title: From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island
author: Lorna Goodison
description: Starred Review. Goodison, an acclaimed poet who received Jamaica's Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999, makes lyrical exposition sing with dulcet island patois in this homage to her mother, Doris, who grew up in the sleepy Eden-like setting of Harvey River, but raised her own nine children in urban Kingston under less coddled conditions. Starting on a supernal note, in which Doris bequeaths this book to her daughter in a dream, the memoir draws a richly textured portrait of a sprawling, well-to-do family, including seven strong-willed siblings with deftly sketched personas. As plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato, Doris&mdash;whose Anglo-African blood attests to Jamaica's history of interracial dalliance&mdash;joins her sisters in the clique of fabulous Harvey girls, their surnames trumpeting the family's landed-gentry status. But it's a working-class chauffeur&mdash;the author's father&mdash;who wins Doris's hand in marriage. Borne away from her childhood idyll, she takes in her first moving picture, produces a succession of offspring and plies her domestic skills, especially sewing, gamely weathering the vicissitudes of life outside paradise. Steeped in local lore and spiced with infectious dialect and ditties, Goodison's memoir reaches back over generations to evoke the mythic power of childhood, the magnetic tug of home and the friction between desire and duty that gives life its unexpected jolts. <I>(Mar.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # The Mothers Of Honore
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Mary Hartwell Catherwood
  
  
  This page formatted 2007 Blackmask Online.
  
  
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  Produced by David Widger
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  THE MOTHERS OF HONORÉ
  
  
  From “Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899
  
  
  By Mary Hartwell Catherwood
  
  
  The sun was shining again after squalls, and the strait showed
  
  
  violet, green, red, and bronze lines, melting and intermingling each
  
  
  changing second. Metallic lustres shone as if some volcanic fountain on
  
  
  the lake-bed were spraying the surface. Jules McCarty stood at his
  
  
  gate, noting this change in the weather with one eye. He was a small,
  
  
  old man, having the appearance of a mummied boy. His cheek-bones shone
  
  
  apple-red, and his partial blindness had merely the effect of a
  
  
  prolonged wink. Jules was keeping melancholy holiday in his best
  
  
  clothes, the well-preserved coat parting its jaunty tails a little
  
  
  below the middle of his back.
  
  
  Another old island