The Meeting Point

by Austin Clarke

  But it was different in this country, with banks. They were built so beautifully, with large glass windows which exposed to her, the tellers and the people doing business in them; and the managers (these Canadian managers were not hiding like Mr. Toppin, in a room with the door under lock and key: they were there, in the open, to attract money and banking-people and borrowers, like fly-paper to attract flies) all visible; and the women who worked there, dressed so clean in their anonymous personality of the bank clerk, so plain and pallid and trained to smile and to be courteous, and to look poor and honest … and I like to see the way they smile every time I come through that swinging door marked PUSH; which I pulled one time, and continue walking in, and I walked right into the blasted glass door, and cut myself and my dress was ripped up in pieces, and I felt so ‘shamed and embarrassed! as if my petticoat was showing, which it was. Yes, the Royal Bank of Canada was a special thing in Bernice’s life. No one can imagine the satisfaction she had, when she received her first cheque book. The word, Royal, gave it that special flavour and prestige. (That same afternoon, she called Dots on her princess telephone, and yelled, “Dots, child, I got it! I get the thing, man. You must come and see it!” It was only a cheque book: not a loan.) It told her that never never, in this world or in the next to come, would this bank ever go bankrupt on her, and burn down, while she was sleeping. It was safe and sound. Safe as the continuation of kings and queens who were royal; whose births and deaths were linked like the beginning is linked to the end, in a line of water flowing through a circular pipe. “Lord, don’t matter how I cuss this place, Canada,” she said once on the bus going home, after a pang of conscience, “no matter how I say Canada is this, and Canada is that, be-Christ, look! three thousand dollars, three-ought-ought-and-ought! thousands not hundreds; on my own personal chequing account cheque book. My name, Bernice Leach, Miss Bernice Leach write down in it, if yuh please, and my address and telephone number printed in it, too. That is what Canada have done for me. This is my testimony to this place, called Canada. And Lord, I am glad as hell that I come here, that I is a Canadian.” But this did not prevent both Bernice and Dots from lambasting Canada that very week, when they saw a story in the newspapers that a certain West Indian nurse couldn’t get an apartment on Bathurst Street, to rent, because she wasn’t white. Subsequently, they both agreed, volubly, that “Canada ain’t worth shit!”

  “This is a place, too?” Dots said, the very next day. “This is no place for a person to live in, and feel like a human being, gal. And when you are a woman, and not married, well …”

  “I feel the same way as you,” Bernice said; but she hastened to point out a condition which she felt would extenuate this denouncement: “But I still have to think of when Thursdays come, pay day. For that, and that alone, I think Canada ain’t such a bad place.”

  “You know something, gal?” Dots was now laughing in her sensuous way. “You want to hear a piece o’ the hard truth, today? Well, listen. No matter how we two bitches sit down here in this white woman’ place, and say the worst things ’bout Canada and the white woman, ’cause she is as Canadian as Canada is, God-love-a-duck! had it not been for that woman and Canada, where the hell would we, both me and you, be, right now, at this very minute …”

  These were things that Bernice felt she could discuss only with Dots: similarities of experiences in this country. They could not tell them to Brigitte, because they did not want her to know. They could not tell them to Estelle, because she was a newcomer. And even if Estelle had showed any interest in knowing the hard facts — she told Bernice the morning after she arrived, she wanted to remain in Canada to work — there was a little incident which had already soured Bernice’s mind against her sister.

  One remark, made in the car coming back from the airport, had bothered Bernice like a bad toothache. It was about the man who sat beside Estelle throughout her flight; and he and me talked about everything. Bernice remembered Estelle’s exact words. She wondered what else they talked about; she wondered what they talked. And she was glad that when the plane landed, the man disappeared, without giving her his name … but no! Estelle has the man’s telephone number! But she remembered she had tossed the card through the car window. She felt safer. I know he had one thing on his mind, one thing. She was so preoccupied with this fear of her sister falling into danger, that the first thing Friday morning when Estelle woke up, with Bernice cold and cramped from having spent so much time in the chair at the window, that before even saying, “Good morning, Estelle, how you like Canada, your first morning in Canada?”, Bernice demanded, “What you intend to do, with that man?”

  “What man?”

  “The man you meet coming up on the plane. That is the man I talking ’bout.”

  “But Bernice …”

  “Now, look here. Let me tell you something. You are in Canada now. Not in Barbados. I can’t tell you what to do, ’cause you are a big woman, twenty-nine years old. But I just want to say that you had better not get yourself mixed up with any man — particular that kind o’ man. In my time here, I see many things, many women having to go back home with their lives mashed-up. So, I just warning you, in case you have intentions of calling that man, whoever the hell he is.”

  “But Bernice, I told you the man didn’t even as say How-d’, the moment he touched ground.”

  “And that is the way I want it to stay. As I say, I not getting into your business, but I been here too long.” Bernice wanted more than that; much more, but she was too timid to say exactly what was on her mind. She wanted to tell Estelle, “Have nothing to do with that white man,” because of the way they had treated her herself, in the past (she was thinking of the subway; and one old, vague, decrepit man who spat green-and-yellow just as she was a foot from him). She tried again, saying, “Estelle, look. We who have been in this country, a long time before you, have seen the ways of this world …” (To hell with the ways of this world, Estelle thought.) “ … and I can only tell you, as a mother would, and as Mammy would, if Mammy was here, that it do not look good to see a black woman walking with that kind of a man. That is all I have to tell you.”

  “But Bernice, in Barbados, I have seen many girls I went to school with, walking with …”

  “This is Canada.”

  And instinctively, Estelle knew this was the end of the discussion. Bernice’s outspoken words raised many questions in her mind. Although she did not give much thought, or desire, to going out with that kind of a man, she could not help being tempted by Bernice’s extremism on the subject. In a way, it fascinated her.

  Bernice did not like her victory: it was more of a moral capitulation on Estelle’s part. And to give her position more justification, she deliberately amplified her grievance: “I would never forget what Brigitte told me, one day. She told me, right here, that she is a German, and she proud o’ being a German; and when I mention to her, all the evil and sufferation and tribulation that her German tribe poured on this Christ’s earth, all Brigitte could tell me, right here, holding one o’ my Chinese teacups in her hand, was, Listen, Bernice, darlink, a frog was in a pond, one day; and a scorpion ask that frog for a ride on his back across the water to the other side. No, says the frog, you think I is a damn fool? Carry you on my back, and let you sting the living daylights outta me? Please, please, Mister Frog, says the scorpion, I am not going to sting you, ’cause I begging you for a ride, and I know that the onliest way I could get ’cross that water, is on your back, Sir Frog. Well, the frog say Okay, and the scorpion get on the frog’s back, and they even exchanged a joke or two, in transit, ‘cross that water. And just as they reached the other side, just as the scorpion could touch land, Jesus Christ, pinnnng! he put such a sting in that frog’s behind, that all Poor Froggy could say is, But man, I thought you say you wasn’t going to sting me, man? And guess what that wicked scorpion say? I is a scorpion! I can’t help that, Froggy boy! And as you may guess, the frog died. Well, think ’bout that, because them is the scorpion, an
d we, the blasted frog.”

  Estelle was trembling. Bernice knew that her victory was now worth something; and straightway, she left to go downstairs to do her work. “Heh-heh! I got the bitch with that story, now, though!” But before Bernice got to the bottom of the first landing, Estelle shouted behind her, “But Bernice. I don’t see why you’re so worried.” And because she herself could not see why, she went back into the apartment, and broke down in tears. She remained alone in the room; and in the world: and she promised herself right then, to get out from under Bernice as soon as she could.

  Bernice could think of no better way to introduce Estelle to her new environment, than to take her to church. It was her first Sunday in Canada. Church to Bernice, was one of the great diversions which was able to seep into her life, and disrupt the iron-gloved triangle of her existence. No matter how sweetly the voices from over the Andes Mountains cooed; no matter how many sins and evil thoughts she confessed to the invisible, washed-in-the-lamb preacher over there in the Mountains; no matter how her imagination placed her in the front pew of that other gospel-singing radio church in Alabama, or in Mississippi, still something was lacking. She had to go down to Shaw Street to worship with her other West Indian co-Christians, men and women. Going down there, in that immigrant street, dressed as if she was going to a cocktail party in Forest Hill; and sitting on the seats that drove pins and needles up through her body, she felt, she knew she had a little cornerstone of involvement in this community of people. It was a community of immigrants: immigrants who were not Anglo-saxon. Like her, these immigrants had suddenly realized they were lost in a foreign land. And like her, and her West Indian friends, they came together like seaweed on pieces of drifting wood, in a sea with a current that went no way. Bernice knew there was something closer than social ties, and acceptance based on the largeness of your car: it was colour. And it was blood. Dots had said, once, about this street, “This is the only street in this place, this Shaw Street, where people talk and walk in a million and one different nationalities and languages, and nobody doesn’t stop talking the moment I walk by, or you walk by. And one thing on this street I notice: nobody don’t look at you with wonder and scorn.” Bernice had to confess too, that, “Yuh know, Dots, I don’t feel that I am either a black person or a white person. Not on this street. This is like home in Barbados.”

  After church, Bernice took Estelle into the basement. There were many other West Indian women there. Most of them had not seen home in many years. Most of them had not read a West Indian newspaper for as many years. But they were expressing opinions about the West Indies, as if they had just come up. Estelle noticed this; and wondered what else they could talk about. They talked about Barbados and Trinidad and Jamaica, and sometimes about the smaller islands. Even the women from these smaller islands, like St. Vincent and St. Kitts, kept silent or talked about Jamaica and Trinidad. Bernice asked somebody, “Who come up lately?” and without waiting for a reply, she asked, “You hear who getting married?” And a young woman from St. Lucia, with the heavy burden of her life reflected in her face said, “But tell me, oui. Which one of us have a chance of finding a decent man in a place like this, oui?” And all the women (including Estelle) laughed; and the laugh was cut in half by someone saying, “Doris from Trinidad five months pregnant. She come by my place yesterday, moaning and groaning, saying how she don’t want no baby, she don’t want no Canadian baby; and that she going try and get a nabortion because her line isn’t getting babies: her line is making Canadian money.” And the women ripped Doris apart, limb by limb; and they talked about all her family history and her boyfriend-history. There was a tall thin red woman from Jamaica who said, “Oh-ho-ho, a worthliss bitch like Doris, stupid enough to let a married man sleep with her, and foolish enough to get herself pregnant! Christ, and this place is so hard, as it is.” And it seemed that this was the same thing as taking Doris bodily, and throwing her into a den of hens. Each West Indian woman took a peck at Doris’s flesh and Doris’s reputation and when they were finished, Doris was like a piece of dried rotten cod fish.

  After Doris, they talked about home. Bernice asked another Barbadian, if she knew the Deep Water Harbour had been built; yes, said the woman, it built three years now, child. And then somebody asked about somebody’s island, and was told that “things not too bright, soul; not as bright as here”; and the person who asked, relaxed, and seemed to feel happier. It was a sort of madness which gave them strength and moral fortitude to return to their various domestic jobs, and as Dots said, “to fight the fight a next day, and a next night, heh-hehhh!”

  Estelle remained aloof but attentive as the conversation turned to the white families for whom these women worked. Bernice was the cheer-leader in this. “My missy tight tight tight as a damn kettle-drum.” And the women bawled. “Man, she so damn tight, that once I caught her in my kitchen counting the blasted rice grains.” The women laughed as if they were hitting all the various missies in Forest Hill, Rosedale, Richmond Hill, all over. It was a field day; and no missy, no matter if she was “Mrs. Queen” from high society, could erase the abrasions of this spiteful flogging.

  “But you didn’t hear ’bout the one I works for?” asked another woman. “She does not have any decencies, whatsoever. I really do not see how she could be so great, with big maid, cook, and cleaning-woman, when … and this is the gospel-truth, as what Rev Markham just preached about … it would make you puke to see the way she splatters tomato ketchup all over the nice, expensive steaks I cooks for her. God, it is enough to make you bring up your guts!”

  “Yes, they ain’t no good,” Bernice said. “They are not any damn good.”

  “… one I work for, have money …” somebody was saying.

  “Yes, money,” Bernice said, having to raise her voice to be heard.

  “But they only have money.”

  “But that is money, honey.”

  “But listen to me!” Bernice was shouting now: it was her revivalist meeting. “Listen to me,” she said, shouting less, because she noticed that Estelle was embarrassed by her manner. “Money do not make the man. Money do not make a person into a lady. Money is only dollars and cents. And that can’t buy, nor purchase what I call breeding.”

  And a very black, thin, beautiful and proud Jamaican woman said, in distinct and venomous clarity, “All-you tell all of them for me, that all of them could kiss my sweet arse. It is only money, as Bernice said, that give them the right to be called missy. It is only the lack of money that give them the opportunity to call me maid. But as long as there is a will, there is a way. I mean to pull out from this arse country as one big millionaire-woman, hear? Or in the very least, as a woman with a few thousand Canadian dollar-bills in my pocketbook.”

  When the talking stopped, Estelle was jarred. And when the last laugh and the last giggle had died, and the last trace of the hymn Abide With Me, which had closed the service, had faded from Bernice’s memory, she and Dots and Estelle and two other women from Grenada walked out into the cold winter afternoon. Some others lingered behind (writing reports for church committees): some of them married, but without husbands with them, because husbands are hindrances; some husbands playing dominoes with the “boys”; or old-talking about girls, with the boys; and some husbands still in the West Indies, waiting for passage money, or a money order, or a birthday card from their wives, or permission from the Canadian immigration department … and some letters written back as periodically as a menstruation period … and others, middle-aged, and unmarried, like kippers through neglect, like virgins on pensions, but still looking and still lonely, they would crawl back on their frustrated way into the suburbs of wealth and loneliness, and long hard work, along Bathurst Street, and along the various street-car tracks of cold, parallel lines of steel and restrictiveness. And Bernice (before Estelle came up) like the others, would close her apartment door behind her, every night; and make certain that the door was locked, and that she was secure inside. She would make certain
to make herself damn safe and sound from men (she always thought of men as Mr. Burrmann); and from the nightmares of men, which haunted and hunted and raped her during the nights of long tension and insomnia. “This is our life, child,” she told Estelle, returning this Sunday afternoon from church. “Child, it is a life o’ snow and whiteness.” By this time, Estelle knew what she meant.

  Bernice saw the great threat that was about to change her life, through having her sister with her, and she said, “Life is a funny, funny thing.” It was some time before she realized the degree of the threat. She did not know, that despite her age, and her set ways before she came to Canada, she would still be flexible enough to adjust her West Indian puritanism to the new Canadian puritanism.

  One day Estelle dropped a hair comb, by mistake. Bernice then realized that she herself had never dropped a comb since she had lived here. And she screamed so hard at Estelle, that Estelle began to shake. But when Bernice caught herself, she was even more fightened than Estelle: (she remembered that once she had dropped a spoon in the kitchen on the tiled floor, and Mrs. Burrmann came screaming into the kitchen, with her hands at her temples, complaining about the din!) It was living alone for so long that made her almost completely independent; and that fashioned her into a tight, selfish orderliness.