by Sam Selvon
If it is too much to ask the sightseer or daytime Londoner to rise and shine ere crack o’dawn for the sight of a spade, there is another time when he can satisfy his curiosity. He has only to wait for the knell of midnight or thereabouts when the civilized world is in bed or about to hit the hay for the stalwart blacks to come tumbling out of the ghettoes.
Once again, the city is in their hands. It is not beyond speculation to imagine that it might well of been a black man who wrote those immortal words: ‘… but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.’ For indeed, the duties of the night is another monopoly granted to him for his love and devotion to labour.
Thus, he not only has one monopoly. He has two. And yet he complains!
If to say this country was invaded in the night when everybody sleeping, who would raise the alarm but one of these nocturnal toilers struggling through a bitter nor’-nor’-easterly on his way to factory or station, who would instantly forget his own miseries and dial 999?
Again, it is not too far-fetched as some might think, that it might of been a black man what pen them famous words: ‘The darkies (sic) watch of the night is the one before dawn, and relief is often nearest us when we least expect it.’
When you consider the working hours of the spade, is it any wonder that the few who are on the scene in normal course of the day appear bleary-eyed and dopey? This is the explanation, not drugs nor all-night parties. When you see them on the last train or the first bus, it is not homeward angel after revelry and debauchery, it is action stations they are bound for.
There is one last point which will illustrate how ungrateful the wretches are. Not only do they hold the exclusive charter for those peaceful working watches when they can avoid the rush hour as millions of white mice dart to and fro, but they are actually paid higher wages than if they worked in daylight!
Really and truly, the profound observation that life is a funny thing is a great thought, for with all these advantages, he still moans and groans that he is unfairly treated, when in truth and in fact the boot is on the other foot.
The population masses believe that racial violence going to erupt because he is being continuously and continually oppressed and kept down. Not so.
It is true that racial violence going to erupt, but not for that reason. What going to happen is one of these days the white man going to realize that the black man have it cushy, being as he got the whole day to do what he like, hustle pussy or visit the museums and the historical buildings, what remain open to facilitate him (yet another boon) and close-up the moment that he, the white man, left work. Furthermore, he will begin to suspect that it must be have some attraction, else why would all them spades clamour for employment in such evil hours?
Last, but not least, he will realize that the formation of that valiant and glorious group called The Black Watch wasn’t by accident, that the black man is already earmarked and commemorated in history.
As the truth dawn (as it were) the white man will not only grit his teeth in envy, rage and frustration. It is then that he will erupt and kick up RASS!
You can see, from that dissertation, that I was already reaping the benefits of my retirement, for how can such astute observations come to a man unless his mind be at peace, and he does not have to worry about going to work? And believe me, I know what I am talking about. I can justifiably claim to be more knowledgeable than most when it come to working evil hours, for it was not by winning the pools, nor spotting the missing ball, that I came into the fortune to buy the house. It was by the sweat of my brow, so do not jealous me, dear R, now that I can afford a few little luxuries, such as having a white man as my au pair. It distresses me sometimes when I see how some men squander their lives in Brit’n, and have nothing to show for their years of toil, be it ever so humble as my penthouse in Shepherd’s Bush. Where have they gone? What are they doing? Somewhere out there, somewhere among the millions of whites; in the bustling traffics and the towering buildings and the confusion and pandemonium of the city, they are scattered and lost. I only hear stories of their plights and sorrows, tales of tragedy whispered on the wind. I hear that Big City has gone mad, walks about the streets muttering to himself, ill-kempt and unshaven, and does not recognize anyone. It is as if the whole city of London collapse on him, as if the pressures build up until he could stand it no more and had was to make a wild dash around the bend. Some, I hear, have migrated to the North, to Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds, to try their luck, and I wish them well. Others have gone back to the islands, and God alone knows what happening to them down there, as they went with white wives, and that is the greatest tragedy of all, as apart from mosquito bite, there are other kinds of mosquito who want to have a bite of white pussy too.
If you do not keep in touch with your friends and acquaintances you will think they are dead in this country. They vanish from your life; they go down in the underground and they never emerge; they are blurred into a crowd and become part of the density of humanity, individualistic only in a kind of limbo memory.
As I settled down into my new life I was sometimes tempted to try and trace their whereabouts, but prudence prevailed, for I know, that wherever they are, there would be a lurch, and they would want me to pull them out of it.
Of course, Galahad did not include himself as an undesirable, and having waited a decent interval for me to get organized, he made himself my first visitor.
He arrived in his Black Power glad rags. Starting from foot to head, he have on a pair of platforms, yellow socks, purple corduroy trousers, a leather belt about six inches broad with a big heavy brass buckle and some fancy, spiky chunks of metal studded in it (That’s my weapon. Look.’ He haul the belt right out of the loops and wield it like a Viking. ‘I will slaughter a white man one day.’) He have on a pink shirt. On both hands, he had on a battery of chunky signet rings, wearing them on unconventional digits. Round his neck he had a heavy chain like what peasants in Trinidad tether their cattle with. And on top of his head, he had on a navy-blue wool cap, pulled down over his ears.
When I opened the door Galahad raise his right hand up in the air making a fist of his fingers as if he going to bust a cuff in my arse, and say, paradoxically, ‘Peace, brother. Black is beautiful.’
‘Is that you, Galahad?’ I ask, backing off from the cuff he was threatening me with.
‘It sure is.’ He come in and start to model. ‘How you like the rags, man? You dig, or you don’t dig?’
‘Way out, man,’ I say.
‘That’s cool,’ he say. ‘I am glad to see you in prosperous surroundings. It is good for Our People to make progress. But you must not forget the struggle.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate that I struggled to get where I am,’ I say.
‘Not that struggle,’ he wave my words away. ‘I mean the struggle. It is only right that you should contribute to the cause. We need financiers. Without the black gentry and nobility on our side, it is a losing battle.’
‘I didn’t know a battle was going on,’ I say.
‘Ah!’ he wag a finger at me. ‘You start already to deny your countrymen! As soon as a black man start to get out of the ghetto and into the castle, he turn a blind eye to the struggle. You are not going to join that band of traitors? We have enough of them to contend with.’
Bob came in unobtrusively and enquired whether I needed anything further for the evening, as he was going out to get pissed. I asked Galahad if he’d like a cup of tea – politeness and genteelity being the only counter for such as my present guest – and he wanted to know if we didn’t have anything stronger.
‘A sherry, perhaps?’ Bob offered.
‘Don’t give him my sherry, Bob,’ I tell him. ‘Tea’s good enough for the likes of him.’
‘Oh. One of those, eh?’ Bob say, and went off dutifully to make the brew.
You see how good I had him trained already?
‘Who’s he?’ Galahad ask.
‘My best friend and all
y,’ I say.
‘H’mm.’ But he was not to be distracted from his course. He start the rap again. ‘We are all in the same boat. You can buy a house or a limousine, and eat caviar and best end of lamb, but you can’t get a white skin if you beg, borrow or steal. Things not like the old days, Moses.’
‘You telling me,’ I say.
‘The revolution has come. At last the Black man is coming into his own.’
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘I am coming into my own, and I just want to be left in peace.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Galahad shake his head as if he sorry for me. ‘The time is ripe now. Long ago we had to stand up and take the blows, but these days we have a chance to fight back. Black Power! All over the world the cry is going up. Power to the people!’ And he lift his hand and make that threatening gesture again, as if he want to thump me one.
‘Save all your steam and energy for Hyde Park Corner,’ I say.
‘You can contribute,’ he say, ‘we need money badly.’
‘That’s your problem.’
‘Correction. It is our problem. You can’t sit on the fence. Those who are not for us are against us. Stand up and be counted, Moses! When the revolution moves,’ he went on, ‘the first to go will be those like you who refuse to live with the times. When I first come to Brit’n you was a different man, Moses. You was like a leader, and all the boys would listen to your advice.’
‘Just cool it, man.’ I was getting a bit fed up.
‘I have to get through to you,’ he say. ‘It is my duty. If I got to spend the whole night here, I have to communicate. One of our troubles is that we don’t talk enough, but I am going to convince you if it’s the last thing I do.’
All the time Galahad was walking up and down as he rap, flinging his hands in the air, and every now and then a fleck of spit flying out of his mouth which I dodge when I see it coming. When Black Power come into vogue Galahad was one of the first to rally to the colours – I mean colour, of course. An American visitor from the Deep South indoctrinate him, and he became a rabid disciple, calling everybody Brother and Sister and advising them to change their names from Churchill or ffoulkes-Sutherland to Obozee or Fadghewi or some other African names what I can’t spell. He form up a Party in Ladbroke Grove and start to fight oppression and all the other ills that beset black people.
‘I will come to the point,’ he say.
‘Do,’ I say.
‘We want to bring out a newspaper,’ he say. ‘You know these English papers does only have contorted views of the scene. If we get our own, we can tell the people the truth.’
‘I will buy a copy when you bring it out,’ I say.
Bob return with the tea, placed the tray on the table, collected a couple of comic books he had lying around, and withdrew.
‘Ah well,’ Galahad shrug and being to sip his cup. ‘Maybe some other time when you in a better mood I can tap you for some new pence.’ He change the topic. ‘I glad you get a house at last, boy. I don’t suppose you got a room to spare?’
‘Not for you,’ I tell him. ‘And in any case, Bob attends to the running of the house. I leave everything up to him.’
‘Tut, tut. Like prosperity gone to your head.’
‘My pocket, too. And it’s staying there.’
‘If I didn’t know you well, Moses, you would fool me. But I know you only saying that, and you would ease-up your countrymen whenever you could.’
‘Try me.’
‘Don’t worry, I know you will rally to the cause in the long run. We compiling a list, you know. We putting down all those that we can depend on, and all those who are not reliable. We weeding out the sheeps from the goats.’
He finished his tea and walk to the door. He stand up there and once more make a fist in the air.
‘Black is beautiful. Power to the people!’
‘We shall overcome!’ I cry, returning his salute at the last minute, as I didn’t want him hanging around, and thinking that this last gesture would spur his exit, and also defend me in case of surprise attack. ‘We is we!’ he say, as an MP culminating his speech to the House of Commons dramatically, ‘and after we, is weevil!’
Thoughts filled me when Galahad left. I smoothed the pages of my Memoirs, and am giving it to you sic, as I intend to do as long as I can – how much faithful can I be? You have it straight from the horse’s mouth. The thoughts that fill me was thoughts about how a man could wish he is just living his life, and how people want you to become involve, whether you want to or not. You just cannot live your own life and do the things you want to. I didn’t have anything to do with black power, nor white power, nor any fucking power but my own. Why it is that a man can’t make his own decisions, and live in peace without all this interference? It is enough trouble for me to cogitate on the very fact of being alive in this world, wondering what going to happen to me, if when I dead I going to come back alive again, if it have a heaven which part milk and honey flow, and if it have a hell where you have to stoke the coals all the time to keep the fires going, else you end up like those favourite English cartoons of a white man hanging by his thumbs against a wall, or in a desert, with all his footprints behind him, panting for water. These are shuddering thoughts: it is enough to fill your brains for the rest of your life. Yet men would come and ask you if you voting, or if you going to contribute, or if you going to join the rally in Trafalgar Square and march with the masses to number ten Downing street. Suppose, just suppose, that you don’t want to do any of them fucking things – you don’t want to join no club, you don’t want to rocket to the moon, you don’t want to cross the Atlantic single-handed in a canoe, you don’t want to dethrone the monarchy or get into the local community group who trying to preserve a oak tree at the bottom of the road what ready to fall down on top of some unfortunate black man, and want your signature, too, on the list what protesting against the Council chopping the rarse of it down and getting it over with? (‘You won’t sign?’ the old dear ask me. ‘No,’ I say, ‘that bloody tree like it just about to fall whenever I passing.’ ‘It will never fall on you,’ she say, as if Black people immune from the vagaries of rotting trees.)
By the time Bob return from his nocturnal ramblings I had worked myself up into an evil mood, and wasn’t able to add a word to my Memoirs.
‘Why don’t you turn in?’ Bob say.
‘In a while,’ I say, wanting to calm myself before going to sleep.
‘Is there anything you want before I go?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘just wash up the tea things. And I’ll have a late breakfast.’
Blessed be the coming of this new generation of Black Britons, and blessed be I that I still alive and well to witness their coming of age from piccaninny to black beauty. It is a sight for sore eyes to see them flounce and bounce about the city, even if they capsize on their platforms and trip up in their maxis. Be it bevy or crocodile, Woman’s Lib or Woman’s Tit, they are on the march, sweeping through the streets. You see one, you see two, you see a whole batch of them. There are no women in the world who could shake their backsides like a black woman. God might give white girls nice legs and high bobbies, but when it comes to backsides, Our females are in a class by themselves. It may be that they inherit that proud and defiant part of the anatomy from toting and balancing loads on their heads from the days of slavery. But howsoever it come into being, it is good to look at. Like how you see an ordinary girl tits jump up and down if she is running, thus a black backside merely pedestrianizing. And it is not only up and down, but sideways, and gyrating in circles, and quivering and shivering in all manner of movement. It is not their coming to look at, but their going. It is after they pass you and you turn your head and look that you realize what a great experience you are experiencing. White window cleaners and navvies digging up the road want to drop everything and follow the pied pipers. Men no longer contemplate blonde and brunette and redhead, but seek the delights of brownskin, octoroon and ebony. Instead of the pale pink landscape
to the foot of Mount Venus it is a dark and dusky journey filled with unexpected pleasures. The tide is turning, yes sir. Men are casting an appreciative eye on the dusky damsels floating about in town. In fact, some white men are taking the initiative and snatching up black things before the black man has a chance. Whereas it used to be the top of the social ladder to be seen escorting a white piece in the Dilly or the Circus, brothers are scorning that sort of thing nowadays, and as these black beauties grace the scene, it is to be noted that they are fecundated soon enough. Of course, the English people are very happy about this competition against the white girls. Not that the new strain tries very hard; they are fully aware that before they cropped up white pussy was all the rage, and they give the brothers a hard time.
I was admiring a bevy of them as they come trouncing in the market in Shepherd’s Bush one morning. They make for one of those shops what does sell everything for the head except brains. Iron comb to straighten your hair, pomades and lotions to make it shine, and of course, wigs. Wigs is in now. All kinds of Afro hair styles on display in the shop window, mixed up with some blondy, long-haired ones for those who have aspirations to be fair.
The girls stand up by the window looking in like professional head hunters, then they went in and start to try on wigs. I don’t know if you have seen them women in C & A or Woolworths trying on hats, how they turn and twist and do Yoga exercises in an attempt to change their physiognomies to suit the hat they fancy. Also, the fashion being fairly new, they had to experiment and pit their wits against this latest female accoutrement.
The trouble with a wig, as I see it, is not that you trying on a new suit or a pair of shoes. It is actually going to be a part of you, like a new hand or nose or something. A time will doubtless come when you could buy a complete new face, or fit a different upper lip, or purchase a pair of new ears over the counter and put them on right away. But the greatest invention will be when you can walk in black as midnight and emerge as pure and white as the driven snow.