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him to marry.
    He married her after his English wife died and left him with six children. He went on to have six more children with Frances Duhaney–Tom, Frances, George, James, Martha, and my grandfather David–and from all accounts he cared forthem all, from the blond, blue-eyed Edward born from his first wife to the dark, Indian-looking David and all the others of varying skin shades in between. He gave each of them equal amounts of land, which he surveyed himself, and he encouraged them to read and to love the books he had brought with him from England. He was known on occasion to chase outsiders from Harvey River, and if, as I suspect, those outsiders were dark-skinned like his own wife, then I’m not sure what that says about the very moral character of William Harvey except that he was deeply complicated and flawed like most people.
    William had chosen Frances Ann Duhaney as his future wife when he went one day to the village of Jericho to purchase a pig and some chickens from her father. My great-grandfather seemed to have been a man of clear and unequivocal feelings. According to my mother, he identified my great-grandmother as his second wife from the first time that he laid eyes upon her.
    Frances Ann Duhaney, called “Nana” as a sign of respect after her marriage, was a fine-featured woman with jet-black skin. Her surname, Duhaney, probably meant that her African grandfather had been owned by the Duhaney family, proprietors of the Point Estate at the eastern end of Hanover. The original form of their name was de Henin, from the descendants of Phillip de Henin of the Netherlands.
    William Harvey had spotted the beautiful young girl moving efficiently about her father’s yard. In the hour or two that it took William to buy the pig and some chickens from Mr. Duhaney, he noticed how lightly the young girl moved, how effortlessly she performed her tasks, feeding the chickens, sweeping up the yard, building a fire, disappearing and reappearing in no time bearing a pail of water drawn from the river, peeling yams and dasheens and feeding the peels to the pigs. Her face was so serene throughout, her high smooth foreheadnever breaking a sweat. It seemed to him that she hummed a low and compelling tune all the time, like a worker bee. Her lips were a shade darker than the rest of her face, as though she had been suckled on the juice of some sweet, energizing black berry. He had asked her father for her hand in marriage.
    Soon the young girl was moving swiftly, silently, and efficiently about the Harvey house on bare feet. She rarely wore shoes inside her house. It was as if she needed her soles to always be in touch with the powerful work energy issuing up from the Hanover ground through the floorboards, the same energy that enabled labourers to perform the ferocious, back-breaking tasks involved in the production of sugar cane; an endless cycle of digging, planting, weeding, cutting, grinding, and boiling under the ninety-six-degrees-in-the-shade sun, and the cut of the whip. Nana Frances pulled that same work energy up through the soles of her feet, and that allowed her to work tirelessly. William always said that it was not just her beauty, but her silence, devotion, loyalty, and capacity for hard work that drew him to her.
    Nana Frances would get up early every morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, to make big country breakfasts or “morning dinners” of roasted yams and breadfruit, bammies made from grated cassava, fried plantains, fried eggs, stewed liver, kidneys, and light, and escoveitched fish, washed down with quarts of coffee and chocolate tea. William was a big man who liked his food. She knew that, and she liked to cook for him and his trenchermen children. She would wash huge hampers of laundry in the river, beating the clothes clean on the river stones, washing linen as white as the proverbial Fullers soap. She kept the big wooden house clean, staining what seemed like