Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  Jean-Yves did not sound happy on the phone call last night, Etienne tells himself, entering a curve on the road. Perhaps Claire is in worse shape than Jean-Yves let on. Though he has not visited his grandmother since moving to Alabama, the thought of living in a world without her unnerves him now.

  The gravel lake road has narrowed, looking like the one leading to the creekside house he and Jocelyn had considered buying. On a few other house-hunting trips, he learned that the conditions to not sell a property to a black person were often called no-colored riders.

  Claire and Jean-Yves aren’t the only Canadian relatives Etienne is remiss in contacting. What would his aunt Luela in Halifax say to him if they were close enough to discuss a no-colored rider clause attached to a house sale? Etienne lowers his head as the motorcycle accelerates into a long curve. He chuckles and leans with the bike as it accelerates further into the bend. He has been on this road before. He knows this curve. He is an eager rider. But is he colored? Astride the motorcycle, he finds the idea of a colored rider funny. Colored rider. No colored rider.

  Back on the bank of the lake, Jocelyn lies on the blanket beside Warner, who is wrestling with his teddy bear. She occasionally looks up from her magazine. After a while she wonders why Etienne has not raced by. But she does not suspect trouble.

  Jocelyn does not hear the skidding. Nor does she see the motorcycle buckle after hitting a hole in the road. She does not see Etienne hurtle from the motorcycle and slam against the trunk of a thick oak.

  Two Hundred and Forty Months

  Ever since Jocelyn read the question to him from her copy of the University Administrator magazine, Etienne has thought of the passage of time in terms of months. He and Jocelyn have silly moments in which they recount their lives in months. Sometimes the play is sexual. How many months since we did it in the car? How many months since we did it in a forest or in a dark movie theater?

  This morning, doped up with painkillers in a hospital bed and barely conscious, Etienne tries to calculate the number of months since he brought his family down to Alabama. How many months has it been? Given the dull throbbing in his hip and his fuzzy mind, it is no wonder that he cannot finish the calculations.

  Even in his stupor, though, Etienne has no trouble recognizing the voice he hears interrogating his doctor. He knows the man who asks why it was necessary for the surgeon to go in for a second time to clean out a troublesome section of his son’s fractured hip.

  “Was my father here earlier?” Etienne asks, when he wakes up from a nap and sees Jocelyn seated beside the bed.

  “That was Timothee in the flesh,” Jocelyn says.

  “Was it something I said?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he didn’t stick around long. Did his girlfriend call him home?”

  “Come on, now, let’s not talk badly about her again. Your father was here for two days.”

  “Did you and my father have a nice chat?”

  “Yes. He wanted to call your aunt Luela in Halifax.”

  Etienne raises his head slightly. “Was I knocked out for that long?”

  “You’ve been out for over a week. You shattered your hip badly.”

  Etienne closes his eyes. “There was no need to call anybody in Halifax.”

  “That is what I told your father,” Jocelyn says. “But it was scary there for a while. We were worried about you.”

  Jocelyn closes the magazine lying open on her lap. “Pretty soon you ought to call your aunt. And you ought to mention her to our son.”

  “I plan to. When he is older.”

  Jocelyn raises a cup with a straw to Etienne’s lips. “What’s the matter?” he says, after taking a drink. “Don’t you believe me?”

  Jocelyn smiles and places a hand on Etienne’s arm. “You look like you can hardly keep your eyes open. Let’s talk about this when your head is clearer.”

  Etienne closes his eyes and soon drifts off to sleep. When he wakes again the nurse tells him that Jocelyn has gone to a meeting at the college.

  “Your wife left something to keep you occupied until she returns,” the nurse says.

  A stack of envelopes sits on the bed near Etienne’s arm. When his head clears a bit more, he realizes that he holds get-well cards. He checks a few return addresses, feeling uneasy. This stack of cards dredges up unhappy memories of the cards his mother got when she was ill.

  One envelope that seizes his attention has a Halifax return address. Inside is a generic greeting card with every bit of white space filled, including the back. He opened the envelope thinking the card was from his aunt Luela, but the card is signed by his uncle Kiryl. He is not surprised to hear that the Platts are still doing business in Simms Corner and on the bluff. Nor is he surprised to read that his cousin, Yancy Platt, has not joined the family business and now works in a bank. When he encounters Luela’s name he starts to worry. Is there bad news about her health? But the news is about his aunt and her Africaville neighbors. Folks on the bluff are threatening to conduct protests like those you all have been having down there in Montgomery, Kiryl writes.

  Etienne sets the card down but immediately picks it up again. Do the people in Africaville know what a scary year 1963 has been here in Montgomery? The colored residents of this town seem angry about everything. A few have been injured in clashes with the police. Is his aunt going to join a protest march up there in Halifax? That could be dangerous.

  Given the strained reunion he had with Luela before he moved from Burlington, he is not surprised that he has not heard any news directly from her. Of course, he could have telephoned her. Perhaps she would have told him what is happening in her life. But what would he have said to her?

  The paragraphs on the back of the card concern his grandmother Zera Platt, in Mississippi. His uncle writes that prison officials there may move some prisoners out of state because of overcrowding. Right now we don’t know if Zera is one of the prisoners likely to be moved, Kiryl writes. But she may be. If you got any intentions of visiting her on the easy, you might want to get on it soon, nephew.

  Would Zera be shipped off to a faraway state, Etienne wonders. The places his uncle mentions in the letter—Utah or Colorado—would be costly places to visit often. But then, what is he supposed to do with this information? He does not even know Zera.

  As he had earlier, Etienne tries to make sense of his family estrangement, which has been on his mind ever since he arrived in Montgomery, a city that seems a planet away from the one where he was born. Even more pitiful than his lack of contact with the family in Montreal is the sorry attention he has given to his family in Halifax. Why? Nobody in either city abused him as a child. He had no explosive arguments with his parents or his relatives. Why has he put such a distance between himself and Canada?

  Did his desire to do so begin with the snickers he heard as a boy when his mother came to pick him up after classes at Greeves Adventist? Yes, he was taunted by kids who found out that he had a colored mother. But they were toddlers who thought a boy who looked white while having a mother who looked colored was worthy of ridicule. And he cannot recall the last time he felt any enmity toward the Saint Richelieu classmate who doubted the logic of his saying that he could be black if he wanted to be.

  What, then, do more recent incidents tell him? Hours after his first surgery, he must have confounded the nurses with all his mumbling about colored riders. His mind must have been brooding over the trouble he and Jocelyn encountered during that first house-hunting trip last July. Would he have treated the idea that the house not be bought by a colored family so cavalierly if he had spent more time getting to know the colored side of his family?

  Etienne puts the card from his uncle back into the envelope, thinking perhaps he might soon have the strength to write to his family in Halifax. But in the short term, he cannot imagine a visit to the prison where his grandmother is incarcerated. There must be relatives in Mississippi who can visit Zera. More important, as soon as he is well eno
ugh to walk, he must fulfill his promise to fly to Montreal for his grandmother Claire’s birthday celebration. Any movement toward his family in Mississippi will have to wait until after that.

  Often when exiting an airplane, Etienne checks out a distant tower or some other airport building, wondering if the firm where his father works designed or constructed it. This afternoon with his family, he walks off the DC-7 and enters the terminal in Montreal thinking only of his grandmother. He had wanted to fly up sooner, after he heard that her words had become incoherent. But until today he was still having trouble moving without the use of a wheelchair.

  In the living room of his grandparents’ apartment, a large birthday banner written in French hangs on the wall behind the sofa. However, Etienne and his family have missed the party by a week. Many of the relatives who attended have stayed on, and a few have assembled here today. In the bedroom down the hallway, there are only the remains of Claire, who died several hours earlier.

  Jean-Yves comes in from the bedroom, insisting that Jocelyn remain seated on the sofa where the baby is asleep on her lap. But Etienne has already risen on his crutches. His grandfather looks heavier than the last time Etienne saw him. He looks tired.

  After kissing little Warner, Jean-Yves makes an announcement in French. It sets a few heads around the room to nodding.

  “He says everyone will get a look,” Etienne tells Jocelyn. “The attendant is still washing and dressing her.” Etienne gives a nervous smile. “He said Claire said she wanted to be presentable for the family.”

  Timothee arrives later with his girlfriend. She huddles close to Timothee, stealing all his attention, rarely letting him talk to anyone, including Etienne. Etienne’s cousin, Berto, who sits in a comfortable chair, talks to Etienne a bit in French, then switches to English. “Do you remember that you used to make up games?” Berto looks at Jocelyn. “Your husband was always running around the apartment, turning things on and off—the hi-fi, the television, the radio. He was always running.”

  Jean-Yves laughs. “I also remember that you and Etienne didn’t get along,” he says to Berto.

  “We got along,” Berto says. “It is just that I did not see Etienne much after my family moved to Quebec.”

  “Remember those bad things you said about Etienne’s mother?” Jean-Yves says.

  Berto, who wears a light-blue suit, shakes his head and lights a cigarette. He is about to respond but notices that the room has gone quiet. Two women in white uniforms cross the living room. They speak with Jean-Yves as they pull on their jackets and then head out the front door.

  “Etienne will go back for a visit first,” Jean Yves says.

  A superhuman strength seems to propel Etienne up from the sofa. His arms feel twice as large as he works the crutches that carry him down the hallway. He had hoped that during this trip he would tell his grandparents about his life in Alabama. He intended to thank Claire for taking him to his first symphony, Jean-Yves for taking him to his first hockey game. He pauses in the bedroom doorway. His eyes go first to the foot of the bed, where he once sat while Claire, feeling under the weather, crushed pistachio nuts and sang an old tune from her childhood.

  The picture of San Giovanni a Mare Church still hangs on the wall. Timothee purchased that on his second trip to Italy. But where is the picture of Claire seated at the grand piano before one of her recitals at the conservatory? The trip across the bedroom seems to drain the last of Etienne’s energy. At the bed, he stands on his crutches, trying to muster the strength to lower his eyes. His mother’s death left him feeling that he might live his life perpetually unhappy. Now he lowers his eyes to take in the only person other than his mother who made him feel that an adopted boy could be loved in the world. Do you think my dead father would have loved me? he once asked Claire. Why he had not thought to ask his mother that question is still a mystery to him. He tries to recall her answer. Knowing Claire, the answer must have been yes.

  “I want to come along,” Jocelyn says in the kitchen later, where Berto has offered to give Etienne a ride to the apartment building where Etienne grew up.

  “We’ll go together next time,” Etienne tells her as she hands him a glass of water and two pain pills. “This time I want to go alone.”

  The ten-story apartment building at 685 Guy-Mathieu Street looks smaller than Etienne remembers. And he does not recall the brick front being a dark-red color. How many months has it been since he was last here?

  What seems familiar to him as he leaves his cousin Berto’s Peugeot behind at the curb is the weather. The sun has a cast like it did the day they arrived back in Montreal, after his parents returned from Italy. His mother had gotten into the Regent with plenty of strength, but she was too weak to walk to the front door of the building without help. The sky that day was filled with the tiniest hint of clouds and a white-hot sun.

  “Go on back,” Etienne tells Berto, who has gotten out of the car. “I can manage.”

  An elderly woman holds the front door open for Etienne and he hobbles across the threshold. In the lobby he catches his breath, taking in the familiar white floor tiles, mirrored walls, and gold inlaid ceiling. Many evenings a strong smell of spice would waft out of apartment 1-E. Today there is only the scent of the carnations in the vase on the lacquered wood table. At the elevator he waits with the elderly woman, who breathes as heavily as he. Did he once know her?

  The building’s owner was from Scotland, Etienne remembers. And the residents were from many parts of the world. A few were well-to-do. Kath liked that the building was quiet, but he did not appreciate all the quiet during the days after his mother died. In the evenings, as he lay across his bed, the only noise was the housekeeper walking the apartment, trying to stay busy. For weeks after the cremation ceremony Etienne rarely saw Timothee.

  Ringing the buzzer at 5-B, Etienne wonders what he would do if his mother answered. Could it be true? Could his memory of the day he learned of Mother’s death be a terrible concocted memory of a day that never happened?

  How clear is that memory anyway? The day he got the news of his mother’s death, he had gone to the field on the back campus at Saint Richelieu with a group of boys, their backpacks full of oranges, beer, and bottles of cranberry carbonate. One of the boys carried two pints of vodka. And Tyrell Levesque, chewing loose strings on the sleeves of his glee club cardigan, kept tossing the oranges stolen from the dining hall over the fence, trying to hit the lacrosse nets on Alumni Green. Etienne cannot remember which of the boys started the joke. But he remembers how they began to look at each other, some with stiff faces, others laughing with their heads down. When Tyrell complained that he didn’t know what everyone was talking about, one boy leaned over and cupped a hand over Tyrell’s ear. At first it seemed he was about to whisper. Instead he yelled: “Etienne’s mother died.”

  Etienne is ringing the buzzer at the apartment again when another sound in the hallway startles him. Has someone else come up on the elevator? He turns quickly.

  “Mother?”

  He rides the elevator to the tenth floor. At the end of the hallway the sign on the door says ATTENTION: MAINTENIR CETTE PORTE FERMÉE.

  Etienne shoulders the door open, causing an alarm to go off. It will quiet after a minute. Before the roof became off-limits, he and his friends pitched bivouacs up here. The ledge is lower than he remembers. Even with his bad hip, it is an easy climb up.

  The view from the ledge is familiar. His friend Fabrice lived in a tall white building down the block. He hated leaving Fabrice, but he made friends at Saint Richelieu. He remembers sitting with those friends one day and laughing during a talk by a priest—was he Korean? Vietnamese?—in the athletic field house. But he also remembers something from the lecture itself.

  To the place where you were born, your spirit returns, always.

  All those years, Etienne believed he had been born here in Montreal. Kath and Timothee sat like statues on the sofa when they told him he had been born in Halifax. That his name
at birth was Omar. Not until the evening before his mother was cremated did his aunt Luela tell him all the details about how his biological father died when a truck he was in slammed into an apartment building in Halifax. Several times Luela made a point of saying that Omar was riding in a truck speeding too fast. Etienne himself had been speeding on the motorcycle as it rounded the lake. Was it the nature of father and son to be reckless?

  What about the place where you die? Etienne wonders, looking down at the people gathering at a window on a lower floor across the street, one of them pointing at him. Does the spirit visit there, too?

  “None of those people would miss me if I jumped,” Etienne says aloud.

  The door to the roof opens. A man in a light-blue jumpsuit sticks his head out. He starts speaking French but switches to English. “Out of bounds. Come down, please.”

  Six months later, during the press of fall classes at the college, Etienne talks with his cousin Berto, who has called with the news that death has taken Jean-Yves.

  “My grandfather sounded so spry on the phone last week,” Etienne tells Jocelyn over dinner. “I am still shocked.”

  Etienne flies up to Montreal alone for his grandfather’s funeral. He returns to the campus in Alabama grateful for the time he spent with his relatives up north. And yet, recalling that his father, consumed as he was with his girlfriend, barely spoke to him, Etienne wonders what is left for him in Montreal. After several weeks, his mind turns to other cities—Halifax and Jackson—and to other families, the Sebolts and the Platts. No way does he have the energy to begin a correspondence with both families. He will contact one at a time.