From Harvey River (18 page)

 

M
y father did not consider his job as a chauffeur for the English manager of the Black River branch of Barclays Bank as a destination in life. His intention was to open his own garage, and along with Doris to run a fine guest house.

My parents were married in the month of August, but when December came around they realized that my father was going to have to spend his first Christmas away from his new bride, because the bank manager was a bachelor who always spent his Christmas holidays at the Liguanea Club in Kingston. The Liguanea Club was then an exclusive members club which did not admit black people. The only black Jamaicans who set foot on those grounds were the waiters, maids, and gardeners. The club's membership was comprised almost exclusively of expatriates, mostly Englishmen, who ran the affairs of the country when Jamaica was still a colony of Britain.

With a sad heart, Marcus left his new bride in the care of his grandmother and drove the bank manager into Kingston, depositing him at the Liguanea Club. He found accommodation for himself somewhere in downtown Kingston, and he spent all of that Christmas and New Year in the city driving his employer to various functions, waiting all night out in the car until the manager was sufficiently soused and ready to
return to the club. He had celebrated Christmases like this before driving for the bank manager, but as a bachelor himself he had not minded hanging out with the other chauffeurs while their bosses drank and bad-mouthed the natives, who were usually outside bad-mouthing the expatriates. But that year he felt different. He was now a married man, and a married man belonged in his house with his family at Christmas. When he returned from Kingston, he promptly resigned from his job and went into partnership with his cousin Charley. Together, they opened a garage, something my father had always dreamed of doing. Like all young men born early in the twentieth century, they shared the same passion, a love of motor cars. Unfortunately, the business did not last.

Charley had been born in Africa, where his father had been posted as a member of the West India Regiment. His wife had accompanied him, and their only child, Charley, was born in Liberia. The first time that my mother met Charley was when Marcus invited him and his wife, Minnie, to dinner in their newly refurbished house to meet his new bride. Doris had prepared a sumptuous Sunday dinner of rice and peas and chicken and pot roast. Using all her new bride things, she had spread the table with a snow-white damask cloth and used her dishes decorated with a bird-on-a-flowering-branch pattern called “Pareek,” made in England by the Johnson Brothers. For years to come my family would talk about this meal. They had barely said grace when Charley fell upon the food. “Piece more meat, man,” “more rice and peas,” “put the gravy on the rice…the rice!” he would say. Then he would bend his head again over the mountain of food before him and work away at it, swiftly and deftly levelling it while tapping his feet in a craven, gormandizing dance.

Out of embarrassment, Minnie began to kick her husband
under the table. Only then did he stop eating to demand loudly of her, “What the hell are you kicking me under the table for?” Close to tears, the embarrassed Minnie pleaded with him. “Charley, please, look at Marcus, he is such a gentleman.” To which Charley, lowering his head once again to work away at the mountain of food, replied, “Marcus does not know how to eat food.”

 

The first time my father saw a motor car, he had been blinded by the light. It was just after dark, and the light came from a lantern that was illuminated by burning carbide and carried on a pole by a proud young boy who walked ahead of the vehicle. The Leyden brothers, three wealthy planters from Black River, St. Elizabeth, were said to have imported the first motor car into Jamaica in 1903, a four-cylinder “New Orleans,” manufactured in Twickenham, England. Perhaps this was the same car that was now making its way through the streets of Malvern, and my father, like the little boy in the nursery rhyme, “stood in his shoes and wondered” at the sight of the magnificent horseless carriage.

My father never forgot how, years before, he had seen his first car, he had been sent as a small boy on an errand by his mother to deliver freshly laundered vestments and altar cloths to the home of the local Anglican minister. All over St. Elizabeth, horse-drawn carriages were a common sight, and to accommodate them there were huge wooden drinking troughs in almost every town square. Marcus's mother, Hannah, who had a gift for washing and ironing white clothes into pristine cleanness, had undertaken to launder the vestments and altar cloths without payment as a kind of temple service from the time that she was a young girl. The job of delivering the clothes to the manse on Saturday evenings soon fell to the child Marcus.

It had been a scorching hot Saturday morning, St. Elizabeth was in the grip of a long and hard drought, as a thirsty, sweating little Marcus trudged through the town square bearing a basket full of holy laundry. Suddenly he heard a great commotion, and when he looked he beheld a group of boys who had stripped themselves naked and were splashing gleefully in the waters of the horse trough:

“Hey Marcus, come bathe wid we.”

He didn't think twice; he just put down the basket and, taking off his shirt and short pants, jumped into the cooling waters of the horse trough. He was having such a good time that he did not see his grandmother Dorcas approaching. She snatched him out of the horse trough, slapped his bottom right there before everybody, and made him put on his clothes, retrieve the basket of laundry, and walk before her to the manse, where to his terrible shame, she reported to the minister that he was a wayward and sinful child. The minister then proceeded to give him a long, long lecture and concluded by saying: “My son, do not be like the horse or the mule which need to be bridled.” My father never felt warmly towards anything to do with horses after that.

But when he saw the car, he knew that his life was somehow bound up with this machine, which was powered by a noisy motor, instead of with an animal that ate grass, produced stinking manure, and needed to drink from a water trough. Marcus had joined the band of youngsters following the boy who held the lantern to light the way for the car, and when the car stopped he watched in awe as the driver descended and handed a tin can with a long spout to the boy, who gave the lantern to another boy to hold while he went in search of water. My father stood there, gazing intently as the driver took out a set of tools, knelt down, jacked up the car, and
unscrewed one of the wheels to change the thin narrow tire that had suffered a puncture. The boy with the lantern held the light high so the man could see to do his work. The first boy returned with the tin can filled with water, took back his lantern-bearing job, and the driver lifted the bonnet of the car, poured water into the engine, and closed it. Then he did something else, he took his leather belt from his waist and used it as a replacement for the fan belt which had snapped. When all these repairs were done, the driver swiftly turned the crank handle to restart the car, jumped in, and departed with the light-bearing boy running ahead of him into the night. My father would have followed them to the other end of the island had he not feared his grandmother's wrath.

So he went home instead and dreamt of the horseless carriage; and he knew that one day he would, like the driver, know how to give it water and to change the tires and replace broken parts and keep it going, for to him the car was more beautiful than any horse he had ever seen. So when big people asked him, “What you want to be when you grow big, Marcus?” he would reply, “I want to be a driver.”

Cars were brought to the island of Jamaica by wealthy estate owners who imported the luxurious machines along with great steel drums of gasoline to power them. For years after, the great steel drums that had contained gasoline could be seen, abandoned, in open fields, gleaming under the hot sun, defying nature to break them down.

Because Marcus was so determined to become a driver, his mother had sent him to one of her relatives to learn how to drive a truck. By the end of one week, just by observing what his cousin did, my father was able to drive. His cousin was amazed when he, partly in jest, said to him, “Show me how you woulda drive, if you coulda drive,” and the thirteen-year-old
Marcus got behind the wheel–half-sitting, half-standing, because he was not that tall–and with a smile of pure joy, drove the big old truck until it reached a steep incline.

“All right, all right driver,” said his cousin, “gimme back mi truck, for me can barely manage this hill, what says a new driver like you.”

Driver. He had called him
driver
, and the word fell like a benediction on the young Marcus's ears. After that my father set out to learn everything about cars and trucks. He would walk from Malvern into the town of Black River to seek out the company of the older men who had been trained to maintain the island's first motor car. Men who were happy to share their knowledge, to explain what made the horseless carriage run and how to keep it running.

 

Life was good for my parents in those early years. Unlike her mother, my mother had no difficulty conceiving, and went on to have nine children in all, one every two years from the time she was in her mid-twenties until she was in her early forties. After a year and a half of marriage, she gave birth to the beautiful and intelligent Barbara; two years later a son was born and named Howard, after her beloved brother; and then came Carmen Rose, whom we called Betty; and then Vaughn, who did not like his name, so he christened himself Bunny. (The five remaining children were born in Kingston, in the following order: the twins Kingsley and Karl, then Keith, me (Lorna) and Nigel.) Their house in Malvern became filled with children and friends always coming and going. There was plenty of domestic help with raising the children and doing the laundry and keeping the house clean, but my mother maintained strict control over her kitchen because my father always claimed that he could taste the difference in the food that she cooked as
opposed to food cooked by anyone else. “I can taste your hand, Doris,” he always said.

Christmas was the most wonderful time of all. Everyone wanted their car in top shape for the great season of party-going, and the garage was busy day and night. Even the most hard-pay customers would settle their debts in the season of Peace and Goodwill, so Marcus was always able to buy wonderful presents for Doris and the children. Toy pianos that played real tunes, lovely sleeping dolls and spinning tops and music boxes. Fabulous lengths of silk and soft shoes for Doris and more and more lovely furniture for their house. Their house, which always smelled of delicious food cooking, where the Salvation Army choir would stand outside and sing carols and Doris would invite them in and give them Marcus's famous Christmas eggnog as a thank you for serenading them. The Bible promised seven years of plenty, and that promise was made good during those prosperous years before they moved to Kingston. “In those days, we had the very best,” my mother always said. And then war broke out in 1939.

My father had feared his grandmother's wicked tongue too much to tell her when his business began to lose money. “You pass you place, Marcus, to go and want to have garage business. You see me, I know my place, you woulda never catch me a eggs up myself bout me a open business. High seat kill Miss Thomas' puss! Nayga people must know dem place, what a way you bright fi go open garage business, is better you did keep you good, good work with the bank manager, it serve you right. Is that Hanover woman you go married to who encourage you inna that damn foolishness.”

As it turned out, Marcus was to lose everything he owned. In the late 1930s, car parts and gasoline became increasingly scarce, and many of my father's customers were forced to
convert their cars into horse-drawn carriages by removing the engines. Also, Uncle Charley, who was supposed to look after the bookkeeping side of the garage business, drank and spent money in the same manner in which he ate.

Marcus never told his grandmother when the business closed. When she sent to call him, it was a week after he had had to padlock the gates himself, and pay off the two mechanics who worked with him. Dorcas had summoned my father when people in the village had brought her news of his failed business. He received a message from her that said: “Come and see me, but don't bring your wife.” He went to see her and found her sitting up in her rickety old iron bed, her airless bedroom lit by one small, irritable little kerosene lamp. The room reeked of her old lady musk smell, the camphor oil she used to anoint her creaking limbs, and the kerosene oil from the lamp. She spoke these words to my father through the semi-darkness:

“I decide out of the goodness of my heart that since you fall so low, you can come back here and live with your wife and children and help me to plant red peas and cassava. But, you and that Hanover woman and your damn children will have to live under my jurisdiction. Although you are a big married man now, I am still your grandmother and under my roof, my word is law.” The old iron bed creaked and groaned as Dorcas threw herself into her homily on the sins of flying past your place. She all but stood up in her bed in order to remind my father how she had never failed at anything in her life, because, “He who is low, fears no fall.” She repeated her offer to have my parents come back and live with her, an offer she accompanied by the thumping of her fist on her bony chest to underscore the phrase “My word is law.” My father responded by leaping up from the chair in which he was sitting, and as he strode out
the door, he said, “Don't worry about me, don't worry about me, my wife, or my children. We will be all right.”

“I would prefer to die than to live under her roof again,” he had said to my mother of Dorcas's offer. After Marcus's refusal, his grandmother took his name off her will and bequeathed her land to the government. Going to live in Harvey River was out of the question; there was no way to earn a living there. So my parents decided that their only alternative was to move to Kingston.