buzzer,” the name of a store on King Street, and she'd handed it to me. I now knew the reason.

“Poor woman,” said my mother, “she married to this man and work her fingers to the bone for him. By accident one day she find him will, only to discover that the man intend to leave everything to the children by him first wife. Well, from she find out that she is not in his will, she been taking money out the till and sending it to me to keep for her. Once a week she come here and collect the money and bank it. Imagine the poor woman have to be stealing out her own money because under the law a married woman have no rights.”