It is the raw suspicion that I am a mere hindrance, to be helped as a way of avoidance, a suspicion that I do not seem to be an elderly, well-dressed West Indian gentleman… “an older man,” a phrase used and regarded as a term of dignity and respect back in Barbados but here, in Toronto, there is no doff of the hat, no pleasant smile on the face, no wave of the hand. Suspicion that here in this country, in the privacy of the heart, I am regarded as “an old piece o’ shit!” as my feet stumble and slip and slide on the moving steps of an escalator, or, upon my walking into a revolving door, being caught in the door by the rude disregard of the person ahead of me, so that, given the cautiousness common to old men, I freeze and become stiff, and I look as if I am dead – a corpse in a revolving door – and I go round two times more, against my will, sometimes three more carousel times!… before I dare to slip out and disappear in a silence of self-accusation and shame, completely bewildered as I hear from a distance the lazy lapping of waves at the edge of a beach where there is the smell of saltiness after a wave has died and the soft whisper of that dying breath touches my own lips with the fire of an unexpected kiss. A kiss that tells me that I love life. I love life even as I embrace wishes of the way I would like to die, to die in my sleep, in the embrace of sleep, where I would be insensitive to what is going on around me… But in the meantime… it is this “meantime” my God, that kills me. This meantime state of slow-moving uselessness like a sudden slap of blindness, this meantime in which so it seems I am having to re-learn, like a child, all the things I have taken for granted, that I take for granted on Bloor Street on this damp November Saturday late afternoon when I look up warily to see who is walking directly in my path and I pick a man, with my warning antennae out of the strolling crowd. He too is slow. He too is shaking. He tries to control two walking sticks. They wobble as he walks. He’s hardly walking. Shuffling and stumbling. He raises the walking stick in his left hand, to greet me. Something like crazed glee, huge relief in his eye at seeing me. Certainly I recognize the man. But I do not understand why, of all the people to slip in and out of my memory, I should be confronted by this man. The stick in his left hand waves. I do not know if this is enthusiasm. Or threat. “Dave, short for Davenport. My name is Davenport. Windsor-hyphen-Britain.” Dave! Oh God, oh God! From Trinidad. We were at U of T together. 1955. The stick in his right hand joins the other stick, waving his greeting. I pretend I do not recognize him. I am in blackface. Shining face. Shining with youngness. Doing my imitation of Al Jolson. He stops in my path. He is smiling. He is happy to see me. He is blocking me. I read his happiness at meeting his old friend. But I move around him. Out of his path. My heart is turning ebber. His mouth is open. I raise my right arm and say, like I used to in those civil right days, “Do you know what time it is?” His mouth hangs more open.
I have spotted a taxi. The taxi stops. “Where you going, old man?” the taxi driver calls out to me in a foreign accent, leaning across the front seat. I guess he is from Somalia. Or Nigeria. Or Niger. Or Zimbabwe. Or another country in Africa where they held the slaves before they packed them into small holds. Before they were shipped out on the passage to America and the West Indies.
Immediately, I resent this African, calling me an old man, when I am trying to cut years off my life; in protest against girls and women who offer me their seats on crowded buses, and in the subway; and in long lineups; and such meetings as this, meeting up, unsuspecting, with old lost friends, who, immediately in their flesh, in their deterioration held up by two walking sticks, remind me of how inevitably and finally lost I am. Swanee, I tell the driver. Take me to Swanee.
AUSTIN CLARKE: RIDING THE COLTRANE
BARRY CALLAGHAN
I walked up to the Big Man’s house, and I call him Big Man not because he is burly but because he has presence, he knows who he is, an island man who’s ended up inland, a sunshine man who has ended up in snow country. He’s got an air of stillness about him, a quiet easefulness, the public stance, I suspect, of a man who has learned how to control private terrors. For forty years, I have watched how self-contained he is, how relentlessly calm. I contemplate his calm as he contemplates me. In silence. We have the gift of silence. Neither of us has the need to impinge or impose. Not on each other. We don’t need to talk, though we can both talk your ear off at the drop of a hat. Neither of us wears a hat. Hatless, we feel free to say anything we want to say but because we are free, we are free to have nothing to say.
He’s a decorous man, a donnish man who likes to take a pew at high mass on Sunday at the Anglican cathedral, and he likes to take a chair at high table at Trinity College, but he has always lived downtown, close to low life, to pimps, moochers, and drug peddlers, elbow to elbow with the street action, where he can watch how the police do behave and misbehave. But, for all that, low life has never laid a glove on him, not on his style. If this were 1920 he would be wearing spats and puttees. A touch Edwardian. He certainly would be sporting a Homburg hat. But it’s now. Linen jackets and penny loafers are stylish. Wig hats and po’-boy cotton picker coveralls are hip. He is too cool to be stylish or hip.
Sometimes he dresses like a cricketer, a white sweater with a maroon band at the V-neck. But he doesn’t play cricket and no one he knows in his town plays cricket. Often, he shows up in a tweed jacket of an Oxford Street cut, but Oxford Street is not his alley, and for chandelier-lit suppers, he will appear in black tie – though black tie has not been called for. At one such supper, while in a tuxedo, he also wore a tiny headset. He was listening on the radio to a Blue Jays baseball game. As an elegant woman from Rome at his elbow talked on, he relaxed his paunch and fell asleep. He remembers dozing: “Dozing off is my habit, while reading, while drinking, while eating. And once, when I was a much younger man, a woman accused me to my face of dozing off while making love when she was on the brink of orgasm. I left her with no satisfaction. I do not remember her name.” He does not remember the woman from Rome but he remembers sitting straight up at the supper table. As if attentive. A trick he learned at Combermere School for Boys on that bump of land in the sea called Barbados. It is his home that isn’t his home: the place where he was expected to grow up stupid under the Union Jack but instead he grew up smart. Maybe that is why he dresses like he’s from somewhere else. He’s always been from somewhere else, even in his own family, where he was the illegitimate child, cherished, but illegitimate, in a country house.
When he laughs he laughs best when he talks country. He talks country when he gets ready to cook country – ox tails and breadfruit cou cou. “Get a fair-size breadfruit, with the stem still in; and wash-she-off; and cut-she-up in eight pieces; peel-off the skin. The skin gotta be turning almost yellow. Put she in a skillet o’ cold water, enough to cover-over the breadfruit; and before you cover-she down, sprinkle a lil salt over she.”
Before you cover-he down you’ll soon discover that the Big Man also loves café noir style – bop till you drop carrying on – Malpeque oysters and dry martinis in a long-stemmed glass (two olives), and rib-eye steak at Bigliardi’s Off-Track Champions Betting Bar where, after making a modest wager on a pony, he will put on his intellectual spats and try to explain how Derek Walcott – being a black poet talking to black writers like himself – has “faced the insistent question of our schizophrenia… faced the question, and recognized that it is our schizophrenia, in fact, that have given us (as blacks) our most positive definition.” It is true: though, of course, he is not clinically schizophrenic, Clarke does answer – ’pon the call – to two names, Austin & Tom, and he easily gets lost, caught – betwixt and between.[1]
On this day, Austin tells me Tom is cooking – and he is stern about it – Tom is cooking and he is cooking island “food that’ll bring on the bess spiritual unctuousness and grace,” and he expects me to be at his house because, among others, his old friend, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is going to amble on through the side-street downtown hookers and druggies, and the Mister Chief Justice – in Cla
rke’s house – is going to partake of pigs feet and punkin, squash and christophenes.
“The feed bag is on.”
When he say the feed bag is on is not a time to foop with the man in his house.
It is a writer’s house behind a wrought-iron gate, except for the big flag over the door (a red maple leaf FLAG: I can’t ever get used to writers anywhere who FLAG their patriotism). The small rooms, made cozy by a certain clutter, smell of pipe tobacco: Amphora, Mix-ture 79. There are books on the chairs, books on the floor, papers on the sofa and books on the papers. Where did he sit Malcolm X when the X-man came to see him? And all the visitin’ Wessindian diplomats and the local Conservative Party honchos (Big Man, the foop man, is a Tory), and Salome Bey the singer and Harry Somers the composer, and what about Norman Mailer? Did he walk Mailer through the house?
There are books, tread on tread, up the narrow stairs.
On the second floor, there is his writing room, and his bedroom, too, with a large black-and-white portrait of Billie Holiday overseeing the bed, a wrought-iron and seemingly fragile bed on tall legs, a princely barque, afloat, “high high, pon which a man or woman would have to jump up and then jump down.” Most of the time when I ask him what’s happening and how he is doing he says – looking grey under the eyes – that he hasn’t slept for three days, being hunkered over his keyboard, writing, trying to find “the right word pon the page,” and in trying to do so, he says he also hasn’t eaten for three days. He grows curiouser and curiouser – he dozes off in public but doesn’t seem to sleep at home, and though he loves to cook, he often goes without food, and though he is a man of prose he quotes poetry about being betwixt and between.
… how choose
Between this African and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face this slaughter and be cool?
In his kitchen he is wild in his airs of decorum: immaculate white shirt, a striped tie of a darker sensible hue, and his good old tweed jacket of the Oxford Street cut. Bending over a burning stove, stirring pots with a long wooden spoon, talking to me about the food he “does make,” he is hassled in his head because he does not have the exact “ingreasements,” so that his beans and rice will taste “good good pon a fork, if you are fussy.”
He is dressed as uptown Austin but he is talking down home Tom, his Bajan voice, for it is Tom Clarke that they call him in Barbados, Tom – who writes a column in the newspaper and tells his readers, “Don’t lissen to no foolishness, particular the kinds and the res and talk emanating from the mouths of neither preachers nor priests; neither vicar nor dean; canon nor bishop; neither lord bishop nor archbishop; nor none-so. Lissen to the gamblers, first. And then, nod-off.”
Mind you, when he was Tom, the barefoot boy in Barbados, he did no nodding, he was a blur. As Tom, the teenager, he ran the 100 yards in 10 flat, an island record that Austin says still stands. But now, be it Tom or Austin, he’s an over-the-hill athlete with a slight paunch. We share that: old jocks, and I assure Austin that as a basketball player I was sneaky-fast, change-of-pace fast, but Tom smiles, knowing he would have left me in his dust, 10-flat. My only consolation is that Tom might have been fast then but Austin is now the slowest man I know, as slow moving as his stirring of the foods in his pots, ponderously slow so that they won’t get bun bun (burnt!), and he tells me to drink up my long-stemmed martini, and get myself ready to get full-up, but also mos important – to expect no dessert – no dessert because dessert is not eaten by Wessindians unless the meal is so light in its offerings and you need “to full-up everybody’s belly.”
There are no light offerings in Austin’s house. He’s got deep pockets, even when he’s broke, and his generosity is often profligate in direct relation to his debts – and so, smiling upon self-indulgence, he fires up another martini for me. The Big Man – cooking cou cou as he dreams up new fictions to tell old hard truths, as he waits for his Tory pal, the affable Supreme Court judge, to come for a meal of port and lima beans – he stirs his pot, and turns up the silver knobs to his sound system, the sound of which is John Coltrane, the Trane’s tenor horn, and it occurs to me that this is where Tom and Austin meet, over a pot of cou cou, smack-dab in Coltrane.
Like a Coltrane chorus, Clarke’s paragraphs – as he sits writing bare-assed in the midnight hours before his computer – don’t really begin, they just start, they don’t end, they stop. He does not surrender the paragraph form (just as Coltrane did not surrender the 12-bar blues grid): but both perform as if form were a jail cell and a chorus is a jailbreak [2]: within the form there are dissonances, counter notes, divided meters (a study could be done of Clarke’s discordant placing of semicolons), and the extended lyric runs that sometimes invert and always imply the melody – the storyline – while seeming to wreck it, a lyrical vexation if not outright anger – modulated to a sweetness:
… and in that time, it was he who understood that a little mistake, a word said under the breath but loud enough for Mas’r to hear; the misappropriation of one of those freed hens in the yards; the miscalculation in the pouring of molasses for the horse and jackass, leaving too deep a bottom in the bottom of the pail; and his ignorance of mathematics and addition, but his proficiency with subtraction: twenty hams was put in the smoke-filled shed with the hickory leaves and the smoke broke out as if the whole goddamn place was on fire, Mas’r; and he said, under his breath, but too loud, Amma wish this goddamn place were going up in flame with these hams; but when he checked their smoking and their curing, one was gone. One gone! These two words became like a bell in the night, like a boot at the door, like a tap on the shoulder in a crowd, like the leather in the boot of the Gestapo, all over that land across the body of water. “One gone!” And dogs barked. Lights came on. Lanterns were carried. Dogs yelped, tasting the sweetness of blood. Whips were cracked for suppleness. And for length. And for deadliness. And men jumped on the backs of horses. Rifles and pistols were taken from their shelves, already oiled and ready for use. Bullets and shots were fired for practice in the air. And the small children, who knew those two words, laughed in their sleep, and wished, and wished.
The prose line has been sprung for suppleness.
The ingreasements are semicoloned.
The doorbell rang.
I’m sure the FLAG stood to attention.
I stepped out of the kitchen – out of (I thought) the music – into the tiny fenced-in downtown backyard. The air circuits were wired. Speakers were stationed at the foot of the back walls of the house: ghetto-blasting speakers: indifferent to decorum, the don was not only putting on a feed, he was pumping out Coltrane – he was churching the neighbourhood… searing jolts of sweet tenor sax and bass clarinet, so loud it could not be ignored by anyone in the near distance, certainly not by the neighbours, and not even by a nocturnal raccoon, an old night prowler who had come down out of its sugar maple tree to sit – with minstrel-shoe eyes – on the fence, betwixt and between yards. It stared at me. I stared at it. Absolutely calm. A silence. Except for Trane’s horn spiralling around McCoy Tyner’s triplets; they were playing “Soul Eyes.” The Big Man had willfully changed the feel in the air of the whole downtown block, in a 10-flat blur. Coltrane was in B-flat. And Clarke was standing in the backdoor of the house, the big heavy-set judge on his arm, the judge flushed from his display of goodwill, the two of them beamish, two high Anglican dignitaries, and their legitimacy – like their friendship – was beyond question. I realized there could be no recipe for knowing who Austin is, but only a consideration of his ingreasements.
[1] He also answers to the call of being the author of nine novels and six short-story collections, most notably The Polished Hoe, winner of the 2002 Giller Prize, the 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the 16th annual Trillium Prize.
[2] Clarke’s friend, the painter Harold Towne, used to speak of form as “the tyranny of the corner.” He painted against the corner as Clarke writes against the pa
ragraph.
drawing by David Annesley
Table of Contents
COVER
THEY NEVER TOLD ME
1. GALAXIE
2. WAITING FOR THE POSTMAN TO KNOCK
3. ON THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN
4. OUR LADY OF THE HOURS
5. OLD PIRATES, YES, THEY ROB I
6. FOR ALL I CARE
7. SO?
8. THEY NEVER TOLD ME
AUSTIN CLARKE: RIDING THE COLTRANE
Guide
Cover
Contents
They Never Told Me Page 14