Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Truth to tell, Uhuru Melesse was grateful to Ward Justice for saving him, temporarily, from himself. He should have known better than to wade into such tricky legal waters so woefully ill prepared. What he knew about reparations for African slavery could be summed up in a single TV news clip he’d seen in which Johnnie Cochran announced he was filing a class action suit against a bunch of corporations, or maybe the American government, seeking millions, or perhaps billions, for centuries of slavery there. But what did that have to do with Canada or, more to the point, with Uhuru Melesse’s sticky-fingered client?

  Uhuru Melesse blamed his client. If the kid hadn’t played the black card and, more importantly, the Raymond Carter Black Radical card, Melesse would almost certainly have tried to talk him into taking a plea. Perhaps he still should. I can get you a deal. A year, two, tops, in Springhill. You’d be back on the streets in a few months. Come out with some money to spend if . . .

  Howe wouldn’t have gone for it, of course. Melesse knew that. Perhaps that’s why he hadn’t suggested it. Or perhaps, more likely, he hadn’t suggested it because he didn’t want to disappoint the earnest young man who’d seen a film about another him from another time and decided he wanted that man for his lawyer. Maybe Uhuru Melesse still wanted to be that man.

  At least Ward justice had saved him from making a public display of his ignorance in court. And now most of the reporters seemed more interested in justice’s treatment of Melesse than in the substance of whatever it was he was trying to argue.

  “How do you feel now, Mr. Melesse? Are you angry?” It was the TV reporter, the woman who’d tried to turn his shaved head into a political statement. She had nice tits. He tried not to look at them.

  “I am more disappointed than angry,” he began carefully, looking beyond her, directly into the whirring lenses of one of the half-dozen TV cameras behind her. “The judge’s actions in court this morning simply confirm what we in the black community have known for a long time.”

  “Are you saying Judge Justice is racist?” Another TV reporter.

  Careful now. He didn’t need a rebuke from the Barristers’ Society, or worse. “I’m not saying anything of the sort,” Melesse replied evenly, smiling as ingenuously as he could while walking the skinny line between giving a good sound bite and getting cited for contempt. “I’ll let others draw whatever conclusions they wish. I’m simply telling you that what we saw in the courtroom this morning—and you’ll have to characterize that for yourself—comes as no surprise to the people of my community.” My community.

  “You talked about reparations.” It was Donovan, a reporter for one of the newspapers. Melesse couldn’t remember which paper, only that she’d interviewed him once and didn’t seem to like him, which, as usual with white women, only served to make her more desirable. That and her tits. Better than the TV reporter’s. “Are you planning to make reparations part of your defence?” she wanted to know. This time he didn’t even try to look away; he spoke directly to her chest.

  “I don’t want to get into our legal strategy at this point, of course, but let me just make the point that black people in this country have endured hundreds of years of racism at the hands of white society, and we have a right—”

  “But what’s the connection between the fraud charges against your client and the idea of reparations?” She’d cut him off just as he was about to take rhetorical flight, frustrating the TV reporters, who’d sensed a six o’clock sound bite in the making. “I mean, he’s charged with stealing money—how do you get from there to reparations?”

  He looked up from her chest and into her eyes—they were green, Irish, he wanted to lose himself in them—and gave her his best call-me-later-and-I’ll-tell-you-everything smile. “That’s a very interesting question, Ms. Donovan, but, as I said, I don’t want to get into the details of what I’ll be arguing in court in front of these cameras.” Smile. “All I can tell you for now is that my client is not a thief, that he is a principled, upstanding member of this community, and that, in the fullness of time, he will be vindicated.”

  The TV reporters had their clips now and were eager to leave, but Donovan, a dog with a bone, refused to be mollified. “But what’s the legal basis for a defence based on reparations?” she demanded again. Melesse watched the TV reporter with the less-nice tits signal her camera operator with an economically raised eyebrow. As the two of them backed out of the serum, so did the others. He and Donovan were on their own.

  “Another very interesting question, Ms. Donovan . . . Moira,” Melesse added, sliding into the familiar and as far away as possible from the fact that he didn’t have a clue about the legal basis for a criminal defence based on reparations. “I don’t have time to get into it right now, but why don’t you call me at the office? We can get together, maybe have a drink, and I can explain it all then.” Assuming he could figure it out by then.

  Not that there would likely be a then. Moira Donovan shot him a withering look, as if she understood exactly what he meant by having a drink. And she did. But that made her interesting. As she turned on her heel and walked away, Uhuru Melesse admired her ass. He tried to hold the image in his head, tried not to remember last night. Perhaps he would call her.

  Ward Justice stared into the nothingness of the white ceramic tile wall, rested his forehead against its coldness, felt the liquid draining out of his body. Almost all. Another sign. It was getting worse. This time he’d barely made it; had, in fact, felt the hot wetness ooze across the crotch of his grey wool pants even as he fumbled for the zip. Thank God for his judicial robes. So he’d squeezed harder, tensing every muscle in his midsection to try to staunch the flow. Finally, when he was able to let himself go, the pressure, which had seemed to fill to bursting in every pore and muscle and marrow of his being, dissipated like air being whooshed from a balloon. Relief.

  Damn Carter, or Melesse, or whatever the hell he called himself these days. Ward Justice had not seen that one coming. A defence lawyer’s familiar complaint about a lack of disclosure, perhaps, even accusations that some overzealous police officer had manhandled his client. He heard that often enough these days. But he’d never imagined that Melesse would try to turn a routine arraignment into a complex, convoluted and time-consuming argument about reparations. The young Carter might very well have played that game, but that was a long time ago. There’d have been Charter issues and jurisdictional questions. The Crown, quite rightly, would have wanted to insert its oar into the discussion by demanding to know what any of this esoteric legal talk had to do with the only germane question, which was whether the defendant had done what the police alleged he’d done. The lawyers could easily have gone on arguing those questions for hours, after which Ward Justice would have been expected to say something wise and judge-like.

  As soon as he’d understood that Melesse wanted to raise an issue he could not dispense with easily or quickly, Ward felt the need to pee. No, that didn’t quite capture it. He had to pee. Now. This instant. But Melesse kept talking, almost as if he knew the havoc he was wreaking. Ward’s nerves jangled and his mind was frayed with the increasing urgency of his body’s demands. He’d had no choice but to cut him off. And then the prosecutor, with her inept dithering . . .

  As the torrent into the urinal in his chamber’s private bathroom slowed to a trickle and then an occasional dribble, Ward Justice’s mind unclenched too, and he was able to consider what had actually transpired in his courtroom with some equanimity. He knew it was silly to blame the lawyers for simply doing their jobs. Worse, he began to realize how others—the press, for starters—might choose to interpret his actions. And worst of all, Ward Justice understood finally that he was dying. Getting up to pee three and four times every night. No wonder he was so tired all the time. Yesterday, he’d almost fallen asleep on the bench during a defence summation. And the more he peed, the less he seemed able to completely empty his bladder, which meant he was not only dealing w
ith the sudden, overpowering urge to urinate, but then, almost immediately, the need to urinate again. He could feel it now, the sense that, even after he had shaken the last drops of this pee, the next one was already pooling down there, waiting, ready to command his undivided attention again at the most inconvenient moment.

  He knew what it meant; he watched television. But even that wasn’t enough to convince him to make the appointment with his new doctor. Old Doc Wilson would have made a joke of it, a little male humour between friends, which is what they’d been for twenty years, and put him at his ease, even if the news turned out to be the absolute worst. But Doc Wilson had retired and his replacement—what was her name? another sign of aging, as if he needed any more portents—would be all business and tests and results. He didn’t want results; he already knew what they would be. Besides, Dr. Thomas—ah yes, that was her name; maybe he wasn’t quite as far gone as he thought—was a woman, and he was not about to drop his trousers in front of some woman, doctor or no, and present his backside for her to stick her fingers in.

  Which is why he’d spent an entire evening a few weeks ago on the Internet. He’d first typed “prostate” and “symptoms” into Google and, “approximately” 0.16 seconds later, the computer spat up an index of 223,000 web sites, all of them seemingly shouting the same message: Ward Justice presented all the common symptoms of advanced prostate cancer. When he added “cause” to his search terms, he got 132,000 “hits,” the gist of all of them appearing to be that, while no one knew for sure what actually caused a man’s prostate to turn against him, Ward Justice was a walking risk factor: he lived in North America (check), ate too many dietary fats and too few cooked tomatoes (check) and had a close relative with prostate cancer (check—his eighty-five-year-old father had recently been diagnosed, among his many and various other ailments, with what he persisted in calling “prostrate” cancer). Although he was not African-American—another of the factors that could double your risk—that seemed small comfort in light of all the others.

  He did find web sites touting “cures,” miraculous and otherwise. “The prostate is a muscle,” explained one article he read under the title, “Enhance Your Sex Life for a Healthier Prostate.” “Like all muscles, the prostate must be used if it is to remain strong. It’s no accident the highest incidence of prostate cancer occurs in celibate men.” Far from offering the prospect of a cure for what ailed him, the article added one more risk factor.

  The closest to comforting news among the thousands of pages filled with doom and gloom, surgery and pain, catheters and impotence, and, of course, decay and death, was the promise that his prostate might be saved by swallowing the oily essence of the berry of a dwarf palm tree. Doc Wilson would have laughed him out of the office if Ward had suggested such a “dumb-arsed New Age, natural, herbal bullshit cure-all.” Ward would probably have laughed too. But he wasn’t laughing now, and since Wilson was no longer practising medicine and since Ward had no intention of asking Dr. Thomas for her advice on any matter affecting his lower extremities, he had simply gone ahead last week and ordered a supply of sixty saw palmetto gel caplets over the Internet using an e-mail address he’d set up for those rare occasions when he wanted to surf porn sites that demanded you provide one to gain access. The address—250849@hotmail.com—wasn’t a very clever choice; it was his real birth date. Besides, he’d had to use his real name and credit card to place the order. If anyone wanted to track him down, they could. But they could do that anyway.

  He’d learned that uncomfortable truth while presiding over a child pornography case last year; the police had painstakingly tracked down a Halifax man who had taken nude photos of his sleeping, seven-year-old twin nephews while he babysat them. He’d sold the photos over the Net to faceless men who apparently got off on seeing photos of nude boys in the sexually charged act of sleeping. The cops pursued the man through cyberspace all the way from a Finnish-based chat-room, where he’d posted messages, back to his Internet service provider in Halifax. The service provider offered up the man’s entire online history, even the fact that he’d once used the Internet to order flowers and send an electronic greeting card to his mother—“Your lucky, loving son”—to mark the occasion of her seventieth birthday.

  Since Ward’s personal interests didn’t veer to nude sleeping boys, he doubted his own very occasional nocturnal wanderings through AlINudeAlways.com would attract the attention of the police. He worried more about Frank magazine. The local gossip sheet had already published details about a fellow judge’s very messy divorce proceedings, in which his ex-wife had accused him of beating her with his belt because she had failed to maintain their household to his exacting standards of neat-and-tidy.

  At least Ward didn’t have to worry that Victoria would dish up the details of their married life in a public divorce proceeding. Victoria simply wasn’t that sort of woman. Besides, they hadn’t had what would be classified as a “married life” for the past twenty-five years, ten months and thirteen days. By his careful reckoning, it had been nine thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight days since the last time he and Victoria had made love. That was one week before the Premier’s office issued its press release announcing that Fisheries minister Ward Justice was abandoning politics forever to become a justice of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia.

  Victoria Justice did not issue a press release to announce that she would never sleep with her husband again. But when she moved all his clothes into the guest room, he got the picture.

  Which reminded him. Today was their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They would celebrate it as usual. Over dinner. At Valentino’s, Victoria’s favourite restaurant. Just the two of them. They would talk civilly about nothing of consequence, and then go home to their separate beds and lives. It was, all things considered, a good marriage. Which reminded him that he hadn’t bought her a card yet. They always exchanged cards, never presents. It was not easy finding anniversary cards that did not refer to either sex or love.

  He zipped up his fly. Perhaps if he stopped drinking coffee in the mornings. When would that saw palmetto arrive? he wondered.

  “Saw you on TV tonight, man,” the voice behind him shouted over the bar’s Friday night din. “You were great.”

  Uhuru Melesse made the mistake of turning in the direction of the voice, which he hadn’t recognized. Too late, he put the voice together with the face and the perpetual bed-head of dirty-blond hair. It was that annoying young reporter from High Tide, the one who called him “man” and inevitably wanted to talk to him about racism, or rap music, or racism in rap music, or anyone of a dozen other topics Uhuru could care less about. What was his name? Calvin? Kevin? Whatever. Fat White Boy—that was his name now—was a short, fat, pimply-faced, just-past-being-a-boy young man who tonight was incongruously dressed in a checked sports jacket that just might have been popular in the seventies. Fat White Boy assumed a familiarity between them that did not exist.

  “Got a question for ya,” he continued, now that he had locked on Uhuru like a target. This was how it always began. And an hour later, Fat White Boy would still be asking questions. Desperate, Uhuru looked above his head and into the sea of bodies between him and escape. He should have known better than to come here tonight.

  The Economy Shoe Shop was the downtown bar of choice for local politicians, lawyers, journalists, film types, secretaries-on-the-make—anyone in Halifax, in fact, who wanted to be seen being seen. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Shoe, named after an old neon sign for a real shoe store the bar’s owner had picked up at an auction and installed over the entrance, was Uhuru’s favourite bar. It was an ideal place for a black man to troll for white women looking for someone new and different and dangerous but not really dangerous. Unlike plenty of other places in town he could name, no one at the Shoe looked askance, or allowed themselves to appear other than blasé, at the sight of a black man in the company of a white woman.

  The problem was that the S
hoe was too popular. By eight o’clock on most Fridays—and tonight was no exception—the narrow, train-like aisle between the bar and the tables in the original section was jammed to more than fire-marshal-full with pre-weekend revellers.

  Most of them appeared to have seen, or at least knew about, his appearance on the news tonight. As he’d worked his way through the crowd from the entrance to the far end of the bar—where Jason, the bartender who knew him too well, was already pouring his usual Jim-and-Ginger—people smiled, and winked, and high-fived, even offered up a solidarity fist in the air. Most of them, he was certain, didn’t understand any better than he what the reparations issue, of which he’d spoken so eloquently, was really all about. Fat White Boy knew.

  “I read The Debt so I think I understand the civil side, at least in the U.S.,” he began earnestly.

  The Debt? What the hell was The Debt? Why couldn’t the kid just ask a question instead of making a speech?

  “But that’s all based on the history of slavery there. Now I know, I know, we certainly had slavery here, too. But I don’t believe there was slavery in Africville. So is this just about the relocation, or is it from before that, you know, to when Africville was created?”

  Uhuru did what he always did when someone asked him a question he couldn’t answer. He smiled as if he knew something the questioner didn’t. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” he said. And searched for an escape route. There was none. Just dozens of shouting-to-be-heard sweaty bodies jammed together. Uhuru hunched his shoulders and squeezed his arms against his sides as he tried to navigate the glass of bourbon to his lips without it being jostled by the undulating wave of humanity around him.

  “And there’s also the whole civil-criminal thing,” Fat White Boy continued, not reading the get-lost message Uhuru hoped he had delivered with his eyes. “You know, like, I can see it as a civil case, I mean, that’s what it is in the States, fifty thousand dollars for every African-American family to pay them back for two hundred and fifty years of slavery and discrimination, and you could probably make the same kind of case even here using, you know, the Charter and such. But as a defence for theft? How are you going to do that?”