From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison

Author:Lorna Goodison
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781551991726
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

My 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.

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