'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  Looking back on that night, on that writing, I know now that I must have been sowing the seeds of the writer of fiction. Afterwards, I walked home from the newspaper office. The cold of Timmins’ cold had had no effect upon my literary enthusiasm. I slept soundly that night.

  From my chair at the back of the reporter’s desks, I could see when the city editor held my copy up to his eyes. The look on his face was of great disturbance. Torment, even.

  “Clarke?” He was summonsing me to his desk. And then he said, “Simms?” — meaning the senior reporter. “Simms?” he said, again. “Translate this, please, into journalese.” And to me, he said, “Clarke, you spend the rest of the morning reading the Globe and Mail, and see how to write a news story …”

  I was transferred to the Northern Daily News, another Thomson newspaper in the region, in Kirkland Lake. As a general reporter.

  Sadness descended upon me. In the loneliness of the first heavy snowfall in November, Kirkland Lake became a town completely barren of acquaintanceship. I had been the second black man in Timmins. Now, in Kirkland Lake, the only other Negroes were the railroad porters who came to town with the arrival of the ONR trains, and left when the trains went back down South, as everybody called Toronto.

  Clothed in this loneliness, my wife and I would buy the weekend Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star, and after dinner — no occasion for levity and relaxation with friends, as we had no friends, and we made no friends in the first few weeks — we turned the pages of these two Toronto newspapers and read the entertainment pages. And pretended we were attending the programmes written so enticingly. We read the names of plays, and became two members of their audiences. This was stronger than any mere pretence. We were in the audiences at the O’Keefe Centre; holding our glasses properly at the long stem with the cool white wine in them, in the lobby of the Thomson Hall. We attended, in our live imagination, all these social events: but they were no more real than imagined literary and social contact with the Toronto literary and social whirl. The literary gossip and the crossword puzzles were as exciting and real in our large appetite for “culture” that we imagined we were living in the realism of the small town, and not spending dollars to win the Lotto. We had never, in our lives before these times in Kirkland Lake, bought a Lotto ticket and sunk to our knees, and prayed to win millions of dollars …

  So, we went to the exciting pages of the Star and the Telegram, and imagined that these two newspapers were in our hands; and that we were, through their pages, living real life. So, we lived in these literary and artistic phantasies, as if we were still in Toronto. And of course, when we did live in Toronto, we did not attend plays and literary events. Now, in the Northland, without friends, without even the evasive presence of the invisible third Negro who had lived in Timmins while we were there, I was thrown back upon my own devices to work out a modus vivendi, through the help of the weekend pages of the Toronto Star and the Telegram newspapers.

  I had developed the facility of writing fast, without the use of shorthand; and this got me assigned to taking news over the telephone. The reports came from the newspaper’s correspondents. You can imagine my shock, therefore, when I recognized the voice talking to me over the extension was that of a Jamaican.

  “Rasta man!” he greeted me.

  “Rasta man!” I greeted him.

  He taught me many things. He told me many more things. His name was DaSilva. He was a member of council for the small town where he was assigned. He taught me how to “string” for the Globe and Mail, and the Star, and the Telegram, instead of spending my time, as other reporters were doing, drinking in the bar of the hotel which was frequented by the other reporters. The father of a Maple Leafs player, Larry, was the chief bartender of the popular hotel in town. My “countryman” showed me how to “rewrite” all the local stories that would interest the Toronto newspapers. I took his advice. Soon, I was making more money from “stringing” for these Toronto papers than most of the other senior reporters on staff.

  Working for Thomson newspapers, you were taught to do everything: write advertising copy, take photographs, for every department, including advertising copy for the sale of used cars, cover the police beat, the local school board, and the Kirkland Lake RCMP.

  Without noticing it, I was being guided into the realm of writing feature stories, which, in time, covered every conceivable subject. And I took to this like a duck to water. It was like being trained to be a novelist. And I marked my serious desire to be a novelist from this point in my life in Kirkland Lake.

  I checked in with the RCMP twice a day. Including Sundays.

  I was assigned to write advertising copy and take photographs of a second-hand Jaguar Mark V. The owner, who was also the owner of the largest garage in Kirkland Lake, asked me why I didn’t buy the car, at the reasonable price he would offer me? I took his advice. I found my beat extended to include searching for hunters lost in the bush, miners swallowed up, by accident, in the Ramore Mine. And two times a day, driving my new second-hand Jaguar Mark V, I paid my respects to the RCMP.

  And then, it happened. A Kirkland Lake woman was reported lost. Or murdered. Her red sports car was found in an Ontario town. Her father, a farmer, had photographs of his daughter. The story, with its new Kirkland Lake twist, loomed big. I visited the RCMP four times a day to get what news I could squeeze from them. I was checking, four times a day, with the Kirkland Lake chief detective. They said that this detective had a photographic memory. He never forgot a face. He had arrested a man from Kirkland Lake for a traffic violation; and that man had fled and then had returned to Kirkland Lake. But when he returned, the detective held him. Without bail. Until he could deal with the matter. And then he had him. The face came back to him. He was now in jail. Charged with the traffic infraction. And suspected of having a hand in the murder of the Kirkland Lake woman.

  I had been making my daily visits to the RCMP, who by now had become accustomed to my persistence, the regularity of which peeved them.

  “If I was you,” the sergeant told me, “I would get in my Jaguar and drive to Timmins …”

  I took his hint, as his word. I would drive to Timmins. First, back to my newspaper office, to get a camera, a notebook, all the clippings written on the murder case — which it had become — and drive straight to Timmins. It was now about midnight. When I arrived at the Timmins police station, the suspect, along with three detectives, were returning from showing the police where he had buried the body of the missing woman. The suspect was now charged, through his confession, with murder.

  It was in the early morning of Thanksgiving Day. The detective sergeant had not forgotten the murderer’s face after all those months. I spent that night, and three more days back and forth from Timmins to Kirkland Lake, writing stories on this case. It was the first time I was covering a murder case, for the Globe and Mail, as a “stringer.”

  It is more than fifty years since I drove up the long driveway of a farm, a few miles from Kirkland Lake, and knocked at the door of the farmhouse, painted in the black of shadows; and mourning; silent, except for the growls of dogs, which frightened me and made me wonder why I would have driven all the way from Timmins to Kirkland Lake, to that remote farm in the countryside of this thick black night. It is 1959. How would a white farmer receive me, a black reporter, at this inhospitable graveyard hour? To ask a question of great indelicacy: “Would you mind telling me about your daughter’s disappearance?”

  My indelicacy did not arouse his sleepy anger. It was, by now, almost three or four in the morning. He would have fields to plough. Cows to be milked. Breakfast to prepare. And a wife, in the kitchen, to whom he would have to explain my intrusion. And his own heavy grief to have to deal with and to explain to me, and to his wife, after I left. And what was this black man doing at their front door at this hour?

  I tried to imagine the two of us in the American South. In this blackness? The South was in the news every day in these days. Montgomery. Texas. Missis
sippi. Alabama. Harlem. Detroit. It seemed to many of us, black and white, that the country at our Canadian borders was exploding. In our faces. Now, tonight, in a country lane, on a farm, on this dark night, at this graveyard hour, I have woken up a farmer, from his deserved and tortured sleep, to ask him about his dead daughter.

  For some time, during these days, I had been assigned to write feature stories on all aspects of life in Kirkland Lake and the surrounding townships. And I must have done a reasonable job, for there was no aspect of life I had not touched in my feature stories.

  “Why don’t you write a feature story on the life of a library book?”

  From the time it enters the library, and to the moment it appears on the library’s shelf to be put into circulation.

  It was at this time of excitement and fear and as the surrounding realities of danger, violence, hope, and hopelessness that began to point me in the direction of fiction.

  But the fiction I had in mind to write was not “fiction.” It was reality. Hard, cold reality. And standing alone that late night, knocking at the door of the farmer whose daughter had been murdered, me a black man on this black dangerous night … he must have wondered if my presence at his front door, foreday morning coming like a photograph out of focus, he must have wondered … and could have done so … if this was the new reality he had to live through, for the rest of his life.

  I returned to the newspaper office. I developed the photographs I had taken of him. Of his home. And a print of his murdered daughter, where you could see the beauty and the liveliness and the future in her strong blond body. I drove back to the newspaper office in a daze. Of doubt. Of astonishment. Of hope. As a white farmer he must have felt no danger, nor threat, at my arrival at his door, at the breaking of that dawn, that cold Thanksgiving morning … no idea that his life would have turned out this way.

  The Globe and Mail liked my stories. They offered me a job, to join their staff, as a cub reporter.

  Chapter Nine

  Robert “Bob” Turnbull, city editor of the Globe and Mail, never liked me. I never liked Bob Turnbull. He sent me to cover a fire at the Royal York Hotel, one night around ten. I walked the short distance from the Globe and Mail office, on King Street West, across the street from the Press Club (where I spent most of my time, learning to be a journalist), to the Royal York. I looked “up in the air” as we do back in Barbados: meaning I would look up to the clouds, to see if there was any smoke. I saw nothing. No fire. No smoke. There was no smoke, so there could be no fire. There were no people on the street. Nobody was jumping out of windows. There was no fire brigade truck. At least I did not see one. There was nobody screaming out, “Fire! Oh God, fire!” So I went back to the Globe and reported this positive news to Mr. Robert Turnbull. Mr. Turnbull was an amateur fisherman. He used flies. He looked at me, over his tortoiseshell spectacles, and he said, “You couldn’t write about the colour?”

  This cryptic statement of his worried me for days. What did he really mean, asking me about colour? In these charged days of tension and discomfiture caused by the civil rights problems in the United States of America?

  Later that night, I finish my shift and leave the Globe, taking the last subway from King Street, and I get off at Bay; and walk along Davenport, past Jesse Ketchum Elementary School; past the fire station at Bellair Street; past Azan’s Beauty Salon, owned by a Jamaican man. Azan is the first black man to have studied hairdressing at the Toronto School of Hairdressing. His “saloon,” as we called it, served all the black women in Toronto, right up to Hamilton. There was no white hairdresser who would, or could, “fix” black women’s hair. Those few who tried, could not do a proper job, as it was done back in the West Indies.

  … Past a dry cleaners, and more art galleries on the north side of Davenport; come to Avenue Road; and more cleaners; past the street of horrors on which the Department of Immigration is located, shaking its finger in your face, threateningly; round the corner where three streets intersect; IGA grocery store, which sold the best fruits and lamb chops in Toronto; the LCBO on your right; come right along the west; pass private houses; pass Walmer Road, Lowther, Brunswick, Albany, and then … ahh!… just before Bathurst — where I have to turn left to go home to Vermont Avenue, Number 2 — there is a telephone booth.

  It is cold. It was always cold in Toronto. It is late. It is late in those days, when midnight came. Toronto used to go to sleep, with locked doors, closed blinds, music turned off, at ten o’clock. I stop in the telephone booth, on the south side of Dupont, to light my pipe. And I make certain that the pipe will be lit from the two remaining matches I have in the box marked SWAN VESTA SAFETY MATCHES, made by Bryant & May, matchmakers to H.M., the Queen, on which there is a white swan almost as tall as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, in the background, in black. I pull the hood of my British Navy light-brown parka over my head, to shield the match from the wind. Out of the corner of my eye I see the police cruiser. I am by now accustomed to the identical colours of taxi and of cruiser. The cruiser drives slowly behind me. Following me. I have seen scenes like this in the murder mysteries on CBC television. The music rises. The tension becomes thick. The man being followed panics. There is usually rain falling. And there is a fog if you are watching this drama in a street in London. In Maida Vale, for instance.

  The pipe is lit. On the first strike of the Swan Vesta wooden match. I throw the match into the gutter. The cruiser is still following me. I walk bold into the night. My pipe is blazing. We are still in the Christmas season. I turn the corner, at Bathurst and Dupont, to get home, not exactly “slap-dashingly.” I have to walk to the first street, south along Bathurst, to turn right at Vermont Avenue. I pass the hairdresser’s. Across the street on Dupont, there is the Beer Store. The Bank of Commerce is at the corner, the southwest corner. I pass the florist shop. And pass the convenience store, Naylor’s Convenience Store, in which during the lazy hours of summer afternoons, I would stand with Bill the owner’s son, and listen to Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else,” so many times, that in two weeks I had memorized all the notes in the solos played by Miles Davis on muted trumpet; by Adderley on alto sax; by the pianist Hank Jones; Sam Jones on bass; and my favourite, because of his attacking style in playing the drums, Art Blakey. This album is so frank, so brutal in its declaration, partially hidden, of its attitude to racial discrimination, so moving, so fast, so beautifully violent in its delineation of the blues, that Art Blakey — known for his fast driving rhythm and pulsing “high hats” — is reduced to keeping time. Keeping time. Keeping time comes into my mind, as the police cruiser is joined by another one. The solo that Cannonball Adderley plays in “Dancing in the Dark,” with its sad, plaintiveness of love and pain, and fear, comes into my mind and into my body. The cruiser swerves in front of me. And cuts me off. Now I have to walk on to the sidewalk.

  And it is now that I see the second cruiser, out of the corner of my eye. And I stand and wait for the explosion.

  “Good night, sir. Where are you off to?”

  “I don’t have to tell you where I am going.”

  “Do you live in this neighbourhood?”

  “I don’t have to tell you where I live.”

  And then the occupants of the second cruiser come toward me. I immediately remember the advice of my stepfather.

  Instead of answering, I take my ID card cockily from my pocket. And I offer it to the policeman. He reads the name of the Globe and Mail on it. He sees that I am a reporter. He saw my name. And he sees the embarrassment that had loomed on the horizon of my cockiness.

  And I save him further embarrassment.

  “Are you looking for somebody like me?”

  “Yes, sir. A murderer. He looks about your size …”

  The man he is looking for, is Lucas. Lucas Somebody. Notorious as one of the last two men to be hanged in Canada, at the Don Jail in Toronto. Back-to-back with a French-Canadian.

  It would be years later that I rented a flat in the same ho
use in which the murder had been committed, silently and skillfully, and clean, by the passing of a knife across the neck of the man who sold the drugs that didn’t belong to him, and had thought he could keep the money from the sale, from the bosses back in Detroit. Lucas of Detroit. His face reminded you of Sonny Liston’s, the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion.

  Days and weeks afterwards, I would spend many hours looking into the mirror in the bathroom, wondering if the policemen saw a real resemblance; or if it was a case that “all o’ you look alike!” I hoped that I was more handsome than either Lucas or Liston.

  South Africa, for its apartheid policy, was in the news often those days. I was a reporter for the Globe and Mail. A demonstration was walking up and down in front of the South African Airways office, somewhere downtown. Richmond, or Wellington. A photographer was assigned to me. Reporters from the Telegram; from the Star; from the Globe; and from smaller newspapers, like Contrast, the newspaper that served the black community in Canada; and the Financial Times. And I was still on probation. But I was ambitious. And I wanted to impress Mr. Robert Turnbull. So, I walked up and down, alongside the demonstrators, asking them questions, remarkable for their foolishness; questions such as: “Why are you marching?”

  “What do you hope to accomplish?”

  This assignment was after the fire at the Royal York Hotel.

  I was seeking “colour.”

  Mr. Robert Turnbull liked “colour.”

  And immediately, all the photographers from the other newspapers, except Contrast, started walking beside me, taking my photograph.