“Oakville? You’ve got to be kidding. Oakville is lily white.”
“It may be now. I wouldn’t know. But I was born there. I haven’t been back, though, since I left it as a boy, in 1930. But Oakville was by no means entirely white in 1850. First, the Mississagi Indians were in the area. Second, a group of fugitive slaves found work in the town.”
“What was your great-grandfather’s name, anyway?”
“Langston Cane the First.”
“So what are you?”
“The Fourth.”
The moment the waiter set crab cakes on the table, Dorothy jumped up and ran to the bathroom. Langston bit into the corner of one crab cake, and then put his knife and fork down and waited. After five minutes, he walked over to the ladies’ room door and called out her name. No response. He pulled the door open. Someone was retching inside.
“Dorothy, is that you?” More retching. Langston pulled the door open, poked his head inside, saw nobody, strode in, and found Dorothy kneeling in a stall. He asked if she was okay. She muttered. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she slumped back. Someone came through the entrance. Langston leaned back, stuck his head out of the stall, and began to ask for paper towels, when the woman saw him and screamed. She fled.
Wonderful, he thought. Here come the cops. Here comes the Klan. Here come the forces of good. Here come the headlines: Negro Arrested in Women’s Toilet.
The maître d’ and the woman burst back into the washroom.
“What’s going on?” the maître d’ said.
“It’s all right,” Dorothy said. She climbed to her feet, flushed the toilet, wiped her face, and stepped out of the stall. “I was sick. That’s all. Sick. Something I just ate made me violently ill, and he came in to help me.”
“Who is he?” the woman asked.
“He’s my friend.”
The woman took a step back.
Langston put his arm gently around Dorothy and guided her to the sink. “Don’t worry,” he said softly to the woman. “She enjoys being my concubine.”
Langston helped Dorothy into a taxi, took her home, and tried to put her right to bed.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” Dorothy said. “I want to have a shower and brush my teeth and change my clothes.”
“Did you eat anything new today?”
“I wasn’t going to admit it, but I’ve never had lobster before.”
“Good thing you never got to the crab cakes. Black folks’ food is pretty strong stuff.”
Dorothy rubbed the back of his hand. “Ha ha.” She kissed the backs of each of his fingers. They were long, and slim, and smooth, as if someone had rubbed a fine coat of oil into them.
Langston massaged the corner of her mouth and ran a finger along her lips. “Mind if I join you in the shower?”
“That is absolutely out of the question. But come back when I’m feeling better. Do come back, concubine.”
They barely spoke during the next two weeks. Dorothy rushed to work before Langston woke, and Langston studied at the library until late at night. He had several examinations. He thought he had done fairly well, but it turned out that he had scored on the fifty-eighth percentile. He tried not to be disappointed. The fifty-eighth percentile wasn’t too bad. Nobody would throw him out of medical school if he stayed ahead of fifty-seven percent of the students. The day after his exams ended, Langston found a note under his door. I’m going to Windsor this weekend. Want to come along?
Langston dropped in to see her. Dorothy explained that she and others in the Toronto Labor Committee for Human Rights were trying to push the government to enact anti-discrimination legislation. It was well known that some restaurants in Windsor refused to serve blacks. She wanted to document it.
“Is this your idea of a date?” Langston asked.
“No. But it could turn into one after we’re done in Windsor.”
“Well, a date in the traditional sense — we watch a Gary Cooper movie, or catch Ella Fitzgerald singing, or Illinois Jacquet playing sax at the Colonial, or go walking in High Park — would be fine with me. But going to Windsor is not.”
“Why not?” Dorothy said.
“I don’t need the aggravation. Why should I go all the way to Windsor for the privilege of being turned out of some redneck’s restaurant? Because that’s what you want me for, isn’t it? You need a black man. You need a Negro for your experiment.”
“Yes, we need a Negro. But it doesn’t have to be you. I have other friends. I just thought you’d like to come along.”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it,” Langston said.
“Do you think blacks in Windsor enjoy getting kicked out of restaurants?”
“The whole idea is naive.”
“It is not naive, goddamn it. I hate that word. My mother used to say everything I did was naive.”
“So you get me thrown out of a restaurant. Then what?”
“We go to the newspapers. We inform the minister of labor.”
“If I were so desperate to experience segregation, I would have stayed in Baltimore. Down there, the only restaurants I can sit in are black-owned. If I want restaurant food, I have to buy it takeout at the back door. If I want to kiss you in the street, I’ve got to look over shoulders — yours and mine — first. I was an American Army soldier, kiddo. Men with the brains of squirrels got to be my commanding officers — solely on the basis of pigment. I left that and I’m not going back. I like you, Dorothy. I like you a lot. But I don’t need to go to Windsor. I don’t need any lessons about segregation.”
“Nobody’s giving you any damn lessons. We want you to help us deal with a problem. So how about it?”
“No.”
“Bit sensitive, are we?” Dorothy said.
“I hate that goddamn word. Just as much as you hate naive.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you swear. So you do feel some sort of social passion? You are an activist, of a sort.”
“Activism, no. Magnetism, yes. I feel an animal magnetism for you, kiddo.”
They spent the night together. They rolled and tossed and climbed and thrusted half the night and half the next morning. Dorothy called in sick and Langston missed the only day of classes he would ever miss, and they touched and held and kissed every square inch of each other. They couldn’t stay apart. They slept only briefly, and awoke to find themselves making love again. Finally, they showered and walked about downtown and stopped in cafés to drink from the same coffee mug and took a streetcar to High Park and walked around Grenadier Pond and ate dinner at the Mars Café and watched an early movie and fell asleep together in his bed and didn’t wake up until dawn. “I’m gonna be late,” Dorothy said.
“I’m behind in my studies,” Langston said. “Way behind.” “How can you be way behind when you were on top of things a day ago?”
“I was on top of you a day ago.”
“But it was worth it, wasn’t it?” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t trouble you again until the weekend.”
“The weekend? How did you know I had decided to come?”
“I don’t know. Something about your animal magnetism.”
“I had a good routine going. You went and broke my concentration.”
“You’ll get it back.” Dorothy kissed him on the lips and whispered in his ear. He thought of her every hour that day.
On Sunday, they drove to Windsor with Cleta Morris and Jack Hanson — Dorothy’s labor committee friends. Jack was black; Cleta white. Jack and Langston entered Hunter’s Grill in downtown Windsor. A sign said Please Seat Yourself. They were left unattended for fifteen minutes. Finally, they hailed a waitress, who started for their table but was stopped by the owner. He was a stout little fellow, mid-fifties, dressed in a tie, a white shirt with a ketchup stain, and black pants. The owner asked what they wanted. They said a menu. He handed over menus reluctantly. They ordered the luncheon special. He said the luncheon special was sold out. Okay, they said, just bring us toast, soup, and coffee.
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They waited for half an hour. Sorry, they were then informed, we have run out of soup today. Maybe you should try another establishment. They left.
Ten minutes later, Dorothy and Cleta entered the restaurant and asked for a table for four. Four? the waitress asked. Dorothy said their husbands would be over in a few minutes. Fine, said the waitress, who led them to a table and took orders for two luncheon specials and two orders of soup and toast, with coffee all around.
The waitress brought the food out quickly enough, and then offered to hold the men’s food in the kitchen. Dorothy said that wouldn’t be necessary. Langston and Jack walked in and sat down and started eating. Other customers began to stare and shake their heads. One woman mumbled to her husband that the four were troublemakers. Two couples put money on the tables and left the restaurant hastily.
The owner approached the table. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“But we’ve just started,” Langston said. “This food is scrumptious.”
“Don’t worry about paying. Just get out.” The owner retrieved a soup bowl while Langston was bringing a spoon to his mouth.
“You want us to leave?” Langston said softly. “You look like a man who could use five dollars. Why on earth would you not want paying customers?”
“I think you know. Get out.”
“I just don’t think I can move without an explanation.” “We don’t serve colored.”
“I’m astonished. I had no idea. But that’s okay — I want to reassure you that I didn’t order colored. Actually, I don’t eat colored people. All I had in mind was piping hot tomato soup.”
“You’re bothering my customers. Get out before I call the police.”
“May I ask your name?” Langston said.
“Tony.”
“Tony what?” “Tony’s good enough.”
“Well, Tony Goodenough, it has been my pleasure to meet you. You make a very nice soup. Colored people like canned soup. We’re doing our best to stop digging into crocodiles and the like. Your canned soup would have civilized me substantially. Good day, Mr. Goodenough. I hope you don’t mind seeing your nice face in the newspaper.”
“Get out.”
Langston stood up. Dorothy snapped a photo of Tony. “No pictures,” Tony said.
“Don’t worry, we’ll make sure it’s a nice shot,” Langston said. “Take another, Dorothy.”
Within an hour, Langston — as a member at large of the Toronto Labor Committee for Human Rights — described the incident in a letter to the Windsor Star. Within six hours, similar letters had been dropped off at the office of the Ontario minister of labor and at the Toronto Times. The Windsor Star didn’t touch the story. The Toronto paper ran a small blurb on the back pages. It didn’t name the restaurant or use the photo. The Ontario minister of labor mailed Langston a letter insisting that the Ontario government was opposed to racial discrimination, but that it couldn’t prevent such an incident.
Dorothy wanted to take him back to another restaurant in Windsor the next week, but Langston refused. “You made your point, Dot. I don’t want to spend my Sundays getting kicked out of restaurants. It’s a good cause, but — “ “Damn right,” she said. “I have to study.” “That’s egotistical.”
“If I don’t study, I won’t pass. But I’ll take up the fight once I’m a doctor.”
“Once you’re a doctor, you’ll be a reactionary.” “Don’t count on it.”
Dorothy left town for two weeks to visit her parents in Winnipeg. When she returned, she didn’t look up Langston. Another week went by. Langston slipped a note under her door, inviting her to lunch the next Sunday.
They walked for an hour in High Park, saw Gary Cooper playing in High Noon, and returned to Langston’s room, where they played a game Dorothy invented and quickly regretted. He spent fifteen minutes scouring two pages in one of her sociology texts — The Polish Peasant in America by W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki — and then had to put it down and see if he could answer her ten questions about it. One of them was: What is meant by the phrase “the definition of the situation”? Langston answered: “It’s how you define a situation that you’re in. You come to assume a set of principles underlying a given situation, and if those principles are subsequently violated, you feel upset or displaced, because your definition no longer holds for the situation.”
“Not bad, Lang.”
“It’s easy to be not bad in sociology,” Langston teased her. “All you do is use your common sense. But try applying common sense to the world of anatomy. It just won’t work. You have to memorize the stuff, bone by bone, tendon by tendon.”
They switched roles. Dorothy tried to absorb two pages of Gray’s Anatomy and answer questions about the human heart. But the ventricles, atria, and chambers flummoxed her. Langston teased her ceaselessly. “I think the definition of this situation is that medicine is harder than sociology. So now you see why I can’t keep going to Windsor.”
Dorothy pulled him down to the bed and planted her lips on his.
Langston and Dorothy barely saw each other for the next two weeks. Langston had to slip a note under her door again to invite her out. He found it a tiresome way to communicate. It didn’t feel right to work so hard for something that he wanted to take for granted. She came by his room that evening. “Come on in,” Langston said.
“No, thanks. You’re studying, and I’m tired. Sorry, but as for your little note, I’ve made other plans for Saturday.” “Other plans?”
“Another guy. I’m seeing a fellow that evening, if you have to know.”
“Who?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. A smile broke out on her face. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous. You are! I love it. How boyish!”
“Boyish! I happen to think we have something going on here.”
“We have had a few things going on, here and there.”
“Here and there? Listen, kid, remember your sociology text? What was it called again?”
“Forgot already, huh? The Polish Peasant in America.”
“Yeah,” Langston said. “It talked about the definition of the situation. I say, we have a situation here. I define it as me seeing you and you seeing me, and nobody else in the picture. So why don’t you call it off with this fellow?”
“We’ve made plans.”
“I’ll come along.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Take me along and introduce me. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just say, ‘I want you to meet Langston Cane. We live in the same house. We sleep together. He saved my life in the ladies’ room of a nice restaurant, when I was throwing up lobster chowder. He’s crazy about me. Do you mind if he joins us tonight?’“
Dorothy slapped her thigh and doubled over in laughter. “What are you trying to tell me? What, exactly, is the definition of our situation?”
“You want a formal definition? A thesis? A manifesto? I’ll try to come up with something. But call that other fellow and call it
off.”
“You’re sweet, kiddo,” she said. She kissed him. He kissed her back. But she stopped it there. She wouldn’t break her Saturday date, but said that she’d see Langston on Friday if he was free.
Several months passed. Langston studied all day long, but he never let the books cut into his sleep. He and Dorothy worked out a beer hour. Every night, at ten-thirty, they got together to split a beer. More often than not, they slept together. Eventually, they bought a larger mattress and converted her room into a bedroom, and his room into a den and makeshift kitchen. Still, Langston studied mightily. He managed to pull himself up by a few percentage points and score in the sixty-sixth percentile of the students completing their first year of medical school. In his second year, Langston hit sixty-eight percent on the students’ bell curve. In his third year, he hit seventy-one percent. He figured that was about as good as he was going to get. In January of his fourth and final year, Langston asked Dorothy to drive him to Oakville.
“Didn’t you tell me you were born there?” Dorothy asked. “That’s right.”
“So why are we going there today?”
“It’s a surprise. Just get up off your rusty dusty and take me out there, would you?”
They got to the town in forty minutes, exited from the Queen Elizabeth Way, and took Trafalgar Road south toward the lake. They parked by George’s Square and walked east along Sumner. After crossing Reynolds and passing a few houses, Langston disengaged his arm from Dorothy’s and pointed at a green, shuttered house. Up top, around an attic window, it had what looked like a lookout tower — a small, square extension from the house.
“What’s that?” Dorothy asked.
“It’s called a widow’s walk.”
“Why?”
“This house used to look out over Lake Ontario. And traditionally, the wife stands up there looking out and waiting for her husband to come home from his days or weeks on a lake schooner.”
“How do you know about all this?”
“After my great-grandfather settled in Oakville, the ship captain who helped him escape — a man named Robert Wilson — built this house. With the widow’s walk.”
“And where’d your great-grandfather go from here?”
“Back to the States, later.”
“After slavery ended?”
“Not quite. I’ll tell you about it sometime. But that’s not the end of it. The house was moved from the lakefront to Sumner, around 1900. My parents bought it around 1925 — and I was born here. We lived in this house until 1930, when we moved back to Baltimore.”
“What other amazing things do you have to tell me?”
“I would like to buy this house. My parents have offered to help. But I would need your financial assistance, too.”
“Hang on a moment, there, Langston, dear sir. I think we require a definition of the situation. You want me to spend my savings, meager as they are, on your house — “
“Our house. It would be ours.”
“Ours, in what way? We need a definition, please.”
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