From Harvey River
Authors: Lorna Goodison
Â
Contents
The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heartâ¦
How Harvey River became Harvey River. For all we know,â¦
Margaret Aberdeen Wilson met David Harvey when they were schoolchildren.
Before the children came into their lives, days in Margaretâ¦
Late one afternoon Doris had gone to bathe in theâ¦
For months after the boy cut off her hair, myâ¦
After she had reached sixth class, the highest class atâ¦
Albertha, or Miss Jo, made only one friend at school:â¦
From the day that Rose was abducted by the villageâ¦
It could be said that uncle Flavius spent his lifeâ¦
When the soles of his feet remained behind on theâ¦
Every year on the seventeenth of March after Margaret's fatherâ¦
It was a cricket match that first brought Vivian Marcusâ¦
Now that all her other children had left the house,â¦
For the rest of her life, my mother would compareâ¦
My father did not consider his job as a chauffeurâ¦
On their first morning in the city of Kingston, beforeâ¦
When my mother awoke from one of her dreams, aâ¦
“I never knew hard life until I came to Kingston,”â¦
In the evenings, when she finished with her sewing, myâ¦
One evening Marcus arrived home from work and came inâ¦
I was seven years old when I first saw theâ¦
When you came up the long flight of stairs whichâ¦
“How you put up with Miss Mirry?” Everyone asked myâ¦
Dear Mrs. Goodison, Would you please sweeten my mouth todayâ¦
After her last daughter, Ann, married and left Harvey Riverâ¦
For weeks my mother's mind had been running on Margaret.
In the early morning hours of Monday, September 2, 1957,â¦
Cleodine knows they call her “Mule” because she has neverâ¦
Â
To Doris and Marcus
Â
Prologue
T
hroughout her life my mother lived in two places at once: Kingston, Jamaica, where she raised a family of nine children, and Harvey River, in the parish of Hanover, where she was born and grew up. Harvey River had been settled by her grandfather William Harvey, who gave his name to the river, and the river in turn gave its name to the village. I do not think that there was ever a day in my childhood when the river or the village was not mentioned in our house. Over the years Harvey River came to function as an enchanted place in my imagination, an Eden from which we fell to the city of Kingston. But over time I have come to see that my parents' story is really a story about rising up to a new life. As a child I constantly asked my mother about her life before, as she put it, “things changed.” I listened carefully to her stories, and repeated them to myself. I also took to asking urgent questions of my father. I have an image of me standing outside the bathroom door calling in to him over the noise of the shower, “So what was your mother's name, and what was her mother's name?” But my
father's people do not live long, and he died when I was fifteen years old. So I never did get to ask him all my questions. After my mother Doris's death nearly thirty-five years later, I began to “dream” her, as Jamaicans say, and in those dreams I continued to ask her questions about her life before and after she came to Kingston. And then there was this one very vivid visitation when I dreamt that I went to see her in her new residence, a really palatial and splendid sewing room with high stained-glass windows, where she was now in charge of sewing gorgeous garments for top-ranking angels. She said they were paying her a lot for her sewing in this place, and that all her friends came to talk angelic big-woman business with her there as she sewed. She said she could not tell me more as she did not want me to stay with her too long, because the living should not mix-up too much with the dead. But as I was leaving the celestial work-room, she handed me a book. This is that book.
Â
part one
Â
T
he baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech. “Her name is Doris,” she said to her husband, David.
In later years, my mother preferred to spell her name Dorice, although in actual fact she was christened Doris. But she was registered under a different name altogetherâClarabelle. This came about because of a disagreement between her parents as to what they should call their seventh child. Her father, David, was a romantic and a dreamer, a man who loved music and books, and an avid reader of lesser known nineteenth-century authors. He had read a story in which the heroine was called Clarabelle, and he found it to be a lovely and fitting name. He told his wife, Margaret, that that was to be the baby girl's name. Well, Margaret had her heart set on Doris, because it was the name of a school friend of hers, a real person, not some made-up somebody who lived in a book. Doris Louise, that was what the child would be called. They argued over it and after a while it became clear that Margaret was not going to let David best her this time. He had given their other children names like
Cleodine, Albertha, Edmund, and Flavius. Lofty-sounding names which were rapidly hacked down to size by the blunt tongues of Hanover people. Cleo, Berta, Eddie, and Flavy. That was what remained of those names when Hanover people were finished with them. Margaret had managed to name her first-born son Howard, and her father had named Rose. Simple names for real people.
There was nobody who could be as stubborn and hard-headed as Margaret when she set her mind to something. She was determined that her baby was not going to be called Clarabelle. “Sound like a blasted cow name,” she said. David gave up arguing with his wife about the business of naming the pretty-faced, chubby little girl, especially after Margaret reminded him graphically of who exactly had endured the necessary hard and bloody labour to bring the child into the world. He dutifully accompanied her to church and christened the baby Doris, on the last Sunday in June 1910. Then the next day he rode into the town of Lucea and registered the child as Clarabelle Louise Harvey, and he never told anyone about this deed for fifteen years. As a matter of fact, he is not known to have ever told anyone about it, because the family only found this out when my mother tried to sit for her first Jamaica Local Exams, for which she needed her birth certificate. When she went to the Registrar of Births and Deaths, they told her that there was no Doris Louise Harvey on record, but that there
was
a Clarabelle Louise Harvey born to David and Margaret Harvey, née Wilson, of Harvey River, Hanover. She burst into tears when she heard what her legal name was. “Clarabelle go to hell” her brothers chanted when the terrible truth was revealed. Not one to take teasing lightly, she told them to go to hell their damn selves.
Eventually her name was converted by deed poll to Doris.
Thereafter, she signed her name Dorice, as if to distance herself from the whole Clarabelle/Doris business. Besides, Dorice, pronounced “Do-
reese
,” conjured up images of a woman who was not ordinary; and to be ordinary, according to my mother's oldest sister, Cleodine, was just about the worst thing that a member of the Harvey family could be.
