“I just need a minute,” he said. “I’m a bit slow in the morning.”
“Where are you going?”
“Can’t stay long. Your father had a message. He asked me to give it to you.”
“Surely, he didn’t expect you to come all the way into Toronto to deliver it. Why didn’t you just call me?”
Aberdeen put his hand on mine. I could feel the calluses all around his palm, at the root of each finger, from years of gardening and working as a handyman. Aberdeen’s grin drooped into sadness. “If I hadn’t come into Toronto, how would I have discovered that Langston Cane the Fifth had become an Algerian?”
“That was just a silly game that got out of control. I told them I was Algerian to get the job. I wanted to see if they’d buy the story.”
“When you were a little boy,” Ab said, “I used to look after you. Do you remember that?” I nodded. “I know I told you about how your grandfather saved my life.” I nodded again. “And I told you about your great-great-grandfather, Langston Cane the First.”
I remembered that, too. My great-great-grandfather had escaped slavery in Maryland and had come up to Oakville on the Underground Railroad. I had heard, from Aberdeen and from my father, that Langston the First had been helped by Quakers along the way. I don’t believe I would be around to tell this story had it not been for Quakers here and there. Anyway, Langston the First arrived in Oakville in 1850, found a wife, had three kids, and then slipped out of town nine years later and was never seen again. According to family legend, he left Oakville in a horse-drawn carriage, seated next to John Brown, who just a few months later led an attack on the U.S. weapons arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The link between my ancestor and John Brown seemed farfetched, but it had always fascinated me.
I walked with Aberdeen to the elevator. I got in with him and rode down.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about your own family,” Aberdeen said. “There are things your father doesn’t even know.” My old friend cracked a smile. He still had all his teeth. Aberdeen stepped out of the building and into the wind. I followed him and asked what my father had wanted him to tell me.
“He wants you to come see him. You are his flesh and blood, Langston. I never had any children — so I know what that means. He says it’s time to end the standoff.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
Aberdeen grabbed my hand. “Do you love me, young man?” “I’m hardly young any more.”
“From where I’m standing, you look young. I asked if you loved me.”
“You know the answer to that.”
“You’ve loved me since I changed your diapers. You’ll love me until the day I die. When that happens, there won’t be anybody putting me in any history book. But will you love me — or love my memory — any less because I never amounted to much? Because I never made history?”
I gulped and stared into his big brown eyes. He was smiling.
“Your family has had some born achievers, son, but you don’t have to do what they did. I know you’re interested in who your people were. Why don’t you write about them? You told me years ago that you wanted to do it. Write, Langston. Go write. Go do the one thing that all the achievers in your family were too busy and too important to do.”
It was freezing outside, and I had left my jacket in the office, but I walked Aberdeen to the Bay subway station. I walked him down the stairs to the turnstiles and fished through my pockets and tried to give him a token.
“Don’t waste your money. I’ve got tickets at a senior citizen discount.”
I told Aberdeen that I would think about what he had said. He pushed through the turnstile and walked ahead. The moment before he took an escalator down out of sight, he turned and called out: “One of these days, you’ll have to tell me all about Algeria.”
I didn’t set out to get fired, or to see my name in the Toronto newspapers. I have enough on my shoulders as it is. So I was not out looking for trouble. But trouble blew in with the wind, at the very moment that I had been wondering about my great-great-grandfather, and about the family legend of his demise alongside John Brown while trying to strike a blow against slavery.
The trouble began in earnest when my boss asked if I wanted to see a confidential government document.
Alfonso, like me, is one of the walking wounded. He, too, senses that he’s been a failure in his father’s eyes. A few years ago, he discovered that his divorced father had remarried, had another child — a boy — and given him the name Alfonso de Altura Jr. “I didn’t turn out the way he wanted, so he figured he’d start again from scratch,” Alfonso told me.
On the day of my undoing, Alfonso urged me to read a secret report that had somehow landed on his desk.
“No, thanks.”
“Guess what our illustrious government is about to ban.”
“Sex?”
“Nope.”
“Sex in public places?”
“Nope.”
“Sex in saunas?”
“Langston, you gotta get yourself a woman friend. But put those thoughts aside, if you can. This government is about to kill anti-discrimination legislation and junk the provincial human rights commission.”
“Let me see that thing.”
I spent an hour or so reading the proposal that had been sent forth to Cabinet. We certainly had entered an era of government downsizing. First, they downsized welfare cheques by about 20 percent. Then, they downsized the need for meat inspectors, elevator inspectors — just about any kind of inspectors, for that matter. Foreign investors sure as hell wouldn’t be interested in putting money down in Ontario if they had to work in a climate where a company could be put out of business for selling bad meat or letting elevator cables unravel. According to this document, it was now the turn of the human rights commission and the Ontario Human Rights Code. They were obsolete and antithetical to good business practices. They had served a need years ago, thank you very much, but this was the nineties. Minorities didn’t require special treatment any longer. Like other Ontarians, minorities knew businesses couldn’t compete in the global economy without treating all employees fairly. Or so the document said.
I imagined having to craft a minister’s speech about how eliminating human rights legislation would contribute to Ontario’s positive business climate. But I knew the minister’s spin doctors wouldn’t allow the term “human rights legislation” in the speech. They would insist that all speeches refer to the old legislation as “the job quota law.”
I have written a lot of trash on the job. But I didn’t think I could write that speech. I imagined my great-great-grandfather, Langston Cane the First, shaking his head as he watched me work.
There was nothing happening in the office on the morning that Alfonso gave me the secret document. I thought about catching a noon-hour movie — but there was nothing worth seeing. I stepped out of the office at eleven, bought a hot dog and a root beer from a street vendor, strolled outside for five minutes, and returned to my desk — only to have the minister’s communications aide pounce on me.
Alfonso was out at a dentist’s appointment. Almost everyone in the minister’s office was out that day. But the minister had a sudden problem. He had been putting in time in the legislature, snoozing through committee meetings, when he was ordered by the premier to stand in for him at a speaking function that same afternoon.
The event was scheduled to take place at a downtown hotel at one. It was now eleven-fifteen. Could I get a speech to the minister’s office within an hour? Write anything, I was told, just get the minister through a ten-minute speech to the Canadian Association of Black Journalists without making a fool of himself.
In leaving, the minister’s aide said, “Hey, this is kind of up your alley, isn’t it? You’re Algerian or something, aren’t you?”
I nodded. Yes, I told him, this was right up my alley.
I know the secret to grinding out pages under tight deadlines — write as fast as po
ssible without thinking. So I switched on the computer and started writing. I swear upon the memory of my great-great-grandfather that I did not set out to get the minister fired. Nor did I immediately conceive of the idea to write two speeches — one straightforward version for the minister’s office, and one podium copy with a curve ball.
Had I spent weeks planning a way to trick a minister into revealing details about a confidential document to a crowd of journalists, I could never have pulled it off. I will admit to a number of character faults. Unlike my ancestors, I seem to have difficulty seizing life by the horns. Regretfully, I have shown the capacity to be unfaithful at a critical time to the only woman I have truly loved. But the one thing that I am not is conniving or deceitful. I would be the last person in the world capable of planning a crime. My face would betray me from the very start.
I knew what I was doing, of course, when I doctored the minister’s podium copy. But it was certainly not “a brilliantly planned, courageous blow against the Ontario government and its right-wing agenda,” as one of the newspapers said later. It was simply a speech that fell into place with the help of chance — namely, the minister had no knack for public speaking. His verbal abilities were so limited that Alfonso and I had nicknamed him Pilot, for his unswerving adherence to any speech placed before his eyes. We speculated that Pilot had probably hired a freelancer to write the thank-you speech for his wedding reception.
It took me twenty minutes to write the speech. It acknowledged that blacks had contributed to life in Canada, suggested that they wanted opportunities for their children, and claimed that the government was paving the way for long-term prosperity by creating conditions in which businesses and investors would thrive.
I brought the speech to the minister’s aide and sat with him while he scanned the pages. He caught a typo and made two edits in style. I promised to bring back a clean copy for him, as well as a podium copy for the minister.
I always prepared the minister’s speaking copy in twenty-four-point type. He liked his lines triple-spaced, with no page more than two-thirds full, for easy reading from the podium.
I ran back upstairs, printed out a clean copy for the aide, and proceeded to doctor the minister’s podium copy. The copy from which the minister would read was essentially the same speech that had been approved by the aide — with one exception.
My so-called “courageous blow against the Ontario government” began about three-quarters of the way through the podium copy. It began at the point where the minister would feel confident that all was going well. It began at a point of no return, where Pilot would know only how to gallop forward, like a horse going back to the barn. It began precisely after Pilot recognized that black people wanted rewarding job opportunities and a solid economic future.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I wrote for Pilot’s benefit, “I understand that if people are to give fully of themselves when participating in our economic and social life, they need to feel respected. They need to feel wanted. And they need to feel that they are being treated fairly.
“Black people have had a history of challenges and of victories in this province. Ontario’s long history of protecting human rights dates back to our first anti-slavery legislation in 1793.
“I am committed to upholding that history. I know that if you want to reap the harvest of a thriving social and economic climate, you have to sow the seeds ahead of time.
“So I am telling you that I will be leading the way in opposing a proposal, recently reviewed by Cabinet, to eliminate human rights legislation and to dismantle the human rights commission. Such a proposal would move Ontario thirty years backward in the step-by-step struggle to create a tolerant and diverse society.”
After that part of the speech, I bridged back to the conclusion in the vetted version. I slipped the doctored speech into a large envelope marked Minister’s speech — Podium Copy and the approved speech into another envelope made out to the communications aide, and delivered them both.
According to media reports, the minister didn’t immediately realize that he had just leaked a secret government document. He read the speech verbatim, and seemed momentarily puzzled when he got a standing ovation three-quarters of the way through his remarks. But he smiled, and swallowed, and waited for everybody to sit back down, and then just kept reading to the bottom of the last page.
Later on, I heard that fifteen minutes after the minister gave the speech, a reporter for the Toronto Times — a black reporter, by the way, whose name was Mahatma Grafton — called the premier’s office for comment. The premier’s office called the minister’s office. The premier met the minister, reviewed the speech, and told the minister that he was out of a job.
The reporter called every office he could think of to find out who had written that speech. He asked the premier’s aide, who didn’t know. He tried people in the minister’s office, but they hadn’t yet decided what to say, so they said nothing. He got hold of a government phone directory and found my name listed as senior writer, communications branch, Ministry of Wellness, and left a message on my answering machine at work.
Under normal circumstances, I would have returned the call promptly. But I was about to pay the price for bringing an elected official into disrepute. I was about to be the first person in five generations of Langston Canes to depart so unceremoniously from a place of employment. I was about to start wearing my very own scarlet letters — FWC, for Fired With Cause.
I learned of my imminent dismissal while visiting the men’s room. Alfonso was considerate enough to catch me alone in there. His words came out slightly slurred, because he had two new fillings and his mouth was still frozen.
“Langston, they’re about to fire you. I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re a revolutionary under that placid exterior. What you did took a hell of a lot of courage.” He leaned over and whispered: “You won’t tell anybody where you got that document, will you?”
No, I assured him, I would not.
Alfonso sighed deeply. He was a portly forty-year-old with thick hands and roving eyes. I’d heard him sigh like that just the other week, over lunch, as a waitress sashayed away from our table. He considered her in the way that a child would study a double-decker ice-cream cone. He let out that long breath, and declared himself ravenously heterosexual and unjustly deprived.
In the men’s room, Alfonso settled into position beside me. I was standing, feet splayed, midway through expelling the root beer, feeling about as content and relieved as I ever felt those days. Alfonso said we had to go straight to a meeting with the personnel director.
“How much time are they giving me?” I asked.
“Thirty minutes.” Alfonso said that after our meeting with the personnel director, I was to remove my belongings from the office. “I admire you, Langston. I know you’ve been hurting badly about Ellen divorcing you. A lot of people would have cracked up. Become alcoholics, or worse. It’s to your credit that the wildest thing you’ve done is leak a confidential document by putting it in the minister’s mouth.”
“Yeah.”
“This is a sign. Don’t just find another job as a hack. Change your life. Somewhere out there in the real world, you’ll find a use for your prodigious writing talents.”
I snorted. “Nobody with prodigious talent writes speeches for the Ontario Minister of Wellness.”
“Anybody capable of producing two speeches in an hour, one that will fool a communications aide and one that will knock a minister out of Cabinet, has writing talent to spare.”
“Are they really going to fire the minister?”
“Looks like it. But let’s get back to business. Can you give me a copy of that speech before we go into that meeting? And I’m not supposed to tell you this, but a security guard will check your bags when you leave the office. Don’t take anything that’s not yours.”
“No dictionaries, no paper clips.”
“You don’t have to be funny with me, Langston. You must be in shock.”
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I turned to wash my hands. “That sure was a lot of root beer,” I said.
When you miss the carrot and slice open your fingertip on the chopping board, the pain doesn’t set in right away. It waits at least long enough for you to see what you’ve done. After coming out of the meeting with Alfonso and the personnel director, the pink slip didn’t feel too bad. It felt like a liberation. Like a kick in the pants, saying, “Okay, you’re off! Don’t waste this opportunity.” The high lasted while I sat at my desk and began removing personal matters from the drawers. I took down my Fowler’s Modern English Usage — which was left over from the time I dreamed of becoming a writer — and I removed my government telephone directory. Then, chin up, I reversed the decision. The government directory went back on the shelf. It was time for a clean break.
The feeling of liberation and rejuvenation lasted while I removed an extra pair of socks and a container of dental floss from my bottom desk drawer. It stayed with me as I found a want-you-back letter that I’d never mailed to Ellen. I turfed old tax forms, pay stubs, bank statements, memos. The feeling lasted as I finished at the desk, switched off the fluorescent light, and swiveled in my chair to face the computer. The feeling lasted through all the rituals of office cleaning until an imposing male voice — a voice of authority, a voice accustomed to getting what it wanted and getting it immediately — filled the reception area:
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Langston Cane the Fifth.”
My father! Except for the rare telephone call, I hadn’t heard his voice for more than a year. It vaulted over the partitions separating me from the receptionist. This is what I heard next:
Receptionist: “I beg your pardon, sir?”
Father: “Langston Cane, please.”
Receptionist: “He’s four desks down on your left.”
Father: “Which way, did you say?”
Footsteps slapped along the cool government carpet. Footsteps that could belong to none other than my friend Alfonso. Alfonso: “Excuse me, sir. How may I help you?” “I’m looking for my son.”
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