Free From Harvey River by Lorna Goodison Page A

coconut cake, a shilling, gifts to help ease the misery of the loss of her plait, which Margaretkept, lying in state, on a table in the centre of the drawing room.
    â€œWhy these things always happen to me? Look how that nasty boy spy on me and make me curse those expressions and embarrass myself, and Almighty God, who seeth and knoweth all things, knows that I was innocently, innocently studying my book and that wicked wretch come and cut off my hair, why me? O Lord? Why me?” And then she cried out something that she had read in a novel: “My life is over, for a woman’s beauty is her hair.”
    Margaret could not let that pass. “A woman’s beauty? So you a woman now? The only woman in this house is me, your mother, so you better put this hat on you head and go on to school.”
    Eventually David dug a hole in the yard and buried the severed plait, saying, “It is only hair, it will grow back, it is not as if the boy took her life.” “Yes, that is true,” said her mother, “but it look like she have bad luck. Look how that renking little boy from town was peeping on her and now look this…her lovely head of hair shorn like a sheep.”

 

    F or months after the boy cut off her hair, my mother wore a broad leghorn straw hat whenever she went shopping in Lucea with her sisters. For these trips they would debate for days beforehand about what to wear in order to “cut a dash” when they entered the town. They favoured linen, crepe, and georgette dresses in cool pastel colours or romantic florals. Never dark colours; dark colours were for older, married women. Sooner or later they each would have decided on an outfit, always ones with skirts that buttoned up the side so they could undo the bottom buttons when they rode, two to a horse, into Lucea. But my mother would be changing her clothes up until the eleventh hour. Sometimes she would change into as many as ten complete outfits before her sisters threatened to leave without her as they rode the five miles into the town of Lucea. “Yes, Match-Me Doris, those black shoes go with that powder-blue dress and you don’t have time to change them,” says Albertha. And Doris, who did not like to be hurried, and was liable to become short-tempered if pressured, would certainly have told them, “Go on, go on and leave me behind, for I am not going into town looking like a poppyshow today. Furthermore my clothes are mine. I sew them, I can change them as much as I like.” “You think you arethe only one who can change clothes?” They would have argued, but once they got there they would become the five ladylike Harvey girls.
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    Lucea, the capital of Hanover, is situated on the western side of a horseshoe-shaped harbour that is approximately one mile wide. With the exception of the parish of Kingston and St. Andrew, Hanover is the smallest of the fourteen parishes in Jamaica. Hanover was almost named St. Sophia, in honour of the mother of King George I , but this name was voted down by the Legislative council in favour of Hanover, originally spelled Hannover. The name was chosen with reference to the German domain of the reigning family of England.
    When the Harvey girls descended from their home in the hilly interior of Harvey River and rode into the town of Lucea, they never failed to look up in wonder at the Lucea Clock Tower, which held a red clock that looked like the high-domed helmet worn by German royal guards. Everyone in the town knew that the clock in the tower was brought to Lucea by mistake, that it had been destined for the island of St. Lucia, and that the captain of the ship which was transporting it had mistaken the Port of Lucea for the island of St. Lucia, and delivered it there in 1817. As it so happened, Lucea’s town fathers had already ordered a new clock built, but it was of a more modern design, and not anything as grand as this German helmet. They decided