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 luminous memoir of her forebears, we meet a cast of
wonderfully drawn characters, including George O'Brian Wilson, the Irish
patriarch of the family who marries a Guinea woman after coming to
Jamaica in the mid-1800s; Doris's parents, Margaret and David, childhood
sweethearts who become the first family of Harvey River; and Margaret
and David's eight children.
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.
