From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (review)

When Lorna Goodison was born, her mother, Doris, following the custom of her people, ‘dipped her finger in sugar and rubbed it under [the] tongue’ of her eighth-born to impart ‘the gift of words.’ Goodison’s captivating eleventh book, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People, is the latest evidence that Doris’s child indeed came into the possession of that gift. Those who know Goodison’s poems and stories will find pleasure in encountering anew places, incidents, and especially people first introduced in her other writings: Goodison’s great-grandmother Leanna, the strong-spirited Guinea woman; Miss Mirry, the misanthropic domestic family servant whose African tongue will not conform to English; Bun-Down Crossroads, the insure-and-burner; and Bag-a-Wire, known as Jamaica’s national traitor for betraying United Negro Improvement Association leader Marcus Garvey for food. These, like the deftly evoked members of Goodison’s extended family, are characters every bit as engrossing as those of a well-crafted play or novel.

Readers do not, however, have to know the earlier writings to find the book engrossing. Through sensuous evocation of place and people, Goodison grounds readers first in Harvey River, a village in Jamaica’s northwestern Hanover parish, and then in Kingston, and she does so while texturing her lyrical prose with cross-lacings of vigorous Jamaican Creole. Readers could well conclude that the whole nation is endowed with ‘sweet speech’ when Goodison reveals that country people called Kingston’s gas lights ‘moon-pan-stick’ and the city itself ‘Killsome.’ When ordinary people describe the fore-day morning as the time ‘Before night take off him black trousers, before cock crow, before the sun show it clean face behind the Dolphin Head Mountain,’ then the stage is set for a writer to personify the situation of Kingston’s poor as Hard Life, an unmerciful landlord, a ‘vicious old hige who liked to suck out the secrets of your broken heart and regurgitate them before your enemies,’ and a ‘gravalitous, grudgeful John Crow.’

Goodison blends generic elements in this book that she claims is the product of a dream visitation to her seamstress mother in a celestial sewing room. Here she fashions angelic garments while all her friends gather round her to discuss the ‘big-women business’ that used to animate the sewing room of Doris Goodison’s Kingston home. Drawing on creative non-fiction’s faithfulness to detailed and accurate rendering of its subject within a narrative frame, Goodison effects myth’s elevation of personal history while freely imagining what she cannot know by other means. She creates a Christian mythic frame for her narrative by establishing that tales of Harvey River are carried on the strong narrative currents of family oral tradition until the village becomes ‘an enchanted place in my imagination, an Eden from which we fell to the city of Kingston.’ In the tradition of Black New World uplift, however, that fall is reconstructed as prelude to ‘a story about rising up to a new life.’

Goodison’s syncretic vision allows such Christian underpinnings to rest easily alongside her descriptions of the manifestations of African culture in the lives of her Harvey River forebears. She allows no note of skepticism to dampen the electric charge of her account of two Harvey ancestors witnessing the psychomotor power of newly arrived twin Maroon-descended Liberian indentured workers. As Goodison relates the incident, the Harvey brothers watched with revulsion and terror when ‘the long, thick strip of cowhide lashed across the backs of the Maroons, raising raw, bloody welts. But . . . it was Elbridge [the owner of the estate where the Liberians and the Harveys worked] who bawled and bellowed in pain . . . [falling], face down, in the cane field.’ Commentary then links the Liberians’ redirection of Elbridge’s brutality back on himself to Maroon Nanny’s ability ‘to make bullets ricochet off her body back at the British soldiers...