Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  “I realize you didn’t know I was coming,” Luela says when they reach the front door of the house. “But you could at least look happy to see me.”

  “I am happy to see you,” Etienne says. “But, please, it’s cold out here. Come inside.”

  Stacks of packing boxes lie about the living room. Etienne’s wife, Jocelyn, narrow-faced with curly hair down to her shoulders, shakes Luela’s hand looking flustered. “I apologize for the mess,” she says as Etienne takes several boxes from the beige crushed-velvet sofa. “The movers will be here on Tuesday. Of course Etienne waited until the last minute to get the boxes we need.”

  “Claire and Jean-Yves said they would meet me here,” Luela says. “Where are they?”

  “They went to pick up the baby at my brother’s house,” Jocelyn says. “I took the baby there this morning because too much dust bothers him.”

  “Claire was happy to go,” Etienne says. “She wants to spend time with the baby.”

  “I’ll bet Claire also wanted to give Etienne and me time to spend with you,” Jocelyn says. “Claire always has marvelous ideas.”

  While Jocelyn heads to the kitchen to get refreshments, Etienne carries Luela’s coat to a rack in the front hallway. Luela unwraps her scarf and studies the line of framed pictures over the fireplace mantel. When Etienne returns, he tries to direct her toward the sofa, but she continues to study the photographs. She recognizes Etienne and Jocelyn, but the other faces in the frames are strangers.

  “What will the two of you be doing down in Alabama?” she asks.

  “Jocelyn and I interviewed for jobs at the same college,” Etienne says. “I’ve already got an offer letter. I will be the director of student accounts.”

  “Director. That is quite a title for a young man. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. How long will you be here in Burlington?”

  “I’m catching a bus tomorrow morning.”

  Etienne rustles a soft-sided pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know if I wrote to you about it,” he says, taking out a bent cigarette. “But I stayed on to work at the college where I graduated. That’s where I met Jocelyn. She worked in admissions.”

  “No I didn’t,” Jocelyn says, carrying in a tray that holds a teapot and several mugs. “I was temping in the bursar’s office. Etienne has a terrible memory.”

  Jocelyn sets the tray on the coffee table and sits down on the floor. “I apologize again about the baby not being here,” she says, dropping tea bags into the mugs. “But the doctor insists the dust could cause another sinus inflammation.”

  “I’m sure his grandmother’s taking good care of him,” Luela says. “But I can’t wait to see him myself.”

  “In the meantime, I’ve got a photo you can look at,” Jocelyn says.

  As Luela finally sits, Jocelyn hands her a steaming mug, then a three-by-five picture of their newborn. “What’s the child’s name again?” Luela asks.

  “Warner,” Etienne and Jocelyn say in unison.

  Ordinarily even a picture of a child with Sebolt blood is cause for a fuss. However, Luela studies this picture, not yet sure what she will say. His grandmother, Kath Ella, couldn’t wait to leave the bluff. And now his father plans to move even farther away than his grandmother did. This may be the last time Luela sees the child. What is the benefit of getting too close?

  “Are there any pictures of your mother on this shelf?” she asks Etienne.

  “I’ve moved so much,” Etienne says. “I’ve never unpacked any.”

  “Not one?” Luela asks.

  Etienne shakes his head.

  Luela sips her tea, taking in Etienne’s neatly combed brown hair and loose corduroy pants. For the moment, she will accept his explanation about the absence of images of his mother. The lack of visible photographs or other mementos of his mother may be his way of mourning her death. Then again, his mother left this world more than eight years ago.

  After several sips of tea Luela heads for the bathroom. In the hallway, a face she sees in one of the framed photographs on the wall causes her to halt. The picture must have been lifted from Timothee’s college yearbook. She looks closer, grateful that she has gotten over her anger at him for cremating Kath. She wants to chastise Etienne for smoking, but she may have other more serious complaints. There is no way to compare parental love, Luela thinks at the door to the bathroom. Nor does a child’s love for his parents have to be displayed for others. But Timothee’s pictures are displayed in this house and Kath’s are not? What is going on here?

  “Etienne went down to the cellar,” Jocelyn says when Luela returns to the sofa.

  “Whatever for?” Luela asks.

  “I guess he wants to show you that he does have pictures of his mother.”

  Luela sips her cold tea, barely able to make conversation. So the cellar is where Etienne has hidden his mother? She drains the mug, finally putting together the pieces of why Etienne might be unsettled that his distant aunt from Halifax has come to visit. Left alone when Jocelyn carries off the tray, Luela begins to suspect that Etienne has been hiding his connection to his colored mother. She pulls her purse closer to her, angry that she has relinquished her coat. It took four payments to pay it off. And it may well be too nice a coat to have worn to a get-together at a house where her nephew has been doing the distasteful thing called crowing.

  You’re a lying crow,” children sometimes say to each other on the grounds of the newly named Africaville Elementary and Secondary. “You’d better stop fibbing, or you’ll never be prime minister.”

  How long has it been since Luela thought about the origin of that put-down? It began during the turmoil of the prime minister campaign of 1933. Every day that year people all over Canada opened their local newspapers, eager to read the latest about a man named Lyon Arthur Crow. A successful lawyer in Montreal and head of the New Labour Party, Lyon Crow spent most of 1933 traveling across Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick, making newsworthy speeches critical of the prime minister, who was eager to get reelected. The most damning criticism Lyon Crow levied was that the prime minister had not done enough to help ordinary citizens during the financial crisis. Lyon Crow’s favorite activity was to poke fun at the incumbent’s 1929 campaign promise of a chicken in every pot. Early in the campaign Lyon Crow’s road crew began letting a chicken wander around the outdoor stage. When Lyon Crow chanted the ridiculed slogan—“A chicken in every pot!”—his workers in the audience would shout in response, “Yes, but where’s the pot?” By the time the campaign reached the western provinces, crowds had learned the call-and-response perfectly.

  Lyon Crow claimed that he was half French Canadian, half English by birth. But two weeks before the election, several newspapers published a report—some said with research paid for by the prime minister—that Lyon Crow had been born in Latvia to German parents. Veterans of the Great War were horrified. Was Lyon Crow a spy of our former enemy now plotting revenge? Many angry veterans took up the prime minister’s call and volunteered at the polls. Dressed in uniform, they handed out ballots, and many of them wore buttons that said HOW FAR TO DEFEAT? AS STRAIGHT AS THE CROW LIES.

  Soundly defeated in the election, Lyon Crow returned to his law practice in Montreal. But for decades afterward, radio shows discussed him, and his name peppered the conversations of residents of Woods Bluff. Why had Lyon Crow lied? Would he really have done anything to become prime minister?

  Damn it,” Etienne says, shoving items back inside the third cardboard box he has opened since coming down to the cellar. “This is not the box I wanted either.”

  His frustration is understandable. The only markings on the boxes in this corner of the cellar are the grayish-green smudges from the asphalt dust and mold that stained every item stowed in the basement of the Peletier family apartment in Montreal. When his father’s girlfriend called to ask if he wanted the boxes shipped, it was clear the only answer she would accept was yes. The second box he opened contained the items packed before he left home
for Saint Richelieu. Several of his glass action figures were broken. His father’s girlfriend must have heard them rattle. The least she could have done was repack that box before shipping it.

  Two textbooks in this box, Finite Mathematics and Strengths of Materials, bring to mind his two fathers. He holds the books closer to the naked light bulb hanging from a fat ceiling beam. To which father—Omar Platt or Timothee Peletier—did each textbook belong? He knows his adopted father, Timothee, studied architecture. And his uncle Kiryl said that Omar—had he lived and had a better attitude—could have been the first black man accepted into Canada’s Royal Civil Engineering Corps. A few engineering courses had been on Etienne’s freshman schedule at Western New Hampshire. But he hated the assignments. He preferred to spend his Sundays with his friends instead of in his dormitory room completing onerous lab reports, which were invariably due at 8:00 a.m. on a Monday. To appease Timothee he decided to major in business administration, although he chose the easier concentration of retail management.

  Etienne is examining a stack of sports magazines when he realizes that Luela has come down the cellar steps. You are not a teenager, he tells himself as she approaches. You do not have to explain yourself. Nor do you have to get along with her anymore.

  “I know the pictures are here somewhere,” Etienne says, setting aside the stack of magazines. “But where I do not know.”

  Luela peers into the open box. “Jocelyn is very nice,” she says. “You did good with her.”

  “I hope you are not mad at me for not inviting you to the wedding. We went to the county clerk. I don’t like big ceremonies. I guess I’m like my parents that way.”

  Etienne searches one more box, then looks at his watch. “Boy, look at the time.”

  “Aren’t you going to open the last few boxes?” Luela asks.

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Why does it matter whether I have a picture?” Etienne says. “She’s dead.”

  “Not her memory.”

  “I doubt anything’s here. Mother never gave me any pictures of her.”

  “Why wouldn’t she do that?”

  Etienne turns toward the cellar steps, where Jocelyn is calling down that it’s time to go. He watches the steps a moment, not wanting Jocelyn to come down. When he turns toward Luela he struggles to find words.

  “Mother didn’t like something I said to her one day,” he says. “I don’t remember what I said, but she didn’t like it. I remember it was the evening before I was supposed to leave to go to school at Saint Richelieu. I had asked her several times if I could remain in Montreal. She said I couldn’t. In my room she asked me where the photo album was with the pictures of me and the family. When I told her I must have thrown it out when I cleaned out my room, she got really upset and started to cry. I don’t know why. There were only a few pictures of her in the book. I told her to stop crying, but she wouldn’t. Some of my friends were there.”

  “She wasn’t herself then,” Luela says. “All that medicine. But you must have had other pictures.”

  “If she had any, she never gave them to me.”

  “She wouldn’t have kept all the pictures,” Luela says. “My sister wasn’t like that.”

  “The sicker Mother got, the harder she was to get along with,” Etienne says. “You didn’t know that.”

  “Maybe that was her way of preparing you for her passing. Maybe she thought if she had the energy to be difficult with you, you wouldn’t worry so much.”

  “What kind of logic is that?”

  “I doubt she expected you to pretend she didn’t exist. Do you at least talk about her?”

  “I’m Canadian. Americans don’t care about my parents.”

  Luela precedes Etienne up the steps, not sure what to say to him. He is no longer a teenager who gets kicked out of summer camp for fighting with his classmates. He is an adult now, perhaps fighting with the world. And there are no parents to return him to after she has chastised him.

  Upstairs in the living room, while Luela puts on her coat, Jocelyn makes a big production of making sure Luela does not forget to take the picture of their newborn. In the car on the way to the restaurant, Luela spends a long time staring at the child’s face. She studies the picture again the next day and for most of the bus ride across the Vermont countryside. She wants to see something of Kath’s coloring in the child’s plump cheeks. But the child’s pink face only dredges up the memory of Etienne as a baby.

  Changing to a different bus at the depot in Bangor, Maine, Luela thinks again about Etienne’s comment that Americans don’t ask Canadians about their parents. She is not sure she believes him, but as the bus crosses into Canada she decides not to complain about how her nephew wants to spend his life. Crowing can work, some residents of Woods Bluff pointed out during the weeks after Lyon Crow was defeated. Yes, the prime minister had stirred up old anti-German sentiment enough to win the election, but most Canadians were too young to remember a war that had been over for years. Lyon Crow returned to his law practice, making even more money than he had before the election. The public forgave him for lying about who he was, didn’t they? What was the harm really? Many people crow about their past and nothing bad comes to them. What harm could it do to hide a little part about yourself?

  And what sense did it make to put up a fuss about a child crowing about a distant grandparent? She may well have some white relative far in her past. Her nephew chooses to hide his mother? She might keep silent about it. But she is not yet ready to forgive.

  No Colored Rider

  Montgomery, Alabama

  Etienne turned down the job offer from Montgomery A&M several years ago because he didn’t see himself working in one of the college’s cramped buildings downtown. Packed in one of the boxes that came in the moving van that brought his family’s belongings down from Vermont last month was a color brochure of the new campus located on a sprawling former army base a short drive west of downtown Montgomery. The new campus was the realization of a plan announced in 1943 by members of the Alabama legislature. The legislature also directed the college to enroll an equal number of colored and white students. Since the announcement, the student population had never been more than thirty percent colored. On December 1, when Etienne arrived for his first day of work, he was told that his job was to ensure colored registration did not regress to its former low levels.

  This morning, on the third day of the spring enrollment period, he sits at one of the long tables in the student union with the two colored work-study students he hired to help with registration. What could be keeping Deedra Cummings, the deputy director of student affairs, he wonders. Yesterday, he accepted Deedra’s excuse for getting to work an hour late. Trees and traffic signs were toppled around the city by a rash of tornadoes that had struck. And many side streets were clogged with rubbish from overflowing garbage cans not emptied in days, because the Montgomery Sanitation Workers Union had declared a strike. But Deedra also said she had to get her child to the special school he attends because of his partial blindness. What excuse will she offer today, he wonders at ten past eleven when he spies Deedra walking through the front doors of the student union.

  With barely a hello, she sits at the other long table. She chats easily with the students who visit the table. And when several colored students who had passed the table earlier bring their registration cards to her, they laugh with her as she checks the course codes on their registration cards against the listings in the printout.

  “Sorry I got here late,” Deedra says to Etienne later, as she gets ready to go to lunch. “The man driving me and the other women to campus was running behind.”

  Deedra has placed a paper on the table in front of Etienne.

  “I saw this when it was in my in-box,” Etienne says.

  “I suspect you did,” Deedra says. “Why haven’t you signed it yet?”

  Etienne studies the form, not a blue registration form for him to initial,
but a vacation request. He heard about the bus boycott by the colored residents of Montgomery several years ago. And now the city has been slammed by a string of tornadoes, and a strike by the Sanitation Union. Does Deedra want a vacation to make herself scarce before any more trouble happens here in Montgomery? Or is this an attempt to leave him to flounder during a busy work period for the department?

  “You know how busy we are in January,” Etienne says.

  “That’s why I’m putting my papers in early.”

  “Why so many days?”

  “I earned the days. I’d like to take them.”

  Etienne picks up his pen, feeling Deedra’s eyes on him. Why is it that when he is angry with Deedra, he compares her to his aunt Luela? True, Deedra is roughly the age Luela was when he spent those weeks with her in Halifax. And Deedra has dark eyes and full lips like Luela. He declined to order the expensive desk Deedra wanted, but he did move her into a larger cubicle—one away from any windows, which she claims now scare her. He also agreed to let her come to work at ten o’clock so she could get her youngest son off to the special school. A little gratitude from her wouldn’t hurt, he thinks, as he signs the vacation request form.

  Everything all right with Deedra?” Etienne’s boss, Livingston, asks the next day, when Etienne visits his office to discuss the vacation request.

  “All right, if you discount the fact that she still wants my job,” Etienne says.