In the third-floor apartment we once shared in a crazy-gabled, moss-shingled old Queen Anne on King’s Bridge Road with dormer windows, clay chimney pots, weather-vaned turrets, and ornamental rooftop fences, Elaine and I loved to sleep together on weekday afternoons when our off-shifts coincided. On long, cold winter afternoons when everyone else was working, we would lie in bed together under the down duvet with the shades drawn, the telephone disconnected, far away from the world and all its cares: blue blinds in the hooded dormers of a yellow house; the large bedroom filled with the cool underwater light of a winter sun; no clock in the room, but the big old cast-iron radiator ticking away. On drowsy winter afternoons in the Archives, I still find myself daydreaming about those times.
On the day I began to feel ill, I brought home some files from the fonds I’ve been slowly working my way through at work, for the purpose of writing a finding aid. The Wilkes-Truxtun-Pollux Fonds contains a copy of the unpublished proceedings of the US Naval Court of Inquiry held at the Argentia Naval Base in February and March of 1942. On the night of February 18, three American warships, the destroyers USS Wilkes and USS Truxtun and the cargo ship USS Pollux, ran aground in a fierce storm on the south coast of Newfoundland. The ships were in convoy to Argentia from Portland, Maine, on essentially the same route as our present-day, summer-season passenger ferries between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. They were navigating by dead reckoning, however, weather conditions being too bad for accurate celestial navigation. The Wilkes had an obsolete form of radar, but even that was not working properly. Strong winds and currents carried them off course and onto the rocks between Lawn Head and the sheer granite cliffs of Chambers Cove, a cove in name only.
In the Court of Inquiry transcript, in a Memorandum to the Secretary of the Navy, Rear Admiral A. L. Bristol says, “It is impossible to describe the scene of the catastrophe unless one has been there. It is some of the worst terrain that I’ve ever encountered. The physical effort necessary in the rescue operations is almost beyond comprehension.” He proposes the construction of a hospital as a “lasting tribute” to the rescuers, whom he describes as “a hardy race of English and Irish descent, quiet, dignified, and reserved; also, hard to know and very sensitive. Almost without exception they are poor and with few possessions.”
The Pollux and Truxtun were battered and broken apart by the wind and the waves, and though 186 American sailors were rescued that night, 203 were lost. All navigation records aboard these two ships were also lost. The Wilkes, however, was refloated and suffered no loss of life. She also retained a complete log of the voyage, and the inquiry found her officers and crew to be mainly responsible for the shipwrecks. Her two commanding officers were subsequently court-martialled.
By far the most interesting, the most moving part of this fonds, however, is not the documentation relating to the cause of the shipwrecks and the attribution of blame, but the evidence given by some of the survivors and their rescuers. The men of St. Lawrence and Lawn, the two communities closest to the bleak, uninhabited Chambers Cove, climbed down over ice-covered cliffs in a vicious wind and sleet storm to rescue men immersed in heavy oil and icy water, then brought them to a makeshift infirmary, where the women nursed them back to life.
Among the survivors was Lanier Walter Phillips, humble Mess Attendant, Third Class, US Navy, not one of Lester Freeborn’s illustrious visitors, but as worthy a candidate for an archive-of-the-soul fonds as ever set foot on these shores—perhaps surpassed only by one Philip Riteman, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, who came here in 1946. Riteman’s entire family had been among the more than six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
A descendant of one of the more than six million slaves transported to the New World in the eighteenth century, Phillips was born in the cotton fields of Georgia in 1923, one of the states in which the lynching of blacks was most common. Terrorized and dehumanized by the Ku Klux Klan as a child, he joined the Navy as a teenager, only to find that he had escaped from one racist milieu and fallen into another. Sailors were unofficially classified as officers, men, and mess attendants, and blacks, of course, could serve only as mess attendants. He had to stand up to eat, wash the officers’ underwear, and shine their shoes.
As noted before, one of Lester Freeborn’s mysterious and illustrious visitors was the Reverend John “Amazing Grace” Newton, as Lester refers to him. Not to take Lester’s word for it, but we do know for sure that John Newton wrote the words to “Amazing Grace.” There is a copy of Newton’s Olney Hymns in the Rare Book Vault; it contains the untitled redemption hymn that would only later be called “Amazing Grace.” The origin of the music, however, is unknown. Hymn books in Newton’s time didn’t have music. The Olney Hymns looks more like a book of poems than a hymn book. Some musicologists have speculated—dredging for irony, obviously, Newton having been a slave trader in his youth—that the tune we now sing to “Amazing Grace” may have been sung by slaves in the southern US before emancipation, or even earlier, aboard the slave ships on their way to the New World. If Lester Freeborn had told Lanier Phillips’s story, no doubt he would have placed Phillips’s great-grandfather aboard one of the three slave ships captained by John Newton himself.
Perhaps it was while aboard one of these ships on the way back to England, caught in a winter storm off the Newfoundland coast in 1748, that the self-proclaimed wretch and blasphemer John Newton had been “miraculously saved from a watery grave,” as Lester had put it in Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors.
So had Lanier Walter Phillips almost two hundred years later. But if Phillips had begged the Lord for mercy during his ordeal, as Newton had done, he too must have wondered, if for different reasons, “What mercy can there be for me?”
On the night of the shipwrecks, February 18, 1942, Phillips at first thought that they had struck the coast of Iceland—it looked bleak and icy enough—and this was why he expected the worst. One of the conditions in the agreement allowing the US to establish a naval base in Iceland was that no blacks would be allowed on Icelandic soil. If he did manage to get ashore, he expected to be lynched.
He not only survives, however, but his life is changed completely and forever, and all because he is treated like a human being for the first time in his life, and not as an outcast, a leper, an untouchable, a nigger. Symbolically immersed in a cold, vile, viscous liquid the colour of his own skin, he is not just rescued, but saved, brothers and sisters, in the most profound sense of the word—transformed, redeemed, no repentance required, for, unlike John Newton, he had nothing to repent.
In Lanier Phillips’s account of his experience, it is his description of the tender nursing care given him by the women of St. Lawrence that is most astonishing. He lays great emphasis on the power of touch in restoring his lost humanity: hands, white hands, the hands of white women, touching him, caressing him, this intimate, interracial contact such a taboo in his mind, so forbidden, that it initially puts the fear of God in him. Sick and semi-conscious, lying naked on a large table, he half-watches, in agonized wonder, as they bathe his chilled black body, covered with congealed oil from the broken fuel tanks of the ship. Even the white men have turned black; the oil has seeped into the very pores of their skin. He confirms the reports, thought apocryphal, of the women trying to scrub the blackness off him, thinking it is oil, none of them ever having seen a black man before. Lanier’s eyes are almost glued together like a baby’s.
“They were holding me in their arms like an infant,” he says.
I am not a religious man, but who could doubt that it is a rebirth he is describing.
16. THE BLUE PETER
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion”
The winter has settled in, and so has Anton. After Miranda returned to work, he came back home. “I’m home” were his very words of greeting when I came home from work one day, just a few days after New Year’s. My God, I thought
, he’s here for good.
Instead of the snow-rain-frost-snow-rain merry-go-round that is our usual winter wonderland ride—see-saw temperatures, freezing and thawing, slop-walks of slush changing overnight into treacherous slag-paths of crusty ice and snow—serious snow began falling in mid-December and continues to come down. After several winters with hardly any snow to speak of—the temperature one year hitting twenty degrees in February, but balancing that the next year with a snowstorm in October—my colleagues are now forecasting a real old-fashioned winter. Anton, of course, says global warming is to blame, and his bête noire, the automobile, is mainly to blame for that. In less than a hundred years, it has taken over the earth. In the years ahead, he warns, we will experience even more extreme variations in the weather. Global temperatures are rising, the ice caps are melting, oceans currents are shifting, and sea levels are rising. His country will be the first, he says, to be swallowed by the sea.
On a minor note, the sidewalks have already been buried in snow, but the walking trails around St. John’s are well travelled, the snow thick and hard-packed. Anton sets out on the trails almost daily, usually around the time I leave for work, with a pair of snowshoes that he found in the basement. He carries them strapped to a knapsack on his back so he can leave the trails and explore the woods. Some days after work, if he hasn’t tired himself out walking during the day, we set out together for a walk before supper, usually around five o’clock, when the sun has already set and the late-afternoon darkness is closing in.
On one of those walks, on Old Christmas Day, he began to talk about his mother, with whom he’d re-established a relationship the year before she died. It was her death that had finally brought him here. He’d already told me everything he knew about his father, which, of course, wasn’t very much.
We were walking along the reclaimed, or “daylighted,” section of Kelly’s Brook, appropriately enough, when we looked up to see a cold white moon shining through thin drifting clouds, and, still visible behind them, a stark blue sky. The effect was startling, for it was practically dark. I had never seen anything like it before. This quarter-mile section of the brook runs along a part of the trail that feels like the lowest piece of land in all of St. John’s. Although it might have been just the unexpected sight of a sky that blue at night—a dark, saturated, melancholy blue—something about the whole scene must have affected the circuits of Anton’s brain and the currents of his blood, made him feel a little homesick, stirred some dark and deep-rooted memories. Perhaps it was the slow, tame water winding through its artificial channel like a drainage canal traversing a polder, or the below-sea-level feel of the lay of the land. As if he were just continuing a conversation he was having with himself, he said, plaintively:
“The night Moeder saw the blue moon she knew for certain he was not coming back. It was late September 1950, almost five years to the day he left. I was only four at the time, back home in Rotterdam with my grandmother, who I thought was my mother. Jule—Moeder’s name was Juliana, but we called her Jule—was with her sister, Mina, at her summer place in Noordwijk. Uncle Claus was in England at a medical conference, and Mina asked Jule to come and stay. She hated to be left alone. It was a cool clear night, and the blue moon rose over the North Sea. She said even the sea and the sky were blue. She saw it first through her bedroom window. She and Mina stared at it for so long on the verandah she thought she saw a small white moon in the middle. It was the Blue Peter she was seeing again, the blue flag with the white spot in the centre that’s raised when a ship is leaving port. It was, as I let you know, the name of the ship I came on, too. The day I saw it at the dock in Rotterdam, I knew that the time for my voyage had come.
“My father explained the flag to her. Maybe he was just planting a seed in her head, getting her used to the idea of him going away. They spent a lot of time walking around the old docks in Rotterdam, the docks the Nazis nearly destroyed before they left, watching the ships come and go, while he waited for his ship to take him home. Leaving was slow, there was a shortage of ships. There was a point system among the soldiers that no one seemed to understand. He was one of the last to leave. But when he did leave, he left quickly, without warning, without even saying goodbye. Perhaps he didn’t have time to let her know. Of course, she thought she would be going with him. But she was left behind on the dock, staring at the Blue Peter as his ship sailed away.”
“Did he tell her his name?” I asked. “Did her parents know about him?”
“William was the first name he gave her. William the Conqueror! Prince William of the House of Orange! William the Silent, Father of the Netherlands! He became William Peter, or Peters, later on. Blue Peter, she called him. She met him in secret, unbeknown to her mother, met him at an army club—only women were allowed in—knew him only a few weeks and he was gone. He did tell her he wasn’t a Canadian, that he came from another country, Newfoundland, and that his country was occupied, too.”
“Ah, a fellow traveller, your father. Have you mentioned this to Miles?” I asked, but Anton was too intent on telling his story to reply.
“William and Juliana of the House of Orange! Moeder was called after Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter, and Mina, or Wilhelmina, was called after the Queen. I was named after Chekhov and Rilke—Moeder was a great reader of books—but the Queen’s enemy was named Anton, too. Anton Mussert, leader of the Dutch Nazi Party. Collaborator lapdogs named their kids after him during the war. Jule joked about that before she died. She confessed, then, said she knew but didn’t care. She loved Anton Chekhov so much. Maybe more than she loved me! The war was over, she said. She had lost all her friends. She wanted to forget about all that. But she was away working when I went to school, and Grandmother used Grandfather’s name for me, Gustav, which became Gust. I changed it back when I went to university. Anton Mussert had long been forgotten by then.
“I thought Jule was my sister till I was twelve years old. It was too late then to call her Moeder. She didn’t want that, anyway. When I found out, she went away to Amsterdam to work. She used to go there sometimes, but now she stayed away for good. Grandmother sent me to Deventer to live with Aunt Mina and Uncle Claus, for I became, as they say, too hard to handle. Grandfather died in the last year of the war, in the Hongerwinter, one of the coldest we ever had. He died of hunger edema, starved to death, for there was no food left, and the old and the young died first. More than twenty thousand people died of cold and hunger. They were eating tulip bulbs. They smell like chestnuts roasting but don’t taste so good. Eating dogs and horses, too. Jule and Mina bicycled a hundred kilometres into the country, to the farms, to find food. The farmers had barbed wire around their fields, like the Nazis did around their compounds. Sometimes they came back with nothing at all, or the German sentries took what they had. In the end, they took their bicycles, too, and then they couldn’t go anymore.
“Grandmother threatened to put me in—how do you call it?—reform school. I now felt nobody wanted me, not even Mina and Uncle Claus, who wanted to take me when I was born. In Deventer, I was back in the house where I was born. Uncle Claus was a doctor, and he delivered me. In a clinic that was attached to his house. But though they wanted to take me then, Jule refused to give me up. Thirteen years later they still had no children of their own, but Uncle Claus didn’t want me now. One evening Mina said to him, right in front of me—she was very emotional, and sometimes depressed—that it’s so strange the way things are. It didn’t make any sense to her. The people who want children, she said, can’t have them, and the people who don’t want them have no trouble at all. She was crying and drinking—she drank a lot—but he just sat there, not saying a word. I wasn’t sure I knew what she meant, but I knew who she was talking about. The people who didn’t want children didn’t want me—my own father, mother, grandmother, and now my uncle and aunt.
“I think it was right then and there, at that very early time in my life, when I was just thirteen, sitting i
n that cold empty house, as Claus stared into Mina’s bitter, teary face and I stared into his dark unfeeling face, that I saw the face of the man who left me behind, the father I never knew, and I felt I had been an orphan, a homeless person, all my life, even though I always had a home.”
When the trail reached the Parkway, we came out of the woods into a festive dazzle of Christmas lights still strung from the trees on both sides of the road, all the way from the university to Confederation Building. Anton’s face lit up and his mood lightened, as it had when we’d first seen those lights, on the fifth of December, Dutch Christmas Eve. But on this particular evening, his mood did not stay light for long. Too many bad memories of Uncle Claus—I wondered if that was his real name—and his not-so-happy workshop still filled his Christmas stocking, like the proverbial lumps of coal.
“Your uncle’s real name was Claus?” I said.
“His name was Nicolaas,” Anton said, “but he spent so much time in London he picked up the English nickname Claus. Jule used to call him Sinterklass, but I can tell you he was no St. Nick.”
“Nickname or not,” I said, trying to lighten things up.
“Yah, he didn’t believe in Christmas. His house, his home, was a strict regime. Every trait of the Dutchman I hated was in him. I had to do all the work he had no time to do. He was at the hospital then—he had closed his clinic—working twelve hours a day. Sometimes he would not come back until the next day.
“Mina tried her best to mother me, but she had problems of her own. Claus was one, as you can see. I had no father, but I had lots of mothers—sister-mothers, aunt-mothers, grandmother-mothers. My psychoanalyst says I am clinically gay, but, truth to tell, I have no interest in men at all, not even as friends, begging your pardon, though I am supposed to need them as substitute fathers. Perhaps I am afraid of men. If ever I have a child, I hope it’s a daughter. A son needs a father who had a father. I think I would be afraid of a son.
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