acres of mahogany floors with red oxide and burnishing them with a club-shaped coconut brush. She dusted and polishedthe heavy mahogany furniture with cedar oil, she cleaned the ornate silver cutlery with ashes taken from the belly of the iron stove, and she used the pulp of sour Seville oranges to shine the copper and brass utensils. Crouched on her hands and knees, she moved across the floors, her small calloused hands beating out a Johnny Cooper rhythm: Joh-nny Coo-per, Johnny Coo-perâ¦that was the scansion and sound of the coconut brush beating out its domestic rhythm on the planks of the wooden floor. She starched and ironed clothes with small triangular-faced irons made by the local blacksmith, irons that were heated on wood or coal fires. She was forever bending over some source of heat or water, to iron, cook, set steaming plates of food before the big-boned Harvey men, proud of her reputation as a hard worker. She seemed to like it when people said, âShe can work you see!â But she never encouraged her own daughters to work like that. She always told them, âI work enough for everybody already, you go and study your book.â So when her son David married Margaret Wilson, Nana Frances advised the new bride to hire a maid to help her with her housework. Above all, she cautioned, âDonât go and wash clothes in the river. Get somebody to do that for you. Donât make these people think you are ordinary.â
Her eldest son, Tom, took Nanaâs admonitions against ordinariness very seriously. He had been sent to Ruseaâs High School in Lucea, but growing bored with the dry curriculum that was imported without modification from English public schools, he took to skipping school and going to listen to the cases being tried in the Lucea courthouse. In time he persuaded his younger brother David to cut school and join him. At home they began to study the law books that their father had brought with him from England, and after a while they both knew enough law to be able to give effective legal adviceto the poor and defenceless of Hanover. Davidâs talents lay more with civil cases. He was a gifted writer who wrote many letters on behalf of people unable to do so. He had a way of choosing appropriate phrases, for selecting the right words to express the plight of some poor, wronged person. Tomâs talents lay more with criminal cases which he would âtryâ the night before the actual case, using his brothers and sisters as the accused, as witnesses, and as members of the jury.
âGo to my son Tom and my son David, they will tell you what to tell the judge.â Nana, proud that her sons were not ordinary, was forever recommending her sonsâ village lawyer practice to any wronged person. Their reputation, no doubt helped by their motherâs tireless word-of-mouth promotion, grew to the point where the local judges issued an order banning them from practising within a five-mile radius of the courthouse. So Tom and David set up office under a Lignum Vitae tree with its masses of lavender blossoms, exactly five miles from the Lucea courthouse. Dressed like most men of their time, in dark trousers and white shirts and wearing felt hats, they stationed themselves under the spreading branches of the national tree of Jamaica while poor people, many of them walking barefoot, came to them for help. Many is the time David Harvey gave his own clean shirt laundered by his mother, Nana Frances, to some poor man to enable him to stand with dignity before a hard-eyed judge. My motherâs father and her uncle instructed hundreds of people how to defend themselves against the British colonial laws that valued the smallest piece of property over the life of any ex-slave, and David went home sometimes without his shirt because he knew how the law judged by appearances.
O to hear him sing the lake Isle of Innisfree,
now become Harvey River, near Lucea.
âDown by the Sally
Scott McEwen, Thomas Koloniar
Aiden James, Lisa Collicutt