It could be said that uncle Flavius spent his life trying to find and keep God. His true quest began one Friday night in the village square, when he, being at a loss to find suitable amusement for himself in quiet, peaceful Harvey River, decided at the urging of his brother Edmund and other locals boys to accompany a band of mockers on a mission to harass a group of Salvation Army evangelists. This was the best that they could do to provide themselves with some form of Friday-night entertainment.

When they got to the meeting, the Salvation Army band was in full swing; the trumpets were blasting and the kettle drums were booming as the white uniforms of the Army members gleamed under the light of bottle torches. The band of mockers gathered and started singing along with the Salvation Army chorus, dragging out the words of the hymns. “I weeeel cleeeeeeeeg to theeee ooooooole ruggeeeeed crooooooosss,” they sung, clinging to each other, shaking their heads and twitching their bodies as if convulsed by the Holy Spirit.

Flavius, like all other members of the Harvey family, was a talented actor, and he began wowing the crowd with a spirited virtuoso performance, causing his scoffer friends to laugh uproariously, ridiculing the efforts of the valiant band of Salvationists who had walked miles across rocky roads to bring the word of God’s army to the Hanover people. The leader of the Salvationists was a tall, indigo-skinned man with a powerful baritone voice. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that gleamed in the night. He had a shock of white hair and he played the big kettle drum. When the boys started their heckling, his response was to beat the drum hard. Harder and harder he hit the stretched goat skin until the drumbeat began to overpower the heartbeats of many of the people gathered in the square.

People stopped laughing at the mockers and stood trans-fixed by the power of the drum sound being pounded out by the man with the hair that stood out in the darkness like a halo around his head. The lenses of the man’s glasses were throwing back reflections from the blazing bottle torches, so that his eyes looked as if they were on fire. He began to stare straight at Flavius, and the next thing you know, Flavius fell down, calling out, “Jesus, Jesus, O Lord Jesus.” At first everyone thought that he was joking, still mocking the Salvationists, and then they all fell silent.

“Flavy, stop form fool now, the joke gone too far, come make we leave and go home before them lock we out,” said his brother.

Flavius lay silent on the ground, unmoving, not responding to Edmund’s voice or his gentle, then not so gentle, shaking.

“Lord have mercy, what is this pon me now. Flavy, gittup.”

Eventually Flavius did stir, but this was only after people in the crowd doused his face with water and passed a bottle of white rum back and forth under his nostrils.

“Duppy box him. Me tell you say duppy box him, see how him rally when we sprinkle the white rum, everybody know say duppy fraid a white rum.”

Flavius rose up and walked over to the band of Salvationists and asked if he could join them. He marched off singing with them into the dark Hanover night, returning late to his father’s house. From that fateful night he spent the rest of his life seeking the Almighty with great zeal and fervour. During the course of his life he held membership in every known church in Jamaica, except for the Church of Rome and the African-based Myal, Revival, and Pocomania sects. Over and over again, he recreated that conversion experience as he joined one church after the other, each time convinced that he had found the perfect one to suit his spiritual needs. After much searching, he finally found a home in the Christadelphian Church, having fallen out over doctrinal differences with the Anglicans, Salvation Army, Baptists, Wesleyans, Moravians, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Brethren–Open and Closed.

His father, David, blamed Edmund for what happened to Flavius. “It’s because of you why Flavius now has no abiding city, he would never go and tease any Salvation Army people if you did not put that idea in his head. Flavy is a respectful boy, he was perfectly happy in the Anglican Church, where he was born and raised. It is you, you Mr. Edmund, who encourage him in that mischief, now look at him walking up and down shaking tambourine–because he has no other musical ability–in a Salvation Army band!”

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Although his father’s anger at Flavius’s conversion really made Edmund want to leave Harvey River–which Edmund had never liked in the first place–even more, his reasons for leaving soon became more urgent. It had to do with a girl from Chambers Pen.

“Fall her, your son fall my daughter, Mr. Harvey.”

That is what the girl’s father had said when he came to report his daughter’s condition to David, who confronted Edmund about the matter when he came in late that night.

“You are going to do what is decent and honourable, as befits a son of mine.”

Two weeks before the wedding, Edmund ran away to Kingston. Margaret accused David of chasing away her son. She wept and cursed her husband for days. “How you know if this child really belong to Eddie? What I was saying was we should wait till it born and see if it have the Harvey little toe, every Harvey child have the same shape little toe, if the child don’t have it, it is not a Harvey, if it have it, then of course, Eddie must face up to his responsibility, now as it stands, you threaten him, him catch him fraid, and now him run gone and I might never see my boy child again!”

After Edmund fled Harvey River, it would be three whole years before they heard from him. He eventually wrote to his mother from Kingston, telling her he was now driving a big Ford taxi. Thereafter he would send her letters containing a few pound notes and the occasional photograph of himself standing with one foot on the running board of his taxi. But as they say in Jamaica, “what is fi you, cannot be un-fi you.” Seven or so years after Edmund fled by night from Harvey River to avoid a shotgun wedding, he saw the woman who was to have been his bride walking up East Queen Street in the city of Kingston, where she had come on a shopping trip. And he could not do it, he could not just drive his taxi past her. He stopped and offered the mother of his son a drive.

He had been sending money to support the boy Neville, who was indeed born with the Harvey little toe, and who from his photographs one could tell was big for his age, bright, and well-mannered. Edmund begged the mother of his son a thousand pardons. He told her that people had told him things about her to turn his mind from her and that had made him confused. He apologized for the fact that she had been humiliated, shamed, and mashed-up by his desertion. She told him that she had read certain psalms for him in order for bad things to happen to him. She cursed him like a dog as she sat there in the front seat of his taxi and he kept saying that he was sorry. Then he asked her if she wanted something to eat. “My God, you must be hungry after you curse me so.” And when he said this she had laughed. He took her for a meal at Arlington House Hotel, where Alexander Bustamante, who had come back from his stint in the Spanish Foreign Legion and who would later become the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, used to take his meals. She went home with Edmund that night and two months later he married her and a year later they had another son, Roy.

But the marriage did not last. Taxi men just do not make good husbands. They are always on the go, they don’t thrive in normal domestic situations. Eventually, Edmund’s wife immigrated to England and sent for their two sons. He never spoke of their brief marriage again.