There have been previous owners of the house. But they were not spirits. The spirits that greeted me were inhospitable to those previous owners. Those owners were incapable of reading the signs that tied them to myths and narratives and drums and shouts and “shants”; and the blues. I could feel the spirits. I could hear them. I could talk with them. And in time, when it was important, they would talk to me. And I knew that I was wise in purchasing the green-door house.
But there are other houses whose front doors are painted green. Arthur de Smet, young Dutchman who is translating The Polished Hoe into Dutch is very intelligent, intense, and sensitive. And he is taking me this morning in 2002 on a tour of the canals of Amsterdam. There is something about the light shining on the three-storey apartment buildings on the canal. They look like the ones in Havana and Venice and in Bordeaux and in Toulouse. Some of the buildings are four stories. But in this canal where we are now, travelling in a boat that looks like a launch, with a transparent roof through which you can see the tops of buildings; where you can drink beer, the smell of the water and the way the light strikes the buildings, standing majestically along the canals, some with doors painted white, some that are blue, some that are black, one that is green, this sightseeing takes me back to the Wharf in Bridgetown, in the Island; to the Venetian gondoliers; to the ships entering the Malecón in Havana; to the ocean-going, floating apartments that look like tourist cruisers, along the river (was it a sea?), in Bordeaux. All this history and history of architecture here in the Netherlands is bound up in slavery. “Bound up” is the ironical, intransitive verb. My history touches all of them: buildings in which I was tied up and flogged, but in which my spirits lived on. So, each time I enter the right-hand half of the green door of the house, built in 1863, I think of all those other houses in Cuba in the Caribbean, in Bordeaux in France, in Venice in Italy, and in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, erected from the help of my sweat and floggings, from the bones in the basements with the skeletons, in such present-day magnificence whose cargo, the source of that trade, has been wiped from the conscience and the moral responsibility of those sea captains, sea-dogs, buccaneers and merchants and investors, and ordinary citizens.
It takes me five minutes to walk from my house to the St. Lawrence Hall, which I have to pass to get to the St. Lawrence Market, which is my destination. Years ago, before 1873, when the house was built, and after 1492, my future and my present disposition were discussed and quarrelled about in this St. Lawrence Hall. I walk past the St. Lawrence Hall now, to buy pigs’ feet, ham hocks, plantains, okras, and pigtails in the market itself. And nowadays, I go to the St. Lawrence Hall to receive the Trillium Prize for Literature, and to drink wine and eat thick slices of cheese at other functions — weddings, book launches, and dances. When I pass the post office, midway to the hall, reputedly the first post office in Toronto, and I pick up snippets of history from the neighbourhood newspaper, I add to the “facts” of that history, the real truth, the “narrative” coached by the spirits and the myths, and I conclude that the man who lived in this green-door house, in 1876, three years after it was built, was a slave — whether in chains still, or “freed,” or manumitted, or spared the hangman’s knot thrown round a branch of a magnolia tree — if there are no magnolia trees in Canada, then I still say magnolia tree, to denote the symbolism, for it doesn’t matter.
The slave’s profession is gouged out in history as “shoemaker.” He lived in this house from 1876, until 1880. More than a hundred years after emancipation. I have been passing this house for fourteen years. Then, I bought it. Not for any historical or racial, or cultural reason. Not even for its archival benefits. Could the “shoemaker,” deliberately, and from the grave, have sent those spirits to alert me, and have me join them?
The shoemaker’s name is Lamb Jno. Lamb is his Christian name. A Christian’s name. His spirit, whether from a body sold in America or in the West Indies, continues “to ride me,” as my mother, who knows more about slavery and ghosts and skeletons and witchcraft than me, would have me believe, referring to matters that pester her for solution. And the shoemaker’s spirits ride me across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Malecón, to Venice, to Bordeaux, and now to Amsterdam.
Chapter Eighteen
The dreams I dream of the Malecón, of Venice, of Bordeaux and Amsterdam, are dreams scotched in my mind in Barbados, in the board-and-shingle house, at the front window in the front house, looking out on to the white road, the colour of its gravel, and the ownership of its construction, “studying my head.” Or acting mad, “with a turned head” (… young men looking and walking old…). But on those afternoons between three o’clock and five, when the sun is ready to skip below the hill into the sea that is the conveyor of mysteries and surprises, bringing in bones washed clean of flesh, like seashells gathered from the sandy beach, by children, there is a madness in my head. The sea to me, as I sit here in Toronto, trying my best “’membering things,” as my mother would put it, I am always quite concerned by my ability to write, as if it is a gift from God; and I have told the young writers who were my students in the master class of Fiction, when I had students, when I had a job, to regard their gift, whatever its standard, as a valuable gift from God. And I am surprised, adding to the concern, that there is Biblical confirmation of this: “The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.” And, as many times as I have held this as a precept, so too have I warned young writers, that they stand in danger, through sloppy writing, and dull narrative, of putting the reader (and in the oral situation, the listener), to sleep. I have also warned them, that there are certain societies in which dull narrative could end in tragic circumstances — a gun to the head of the author-reader.
The dreams I was dreaming in 1963, just after my return from Harlem and Newark and Greenwich Village — from Amurca — had nothing to do with wanting to be a writer. I wanted to continue being a freelance broadcaster in radio, for the CBC, as this was a secure means of earning a living, and was something that was tangentially “artistic and literary,” while at the same time existing on the fringe of the tremendous cultural vitality coursing through the city and the country. But there was more to it than this: a deliberate intention to separate the energy and the commitment necessary to be a good freelance radio broadcaster, from the insecurities and frustrations of being a writer of short stories, and, eventually, of novels. At this time, there was an emphasis on the publication and sale of short stories: finance, or fitting into the available editorial space. And there was no stigma attached to being a short-story writer only; and no extraordinary glory attributed to being a novelist. If there were any laurels associated with the mere division of this “artistic labour,” it was to be found in the writing of poetry. The poets at the time, those who were labelled as representatives of the times, were Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, and the three other members of the Montreal Group, with Phyllis Webb on the sidelines with Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee, ready to pounce upon the landscape and the canon of poetical critics, and gain acceptance. The poets were to the art scene in the 1960s what the painters of the Pilot Tavern were, to the entire canvas of Art and Artistic expression.
And so far as I was concerned, there was no “model” against which I could place my thinking about being a writer. In these days of excitement about wanting to become an artist — and some of us dressed as we imagined artists to dress and to behave; for we had as evidence of this artistic behaviour, all of America and the hippie movement. Mode of dress and manner of behaviour, social and sexual, were already established, and to some extent worshipped and ingrained in the sensibilities of anyone wanting to be “an artist,” and placed upon an altar of acceptance like a commandment.
The Survivors of the Crossing was my first novel, published in 1964. It is a novel I do not have any affection for: it is too tentative and unrealistic; and it paints a pictu
re of fiction about a place and an attitude, which, even taking into consideration the literary licence of a writer to disregard. But, as I said, there was no model in Toronto against which I could match my intention. No Canadian writer, in 1963 — and even today, there are very few — had dealt, in a realistic way, its limitations notwithstanding, with the “presence” of black people on the Toronto landscape of whiteness. Not even were black characters placed, unspeaking, and “invisible” upon the pavements of Bloor Street West; not even down Spadina Avenue, the meeting place of blacks at this time; not even in dreams. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe had outstripped us, by the presence of black characters — no matter how despicably and racially drawn — in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We black people, as characters and presences on the landscape of the city, were “invisible” precisely in the context of the term as it is used by Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man. I had to look elsewhere: to Richard Wright and Native Son; to James Baldwin and Go Tell It on the Mountain; and to Ellison himself. These were my nearest models, so far as geography and a veneer of cultural-racial context were concerned. My more real, “literary ancestors” had to be found elsewhere: across the Atlantic, to Great Britain. And this caused me to hesitate since I had lived in a British colony, Barbados, and to seek literary succour amongst the colonizers, even though the “colonizers” were black men like myself, seemed a bit retrogressive. But I could not ignore the contribution that these “black Englishmen” had made, not only to West Indian literature, but also to Commonwealth writing. George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, O.R. Dathorne, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey, V.S. Naipaul, Victor Reid, Edward “Kamau” Brathwaithe, and Derek Walcott. There are others who were writing at this time of what I like to call the Renaissance of West Indian Literature, 1955 to 1975. But the theme of this literature written, though conceived back in the West Indies, dealt too strongly with a pleading sensibility to acknowledge the West Indian character, the West Indian personality, the West Indian narrative history, as the lot of the colonized man. I saw a sharp discord between this “message” in those novels, and the message of harshness, of toughness, of threat and the threat of retributive violence … there were no significant “motherfuckers” in this West Indian literature written at this time in London, as there was in Native Son, and Go Tell It on the Mountain and in Invisible Man, written in America. I could not use the West Indian novel written in London as a model. For this would have been to accept as realistic, to time and to place and to geography, the omission from the literary landscape of Toronto, that the Canadian novelist (and short-story writer) had indulged in, from 1955, when I arrived in this country, and for decades afterwards. The “feeling” of The Survivors of the Crossing, therefore became an enforced realism, a fraudulent exploitation of tension, racial and social, a conflict between “them and we” and between “we and we.” Not even the contention that fiction is able to bear the most imposing burden of unreality, the fiction, and therefore the narrative of The Survivors of the Crossing, were too extraordinarily unreasonable.
But how ordinary is it for an author to write about his work in this dismissive way? And how morally obligated is he to point out the errors, or misconceived aspects of the book, after it has been discussed in various ways of intellectual significance, and discussed in comprehension? What right does the author have in repudiating a conclusion already laid down and believed in, from the number of persons who have followed that delusion? The critic and the book reviewer are, I believe, free, and intellectually on solid ground to dispute the interpretation of a narrative even though the author might very well contest such an interpretation.
The Survivors of the Crossing is therefore a novel I would like to hide from; a novel I would, at the same time, like to write over from the first sentence: “Rufus looked up from the ocean of young green sugar cane plants and saw the threat of rain, painted grey and black in the skies.” Right down to the last sentence: “For a purpose — a good purpose —”; not because I think that The Survivors of the Crossing is a literary disaster. I would like to recreate it because I have just learned how best I could have dealt with the material I was using — as plot, as narrative, and as political purpose. I would have lessened the burden of social and political tension that the character of Rufus has to bear — and irrelevantly so — and I would have given a more detailed treatment, emphasizing the way in which Rufus’s disadvantaged, stunted vision from being a cane field labourer, affected the way he saw his world, the world of the Plantation and the Village, not as two hemispheres, but as structured parameters of a well-structured society, a symbiotic reality of personal sorrow.
I sometimes refuse to acknowledge that The Survivors of the Crossing, though published a year before Amongst Thistles and Thorns, in 1964, was actually written afterwards; and I think that my reservation about giving the correct order of the writing of the two novels the significance it deserves, is my belief that Amongst Thistles and Thorns is a better novel, and the author likes to feel that his writing is on a line of progression and improvement; that each succeeding novel shall be better. I cannot remember why I held Amongst Thistles and Thorns back. And I do not even think, on reflection that I thought that The Survivors of the Crossing was the better novel, the flagship, so to speak. Now that the disclosure is made, I have to admit however, that I do not have the obsessive insecurity about the second novel that I suffer from the first. I would not, if I had the time, write over Amongst Thistles and Thorns. But what I would do, if I did have the time, is to take out the expletives in the “dialect” that the characters use. And let me explain my corrosive usage of expletives. It was simply the way I heard men and women — but mostly men — speak in the neighbourhoods in which I grew up, in St. Matthias, in Dayrells Road, along the Bath Corner, which we later called the University of the Bath Corner, and finally, in Clapham, on Flagstaff Road. I indulged in it, because I found it more poetic than offensive. There was drama, violence, and tension in the way these men used the Barbadian “dialect” or nation language, which rendered their narrative poetic and legitimate. But I would still take out the explosion of expletives. And the reason is really more monetary than literary. These first two novels have never been taught in schools in Barbados. The “censors” in the Department of Education, and those on the school boards and the committees of the CXC, Caribbean Examination Committee, have refused to expose schoolchildren to this “use of bad words,” even though the very members of these distinguished bodies hear these “bad words” and use them, themselves, not only in the privacy of a game of dominoes or the playing of poker on Friday nights. I would indulge myself as a copy editor and remove all expletives, just so that young Barbadians in primary and secondary schools could experience through reading about it, that their great grandfathers lived in the same villages and neighbourhoods that they inhabit today, and that they used these “bad words.”
Apart from this, there is nothing in these first two novels that I am dissatisfied with, that I would want to change, in order to embellish my reputation. But looking back to 1964 and 1965, brings me now to remember the context of my life at this time, before and after.
Harlem and Newark and Greenwich Village, and New York, the glorious jazz clubs of the early sixties, were now behind me. I had to concentrate on making a living, as a freelance broadcaster. Even with two novels and some short stories in my pocket, I was still very insecure about a future in writing fiction. I had seen the flattery given to a few writers, most of whom lived in Toronto — the “giants” of Canadian literature, at a time when the term was used with some duplicity. For we were still engaged in fierce arguments, private and public, about the meaning and the “place” of Canadian literature, which I regarded as a colonial literature, in the scheme of things, meaning the Canon, which as a true colonialist mentality, meant primarily, if not entirely, England. And American literature came second. Those few were Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Morley Callaghan, Robert Kroetsch, Farley M
owat, Margaret Laurence, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, and some other members of the Vancouver School, and the Montreal Group. I have not mentioned all those who deserved to be called “giants” of Canadian literature at this time; and the reason is that I cannot remember all of them; and I know that there are more; so it is not the prejudice of selection, but rather, not mentioning those whom I did not know. There are always others. For years and years, I withered in the ranks of the unmentioned and probably the unmentionable. Times were the occasions too many to number when the list of Canadian writers was published, to the exclusion of the name of Austin Clarke — and of all other black writers in the country. And I always wondered who compiled those lists: and resented the exclusion of my name. Even today, after the Giller Prize, names of Giller winners are mentioned, and the hand of invisibility, similar to the tongue of silence, is characterized by the omission of my name. Now, after I had won the Giller Prize, it is easier to take this literary slight. I ascribe a new reason to this “invisibility.” Years ago I called it racism. But it could have been, innocently, an enumeration based upon an honest placing of talent made from an honest evaluation of that talent.
How did I live with this omission of my name from the Lists? And how did I deal with the implied egoism in thinking that my own evaluation of my work justified my name on these Lists? And how does the author, at whatever stage in his development and acclaim, justifiably argue against his omission? And to whom does he vent his animosity? We, authors and critics, are prone to dismiss the blowing of one’s own trumpet of idolatry, as just that: idolatry. I know the punishment the Establishment, which is a secret, silent vindictive agency of putting one in one’s place, can do to such excessive egoism. Years ago, after The Meeting Point was published to fairly good reviews, I was interviewed by Kildare Dobbs, who like me, worked for the CBC, in radio, most frequently as the host of CBC Anthology, the prestigious literary programme, of which Robert Weaver was the executive producer, and who later became my friend. Kildare used the headline, “An Author to Watch,” signalling to the Establishment that I was coming into my own as an author. During that interview, I made the remark that I considered myself to be one of the best writers in Canada. I do not now feel that it was more egoism, than it was a declaration that I wanted to become, and was working toward that end, to be one of the best, if not the best writer in Canada. I do not think, that considering my upbringing in Barbados, and the precepts of my mother, the obsession with success drilled into me like a book of manners, that I could have said that I wanted to be the worst writer in Canada, or one of the mediocre writers, if I was not serious. The statement was made. I did not at that time, and still do not, know who read my comments; but I am aware of the reaction the statement caused and how that reaction was translated into neglect, resentment, and most importantly, a turning off of the tap of freelance assignments and the drastic reduction in the amount of stories I was able to sell to the literary programmes and magazines. It took some time, about six months, before I was able to redeem myself from that the precipitous remark.
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