Who are these they? They are all the unspeakable, invisible spies, the unnameable people, people who watch you when you do not know they are watching you, do not feel they are, or should, who take it upon themselves to be your sponsors. Beware of sponsors. Beware of liberals too. Beware of patronage. Beware of fools. And beware of Gordon’s Dry Gin.
The only ones you do not have to be wary of . . . I just had a silly thought, the musings of an old man. We can say “beware of,” and be splendidly and syntactically correct. But we dare not say “those whom you should be beware of.” English is such a blasted puzzle. Such like a young woman under thirty-three. A woman under thirty-three, who does not know how to make love when she says she is making love, is as unattractive as bad English. I do not know what that means. And I do not know why I said it. Do you? I am not, as you have guessed, talking about all thirty-three-year-old women, girls, up there in that City of Toronto. I am talking about those who were born in working-class districts, in London, in England, and in the East End in Toronto, of West Indian parents; those who grew up in the slums of Brixton, and do not tell you this, when luck or a football pool brings them to you, unprepared for Canada; and when they speak to you in their Braytish accent, which, if you remember listening to the BBC World Service radio news, and have been taught, as you were, by Englishmen at Harrison College here, you would readily see that their Braytish accent is nothing more refined than the cockney of a braying jackass. They are all lower class. Beware of the lower classes of all races. They spit on you because they grew up spitting on the ground. Spitting was the way of their lives. They were spitted on; and now, they spit on you.
Spitted, spat, spatted . . . spat on. Haaawk! Kah-chew!
Did I ever tell you of Kay? Why would I have done so? You are, after all, still my son, and while you were here, you were still a little boy, and there was no way I could, or should, have spoiled you by these disclosures, and spilled my love life and escapades, in that City of Toronto, onto your youthfulness of innocence. But now at twenty-two not quite yet, according to our customs and ethics and culture, at twenty-one, and therefore a man, not yet peeing a pee that foams the foam of manhood—nevertheless, at twenty-one and being away, abroad, overseas in that city, which gives you a certain privilege, I shall bend the moral and disciplinary precepts you learned so well at Edgehill House, and tell you about Kay.
Kay dressed well in cheap clothes. She loved clothes, but didn’t have the money to accommodate her tastes. Kay talked with a Braytish accent. Kay said, “I am not a Canadian. I was born in Brayton,” meaning Britain. Kay looked intelligent. Kay was affianced to a Barbadian man of unknown social background, but who had some brains, some luck, and—through the emergence of Black Power, and the unachieved importance of Eldridge Cleaver and Black Awareness—was given a scholarship to do gradual work at a university, in the Sociology of Violence. The Sociology of Violence! Did you ever hear anything like this? Beware of poor West Indians who, with changing times, find themselves in Gradual Schools, in second-rate universities, writing second-rate theses in second-rate disciplines. The Sociology of Violence! They are the worst kinds of socialists.
But to get back to Kay. Kay was courting this man, was to be married in the October, when I invited them in the September to tea one afternoon, when he brought Kay along. She was the most beautiful black woman I had ever seen. I served tea and biscuits, grapes and cheese, and then wine. Chateauneuf du Pape. After tea, we had pickled pig’s feet and Scotch. She was very Braytish during tea. She held the teacup the wrong way. With both hands. Cupped. And she said, three times, “I like this silver teapot. These are lovely cups. Chinese? Bone cups? I like these Chinese bone cups. This is very civilized.”
We had been talking about West Indian immigration to Britain and to Canada. She said, “I am Braytish.” It was the second time she had declared her ancestry. When it came time to eat the pig’s feet, she put up her nose. Her nose is rather flat and broad, for that kind of superciliousness. Years later, when I met her sister and her “half-sister,” as she called her, and her mother, all three noses were flat and broad. But those three flat broad noses understood the ancestral dignity of design. They understood pig’s feet also. Not Kay. “I’ve never eaten pig’s feet. I am Braytish,” she said, when her fiancé, embarrassed by the repetition of her exploding airs, told her about souse, probably to take the reservation out of her palate and taste. He looked at me in one of those quick nervous glances. He was mortified, as mortification mortifies a man of low class, and he told her about his “primary proposition” and about the “point he is trying to make.” Beware of “primary propositions” and “points people try to make.” I had welcomed her because I saw only her beauty. Beware of beauty. I saw her good looks. Her appearance. Beware of appearance.
“Girl, don’t be a stupid bitch, do,” he told her, trying to make the point that he disapproved of the passing of her airs. “Woman, what British you talking ’bout? I am doing a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Violence as It Affects the West Indian Diaspora in Britain. And I know. I know people like you been eating nothing but shit like fish and chips in Britain since 1950, when the first wave of immigrants washed up at Southampton. Ackee and bad salt fish. Pig ears. Pig snout. Pig tail and rice. And kiss-me-ass fish and chips! Or were you bought up on Yorkshire pudding? Look, girl, eat the blasted trotters, do!”
That was the first sign I got about Kay’s problem of positive or negative self-identity. She did not tell lies at those times. She allowed people, me and my friends, to make conclusions about her, and spread them, and in turn, believe them, and she kept her silence, knowing all the time they were lies.
She graduated from McMaster in business, we told our friends. She was a trainee at a large commercial bank downtown, we told them. She was born, as I have said, in Brayton, we said. She had a nanny, we said. She went to private school, we said. She called herself a banker, we assured our friends.
She was, in fact, a teller. A junior teller. At a counter. In a small bank. It was not even the main branch. And she was born in Jamaica. She went, however, to a girls’ boarding school in Clarendon.
One day, she called me. She was crying. Her fiancé had met a white Canadian woman, much older than she, much older than he, who had a child nine years old. He told his colleagues in Gradual School, in the Sociology of Violence as It Affects Department, that he was going to marry this white Canadian girl. And he did. And he regretted afterwards. But he never apologized to Kay. Never called. Never wrote a letter to save breach of promise proceedings. Never sent a message. Never sent back the three hundred dollars she borrowed on her credit card to buy his wedding shirt from Stollery’s store at Bloor and Yonge. Was not mortified by the mortification of the breacher of promise, or by the Sociological Violence that her family, the three women with ancestral noses, were preparing to be wreaked on the jilter.
The church had been booked, she said. The reception, in a rec room—what a doleful term!—a rec, could it be a wrecked room, was booked for the reception, she said. Flowers were ordered, she said. Her girlfriends at the bank, all tellers, and of lies, presumably (not one of them a junior trainee), were invited, she said. They had bought their wedding dresses, she said. She had bought her wedding gown too, she said. White, she said. She had one child left back in England, he said. She did not have any offspring in England, she said. Everything was arranged, she said. The “wrecked” room was vacuumed twice by the superintendent of the apartment building, she said. It was situated in a dreary district in the City of Toronto where there were five factories and one slaughterhouse, for cows and pigs. Do you think that’s why she did not like pig’s feet?
I found myself in the ticklish predicament and role of a father figure giving fatherly advice to a young woman I wanted to take to bed. Young, because at that time, I was twice her age, plus three. Her father left her mother when she was two, in Brayton. You were not born then. I saw myself as the main character in the movie made of the novel Lolita, that the vicar
told me about; a novel about a dirty old man, and a dirty little girl of sixteen and of monumental sexy disposition. I saw the inequality and the immorality in our relationship. She was a nymphomaniac. I was steadily on a diet of green bananas and flying-fish roe, prescribed by a woman once my age!
I found myself, after working ten hours six days a week, in a packing company as a packer’s assistant, walking beside a person in blue jeans and white ankle socks, eating small plastic tubes that contained frozen ice of many colors, and artificial sugar. Holding on to a paper napkin, on a Sunday afternoon, to wipe every trace of dripping stickiness from the white hairs of my beard. (I grew a beard then, to help hide from the Immigration and Farm Workers’ people.) So, walking through Queen’s Park in the dead cold of winter, and leaving conflicting, contradictory, unequal pairs of footprints deep in the thick, indifferent snow. Deep, because we used to walk hand in hand, and slow, and talk. What do you talk to a woman half your age, plus three? And who likes Chinese bone teacups, and does not eat pig’s trotters?
“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter so big, man,” Rufus, a fellow who had walk-away from being a farm labourer the same way I did, said to me. The son of a bitch! He had seen us necking on a bench whose colour I could not tell, the snow was so thick. He probably meant, by his salutation, that I should think of incest. Had he said “robbing the cradle,” I would have been happier. Rufus is not more than five years younger than me. He had refused to grow a beard to camouflage his illegality at the time, from the Immigration people.
But she, Kay, twenty-two at the time, made me, by her sensuality, look and behave older than I was. And I, knowing my own age, seeing her look and behave like Lolita in the movie version, increased my consumption of green bananas and flying-fish roe from only Saturdays, to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And a Chinese man in a store down in the Kensington Market had pity on me, and gave me something Chinese to drink. My son, it was Sodom and Gomorrah, after that! Beware of twenty-two-year-old women. Lolita, as you would remember, from the book or the movie, was not the kind of person anyone could accuse of having brains. In the four years that we lived together in the townhouse, I never could accuse her of that. Of other things, maybe. And I accused her of many other things. But never of that. She was, however, infelicitous in other ways which I shall tell you about, at another time; for at the moment, I have to boil some rice with lard oil in it, and a few fish heads, for this growling dog, Hitler. Why did you ever christen this poor, unfortunate dog with the name of Hitler? Were you being intellectual? Symbolical? Or diabolical? Or ironical? Suppose Hitler had won the war? Don’t you see that, all this time now, Hitler would be one dog you could not kick?
The government of brown-skinned and red-skinned men that is governing this place (there is no woman in this Cabinet!) has raised the price of propane, and since I am cooking for a dog—what a dog’s life!—I have to prepare his vittles on a wood fire. The previous colonials who owned this house, before it passed into our family, through whoring and prostitution and piracy, in 18-something, were smart enough to build a solid iron grate, with a stone fireplace, so I shall be bending over a fire, blowing my guts out, to give it wind and make it burn, and cook the rice and red snapper heads, for this dog, Hitler, as if I was cooking for a person.
It is only nine o’clock in the night here, on a Friday night. A good night. But it could be after midnight, the blackness is so thick. Days in this part of the almost forgotten world are too short. When they get short, and the nights long, the lawyer-fellow and the vicar and me would deal a few hands of five-card stud. Sometimes, we play “no limit,” sometimes, ten dollars a raise: highest raise, fifty dollars, and raise as much as your little heart desires. These last short days with the long nights, the vicar has been lucky. The lawyer-fellow had to tell him that the parishioners lucky too, because that demon’s hands won’t be in the collection plate! We three, old men, retired from life and from the tribulations of the young, with money in the bank and time to spare . . . what more—save health, praise God—do we want? But where you are, in that city at this time of year, September and autumn, the days fade more gradually, more romantically, though faster, into night than they do in June, July, and August.
So, before it gets blacker than that afternoon in 1910, with the May Dust, I still have to read the Good Book. I am reading from the front and going steadily to the back, with the help of some strong, stiff snaps of Mount Gay rum and water.
Don’t ever feel you are too much of an academic to read the Good Book. And do not let “blackness” or the colonial syndrome make you feel that the only people who get something mentally nourishing from the Good Book is white people, racists, and Jews. The Good Book is beyond culture. I don’t know who wrote it. And I don’t care. It is like the air, the skies, the wind, and the blue sea. It is attainable. So, even if you have to wrap its cover in brown paper, and hide the title from some of the radicals and semi-atheists in Trinity College, in order not to be called unsophisticated and be called a fundamentalist—beware of fundamentalists, especially fundamentalist women under twenty-three—still do it. You can hide and read. You can’t read and hide. As a matter of truth, you should enter that kind of meditation, in the privacy of your conscience.
I have finished with Genesis again—not a bad piece of writing—the vicar told me so, and I have to agree with him—and am now moving through Exodus.
“Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils. And he did eat and drink and rose up and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.”
When I read these words in the evening, in this tropical part of the world, sitting under my mango tree, with Hitler beside me, and a rum and water on the bench beside me, with the stillness of the air, the smell of flowers, and the smells of all these polluting fumes from cars and buses and lorries, with the crickets chirping and the mosquitoes humbugging me, I still can’t help feeling that the meaning of these words is more immediate and precise in this circumstance of climate. I read that same passage once kneeling down in St. Paul’s Anglican Church on Bloor Street, just before you get to Jarvis, after you pass Church Street, one week before I was to face the Immigration people with regards to deporting me, or letting me leave on my own two oars, in case I wanted to creep back into Canada. And all I felt was that I was reading the Bible, praying for help, in order to understand, in less than twenty-four hours, the economics of my situation and the versatility of my fabricating a story to impress the Immigration officer with. I felt nothing more. It could have been like reading the Telegram newspaper, which was one of the best pieces of journalism ever sold in that city. But here in this island, with the vicar living beside me, with all the poverty, dead dogs, and dead crappauds in the road, untouched and unmoved for days, with all the poorness and poverty and political pillage by the government of the brown-skins and the red-skins, I feel that Moses or Mr. Genesis had just written the words for me personally to read, and had intended these words specifically for my ears. I never got this feeling of recognition, this pointing out of respect, when I read that verse, that Sunday morning in St. Paul’s Anglican Church. It was damn cold too. Minus twenty-something. It was January. It is ninety-eight here.
And don’t ever let me hear that you have become so modern, that you have started reading the new edition of the Good Book, which reads like the constipated prose of that American writer Ernest Hemmighway. Read it in the King James Version, not the Oxford edition. Me and the vicar came to words, and nearly came to blows over this same argument. Christianity is contemporary, he say, as if he was talking to a child, or was talking about manners and deportment.
Listen to how beautiful these words are: “And tarry with him a few days, until thy brother’s fury turn away.” Where but in the King James would you hear language as pretty as that?
Only a person with Kay’s understanding would want such language modernized, for easier comprehension. The infelicities of the young . . .
I don’t know how and why I got started on Kay
. But having begun, you shall hear the end of that part of my life. I do intend, however, that the end of my life shall be slightly postponed. At seventy-one, I intend, as I have said, to begin at Genesis, and word for word, word by word, worm and work my way through, until I reach Revelations and Concordance. Another poetic word! I feel that I have reached concordance with you, my son, in the writing of this letter, at this stage, for after Hitler has been fed his rice and fish heads—hoping that no bones are caught in his swallow-pipe!—and I have read a few chapters of Exodus, I shall retire for the night, and join you again, soon, in a concordance of love and of deep nostalgia. I hope to complete both: this letter, and the Good Book, and I wonder which of the three remaining duties of my remaining days shall have been dispatched first? The Good Book? This letter? Or my life?
The feelings which I have been expressing to you, and which I have been expressing particularly with more emotion and honesty than normal, are taking hold of me, because all of a sudden, you are not here, not here in the big old house, whose emptiness echoes as if it was a rock quarry and I myself dynamiting coral stone. It is an old house. And it is larger, larger than for one man who spends almost every hour of the day and night inside it, except when I am next door with those two robbers, the vicar and the lawyer-fellow, alone. But it is a happy house, a warm house, a museum of memories and events and things which have been ourselves and our past and our aspirations. Your absence gives me the joyful opportunity, both to view these things and to rearrange them. Your absence, I hope, is merely temporary. Four years of study in that City of Toronto, which at this time of year must be forgetting the life and love of summer.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 78