From Harvey River (22 page)

“I am not living any whoring life, you think I don't know why you have me in here?” said the old woman. “You want me to sell myself to those sailors over there in the white clothes, and you are trying to bribe me with cornmeal porridge, but I am not eating it, and I'm not selling my good, good pumpum to any nasty dirty sailor.”

“No, dear,” my mother explained, “the men in the white clothes are doctors, not sailors, and you are too old to be talking like that.”

“Oh yes,” said the old woman who was bony and haggard as a yard broom, “Oh yes? It's because you don't know how the men dem go crazy for me.”

The young girl was the only one who could get her to calm down. “Come Grandma. I won't make them do you anything,” she said, and the deranged old woman, who had come to see the young girl as her granddaughter Beatrice, would say: “I am so glad you have come, Beatrice, these godless, worthless people want to come and turn me into a prostitute.”

“Drink your porridge and don't pay them any mind,” the young girl would say, and the old lady would quietly obey her. Once, the girl had even changed out of her flour bag uniform into a short dress that was too tight for her, and had gone off the premises, but she had come back before evening to help feed the older patients.

“What is your story, little miss?” my mother asked her.

“My mother get a new boyfriend after my father leave, she
start to send me to where him live to carry dinner for him sometimes when she have to work late. One evening I carry the dinner and him say I must come inside him room and wait till him finish eat and then him would give me back the carrier. When I was waiting on him, him start to look at me funny and ask me if I have boyfriend, and I say no, I am still a child, and him say I look big for my age. But when I go home and start to tell my mother what him ask me, she say she don't want to hear nothing from me. The next time she send me to carry dinner for him, I say I was not going, but she beat me and force me to go and him hold me down, and after that, I bawl and bawl till them say I was mad, and my mother boyfriend say is lie I tell on him, and my mother call police and lock me up. Matron say I can go home now, but my mother don't want me to come back. I wasn't mad you know, I wasn't really mad.”

My mother persuaded the Matron to release the girl into her care, and she brought her home with her one evening, where she sat quietly on the verandah, touching everybody who passed by and whispering the same words over and over, “I wasn't mad you know, I wasn't mad.” The young girl looked like a different person once she started to wear the dresses my mother sewed for her; and as soon as she could, my mother sent her down to Harvey River, where she lived among the Harveys for years, telling everyone who heard her story, “I wasn't mad you know, I wasn't really mad.”

“There but for the grace of God,” my mother would say. “There but for the grace of God, go I. You know how many of those people come to Kingston just to find work and hard life mashed them up?” Some of the patients who were collected enough to give her a name and address got my mother to write letters to their families telling them where they were, and how they were doing.

However, her job at the Asylum did not last very long. One day she came home from work to find that in her absence my sister Betty, who had been plagued by epileptic fits from the time she was a baby, had begun to have full-fledged grand mal seizures.

 

“I
never knew hard life until I came to Kingston,” my mother would say as she gazed at her hands. “I used to have the most beautiful hands.” Hard Life. When she sounded those words they became a fierce giant, a merciless enemy whom you had to struggle against. Hard Life was the hurry-come-up, ex-slave landlord who, now that he owned some property in the form of a tenement yard, wanted his turn to play busha, or slave master, to delight in lording his owner status over you, to extract exorbitant sums of money from you for the privilege of living in his dry-weather premises. To inform you loudly that he normally did not rent to people with children and that he would be coming every Sunday morning at 6:00 a.m. to beat upon your door and demand his rent, which you had better have or he would turn you out onto the street.

Hard Life was a levelling teacher, anxious that no pupil should ever outstrip him, who liked to shame you before your class, to expose your errors and mistakes and poor judgment to the mocking scourgings of those you thought were your friends before you got marked down. Hard Life was an ill-mannered visitor who came to call on you in order to search up your cupboards when your back was turned, so that they could go and tell everyone how things were bad with you. To lie
about you, that you had no sugar for your tea and that you had to trust or credit food. It was a vicious old hige who liked to suck out the secrets of your broken heart and regurgitate them before your enemies. Hard Life was a pyaka, a cantankerous flying spirit who fed on the bitter seeds of the bad-mind tree, who lived only to fly about and broadcast to others that you mash up, mash up, mash up. Hard Life was a gravalitous grudgeful John Crow who kept pressing its black suit for the day when it would attend your funeral and give a eulogy which picked at your remains. A lamentation over poor you. Hard Life was a Cyclops whose cast-eye you had to blind with psalms in order to escape from the dark cave in which it wanted you trapped, and he would have trapped you were it not for your own strength and for the ties of blood, the generosity of some of your relatives, who as soon as they heard that you were now living hard life in Kingston, began to send you regular food baskets. Country baskets filled with ground provisions, yams, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, corned beef and pork, bottles of coconut oil, baked goods, peas, cassava, plantains. These baskets were the Jamaican equivalent of the manna fed to the Israelites by Yahweh as they wandered in the wilderness.

All over the city of Kingston, happiness and contentment would be generated in cramped tenements with the arrival of these baskets sent by friends and relatives in the country. Families would partake of generous oily-mouthed feasts, and children would be told stories about life in the villages where this food came from. Normally ill-tempered mothers, nerves frayed from hard life in town, fathers burdened by hard work or lack of employment, would become carefree children again as they enjoyed the sense of ease and plenty generated by the largesse of those back home in the country. “See this soursop here, it come from a tree that my grandfather plant and my
navel string bury at the root.” These food baskets were brought to Kingston on the backs of market trucks, or labelled and loaded onto the train and watched over by kind, considerate conductresses who knew they were doing a form of angel-work by delivering them. The conductresses knew how gratefully, eagerly, the people of Kingston greeted the arrival of the country baskets filled with fresh, life-sustaining things to eat. Our family began to receive regular baskets from Harvey River as soon as my mother's relatives found out that she was living in Kingston, and first thing that she would do when she opened one of them was to pass on some of the food to others who were even more in need.

First, you put something soft under my sister Betty's head, like a pillow or a rolled-up blanket to keep her from battering her head bloody, and then you try to force a spoon between her teeth to stop her from biting and swallowing her tongue. You should also try to put some salt in her mouth to stop her from foaming. The seizures take my sister with no warning. She will be walking along and in midstep it will be as if some great unseen beast has taken her in its jaws and is just shaking her to and fro. “I fell out of the car in Malvern when I was carrying her,” my mother would say. “Your father was driving and as he turned a corner going into the town of Black River, the car door swung open, and I tumbled out of the passenger seat. I was young and strong, I just got up and said no harm done. But I was wrong.”

My mother would dream of life in Harvey River on days when her child had as many as four seizures, the days when she saw unspeakable things at the Asylum. In her mind she would
return to the place where everyone called her “dear Dor,” where life in her father's house was so easy, where she never had to work hard, where she was one of the fabulous Harvey girls. They used to sew their own bathing costumes in Harvey River, short loose tunics or bloomers with loose-fitting camisole tops. She often envisaged herself in her favourite tunic of bright red cotton with tiny green and white blossoms. She would braid her hair into two long plaits that would become undone as she swam and her hair would stream out behind her. She and her sisters, gorgeous mermaids cavorting in the river named for their grandfather, were washed by the cool green water, the bowing bamboo screen around the river protecting their privacy. “Dive now, Doris.” And she dived deep, feeling the water cover her completely. While she was under its smooth, cool surface, she took some of the hurts and disappointments life had dealt her that were written on what would have been bitter-tasting scrolls carried in her bosom, and lodged them in the eel holes and crayfish dwellings in the river. She never, ever again mentioned her troubles once she had lodged them there.

She loved being a wife, but she really, really was born to be a mother. She sometimes fed her children like mother birds do, passing food from her mouth to theirs. Like her mother, Margaret, she was known to put her own mouth to the tiny congested nostrils of any of her nine babies and pull mucus down to clear their heads. “A mammal is a warm-blooded animal that gives suck to its young.” She had told this to her children as a fact, a piece of information she handed out from the great mine of facts she stored in her head.

“Mama, are you a mammal?” one of the children asked her. “Yes,” she said laughing, “Doris is a mammal.”

All the children in the yard seemed to know that Doris was a mammal because they were drawn naturally to her. They
climbed the steps and stood outside the door, looking in at her seated at her sewing machine and called over and over, “Hello, Mama Goodie. Hello, Mama Goodie.” All the children in the yard called her Mama Goodie. She fed them when their mothers, who did not like her, were not around. She called them sweet names like “precious” or nonsense names like “my little noonoonkum” and encouraged them to go to school. Even Vie's ill-cared-for son, Errol, adored my mother; she was always feeding him, making whatever food she had for her own children stretch.

Little by little, she put away the fabulous Doris. The one who was the clothes horse, the one with the beautiful hands who, along with her handsome husband and her lovely children, was going to run a fine guest house situated in salubrious Malvern, where she would direct the staff how to provide the best accommodation possible for guests as she changed her dresses to preside over every meal.

She put away the fabulous Doris who took such pride in her mahogany furniture, as gradually the chairs, tables, and the gramophone on the verandah were broken by the children, stolen by the tenants, or just destroyed from hard use. She watched as all her china was broken and her fine linen torn, stolen, or just worn out from wear. And apart from always keeping one or two damask or lace tablecloths to “pull shame out of her eyes,” that is, to put on a small show if visitors came, she forgot what her sister Cleodine had taught her about running a perfect household and she never worried much about those things again.

She put away her dream to travel to Montreal to see and experience snow first-hand and dress up and go shopping with her fabulous sisters. She began to live in two places: as Mama Goodie the mammal in hard-life Kingston, and as the
daughter of David and Margaret Harvey in her memories of Harvey River.

Eventually my sister Betty's seizures became so severe that my mother had no choice but to stay home, where she could care for her. It was then that she decided to make her living as a dressmaker; and for the next thirty years she would design and sew her extraordinarily well-made garments, charging very little money, to every and anybody who needed her services.

Funnily enough, the terrible Vie became one of her first customers. Soon after my mother made it known to some of the women in the yard who had become friendly to her that she was now taking in sewing, Vie announced that she had been invited to the wedding of one of her sisters in the country. She wanted, she said, to return to her birthplace in style, to “cut a dash.” To make all the people–especially her sister who had predicted, no doubt with good reason, that Vie would come to no good–see how well she was doing in town. Well, who better to help her cut a dash than Doris? So Vie waited for my mother to come into the dark kitchen one morning, and there, before all the other women, she apologized for harassing her. And my mother accepted her apology, sewed her a fine dress, and everyone agreed that Vie never looked better in her life.