From Harvey River (31 page)

 

On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became an independent country. The Union Jack went down and the black, green, and gold flag
of our newly independent Jamaica was hoisted. On the radio they said that the Queen had given Up Park Camp, which was where the now departing British soldiers were billeted, as a gift to the Jamaican people, who wondered how she could have taken it back to England anyway. Independence Day was not celebrated on August 1, which was the day that slavery was finally abolished in 1838, but on August 6, and our leaders said to a country in which 80 per cent of the people are black that the black in our new black, green, and gold flag, stood for “hardship.” “Hardships there are, but the land is green and the sun shines.” And my father, Marcus, is dying.

For a year he suffered from constant indigestion. Eventually his dinner had to be cooked differently from the rest of the family's so that he became like a child again who had to be fed baby food, soft bland foods like steamed chicken and mashed potatoes and egg custards. Sometimes in the night he vomited in the bathroom. What did Doctor Donaldson say, Marcus? “That I have a stomach ulcer. He gave me these Gelusil tablets.” For months he ate small, round, chalky white antacid tablets all the time. He ate them by the dozen, hoping that their soothing, milky chalk would coat the angry inflamed sores in his stomach. But they only got worse. My mother said, “I tell you that Doctor Donaldson is a quack. He is the Company doctor. He does not care a damn about you. You better try to see a doctor at the University Hospital.”

At the University Hospital the doctors cut Marcus's stomach open, then quickly sewed him up again because the sores in his stomach were cancerous and spreading rapidly. At age fifty-five he lay in the front bedroom of the house at Harbour View that he and my mother had just bought. He lay there, in a drugged sleep, his body rapidly shrinking, taking up less and less space in their double bed.

“Marcus, what do you think we should do about adding on another bedroom?”

“I don't know, Dor, can't you see that I am not dealing with worldly things now?”

And Doris, who knows this but does not want to hear it, breaks down and weeps.

“Papa, guess what, Karl take my good shoes and give them away.”

My brother Karl, who was born a social worker, would make periodic raids on our possessions, taking our shoes and clothes and giving them away to the really poor children of Kingston, then lecture us, his siblings, about having more than one pair of shoes when some people have none. Normally, my father would have told him that he should at least ask us first before he helped the really poor with our things. But my father just smiles a half-smile and says:

“That's just material goods.” Then he closes his eyes.

My cousin Joan sits with him sometimes, she just sits there, quietly holding his hand. I tried to but I cannot sit still and watch my father die. So I learn to cook egg custards and milky baby foods to feed to him. Sometimes he says, “Come and sit and keep my company,” but I cannot sit and watch him die. On Monday, December 6, 1963, his stomach became rock hard. He was vomiting blood, and the only place for him was the hospital.

“Hello, Dr. Thompson. How is my father?”

“Marcus went about an hour ago.”

My brother Nigel was outside in the street playing football. I stood on the verandah and called out to him.

“Nigel, Papa dead.”

He said nothing. He just kept on playing football, kicking the ball up and down the street. He played until the street
lights came on and he kept playing, kicking the ball harder and harder. He played until people began to turn off their lights to go to bed, he kept on playing football. Then he stopped and abruptly sat down on the sidewalk under a street light and dropped his head into his hands.

 

C
leodine knows they call her “Mule” because she has never birthed a child. Sometimes they even call her “Grey Mule” because she is so light-skinned, but they never call her so to her face, never. Behind your back is “dog” but to your face is “Miss Dog.” No, they never call her anything to her face but “Miss Cleo, Mi Missus.” Or her married name.

All she wanted was one child. One child. Not a whole brood like her sister Doris, whom she once referred to as a “baby-factory.” She eventually adopted a child from a nearby village, a girl with a yellowish complexion like hers. But try as she might to make her into a young version of herself, confident, gifted, erudite, and superior, the child proved to be gifted only at mischief-making; and by the time she ran away to Kingston with a truck driver at the age of sixteen, she had managed to earn the undying dislike of every member of the Harvey family, so dedicated to creating trouble for others was she.

“Queen Cleodine,” her husband used to call her. “My queen,” he called her. She wouldn't have believed that he would ever have the gall to disgrace her because he used to say himself that he was so lucky to be married to somebody like her. She had eventually told him, “Since you are mixing up with these
common women in the village, you are never, never again in life to touch me.” She is determined as always that they will never haul her down, never. Her back becomes straighter than ever. She walks to church each Sunday, dressed perfectly. She is partial to fine linen dresses tastefully trimmed with hand-embroidery. Her pumps are leather, soft for her long feet. She fashions her hats herself, there is no chance, none, that some blasted commerown will ever wear the same clothes as she. She walks through them every Sunday, fixing her spectacles on her narrow nose bridge.

He built her coffin while she was still alive. One day her husband came up with the suggestion that since she was so particular and fussy, since she did not like for a lot of strangers to be crowding up her yard at any time, that they should make arrangements for their funerals while they were still alive. She said nothing, just allowed him to call in the carpenters and make the two coffins, then he stored them under the house. It was her brother Flavius who noticed them and Ann remarked on it too, that her coffin was stored directly under her bedroom. It was as if the man was hoping that she would fall right through the mattress and the floorboards and nestle perfectly into the cedar dress that he built for her. Her brother Flavius asked Clement why in the name of God he had put his wife's coffin right under her bed. Clement acted as if he hadn't even heard. Flavius just stood right there in the yard and began to pray the Lord's Prayer.

In her heart Cleodine was praying too, calling on David and Margaret and all the Harvey generations to protect her. In a dream her mother came to her, right there on the front verandah, she came and said that she was sorry, that she had been taken in by appearances; that she should have looked past this man's dashing caballero act that he had learned in Cuba and
Panama; that she should have seen that he had lived the loose life too long and that he would never truly be able to settle down. Now that had to be a dream, for Cleodine never heard her mother say she was sorry in all the time she was on earth. Cleodine got that from her. She too did not believe in saying “I'm sorry.” She believed that you should try to do a thing right in the first place and then there would be no need to be sorry. After that dream Cleodine woke up in the middle of the night and played the organ until morning. She was alone in the house so she disturbed no one.

Still, when her husband suddenly fell ill, she nursed him, cooked for him herself, tried to give him all the healthy food he didn't want to eat. “Leave out the fatty pork and the beef,” she would tell him, “that kind of food is not good for your heart.”

They eventually hauled out his coffin from under the house and put him in it. My mother went down for the funeral with some of her children. She was a widow too now but she had nine children. If each child represented an opportunity to help a parent, my mother had nine more chances to get a drink of water than her sister. At the funeral, when Cleodine was sitting in the front pew with her eyes dry, Doris went and put herself beside her sister and took her hand and sat there with her hand in hers for the entire funeral.

The day after my mother died, I go to Papine Market to buy food for the people who would be coming to pay their respects to the family. Weighed down by loss, I walk slowly into the market and as I approach the stall where my friend Peggy sells yams, she calls out to me, “My friend, what happen to you?” I come up and stand by Peggy, who is seated before a big heap
of yams, and I say, “Peggy, my mother dead.” And the minute I say that, she turns to the woman to her right, then to the one to her left and the one behind her and tells them, “Her mother dead.” Immediately these women leave their stalls and come and circle me and begin to sound the Jamaican Om: “nuh mine nuh mine nuh mine nuh mine.” I just stand there weeping, allowing their sounds of consolation to push back my grief. And as I am standing there in their midst, my mind drifts back to the time I'd told my mother I wished that I was dead, and how she had almost killed me for saying something so horrible.

I had been about twelve years old at the time. It was a Saturday morning, and just as I was escaping deep into one of my sister Barbara's books, my mother called me into the sewing room and presented me with a two-page shopping list which she had drawn up in her beautiful, confident handwriting. “A good fist, we Harveys all have good fists,” she'd always say in admiration of her own handwriting. And so, with her good fist, she had smashed my plans to spend the day reading
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
.

I didn't like going to buy trimmings. It meant taking the bus downtown to King Street and walking from store to store and trying to get the exact match to the things on the list. My mother's standards were very exacting. If the colours were a little off, or if you bought one-inch belting instead of one and a half inches, or if you bought buttons which in her opinion looked cheap because you had skimmed off some of the trimmings money and bought an ice-cream cone from the cafeteria on the second floor of Times Store, she would become harsh, angry, and insulting about your lack of good taste. At such times she looked just like her mother, Margaret, did in a photograph taken with David in the yard at Harvey River on their
fortieth wedding anniversary. “Mummah look vex in this photograph because Puppah give away almost everything that they owned,” my mother would say.

As I stood there, wilting under my mother's fierce gaze, I thought on the injustice of my seeming to be the only one of her children who was available to buy trimmings. And the more I thought upon this, the more I became convinced that a serious wrong was being done to me. The boys could not be sent to buy trimmings for the same reason that my mother did not let them do housework, such activities being unmanly. My sister Barbara was at work at the newspaper, and my other sister Betty was never able to go out on her own because of her epilepsy. It just did not seem fair to my teenage self. I started to cry at the misery of it all, at being the only one chosen to do this errand which, as my mother pointed out, would help to put food into our mouths. I stood there weeping as she handed me the list of zips of various lengths and beltings of different widths and buttons to be bought at Triff Hyltons and covered buckles and accordion pleating to be collected at Amy Cruz's. Through my resentful tears, I said, “I hope that a bus runs over me and kills me when I go downtown, and then you will be sorry that you forced me to go.”

I would live to regret saying those words for many years to come, for my mother repeated them to everybody as proof that I was a Don't-Care girl with a divided mind who was in danger of “becoming dead to trespasses and sins.” She was not intimidated by my hysterical adolescent attempt to guilt her out. She ordered me to go and buy the trimmings anyway. As I left the house in tears, I wondered what would happen if a bus did run over me. Would people say, “the poor little girl get a warning man, her mother should never force her to go downtown and
buy no trimmings that day, I am telling you, the woman well hard, look how she send the poor child to her death.” Fortunately for both of us, I completed my trimmings errands without being killed by a bus, and now here I was, more than thirty years later, crying in Papine Market because my mother was dead.

One by one, the women standing around me begin to testify to the goodness of one's mother. “There is nothing like a mother, no sir, there is nothing like a mother's love.” “Even if your mother is the worst woman in the world, you still have to love her because she give you life.” One woman tells of her mother's peaceful passing in the care of a loving daughter: “I did just bathe her and put on a new panty on her and put her to sleep on a clean sheet, and is just so she sleep off.” Each of them tell me about this rite of passage when your mother becomes your child, and I stand in that loving circle of women, like Sally Water of the children's ring game, with weeping eyes as they comfort me, no mind no mind no mind.