'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  “I would really like to know what it is you said to our consul general in Barbados, in 1964,” the consul in Toronto said to me. As he said this, there was a smile on his face. “We don’t think you like us.”

  It was not necessary for him to have added that. He seemed to me then, to be a man caught up in a useless intrigue of international diplomacy that was minuscule; and he was no doubt trying to bring me within the sphere of his intrigue. He was smiling. And I had come to suspect smiles more than growls.

  To me, going to Yale University to teach Afro-American literature, and American studies, was a diversion not so sophisticated as the parry and thrust of intrigue. And it certainly was not diplomacy. It was, in plain terms, a matter of bread and butter. It had put me in a serious moral position, too: my willingness, my eagerness coupled to this, to procure this bread and this butter while living within the lion’s mouth. The terror and the danger, if not the subconscious suicidal bent to my nature, were also obvious to me. And though I had decided, against an inflated moral arrogance, to make this bread in America, and even though I had understood clearly that my intention to acquire this money in America was, to say the least, an expression of schizophrenic behaviour, I was still determined to permit neither the racial situation in America, nor the pragmatism in my scheme to become bogged down in the inquisitive tangles and smiles of another American diplomat, a consul.

  Now that I am thinking of this, I do not think he was a consul. He was definitely not the consul general. My file was too flimsy, even with its potential incendiary phrases, to warrant the attention of a head of mission. He could have been a “tenth secretary” handling short-term visas.

  Looking back now, and trying to piece together small and insignificant details of my interview at the U.S. Consulate General at Toronto, I can remember certain actions and attitudes that, through my instinct, I have always managed to identify clearly, simply as a means of self-preservation — if not the means of providing myself with a second gust of strength, for the purpose of counterattack and retaliation.

  I remember a secretary, a woman, who saw me before the tenth secretary did. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles. I remember the bland taste of her choice of clothes; and I remember the tension in her fingers. She spent the entire ten minutes with me, making lines on her notepad. Her notepad was yellow and legal-sized, with blue horizontal lines, and a red margin on the left side. But I was not supposed to be looking at her notepad. The lines she drew on it became long, and then she thickened them; and then, still fumbling, still doodling in her mind for a piece of diplomacy with which to make me feel comfortable while I waited for the tenth secretary, she found herself making symbols: heads of spears, or arrows. But she had attached the heads of the arrows in the wrong direction, in relation to the shaft of the spear, or the arrows. The heads of the arrows were attached in such a way that I felt she was not thinking of violence, even symbolically, so much as she was expressing a corporate decision, indulged in and decided upon before I stood before her, and in which she had shared; as a decision to turn me back.

  A woman who happened, years before she told me this story, to be the receptionist and secretary in an advertising office where I presented myself to apply for a job as a writer, writing copy to sell Forsyth shirts and men’s college blazers, told me that the moment I left the office, after the manager had declared his love for Barbados, and his good impression of the very high literacy rate of Barbadians, after telling me I’ll hear from him, after promising me the job — “You’ll be a credit to our firm, Mr. Clarke!” — he tore my curriculum vitae neatly into half, down the length of its legal size, then place the halves, evenly as if he were measuring advertising space, then reduced them to quarters, then into the small size, then held them between thumb and index finger, and, like a basketball player, dropped them into the empty wastepaper basket that sat at the feet of the receptionist-secretary. And he ended his “slam-dunk” with fingers still arranged in a delicate, dainty gesture of satisfaction. Years after this, a woman who worked as a secretary in an employment office of the civil service, told me ten years after I had been presenting myself before a supervisor to be interviewed for jobs: job as night watchman, Christmas rush postman, cleaner of the elementary school just south of College Street, one building west of police headquarters on College and University Avenue; janitor of the Baptist Church House, up from Bloor, on St. George Street; and some women who worked for the Bell Telephone Company, in its office on Asquith Avenue, these two informants told me, in strictest confidence, “’cause if it get out that it is me who tell you, I will get fired,” that the officer at the desk to whom I gave my preliminary information, such as age, education and address, this man — or woman — wrote a code, a letter, a number, an exclamation mark, perhaps three black dots, the purpose of which was to “warn” the man who would interview me, that I was a Negro. “Shit! Would I lie about a thing like this?”

  This secretary in the U.S. Consulate at Toronto might have been thinking of journeys and passages, of time and place; and of countries and entry and exit. And detours. Perhaps, also, her mind might have bordered on deportation. Was she conscious of her thoughts? Or, was she, as a psychiatrist would conclude, unaware of the thoughts that were crowding her head? Was she fashioning in her personal forge, in her anvil, the heads of arrows pointing in the wrong, but in my direction, subconsciously?

  The heads of arrows turned into detour signs. She was telling me, through her hammering on the anvil of her yellow legal pages, that so far as my being granted an American visa was concerned, that she knew, had been instructed that I was on the wrong path. She had attached the heads of the arrows in the wrong direction, in a backward direction. I knew then, I felt it through my system, I was aware of the blow of instinct upon my reason, that even before we had discussed the matter for two minutes, what my position was. No visa was to be granted.

  I cannot remember anything she said to me during this interview. It was really a preliminary interview, like the ones at the front of the employment office. But I might have been inattentive to her words. I had, by then, developed a mental mechanism that made it easy for me to switch off my hearing faculties whenever I suspected someone of telling me something that I felt the person himself did not believe in, and which I feared was detrimental to me, had I listened to it, and tried to understand it; and this ability to switch off my ears, at will, has protected me from being assaulted by hypocrisy and stupidity. And surprised. The secretary was doodling away her time in order to catch the most gentle opportune moment in which to break the gloomy news to me.

  When a man has compromised his moral position (as I seemed to have done), his point of view, or his conviction; and if that compromise should force him into rationalizations in an attempt to try to justify it on grounds of pragmatism, then that man like myself stands in grave danger of being destroyed and insulted in matters of even greater personal significance. He can no longer claim that he has retained the same moral position by explaining later on (even before the catastrophe consequent upon his compromise) that “in the first place” his logic had warned him against being entangled in the matter, or in the person, or in the attitude, in the point of view and conviction, which five factors were hinged on to his moral principles.

  So, when I told this American tenth secretary that I did not regard it as a favour, nor as an honour, to be permitted to live in America, anyhow, the moral poignancy of my rebuke, if at all it was still a rebuke, and had retained the significance of righteous protest, it had already been dissipated, had lost its strength and virtue, its body, and was now corrupted by an official refusal of a visa to permit my immigration to America. “In the first place,” I should never have applied for the visa. I should never have accepted the one-year appointment to teach at Yale University. My moral foundation had already been shattered at the root by my acceptance of the appointment. For I had already deluded myself that I could hate America for its treatment of “Negroes” like me, and still, in th
e next breath, accept a situation to work within its system.

  “Politically controversial,” the tenth secretary had said.

  My papers would have to be sent to Ottawa to be “officially processed”; and by the time they were processed, it would be six months later.

  Ottawa did get the papers from the Americans.

  And when I tried to sidestep the Americans in an amateurish manoeuvre and applied instead for Canadian citizenship (certainly not an expression of my desire to become a Canadian citizen!), Ottawa replied, in a form letter, couched in official jargon, and with considerably more indelicacy and less humour than the Americans, that “certain confidential” files pertaining to my “activities,” files that could not be made public, “in the public interest,” stood in my way of obtaining Canadian citizenship at that time. But I might, and could, if I still desired to be a Canadian citizen, apply again in two years. Apparently, two years is the length of time necessary to convince “politically controversial” West Indians to see the un-wisdom of their political activities. Two years was therefore the silk of time in which I could have my application for Canadian citizenship reconsidered. Miss Donovan had copied her files efficiently to the proper Canadian and American agencies. Canada, which proclaimed itself at that time, to be guided by a distinctive nationalistic foreign policy, with no influence from the Americans, had collaborated with the Americans in a definition of “political controversy.” But the policy of the Canadian government toward black people was not different in essence and in quality from that of America. And since America had judged me as “politically controversial” for a speech I gave in Barbados, then Canada and no doubt, Britain, would have judged me as a black extremist and a black militant, which were the terms used then for any black man who talked about white racism, in terms that exploded integration as an ineffectual tactic, and inapplicable to the assurance of dignity and even of human rights.

  I was becoming known outside of Toronto for something. And my sponsor at Yale, Professor Robin W. Winks the historian, had found my name cropping up here and there during his tracking down through research, information about blacks in Canada for his book The Blacks in Canada. The historian and the detective had tracked me down. But his intention was different from that of the diplomat, of course. And so, it was no surprise to me, some months later, when I was invited to a Danforth Foundation conference in a place named Zion, near Chicago, that Yale got in touch with me to advise me that I should not apply for the type of visa that the Tenth Secretary had suggested, but that I should apply for the visa that Yale was now suggesting. Yale advised me to apply for the type of visa that Yale wanted me to have. I was disorientated at the time.

  The riots in Chicago and the tragedy of the 1968 Democratic Convention in that city were oppressing my mind. And now that I was in this place, named Zion, offered no redemption and no absolution, even of a biblical nature. My disorientation lingered. I was too near to Mayor Daley. Too near to the city of Chicago. Too near to Chicago’s policemen, about whom the French playwright Jean Genet, on assignment by Esquire magazine, and attracted to the physical bodies of the cops, used the metaphor of the male penis in his description of the nightsticks these cops held menacingly in their tattooed, hairy, white arms.

  But Yale University had demonstrated a kind of paternalistic interest in my welfare. And Yale was perhaps more powerful than either Chicago or Mayor Daley. For Yale had said in its telephone message: “Just tell the Immigration people in Toronto which plane, which hour, which day you’ll be coming to Yale, and the visa will be waiting there for you, at the Toronto International Airport.

  That is power. What kind of power, I don’t know, but I understood it as being a simple, clean, unadulterated power. I do not know how many telephone calls Yale University had to make on my behalf; and to whom; I do not know if Yale called its senator, meaning the senator from Connecticut, a piece of intelligence given to me, right off the bat, by the tenth secretary. But I do know, from a call from my wife, that the visa was there, in Toronto, at the American immigration office, half an hour after I had received the telephone call in Zion, Illinois, from Yale University.

  It had taken me four months before the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto could see me; and I had had to make that appointment myself, when I realized that the consulate might have been doodling and marking time on my application, probably in the rhythm of the death march …

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  This Friday afternoon is a day of sun and happiness and excitement. I am leaving Canada. Not for good. Not for England, the Mother Country, as I had it in my mind to do, less to register at Middle Temple and become the barrister-at-law I thought was in my stars, and more as an escape from the way my life had been balanced in the scale of unknown endings. I would walk in front of the Supreme Court, a short tack to joining demonstrations in front of the U.S. Consulate, and would take a minute to look up at Justice, a woman — sometimes I wondered if Justice was never sculpted in the body of a man? Or, a boy? — and I would wonder whether a prejudice, an opinion not necessarily dressed in law and in logic, a breath, deliberate to tip the scales, and any other aberration, what act could, like the two fingers of the shop keeper placed stealingly on the scale, to add avoirdupois and profits, in the small kerosene-lamp shop, in that weak light, back home in Barbados, and give the wrong justice. And I imagined myself in a dock in this Supreme Court, pleading for the justices’ understanding that the weight of racial prejudice is more burdensome, psychologically, than in its execution, physically. For if this were not the case, then there would be no black Americans. The Middle Passage would have been their ovens and concentration camps. But we know that they lived on, through this rough crossing from one tent and grass hat, to a wooden shack of hell in America. And in the West Indies. But I am leaving Toronto, and the uncertainty that faces the writer, at almost each step of life, no less unsettling after the second book, than after the fifth, each step shaking like an unanchored flight of wooden stairs not pinned or screwed to its foundation.

  This is a journey of unknown destination in the sense that although I know where I am going, I do not know where I am heading to, in the strict sense of destination. And I know it is a journey, which, whether undertaken in full, going from LaGuardia Airport in New York, to Yale University in New Haven, or aborted before its terminus, is going to change my life, forever.

  So, I am in the white Connecticut limousine car, crammed and crushed against unspeaking white men and white women, professors, and students returning to various colleges and universities in the Eastern seaboard, for the September term, or entering for the first time, on the way between Darien and New Haven, early in September 1968. I tried to remember and fit together, into some perspective, things about the itinerary of my trip over this strange countryside.

  Here I am, moving east and slightly north from New York City. I was more safe and comfortable in New York City, especially the part that is Harlem, for there I have interviewed, on assignment for the CBC, Malcolm X, Leroi Jones, Floyd McKissick, Roy Innis, Minister Louis Farrakhan, John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and others, as long ago as 1963 and 1964. But this journey now is over new terrain. I try to think whether some of the names of the exits from the highway that go into smaller towns and villages and residential districts, have a peculiar and specific history that I should know, in order to assist my integration.

  Westchester comes into view; and from the pages of the New York Times newspaper social columns, I already know that a certain breed of rich and retiring, successfully retired American white man and white woman, inhabits this part of the reservation of suburban living.

  I think of the number of pieces of luggage I have on the roof of this limousine, shapeless as a long, fat, green worm, painted white, that one would find on the manicured lawns of the residential area we are passing and are told the correct exits, by number and by name, that we should take, to get to the strong-drinking safe suburbs. “T
here ain’t no niggers living up there, Jack!” Leroi Jones has told me. And I become frightened that I have moved too many of my belongings into this country of America, unsettled as a new colony. Nobody in the white limousine has anything to say to anybody else. The New York Times, the New York Herald, the Village Voice, Look magazine, Time, the New York Review of Books, Playboy, Ramparts, the Washington Post, Esquire, The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly were all filled with commentary by America’s leading intellectuals, those on the right who were not always as religious as they boasted; and those on the radical left. Not one woman in the limousine has anything to say to the person sitting beside her.

  My wife, sitting beside me, mentions repeatedly her shock at the “power” that Yale demonstrated in procuring visas for her “political controversial” husband. The visa had been waiting for us earlier that morning at the Toronto International Airport. And Yale had sent her a visa, too! What other miracles of power would Yale be disposed to pulling off on the behalf of this black man and his black wife, and his two black daughters travelling in New York State now, in this white, silent, and apparently disapproving limousine heading, like an overeating suburban dweller on its way to Connecticut. Connecticut Yankee comes into my thoughts. I do not know what a Connecticut Yankee is supposed to look like; but I remember the term used in articles in the Atlantic Monthly. And I think someone had told me that William Styron, who had already stirred up a controversy amongst the black American intelligentsia, lived in Connecticut. Perhaps, he was a Yankee, too. But I got the impression that Connecticut Yankees were radical liberals who did not mind the integration of Negroes into their suburban communities, on gentlemen’s agreements.