From Harvey River (6 page)

Nana Frances would get up early every morning, after only a few hours' sleep, to make big country breakfasts or “morning dinners” of roasted yams and breadfruit, bammies made from grated cassava, fried plantains, fried eggs, stewed liver, kidneys, and light, and escoveitched fish, washed down with quarts of coffee and chocolate tea. William was a big man who liked his food. She knew that, and she liked to cook for him and his trenchermen children. She would wash huge hampers of laundry in the river, beating the clothes clean on the river stones, washing linen as white as the proverbial Fullers soap. She kept the big wooden house clean, staining what seemed like acres of mahogany floors with red oxide and burnishing them with a club-shaped coconut brush. She dusted and polished
the heavy mahogany furniture with cedar oil, she cleaned the ornate silver cutlery with ashes taken from the belly of the iron stove, and she used the pulp of sour Seville oranges to shine the copper and brass utensils. Crouched on her hands and knees, she moved across the floors, her small calloused hands beating out a Johnny Cooper rhythm: Joh-nny Coo-per, Johnny Coo-per…that was the scansion and sound of the coconut brush beating out its domestic rhythm on the planks of the wooden floor. She starched and ironed clothes with small triangular-faced irons made by the local blacksmith, irons that were heated on wood or coal fires. She was forever bending over some source of heat or water, to iron, cook, set steaming plates of food before the big-boned Harvey men, proud of her reputation as a hard worker. She seemed to like it when people said, “She can work you see!” But she never encouraged her own daughters to work like that. She always told them, “I work enough for everybody already, you go and study your book.” So when her son David married Margaret Wilson, Nana Frances advised the new bride to hire a maid to help her with her housework. Above all, she cautioned, “Don't go and wash clothes in the river. Get somebody to do that for you. Don't make these people think you are ordinary.”

Her eldest son, Tom, took Nana's admonitions against ordinariness very seriously. He had been sent to Rusea's High School in Lucea, but growing bored with the dry curriculum that was imported without modification from English public schools, he took to skipping school and going to listen to the cases being tried in the Lucea courthouse. In time he persuaded his younger brother David to cut school and join him. At home they began to study the law books that their father had brought with him from England, and after a while they both knew enough law to be able to give effective legal advice
to the poor and defenceless of Hanover. David's talents lay more with civil cases. He was a gifted writer who wrote many letters on behalf of people unable to do so. He had a way of choosing appropriate phrases, for selecting the right words to express the plight of some poor, wronged person. Tom's talents lay more with criminal cases which he would “try” the night before the actual case, using his brothers and sisters as the accused, as witnesses, and as members of the jury.

“Go to my son Tom and my son David, they will tell you what to tell the judge.” Nana, proud that her sons were not ordinary, was forever recommending her sons' village lawyer practice to any wronged person. Their reputation, no doubt helped by their mother's tireless word-of-mouth promotion, grew to the point where the local judges issued an order banning them from practising within a five-mile radius of the courthouse. So Tom and David set up office under a Lignum Vitae tree with its masses of lavender blossoms, exactly five miles from the Lucea courthouse. Dressed like most men of their time, in dark trousers and white shirts and wearing felt hats, they stationed themselves under the spreading branches of the national tree of Jamaica while poor people, many of them walking barefoot, came to them for help. Many is the time David Harvey gave his own clean shirt laundered by his mother, Nana Frances, to some poor man to enable him to stand with dignity before a hard-eyed judge. My mother's father and her uncle instructed hundreds of people how to defend themselves against the British colonial laws that valued the smallest piece of property over the life of any ex-slave, and David went home sometimes without his shirt because he knew how the law judged by appearances.

O to hear him sing the lake Isle of Innisfree,

now become Harvey River, near Lucea.

“Down by the Sally Gardens.” My mother used to sing that song in a funny short-of-breath style, and looking back now I realize how many Irish words and phrases like “cute hooer,” referring to a deceptive man or woman, were part of the language of the Harveys. They must have picked their Irishness up from the sailor who jumped ship in the Lucea Harbour and fathered my maternal grandmother with a woman of African descent who became the Guinea Woman in the poems and stories I would come to write.

The sailor was George O'Brian Wilson, who first saw Leanna Sinclair, mother of Margaret Wilson Harvey, when he went to call upon an Irish penkeeper on a sugar estate in the neighbouring parish of Westmoreland. He had jumped ship in the Lucea Harbour at the sight of the magnificent blue-green mountains of Western Jamaica. “The fairest isle that eyes ever beheld,” is how Columbus had described this island. The intensely green landscape reminded George Wilson of parts of Ireland, but the weather here was much better, with its almost always hot, energizing sun and the warm clear blue seas with white sand beaches. Paradise. When he abandoned ship he took with him one thing, a woollen suit that had been woven and tailored by his own father. The wool had been dyed “rich black” by soaking it for a time in a boghole, then oiling it with goose grease before weaving it. That suit lasted him for his entire life, and he was buried in it.

George O'Brian Wilson was even more determined to stay in Jamaica once he landed and began to enjoy the rum bars and brothels of the small seaside town. This was the ideal place for men like him, and every white person he met seemed to have
come to Jamaica to run away from some dark secret. No man gave a straight answer to any questions about his past life. So he let the ship sail without him and set about trying to locate and form alliances with other Irishmen, who gave him this advice: find and marry the daughter of some local Creole.

Whites born in Jamaica were not considered white by the English, because by now there was so much mixing of white and black blood; with so many black women giving birth to “sailor pickney,” light-skinned children and jet-black children walking around with “good hair,” Aryan features, and eyes the colour of semi-precious stones. Creole families needed to find white husbands for their daughters, for one day they all hoped to escape this place where they were outnumbered by Negroes and return to “the mother country,” which many of them had never seen but which they nonetheless regarded as home.

It was not difficult for the Irish sailor to find a wealthy bride from one of these “anxious-to-upgrade-their-colour” families. Less than six months after he let the ship return to Ireland without him, he became a married man with property, the dowry of his Creole bride. Not long after his marriage, he went to visit another Irishman who worked as a penkeeper on a sugar estate in Grange, Westmoreland. It was there that he first saw Leanna Sinclair.

She was sixteen years old, just over five feet tall, and her skin was the colour of onyx. She had wide, amazed-looking eyes and a dusting of tiny warts that looked like beads of jet along the top of her cheeks, which is why she was called a Guinea woman. She was standing sideways when he first saw her, her face turned in the direction of the sea, standing on one leg like a Masai warrior or an egret, her other leg tucked up behind her. Her thick hair was hidden under a white headkerchief, and she gazed intently out to sea even as she served them.
George Wilson began to fear that she would drop the tray with the glasses of planters' punch called sangaree, and grow wings and fly straight over their heads as they sat there in their leather-backed planters' chairs on the wide verandah. He grew afraid that she would fly back to Africa before he got a chance to clasp her strange, wild beauty to him, and in that instant he became completely convinced that she possessed something that he needed in order to live, some powerful life force which he had to catch and absorb into him to enable him to make his way in Jamaica. He needed to cover her and be ready to catch it when it escaped from her throat as an ellipse of light. His fellow Irishman laughed when Wilson told him about how affected he was by the sight of this girl. “And you a newly married man and all!”

George Wilson, who would always refer to Jamaica as being “behind God's back,” enjoyed parallel honeymoons. His efforts eventually produced Margaret Aberdeen Wilson, as he named her–he insisted on the Aberdeen but never explained why–who was born with his fair complexion, grey-blue eyes, and long straight black hair; and another daughter, Mary, who was born a few months before Margaret to his lawfully wedded wife and looked like nobody he knew. George Wilson grew to love the child Margaret more than he ever loved any other human being in his life.

One day when Margaret was a small girl, her father had called her his “little neega,” which was probably his Irish pronunciation of “negro,” and the child told him, “If me a neega, you a neega too, for you is my father, you a white neega.” And that was true. He was much more in tune with the ways of the poor black Jamaican people than he was with the imitation English manners of the Creole class into which he had married. He had little or none of the graces of the well-to-do.
As the head of his new family, he was expected to behave like a member of the colonial ruling class, having to sit at table at night with the local gentry of Lucea, who talked about the “lazy, dirty Negroes” in much the same way that they spoke about the “lazy, dirty Irish” in England. He was much more at ease drinking in the small, dark wattle-and-daub rum shops with the thatched roofs which looked like the thatched sod and stone huts of his native county Galway, and he loved the robust African rhythms of the native music. He himself played a wicked fiddle and could sing so that it brought tears to the eyes. He would tell Margaret stories about Ireland, about the little people and the leprechauns. In turn the child would tell him stories told to her by her mother, about the trickster spider man, Anancy, from West Africa, and duppy stories about rolling calves. Wilson grew to admire Anancy's wily ways and he told her that Buddam, the village ne'er-do-well who was always being arrested by the village pan-head (which is what Jamaicans called district constables) for beating up people, had the strength of the mythical Irish warrior, Cuchulain.

When he grew old, George Wilson abandoned his family in Lucea, and came to live with Margaret in Harvey River in the small house that she and David built for him. In Harvey River, he plied his trade as a shoemaker and saddler, and my mother loved to tell the story of how he once made a pair of boots for a woman from the nearby village of Jericho. When he delivered the boots to the woman, he told her that the leather was rather tough, and that she should oil the boots before she wore them in order to soften them. He said this in his rich Irish brogue, and to the woman's West African ears the advice to oil her boots came out sounding like “boil your boots.” She promptly went home, made up a roaring fire, put on a
large cauldron of water, and boiled the boots until they shrank, so that they looked like footwear fit only for a small cloven-footed animal.

She returned to George Wilson in a great rage, insisting that he had told her to “bwile” her boots. He insisted that he had rightly told her to “aile” them, and then he probably told her that she should get her “bleddy eegnorant arse” the hell away from his shop before he shied his lapstone at her. The woman was thereafter called “Bwile boot, me tell you fi aile it, you bwile it” by the village children. My mother's people love beautiful shoes. In every photograph ever taken of the Harveys, they are wonderfully shod, no doubt a taste they acquired from George Wilson.