Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  There may still be hope, Kipbo thought as he laid the first plank in the floor. Putting in more planks, he imagined his parents returning to Halifax. He recalled the symbols his father had etched into the wooden chairs, bowls, and utensils he had made to sell to neighbors. At the board ends, Kipbo etched every other plank with little designs. In a corner he nailed a tiny brass square with the date the floor was laid: 1858.

  George Sebolt also named his son George. Nobody called the son Junior. He was always called Little George. Each time Little George asked his grandfather if he would ever go to Sierra Leone or to Jamaica, Kipbo shook his head. “Nothing over the seas for us anymore. We must make do here in the tough land of the Hindquarter. Rocky land, after all, is better than none.”

  Near the middle of June, Mrs. Eatten herself arrives to deliver the news. On the Sebolts’ sofa, wearing another busy print dress, her wide patent leather belt disappearing into the folds of her midsection, she leans forward to speak. “I have always felt Kath Ella was the smartest girl in her class,” she tells Shirley. “She got the highest score on the French exams. Her scholarship essay was a struggle, but in the end was first-rate. But the decision was not mine, you understand?”

  Mrs. Eatten says that although Kath Ella did not get a scholarship, the committee wrote a nice letter about her. The following day, seated next to the principal’s desk, Kath Ella unfolds the letter. It is the same hard wooden chair where, two years earlier, Luela read her disappointing news. Having seen how the white ladies on the scholarship committee nodded as she explained what she had learned from the trouble she had gotten into with Kiendra, Kath Ella was certain she would get the scholarship. But unlike Luela, she will not even be a finalist.

  Kath Ella leaves the dinner table later in the evening and goes directly to bed. For several days she imagines her life withering up like a dried beach creature. Buck yourself up, George says. But how can she? With no scholarship, what college can she attend?

  “I’ve been thinking about a woman who used to work with me at the shirtwaist factory,” Shirley says to George the next evening at the dinner table. “I believe I remember her saying a college out in New Brunswick was always on the lookout for smart colored students. Let’s take Kath Ella out there.”

  Later in June, after the family has visited the campus, a scholarship is offered. But the amount is not enough. When the only option seems to be the local trade school, Shirley writes a letter to one of the women on the selection committee that had denied Kath Ella a scholarship. On June 23, three days before the graduation ceremony for Woods Bluff Secondary’s Class of 1933, a letter arrives from a college in Montreal. A representative from the college will be coming to Halifax in late July. An interview is a mere formality. They already believe Kath Ella will be a nice addition to the campus. A full scholarship is a very good possibility.

  “Will she want to go to Montreal?” Shirley asks George.

  “She is always going on about traveling,” George says. “Of course she will.”

  The Memory Cabinet

  When Kath Ella arrives at Sainte-Marie College in Montreal in September, she is told that only three other colored girls have ever attended the school. What she is not told is that none of those girls graduated. Near the end of the school year, Kath Ella learns from a nice lady in the office of the newly installed president that her late acceptance and scholarship came about because the school was in a panic. Two colored girls who were supposed to enroll that fall chose other schools.

  “Your job is to be one of the first colored girls to graduate from that college,” Shirley says when Kath Ella is home for summer vacation. “Study hard and you will be.”

  Kath Ella returns for her second year, determined to study even harder than she had during her first. The classes are more challenging and little annoyances still make some days difficult. Instead of being satisfied that most girls at school are nice to her, she constantly fumes about the few who call her names, keep her out of school clubs, and openly refuse to invite her to parties because she is colored.

  By the time Kath Ella begins her junior year, three more colored girls have been admitted. And there is even talk of the college appointing a colored trustee.

  Three weeks into the fall term, Kath Ella is pouring herself a drink from the water pitcher in the dormitory hallway when she notices a flyer on the bulletin board announcing an upcoming Deerfield Lecture. Oscar Mislick, a businessman who will be giving the lecture, is a colored man and a childhood acquaintance of the previous college president. Apparently he has helped many students find positions in Toronto after graduation. A South African shipping magnate, an American general, and a nine-year-old mathematics prodigy have all delivered Deerfield Lectures. The first ever given by a colored man will be something to write home about.

  “I like going to lectures,” Kath Ella tells her roommate, Yvette. “But afterward nobody talks to me at the reception.”

  “Stand by the refreshments table,” Yvette says with a wave of her freckled hand. “After listening to another windbag lecture, tout le monde will rush toward you rapidement.”

  Kath Ella became friends with Yvette last year when they studied together for their French exams, which were extremely difficult at this bilingual college. Yvette has already passed the exam and is now a know-it-all, Kath Ella thinks.

  But on Saturday evening after the lecture, Yvette’s advice seems prudent. Standing near the refreshments table, Kath Ella is in the middle of her third conversation, when she realizes that the lecturer is approaching her and extending his hand.

  “I knew a man who lived in Halifax,” Oscar Mislick says. “His name was Joseph Craigsmore and he lived over in Dartmouth. Have you ever had the chance to become acquainted with him?”

  “Dartmouth’s across the basin,” Kath Ella says. “I live in Halifax.”

  “Where?”

  “Woods Bluff.”

  Oscar’s large face is a few shades lighter than Kath Ella’s. His silver-gray suit reminds Kath Ella of the suit Daniel Steptoe, one of the young men from the bluff, wore at his wedding, the week before she left for Montreal. A bit of friendliness seems to leave his eyes, as if he is disappointed to hear that she is from the bluff.

  Oscar shakes the hands of several students who approach but continues to speak to Kath Ella. “Glad to hear you want to be a teacher,” he says. “Shaping young minds is God’s work.”

  “Young children are my favorite,” Kath Ella says. “Six- or seven-year-olds. At that age children have capacity and desire.”

  “Why not join me for lunch tomorrow?” Oscar asks, pressing a card into her palm. “We could discuss getting you a teaching job.”

  Oscar drains his cup of punch and follows one of the deans back into the crowd. Kath Ella wishes she could have better read the grin on his face as he left. But she recognizes the boyish way he glances behind him when he is a few steps away. Every schoolgirl recognizes the clumsy saunter a boy has after talking to a girl he finds interesting. Kath Ella slides the card into the sleeve of her dress, suspecting the college’s social director is watching from somewhere in the room. Mrs. Wittenberg, who takes an interest in all the colored girls at the college, will soon be over to find out Kath Ella’s version of her conversation with Oscar Mislick. With so many of the social director’s spies in the room, Kath Ella has no choice but to tell the truth.

  Through the large picture window Kath Ella can see the lights of Montreal spread out like embers tossed onto a dark plain. Dinner is not mandatory for upper-division students this evening, so the corner suites in the dormitory will be quiet later. Many of the girls will be getting into the freshly washed cars parked near the quadrangle and heading to restaurants, parties, or secluded places around the city. A modern woman can go wherever she wants with whomever she pleases, the girls say. She can be alone with a gentleman she has just met. She can be intimate with a man if she wants to.

  Turning from the window, Kath Ella searches the crowd, but Oscar seems
to have left. She noticed the wedding ring, of course. Within a week of arriving at the college, she knew the names of all the divorced professors who still wore their wedding rings. Apparently, plenty of professors think it makes them more desirable. Descending the front steps of Deerfield Hall, she realizes she could have asked Oscar if he is married. She could also have found a sly way to ask Mrs. Wittenberg. Why hadn’t she?

  We’ll go down to lunch in a minute,” Oscar says the next afternoon, even before Kath Ella has said hello. After she steps into the hotel room, he closes the door. “I want to talk to you here first.”

  Oscar’s large hands grip her elbow as he directs her further into the room. The maroon rug smells of rose-scented pipe tobacco. The matching curtains, pulled tightly, block the fall sunlight that warmed her on the walk to the hotel. Oscar leads her to a seat on the divan, next to an antique desk.

  “Have you seen the little artifact they wrote about my lecture?” Oscar asks, picking up an open newspaper from the desk. Without waiting for an answer, he reads aloud a paragraph praising him for being one of a handful of colored men to have fought overseas with a Canadian Army battalion.

  “Were you really fifteen when you joined the service?” Kath Ella asks.

  “Ashy-kneed and stupid,” Oscar says.

  Oscar folds the newspaper and walks to the bed. “Come here a moment,” he says, sitting down on the striped bedspread.

  Four new blouses were in the suitcases Kath Ella brought with her to college last September. For this visit, she has chosen her pink blouse. The material feels heavy as she sits beside Oscar. He has taken off his tie and is unbuttoning his shirt. A voice in her brain is telling her to keep her blouse on.

  But Oscar is already working at the buttons. Feeling the material, his hand rubs against her breast. When he slides his hand down to her stomach, Kath Ella sits up straighter. Talking to him after the lecture, she believed he was around forty years old. Today he looks older. With his shirt open, he shows that he carries his weight on his chest. She never thought she would find something appealing in a mature body. But she does.

  He gives her a long kiss.

  “This is a nice skirt,” Oscar says, his hand now on Kath Ella’s thigh. “Let’s free you of it, so we don’t damage the material.”

  Kath Ella steps out of her skirt, feeling a nice swelling in her chest and neck. A similar feeling rose up in her several summers ago, when Daniel Steptoe put a hand on her thigh. Though she frowned and pushed his hand away, a nice feeling lingered for several minutes afterward. At Daniel’s wedding last August, she thought about that feeling, wanting it to return. And now here it is.

  But Daniel Steptoe never relieved her of her blouse and skirt. Nor did he ever lean her back onto a soft bedspread. Lying with her head against the spread, she studies the ceiling, which appears to move almost imperceptibly, like the surface of one of the interior lakes on a day when the wind is quiet. She imagined she would first offer her body to a man in a college dormitory room or a library alcove. He would be a professor. The lovemaking would occur in late fall, with orange sunlight streaming in through leaded windowpanes. She never thought her first time would be in a hotel room with the curtains drawn.

  Oscar’s tongue feels rough on Kath Ella’s neck. But his two fingers feel pleasant as they push into her. Oscar licks her breasts and her jaw clenches. But she does not speak, not wanting to interrupt her lightheadedness. A heat seems to be rising through her and up toward the ceiling. Oscar positions himself between her legs. He kisses her neck and rubs his penis against the lips of her sex. Kath Ella opens her legs wider. Oscar turns her over and rubs his penis against her buttocks. When she lies on her back again, he puts his fingers back inside her. He works his penis with the other hand.

  Oscar’s fingers now push more roughly inside her. How did he know she would like that? She did not know herself. Each time she relaxes her shoulders, as Oscar’s fingers move inside her, her shoulders stiffen again. Oscar’s body jerks and then relaxes. Kath Ella relaxes, too, letting the calm sweep over her.

  Lying beside Oscar, she finds more pleasure in trying to match his labored breaths. She watches him turn on his side and begin taking in her body again, rubbing her chest and stomach. She is disappointed later as Oscar bounds from the bed and walks to the lavatory.

  When he returns, Kath Ella is still on her back, letting the sensations linger. She dresses quickly and the lightheadedness is still with her on the walk back to her dormitory. Seated at her desk, she recalls a few of the strange moans she made during their time together. She opens her French history book, imagining new conversations she will have in the dormitory and back home in Woods Bluff. She is happy she went to the hotel.

  Sebolt family lore is rife with stories about the letters Kath Ella’s ancestors wrote to officials in London, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone, trying to locate the Sebolts who left Halifax on those two ships. And she has heard how many of the letters went unanswered. She agrees with her father: if somebody writes to you, have the decency to write them back.

  Several months after her visit to the hotel room with Oscar Mislick, she wakes up one day with the thought of writing to him. By now the happiness she felt about meeting him has vanished, replaced by distracting feelings that seem to rise in her at least once a day. Each time she imagines him standing before her in the silver-gray suit, he seems just out of reach. But could she write to him?

  What is the matter with her? she wonders late one morning, leaving a classroom after a geography exam and recalling not a single map she has drawn. She has met Oscar only once. Why does she worry about the possibility of never seeing him again? She must get her mind firmly on her studies or her school marks will suffer. And then where will she be?

  The end of the school year comes with no letter from Oscar. Clearly he does not have the same attitude she has about answering letters. Or perhaps he was reluctant to mail a letter to her at the college, Kath Ella thinks, when she has returned home in early June. Yes, he will respond to a letter if she writes from Woods Bluff.

  The thought of this correspondence sends Kath Ella to the shed looking for the four-drawer chest her father made for her twelfth birthday. The year she got the cabinet, she asked her relatives to send mementos in their letters: bits of ribbon, newspaper clippings, portions of school or church programs. If nothing came with a letter, Kath Ella sometimes placed items inside the envelopes herself: a drawing she made, a ticket stub from a bus trip, a dried blade of seagrass. She calls it her memory cabinet.

  The shed is in such disarray that it looks as if her father has not straightened up here for several springs. She decides to help with that. After clearing the interior, she pours scalding water over the floor, uncovering etchings on the planks that she had not realized were there. With an ice pick and a wire brush, she excavates sawdust and oils from the grooves in the etchings. With charcoal chips and sheets of onion paper, she lifts a copy of each unique pattern. The twelve sheets contain helixes and the heads of animals and sea creatures, designs she recognizes from the underside of furniture and on the wooden toys her grandfather made for her and her sister.

  The memento letters, once stored in drawers of her memory cabinet, are now in boxes. Kath Ella places the charcoal transfers in the bottom drawer of her memory cabinet, leaving the other drawers for her letters from Oscar. There may be many over the next year. No need to put the tiny padlock back on yet. She assumes that Oscar will be discreet in the letter he sends here, just as she has been in hers.

  But during June and July, not a single letter that Kath Ella stores in the memory cabinet is from Oscar Mislick. Why hasn’t he written? she wonders, when her summer drifts into August. She addressed the two letters she wrote before leaving Montreal and the letter from here in Woods Bluff to his office in Toronto. She had been circumspect. She wrote about her classes. She reminded Oscar about her desire to teach. She hadn’t said anything improper. Did all three letters fail to reach him?

  An odd Sep
tember heat wave beats down on Montreal when Kath Ella returns to the campus. On several afternoons after classes start, she returns to her sweltering dormitory room feeling more depressed than on the day she returned. Finally, in the middle of October, a letter from Oscar arrives.

  The typed letter is barely half a page. Oscar asks about the weather in Montreal and what classes she is taking. As the school term progresses, Kath Ella peeks at the letter again every few days before going to bed. In early December, she is elated when another letter from Oscar arrives. He will be in Montreal in February.

  They spend two days together, visiting places mostly on the outskirts of Montreal. “The college does a spring excursion to Toronto,” Kath Ella tells Oscar on the second night, after she has dressed to leave his hotel room. “I’d like to visit you. May I?”

  Oscar, stretched out naked on the bed, rubs his mustache, his eyes directed at his bare feet. “That might not be wise.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want me to come?”

  “It will always be better if I visit you. I’m a busy man in Toronto, you understand.”

  Kath Ella gives a reluctant nod as she slips on her boots. She puts on her coat, wanting to understand, but she does not. For the next few days she walks to classes wondering if it was wise to have gone to the hotel room the first time. Yes, she decides, it was.

  Several weeks later, Kath Ella leaves the campus on an excursion bus filled with students from the college. In Toronto, after barely thirty minutes of strolling through the Ontario Museum of Art, she steals away from the chaperone and catches a bus going up Yonge Street.

  For an hour she stands across the street from an antique, three-story building. Then she spies Oscar coming outside with a tall man in a suit. The man rides off in a taxi, and Oscar is about to head back into the building when he sees Kath Ella.