From Harvey River (28 page)

In thinking back, I realize many of the guests at the wedding that day would probably have taken part in poetry and elocution contests at meetings of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, enabling them to give the gift of poetry to Lennie and Pinky as a “a thing of beauty” to be to them “a joy forever.” The last speech of the evening was made by Doctor Goldman, who spoke about “hope springing eternal in the human breast” and made references to how courageous the bride was and how it was necessary to have faith and be optimistic.

Afterwards, Lennie and Pinky opened the dance floor to Mickey and Sylvia's “Dearest.” The dancing ended at about 1 a.m., and Doris got to keep one of the smaller cakes off the big cake and she took it into her bedroom for fear we, her children, would rise in the night and devour it.

A few months later, Pinky was operated on, but it was too late. She died, and they buried her in her wedding dress. Lennie was drunk for two weeks straight after that, and even Miss Mirry was moved to say that she felt sorry for him.

 

“D
ear Mrs. Goodison, Would you please sweeten my mouth today with some of your dinner? Love, Teacher Bernard.” Our house at Studley Park Road became a hospitality centre, much of which revolved around my mother's seemingly bottomless cooking pot. Teachers from All Saints School; our schoolfriends, many of whom became important Jamaican statesmen and entertainers; relatives visiting from the country, many in the process of immigrating to England, who had come to receive a crash course from my mother on how to look and behave stylishly in a new land, all came to eat every day from Doris's bottomless cooking pot. The main meal of the day, “dinner,” was served at noon, and all the children came back from school to eat it. Marcus and our eldest brother, Howard, would drive up in the telephone company van and as soon as they arrived, the miraculous midday feeding would commence. Many of our schoolfriends who came to eat at our house did so to avoid eating Bullo slush, the free school lunch provided by the government for Jamaican schoolchildren. My mother began running a guest house of sorts after all.

Bullo slush came by handcart each day, steaming and sloshing from side to side in a big square galvanized tin. It
was cooked in a kitchen somewhere in the city and dispersed to primary schools throughout Kingston to provide a hot nutritional meal for the city's schoolchildren. Bullo slush was a dark brown lumpy stew in which portions of gristly mystery meat moved like the fins of a shark. Many children claimed to get running belly from eating it. Bullo slush gave off a faintly medicinal smell, the same smell given off by the free cheese and milk powder distributed at school. There were rumours that iodine was added to all “government food” so that in case the schoolchildren had any cuts, this food would heal them.

Like her mother before her, Doris cooked huge amounts of food every day and much of the money she made from sewing went into feeding the multitudes. You could “smell her hand,” as her father once said, from the moment you turned into the gate. She always cooked the midday meal herself. Miss Mirry acted as her assistant, cleaning the seasoning and picking grains from the rice. My mother believed in the culinary power of garlic, always scraped with the edge of a knife; and many white circles of sliced onions, pimento kernels, lengths of escallion were pressed hard to release pungent juices, and were added to with sprigs of fragrant thyme, sliced country pepper, black pepper, and salt. All these were rubbed into the meat with clean, bare hands. And the meat–beef or pork, mutton or chicken–was seasoned then browned in huge iron Dutch pots, then covered with just enough water and left to stew into succulence. To the bubbling gravy she added Marcus's favourite sauce, Pickapepper Sauce, whose bottles had on the label a rendering of a gaudy plumed parrot picking a red pepper. Then tomatoes and thyme were added to the bubbling brown gravy. She cooked deep pots of rice, steamed verdant leafy bundles of iron-rich calaloo, grated carrots, sliced tomatoes,
because she believed in the importance of eating vegetables; and she fed all the children who came, including a few of my brothers' schoolfriends who had become Rastafarians.

Below All Saints School, along the gully bank, was a Rasta camp from which the sound of hypnotic drumming and chanting issued night and day. Neighbourhood rumours of dark deeds, from ganja smoking to human sacrifice, ran rife and fuelled my mother's fear that her sons might be drawn by some compelling, ganja-smoking force, to go down and join the Rastafarians. She prayed night and day to the God of the Church of England, and dispatched all her children to Sunday school at All Saints Anglican Church every week without fail. “The Church of England, all the Harveys were born into the Church of England,” she would say, and she would tell her children again and again how the Anglican religion had brought the Harveys through everything from Uncle Howard's murder to the robbery by George O'Brian Wilson's legal family of the property willed to Margaret by her father, and because of their faith, the Harveys were still going strong. Surely, she said, it was the teachings of the Church of England that had kept her going when she and my father had lost their Malvern house. And in her early days in Kingston, what but the Anglican religion had helped her to rise up every morning and read from the Book of Common Prayer and choose a good Anglican hymn to sing to herself over and over as she faced the hostility of Vie and the women in the yard–“God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain”–to help her to make sense of all the changes, the upheavals in her life. My mother could
not see how an angry God, who had to be worshipped in clouds of ganja smoke, could help her or her children.

Fireball, thunder ball, earthquake, lightning, fire bun, Babylon, fire fi you, Babylon, fire fi you. On every street corner in Kingston in the 1950s, there had suddenly appeared fierce “Beardmen.” Some of them said that it had been the great Jamaican prophet, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who had announced “Look to Africa for the crowning of a black king. He shall be the redeemer.” And so it was in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen, direct descendant of King Solomon and the black Queen of Sheba, was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and given the title, Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. And thus it was that the descendants of kidnapped and dispossessed Africans found a god who looked more like them.

My mother said she could understand why they felt this way, for slavery had been a terrible and wicked thing, but she did not want her sons to become Rastafarians. Rastas wore their locks like Samburu warriors. Dread, uncut locks because the Bible that they lived by said that a razor must not touch the hairs of your head. The Dreads, with their wild, red eyes, poured scorn and destruction on Babylon, Babylon being the system of government that Jamaicans as colonial subjects lived under, Babylon being Jamaica, a strange land to those who considered Africa to be their true homes.

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” sang the ex-slaves, the ones who celebrated Empire Day, the Queen's birthday, by going out and lining the streets in town and country, and waving small Union Jacks. When the children went to school on Empire Day, they were rewarded with a penny bun (a kind of coarse lump of the
Queen's birthday cake). Was there a special fund in the coffers of the colonial government to provide penny buns for the black children who sang that Britons would never be slaves? Some Calypsonian sang, “Build me a road make I walk on the sea to see my mother country.” He did not mean Africa. Every New Year, the Queen gave Jamaicans a message. Sometimes she and her family came to visit and everybody lined the streets again and waved small Union Jacks.

My mother took all of her children to see Her Royal Highness, and when I said that I did not want to see the Queen, she said to me, “So you think that you are your own big woman now?” I remember standing there on King Street, totally miserable as the sun blazed down upon lines of Jamaicans waiting to see the Queen go by. When she finally passed by in a big topless car, we could see that she was a small woman who waved her gloved arm mechanically and smiled. All I kept thinking was that I really did not see why I had to stand up for such a long time to catch a glimpse of the Queen for such a short time.

The Dreads were capturing land all over Jamaica, seizing Crown land and building settlements and camps and sending smoke signals to young men in clouds of wisdom weed. There was explosive Nyabinghi drumming and chanting, days and nights of endless reasoning, reasoning upon reasoning, to turn Babylon's logic upon its bald head. But there were things about Rastafarians that fascinated my mother, who loved words, like the strange language they spoke with “I” as the centre of all things. According to Rastafarians, there was no separation between people, so you and me became “I and I” even a great crowd of people became a multitude of “I's.” “Africa is I father's home, Africa I want to go,” cried the Dreads on the streets of Jamaica. They said there was no more understanding, for too long had Jamaicans been kept under so Babylon
could stand, so henceforth the I and I would “overstand” and “Bungo,” which used to be a curse word signifying black and uneducated, would be a title of honour. Bungo Natty would be a high title because knotty hair offended the aesthetics of Babylon and the texture of black hair was something black people could not do anything about without causing great discomfort to themselves.

The reason for this subversion was explained to my mother by one of the young men, known as Phantom, whom she used to feed from her bottomless cooking pot. Although he no longer ate her food, because Rastafarians preferred not to eat salt, he always came to visit with her and to be received as an honoured guest, as she was known to receive everyone. Having nine children of her own did not prevent my mother from becoming very attached to other people's children, and Phantom was one of the many neighbourhood children for whom she cared deeply. He was honest, hopeful, and ambitious–qualities my mother found endearing in combination. “Phantom,” she had asked him, “why a nice young man like you from a decent home, who went to high school and who your mother try with so, go and take up Rasta?”

“Mother Goodie,” replied Phantom. “Babylon don't like how I and I talk, Babylon don't like how I and I walk, for I and I mouth too big and I and I nose too broad and I and I skin too black and as for I and I hair, I and I won't touch that. Everything about this kidnapped African is like poison to Babylon. So what Rastafari come to is this, block this game, turn over this table. I and I will not play by Babylon rule book, for that book no fair, I and I take I self outta this three-card game, and who want play it can play it, now mum is the word, parapinto is the game. I and I prefer not to eat no salt, and I and I will touch no part of pig, that is why the I cannot partake of that
lovely plate of stew peas that the I has offered the I, because I and I foresee that a day will be coming when what sell in a shop will not have buyer, I and I will live close to the ground and grow the green herbs and eat the iron of the quick-springing ilaloo, and build our structure with ground provisions until that bright morning when I and I work being over I and I will fly away or will board the Black Star Liners which will come at last into Kingston Harbour. You know Mother Goodie, them arrest I last year and the first thing that Babylon representative do is to walk scissors through I head. Years now the I cultivate these dreads, no razor walk near these locks. I let them clump together as they see fit, grow like stout vines and hang long down I trunk. They accuse the I of breeding lice, rumour, and propaganda of forty-leg in the dread head. Mother Goodie, Babylonians are Delilah's descendants. The I watch I locks lying like woolly serpents at I feet, locks which were once woolly serpents alive on the I head, then I turn and see the grinning house slave holding up scissors like a forked spear, claiming him is warrior, him cut I down and conquer I. I drum for him, a funde mental mourning song, for his living death to come. Life set on a wheel and it will wheel, wheel and turn till the I turn come, must come. Come down Babylon, come down, come down offa Black Man shoulder.”

Years later, we were told by a family friend from Ghana that at the same time Rastafarians were becoming a force to be reckoned with in Jamaica, in parts of West Africa, specifically in Cape Coast, in the town of Oguaa, dreadlocked men had also begun to appear. Wild-eyed men who lived apart from the rest of society, in remote places, by deep lagoons, who dressed in rough, woven crocus-bag garments and carried staffs would appear on street corners and chant.

“Wona nyi, wegya nyi. I am your mother, I am your father
Ahomaka wo mo. There is joy in it, papapahpa. Very well,” cried the Dreads on the streets of Ghana, lending cosmic support to the Dreads of Jamaica.

Some of the neighbourhood boys began to disappear down the gully bank. You would see them on the street, dreadlocked strangers with red eyes who stared past you because they no longer knew you. For fear that a similar fate would befall her sons, my mother prayed harder and harder to the God of the Church of England to preserve her sons from what she saw as a state of perdition, because once these boys “sighted up” Haile Selassie, it seemed they never again returned to normal life.