The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  These ads suit carnivores, or patriots, or men who know that more education is like taking an endless vacation from Poverty. Carl dismisses the pulp mag tales of men “kicked to Kingdom Come by mad horses,” or tell-alls about “What You Don’t Know about Nymphomaniacs.” Still, he surely is “TIRED OF WORKING for someone else.”

  He chances Lincoln. Maybe Art can emancipate him from shackles of “class oppression,” just as Abe Lincoln emancipated slaves, well, sorta.

  When the Lincoln Art kit lands at his door, it is full of standard, paintable images—lighthouses, churches, horses, nudes. There are also paints—oils—and brushes, and a how-to booklet. Also included is a pamphlet, “How to Make Money with Simple Cartoons.” Carl dreams now of drafting—i.e., courting—models, choosing from among the waitresses, maids, secretaries, teachers, and Sunday school madams, all within his lower-middle-class, Negro orbit. Such are his available mannequins, who might very well strip down—not for cash, but for relative Immortality, the satisfying monument of a portrait.

  The Halifax train station, with its sculpted image of Britannia ruling the waves, executed in white marble, set above the main portals, graced also by thick, concrete Greek columns, is a salt-spray White House, a Maritime slave mansion, where dark-black men still shine shoes, porter, lug baggage, and tote linen. From the station’s entryway frieze, the profiled, helmeted Britannia, her triple-penile trident held erect, peers dismissively down at the Coloured porters and shoeshine boys, the Negro Scotian flotsam and jetsam of British slavery and royal wars. In enticing revenge, however, they are far more real than is the Empire, having “lost” India and Pakistan, and now slowly “losing” Africa and the Caribbean possessions (confiscations). White Britannia overlooks a station that is a quaint, outpost relic of the Raj.

  Carl respects the sleeping-car porters. Their service is never insolent; their courtesies are those of chevaliers. They are the dark knights of the steel roads. Each talks like a professor and struts like a potentate. Bold, they possess the vocabulary to make their arguments register as lucidly in taverns as they could easily do in legislatures. These guys personify Dignity.

  Too, by picking up discarded newspapers, thrown-out magazines, and refuse books, and by accepting gifts of Bibles and poetry, a porter can become an expert—with the lingo to accompany it—on any subject. The King James version is fine for morals, but Jesse James is better for finance. (Carl trusts that bankers are the best bank robbers about, preachin, “A dollar stolen is a dollar saved.”)

  The railway is frustrating, even for aristocratic, richly tipped porters. Yet, Carl likes the grit of the work, the gravel that chuckles under his feet, the steam and oil smell of the old locomotives. Whenever Carl hears a train whistle, he hears a cry for Freedom, if also the moans of Lust—his two imperatives. He suspects the very phrase rock ’n’ roll got bo’n due to Negroes copulatin in sleeping cars (Victoria and Beardsley being a case in point). Trains are romantic vehicles: Carl prays to pull out of Halifax, to exchange Africville and the Halifax garbage dump for Chicago, home of Black Muslim toughs and bandy-legged Playboy Club heifers.

  He be only a linen-and-equipment checker, but Carl sees himself as a subversive menial. Surely, the world of the Negro custodian—as railroader—in Halifax, as in Harlem, is never pure black and white, but full of greys. Carl understands himself as a struggler, as Trotsky with mahogany skin and Brylcreemed hair, as revolutionary even when he is saying, “Yes, sir,” vivaciously—as if he means it. The railway is just a way station until he can make his own way forward as an artist. To be a man not reading Male, but profiled therein.

  That’s his dream, but Carl fears the CNR has him penned up and pinned down—like a stallion, a Black Beauty, corralled by railway tracks and outpaced by those steel wheels. No wonder he’s got to jump on Liz II and have his Freedom the way the Queen has hers, happy aboard her horses.

  Certainly, his immediate bosses treat Carl like crap. “Sparky” Jollimore—razor-pitted and red-dotted scabrous—and “Studs” Sponagle—nerdy with Scotch-taped eyeglasses—are, by rank, subservient to Beardsley. In practice, they run roughshod over him and run herd on Carl. Neither Jollimore—skinny and hatchet-faced—nor Sponagle—fat and Mussolini-bald—can cipher or letter worth a damn. But they’ve been at the CNR almost as long as Rex Georgius VI had his smoking problem. However, they resent Carl because he looks “pretty” (as Cassius Clay would word it), speaks way too intelligently (grammatically), and is only tangentially deferential. Because Carl reminds em they work for Beardsley, Sparky and Studs slag him as flippant. They also loathe Carl for chatting up so breezily the station’s white, black-coffee waitresses. So, the two louts serve Carl grief. If he drops a suitcase, or finishes loading or unloading a train too slowly, or fails to fold a pillowcase or sheet “just so,” they dock him precious-precious coins.

  The Abbott and Costello of the Halifax station also loathe Carl’s literacy. (“N-i-g-g-e-r is how ya spell stupid.”) Two years back, in ’57, Carl committed the crime of leafing conspicuously—in the lunchroom—Trotsky’s The Negro Question in America (1933). His act agitated Studs and Sparky. The boss-men buds tried to get Carl fired for bringin “pinko shit” to work. They got up so close into his face that Carl could smell the urine in their underwear. Carl had to satisfy the inquisition; he intoned, “Yes, sir; no, sir.” He did want to slug his overseers, but decided to drop ice-picked-on Trotsky for Ian Fleming’s nasty but hip-hip-hooray Bond capers. Didn’t help: Jollimore and Sponagle still dub Carl uppity.

  Matters worsened when that innocently lurid photo of Carl, as Baptist Youth prez, surfaced in The Morning Herald in January 1959: he was positioned directly behind two young white women, bent over a table, with their crossed arms before them and their sheepish rears proffered invisibly to their black male ram. Sparky and Studs espied interracial hanky-panky in this provocative posing, and summoned Carl to their desks to complain. He could only grin inwardly at the discomfiture of his superiors. Spittle seethed at the corners of their yellowed teeth; red veins X’d the whites of their eyes.

  No wonder Carl is so circumspect in his parley with white female train passengers. Especially if they are single and travelling solo, his service requires a kid-gloves aesthetic. A too-familiar glance, an accidental touch, and he could be tossed from the railway and tarred for life. In his daily rituals of lugging baggage and laundering bedding, he must be as ascetic as a Shaker and as asexual as a eunuch.

  Recently, one grey-haired, skinny schoolmarm, with glasses, asked Carl, “Do you credit Mr. Will Faulkner with being correct in describing an oddity of the Negro male anatomy?” Carl looked at the attractive, perhaps lonely, lady, and could not help but smile, sincerely, and whisper, “Ma’am, it’s no oddity, I assure you. It really is a dilly.” A twitch ran through his manhood when he saw her eyes glaze over, fantasizing. But he’s had to keep the episode so private that it’s come to seem more dream than memory.

  Relations between Victoria and son were—in his teens—frosty, given Carl’s blinkered attempt to police her genitals. Their relationship warmed only when Carl admitted being sweet on a white classmate, one Liz Publicover. Both named Head Boy and Head Girl for their school, their proper photos had appeared, cheek-by-jowl, in The Morning Herald. Thus, her apple-blushed face highlighted his almond-dark complexion, while both gripped the trophies demarcating their triumphs. Carl’s smile was tentative, while Liz’s teeth shone fulsome. This contrast prompted Victoria to ferret out the truth that Carl fancied the filly. Having been herself, severally, the not-quite unwilling recipient of Caucasian male lust and largesse, Victoria had no illusions about Respectability, and believed white folks were no way more virtuous than Coloured—just better able to parade a torch-lit wholesomeness (shades of Nuremberg). She’d toast happily the knowledge that Carl—and her other sons—were regularly ploughing any number of Caucasiannesses to reveal them all as consummately Concupiscent, despite all their soap, silks, and sermons. Thus, Victoria badgered Carl to p
ester Liz for a date. She smiled and winked at her son whenever he mentioned Liz—he thought nonchalantly. She’d vindicate her self-taught morality if a white girl from a proper home were to be caught, in flagrante delicto, with an amorous Negro. When Carl courted Negresses, Victoria was less interested, for a Coloured woman’s hymen wasn’t worth shit (as, slurred white and black dudes, hers wasn’t).

  Victoria’s sentiments were acrid but accurate, for they were derived from experience. Convinced that humanity is depravity (a notion every laundress affirms), and that Purity belongs only to Nature, Victoria lusted to read accounts—or eye photos—of brown babes at white breasts. To her, the British Empire itself was royal rapine and crowned Criminality. Encouraging her sons to screw white daughters was her vicarious way to rub upturned Anglo-Saxon noses in African and very earthy soil. To use her black sons to hit their white daughters executed a Garveyite vengeance in the style of Euripides.

  Thus, Carl credits that, yep, the most desirable women are white and are the most satisfying once subjugated. It’s an imperious attitude, imbibed from History and from his home, and he spied its workaday reality in the North End of Halifax. Coloured women are for work, white women are for “sleeping with,” all women can be beaten, and none can be trusted. Thus did Carl chew up the boiled-down misogyny of hard-boiled crime comics and Tijuana bibles. His dark-complected (and complex) sexism became his answer to redneck racism and blueblood classism.

  This Negro male revanchisme, the battering of women (principally wives) was prevalent in Carl’s childhood. Right on Belle Aire Terrace. The brute idea that manhood was what was distilled—left over—from a smashed-down woman’s blood and tears.

  The woman splintered the pine door as she come through it, screamin as if bein born. The locked front door should’ve blocked her egress. Except the small, brown woman—pure five-foot-two and ninety pounds—come crackin right through, then roll down the steps and onto the sidewalk. She was hollerin and cryin and gaspin, her arms flailin, clutchin at air, as she was projected through the door and down the rough wood steps. She looked like she’d fainted, once she hit the bottom step and then sprawled—a disjointed mannequin.

  The Blacks lived side the Downeys. Behind and above smashed-down Mrs. Downey loomed her gross husband—summide three hundred pounds of plus-six-foot-tall muscle. A railway porter, often away from home, carrying suitcases, shining shoes, and making beds for people who called him the homely, gutter-language, trash-talk names. All of Belle Aire Terrace—white and black, Catholic and Protestant, sweatin class and petty bourgeois, stood and watched nice, neighbourly Mr. Downey “put a hurtin on” his missus.

  Mr. Downey always strode ramrod straight, and he might say hi or he just might tip his hat and keep on goin, acknowledgin you even as you got dismissed. But he was a serious Negro, tannish, while his wife was caramel in tone. His face was as hard as algebra. His voice was quiet, but his hands—his fists—were huge. Carl was wary about those fists—that temper—just like everyone else.

  When he’d heard the hubbub and come outside, Carl saw Mr. Downey, forty-ish, adult enough to get shot by a cop or railroaded to a jail, hulking in the splintered shadows behind the jagged hole that his wife had made. The man was too far away and he was too dim in those sharp shadows; still, something human had vanished from his guise.

  The moment seemed still and silent. But it weren’t. Folks’d come streamin out their own homes, wives especially, to pick Mrs. Downey up from where she lay, all akimbo, blubbering, her hot-comb-straightened hair awry, and to take her into their homes, their arms, to nurse her bruises, bandage wounds, dry her tears, fix her hair, and later let her return quietly home, once again walking—or limping—with Dignity. Simultaneously, her husband and one son went about repairing the breach in the door—the breach of the Sunday peace—with boards. Did one of em whistle?

  But nothing could erase for Carl the image—fact—of Mrs. Downey breaking the door as she flew—or fell—through it, at the butt of her husband’s fists. And no one phoned the police (for that could have been a death sentence for Mr. Downey). Carl did think the incident one on which all of Belle Aire Terrace agreed: a man’s home is his boxing ring (if he so desires), and wife and kids are handy punching bags.

  Carl couldn’t dismiss the incident, though never did his respect for Mr. Downey cease. He still said “Mr.” and “sir,” though it was hard to ignore Mrs. Downey’s bruised cheeks and her loss of a smidgen of Vitality, even as her carriage became ever more rarefied. Carl saw that the high-prestige job of sleeping-car porter had a downside. A man like Mr. Downey could be a travellin man with shiny shoes, status, and an address that lacked “Apt” as a suffix. Plus, he could carry home enough cash to keep a house and a wife who was not a white man’s “help.”

  Had Carl mused on Mr. Downey’s behind-closed-door Violence that had exploded, accidentally, into a spectacular, alfresco affair, he might have said, as if quoting sociology mavens, that Mr. Downey felt frustrated by his lot. Thus, he’d morphed into King Kong, caged inside a dinky kitchen, knowing impossible energy, translated into muscles—arms, legs, fists, feet—and, to his own surprise, perhaps, turned his wife into an ungainly football, or a soft-tissue battering ram, that, smashing saggingly through their door and out into the sunlight, had transformed their in-house squabble into outdoor entertainment.

  But Violence was all about: Japs, Krauts, Commies were being atom-bombed or firebombed or hit with flame-throwers, depending on whether the foe was Red Scare or Yellow Peril or Blackshirts. Murderers might be hanged at Rockhead Prison (overlooking Africville in geography, but never overlooking Africville for prey) or face lynching at Italy Cross. Men took cleavers to rivals’ necks. Women stomped on the babe-bloated bellies of rivals. Everyone learned the sign language of fists. Cops shot up everybody who was poor, as if lead was a charitable donation. Churches preached Peace, but it was a nebulous notion. Those who were pacified were either in coffins or in shackles. Violation was the norm. Even hockey was about thin steel blades slicing into ice—or about ice-borne slug-fests and hockey-stick bludgeonings.

  How does a Coloured boy—man—get to feel safe and free enough to Love? That he can love fearlessly and be loved fearsomely? That his too-free kisses don’t put a lynch noose about his neck (if he’s caught neckin with the wrong shade of gal); or that his gentleness doesn’t send his uncorrected sons to gaol or the gallows? Hard to give Love when you must police all that you do. Dilemmas to stump Plato, let alone Carl.

  Sailor Black had vanished—perhaps into the anonymous mass graves of the eponymous Black Atlantic, where Africans had been unceremoniously dumped if they became hostile inmates or cumbersome cargo, en route to Slavery, but also now where black sailors could drown in defence of white Anglo-Saxon plutocrats vis-à-vis white Nazi goons. Whatever: Carl’s father was gone from his life, almost as soon as Carl had it, but he didn’t resent his father for vanishing, for that’s what sailors do. They go down to the sea; they sail off into Oblivion.

  Carl couldn’t look to his mother’s lovers—bed friends—as surrogate fathers, for they were mere glimpses of masculinity. Nor could he look up to Beardsley, even though he was a more permanent gent at his mother’s side than the other guys had been. The problem was, G.B. was, in strict terms, a fink.

  Nor could Carl idolize Grandpa Waters, who, after all, had stuck his daughter and grandchildren in a barn. Rev. Waters had immured his own flesh and blood in a castle of once–cow manure, once–horse manure, and a warren—still—of rat feces. Capt. Waters had—thanks to his high principles—placed his descendants in Squalor, hardly alleviated by laundry soap and turntable operatic arias.

  So Carl’s first hero was Jesse Owens, the star Negro of the ’36 Berlin Olympics. Owens’s fleet speed had scooped four gold medals and scuttled the Race theories of the Third Reich and the Southern-fried Dixie Nazis. Before his foot racing won him those Olympic gilded laurels, Owens had been a humble worker—like Carl—bagging groceries, shovelling coal, and r
ubbing in dat shoe polish. Even in university, he’d had to take part-time jobs, still reeking of shoe polish.

  (Hard was it for Owens to wait tables, though: hard to take orders for steak and hamburger when he stank of blacked-up leather. His fragrance would remind diners that the beef they were set to consume could just as well be the leather shoeing their feet.)

  After his Olympic triumphs, Owens found his gold medals inedible and so gobbled humble pie instead, turning his athletic prowess into small-town titillation, running against racehorses. He even pumped gas and dry-cleaned clothes to make a penny-ante buck. Carl liked this bio—of a Caesar of the track who struggled against the colour bar and anti-black codes by just sweatin and holdin high his head. Carl also liked Owens for refusing to raise his fist against White Supremacy. Owens had said, reportedly, the only time it’s worthwhile to make a fist is when ya got dollar bills inside. So Owens was, to Carl’s mind, a real Olympian, able to stroll with kings because he could outrun steeds—and not worry the seeming Humiliation. Owens fronts the Equality of folks of Quality, not the Negro mass cravin entry to the middle class.

  But Paul Robeson is another matter. A superlative singer, actor, and athlete is he. But, as a declared Commie, he’d never warble for Edward VIII. So, though Aunt Pretty once shared a stage with the “Ol’ Man River” singer, the man who exchanged the Hammerstein lyric “niggers” for the Comintern plug “workers,” his anti-royal leanings make him an unsavoury character to Carl, who prefers lusting after Liz II to ever having to bunk down in the bunkum of a “Democratic (Peoples’) (Socialist) Republic,” the very moniker that translates as “no good martini available.”

  Joe Louis did the anti–White Supremacy–right thing by knockin out Hitler’s champ, Max Schmeling, in the first round of their June 22, 1938, bout, when Carl was but three years old. The Brown Bomber had become such a hero that the Vachon pastry bakery outta Quebec had begun marketing its own Jos. Louis sponge cake, wafering vanilla cream between chocolate layers and under a chocolate coating. But, as a teen valuing classical music and elocution, Carlyle needed his heroes to project good grammar, not just throw redoubtable punches.