Free From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison

the one that everyone loves,” her brother Flavius would say. “Dear Dor” they called her, for if Cleodine was pristine and as perfectly designed as an anthurium, Albertha a lily above reproach, Rose a fragrant damask rose by name and nature, and Ann gorgeous and intenseas a bird of paradise, my mother could be described as a mixed bouquet. She was a little of all those flowers, with a good spray of common wildflowers like buttercups and ramgoat roses bundled in with hardy perennials and quick-growing impatiens, and she learned how to send her roots down deep when storm-time came.
    Storm-time was the furthest thing from Doris’s mind while she grew up as a daughter of the first family of Harvey River. She was an easy-going child who from an early age displayed signs of a quick intelligence and a love of hyperbole. Once, when her brother Edmund hid in a bush and jumped out at her, a frightened Doris declared: “Only Almighty God alone knows how my poor, poor, trembling, fearful little heart could stand such a great fright…” This she said with her eyes raised to heaven and one small hand covering her little palpitating heart. She had a way with words, words being one of the things she learned from her village lawyer father, David, from the vituperative Irish eloquence of her maternal grandfather, George O’Brian Wilson, and from the West African Guinea woman griot-style of her grandmother Leanna.
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    â€œDoris is really Mas David daughter.” In the same way that her father literally gave the shirt off his back to people going to Court, and constantly loaned them money to pay fines, my mother was known as a “come to help us.” Much as she loved her dresses, she would give them away to her cousins who admired them. She was the one you went to if you wanted to borrow anything. If you needed somebody to keep your baby while you went on an errand or if you were feeling sick, she was an excellent nurse. Once her sister Albertha’s fingers had become so swollen and infected from excessive embroidering that she could do nothing for herself. It was my mother whobathed her and dressed her until her hands healed, and Albertha always spoke about her sister’s ministrations with tears in her eyes. Everybody in Harvey River loved Doris; so on that September morning in 1920, after Margaret Wilson Harvey’s husband and children had left the house, and she noticed a line of red ants marching along her clothesline–a sure portent of trouble–she did not expect trouble to do with Doris. In the late morning, she glanced across the valley, up to the hilltop, in the direction of the village school and saw what looked like a group of school girls in navy blue uniforms fluttering down the hillside like a flock of grass quits. Minutes later, when she heard the girls burst into the village with a great warbling commotion, Margaret hurried out into the square only to behold her daughter Doris at the head of the crowd bearing her long black plait in her clenched fist.
    Back up the hill they went, this time with Margaret at the head of the crowd, carrying her daughter’s once waist-length braid flung over her left shoulder. As they climbed the hill, she cried “this is like murder” and swore to personally punish the culprit who in a fit of adolescent concupiscence had sliced off my mother’s hair as she sat in front of him with her head bent forward, concentrating on the rules of proper speech in her Nestfield’s Grammar .
    So devastated was Doris that she refused to go to school for weeks, staying close to home with her chopped-off hair hidden under a mob cap and bursting into tears anytime anybody said something like: “You hear what happened” or “ Here is some money, go and buy a bread for supper,” or “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
    Harvey relatives came from far and near, bringing Doris little gifts, a nice ripe mango, a