I am, morally, and virtually balancing, with a feather bearing the determining weight, between “yes,” and “no,” of returning my Order of Ontario, along with the Order of Canada. And seeking refuge elsewhere, perhaps in Brixton, London, in England.
I wrote this note of censor against Mayor Lastman’s rabid offensive comments, as a means to encourage debate on the subject, but the Toronto sensibility is so conservative on these matters, so immoral in its silence, that I left it unfinished. Its enthusiasm melted like the snow in May, and the “silence” because indifference and individual satisfaction which in wiping out the injury to self and to race, rendered the problem no problem at all. Toronto went back to is placid contentment. “No prab-lem, man! No prab-lem!”
Many years ago, almost twenty, I was in Vancouver promoting The Origin of Waves, and saw this sign, painted in blue-black spray, in capital letters, taking up three lines, on a white wall. I cannot remember if the wall was the wall of a house, or of a store, or of a public building. In the photograph that I took, there is the sky, blue with white clouds, and on the right-hand side, is what looks like a metal staircase, leading up to the blue and the white in the skies; and on the ground are more metal pipes, and sharp pieces of rock, and the ground. It is an aesthetically unpleasing portrait of a street, of a neighbourhood, of a city — of Vancouver:
OUT WHITE MANS
CANADA NOW FOR
ASIA PEOPLES
There are serious problems with the syntax of this sentence, which is perhaps not a sentence at all. It is not a declaration. It is not a summons. It is more like the intractableness of a new testament. It is both a declarative statement and a plea.
It is chilling.
And my next curiosity is to define the author of these sentiments, to draw his picture, to see his face, and to see whether the way he looks and the way he talks and the way he walks, is similar in its lumbering, its awkwardness, to the difficult language he is learning to use, in his plea for political and geographical belonging; and status.
And the harder I sprain my brain to paint a picture of him, one that is true, and is not based upon the effect of the sensational gnashing of teeth that surrounds his written testament, the more he is a figment of my imagination, a man walking in the thick mists and low clouds of Vancouver’s weather. A man in the mists. Impossible to capture on canvas with paint.
I wanted to find it to send to Mayor Mel Lastman at the appropriate time. But I had misplaced it until this very moment. And now, for three reasons, it is too late.
Chapter Twenty-One
In a colour photograph, with dimensions of seventeen and one-half inches by eleven and one-quarter, is Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, sitting with calm, and stoic determination — impossible through her Britannic power to ever feel that numerical smallness leads to being in the minority! Herself alone, amongst forty-
seven men; and not one other woman in the photograph! Some of the men are cut off at the shoulder, others at the neck, in order to be accommodated within the cropping of the photograph. The photograph shows the Queen in the middle of the first row, sitting in that row, with the four officers, members of the 1st Battalion of The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at Howe Barracks in Canterbury. The Queen is surrounded with barely detected smiles on the faces of the officers’ sternness. Not one of them is smirking. This is serious business, spit-and-polish such as I had seen on the countenance and the black boots of the Guards officer, on the eighth of March 2004, a Monday, at
12:40 p.m., when I arrived, chauffeured in a Mercedes-Benz, at the main entrance to Buckingham Palace. I was having my audience with the Queen. It was the last symbol, acknowledgement — the cheque had preceded it, so too had the congratulations from around the world — of my having won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for having written the best book in the Commonwealth in the year 2003.
The whole week was full of enthusiasm, of reminders of the British Commonwealth, which in a way has really not ceased to exist, but is still burly and contented, satisfied with its girth of influence and power; and revisiting old themes, old castles, old shops, old roads that bring back their only memories, it was almost like going home, going home to mother, and to the Mother Country. And I was in the midst of this, as an honoured writer, but in a real sense, even if I did not absorb it, beginning with Commonwealth Day, which was observed in its lingering taste of history, my history, the history of colonialism, this history it was that defined me and my presence amongst the powerful and the wealthy of the Commonwealth.
Commonwealth Day was observed with a late afternoon service at Westminster Abbey.
On Sunday afternoons, late and before the bells of St. Matthias Anglican Church, climbing the hills in the fading presence of the humidity, which left the land just as dusk was descending like a chastisement, to remind us that in one hour, Evensong and service shall start with the organist, Mr. Williams (nobody dared remember his Christian name, or called him by it, he was such a musical genius — some called him Bach, and some called him Palestrina, not even knowing who they were — that it was unspeakable to claim equality with him), he who got the organ to breathe like what we were told in elementary school, whales breathed like, “parading on the pedal organ which breathed like a sea monster,” the single speaker of the “private set,” its aerial a piece of fine wire given to my stepfather (I shall call him Father after this, for he behaved and treated me as a father would; and did), by the neighbourhood joiner, and tuned to Hilversum, in the Netherlands, religiously from nine o’clock this Sunday morning, and all other Sunday mornings so long as I lived in the grey-painted house, with white trim, windows, doors, eaves and gate, named “Macon,” after a town in the American South in which the “private set” pinpointed a religious sermon by a Southerner whose accent my father could barely understand; a place whose geography no one in the neighbourhood knew, or could find out about; and the men in the neighbourhood, policemen like he was (he was a private and remained a private for most of his life; and then turned lance corporal, with the Distinguished Service Record, the best in Her Majesty’s Royal Constabulary in the Island, for having not arrested one man, one criminal, one suspect during the twenty-four years he walked the beat). So, carpenters, joiners, fishermen, and the man who drove the iron drill into the coral stone, in the rock quarry, and thought of his wife each time he tore up the palms of his hands, and the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger, from five until six, standing alone in this quarry, his kingdom of rock and dust and pebbles and marl, every day except Sunday, they all — meaning the men; the women were wiser and kept their silence — said that my father was mad, crazy, “crazy as shite!,” that “you loss your fucking marbles, man”; and to his face, they called him “Foolbert,” meaning that he had passed the limit beyond possible saving. And when they called him “Foolbert,” I did not laugh in agreement with them, because he who had begun as my stepfather one year after I was born, had now become my father, in word, in love, and in deed; so, together, son and fathering-stepfather, around six-thirty, with the heavy sound of the organ from Westminster Abbey whose choir we in Barbados did not think could “sing as sweet as we,” but which we listened to, religiously; going down the hill where the stone cutter worked alone in the hot sun until midday Saturday afternoon, payday, through the fields of sugar cane and Indian corn, hedgerows of pigeon peas, like fragile guardians to protect the boys in the neighbourhood from stealing the young, sweet canes, or digging up a hole of eddoes, or sweet potatoes to sweeten the pot, their roots and fragile limbs to serve as dams to prevent the rain water from washing the fields down the hill, and into the sea; cross the Brittons Hill main road, near the Tank, a hill built out of grass and dirt, like a fort made out of the ground, owned by the Marine Hotel, but claimed by us as a cricket pitch to play firms on, during the week, and “Tess Matches” on Saturdays and Sundays. Then, down the incline, walk along the gap where I began my life, into St. Matthias Village, passing Mr. Edwards’s cows who
did not observe Sundays, and the pigs quarrelling at five minutes to seven on a Sunday evening, precious as a wedding, and as loud and as dirty and as smelly, as during the week, but reminding us of our order of black pudding and souse made and delivered by Mistress Edwards, we turned left, under the streetlamp with the forty-watt bulb that burned from six till five the next morning, in front of the reddish-brown painted house, a one-roof-and-shed-roof, with a six-foot galvanized paling, like a moat, to prevent fowl-cock thieves from climbing over, to grab a Leghorn or a Barred Rock pullet, this galvanized paling painted glossy black, guarded this house tidy as a Scottish cottage, where George Benn lived with his aunt, and across the white gravel road, passing five more houses like this, but which are painted grey, the St. Matthias Elementary School for Girls. Then, the large wall-house with breadfruit trees, Julie mango trees, sugar apple trees, golden apple trees, and a dunks tree in the backyard, making Africa and jungle of this special verdancy; and one bougainvillea tree at the front, beside the six cement steps you have to mount to reach the latticed front door, to press a bell the size of a cent, to bring Mr. Morrison, the retired headmaster of the boys’ elementary school, who wrote with a Waterman fountain pen, grey and black and white, where he lives with a wife no one has ever seen; and a servant, a woman who walks the road as if she is Mistress Morrison, his wife. Mr. Morrison lives here, in Labour Blest, the name he christened his house with. Writing with a nib pen into his thick ledger book, lined in red and black, with blue-black Quink ink, the entries of the Savings Society, “a penny a week,” and having it marked by his italic handwriting in the ledger book, like a secret, that you were “paid up — clear, just in case you dead suddenly, you paid up, and your survivors could get a nice ‘turn-out’ from Mister Corbin the Undertaker …”
You walk up the path of the East Gate, with the bougainvillea and the mayflower and wisteria blowing into your face like the handkerchief of a woman whose love for you is dipped in No. 4711; and you know, as you are walking beside your stepfathering father, that you cannot steal a glance in the direction of any girl; and you understand the sacredness of stone and coral stone, and rock in these surroundings, for the graves, tombs and slabs of marble with the names of Englishmen on them, in gold, are not to be disturbed, so the same silence of your passage over all this history that died in the Island centuries ago, will remind you in whose presence you are; and it is the same as if you are in Westminster Abbey, in the presence of the Queen of England, of prime ministers from the four square corners of the world, and by the world, because you are a black Englishman, you mean the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is the successor of the British Empire. It is the remaining decaying anachronism and metaphor contained in “Rule Britannia.”
I had never been in such presence of the mighty, the high and the low mighty. The swath of former Empire swept wide. The Speaker of the Legislature of Ontario, a Jamaican by birth, the Honourable Alvin Curling, was present. Bishop Tutu was there. But I mention these two only to give scope and wideness of theology and politics to the service of benediction, and of praise. One more must be singled out. Three is a good number, a lucky number back home in the Island. Three is a female number, a woman told me once.
Westminster Abbey is larger than either St. Matthias Anglican Church or St. Michael’s Cathedral Church. But the feeling that you are in the presence of saints and holy men and wealth and power and the correct way to behave, and the silence of finger touching lip. From their posture and gait, from the way they held the Hymn Book, from their enthusiasm in singing the hymns, slightly off key, slightly too loud, except for those with good voice and pitch, I concluded that the English in Great Britain, are of lusty voice, unashamed to contribute to the ritual and hymn-singing of this great abbey. It is as if each one of them knew exactly the year in which Westminster was built, how many bricks were quarried in its construction, and the first year it opened. And that somebody in the skeleton of their history was an artisan, if not a “straw-boss,” if not the architect, stonemason, artist who created the stained-glass windows. I could compare this splendour with the sugar-cane fields of my own Island; artisans, women and men who spent most of their waking hours picking weeds from the rich, rewarding soil, bent almost in half. But here were English artisans working in stone and mortar, cement and wood, beams hewn from trees whose bodies were stout like hearts of oak, understood before their time, looking into the future, how to make a whisper in a church, in an abbey, and have it resound like the amplification of microphones. This they knew, and gave us the simile that means absolute silence, and referred it to the church mouse. Quiet as a church mouse.
And then, from somewhere in the deepness of the abbey, incense and rich deep-coloured velour, from choir stall, from chancel, from altar, from pulpit, came the third important personage I have enumerated, known to me. Courtney Pine. Dread-locked “like a lion from Zion.”
I was dread-locked, too. And I claimed immediately a brotherhood of cultural understanding.
In this quiet came the Lion, with tenor saxophone, meandering through nave and aisle, walking along each aisle like a needle with fine thread, sewing the geography of his art; for it was as if, not only the saxophonist, but what he stood for: Bob Marley, Ras Tafari, all black men in England and in other places, back in Jamaica, was making a claim of possession, if not a claim of associated ownership. For Westminster Abbey this late afternoon was turned into St. Matthias Anglican Church, and into St. Michael’s Cathedral Church, and into Charlotte Street in Port-au-Spain, on Carnival day.
“Redemption Song!”
The irony is as dramatic as is the appropriateness of the song.
I closed my eyes and allowed Courtney’s saxophone to water the words that Bob Marley first planted in 1980, almost a quarter of a century ago. Would he have thought that his “Redemption Song” would be played at this Commonwealth Day, in the presence and hearing of queens and kings and prime ministers and dictators, with the Queen present? And princes, too? I kept my eyes closed and I was now hearing John Coltrane and his management of keys and sharps and chords, and the multiplication of notes in the furious expression of the blues content in “Redemption Song.”
I opened my eyes, expecting this Commonwealth congregation, including Bishop Tutu, to scream, “Yes, Bob Marley. Yes. We shall help sing these songs of freedom.” For indeed, when you took us out of the abbey, when the taxi, bus, private motor car, or chauffeur-driven diplomatic limousine has delivered us to our destination and address, we might very well be in need of some redemption. Our true natures will have been exposed to the police or the skinheads, or just the mean-spirited. This is why I closed my eyes and imagined other things, as Courtney Pine walked down the aisles of the abbey, serenading Queen and prime minister, bishop, and speaker of the house.
The dignitaries in the abbey in full beautiful blast of Courtney’s saxophone, moved in their personal redemption, were too dignified through custom and class to break out in clapping, to applaud. But you hear the beating of their hearts and their palms, in silent applause. It was left to the hoi-polloi, the witnesses without invitation embossed by Commonwealth insignias, not restricted by that protocol, to clap their hands in a joyful appreciation of the clear, piercing, precise notes, the daggers of his artistry being plunged deep into their hearts. In full appreciation. “Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?”
We walked, as if in a slight rain, although no rain was falling, but we walked as if we were being drizzled by the water of tears and applause from the notes of “Redemption Song,” to a reception; ushered into a room that was small and that had more than fifty persons standing with drinks, recalling the way the saxophone’s notes went through their hearts. These I had not seen in the abbey. They had better seats than I had; but we were all members of the same family of the Commonwealth, and we knew this by the quality and the amount of champagne being poured into our flutes.
On a chair, away from the press of people and the passing waiters pouring drinks and champ
agne, was Bishop Tutu and his wife. I had heard everything about the Bishop, had disagreed with him sometimes, had agreed with him sometimes; did not agree with him and his court of reconciliation. South African whites should pay for South African whites’ brutality to South African blacks. Here he was, with his wife, jovial and happy and wise. Just one month before, in an American city, promoting my novel The Polished Hoe, a woman came up to me, and said, “Oh, gosh! I mistook you for Bishop Tutu!”
I was not sure there was a compliment intended. I think South Africa’s whites should do penance for their treatment, all these years, of South Africa’s blacks. I remembered each time my appearance was associated with a South African black: Chief Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, and one South African coloured whom I helped to get out of South Africa, at the height of the atrocities of apartheid, and my friend who attended McMaster University in the sixties. He gave me his pass book. He gave it to me, to make me know, from reading the restrictions with my own two eyes, how deep in the marrow of a black man was the insult slammed into his face, like a rotting pie; that was his daily experience. This pass book is one of the most precious gifts I have. So, I was pleased to meet the Bishop, and to introduce myself to him; and to his wife.
“If you do not mind, sir,” I said, having by now had three flutes of champagne, which I am sure loosened my tongue to make this approach. “I must tell you that people mistake me for you, and say, ‘You look so much like Bishop Tutu.’”
“They make a mistake,” he said, smiling. His wife was attending.
“Why do you think so, sir?”
“You are much more handsome than I!”
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