Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Whitney French

  Toronto, Ontario

  February 2018

  Everyday People

  What Will You Tell Your Children?

  — Simone Makeba Dalton —

  We were nearly drowned by a sea of blue and white.

  Donna, Akeisha, Stephanie, two Crystals, and I. Except there was no sea, but 800 or so uniformed girls dressed in blue-and-white checkered tunics over white short-sleeved shirts. With bobbing and laughing bodies, they rushed out of cramped classrooms from the left, the right, the top, and the bottom, to the lunchtime bell of our primary school.

  We could see our principal, Mrs. Daniel, lording over her charges. She looked precarious as ever; her large bottom, cocked high, tested the strength of her stiletto heels. We could hear the competing choruses of “Brown Girl in the Ring” begin as we pressed ourselves against the locked gates of our school. We could also see the busy two-lane carriageway with its rum shops on either side beckoning beyond.

  Have you ever seen a rum shop in the daylight? How the cracks in the paint are no longer hidden by the marquee lights? How the patrons spilling out of its doors all wear the same shade of shame across their faces?

  We were tall for our ages of nine and ten, though I, at four feet eleven inches, was the shortest of the clique. We often stood with a girlish closeness, shoulder to shoulder, arms at times interlaced. The inherent ‘we’ disappeared into the singularity of sameness—same two plaits, same bony legs, same prepubescent voice.

  Girls were allowed through the school’s gates before 3 p.m. on two occasions: to make the Stations of the Cross in May, or with a signed note from a parent. Earlier that day, I had shown Mrs. About-To-Fall-Over my permission slip. The single foolscap sheet was a familiar shade of yellow. It reminded me of corn, just before it’s roasted by the lick of red flames from a coal pot. My mother’s penmanship defied the faint blue, single-spaced, ruled lines of the page, each cursive letter taller than the next. Her crowning glory, the swooping E.D. of her initials, finished her request. I was to be let out of school that day. My father was taking me to lunch.

  There is nothing unusual about a father taking a daughter to lunch. But it was unusual for that father to be mine. Unusual for him to be there, in Trinidad, a place where he was born but did not live. He lived where a Red Rocket takes thousands of people to work, school, and play. Sometimes the faces of those people are twisted in mournful ways. That’s how you know it’s winter.

  I had seen him fewer times than I had blown out candles on my birthday cake. I knew him from Oh Henry! chocolate bars and stuffed animals he left at my grandmother’s house. He sometimes brought clothes for me, though they were never quite big enough. Once, he brought a roll of used pens and pencils kept together with a rubber band. I wanted to use the pens in school the next term, even though we weren’t allowed to write with ballpoint pens yet.

  When he approached the gate, we fanned out like dominos. Donna was the first to speak. Her “that’s” became “dais” when she asked, “That’s your daddy? He’s so handsome!” She was equal parts admiration and awe. Donna’s father was always at the dinner table whenever I was invited to share a meal at her house. What might have come across as imposing from his muscular fireman’s frame was immediately lost when he laughed. I didn’t know a more handsome man at the time.

  My father made his way slowly up the broad concrete staircase. He was dressed like a man on holiday. His collared shirt and shorts looked like a matching set, except for the dots of pink flamingo feathers peeking out from behind the palm trees.

  The exchange of a few words between him and the security guard at the gate was the only time I had to gather my thoughts. It was decided. I would introduce him as “Dad” since I had never called him “Daddy.” The back of my throat tickled with the flutters that were once in the pit of my stomach. Out of the sun, he squinted into the sea of blue and white, looking for the first sign of a life that belonged to him. There he stood for all to see. I suddenly felt free of the secret dash under “Father’s Name” on my birth certificate. Someone nudged me forward. “Dad,” I called out as I waved shyly.

  “There you are!” he said, with his arms open and lips parted wide to reveal a smile. “Are these your friends, Sam?” I forgot to tell the girls that when he says “Sam” he means me; it’s the nickname that he decided I should have when I was born. My face grew hot. To recover from my embarrassment, I began to quickly make the rounds, introducing each one of my friends by name. He looked happy and seemed interested in getting to meet the quintet, to experience the easy sum total of my life at the time.

  Dad and I crossed the street, past the bars, and headed to a chicken and chips spot of my choice for our lunch date.

  —

  That was 1991. It is now 2017.

  I sit across the dining room table from my father. The half-lit room is filled with the sounds of screeching basketball sneakers and “Defence! Defence!” from his too-loud television. Even the halftime buzzer cannot save the Toronto Raptors from tonight’s loss. Outside it’s chilly, but sweat runs down the crease of my back. The apartment’s thirty-year-old thermostat only registers two temperatures: off and dry-season hot. I turn to watch the near-naked maple tree branches on his balcony as they make tortured shadows against the wall of glass that separates us from the susurration of an evening breeze.

  To be deciduous is to “fall away.” Maples trees, like the one outside my father’s apartment, are reduced to a carpet of fallen leaves when the damp crispness of autumn arrives. I’m not a tree. Through most of the seasons of my life I have longed to fall into my father’s stories. To get closer to him. To know him and for him to know me.

  I started asking him questions about his life, after my mother’s death. I tried to piece together parts of him from a handful of black-and-white photos I saw once, but the gaps remained. Who was the boy at seven, the one dressed for church in knee-length slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, spit-shine Oxfords, and a pair of tall socks? His self-effacing demeanour was quite unlike the womanizer Dad was reputed to be. Then there was the boy who raced clothespin boats in the skim of water that collected under his neighbour’s house after the rain. That neighbour happened to be Stokely Carmichael. What was it like to be playmates with a future American Civil Rights leader? Playmates in the way that children become fond of one another when there is one football, one cricket bat, or a single packet of jacks to be shared among all of the households on the street.

  I felt the echoes of the choices my father had made, but I had no sense of why those choices were made in the first place.

  What I had instead was a composite of stories of my creation. There were scenes punctuated by a lilting voice with pronounced calypso tones over distorted, collect phone calls, and looping signatures of “Love, Dad” in occasional birthday cards sent by airmail.

  My mother also authored her own stories about him. She sometimes stopped mid-sentence, interrupting her instruction of a chore or chide. Mouth agape with wonder, her lips snapped back into motion only to say, “Lord, child, you looked like your father just now!” When I asked over and over how she knew she wanted him, to have his baby, my five-foot-nine, statuesque mother always looked nostalgic. “He was good looking and had brains for so,” she said with a smile that curled her lips back far enough to reveal two miniscule splices of gold implanted between her teeth. My body had its way of revealing its own tale about my father. For a while, his forehead was my least favourite inheritance.

  Sitting in his house, I now know the address and the dwelling it leads to. A veil of mystery is lifted. No longer do I have to fantasize about boats moored outside his bedroom window, as the tide ebbed out to sea. Those were the dreams of a child. This just my father’s two-bedroom apartment on Longboat Avenue.

  My fingers circle the rim of a glass of rum and Coke on the table in front of me. He’s on his second drink, but without the
Coke. Instead, the dark molasses colour of the rum is bleached by a splash of water and ice. Tonight he’s uncorked a bottle of his fifteen-year-old Eldorado Special Reserve. Our arms cycle through the same motions as if in mime.

  I shift in my chair. There is barely enough room for my rib cage to expand, but I make do with the discomfort. I don’t want to disturb the disorder of his things. There are piles of open bills, books being read, his toque and two pairs of dollar-store glasses on the table. Soon a meal will be before us—a pot of pelau is on the stove, with pieces of chicken browned by burnt sugar, pillowed by rice and pigeon peas. Like me, the food is different from the fare we shared during those childhood show-and-tell lunches of yesteryear. I’m older, braver, more curious.

  On the wall in front of me is a framed newspaper clipping from 1971 with the headline, “Biggest Conference of Blacks In The History of Canada To Be Held In Toronto, Feb 19th.” A small photograph of my father is in the frame under the boldfaced, all-capped, black letters. Though the sharpness of the ink print has dulled with age, the prominence of his Afro is not to be mistaken. It is anchored by dark sunglasses; he’s been wearing his indoors since long before it became cool in the eighties. The waist-deep photo shows him in a khaki trench coat with a black turtleneck. His angular cheekbones and nose are in profile, pointed towards his chest and away from the viewing audience as he broods over a sheet of paper. Those are my cheekbones, my nose. I move through the world with his watermark.

  When the story was filed he was the chairman of the then-named Black Students’ Union at the University of Toronto and the co-chairman of the conference. His photo and name, Selwyn Henry, appear alongside those of Amari Baraka, Louis Farrakhan, Burnley “Rocky” Jones—all noted political activists of the American and Canadian Civil Rights era and speakers at the event.

  “What were you reading?” I ask, pointing at his image in the clipping.

  “My speech,” he replies.

  “You gave a speech? What did you say?” I perk up with a sense of pride, although I’m uncertain what exactly there is to be proud about.

  “Well, it wasn’t really a speech. They were more like remarks. I probably said something generic about our attempt to build a unified international Black movement.”

  “There’s nothing generic about that,” I say, shaking my head.

  The conference took place three years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and two years after the student-led uprising against racism at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. With the death of Dr. King and the call for “Black Power” reverberating up north from the United States of America, the actions of the students reflected the tenor of the times. Many of the students who were Black and from the Caribbean had left homes where the concept of a minority status was foreign. In fact, the Montreal Congress of Black Writers held in Montreal in October 1968 was seen as a watershed moment for many of Canada’s Black university students. There, over four days, their sense of Blackness was lit on fire by Stokely Carmichael, Rosie Douglas, Miriam Makeba, C.L.R. James, and others.

  “I saw Stokely in Montreal, somewhere in the crowd,” my father says. “We didn’t speak, just sort of embraced each other’s fists over the heads that passed between us.”

  Stokely Carmichael embodied the ‘nation within a nation’ philosophy when he changed his name to Kwame Ture a year later.

  “Really? Wow, that must have been surreal,” I say, remembering the pictures I had seen of Stokely’s fist held high when I started googling his name a few years back.

  “It was, in a sense. I hadn’t seen him since he left Oxford Street,” he replied.

  It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I found out my father and Stokely Carmichael were born a year apart and lived across the street from each other on Oxford Street in Belmont, Trinidad. One day my grandmother sent me to get new bed linens out of her bedroom closet. I stumbled upon two large boxes filled with books. They were copies of Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). They were dusty but untouched by bookworms or termites. The Carmichaels, many of whom had migrated or were deceased by that time, had entrusted my grandmother with those copies for the community.

  Twenty pages of the autobiography are dedicated to the first eleven years of Stokely’s life in Belmont, the effects of the Second World War on his twin-island state’s nationhood, and the country’s eventual changing political and cultural grounding as an English colony.

  Although he is not mentioned by name, my father lived among those pages. In fact, it’s almost as though he could have written them with his own nuances of life in Freetown, so named for the former enslaved Africans who made Belmont their home a century before Stokely and Dad.

  The year I turned twenty-nine, a commemorative plaque was erected on the wall outside the Carmichael’s house by the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago. As a designated heritage site, the house was to become a centre for learning. Young people from the neighbourhood would have access to a library and computers, as well as health and wellness workshops. However, the intentions of those well-meaning committees never materialized. Those books never made it from my grandmother’s closet to those library shelves.

  Selwyn was twenty-nine at the time of the 1971 conference in Toronto. He was also the father of three of my half-siblings. He left his two sons and his daughter with their respective mothers in London, England. He joined more than sixty thousand Caribbean immigrants who moved to Canada in the late sixties and early seventies, thanks to the Liberal government’s reformed immigration policy. He was a student, held a part-time job at Toronto Western Hospital as a lab technician, and tutored Black youth through the Transitional Year Program at the University of Toronto. His work with the program and the Black Student’s Union came in handy when he helped design what became known as the Black Education Project (bep) alongside Horace Campbell.

  “Do you think you changed anything? With the kids, I mean…did things get better for them?”

  “Well, I certainly think so. We helped more Black kids access a university education for one,” he starts. “With the bep, well, even though the situation was not as bad as in the States or even as I experienced in London, Canada was not prepared for us. They didn’t know how to deal with our language or our culture. You just had to look at what was happening in the elementary and high schools to know that. We were students ourselves and figured we could have an impact on Black kids.”

  Paradoxical is the word I think I’m looking for when he tells me about his community work and activism to benefit children. I think about my half-brothers and sister, at the time too young to go to university, but old enough to know that their father was absent. I think about the four of us who came later, after the young men and women Dad mentored were long graduated. How would our lives have been different if he was there to do our homework with us or tuck us in at night?

  In the background, he continues to tell me about the struggles faced by Caribbean immigrant parents and the dangers of the subtleties of Canadian racism. But what I want to know is how he felt as a father during those times? It’s the question I don’t have the heart to ask tonight.

  Glass Lasagna

  — Cason Sharpe —

  Ashley says the year after she finished school she blew her life up. We are smoking a joint outside of Concordia after hearing Lisa Robertson do a reading. I have been out of school for a year now and the idea of blowing up my life sounds appealing. I want to keep the good in and kick the bad out. Lisa Robertson is a chill poet, nothing bad to say. I don’t always understand what she’s talking about but she does her thing and I respect that.

  Winter is almost here—I have to wear one of my heavier fall jackets outside or else I get sick. It’s been raining for three days straight. I have to work tomorrow. I hate my job so much, but I don’t know what else to do. I used to want to go to grad school but now I’m
like, No thank you. I don’t mean to be anti-intellectual about it; it’s just not for me. Not right now at least. Take Lisa Robertson, right? I think I would’ve felt more defensive about ‘not really getting it’ had I still been a student, but since there wasn’t going to be a test or anything I didn’t really care. I liked the parts that I understood and that’s fine. I’m sick of trying to prove to people that I’m smart.

  It’s Thanksgiving this weekend. Usually I go back to Toronto for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get it together this year. I’ve stayed in Montreal for Thanksgiving two times since I moved here five years ago, and both times friends have thrown elaborate dinner parties: wine flowing, a full turkey, and two dozen guests seated on either side of a long wooden table.

  Kalale says Mada wants to do something more low-key this time around, just a few of us. No one’s getting it together this year.

  Later I go to karaoke at P'tite Place with some friends. I sing “A Simple Kind of Life” by No Doubt, which is not a crowd pleaser, but I have to—it’s my favourite song. And all I ever wanted was the simple things…A simple kind of life.…On stage I’m really feeling it even though nobody’s paying too much attention. I really do just want the simple things, a simple kind of life, but recently everything feels so complicated: there is anxiety about the rent, my job that I hate, artistic ambitions left unfulfilled. When I finish the song Kalale does one of those finger whistles, which is impressive to me because I don’t know how.

  —

  When I was a kid I affectionately referred to my generalized anxiety as my “worrywart disease.” I chewed the collars of my shirts and cried whenever I was away from home for more than a couple of hours. I used to draw these portraits of myself as a teenager with thick Crayola markers. In these pictures, I rode a skateboard and wore a backwards baseball cap with baggy jeans. “Me at 16,” I wrote at the bottom in crooked block letters.