From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island

Throughout her life my mother, Doris, lived in two places at once: Kingston, Jamaica, where she raised a family of nine children, and Harvey River, in the parish of Hanover, where she was born and grew up.

When Doris Harvey' s English grandfather, William Harvey, discovers a clearing at the end of a path cut by the feet of those running from slavery, he gives his name to what will become his family' s home for generations. For Doris, Harvey River is the place she always called home, the place where she was one of the fabulous Harvey girls, and where the rich local bounty of Lucea yams, pimentos, and mangoes went hand in hand with the Victorian niceties of her parents' house. It is a place she will return to in dreams when her fortunes change, years later, and she and her husband, Marcus Goodison, relocate to hard life Kingston and encounter the harsh realities of urban living in close quarters.

In Lorna Goodison' s spellbinding memoir of her forebears, we meet a cast of wonderfully drawn characters, including George O' Brian Wilson, the Irish patriarch of the family who married a Guinea woman after coming to Jamaica in the mid-1800s; Doris' s parents, Margaret and David, childhood sweethearts who became the first family of Harvey River; and their eight children, Cleodine, straight-backed and imperious; serious Albertha, called Miss Jo because she was missing all sense of joviality; beautiful Howard, who dies an early death; Rose, whose loveliness inspires devotion but whose own heart is never fulfilled; taxi-man Edmund, who yearns for the freedoms of the big city; Flavius, whospends his life searching for the true church of God; large-hearted, practical-minded Doris, whose bottomless cooking pot often feeds more than just her family; and vivacious, hard-headed Ann, whose gift of reading hair tells her the future.

In lush, vivid prose, textured with the cadences of Creole speech, Lorna Goodison weaves together memory and mythology to create a vivid tapestry. She takes us deep into the heart of a complete world to tell a universal story of family and the ties that bind us to the place we call home.

"Goodison, an acclaimed poet who received Jamaica's Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999, makes lyrical exposition sing with dulcet island patois in this homage to her mother, Doris, who grew up in the sleepy Eden-like setting of Harvey River, but raised her own nine children in urban Kingston under less coddled conditions. Starting on a supernal note, in which Doris bequeaths this book to her daughter in a dream, the memoir draws a richly textured portrait of a sprawling, well-to-do family, including seven strong-willed siblings with deftly sketched personas. As 'plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato,' Doris — whose Anglo-African blood attests to Jamaica's history of interracial dalliance — joins her sisters in the clique of 'fabulous Harvey girls,' their surnames trumpeting the family's landed-gentry status. But it's a working-class chauffeur — the author's father — who wins Doris's hand in marriage. Borne away from her childhood idyll, she takes in her first moving picture, produces a succession of offspring and plies her domestic skills, especially sewing, gamely weathering the vicissitudes of life outside paradise. Steeped in local lore and spiced with infectious dialect and ditties, Goodison's memoir reaches back over generations to evoke the mythic power of childhood, the magnetic tug of home and the friction between desire and duty that gives life its unexpected jolts." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Lorna Goodison, the internationally known Jamaican poet, has now written a family memoir. 'From Harvey River' covers some generic colonial matters: how white men, both respectable and disreputable, came to the island a couple of hundred years ago to make their fortunes and find new lives; how masses of the 'native' (i.e., African) population were in one way or another uprooted from their land and... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) ended up in the inhospitable but fascinating city of Kingston, where they had to learn new skills to stay afloat. But Goodison intermingles her more personal material with reverent and luminous memories of her mother and four aunts, the 'Fabulous Harvey Girls,' who hailed from the lovely little rural hamlet of Harvey River: young women who burned up the place with their beauty and pizazz — until they walked out of their youth in various directions, enduring the vicissitudes and challenges of the larger world, armed mostly with the etiquette and strong beliefs they had learned in their Eden-like childhood home.

Ah, beautiful! Beautiful is the life Goodison evokes from the far-distant past: Jamaica as paradise, inhabited by West Africans who stand on the beaches (sometimes on just one leg with the other tucked beneath them), gazing eastward across the ocean to the lost homeland they remember only in dreams. Beautiful, the stories of her two white great-grandfathers: one, the upright William Harvey, who had a black wife and answered his critics by saying that 'any woman who was good enough to share his bed was good enough for him to marry'; and the other, an Irish deserter who jumped ship, drank and hung around brothels on the island until he married into a wealthy Creole family desperate to lighten the color of its descendants' skin. Then he spotted an ebony-black girl whom he was crazy about but never did marry. They had a child, and though the Irishman was morally wanting, he brought a terrific talent for shoemaking into the extended family.

The upright William Harvey started a small dynasty. His dutiful wife worked day and night, his business flourished, and soon they accumulated some wealth. They had six children and a big house and polished mahogany furniture and flowered china, but they did their laundry out of doors and bathed daily in the river. In Jamaica, slaves had been emancipated since 1838, and the society was fluid, still sorting itself into castes and classes, with many unfortunates still toiling in the cane fields, others working just as hard at less backbreaking jobs, putting together a good life that seemed (nostalgically speaking) as close to heaven as you could get on this Earth.

In a long, lovely set piece, the author imagines her mother and sisters as teenagers getting dressed up to go into the closest town, about five miles away, to buy fabric for the many outfits they ran up on sewing machines for themselves. They dawdled through the first half of the day, changing their clothes maybe a half-dozen times, then got up on a couple of horses and meandered on paths toward the town. Goodison gives us pictures of them taken at about that time, photographic portraits of five young ladies, dressed to the nines, as cute and stylish as can be.

The author's mother, Doris, married a sweet man named Marcus, a mechanic who dreamed of owning a garage. The first years of their married life were, again, idyllic, with good food and family traditions and children and friends. Then Marcus lost everything, and they had to move to the city. Kingston was a nightmare of savagery, poverty, hopelessness and bad manners, but Doris rose to the occasion, being mean when she had to be, taking awful jobs but always managing to put food on the table. She worked for a while in the Kingston insane asylum but ended up as a seamstress, fashioning beautiful clothes for people who really needed them. She raised a total of nine children.

This is, no doubt, a 'women's' book, filled as it is with instructions for the correct way to perform women's chores: rising before dawn to stoke wood fires, to make coffee for one's husband and chocolate for the kids; a list of the proper meals for Sundays, holidays, small family gatherings and parties with lots of guests. Another lovely set piece involves the wedding of a hunchbacked lady, radiant in a dress that Doris has sewn — a wedding with an elaborate cake and refreshments and merrymaking. The bride dies a short time later, but she has had her wedding, buoyed up by a network of generosity and tradition.

This is Goodison's tribute to her mother, but more than that, it is a window that opens onto a society that most of us will never know."

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Throughout her life my mother [Doris] lived in two places at once: Kingston, Jamaica, where she raised a family of nine children, and Harvey River, in the parish of Hanover, where she was born and grew up."

In the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana comes Lorna Goodison's luminous memoir of her forebears—From Harvey River. When Doris' English grandfather, William Harvey, discovers a clearing at the end of a path cut by the feet of those running from slavery, he gives his name to what will become his family's home for generations. For Doris, Harvey River is the place she always called home, the place where she was one of the "fabulous Harvey girls" and where the rich local bounty of the land went hand in hand with the Victorian niceties and comforts of her parents' house. It is a place she will return to in dreams when her fortunes change, years later, and she and her husband, Marcus Goodison, relocate to "hard life" Kingston and encounter the harsh realities of urban living in close quarters as they raise their family of nine children.

In lush prose, Lorna Goodison weaves memory and island lore to create a vivid, universally appealing tapestry.

Lorna Goodison is an internationally recognized poet who has published eight books of poetry and two collections of short stories. In 1999 she received the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and her work has been widely translated and anthologized in major collections of contemporary poetry. Born in Jamaica, Goodison now teaches at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor and Toronto.