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look like a girl in a Gauguin painting–did not fear her mother, Margaret. All the Harvey children humbled themselves under their mother’s stern, often unsmiling gaze, and they tried to respect her oft-quoted edict, “No child of mine will ever rule me.” No child, except Ann. It wasn’t so much that the girl wanted to rule her mother, it was just that she was born free. The girl looked like a Gypsy. It was amazing how all the mixing of bloods produced people who looked like Indians and Gypsies. People who, if they were flowers, would be birds of paradise and Cataleya orchids. Ann, the last child of David and Margaret Harvey, looked like a bird of paradise. She radiated a kind of energy that was hard on her mother. “David, tell her that she cannot back-answer me.”
    â€œJust allow her, she is a good child, don’t break her spirit.”
    â€œWhat, and make her rule me in my own house?”
    People would call out to her, “Come here Ann Rebeker and give me a joke.” And the child would do just that. It seemed as if she had been put on the earth to bring joy and happiness to everyone except Margaret.
    â€œShow off bring disgrace, and high seat kill Miss Thomas’ puss,” she’d say.
    â€œLord, Margaret, just allow the child to prosper.”
    Where did this girl get this joy? This uncontainable, bubbling-over merriment that made her laugh and joke and giggle so much?
    Unlike Margaret’s other children, Ann never, ever appeared to be afraid of her. Once, when Margaret had quoted the Biblical injunction to her about honouring one’s mother and father, the girl had reminded her that the same passage also said that parents should not provoke their children to wrath.

 

    H ow Harvey River became Harvey River. For all we know, the village of Harvey River used to have another name, but when my mother’s paternal grandfather and his brother founded it in 1840, the old name was lost forever. The Harvey River was the source of life to everyone in the village. It was named by David’s father, William Harvey, and his brother John, two of five brothers named Harvey who had come from England, sometime during the early half of the nineteenth century. They were related to one Thomas Harvey, a Quaker who had come to Jamaica in 1837, along with Joseph Sturge, the two men later writing a powerful and moving account of slavery in the British West Indies. The other Harvey brothers split up and went to live in different parishes in Jamaica after their arrival; only William and John stayed together. One version is that the two took up jobs as bookkeepers on the San Flebyn sugar estate, but one day soon after their arrival they witnessed something that made them decide to abandon all ideas about joining the plantocracy.
    The estate overseer had hired two new Africans fresh off the boat in Lucea Harbour. Although slavery was officially abolished in 1838, some Africans were now being brought to Jamaica, along with East Indians and Chinese, to work asindentured labourers on sugar plantations where production was severely affected by the loss of slave labour.
    Among the new Africans was a set of twins from Liberia, the great-grandchildren of fighting Maroons who had been transported there from Jamaica after the Maroon War in 1795. These fierce fighters had been banished to Nova Scotia in Canada, and had later settled in Liberia. The twin boys had grown up hearing many tales of Jamaica and of the courage of their ancestors, runaway Africans who refused to accept the yoke of slavery. The twins even claimed to be related to the supreme warrior woman, Nanny of the Maroons. Grandy Nanny, as I have heard some Maroons call her, had led her people in a protracted guerrilla war against the British until they were forced to make peace with her, on her terms.
    These two young men had chosen to travel to Jamaica from Liberia on a one-year contract as indentured labourers, mainly to see