That first year in Montreal he came home from school anxious, angry, and sullen every day. The joyful, humorous Paul, who never missed an opportunity to best me, was gone. At the end of September he told me he hated being Black. “They eat, dance, talk nonsense, and harass their teachers. Klunks! Imagine, Jay, this fool telling the science teacher: ‘Sah, lemme tell you a liklow secret. If you want we fi l’arn, you ha’ fi’ beat we.’ They talk loud. It’s hellish when it’s raining, because then we stay inside. They plug their ears and yell from one end of the hallway to the other and scream to be heard over one another. Noise! Noise! Jay, it drives me crazy. Then there are these Black and Latino guys that walk around stomping the floor, ropes of gold and silver around their necks, washcloths bulging from their pockets, the crotches of their jeans down to their knees, chains dangling from their hips, like cattle that broke their tether.” (Later when I started tutoring at the Côtes des Neiges Black Community Centre, I learned, usually from desperate mothers, that these were children arriving here at age 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 who were being put in grades 9, 10 and 11 slow-learner classes in which they performed at the grade one and two level. To hide how little they knew they bullied the teachers into ignoring them. Most had long been out of school in the Caribbean and Latin America or had been attending school sporadically while their mothers were undocumented workers in Canada or waiting for their refugee claims to be heard. Most of the youngsters never returned after the initial meeting. Half of those who returned quit the tutorials after two or three weeks.) “Louts. Thorough-going louts” — Paul’s voice was almost a hiss. “They eat like hyenas tearing into kill. Only the snarls are missing. Then they lick their dirty fingers and wipe them on their jeans!” He closed his eyes tight and grimaced. “And yelling with their mouths full! You cover your face and hope it doesn’t land on your clothes. Half the time you don’t know what they’re saying because they don’t have the language to say it. I can’t help it, Jay. They make me feel ashamed I’m Black.”
“Explain.”
“Listen to this, Jay: ‘Smaddy t’ief me t’ing. If I-man ketch ‘im is dead him dead for true, ‘cause I-man bruck him neck.’
“‘Man, how yo’ kayliss so! Yo’ mek smaddy get in dey n tek it hout an’ yo’ nuh know!’
“‘Ah nuh dat me a talk ‘bout.’
“Jay, this at ear-splitting volume in the midst of French class!”
Excelsior Paul. “Watch it, Paul. Daddy breaks stones for a living. Grama owns a store and runs it. True, it made us live well. But there’s nothing high-class about it. You’d be speaking like your Caribbean schoolmates if Grama hadn’t raised you and you hadn’t gone to Excelsior. There’s nothing wrong with how your schoolmates speak. It’s their language. When I’m with people who speak our dialect I speak it too. Grama does too. You know that. You spent a lot of time in the store with her. Aunt Mercy speaks only dialect, and she and Grama are like sisters.”
“Say what you want, I still can’t stand them. For your information, Grama didn’t let me speak like that, not even to the people in the store.”
That was true. On the couple of occasions when I had slipped and spoken to her in dialect, she told me to keep that language for my friends and to speak to her in “standard English.”
Paul was no gentler on Black Canadians. Their double negatives amused him. “‘That there don’t mean nothing.’ Why do they talk like that, Jay?”
“I hope you don’t try to correct them?”
He shook his head but turned his face away and pulled at his chin, a sure sign he was lying. Now I wonder whether Grama hadn’t given him too much latitude. She encouraged him to argue with her and allowed him to say whatever he wanted and to express his feelings candidly, intervening only when she thought he’d crossed the line of politeness — like when Aunt Mercy once told him to give his mouth a rest; and he replied: “My mouth isn’t tired. Besides you only spent two years in school; there’s a lot you can learn from me.”
Grama apologized to Aunt Mercy, took Paul into her bedroom and scolded him. He was around ten at the time. She never had any such issues with me. I spoke to her only when I needed to clarify instructions about some chore she’d given me and to answer her questions — always in the fewest of words. Except for when Paul and I were in town, I found a way to let most of Paul’s chatter merge with the breeze in the trees and the surf lapping the shore.
In Montreal, Paul and I shared a bedroom the first couple of years. Anna gave us the bigger bedroom. She’d fitted it with twin beds, leaving just enough space for our tiny desks and a chest of drawers each. “This is our room!” Paul said and pulled in his lips. It was less than half the size of our bedroom in St. Vincent and about a third smaller than our bedroom at Cousin Alice’s.
Two months after Paul started school, I would hear him whimpering in his sleep. A mid-November morning around 3, we found him fast asleep trying to open the front door of the apartment. One morning at the beginning of December, as Paul was leaving for school, I asked him if I could borrow an eraser. Paul emptied his backpack to search for it. Something glinted among the books.
“What’s under there?”
“Nothing.”
“Let me see.”
Paul hesitated.
I removed the books and saw a switchblade. Paul instantly put a finger on his lips, and motioned in the direction of Anna’s bedroom. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Leave it with me.” He gave it to me without protesting. I waited for Paul to tell me why he carried a knife, but he never did. A week later, Paul began wetting his bed. In February Anna took him to see a psychologist. We found out then that the older boys in his class were roughing him up at lunch and recess and constantly threatening to beat him up. One noon, Alfred, a lubber of a fellow, met him coming from the bathroom and slammed him into the wall outside the door three times and told him: “If yo’ complain ‘pon me, I-man will kick yo’ ass every fucking day!”
That morning the class had laughed at Alfred. They’d heard him exclaim: “Gwan from ya! Yo’ stink!” and everyone had turned to stare at him sitting in the back.
Alfred told Mme Loubier, their teacher: “Nick a fait la chose qui fait boum.” The laughter exploded for real then.
“Man, just tell her I farted,” Nick said, causing laughter to resound a third time.
Some of it Paul had brought upon himself. In the first few weeks, he’d laughed at the stupid answers his classmates gave to their teachers’ questions (as he’d have done at Excelsior and as I and my classmates would have done at Kingstown Secondary), and he hadn’t understood that he shouldn’t raise his hand to answer every question. (The secondary II Black girls who did homework and performed diligently spent their recess and a good part of their lunch hour in the library — far from the playground and the corridors — and answered questions in class only when the teachers called upon them to do so. This Paul would aver later, when he came to understand the stratification and socialization process.)
And it wasn’t just the Black students who ridiculed him. At the beginning, he’d tried to join an Asian-White group, but they made fun of his teeth. “Man, your fangs are falling out.” He had slightly crooked teeth from sucking his thumb until he was three. And they taunted him. First boy: “How many Blacks it takes to screw in a light bulb?” Second boy: “None. It’s too damn complicated.” Third Boy: “Naw, Paul’s the exception. He got it after the hundredth try.”
By the end of the fifth week they’d subjected him to one joke too many. “There was this White dude, see. Truck driver. Away on a trip for a couple o’ days. Comes back. Goes to screw his wife, and sees she like has this slack hole. So he starts to rough her up to find out which Black dude she’d been fooling around with. She confesses it’s the paper boy, and him just 13. She’d been to get the paper, and he saw her in her bathrobe and got this erection like a baseball bat. She fainted, and he fucked her,
and now her thing can’t close.”
“Awesome!” Pi Chang shouted. “Paul, how’s your baseball bat?”
“Why? You’d like it up your arse?”
“Slug him, Pi! Don’t let the bastard get away with it!” Willy, the runt of the group, urged, leaping up and down, his thick spectacles glinting.
Pi grinned, his mouth grey with dental braces.
“Loosen up, man,” Richard Hazan (“a two-metre bean pole”) said. “You’re like so fucking uptight. Be cool, man. Chill! Learn to like take a joke like a man. After that, who knows, we might accept you.”
I listened to him and remembered how much Paul admired cougars. The killing instinct was there alright, but none of the discretion.
Thereafter Paul never strayed far from the everything-goes group of Blacks, Greeks, and Hispanics. With his journal open in front of him, he revealed all this to Anna and me in the intervals between the sessions.
After twelve sessions — the last six included Anna and me, the psychologist told Anna that Paul’s esteem needs weren’t being met. Beyond letting us find out the cause of Paul’s distress, the sessions seemed useless. About the only remedy Anna could bring was to take him to a dentist and have him fitted with braces to straighten his teeth.
***
So began Paul’s ambivalence for Canada and, indirectly, his hatred for Anna because she had brought him here. “Fathom that,” he told her on the anniversary of our arrival. “Just fathom that!” — sounding like Grama — “We left our comfortable home for this.” He made a hand-sweep, indicating the apartment. “From our back porch we used to look out over the sea, watch the sunset, the fishing boats, the fishermen pulling in their seines, the plovers diving in and out of the water.” Pointing to me. “You and I used to go through Grama’s orchard raiding the fruit trees and spend long hours in the sea all year round. Now we live penned up here like prisoners, our clothes reeking of our neighbours’ cooking — in a country that’s frozen for half the year. Open your eyes, Ma! This is no place for us. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the trees. They are grey skeletons that hiss and scream like haunted ghosts all winter long. They tell you nothing? Some mornings it’s so cold the air is blue. And the people we live among, they’re just as cold, colder than the climate. Why are we here, Ma? Can you tell me why we are here? So you can earn a living emptying bedpans? It’s a dying, if you ask me.” Most likely he was quoting from memory one of his journal entries.
Anna ignored his rant (or so I’d thought). I chalked it up to his flair for melodrama, problems he was having with his classmates, and the traumatic experience the ice storm had been our first winter here, although we were among the few who didn’t lose electricity: something about the hi-tension wires serving our area running along the cement walls of the Décarie Expressway, preventing them from snapping under the weight of ice. Even so, it left us in awe of winter’s destructive power.
About two weeks after this outburst — Paul and I were standing alone on a Barclay street corner waiting for the 160 bus, I asked him why he’d become so silent at home. He breathed deeply, looked away, and said: “Bro, Ma doesn’t have the intelligence to deal with my problems.”
“How can you say that, Paul?”
“You’re blind when it comes to Ma, Jay. Blind. You know what I mean? Ma can’t cope with her own problems. You don’t see her lips moving all the time? She’s lost, Jay, more lost than we are.”
“Paul, you don’t know Ma.”
“If you say so. She’s clueless about what’s going down in this society. That I know. She shouldn’t be here and neither should we.”
The bus came then, and it wasn’t a discussion I wanted to engage in, there or at home. Was that a mistake?
***
Shortly after we arrived Anna assigned our chores. Whenever I cooked, Paul was to wash the dishes. Whenever Anna cooked, we were to take turns washing the dishes. It was Paul’s duty as well to empty the garbage and to help me with the vacuuming. But Paul turned it into a power game he was determined to win, and it became too exhausting to battle with him. Once, when Anna told him if he didn’t do his chores he shouldn’t expect to eat, he smirked, sucked his teeth, and told her: “You’re responsible for me until I am 18. I don’t have to work for my food. You laid this egg, Ma, and you will hatch it. And why should I do chores? Your clay-coloured son” — he stuck his tongue out at me — “will do them anyway to impress you what a wonderful son he is. You prefer him anyway — admit it, Ma — because he’s clay-coloured like you. Whose birthday you forget? Not his. Know why? Because I’m dark-skinned like my father, and you dump on me because he used to beat you. See? You can’t answer because you know I’m right. The day I turn 18 I’ll leave this jail. I would leave now and go back to Grama if I had the money.”
What could she say? Initially she argued with him, but eventually she’d grimace and turn her head away. Now I understand: Paul wasn’t getting from her the attention he’d gotten from Grama, his Vincentian classmates, his teachers, and those Haverites who’d renamed him Ma Kirton’s Genius. Would have been impossible for her, even if she’d understood his needs. Her and Paul’s temperament made for an impossible relationship. He needed Grama’s authoritative presence and spontaneous warmth. Anna had neither. And because Aunt Mercy practically lived with us, someone was always on hand to give Paul the attention he craved.
The first time Paul told Anna to fuck off, I met her sitting on the sofa, her face tear-stained, singing “There is a balm in Gilead.” She recounted what had happened. Paul had ridiculed her attempt to reprimand him for using the expletive. Later Paul gave me the details with relish. “I told her: ‘Ma, everybody knows what fucking is. You’ve certainly fucked, or I wouldn’t be here. Sorry, Ma. I’ll say fuck whenever it suits how I feel. Cloacal expressions are good for soul. But you won’t know what I’m talking about.’” He stared at me and laughed loud. “Know what that means? I’m not afraid of her and I’m not afraid of you. Now turn that into a cigar and use it.” He sneered and wiggled his head and shoulders before sauntering off.
I had hoped the incident would be a one-time affair, that when alone Paul would reflect on his behaviour and know it was unpleasant and unnecessary. I even expected him to apologize to Anna the next day. Back in St. Vincent, when he got out of line, Grama sent him into our bedroom alone to reflect on his behaviour and, afterwards, asked him to tell her why his behaviour was unacceptable. Sometimes he gave a reason, sometimes he didn’t, but he always apologized. But here no apology came, and one week later, his surliness resurfaced. Anna had reprimanded him for something, and he told her she was a crab that should keep on crawling. She said that in that case, he should stay clear of her claws. He said she couldn’t identify claws, never mind own them. I couldn’t believe he’d speak to her like that — calm and composed, as if he were the parent and she his child. When I intervened, he told me to shut up, that I was just “a defanged adder heading straight into the jaws of a waiting mongoose.”
Thereafter Paul taunted her intermittently. At school he became what he first hated. Up to the end of the second year, he did his school work, but with less diligence, and still kept a playfulness about him, continuing, for instance, the alliterative play we sometimes engaged in since St. Vincent.
Paul: Just listen to my fulminating falcon of a mother.
I: No worse than you, a bellicose, bellowing bull.
Paul: That makes you my bothersome, bestial brother.
I: And you’re a tiresome, tyrannical thug.
At which point all three of us broke into laughter.
And he still backslapped me — something he’d started our last year in St. Vincent — and gave me the occasional hug, palm-slap, pound, and high-five: gestures he picked up here. And he’d genuinely inquire how I had done on some paper I’d been working on or some exam I’d been studying for, and was always pleased when the result was very good or exce
llent. And he’d on occasion share bits of interesting information with me. Like the time he read aloud a passage from Peoples of Africa, dealing with the Kpelle practice in which, if the father dies, the oldest son inherits his father’s wives, except, of course, the son’s mother. “And, Jay, if the father wants to, he has the right to have sex with his sons’ wives or the wives of his brothers. I wonder if they still do that.” But I could see he was conflicted, caught between wanting to strengthen our bond and severing it.
And the bolts of inexplicable, gratuitous cruelty! “Your mind is a cornucopia of confusion. Why do I bother talking to you?” Then leaving Anna and focusing on me: “I would educate you too if you had the capacity to absorb it.”
“I’d like to watch you say that to your classmates, to Alfred, maybe.”
“He won’t understand what I’m saying.”
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