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heartstopping beautiful moments, the sheer joy and pure delight that babies bring. She therefore elected to go through her last pregnancy with a fatalistic, what-is-to-be-must-be, woman-must-have-out-her-lot, we-are-the-vessels-of-the-world kind of attitude.
    Ann emerged into the world one June morning, looking like a chubby Hindu goddess made from milk chocolate. Her round little “head-cup,” as Jamaican people call the skull, was covered by a cap of shiny blue-black hair, and instead of letting out a loud cry when the midwife gave her a welcome-to-the-world slap, the first sound that the baby Ann made was a cross between a laugh and a shout. She promptly proceeded to charm everyone around her when she opened her wide, heavily fringed dark eyes and proceeded to wink! Everyone instantly fell under her spell, everyone except her exhausted mother. Her siblings, even Cleodine, always treated her as if she was apretty doll who was born to amuse and delight them, and they all vied to take care of her, which suited Margaret just fine.
    â€œOne of you come and take this baby little, make me get to sleep, she is one fiery little thing, just want to laugh and play day and night. I’m a old woman I can’t manage her.” Her brothers and sisters were happy to oblige and from early on she developed into a very sociable being. Ann walked and talked before any of her siblings, and from the time she was small she was able to keep a roomful of people in stitches by doing her solemn wink and pulling ridiculous faces.
    As soon as she could talk in sentences, she began to do funny, wicked imitations of everyone in the village, including the local Anglican minister. Her brothers and sisters would often put her to stand on a chair in the dining room of the Harvey house and say, “Go on Ann, preach like parson now,” and the little girl would say, “Peeeple of Hawvy Rivah, heed the wohords of the a-passil Pawll…” catching the minister’s affected preaching voice exactly. It was the same minister who had told her father, David, when he went to call upon him to welcome him to the parish, “Oh, I already met your half-brother Edward, whose mother was from England. Surely he is the king of the Harveys.” “King to you,” David had replied, “but not to me.”
    This same minister loved to preach from Ephesians 6:5, about how masters should be kind to their slaves and slaves were to be obedient to their masters. David had finally told the Englishman one morning after church that he would appreciate it if he stopped quoting from that passage in the Bible because slavery was fully abolished in Jamaica in 1838, and as the natives had it to say, “Massa day done!”
    People soon began to beg the little girl Ann to do her imitations, especially the one of the village mendicant, who alwayscame by the Harvey house at the same time every day saying the same thing. “Morning mi massa, morning mi missus, beggin’ you something to help poor me one.” The “poor me one” was a bird whose low plaintive cry sounded to the ears of the Jamaicans as “Poor me one,” and this man had adopted its name to aid him in his solicitation of alms. Everybody had forgotten his real name anyway, so they all called him “Poor me one.”
    But the man was not poor. He was a miser, and some people said that when he died they would probably find crocus bags of gold hidden under his banana trash mattress. The small child Ann had waited for him one morning, and as he drew up to the gate to sound his alms-begging request, the young girl borrowed the man’s own voice and pre-empted him, calling out, “Morning mi kind massa, morning mi kind missus, beggin’ you something to help poor me one.” He never stopped at their gate ever again.
    Unlike her siblings, Ann–the baby of the family, eighth child of David and Margaret, Ann with the blue-black hair, who grew to