EXILE BLUES
Douglas Gary Joseph Freeman
Baraka Books
Montréal
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Douglas Gary Joseph Freeman
ISBN 978-1-77186-200-4 pbk; 978-1-77186-207-3 epub; 978-1-77186-208-0 pdf
Cover by Maison 1608
Book Design by Folio Infographie
Editing by Elise Moser and Robin Philpot
Proofreading by David Warriner
Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2019
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Library and Archives Canada
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Contents
1
Montreal, The Plateau, December 1968
2
Montreal, January 1969
3
Montreal, March 1969 – A Friday
4
Montreal, May Day, 1969
5
Chicago, Summer 1968
6
Montreal, Summer Solstice, 1969 – Pre-dawn
7
Montreal, Summer Solstice, 1969 – Sunrise
8
Washington, D.C., Spring 1953
9
Washington, D.C., May 1953
10
Washington, D.C., June 1953
11
Washington, D.C., July 1953
12
Washington, D.C., late July 1953
13
Washington, D.C., August 1953
14
Washington, D.C., September 1953
15
Washington, D.C., Beginning of Summer 1955
16
Southeast Washington, D.C., 1957
17
Washington, D.C., late Summer 1957
18
Washington, D.C, Spring 1958
19
Washington, D.C., Fall 1958
20
Washington, D.C., Spring 1959
21
Washington, D.C., Summer of “fiddy-nine”
22
Washington, D.C., Fall 1959
23
Saturday, June 18th 1960
24
Saturday, June 25, 1960
25
D.C. General Hosptial, Later that evening
26
D.C. General Hospital
27
Montreal, Summer Solstice, 1969 – Supper
28
Washington, D.C., August 1960
29
Washington, D.C., late August 1960
30
Washington, D.C., September 1960
31
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, June 12, 1963
32
Washington, D.C., June 19, 1963
33
Washington, D.C., Saturday, July 6, 1963
34
Washington, D.C., late July, 1963
35
Howard University, September, 1963
36
One Week Later
37
Northeast Washington, October 1963
38
Washington, D.C., November 22, 1963
39
Chicago, 1964
40
Chicago, Wednesday, June 24, 1964
41
Chicago, Fall 1966
42
Chicago, August, 1966
43
Chicago, September, 1966, A Friday
44
The Next Morning, A Saturday
45
The Monday Morning After
46
Washington, D.C., 1967
47
Chicago, January, 1968
48
Chicago, South Side, February 1968
49
Chicago, April 4, 1968
50
Chicago, April 6, 1968
51
Chicago, December 1968
52
Montreal, Summer Solstice, 1969 – After Supper
“The natural state of mankind is, and I know this is a controversial idea, is freedom. Is freedom. And the proof is the length to which a man, woman or child will go to regain it once taken. He will break loose his chains. He will decimate his enemies. He will try and try and try, against all odds, against all prejudices, to get home.”
John Quincy Adams
1
Montreal, The Plateau, December 1968
“You’re beautiful, you know.”
She spoke quietly, almost reverently, to the mound of flesh buried under her bedding. His night had been rough and she didn’t want to startle him. She wasn’t sure if his stirrings meant that he was awake or not. But he was.
He had been peeping out at her and the room for a while waiting for the wooziness to go away. Her white satin bed covers, while shielding him from the chill, magnified the harshness of her stark white room. Light rushed in through her uncovered windows and undulated magically upon the satin surfaces. It made him feel submerged in the Northern Lights. Beyond the windows the outside world came into focus to reveal how it had been utterly transformed during the course of a single night. An enormous snowstorm had buried the city.
It had just begun to snow when he arrived the previous night. He was accustomed to snow falling in big, fluffy, floater flakes that drifted down dream-like from a softly pulsing sky. But the previous night he experienced hostile snow: small, wet pellets of meanness with a mission to blow into every exposed human cavity and prevent normal human functions such as breathing, hearing, and, above all, seeing.
Now his eyes felt sore as he squinted through the brightness. He needed to make sense of things and he needed his vision back. The previous night he squinted through dark billowing smoke in the plane’s cabin before tumbling down the emergency chute. A little woman with a thick French accent had yelled at him, “Go, man!” and pushed him out before he was ready. It was the same strangely beautiful little woman who kept staring at him during the flight. He landed not on his feet but on his rump, which forced a large “umph” of air from his lungs. Sirens blared as he found his feet and joined other feet that shuffled, ran, then shuffled some more upon a wet tarmac that threw distorted reflections of colored lights and moving shadows back towards his eyes. A voice through a loudspeaker advised calm. The voices around him were not listening. When he was inside the terminal, he wiped his eyes and could see without squinting. That was when he spotted the tall, goateed, ponytailed guy wearing black combat boots and a green US Army parka, who beckoned to him. The thought materialized that the panic was all smoke but no fire. He had passed Customs without actually passing through Customs.
But that was last night, when he could actually see a city as he was being driven from the airport.
This morning the city lay buried under tons of white that would prevent it from being found for a very long time, he thought. He winc
ed at the thought of his little five-foot, eight-inch self venturing out into that stuff and becoming lost forever. He did not want to die in such a place. The thought of dying and being buried under so much snow that his mother could not find his grave made him shiver.
“Are you alright?” she asked, her voice still quiet, yet now with an edge of concern.
She had seen the bloodstains on his clothes when they brought him to her place. And when they heard the loud thud and rushed into the bathroom to find him collapsed on the floor, sweating with fever, they immediately disrobed him and she had seen the wounds. His back and arms were covered in lacerations and there was a swelling to the back of his head. Their good doctor Freyman said he had the flu and a slight concussion. She left them with instructions; “Watch him for anything resembling convulsions. Don’t leave him alone for the next twenty-four hours at least. Get him into a cool bath, but don’t let the water get so cold that he shivers. Bon? À demain.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He decided it was time to try sitting up. He stuck his head out from under the bedding. He wasn’t fine. There was a sharp pain at the base of his skull. And the rest of his head throbbed. He had all kinds of little stinging pains. His right shoulder was especially sore.
Marianne sat on the radiator wearing a powder blue khaftan hoisted high above her freckled crossed legs. Her thick red hair kept the khaftan’s hood buoyant. Her hazel eyes studied him through smoke circles she blew after taking long puffs from a cigarette she wiggled between her fingers. She may have been the palest person he had ever seen but she wasn’t white. Her room was white. He vowed to himself at that moment to never again use a color to describe a person.
A tiny mound of blown-in snow had formed in the corner of the windowsill behind her. It matched in contour the huge mound in her front yard that was as high as her shoulders. He wondered how could she not be cold sitting on a radiator that surely wasn’t working. It emitted no hissing sounds. In Chicago radiators always hissed.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Will you come out and eat or should I just shove something under there for you?” She thought she heard a muffled giggle that she guessed she wasn’t supposed to have heard.
“I’m gonna get up,” he said. Realizing he was naked under the sheets, he asked for his clothes.
“Your clothes are still wet. I had to wash them. I couldn’t get out to the laundromat to use the dryers because no one can get out this morning until the snowplows come along and clear the streets. But even if we weren’t snowed in, I could not have left you alone. Besides, your turtleneck and sweatshirt are too ripped up for you to wear them again. Jamie’s coming by to bring you some clothes later on. In the meantime, how do sausage, eggs, porridge, and coffee sound to you?”
“It would all sound very good if I had some clothes to put on,” he replied.
“Mon dieu, relax,” she said, smiling. “You mustn’t forget that you were in my tub, so I got to see everything.”
He looked at her with what he hoped would be one of his most evil stares ever. She just giggled.
“Je m’appelle Marianne,” she said. “Et vous, monsieur, comment vous appelez-vous?”
They must have told her his name, he thought. Was she testing him?
“Mary Anne,” he said. “Mary Anne what?”
He thought he saw a gleam in her eyes. He was mistaken. It was a glint. The kind that signals a sharp blade has been drawn from its sheath.
“Please,” she said, “never call me Mary Anne. I am Québécoise. Born here, raised here, and my family can trace our ancestry back to the original French settlers in the 1700s. I’ve lived all my life in Montreal except for three and a half years at Brown College where those stupid American girls virtually changed my name, anglicized it like they try to do to everything, forever calling me Mary Anne in spite of my constant protestations. In lecture halls, in the dorm, in the cafeteria . . . as if they were either trying to save me from my Frenchness or stew me in that non-existent melting pot. The disease spread here long ago; Marie-Andrées calling themselves Mary, Robertos calling themselves Robert—or worse, Bob! I am Marianne. It is one word, spelled M-A-R-I-A-N-N-E, with no big accent on the third syllable, merci beaucoup. And please, don’t punish my name by trying to roll that R.”
“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve forgotten a lot of my French. I took it for a couple of years in junior high, and frankly found the whole aura around the language to be quite bourgeois. I wanted to take Spanish, but because I was in the honors class, I had to take French. But I remembered enough to realize that you had told me your name and were asking mine. I’m sorry, okay?”
The French-language bourgeois! Classic American ignorance, she thought, while wondering why she had no urge to fire back with a retort.
“You never answered my question, Marianne,” he continued. “What’s your last name?”
“Bourgeois.”
“What?” he asked incredulously while still squinting through the brightness. “Your last name is Bourgeois?”
#
Marianne France Bourgeois was born and raised in Montreal. She was raised by a great-aunt, Grande tante Céleste, the youngest of her maternal grandmother’s sisters, who had been a nun in the Saint Augustine Convent just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Marianne had been twice orphaned.
Marianne’s mother, Céline Bourgeois, was a rebellious, headstrong, intellectual firebrand. She was of an emerging generation of Quebec women who would never again be satisfied with assuming traditional women’s places in the staunchly paternalistic and Catholic society of Quebec, or in the world for that matter. She met Marianne’s father, Jack, or Red Jack to his rugby teammates, while both were in post-graduate Anthropology studies at McGill University. They knew immediately that they had so much more in common than red hair and freckles. They fell in love as though it had always been. And they had plans; plans which involved her traveling to France to get at her roots and him traveling to Northern Ireland to get at his. Her becoming pregnant simply made their bond tighter. She delivered their baby girl just as they finished their studies. Céline insisted that she be named Marianne after the feminine icon personifying French liberty that sprang spontaneously from folk culture during the French Revolution of 1789. Not long after they traveled to Northern Ireland, somewhere in those Belfast Hills the Troubles caught up with them and they never returned. Marianne had been left in the care of her grandmother.
Fate was not finished with baby Marianne. Her grandmother and her missionary-pilot husband who were granted custody took little Marianne with them on a fateful trip to bring Christianity to the Shipibo people of the Amazon. A deadly fer-de-lance fell through a hole in the thatched roof of the hut they occupied, and—perhaps as shocked as Marianne’s grandmother—landed upon the canopy of the baby cot Marianne was asleep in. Marianne’s grandmother swatted at this most venomous of snakes only to have it strike at her so hard that a fang became embedded in one of the bones of her hand. Screaming, and suffering great pain, she ran out and encountered her husband who had heard the commotion and hurried over. When he saw the yellow viper thrashing from his wife’s hand, he grabbed at it and had one of his own fingers lacerated. Before the Shipibo could get them upriver to the Missionary Medical Compound they had both succumbed to the venom, leaving little Marianne an orphan again. She was five years old.
A merchant steamer conveyed the bodies and little Marianne back to Canada and took port in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The nuns of the Saint Augustine Convent undertook to see that the two souls received proper ministrations. Sister Céleste Bourgeois resided there. She was Marianne’s grandmother’s sister and she promptly decided to leave the convent to take custody of and raise Marianne after taking but one look at her grandniece and gasping, “She is the mirror of her mother, a little Céline!”
*
Marianne blew another
circle and looked at him. She snuffed out her cigarette and thought aloud, “that was my last one.” She walked over to the closet, took something from a top shelf and gave it to him. “Here. You’ll be warm under this furry blanket.”
“This feels weird against my skin,” he said as he shifted the “furry blanket” about his shoulders. “It looks like a whole bunch of animal skins sewn together.”
“In fact,” she said, “I bought that beaver-skin bed cover last summer from the Cree up at James Bay.”
He sprang to his feet. “Shit! You mean I’ve got dead animal skins around me? Jeezus!” Without thinking, he dropped that beaver-skin bed cover as fast as he could, exclaiming, “You know, beavers are just big ole water rats! Don’t you know that? Jeezus!”
She shrieked out her laughter. He was actually jumping around now, trying to get away from the beaver-skin blanket as if it were alive, which brought Marianne to a near-hysterical laughing fit. He frantically wiped his palms over himself, trying to cleanse himself of whatever “big ole water rat” impurities might still be clinging to his skin. His sudden panic to get away from the skins of big ole dead water rats made him totally oblivious to hunger, the cold, or his nakedness. Marianne bent over laughing.
2
Montreal, January 1969
Preston “Prez” Coleman Downs, now known as Douglas “Doug” Norberg to all but Isabelle, Jamie, and Marianne, had been walking for three blocks from the grocery store.
He lived in a triplex on the west side of De l’Esplanade Avenue in a spacious bright apartment he rented from Marianne “for a third of what the rent really should be,” Jamie—Marianne’s boyfriend—was fond of reminding one and all. “She wouldn’t even rent it to me for twice the legitimate rent even though I begged her on bended knee. She said it was better not to live too close to the person you’re involved with. What rubbish!”
“What rubbish!” was Jamie’s signature phrase. He came to Canada in 1965 as part of the first wave of American anti-Viet Nam war activists. He professed to be a pacifist and an atheist. He had confided to a not tight-lipped Marianne, however, that his New Jersey family was Jewish and wealthy. He, however, proclaimed himself to be an anti-establishment rebel who shunned materialism. And though he missed his mother and siblings, his father was another story. As early as Jamie’s Bar-Mitzvah his father had sought to control his future, going as far as actually trying to arrange his marriage to the daughter of another wealthy Jewish family.
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