From Harvey River Read Online Free PDF Page B

for themselves the green and mountainous land to which their foreparents always longed to return. Maroon Country, where places had sinister and coded names like “Me No Send, You No Come.”
    They stood like twin panthers on the docks at Lucea, with such a fierce, mesmerizing presence that the overseer of the San Flebyn estate, one Grant Elbridge, felt compelled to hire them as a matching pair. He did this partly with his own amusement in mind, for he and his wife often indulged in elaborate sex games with the Africans on the property. One week after he hired them, Elbridge announced that the twins had to be whipped, abolition of slavery or not, for who the hell were these goddamned twin savages to disobey and disrespect him? The night before, when he had summoned them to his overseer’s quarters, and he and his wife had indicated to them that they wanted them to take off their clothes, the two, acting asone, had spit in his face and stalked out into the dark night.
    So Elbridge ordered the twins to take off their shirts again, this time in the middle of the cane field, and the twins obeyed at once. They tore off their shirts and bared their chests to him before the other labourers who now worked under conditions that were hardly better than before their emancipation. The huge, dark eyes of the twins locked onto Elbridge.
    The Harvey brothers, who had been ordered by Elbridge to leave their bookkeeping and come down into the cane piece to watch him in his words “tan the hide off these heathen savages,” stood close to each other and watched sick to their stomachs as the long, thick strip of cowhide lashed across the backs of the Maroons, raising raw, bloody welts. But they became truly terrified when they saw that it was Elbridge who bawled and bellowed in pain. The whip dropped from his hand and coiled loosely like a harmless yellow snake when he fell, face down, in the cane field. The Maroon twins seemed to have mastered the “bounce back” techniques of Nanny, who was able to make bullets ricochet off her body back at the British soldiers. Just as the bullets had bounced off Nanny’s body into the flesh of the soldiers, so too did the twins redirect Elbridge’s chastisement onto him. As Elbridge screamed and writhed in pain, the Harveys watched as the Liberian twins walked out of the cane piece and turned their faces in the direction of the Cockpit Country, knowing that no one would ever find them once they disappeared into Maroon territory. After witnessing this, the Harveys resigned their jobs as bookkeeping clerks on the San Flebyn estate and decided to find some land to make a life for themselves.
    In the spirit of true conquistadors, William and John Harvey had come across a small clearing up in the Hanover Hills on a Sunday as they combed the area outside the estate insearch of a place to settle themselves. It was not far from a place named Jericho and the entire area was cool and scented by pimento or “allspice” bushes. They did not know it then, but in the years to come, almost all the world’s allspice would come from the island of Jamaica.
    Tall bamboo trees bowed and bumped their feathery heads together to create flexible, swaying arches, and here and there solid dark blocks of shale jutted up from the ground in strange Stonehenge-like formations. On close examination, they saw that the rocks had bits of seashells embedded in them, so it is fair to say that at some point that area must have been under the sea. The clearing was verdant green and watered by a strong, coursing river. They had reached it by following one of the paths leading away from the estate. These paths had been created by the feet of men and women fleeing from the beatings and torture that was their only payment for making absentee landlords some of the richest men in the world. “Rich as a West Indian Planter” was a common saying when sugar was king during the eighteenth and nineteenth