The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “You know too blasted much. You must be working obeah, that you can read my mind.”

  The five women were sitting again. The wind came through the windows in a slight gust, and for a moment, it was as if Christophe had fixed the air conditioners.

  “Every year. Child, when you see Christmas come and the twenty-eighth is here, I longing for home. But I won’t go home before Christmas. Christmas isn’t Christmas unless you have a tree and snow.”

  “Child, all over the West Indies nowadays is trees, and real Christmas trees too! Not the artificial ones we had in our days!”

  “Snow too!”

  “Snow too? What the hell I hearing?”

  “You didn’t know? Didn’t hear? For years now, the tourist board people in Barbados been importing snow from Canada. For years now.”

  “You don’t mean the tourisses from Canada? You not referring to white people?”

  “I am no prejudice. I talking about the snow. I understand it comes from Toronto, whiching—”

  “And Montreal!”

  “—whiching is the best snow in North America.”

  “Who’s next, my cherries?”

  Christophe removed the plastic bib from the neck of the woman who was now almost two hours in his chair. The smoke from his cigarette rose gently. He put the cigarette to his lips; pursed his lips as if he was about to kiss the woman dismounting clumsily from the high chair; put the cigarette in the glass ashtray; and said, “Who’s next, my cherries?”

  The five women looked at one another. They had had lunch together at the Four Seasons Hotel nearby. They had had two martinis each. And when they arrived, giggling, after discussing their children and their families and their husbands, as they did each time they had lunch, once in two weeks, they were fortified with food and drink, satisfied to wait the long wait in the old, hard, plastic-bottomed chairs. The plastic made their dresses stick to their bottoms and they could feel the lumps where the upholstery had collapsed against their soft well-cared-for skin.

  “You have a child coming from school soon. You go.”

  “Charmaine can look after herself, man.”

  “You’re not concern about that little girl walking the street and going home to an empty house with all this worthlessness you read about in Toronto?”

  “Well, child, I would never allow my Suzianne to enter an empty house. Nor go to the mall with her friends. Some o’ these friends, I tell you . . .”

  “Charmaine’s the same age as that child the police had downstairs a few minutes ago.”

  “Talking about bringing up children, do you believe we bring up our children better than them?”

  “Well, you getting me mad as hell now! The evidence speaks for itself.”

  One amongst them, who had been quiet, now spoke up. “How you could compare them with we, with us? The facts speak for themselves! If it is only once, in my twenty-something years living in Toronto, I have lived to see the day when a police go in a store and don’t bring out a black boy or a black girl, but a damn white girl. And all o’ you spending your time taking up for that girl? I haven’t heard nobody amongst you, in the two or three hours we been sitting down waiting for Mr. Chris to fix our hair, nobody, not one of you haven’t uttered a word in support of the police! Not one of you!”

  “Wait! She fooping a police?”

  “She’s a married woman, child.”

  “Her husband would break her arse if he only heard!”

  “Are you sleeping with one o’ Metro’s finest, on the sly, girl?”

  “The girl is a little whore!”

  “She was unfaired by the police.”

  “Not the police. The man who own the store is who called the police. Blame him. He could be the son of a bitch.”

  “Who’s next? Cherries? Who’s next?”

  “We’re talking business, man.”

  “Just a minute, Chris, man.”

  “The fact that it was a white girl and not one of ours, well, that answers the question. We raise ours better than them.”

  “We had just moved to Pickering, in the house we’re living in now, and it was a day like this, in late July; no, it must have been in August, ’cause we had just come back from watching the Caribana parade on University Avenue, and—”

  “You see? You see? Christ, they couldn’t let us go on to parade on University, ’cause University Avenue is too good for black people, so they moved us down beside the lake, where nobody can’t see us, whilst they leave right-wingers like the Shriners to walk all over this city on tricycles as if they are still blasted kids! You see? You see?”

  “Nevermindthat!”

  “Why never mind that?”

  “Nevermindthat! We had just moved into Pickering and my daughter was nine, my son was six, and my other daughter was eight, and we had just got home from sweating-up ourselves in the Caribana parade, and it was so hot and we had nothing cool in the house to drink, so me and my husband—”

  “The cop you was seeing on the sly?”

  “And fooping with? I did-hear that.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Me, child? I can’t do it by myself!”

  “Was nothing in the house cool to drink, as I was saying, so we send the eight-year-old to the convenience store, just across the street, in the mall, to buy a large bottle o’ pop, ’cause we had just got a bottle o’ Mount Gay rum from a girlfriend who had gone home on holiday, and me and Percy opening this forty-ounce and waiting for the child to come back from the plaza, and when we hear the shout, these blasted sireens going like hell in front our house, and four police in three cars jump out and my child in the back seat of one o’ them police cars, handcuff. Well, be-Jesus Christ, you shoulda seen how my husband react!”

  “No!”

  “Good dear!”

  “Oh God! This happened to you?”

  “And you never mentioned a word of this before?”

  “Some things you have to keep to yourself, eh?”

  “No! Not a’ eight-year-old child, handcuff, in the back of a police cruiser! No!”

  Christophe struck three matches before he could light his mentholated cigarette. The smoke shot through his nostrils without sound, in two long piercing white streams. The cars outside the windows were moving fast. Horns were blown in exasperation. And the women could hear a few complaining voices. When the cars passed they could hear the footsteps of people on the street, and the scratching of the broom as the store owner swept the sidewalk, and then they heard the scratching of a match on a box, and the inhaling of the first lungful of cigarette. It was one of the two assistant women hairdressers, smoking a Salem.

  “Go on. Pass her a fresh Kleenex to dry her eyes.”

  “My eight-year-old. We send her to Sunday school every Sunday. From the time she was two, every Sunday as the Lord send, she was in that Sunday school class. We send her to piano lessons from the time she was five, and last year, taking the advice of a friend of ours, she’s been taking ballet lessons, and—”

  “That’s the way we bring up our children!”

  “And her ballet teachers at the Ballet School just down there on a side street off Church, her ballet teachers tell us that the child have a future in pirouettes. And, don’t laugh, that August afternoon at five, four police have my child handcuff, in the back of a police cruiser, and all the neighbours looking out and pointing. When we moved up there, four months pass before the one on our left said a word to me, in regards to good morning or good evening; and the afternoon my husband brought home the new car, you should have seen them staring from behind their curtains. We shouldn’t have those things. We shouldn’t live the way they live. We shouldn’t.”

  “What your husband did?”

  “Pass her another Kleenex.”

  “It’s too sad. It was too sad that August afternoon. It was too sad. And too shameful. I can’t talk about it no more.”

  “Don’t then. We know everything you were going to say. It happens to all of us. We know.
You don’t have to say any more, ’cause it is the history and the experience of each and every one of us in this room.”

  “Well, who’s next?”

  “My mind is still on that white girl.”

  “Are you her godmother?”

  “She’s a child.”

  “A child? She’s a white girl. And she is the daughter of the four police in those three cruisers who molested this woman’s eight-year-old daughter and handcuff her. She is the daughter of that landlord who didn’t rent me that musty, stinking basement apartment thirty years ago, in 1961, on Walmer Road. She is the daughter of the woman at the Eaton Centre who had the security guard come up in my face accusing me of shoplifting, a decent person like me. She is the future mother of all the racists we come across in this city. She is just herself.”

  “Is a hard sentence, though.”

  “At least, she’s a thief.”

  “I won’t put that judgement on her, though, ’cause as I said, when my husband saw those four police having my daughter in the back of that cruiser, handcuff, well . . .”

  “Sins of the fathers, my dear. Sins of the fathers. I didn’t say it, and like bloody hell, I didn’t cause it! You can find it in your Bible, if you ever read the Bible.”

  “And what sins have we committed in this place, since all of us were living here, coming from various parts of the West Indies? Name me one. Go right ahead and name me one. Name me one. The only sins we committed in this place, is obeying the blasted law. And from what I see, there is one law for us, and one for them.”

  “We raise our kids better than them.”

  “There isn’t no argument ’gainst that, as far’s I concerned.”

  “We’re sitting down here in this hairdressing place, in at Christophe, five middle-class bitches with not one worry in the world, except if our husbands going-crawl home before three in the morning, from cattawouling.”

  “And with some o’ these same white bitches!”

  “Look at the five of us! I dress well. She dresses well. You dress well. Look at the dress that one is wearing. Five well-off bitches like us, with two-car garage, educated, decent, and have more education than most women, than the average Canadian white woman. And with all this, we have to walk-’bout Toronto with our head down, and—”

  “Shit! Not my head!”

  “Christ, I looks them right in their blasted eye!”

  “I know, I know. Individually. But I’m speaking as a rule, as a general rule. You know what I mean. Back home, we’d be ruling the roost. We’d be women with men and husbands that make decisions and run things. But here, if it isn’t some bloody parking lot attendant who hasn’t been here for six months, and can’t even talk English, if it is not some woman in the Eaton Centre, and don’t mention Holt Renfrew or some o’ them places in Yorkville Village, if it is not some damn racist cop, if it isn’t some woman in a beat-up Toyota, while you or she are driving a BMW, or I behind the wheel of my husband’s Benz, anything, any-blasted-body, we always have to explain some thing to them. Explain ourselves. Explain.”

  “My husband been driving a ’68 Chev for ten years and would come home and curse me, and say how the cops in Toronto are the best. Last year, the son of a bitch got his hand on some insurance money from a policy we had take out fifteen years ago, and he bought this second-hand Mercedes-Benz I just referred to. It spends more time in the garage ’round the corner on Yorkville than parked in front our house. He bought a notebook from Grand & Toy. A black little notebook. Guess what he puts down in that little black book?”

  “’Course, he puts down the mileage!”

  “Or the miles!”

  “What’s the difference? Miles is mileage!”

  “Not in my book, cherry,” Christophe said.

  “Every week. After ten o’clock. When he gets off the Don Valley Parkway. A cop. A cop in his arse! Three times a week, a cop pulls him over. As an average.”

  “They want him.”

  “Sending him a message.”

  “To go back to the ’68 Chev.”

  “And here we are worrying about a little white girl that got picked up for shoplifting from a Mac’s Milk. Ain’t that something? We five black bitches, in a black hairdressing saloon, sitting down this lovely summer afternoon, worrying over a little white thief!”

  “Harsh, though! Too harsh, cherry,” Christophe said.

  “How would you know? You ever given birth?”

  “You don’t have to be a woman to know that.”

  “A woman is a woman.”

  “I suppose you gonna say next that we have the same thing between our legs!”

  “I wasn’t getting personal, I was barely stating that a woman is a woman, and a mother is a mother, and—”

  “A child is a child. Is that what you saying? That the one out there a few hours ago, arrested by the police, is the same as my eight-year-old? I bet you, I bet you anything, that they took her a little way down the street from the Mac’s Milk, and let her go, and that poor man who owns the store will never get satisfaction for whatever it is she took.”

  “What she took?”

  “What she could’ve taken to justify the way the police came, with sireens blaring?”

  “That’s a strange comment coming from a black woman like you! With your eight-year-old?”

  “What was her crime? We sitting down here all this time, and nobody knows what is her crime?”

  “Stealing!”

  “Who’s next? This is my last time, cherries!”

  “And being white.”

  “Suppose, just suppose, they took her away for her own good. Suppose it’s the owner of the store down those stairs who did that to her?”

  They could hear the footsteps coming up the stairs. Another customer, probably. The breeze was cooler now. No one snatched a white tissue from the jumbo-sized Kleenex box. The thin smoke from Christophe’s cigarette moved in their faces. One woman sneezed.

  “Bless you!”

  “Sinus?”

  “Allergies.”

  “Is these blasted cigarettes Christophe smoking!”

  The footsteps stopped. All of them turned to look. It was a young white girl. No more than sixteen. They continued looking, not speaking, not believing their eyes. In the short silence that was heavy as the earlier humidity in the room, they went back over the scene down below on the street, the police cruisers and the policemen with their hands on their guns, and the short store owner in his stained white apron sweeping the dust from the entrance of his store. And when they saw her, a gasp came from their mouths, and they were paralyzed for a moment. And then they all rushed to the little child. A newspaper was in her hand. She was sixteen perhaps, as in their recollection; but her appearance rendered her helpless, unprotected, and much smaller, a child in their eyes; and she seemed unable to move another step up the stairs. She had stopped at the round, hand-polished newel ball at the head of the banister. Christophe had tied a red ribbon round the newel last Christmas Eve, as decoration, and it had remained there ever since.

  Her face was red. Red from the colour of the blows that had struck her face. Her lips were thicker than the lips of any of the five women. Her face had no expression. At first, the women could not tell whether it was fright or shame.

  They were sure that what they would hear from her mouth would be tales of pain, of assault. The thought went through each of their minds at the same piercing moment and, with five slight variations, their minds sped to their homes, where they could see their own children. She looked as if she could be drugged. As if someone had given her something to drink that contained a drug. They did not believe she had taken it herself, by herself. They believed she was too innocent, too nice a little girl. She was a child. A newspaper was in her hand.

  “Lisa!”

  She held the afternoon Star.

  Christophe said the name; and said it two more times. The third time he called her name, it was astonishment turning to unbelief. “Lisa?”


  “You know this girl?”

  “She’s his niece. She delivers my paper.”

  “The corner-store man?”

  “Mr. Macdonald’s niece, Lisa. She lives with him.”

  “This girl’s in trouble, Chris, you can’t see that? We have to do something for this poor child, man.”

  “Come, come,” one of the women said. “Come.”

  “Ask her what happened.”

  “Not now, man, not now. This is an emergency.”

  They half-carried her, surprised at her solid weight, to the chair where the last customer had sat; and they turned the tray with the shampoos and the pins and the curlers and the straightening agents to one side, and they placed two soft cushions on the black leatherette bottom of the chair, to give growth and height to her body; and someone in the meantime was filling a sink with hot water; and the steam was rising higher than Christophe’s cigarette smoke; he was holding a cigarette at the corner of his mouth, with one eye closed against the sting of the mentholated smoke; and one woman stood behind Lisa and held her gently against the hard black leatherette back of the chair; and one woman stood on each side, rubbing a hand over Lisa’s chest which was rising and falling as if she were running from something, while the remaining two women took turns testing the heat of the water pouring out of the hot-water tap, soaking white towels and testing the heat against their faces and gauging Lisa’s ability to withstand the steam.

  The hot towel made her start. And close her eyes. And it was then that they saw bruises on her beautiful skin. The towel moved over her cheeks, and she winced. She closed her eyes each time the towel touched her, but they could see the blueness of her ears. They could see the holes pierced into her ears, for earrings. They could see her teeth, pink against the strong fluorescent light pouring down from the ceiling; and when they shifted their position, running the warm towel round her neck, her teeth became sparkling white. They could see a scratch at the bottom of her neck. “Take off her dress.” She still had the newspaper in her left hand.

  “Not the whole dress, she’s a child, after all. Just lower the blouse.”

  But someone raised the hem of her dress, and they saw it. For a moment, they stopped passing the lukewarm towel round her neck. They took the newspaper out of her hand, and handed it to Christophe, and he dropped it on the floor. And the women who stood at the back of the tall leatherette chair kept their hands on her wrists and on her left shoulder. Christophe stubbed his cigarette into a jar of hair pomade. The grease embedded the cigarette into itself. It was blood on her leg. On one leg.