Emancipation Day

by Wayne Grady

  After dressing—Jack had brought some civilian clothes from his mother’s house—they would walk to Ouellette Avenue, Windsor’s elm-lined main street, and turn up towards the river, looking into shop windows and wandering through dime stores, killing time before going to Jack’s mother’s for lunch. She forced herself to move lingeringly. They were on holiday, a kind of honeymoon, and she wanted to enjoy it. She would pick up some small item in a shop, a scarf or a comb, and he would stand beside her jiggling coins in his pocket.

  “Do you want to buy it?” he’d ask her. “Go ahead.”

  “No, thank you, darling,” she would say, putting it down, trying to keep her voice light and her spirits up. “Maybe we should send Iris a scarf?”

  “Why, is it her birthday?”

  “No. Never mind.”

  Close to the river the shops became smaller and cheaper and the streets more congested. It reminded her of the St. John’s waterfront, only here the sidewalks were filled with coloured people instead of dockworkers, people with varying degrees of the Windsor tan, as Jack had once called it. She had seen Negroes in St. John’s, of course, merchant mariners from cargo ships. They came ashore for a day or two and then left. Coloured people in Windsor behaved more like they belonged to the place. And here the waterfront was a river. Rivers were unfriendly, she thought. She was used to water coming towards her like a greeting; here it swept past as though it hadn’t noticed her at all, dismissing her the way Jack did.

  There was a dirt lane at the bottom of Ouellette, leading down to the ferry dock, and a path running east with the flow of the river, with a wooden railing to keep people from falling over. When they reached it, she leaned against the top rail and closed her eyes, breathing in the wind and the rusty cries of gulls and the warm autumn sun pressing against her bare skin. When she opened her eyes again, she was surprised to see a city shimmering like a mirage on the other side: Detroit, it must be, the Arsenal of America.

  Jack took her hand and they walked back up Ouellette on the east side. In one of the shops she bought him a fedora, and he wore it pushed back on his head, looking more like Frank Sinatra than ever: people turned to look at him, and as the afternoon passed his mood improved.

  Eventually they came to a large park, with a low, black-painted chain fence dividing it from the sidewalk. Paths ran among shade trees, bordered by neatly tended flower beds and wooden benches. It looked cool and safe.

  “What park is this?” she asked.

  “Jackson Park.”

  “Can we sit for a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said, “if you want to be mugged.”

  A shadow had crept into Jack’s voice. Why? Why did something as innocent as walking in a park cause him to scowl? He was the touchiest person alive. Maybe if she jollied him enough, said the right things, avoided saying the wrong things—like mentioning his father, or his mother’s use of face powder—the old Jack would return and they would get on with their real lives. But she never knew when the next crash would come, and the strain on her nerves was wearing her down.

  Soon he’d be out of the Navy, though. This visit would end, Jack would be demobilized, and she’d be on her way back home to her family in St. John’s.

  “But we won’t be mugged if you’re with me, darling,” she said. “You’ll protect me, won’t you?” And she drew him into the park.

  JACK

  The grass was trampled at the Ouellette end, nobody stayed on the paths, probably because they were muddy and traced with bicycle tire marks. And why did dogs always shit on paths? Vivian didn’t seem to notice, even though she was the one wearing white shoes. He guessed she also didn’t see the squares of waxed paper caught in the shrubbery, or the coloured couples entwined on the benches in broad daylight. She walked with her arm through his, looking up at the trees as though they were on a country lane.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” she said, “how one tree can be perfectly still and the tree right beside it is trembling in the wind?”

  “Just like you and me,” he said.

  They sat beside the fountain, downwind of the spray so the freshened air blew over them, and then they walked again. They could hear traffic from Tecumseh Boulevard. When they reached the sunken garden without being mugged, she led him down the steps. Flower beds lined the paved walkways and she stopped at each one, stooping to sniff or to cradle a bloom in her cupped fingers. Masses of rose petals fell off into her hands, and she lifted them to him. “Just smell their bouquet,” she said, but they reminded him of his mother’s face powder and he turned his head away. Through the trees they could see Kennedy Collegiate, which backed onto the park from McDougall Street.

  “My old high school,” he said, nodding at the back of the turreted, red-brick building. “We used to call it the Castle.”

  “Were you a good student?” she asked him.

  “Oh, sure, straight As. Captain of the baseball team, all that.” He stared at the deserted diamond behind the school.

  “Actually,” he said, “I didn’t finish grade nine.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had to help my father.”

  “Building houses?”

  “The war was on, the Depression was over. Anyone who didn’t have a job had joined up, so wages were high. Dad couldn’t afford to hire anyone except coloureds, so I quit school and worked for him as a plasterer for next to nothing, room and board. Didn’t you ever work in your father’s store in Ferryland?”

  “No,” she said. No, of course she wouldn’t have.

  “That’s why I joined the Navy,” he said. “I got tired of working for nothing.”

  He could see this information puzzled her. He had told her his father owned a big company and could have afforded to hire lots of workers, but now she’d seen enough to know that that hadn’t been entirely true, and he had to give some other reason for his leaving Windsor. What he’d told her might have been true. Just as it might have been true that he had gone to Kennedy Collegiate, which was an all-white school, instead of Patterson, which was mixed. He should have gone to Kennedy, so what was the harm in saying he did? He knew his family didn’t believe he was white, but he believed he was, and that was all that mattered. He didn’t know how it had happened and he didn’t care, but he knew it was true. You only had to look at him to see it was true.

  He hadn’t thought about Jackson Park in years. When he was a kid he’d believed the park had been named, like him, after his grandfather, Andrew Jackson Lewis, and that, although the park didn’t exactly belong to him, he had a special right to be there. As he grew up, Jackson Park had been one of the few places where he felt he belonged. In the summer, when the other kids on his street gathered there to play baseball, he used to wander to the pavilion, climb up to the grandstand and look out over the gardens, imagining himself conducting an orchestra or singing into a microphone. He preferred singing because a singer stood before both the orchestra and the crowd, and both sides looked up to him. People strolling along the paths would wave at him, coloured couples in their Sunday clothes, unaware that they were waving goodbye.

  The big celebration in Jackson Park was always August the first, Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire. When he was little, he’d thought slavery was illegal only on that day, and that the rest of the year people could treat coloureds any way they liked, since they did. His parents would dress him up and give him a nickel. The park, his park, would smell of horseshit and barbecued pork, and there would be gambling tents and watermelon tables and more coloured people than he’d ever seen in one place before. His father would park their car on the grass just off Tecumseh Boulevard, next to other cars with licence plates from all over the northern States, from Indiana and Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. By nightfall everyone would be drunk just to show how free they were, and Benny and his friends would swig stolen beer and check car doors and watch out for the police, who mostly weren’t around. He remembered his father singing in the grandstand with t
he Garden City Quartet, and Alvina, who was barely into her teens, wearing high heels and lipstick and smoking cigarettes given to her by men in tan suits and wingtips, men with southern drawls and skin so dark that if they shut their eyes at night Jack was sure they’d disappear.

  In the morning there would be blood on the pathways, torn shirts in the garbage cans, men and women sprawled under picnic tables. Before going to First Baptist, he and Benny would collect as many bottles as they could fit into their wagon and take them down to the sheeny man, who gave them a dime a load. That was during the Depression, when you could still buy something with a dime. He’d always felt as though the dime, earned only once a year, was a gift from his grandfather. At First Baptist the pastor would preach about Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities on the banks of the Jordan River, as near to one another as Windsor was to Detroit, destroyed by Jehovah in a shower of fire and brimstone for the wickedness of their ways. What that wickedness consisted of was never spelled out, but the reference to Emancipation Day was clear and the congregation squirmed in their seats.

  When he turned eight and found out that Jackson Park had been named for an old mayor, he felt as though he’d been kicked out of it. The knowledge had lowered his grandfather in his eyes. Of course, he’d thought, why would anyone name a park after a barber?

  WILLIAM HENRY

  “How’s things at home?” William Henry asked Benny. Benny was sitting across from him in the tavern, reading a newspaper. If you saw a person reading, it meant he was bored, and William Henry didn’t want Benny to get bored and leave just yet. He raised two fingers to Fast Eddy and four draughts appeared on the table. Benny took a drink from one of them and lit a cigarette. William Henry relaxed.

  “Okay, I guess,” Benny said. “Jackson brung home his new wife. She’s a bit confused, though, if you ask me. First time she took a look at me I could hear the gears whirrin’ away in her head. I don’t think Jackson told her a thing about anything.”

  “White girl?”

  “White as a mushroom.”

  “They must not get any sun in Newfoundland.”

  William Henry took a long pull. Jackson didn’t just want to be white, he thought he was white. How he explained that to himself or to his new bride William Henry didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t explain it, maybe he just brassed it out. Weren’t many other ways he could do it. William Henry remembered the time when Jackson was fifteen or sixteen, working summers at that mattress factory on Walker Road, where they didn’t hire coloureds. Jackson just walked in and applied like he was white, like he had the right to work wherever the hell he wanted, and they hired him just like that. One day, William Henry was walking down the street and he seen Jackson and his boss talking on the sidewalk in front of the factory, smoking and laughing like they was old friends, and William Henry had had a good mind to go up to Jackson and say something like, “Yo’ mama wants you to buy her some cracked corn on your way home, we gonna have us some fried mash for supper.” That would’ve been the end of that job. But he didn’t do it. Jackson seen him coming and his face froze, like he was expecting something like that, and his eyes drifted off, and William Henry just kept walking by, didn’t say nothing, didn’t even nod to his own son. Pretended he didn’t know him. Did him a favour, just like William Henry done during that riot in Detroit. Let him go. How many times in his life had he said that about Jackson? Just let the boy go.

  “Look at this,” Benny said, pushing the Free Press across to his father. “Says they doin’ some work on the old Fox.”

  William Henry loved talking about the Fox Theatre, his moment of glory. It pleased him that Benny had brought it up. He had a big outfit then, six people working for him, took them a week just to put up the scaffolding. That was 1925, the year Jackson was born. He shook his head. Whenever there’s sun there has to be shadow somewhere.

  “Let me see that,” he said.

  Detroit was safer in them days, he could give Benny a nickel and let him walk down the street without thinking twice about it. He always come back with something different, a twist of licorice, a balsa-wood airplane, a stick of gum. Jackson stayed at home with his mother and Alvina. That was maybe the trouble with Jackson, he’d been raised by women. They let him keep his attitude, let him think too highly of himself.

  When the Fox opened things were good for a while. Lots of contracts, new truck from Labadie’s. They even almost moved out of the Settlement, had their eye on a house on Church Street, their first dream home, which they could’ve got someone white to buy for them and when they moved in probably nobody would’ve said anything about them being coloured because Josie and Benny were almost light enough to pass and they had Jackson, who was lighter than all of them. Anybody started asking questions they could just stick Jackson out on the front porch in his carriage. Jackson would’ve felt right at home growing up in that neighbourhood. Things would surely have been different. When the crash came in ’29, all the offers dried up and Labadie repossessed the truck and the house on Church Street got sold to somebody else for under five hundred dollars. Like he said, no sun without shadow.

  “They should get you to do that work,” Benny said, pointing at the article.

  “I couldn’t do that kind of work today,” William Henry said. “I’m too old.”

  “You ain’t that old,” said Benny.

  “What’s that mean? How old ain’t I?”

  “You ain’t too old to put up gypsum board.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m too old to want to.”

  William Henry’s father hadn’t wanted to cut hair anymore, either, that was probably what killed him. When the old man died, William Henry was Jackson’s age, it just struck him. The old man hadn’t been living at home, either, spent most of his time down here at the British-American. Something to think about. That man sure cut a lot of hair in his day, though. First he had a place on McDougall, then a place on Albert, then he got a chair in a big barbershop in the basement of City Hall, mirrors on all four walls, six chairs going all the time. When Harlan turned eighteen and said he wanted to be a barber, too, they took this place in the British-American. That’s when something went south, he didn’t know what it was, his father just got tired of cutting hair. Maybe it was the people who come into the shop wanting their hair cut just so, not the way he done it last time. Even customers Harlan had had for thirty years started bringing in pictures of movie stars from magazines, wanting their hair to look like this one or that one. And when they got home and looked in a mirror and didn’t see a movie star, the next time they went somewhere else to get their hair cut. It was the same with plastering. You spent your life getting good at something, you thought people appreciated what you did for them, and then some new way come along that looks like hell but is easier and cheaper and suddenly it’s so long, old man, we don’t need you anymore. Gypsumboard, he wouldn’t touch it. Don’t talk to me about loyalty, William Henry thought. My own son taught me all I need to know about loyalty.

  “Why’d he bring his wife here, d’you think?” William Henry asked, more to himself than to Benny.

  “Wanted to show her off, more’n likely,” said Benny, taking the paper back.

  VIVIAN

  On their fourth night in Windsor, Vivian and Jack crossed the river to hear some music.

  “You wanted to see Detroit, didn’t you, doll?” Jack said to her.

  What she wanted was to meet Jack’s father, but she didn’t dare bring that up again. And she did want to see Detroit. It would be her third country in a week. She was seeing the world, even if the world wasn’t what she thought it would be. Maybe Iris was right, after all.

  They ate supper in Benny’s apartment, a nice stew she’d made on top of the stove, then she and Jack walked to his friend’s house on Victoria Avenue, a couple of streets over from Ouellette. “A better part of town,” Jack said as they walked, pointing out the houses and lawns and shade trees. It was starting to feel like fall, the days were shorter but still warm enough that she did
n’t need a sweater. “Peter’s father’s a doctor. We were in the cadet band together.”

  “Did he join the Navy, too?” she asked him.

  “Who?”

  “Peter.”

  “No.” But he seemed uncertain about it.

  They walked in silence for a while under the elms and chestnuts. Maybe he was afraid that the war had changed his friend as much as it had changed him.

  Jack rang the bell and a woman came to the door.

  “Hello, Della,” Jack said when she opened it, and it took Vivian a moment to realize that this was Peter’s mother. In a slightly flared skirt and silk blouse, she looked very pretty, and young enough to be an older sister. Still, Vivian wasn’t sure if she should call her Della or Mrs. Barnes.

  “Yes,” Della said, “do come in. Peter will be down in a minute.” She seemed flustered. She didn’t appear to know what to do with her hands. They were standing in a large, open foyer, just inside the door, with stairs at one end and large, solid wooden doors taking up almost the whole of one wall. “You must be Vivian,” Della said. “I’m Della. How do you do?” They shook hands rather vigorously. “How are you liking Windsor so far?”