'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  My pleading with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Whitney Young fell on deaf ears. Neither was able to turn Dr. King’s attention to my request.

  Dr. King was in the CBC New York studio to revise his recorded version of the 1965 annual Massey Lectures. It was over a year after my interview with Malcolm X, in the same studio.

  The animosity I carried that humid summer when I sat fumbling with the Nagra in the tiny student’s room in Columbia University, is the same animus I held for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I wrote about this animus in a pamphlet, “The Confessed Bewilderment of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Idea of Non-Violence as a Political Tactic,” was published by Al Kitab Sudan Publications of Burlington, Ontario. I began my salvo with this bitterness:

  During the hallucinatory climax of something called Integration, Martin Luther King wrote a book called, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps over-optimistically, Why We Can’t Wait. More significant than the contents of this book, which dealt with Dr. King’s misgivings and hopes for integration of the black man into American society, is the advertiser’s blurb on the front cover of the book jacket. It refers to Dr. King as “the moral leader of America.” (Note, not white America; nor black America: but America!) It also says that Dr. King was stating the case for freedom now. That was in 1964.

  Then as now, it is as much a presumption, if not a hallucination, on the part of a black man, to allow himself to be referred to as “the moral leader” of a country, which in its daily dealing with him, and others like him, is immoral in certain important functions of its genitals and its arteries. But this “presumptuousness” does not raise as many eyebrows of cynicism, as it raises the question, now very relevant, particularly when we consider the history of “immorality” in America since 1964. This question arises out of the results and practices of that “morality” which is concerned with the presence or absence of freedom that Dr. King has been talking about. Bluntly speaking, that question is, “What freedom, Dr. King?” Was it a freedom to eat at lunch counters with whites, the food at which counters was, in cases, worse than the grits and the cornbread and the collard greens that have been known, mythically, as the characteristic fare of some of those Americans of whom he is supposed to be the “moral” leader? Or was it a freedom to demonstrate against evil wrongs; and demonstrate non-violently; and suffer violence from the white population of America, (of which he is the moral leader), peacefully? Dr. King made no gains of freedom, even with his nation-wide liberal support, and his emotional appeal to the conscience of white liberals, and black bourgeois liberals. The only significance of the NAACP, through which organization Dr. King came to prominence as a “Negro” leader, was that the violent suffering of black people, whom he insisted should suffer non-violently, was witnessed on television by the whole American nation, both black and white. The world saw the degree to which sections of American society are “immoral.” In this respect only, was he ever a leader, a “moral” leader: he led a march of civil demonstration that brought out in the open, certain hidden and subconscious realities of American morality. But he was merely the present, coincidental agent. Those realities had to be faced, someday.

  Another “reality” was facing me like a conscience. Riding me like a horse, at night into long-distance races of insomnia, and engaging in long, loud, and sometimes logical “conversations” while soundly asleep. I woke up each morning with a taste of the sourness of these nocturnal conversations — more regularly, soliloquies delivered in theatrical declamation — and the fear that I could have walked in my sleep, like Lady Macbeth attempting to wash the guilt of conscience from my nightclothes.

  Why did I lash out at Chinua Achebe? And then at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? And why did I think that this malevolence toward these two gentlemen would, in any way, weaken their appeal, and compromise their legitimacy in the eyes of their respective communities, and thereby give to me an acclaimed superiority over them, as a critic of their philosophies?

  James Baldwin’s fratricidal attack on Richard Wright, his former mentor, in Notes of a Native Son, was justified by Baldwin, in the most harrowing consolation, that the son must kill the father. And this is what Baldwin, devaluing Richard Wright’s masterpiece Native Son, had done. I was shocked when I read Notes of a Native Son, a book in which Baldwin entertained his raw fratricidal assault, similar in my mind to Baldwin’s criticism of the Black Muslim leader, the Honourable Elijah Muhammad, in his mansion in Chicago, when Elijah extended membership in the Muslim community to Baldwin. It was not only a gesture of brotherhood: the Muslims were enthusiastic of attracting black men and women, celebrities in all walks of life in America — Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali — so why not a writer of national lustre? This man, Elijah Muhammad, of gentle manner and vicious religious and political pragmatism, and threatening masculinity, still was, in Baldwin’s mind, the father, the father figure whom he did not have in his stepfather, when he was growing up as a child preacher in Harlem. Elijah Muhammad was a more legitimate father figure than Baldwin’s own stepfather. In the same way as Elijah Muhammad was a father figure to Malcolm X, his most distinguished disciple, whose natural father died at the hands of a lynch mob that threw him under the wheels of a freight train. But Baldwin had already chosen one other father figure, or role model, the black American expatriate, Beauford Delaney, who lived in Paris at the same time as Baldwin and Wright and others.

  “Whose little boy are you?”

  James Baldwin did not return from his holiday in Greece in time for me to interview him. So I returned to Toronto. Sixty-three minutes of Malcolm X on tape, clear and stridently controversial, speaking into the microphone, were played on the CBC, from coast to coast, awakening the black population of Canada to the philosophy of other black people like themselves, and to the justification of posing the question, “Is Canada as racist as the United States of America?” even if they did not have the guts and the honesty to answer the question, publicly. And so far as the white population of Canada was concerned, listening to the interview on national radio, they were made uncomfortable, and they continued to bury their heads in the sands of shame and denial; and they separated themselves from America.

  I have wondered whether, had I been fortunate to catch Baldwin before his departure for Greece, whether the interview of him would have hurtled me into the same controversy and fame that my interview of Malcolm X caused.

  Whether through naïveté, whether through the lack of malevolence in my unsophisticated nature, or whether through pure and simple ignorance, I never did grasp, immediately after my return to Toronto, the importance into which the Malcolm X interview had placed me. I was subconsciously putting distance and the danger of the theological and political association the interview had posed, between writing and broadcasting. I felt the danger, and the possibility that no difference between the two would be made by the Canadian literary establishment, newspaper editors, columnists, and the writers of opinion, in how they regarded the Black Muslims and me, the freelance broadcaster who had brought that threatening, dangerous, and frightening presence into their living rooms on that first Sunday evening, when supper was being thought of; but was postponed, in order to catch and be scared by each pronouncement from the mouth of this strange “prophet of false theology,” called Black Muslimism. It was a situation of which I saw its raw ambivalence: to eschew this message; or to embrace it, in keeping with the new North American political liberalism towards racial integration that was now sweeping consciences previously convinced of the tactic of “go slow.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Life had changed. Life was moving fast. Life was putting me into situations I had not bargained for: and one of these was the request for my opinion on all matters to do with race, racism, the civil rights movement, and the Black Muslims. I became an authority on blackness. Years later, when I campaigned for the nomination as the candidate for Oakwood, for the Progressive-Conservative Party of Ontario, I not only reaped the wrath of the New Democratic Party candida
te, Tony Grande, but also suffered the shock and embarrassment and censure and downright dirty tricks planned and executed by the Progressive-Conservative Party, my own party. I was not, to them, suitable. But there was another, more dramatic irony: I was an official member of the Progressive-Conservative Party when I sought the nomination. It was during a meeting with one of the party’s “bagmen” who asked me if it was true I had written the constitution of the Black Panthers. He said it was said that I had been a friend of Malcolm X. The information had come from two men, both black, one Canadian, the other American. Their function and service to the PC Party, was to inform on blacks, usually West Indian immigrants who were too vocal on the subject of civil rights for their taste and for the party’s taste. But in these young days of political immaturity, and my characteristic naïveté, I was confounded to learn that there were two other men who informed on black people for the Progressive-Conservative Party, feeding the party (and the government), and those Cabinet ministers who had thrown certain “bones” in their direction, “the goings and comings in the black community.”

  This “bagman” of the party, sitting opposite me in the Vines Wine Bar & Restaurant on Wellington Street East, in 1977, said to me, with a new air of confidence and fondness, as if we had been friends for years, showing that he was one who no longer questioned my suitability as a candidate, “We asked Dr. Dan Hill and Lloyd Perry what they thought of you as a candidate.” I did not expect endorsement, nor glowing comment from these two gentlemen. To me, they were opportunists, middle-class men appointed to positions to assist the immigrant and the visible minority communities on how to deal with racism in Ontario. They mistook the danger in the situation; and did not know it was like a volcano, ready at the slightest next instance of racism, to explode as it had done in American ghettos. But I did not expect complete dismissal from the mouths of these two pillars of stability in the black community.

  Dr. Hill is now dead. He was an American who had fled the segregation of the United States he suffered in Washington, D.C. He was appointed human rights commissioner in 1977. I think he was the first one.

  Lloyd Perry, a light-skinned black Canadian, was, in 1977, the Ontario ombudsman.

  I did not even have to ask what Dr. Hill and Mr. Perry thought of me. In the silent, seething animosity that existed between West Indians and black Canadians (and black Americans), particularly when the culture of class and colour is considered in this context of clenched black fists, reminiscent of the culture of black-on-black violence, and more appropriately, to the clash of Marcus Garvey with Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois with Booker T. Washington, this internecine animosity, the struggle of black men with black men, for the skimpy remnants of largesse and victuals and funds left over from white consumption, has its roots in the confused society of slavery. And even though I knew this, and have seen it illustrated in the interviews I conducted with figures of the civil rights movement in America, Negro leaders squabbling for individual paramountcy and white acceptance of their black protest, I was still not prepared to hear the declaration on my suitability to be a political candidate.

  The “bagman” was now suggesting a “better wine,” one that was full-bodied, and “goes well with the trout you ordered.” He was ready to tell me what the two gentlemen thought of my suitability.

  “I won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole!”

  We drank the wine, which was, in truth, full-bodied; and it went well, very well with the trout I had ordered. This was after we each had devoured one dozen oysters. Raw.

  And what lesson did I learn? And what caution did I remember always to harken to, from this interview and lunch in the back room, sitting in the single booth at the Vines Wine Bar & Restaurant?

  I learned to drink a full-bodied wine with trout. And I developed a taste for raw oysters. Nowadays, the Vines has a new name, Trevor Kitchen and Bar. These days I get my oysters at The Grand on Jarvis Street; at Bistro 990 on Bay Street; and at George on Queen Street East.

  Willis Cummins, a Barbadian immigrant and I, two political amateurs facing serious elective politics, facing the Tory dynasty that had ruled Ontario for three decades, at the time, decided to tackle the “easy” task of registering the most members to the Progressive-Conservative Party, to support my nomination to run in Oakwood, “to throw our hat in the ring!” We had done our research, unprofessional as it was. Oakwood was 40 percent black: meaning West Indian, black Canadian, African, and others, living in this riding that had been held by the New Democratic Party, the NDP, for many years. But the important point we grasped was that the number of votes that the NDP got in each election was relatively small. Willis and I felt we could, when we won the nomination, get more people to vote for me.

  Two very important events were taking place on the few nights before the nomination meeting. The first was that the miniseries based on the book Roots, by Alex Haley, was being shown on primetime television, every Sunday night. Perhaps it was a re-broadcast, but I cannot recall. Secondly, the NHL hockey playoffs were on. And a third, rain was forecast for the day after the Sunday. Roots. The NHL hockey playoffs. The rain. Three very significant factors to be considered when you are depending upon West Indians to leave their apartments and attend a meeting, any meeting, never mind a nomination meeting to support your candidacy.

  I had given these social-racial determinants no attention. And I suffered fatally as a result. I paid the price of not knowing the tastes of the very persons whose support was essential to my victory. Perhaps, I knew about rain. As a West Indian, I had remained at home many mornings because the “rain was falling.” But the rain fell many mornings, right up into the following morning. But few left their homes, many of which leaked through the roof, to go to work. Going to school on a rainy day was a treat. The masters gave us no work to do; heard no lessons set for homework; for it was as if we were all listening and in our listening, paying proper respect to the elements, to the natural works of God.

  And now, remembering this attitude to rain, I see also that there were not any umbrellas or raincoats in our neighbourhood. Whether we were too unsophisticated, another term for being poor, to afford an umbrella — to say nothing of a raincoat! — or, whether we found a piece of newspaper over the head, or a piece of cardboard, would do the trick. It did not. And this is why not many of us ventured out when the rain was falling.

  “What else the rain does-do?” a bright boy, who was always reading, and whom we detested because he was always reading and remembering what he was reading, said. “The rain can’t fall up! All you have to say is ‘it is raining.’” But who amongst us, excepting this boy who was always reading, would describe such a phenomenon of climate that sometimes lasted three days and three nights, and turned into a storm, or a hurricane, by using such spare words? “It is raining” is not the same dramatic experience as “the rain falling hard-hard-hard, man!”

  Rain, rain, come-down! The rain falling buckets-o’-drops! This is a night-rain, boy! Like in the Flood!

  Did the supporters of my main rival, Fergy Brown, a druggist, know this peculiarity about West Indians and rain, from his supporters who were West Indian, that West Indians do not leave home to go to work, and certainly not to vote in a nomination, when it is raining hard-hard-hard! Did Fergy Brown learn this from the West Indians in his camp, men and women now serving as recruits and as fifth columnists? Or did this privileged information come from Dr. Dan Hill, and Mr. Lloyd Perry, QC? Whatever means he had to gain this information, the party did not “touch me with a ten-foot pole!” Their strategy worked effectively. Even though, single-handedly, Willis Cummins and I signed up thirty more “members” to the party, than the sum total aggregate of my three opponents: Fergy Brown; Ben Nobleman, a counsellor from North York; and Arthur Downes, a well-respected long-standing member of the party, who was well-liked in party circles — we still lost the nomination. The Fergy Brown people, who were known to PC headquarters, and had staff members of headquarters working on their campaign, called my suppo
rters (each candidate’s list of signed-up “members” was made public), and told them that the nomination meeting had been postponed. Because the “the rain was falling bad-bad-bad-bad!” The West Indians could hear it raining. They did not need to be told. Rain, rain, come-down. It was their prayer. The rain falling too hard, to leave home. The hockey playoffs! And Roots!

  Their plan was deliberately organized. And with a great, oiled machinery of dirty tricks.

  For years afterwards, I felt that they had had some experience in these “dirty tricks.”

  Their plan was launched in the afternoon, about four hours before the nomination meeting was to begin. The telephones in my committee rooms started to ring, bearing the tidings in language and in dialects that were recriminatory. And they all seemed to be related to the three factors that prevent or limit West Indian attendance at school, at work, and at church. The rain falling …

  The rain was falling. Alex Haley’s Roots was at its most dramatic installment. All the black people in Canada, and in my riding of Oakwood, were glued to the television screen. They were learning about their “real racial roots” in Africa. And a hockey playoff game, in the Stanley Cup final, was about to begin. At eight o’clock.

  The telephone calls that my supporters made were not seeking explanation for the “postponement” of the nomination meeting: they were accusing me of two-timing them.

  “You come in my house. Every night almost, including Sunday nights. You prevent me from watching Roots. You prevent me from learning about my heritage. I tell you I voting for you. I disobey my wife’s advice, and decide to vote for you to win the nomination. My wife had-tell me to-don’t trust no Bajan running for the Conservatories. My wife, as you know, is a Jamaican. I is a Bajan like you. But you seeking political office for the wrong party, man. Why you went with the Progressive-Conservatories? You cause me to went-against my-own wife. I promise you my vote. And now, look how you disrepeck me! You postpone the meeting, and didn’t have the decency to tell me, to my face, it postpone. Man, you wasn’t man-enough to tell me the nomination put-off? How I could trust you? You isn’t even elected yet! So, how I going trust you, when you get eleck to the Legislatures? You tell me!”