What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Who was in charge? I didn’t know, how would I? The strong, the cunning, the smart, those who could run fast, those who could hold their breath, those who had money and gold, cigarettes and chocolates, those who could talk; anyone who had a knife or gun or stick. Don’t ask me about authorities. They were the authorities. The woman and her gang and the other gangs who fought her. I was glad she took me under her wing because that is how I met the monk and my fate.

  The monk told me many stories. When I first met him, he looked me right in the eye and told me this one. There was a boy once who lied a lot, the monk said, he lied until his teeth were green and he stole and he was wicked. One day he went to fetch wood and he met some tiger cubs and he played with them until he was bored, so he decided to break their necks to see how it felt. When he did that, the mother tiger saw him and let out a roar and came racing toward him. He was so scared he flew up into a tree. The mother tiger saw that the cubs were almost dead and she went and got some leaves from a special tree. She chewed them up and spit the mixture on the little tigers and soon they sprang back to life and the mother tiger took them home. So the boy climbed down and dug up the special tree and took it home. Soon he became a doctor, a miracle healer, and he raised the daughter of a rich man from the dead and the rich man took him for his son-in-law. He lived happily ever after with his wife, the rich man’s daughter, until one day his wife grew jealous of the tree he had in the backyard, which he paid more attention to than her. She went outside and pissed on the tree, and the tree was vexed because it hated nastiness, so it uprooted itself and started flying to heaven. At that moment, the man came home and saw the tree taking off. He couldn’t catch it, so he threw his axe at it, but the tree kept flying, taking the man holding on to the axe along with it. And that is why there is a man in the moon to this day.

  When the monk told me this story, I began following him around. That boy’s name was Cuoi. There and then I knew the monk could look right into my soul and see who I was.

  No one was in charge of Pulau Bidong. The people in charge only wanted us out of Terengganu, out of Malaysia. Don’t ask me. I knew nothing about big politics, who ran what wasn’t my business. I only knew small things. The way things look to a child. Everything about this island was large, everything was bright, everything was brown or yellow. When you are a child, you concentrate on small pebbles, small looks, you look at the ground, you get shoved and pushed. You get shoved and pushed so much you look for something smaller to push back. You wait, you plot, and you savour it when it comes. That’s how that boy fell in the rotten boat. I saw the wood lice; the wood was soft, but he didn’t know. He was stupid. I told him to go first. He was stupid, and those who don’t hear will feel. That’s what the woman with a cleft palate said to me. Those who don’t hear will feel. And anyway, better to be taken away by a clouded leopard than to live on Pulau Bidong. But I think it’s the rats that got him, piece by piece. The rats were vicious and they respected no one. They didn’t run when you came near. They would stand up and show their teeth. And me, I was little, so I had to protect myself. I always carried stones. Troi co mat. Troi phat. Heaven has eyes. Heaven punishes.

  SEVEN

  Quadraphonic, Jo Jo Flores, Paul E. Lopez, Boris Kid Conga, Divine Earth Essence, Live percussion by Tribalismos, Saturday 18. Oz/Off Centre PJ Patric Forge, Movement, Lond., U.K., Da lata, computer of rebirth of Cool., Aku John Kong, OJ palma at Roxy Blu, Konfusion, Design/vice, Soul Power, DJ spinna, with resident DJs Semois & Kila, Una mas! Ziolay 21st disco, hip-hop house, soul-funked/Brazilian/OJ John Laumahara, Fiction Design Co.’s men’s and women’s summer collection. Exclusive up roc/FDCO 416 Fashion, Juice/solid Garage featuring Jephte Guillarme—New York—born in Haiti, uprooted to Brooklyn with his family, turning vodun spirituality into something understood. Hit single “The Prayer.”Voyage Dreams “Mad Behind the Tet Kale Sound” — Friday 5th — Una mas/Funk d’void—Techno meets funky jazzy house meets Glasgow Funk d’void/Grand Master Flash “immortalized by Blondie, feted by the hip-hop cognoscenti, Grand Master Flash turned the humble record deck into an instrument as potent as the piano or guitar”/Afrika Bambaata. B. Boy and Dance classics Saturday 29th (Mancccc Wabanakkk) …

  Looking for her cigarettes, Jackie had pulled these advertisements out of her bag yesterday morning. She’d handed them to Oku during her thesis on innocence and hadn’t taken them back. What did she mean, innocence? He hadn’t done anyone any harm, ever. He had only noticed that he was still holding the cards and bits of paper she’d chucked at him as he walked down Augusta Avenue trying to recover from what she’d said.

  He’d been looking over them as he sat at the Rose Café. He really should be in a class, but that was over for him. He liked Jo Jo Flores and Paul E. Lopez. He’d danced to them at Tuyen’s place. The fashion show trip he just couldn’t take, though. Who the hell was Fiction Design? Foolish as he must have sounded earlier, had she seemed the slightest interested? Had she in fact stepped closer to him, deliberately put out that vibe, or was it just he? But he had said the lamest line, the most insipid words in the black vernacular, the most washed out, most overused. Oh shit! Man, he wished he could snatch them back—was he elegant and gorgeous enough to use those words—“Jackie, hook a brother up” and get away with them? Well, they had seemed not to have the right effect, so clearly not. She just took off on him. Would she show up at Tuyen’s this evening? Right now he wouldn’t know what to say to her if she did. But flimsy as it was, he had something belonging to her and therefore an excuse, if he needed one, to get in touch with her. Not that this junk was important to her, he was sure—just ephemera—but he had looked at them through the day, the cards and posters, hoping that in them was a map to her, to Jackie.

  This morning his father’s cough had awakened him as usual. He rolled over, feeling the advertisements near his left hand. His father was in the bathroom upstairs now. Oku heard him blowing his nose in that disgusting way he had, and hawking into the sink. Oku got up, put the ads carefully into his knapsack, and prepared himself for the morning ritual with his father and mother. He showered quickly, trying to beat Fitz to the kitchen. His mother was already there. This morning ritual made him feel like a child. For a moment he understood why Jackie would call him innocent. One never feels like an adult with one’s parents, and he did experience a slight embarrassment still living with his at twenty-five.

  Fitz, his father, never ceased to make him aware of that, either. Oku had tried to move out a few years ago, but Fitz had made him feel both guilty and stupid at the same time.

  “Well, if you want to break your mother’s heart, I am not the one to stop you. And if you want to go give white people your money while you could give it to your own family, fine. Go follow other stupid black people and treat the white people better than your own flesh and blood.”

  Nothing about himself, of course. Fitz had put out that it was not on account of any personal regard Oku owed him, but Oku felt ungrateful anyway. There was Fitz saying that Oku was betraying not only his mother but also the race. The combination killed off Oku’s idea of a slamming bachelor apartment with a black leather couch, a CD player with multiple loading, a space where he could smoke ganja any time and possibly seduce Jackie without interruption. If he had had that place two months ago, he could have taken Jackie home after the Lula Lounge. He would not have gone cold when Jackie closed the door, disappearing into Ab und Zu, leaving him sick and strangely frightened, picturing her slipping into bed with Reiner. He would have had friends over day and night, he would have spent hours listening to Monk and Miles and Ornette and Dizzy and, best of all, not had to hear Fitz’s voice each morning. All that if he had not listened to that same voice confidentially saying, “Now you can stay home and save the little money, which, for me, would be the best thing. Me know say you is a man. Me respect you as a man and as a son, whatever is mine is yours. So you know the right thing to do. You no have to leave. Me as a man would never say you shoulda leave.” This was
as close as Fitz could come to saying that he was asking Oku to stay; it was as close as he could come to saying he would miss him. And Oku had been seduced by it, thinking his father was finally acknowledging that they were men on equal terms. Fitz was pleasant or at least silent for the better part of six months after Oku’s decision to stay. But he gradually reverted to his old self as time went on. By which time Oku had blown the first and last months’ rent he had saved and Fitz had the upper hand again.

  Oku was waiting for Fitz Barker to speak. Let him talk all he wants, he thought, don’t answer, appear interested, even schooled, in all the old-time lessons that are his pleasure. Then leave the room. Every morning Fitz delivered the same history lesson in between chewing his hunk of hard dough bread, thick with butter, and downing his cocoa. Oku’s mother, Claire, listened diligently, eyeing Oku as if to say, Please, please don’t answer back and please, please take a lesson.

  “Boy, when I come to this country, I didn’t have nobody, you know!” Fitz paused for accent, searching Oku’s eyes to make sure the significance of the point was understood. “You think is one time I wanted to weep here in this place? But I couldn’t do that. Who would bother with me? I was a man. Boy, you hear what I’m saying? I was a man.”

  “Understood, Pops.” Oku couldn’t help a little sarcasm, a little humour.

  “Don’t ‘Pops’ me, boy. You think because you go to school you smarter than me? Is me who send you to school, boy. Don’t think you have it on me, you know!”

  “No, Pops, I don’t have it on you at all.”

  Fitz fixed him with another searching look, trying to figure out if Oku was joking again, trying to make a fool of him. Oku looked as sincere as he could, sensing his mother.

  “You damn right there, boy.”

  “Damn right, Pops.” He was thinking of Jackie.

  “Damn right, I tell you.” Fitz was lingering over these words with his knife in his hand, making sure that each centimetre of bread was covered with butter.

  “You’ll get a heart attack doing that, man.” Oku tried this as much to halt Fitz as to warn him.

  “Heart attack? I work every day, boy. You ever see a man like me with a heart attack?”

  Fitz was on his favourite subject now, the physical and moral benefits of manly work. Let him go on, Oku thought, finding something else to do with his mind as his body absorbed his father’s harangue. What an unhappy man. Jesus. He looked out the kitchen window to the garden, where his father grew tomatoes and sweet peppers and mint in the summer. Back of the garden was a garage with at least three broken-down cars, parts, anyway, from three broken-down cars. His father threw nothing away. An old muffler, a leaking carburetor, a rusty fender. Fitz filled every minute and every space with work. Oku had no desire to do any of the things his father did. They shared little beyond genes and the way that DNA makes you walk the same way and lift your head the same way, the way it makes your hands seem as the hands of one person. With one exception—his father’s love of music.

  Fitz had a trunk of old records, which he opened every Sunday with a bottle of Scotch while Claire cooked their favourite meats. Spinning Miles and Dizzy and Coltrane and Charlie Parker, the Shirelles and the Four Tops right along with Toots and the Maytals, John Holt, and Burning Spear. As with all his things, this trunk was off limits to his wife and Oku. For Oku, it was the only thing fascinating about his father—this trunk. Sundays were the only days that he could say—apart from the times when he was so young as not to remember—Sundays were the only days that he could say he loved his father. “Claire, Claire,” his father would call, “you remember this one?”—throwing a forty-five of the Platters on the record player. Fitz still had forty-fives and some seventy-eights. He had the long spinner and the inserts for the holes in the small records. When the music hit him, he’d swoop Oku’s mother up in his arms and spin her around, his thick hands becoming elegant and smooth on her back. “This is what you call dancing, boy,” he would laugh if Oku ventured into the room. “You could never dance like this!”

  On Sundays, if Fitz was in a particularly good mood, he would drive Claire out of the kitchen and start cooking himself. Claire having done all the seasoning the night before, there would be a hyperbole of pots and pans clanging, and oil splattering everywhere, before Fitz emerged with simmering curried goat and aromatic coconut rice, boasting at his prowess and his versatility. All along delving into his trunk and putting the Mighty Diamonds, Beres Hammond, and Gregory Isaacs on the stereo. Of course, when the bottle of Scotch was coming to an end and the music from the records becoming sadder, when he began to play Wilson Pickett and Swamp Dog and realized that he was on the brink of tears, he would have to get angry and turn on Claire and Oku instead. He would tell them they were useless and did nothing but eat him out of house and home. If they were lucky, he would go outside to the garden and slam the back door behind him. And if not, they had to sit very still until his anger subsided or risk having an ornament flung at them if they moved. Not that Claire took it always, but it was better to take it than to object. She didn’t want a fight lasting days. And Fitzy was a good man, he only felt that he had been held back, and were he a different man in this country, he would be further ahead.

  Sundays were like that—which lately Oku had avoided by staying out all weekend—and weekday mornings were like this: everyone had to wake up at the same time as Fitz, and if Oku made the mistake of sleeping in, Fitz would kick the door in. “I have to put bread on the table for you, the least you could do is be at that table when I’m there.”

  This used to annoy Oku, but not recently. Recently he would surprise his father by saying to him, “Fair enough, Pops. Level vibes.” When he first said it, Fitz was struck quiet. “Hmm.” The boy looked like he was pulling a new tack. What did he want now? But Oku would jump up and head to the kitchen close behind him.

  “You find a job yet, boy?” That one he knew Oku couldn’t answer.

  “Soon and very soon,” Oku mumbled.

  “ ‘Soon and very soon,’ eh? All right, boy.”

  This was Oku’s new plan, to humour Fitz. Not to fly off in a rage at him, not to bait him, not to look down on him. But to feel sorry for him and to see him as oppressed, ground down by the system.

  “You happy, Pops?” Oku said, looking back from the window and the carcasses of Fitz’s plants and cars.

  “Happy!” Fitz was incredulous. “It don’t have happy in that! Happy, boy. You think they put you here to be happy! You damn fool. Claire, this boy need to do a good day’s work, then he’ll understand. Happy, my ass.”

  “You don’t think that you should be happy by now?”

  “This university business making you stupid or what?”

  “No, really, Dad, you don’t think that you should be happy by now? What’s all this for?”

  “To put food on the table so that my betters can tell me I’m not happy.”

  “Why you got to be so sensitive? Why can’t you just answer the question I’m asking you? Are you happy? Don’t you feel you should be happy?”

  Fitz looked as if he was about to burst. “Claire, you hear this nonsense? You hear what this idiot boy, you make, asking me?”

  “Fitz, mind yourself now.”

  “You don’t see the boy speaking as if he better than me?”

  “Ah, forget it, ‘old school.’ Never mind.”

  “Why you don’t go about your business and make me go ’bout mine?”

  “You’re right, you’re right, Pops.”

  His father thought he was going to the university, but he wasn’t. Oku was doing a master’s degree in literature, but he had dropped out in January. He couldn’t bear it. And he was weary with the fear of what Fitz would say and do if he knew. They’d already had an argument long ago about why he was doing literature. What good would that do, what the hell kind of job could you get with that, was Oku intending to eat the papers or wipe his ass with them when he got it? Because that is all his “master’s”
would be useful for. Oku had endured any number of attacks on the efficacy of a master’s degree in English literature. He had used aloofness and rudeness. It would be a dreadful comedown to now admit that, though for altogether different reasons, he had arrived at the same conclusion as his father. Every now and then he had an attack of panic so strong that he felt weak, he had pains in his stomach. Each morning he thought he was working up to telling him, but each morning he failed.

  When he examined this fear, he realized that it wasn’t simply a fear of Fitz. It was he himself who was afraid. He didn’t know where to go from here, and he would see that in his father’s rage, and the panic in him would threaten to burst out and he did not know where it would go.

  This morning he’d started what he now thought was a stupid argument about happiness. His father was intolerable, couldn’t hold an adult discussion. He always had to be certain and right about everything. There were no variables in his life, no uncertainties. If there was anything he was uncertain about, he just pretended to know it. So there was no talking to him. He knew everything.

  Fitz was a compact man, not a small man by any means, but compact, tight in his big body and tight in his self-assurance. Oku watched him leave the table, his face resolute. He hated him and he envied him. Often Oku, who resembled him, would find himself looking at his own image in a sudden glass window. He would see his father there in himself but with just that iota of doubt that made him himself and not Fitz. The image would catch him by surprise and not a little disappointment that that self-containment, that pig-headedness, could not be his. No doubt he would get along much better in the world if it were. And just now, as his father rose, he remembered only a few years ago, when he was a teenager, looking at his dick in the mirror and wondering if his father’s dick was the same length, the same shape. A chuckle escaped him. Fitz spun around and stared at Oku hard, making sure that he held his gaze long enough for dominance. Oku chuckled and gave it to him. “Boy …” Fitz finished, leaving the room.