From Harvey River (20 page)

At the gate of no. 117 Orange Street, my mother's face had fallen when she saw what was to be their new home, a set of three rooms off a central courtyard, with an enclosed verandah. Still shaking from their encounter with the speeding cart of the latrine cleaners, she saw that the street was lined with rows of houses and places of business all jostling with each other for space. By the light of the street lamps, she could see that there was no room for trees on this street. The small wooden gate of no. 117 was reached by climbing a brick platform, via stairs set into it. When they had walked up the stairs, pushed open the wooden gate, and stepped into the vast brick courtyard, my mother realized that things had truly changed. For the first time in her entire life, she was going to share a living space with complete strangers, many of whom she could feel peering out at her and her family from rows of dimly lit rooms.

The friend who had found this place for them was waiting at the gate to hand over the keys. When he saw how my mother's face had changed when she stepped from the truck, he told her that they were fortunate to find a place like this because Kingston landlords don't like to rent to people with children!

Her four children lay asleep, wearing the clothes she had dressed them in the day before, on one of the two beds that
they had hastily assembled last night. They were all exhausted from the long everlasting truck drive from Malvern to Kingston. All the way there the two younger ones, Betty and Vaughn, who rode with her in the cab, were restless. Betty kept asking where were they going over and over again, till my mother finally snapped and said, “What are you asking me for? I don't know,” and she had felt bad the minute she had said it, for a remark like that would make her husband feel very small and ashamed because he had lost them their house. He did not respond, but just reached down and changed gears and stared hard at the road. In order to quiet the children and to change the mood in the cab of the truck, she had fed them biscuits and cakes and sweet drinks all the way to Kingston. The two older children, Barbara and Howard, rode in the back, seated on various items of furniture, happy to be having such an adventure. My father had made sure that they were secure by nailing a wooden gate across the back of the truck. Where were they going? She really, in her heart of hearts, did not know. This morning though, lying in this small bedroom in Kingston, she knew that soon the children would be awake and needing to be fed. Exhausted, disappointed, and overwhelmed as she was by her new surroundings, she felt guilty that for the first time in their married life, she had not prepared breakfast for her husband. She was not going to do the same to her children, so she ventured down into the yard in search of the kitchen. There was not a single tree in sight except for a headless breadfruit tree rising from the one unpaved space in the brick courtyard, its blunt silver-grey trunk bowing to the east. The only greenery in evidence sprung from discarded paint tins and old chamber pots arranged outside room doors and under the jalousie windows. These were planted mostly with mint bushes and common flowers like monkey fiddle and ram
goat roses. My mother saw that her new source of water was to be a metal standpipe springing out of a low concrete cistern and she later found out that each of the tenants was supposed to take turns scrubbing it, a system guaranteed to generate no end of strife. Like the Harvey River, the standpipe was the place where residents gathered to collect water for all domestic purposes. Unlike the people of Harvey River, who found refreshment and blessings in their source of water, she would soon discover that the residents of the tenement yard regarded the standpipe as the site for loud quarrels and even the occasional fist fight.

“I would prefer to dead like a dog in the city of Kingston than to bruk mi back chop cane.” That was the sentiment of all who had elected to “make life” in the city, to live in rented rooms and share the same cooking and sanitation facilities, to work and educate their children and to one day own their own house and land; they always said house and land.

“These damn hurry-come-up Kingston landlords don't like to rent to people with children.” This is what the friend who had found the place for my parents had warned them. He also warned them how some of the people who had not too long ago come from rural Jamaica to find employment in the city were in the habit of declaring themselves “born Kingstonians,” which entitled them to make fun of the latest arrivals from the country. “If they trouble you, don't pay them any mind, Dor, we are only passing through” was what Marcus had said.

As my mother made her way to the communal kitchen, one woman called out to her friend, “Mi dear you see mi new style gramophone?” and the other one replied, “Yes mi love, I see you have one that can only play pon verandah.” As most of my parents' furniture could not fit in their now much smaller
living space, they had had to pile much of it, even their precious gramophone, on the small verandah outside. When the other tenants woke that morning and saw the overflow of furniture on the verandah outside my parents' rooms, those whose worldly possessions hardly filled one small room immediately began to “throw words.” Mocking phrases like “country come a town” rose up to meet her as she stepped down into the yard, saying good morning, good morning to everyone as she went, bearing a small newly acquired cast-iron coal pot stove that she intended to set up in the kitchen, which she identified as the long, low structure near the right-hand corner of the courtyard, with clouds of black smoke issuing from its narrow doors and windows.

“Ace-blank inna you arse” was what she heard as she stepped further into the courtyard. “Learn fi play domino bwoy.” A group of big able-bodied men, including an old white-haired man dressed in a white sleeveless merino, sat crowded around a table, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea from large, battered enamel mugs as they slammed down bone domino tiles. It was 7 a.m. Women, some still in nightgowns, were plaiting the hair of small girls in the doorways of joined barracks-type rooms with narrow verandahs. One or two of them were vigorously beating children who were reluctant to go to school. “You duncey head little wretch you, you fi gwan a school, you want push handcart when you grow big?”

One young girl, who looked as if she had toiled all night somewhere, was slowly making her way to the farthest room in the yard, as two older children advanced towards my mother bearing brimming chamber pots. They were headed for the toilet that was housed in a ramshackle wooden structure to the left of the yard. The level of noise, and what her mother, Margaret, would have condemned as loud common laughter,
nearly drove her backwards. She was tempted to turn and go back into her rooms and bolt the door, but she kept going.

“Good morning, everybody,” my mother had said to the women standing stirring their cauldron-like pots in the dark kitchen. Nobody answered. Nobody made a move to make room for her at the “firewall,” the sooty concrete counter where all the stoves sat. Chocolate, tea, coffee, ackee and codfish, rank corn pork, green bananas, boiling cornmeal porridge, and flour dumplings contested for scent supremacy in the early morning air. From the recesses of the dark kitchen, one woman immediately raised a bantering, mocking song, a song with words intended to wound. Actually it was more of a chant that had just one line that she intoned over and over, “How art the mighty fallen, how art the mighty fallen.” The other women took up the chant, and my mother left the kitchen in tears.

“She think she better than we,” the same woman kept telling all the other women in the yard as they squatted near the standpipe with their wooden washtubs. “Then if she better than we, why she and her husband and pickney have fi live here so?” The hectoring woman was named Vie and she had taken an instant and virulent dislike to my mother. My mother could hear Vie and the other women in the tenement discussing her and her family from her rooms in those first few weeks. She tried to keep her children confined to the rooms and verandah and to do her laundry late in the afternoon instead of early in the morning, after all the women had left the pipeside, but every day she still had to face the kitchen.

“How art the mighty fallen, how art the mighty fallen.” Every time she went into the kitchen there was Vie, raising her “How art the mighty fallen” anthem. Eventually even the other women agreed that Vie took her hectoring and “throw-word”
too far. How would anyone like it if every time you saw them they were saying, “How art the mighty fallen,” when they did not even know you, did not know the circumstances of your life. Over time, Vie added to her chant a few other choice lines such as “Scornful dog nyam dutty pudding” and “High seat kill Miss Thomas' puss.” At first my mother tried to ignore Vie, as my father suggested, and managed to make her way around the communal kitchen and bathroom arrangements by just watching to see when they were not in use. She also began to imagine that she was wearing her sister Cleodine's backboard every time she went down into the yard, her sister Cleodine, who would surely have a few things to say when she heard about where Doris and Marcus were now living.

 

In the 1650s and 1660s, what is now known as the city of Kingston, Jamaica, used to be Colonel Barry's Hog Crawle. The town itself was established on June 16, 1692, in acknowledgement of the importance of its massive harbour, said to be one of the seven largest in the world, its abundant good water, its proximity to natural resources, its fertile soil, and gentle breezes. Drawn up as a parallelogram one mile long from Port Royal to North Street, and half a mile wide from East Street to West Street, by 1716 Kingston had become the largest town on the island of Jamaica. According to travel writers of that time, Kingston was a city to be either hated or loved. Some writers found it to be one of the most backward and least attractive of southern cities, with narrow streets and dull, shabby houses. Others remarked on the handsome residences set far back from dusty roadways, showing white through shades of palm. Some referred to it as a city filled with hovels of low degree, dark with grime and populated by multitudinous negroes. But a little later, travel writer Ethel Symonette
described it as a place with everybody on the go, tongues busy effecting purchases with the confused jingling of streetcar bells, joining with the clear ring of horses' hoofs, the shrieking whistle of the locomotive making itself heard. A bustling little place with rows of good business houses, nice churches, and passable shops where good English stuff could be bought at a ridiculously low price.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Kingston boasted hotels like the fabulous Myrtle Bank and the Constant Spring Hotel, also the ornate velvet-curtained Ward Theatre, where touring thespians from Britain gave regular performances. Then in 1907 an earthquake shook the city and fires broke out all over. The citizens swore that Armageddon had come. The Kingston Parish Church lost its steeple, and the owner of Nathan's, one of the largest stores on King Street, was killed when his store collapsed on top of him. By the time Marcus and Doris moved there in 1940, the population of Kingston numbered 150,000.

My mother rose early and ironed a shirt for my father to wear on his first day at work. She was pleased because she had ironed the shirt perfectly, with no seams in the sleeves and no creases along the collar. She was especially pleased as she went singing down to the kitchen because her husband had found a job, and that morning he was behaving more like his old self as he patted her on her bottom playfully when she passed by him sitting on the verandah, polishing his shoes. “Marcus, you are too out of order,” she half-protested, sounding again like the young bride Doris, reacting to her frisky young groom for the first time in months–her groom, who was saying that maybe
he would drop by to visit her in the telephone van that day when all the children were at school.

“Marcus, you mean we can soon move from here?” “I tell you we were just passing through,” he had said. For the first time since they moved to Kingston the future began to look bright. He had gotten a job as a linesman at the Jamaica Telephone Company after weeks of job hunting, and my mother could not have been happier. She was singing, “God is working his purpose out” as she went into the kitchen. She did not give a damn about those lowdown Kingston women who were so vicious and unkind to her, for indeed God was working his purpose out. Her husband had found a job, they were just passing through, soon they would be leaving here, and just as she had that thought, Vie came buzzing around her like a damn rotten-teeth, one-frock locust.

My mother, who had been so excited and so anxious that my father should not be late on the first morning of his new job, would later swear that she heard George O'Brian Wilson's voice as she poured my father's tea into his favourite teacup while Vie bantered away in the background. Her grandfather's voice was asking, “Why the fock are you letting this eedjit bully you?” My mother turned and, like a great she-bear, slapped Vie, and my father's cup broke. Vie stood there stunned as my mother passed her, went upstairs, served my father a fried egg and bread, with no tea, which he ate standing up in the doorway before hastening to catch the tram to the telephone company. Then she fell on their bed in that cramped Kingston room and bawled like a baby, with two of her four children crowding round her, the two eldest having been dispatched to school early.