“Pin my hopes on a Barbadian immigrant, running for the Conservatives? What the rass is this?”
“Eh-eh, boy! You making-pappee show!”
We spent the critical hours, just before the time the nomination meeting was to begin, in a school somewhere in the Eglinton-Oakwood area, calling our supporters, pleading with them to come to the meeting; trying to convince them that the meeting was not postponed. And we discovered in our calls, from the mouths of those who had been tricked, that not only had the fifth-columnists said that they were calling from my campaign headquarters, we learned also, with fallen hope of winning, that the callers were instructed by people at PC headquarters.
My campaign headquarters now had many West Indians, Italians, a handful of Jewish supporters, in addition to Willis Cummings and myself; and things took on a serious aura of a political campaign office. But the die was cast. William Rashleigh McMurtry, a young corporate lawyer from Blaney, Pasternak, Smela, who was one of my advisers, who, like myself, was surprised at the turn of events — my supporters remaining at home, through the downpour of rain, through the playing of a hockey playoff game, through the cultural and racial significance of it, to the majority of them, the showing of another episode of Roots — all these shingles in the structure of my house fell off, and the ship began to sink. It was a Titanic disaster. And when it was clear, as an iceberg, that many of my 1,100-odd registered supporters had stayed home, sheltering from the rain, or watching Roots, or the hockey playoffs, when I “heard the shout,” and when my competitor Fergy Brown secured the support of Ben Nobleman and Arthur Downes; the results were announced. Fergy Brown was the candidate.
It was now the second time he was nominated as the candidate for Oakwood. In the previous election, where he had fought, primarily against the NDP candidate, Fergy Brown had got less than one thousand votes. In this present election, when it was fought, his votes numbered a similar stunning figure. This was the man the Progressive-Conservative Party had thrown their support behind. This is the man the Progressive-Conservative Party of Oakwood considered “suitable.”
And then, William Rashleigh McMurtry, schooled in the propriety of matters political in Ontario, gave me the biggest shock on that sad night of nastiness. He told me I had to congratulate Fergy Brown on his victory.
Compliment the man who had defeated me: who had wiped my slate clean-clean-clean? As a blackboard? This was a most un-Barbadian act of political sophistication. In Barbados, you would want to curse this man. You would confront him and tell him he is a low-down, dirty, nasty fighter. You would tell him he has no character. You would promise to beat-him-up tonight; and the next time you met him; you would want to join battle with him the next time. You certainly would not go up to him, and say, “Congratulations, Fergy. You win. The better man win!”
“Better man, my arse!” my mother would have told him.
This nomination meeting was held in 1977. President Richard Nixon, and Deep Throat, and the culture of Watergate, and the break-in of the Democratic Party Campaign headquarters, and the suspicion that everyone who was not a Republican had his telephone tapped; and the FBI was still on the minds of most Torontonians who had a political opinion, in opposition to established conservatism. The right wng as a political sentiment and strategy was now rearing its head. When I wrote these words, in 2005, its head was like that of the mythological creature, the centaur or the minotaur; or the many-headed beast, with the head of Hydra.
In 1977, I was listening to the new wave of jazz, led by Miles Davis, and John Coltrane; and the singers, Sarah Vaughan, of course, and Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln. These were the same black artists who had put their stamp on the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the other expression of protest, the protest in music at the debaucheries against the “American Negroes” that sought its most depressingly cruel torture and terrorist behaviour by any country, since the Nazi regime in Europe during the 1940s, until 1945, when Auschwitz became a metaphor of excessively raw brutality: snarling dogs we had seen in movies about the Nazis, ripping black flesh just as they had, in their literary context, ripped Jewish flesh; and water hoses that could, like boiling water, rip your flesh from your bones; and policemen kicking men and women, when they were already down … this was the background … not the background, the foreground to the context of my timid touching of the political water with my toes, on the winter landscape of Oakwood, the provincial riding, in the Ontario Legislature. Marvin Gaye, in an international hit, asked the question, “What’s Going On?” But he never got an answer, either in a political speech, or in a ditty.
Chapter Fourteen
At the same time as I sought the nomination in Oakwood, I was writer-in-residence at Sir George Williams and Concordia University, in Montreal. I was making the journey by train: arriving in Montreal on the tick of time. I had fifteen minutes, if the train was on time, fifteen minutes left, for me to get to Concordia, by taxi; and walk along the unwelcoming buildings built in a time when Canadian architecture, because it has no tradition at this time, was the echo of the sound of brick and stone and mason’s chisels and hammers echoing the structure of buildings erected in France, duplicating France’s colonization, and cultural association with the French; and I would walk in this environment that remained dumb and unspeaking like a rude host, with no welcome, because I could not speak French. And never tried to speak French. I never once, in the academic year that I was commuting from Toronto to Montreal, said the French for “good morning” or for “thank you” — simple enough words to express basic courtesy. I was tongue-tied in Montreal, for the whole of 1977. In my mind, in my thoughts, in my body, I carried the plaintive question, “What’s Going On?” Did I know the answer to Marvin Gaye’s question which was more political and more accusatory than a rhetorical question?
It was not only the winter and the freezing of my blood that kept me in a straitjacket of English reserve, it was the architecture, the buildings, which placed me in France; in Europe; in England, perhaps. And I could not extricate my body and my mind from the narrowed channel of alienation, and from the isolation that ignorance of the language being spoken around you, in a tone and manner and voice of lightness so characteristic of French nuance, a turn of the head, a pout of the lips, a flash of the eye, and the hand, gentle and young and searching, on the stem of a long-legged glass that contains wine the colour of urine. I would leave Concordia University, which seems like a corner of a nearby suburb, and return to Montreal, to Sir George Williams College, in a taxi, more like a hearse because there was no relationship between me and the people who passed in silence, in the silent early afternoon. When you are lost; when you are feeling that you are lost; when you are in a strange place — Montreal from Toronto — there is the silence of terror and loneliness, as if you are in a state of solitary confinement, as if you are a tourist, inarticulate in the language and the mannerisms of the place you have been dumped by a tourist boat, or a plane. And I behaved just like a tourist. Every afternoon, after a quick drink of Scotch in a bar whose name I cannot remember, whose address has long been wiped from my mind, in this atmosphere of foreignness — French was spoken upon my entry, and dropped immediately when my gait and posture and the way I sat at the bar was diagnosed as “foreign” — when I found myself in the same bar, by glancing at the name on the matches for my cigarettes — Gauloises, of course! — my own touch of Frenchness, and even though there was a more relaxed feeling in this Montreal bar, I still was lost in the surrounding Frenchness of Montreal. I yearned for seven o’clock to come, when I could get back on the VIA train to Toronto, and live through, with vicarious indignity and some shame, the lives of men who had come before me, from the West Indies, to this same Montreal, from the United States of America, to work on these same trains as porters, as cooks in the galley, as men who cleaned shoes and laid them out like shells for cannons, and who made beds, and who cleaned spittoons, twenty raw years ago, and did not make a trip “on the road,”
two times a week, to teach creative writing to white Canadians, at two campuses.
Whenever, in those days, I thought of trains, I thought of the song, “Georgia on My Mind.” Ray Charles, whom I was listening to in these years, has a way of playing with the scansion of the word, something like deconstructing the word, “Georgia,” at the beginning of the song. “Georgia” is pronounced in a shortened vowel, as if he is accusing Georgia of something terrible. And those of us who have lived through the Georgias of the civil rights movement, understand why this scansion must be employed. It is the second pronunciation of the word, long and romantic and passionate, demonstrating a romantic association with Georgia, a state of mind and of artistic brilliance — a reflection of the attitude of “American Negroes,” their ambivalence, if not their schizophrenia, toward America. The second Georgia is drawn out, suitable for a song that is really the blues. Whenever I think of trains, I think of Georgia, the song — certainly not the place, where “they had the most slaves, and the worst slave-drivers,” contends Mary-Mathilda in The Polished Hoe.
One night, arriving in New Haven on the last train from New York, where I had spent the day, at a friend’s, Tony Best, a Barbadian journalist, watching the Super Bowl, between New England and St. Louis, on which I had bet twenty dollars, Canadian, that St. Louis would win, the taxis that came late, and that picked up all the white people waiting for transportation before they picked up a young black woman and me … it is she who told me that this was going on before my eyes, not seeing this ploy; and she recognized it was a ploy, the taxi driver asking where you are going, hearing your destination, and then telling you he was not going in that direction … and I was reminded, in 1980, by my friend Professor Robin Winks, who was responsible for my appointment of Visiting Professor at Yale in l968, that I should use “a little care” in where I was about to stay. It was a short visit to Yale to give a lecture on “Bob Marley’s Lyrics of Violence and Revolution: The Distance Between Its Message and Its Lyricism.” Robin had said, “Yale has changed since you’ve been teaching here.”
This warning comes back to me, this late night, only about eleven-thirty, for after all, I was in America, I was not in Toronto. It was 2002. I was still working on The Polished Hoe. It was useless to protest. Besides, I had the company of the beautiful young black woman. And she took the insult and the act of racism as one who has lived through these rebuffs from birth tends to do. I had lost the bet on St. Louis. I was no longer in a competitive mood. And it was a warm night. On my mind, was not the excuse and the chastisement the next taxi driver would give; not even a mental note on New Haven’s racist disposition. I had lived through that, with the corroborating evidence of the black students who were admitted to Yale in record-breaking numbers, between 1968 and 1972, when I left to teach at Williams College, in Northern Connecticut.
A taxi came. We said nothing about the “tactics” of the previous taxi drivers. We gave our addresses. And we were driven off in silence.
“Be cool, brother!” she greeted me, as I got into the taxi. And immediately, we were buried in the blackness of the back seat of the rattling taxi that took her home and me to my hotel.
And before the clerk at the desk of this very rundown-looking hotel was finished registering me, I asked her the question that was on my mind. I think the hotel was in the Holiday Inn chain. The lobby looked like a part of a high school gymnasium. Coats and books and things were thrown into cupboards and lockers, whose doors were ajar.
“Could you direct me to the bar?”
“There’s no bar here, sir.”
“No bar?”
I was booked into the wrong hotel. The Department of African American Studies, who had invited me, probably to check me over to offer me a job … the second time around … were probably not aware of the “changes in New Haven”; or else, it was a matter of budgetary constraint …
“But across the street is a restaurant,” a woman, the receptionist, said. “And they’d give you a drink.”
I left my bags with the receptionist. I walked with uncertain gait, across the street.
New Haven had changed. I had never visited this part of New Haven. I had never trespassed into this tough, informal section of the city. Between 1968 and 1972, when I lived in New Haven, it was “on campus” Across the street from my friend John Hersey. John was Master of Pierson College, on Connecticut Street, “in a safe neighbourhood.” The first time that he invited me to dinner in the Pierson Master’s House, I addressed him as Mr. Hershey. He did all his best not to explode. Hershey was a despised name in all Ivy League colleges — because of the Vietnam War.
“No relation, thank you,” John Hersey had said.
He returned to his beer — Heineken — which is the only alcohol I ever see him drink; and I returned to my bourbon and branch water, something I had copied from Robert Penn Warren, in the Yale Faculty Club.
But here I am, in the year 2002, I think; tired and disappointed; walking across the street from this Holiday Inn motel, I think; thirsty for a drink to drown my sorrows; and the loss of the bet, and the nagging reminder of racism that I see, each time I am in New Haven, hoping that they make martinis … the light is soft and golden, for the night has probably passed very slowly and expensively; and there are just a few heads I can see from the middle of the road I am crossing; and I can hear no sound of voices, for the door is closed; although it seems to be of glass and mesh-wire.
But I open it. And the room is silent. There are about one dozen patrons. Men and women. They all look tired. Fatigued. Worn out, from the dramatic commentary of the Super Bowl game. In this smallish, screaming celebrations of the winners, and the moaning disappointments of the losers. They had not backed the right horse.
A woman is talking to a man. Another woman is sitting beside a man, not talking. Two men are playing a game of pool, with the same desultoriness as the men sitting at the bar. The barman is nodding. About to fall asleep.
“Who did you bet on?”
The question takes me by surprise. The question is directed to me. New Haven has changed. Who, in the period of 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement and the torching of urban ghettos, Harlem, Detroit, Watts, and Newark, would pose such a question to a black man, on the night of the Super Bowl, after the game has finished?
“I hope you didn’t bet on New England!”
Was I in New England, as a geographical point of reference, and as metaphor for liberal political thought, even liberalism in the “race relations,” whirring through America like a vibrating wire?
There are some questions, when posed in a belligerent voice and tone of confrontation, that do not require much intelligence to determine the right answer, the prudent answer, the answer to save your soul, or in this tense, run-down bar-restaurant, to save your arse. For the moment the question was asked, I imagined myself in the Deep South, regarding a game played by a Southern football team, and a team from New England.
“St. Louis,” I said.
Cheers all round the room went up. We were all losers. We were bound in friendship by our misfortune.
“Come on in, fella, and have a drink. Those fucking New England Patriots!”
For some time, respectable in its length, and in its quiet, I watched the two men play their game of billiards; and I watched the women talking and drinking with the men; and the room was peaceful, with a tension that was like the feeling of unease in which the black woman and I drove from the New Haven train station in the back seat of the taxi … it was the same one that had refused us, that had asked “Where you going?” and that had pulled off when our address was not acceptable to him.
And then, as in these uncertain cases that lie between violence and ignoring, a man went to the nickelodeon, stubby and sturdy in a corner, and lit up like a Christmas tree that appeared on the front of the machine, the moment he dropped the quarter into the slot, and out came “Georgia.”
The room became silent. The room became respectful. The room becam
e sacred, like a church. Like the sacredness at Communion, up in the chancel, when the reverend is mixing water and wine to feed the congregation whose number and whose thirst he had not calculated correctly. The room became respectful. As it used to become, when “We Shall Overcome” was sung at political gatherings for racial integration, with lustiness and visible and vocal determination. “Georgia …”
I had never witnessed anything like this. This acknowledgement of the music, the lyrics, the voice, and the meaning of the song. “Georgia on My Mind.” I could not really understand what was happening. This group of white men and women, whose attitude toward me was, at first, so tricky in a Southern way, a way that greets you at the door of a run-down lunch counter, when you are not sure, if before you had presented “your black ass,” your shadow, your spectre at this door, if a black man had ever entered these same doors before. That uncertainty.
We listened, in silence. And in love with the voice, and with the song, and with the man singing the song. Ray Charles. “Geor-giah! Georggg-giah!”
“Ray Charles!” somebody said.
“… moonlight through the pines …” a man said.
“This is our national anthem,” another person, a woman, said.
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