Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “Don’t you worry about me,” his father responded. “There are some things you can change, and some you can’t, and this is just one you can’t. That’s okay. I always said I was gonna quit fishing someday. I guess today’s the day.”

  And so it was settled. The strike was over. The Eisners had won. Desmond Justice wasn’t a fisherman any more. But what was he then? And what would Ward be now that he wasn’t the son of a fisherman?

  He knew what he wanted to be. He wanted to be Bill Mazeroski. But somehow he didn’t think that was going to happen.

  Raymond could already feel the sweat forming under his armpits. He wanted to loosen his tie—the tightness of his starched white shirt collar was scratching against his neck—and take off his wool suit jacket. But when he looked around he could see all the men were wearing suits too. They didn’t appear uncomfortable. His father had insisted Raymond dress properly if he wanted to tag along to tonight’s meeting at the church. And Raymond wanted to be there, wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

  Raymond couldn’t remember the church being so crowded, though it had been nearly a year since he’d last been inside. Last year, shortly after he turned thirteen, he’d announced to his father he was too old to be told what to do, and that he wasn’t going to go to church any more. Ever. His father hadn’t objected. Perhaps, Raymond realized later, it was the excuse he’d been looking for not to go himself.

  That’s not to say his father hadn’t been inside the church at all. Seaview African United Baptist Church wasn’t just Africville’s only church, it was also its community meeting place. And there had been plenty of community meetings there lately. Most had to do with all the talk he’d been hearing about tearing down their houses and moving everyone somewhere else.

  Tonight’s meeting had been called so the residents could hear the latest report from an urban planning consultant the City had hired to advise it on what to do about Africville.

  Raymond couldn’t help but notice that most of the pews were filled with white visitors. Apparently, the other Africville residents had given up their usual pews to the whites. Not Raymond’s father.

  The women of the church auxiliary were standing, hovering near the back of the church, watching and waiting. They’d spent much of the day making the little quarter-sandwiches with the crusts cut off that Raymond loved, and baking the date squares Raymond loved even more. They were poised now, waiting for the meeting to end so they could serve them.

  Sitting beside his father in their pew close to the front of the church, Raymond tried to identify the white people around him. He recognized the mayor. And their local member of the Legislature. Raymond remembered him—his name was O’Sullivan—from the provincial election campaign last summer when he’d led a cavalcade of horn-honking cars and trucks around Africville. The parade had finally come to a halt just outside the church. O’Sullivan got out of his car, a big white convertible, and shook hands with Deacon Johnstone, who’d assembled a small crowd of supporters to greet him. As the street outside the church filled up with other Africvillians like Raymond who’d been attracted by the commotion, O’Sullivan’s workers took up positions beside the trucks and efficiently began handing out goodies. Balloons for the kids. Nylons for the ladies. Pints of rum for the men. There were even cardboard boxes filled with groceries. But only a chosen few seemed to get the boxes.

  “How I get one of those?” Old Blackie asked. He was an elderly man whose last name was Black so everyone called him Old Blackie, even to his face. Old Blackie drank too much.

  “It’s easy, old fellow,” answered a young white man in a cream-coloured summer suit. He seemed to be in charge of distributing the largesse. “We get your vote, you get your pint. Get five more people to vote for us and we’ll give you groceries, too. How’s that sound?”

  Raymond’s father was angry when he brought home one of the balloons. THE O’SULLIVAN WAY IS THE LIBERAL WAY, said the bold white lettering on the red balloon.

  “I don’t want that shit around my house,” his father said. His father rarely ever swore, so Raymond knew he was serious. “I don’t need any of them telling me which way to vote.”

  Raymond didn’t know how his father had voted—“that’s between me and the ballot box”—but he did know O’Sullivan had won. Which was why O’Sullivan was back here tonight, Raymond guessed, looking out for the interests of his constituents.

  Raymond didn’t recognize most of the other white men in the audience, but there sure were a lot of them. Raymond might not have even known he was in Seaview Church if not for the sight of the still-crooked painting of Jesus on the cross that hung beside the pulpit. Raymond used to stare at it during services, seeing if he could will it straight. He couldn’t. Perhaps that was when he’d stopped believing; after all, he’d prayed to Jesus to straighten Himself out and He hadn’t.

  The Deacon finally made his way to the pulpit. Raymond’s father looked at his watch. It was nearly 7:30, half an hour after the meeting was supposed to start. “Africville time,” he muttered under his breath. His father didn’t much like the Deacon. And the Deacon seemed to feel the same about him. That might have been another reason, Raymond thought, why his father wasn’t angry at him for not going to church any more.

  “Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Mr. M.L.A., aldermen, members of the Halifax Negro Betterment Association, distinguished guests and brothers and sisters of Seaview African Baptist Church,” the Deacon began, in what Raymond’s father would have dismissed as his “windbag way.”

  “For those of you who may not know me, I am Deacon George Johnstone, and I want to welcome you all here this evening, especially our esteemed visitors from the Province and the City and, of course, Mr. Wilfred Jamieson, our acclaimed guest speaker for this evening.”

  Raymond wasn’t the only child there. Rosa Johnstone, the Deacon’s daughter, was sitting in the pew ahead of them, squirming and fidgeting. The Deacon stopped speaking suddenly and froze her with a stare. Rosa was only eight, but she knew the look. She sat still and quiet. The Deacon had brought her along because Rosa’s mother was working downtown. She was a cleaning lady—the Deacon referred to her as a “custodial specialist”—at the Dale Building. She began her job emptying wastebaskets and ashtrays, sweeping and washing floors after the building’s white office workers had all left for the day.

  Deacon Johnstone’s own real job was as a porter on the CN railroad. His proudest moment came in 1939 when he was selected to be one of the porters on the special train that ferried the King and Queen of England across the country during their Royal Tour. “She was a gracious lady,” he would say to anyone who would listen. A framed photo of the King and Queen hung in his living room.

  Deacon Johnstone was also proud of his role as a deacon at Seaview. He’d wanted to be a preacher when he was growing up but he’d left the old Africville School after grade six to work in the railyard and never went back. That didn’t stop him from talking and acting like a preacher whenever the opportunity arose. Seaview couldn’t afford its own minister so it depended on other black ministers from around Halifax to conduct the services for them. When none of them could make it, the Deacon did it himself.

  Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone’s fourth child, their only daughter, Rosa, was born on December 7, 1955. It was exactly one week after a Negro seamstress named Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. “My Rosa is going to be a credit to her race, too,” Deacon Johnstone would say. He would not have said that tonight as she resumed fidgeting and fussing with the doll her father had allowed her to bring with her. Now he tried to ignore her.

  “Mr. Jamieson brings with him a cornucopia of credentials,” the Deacon said. Raymond’s father snorted derisively, but Johnstone ignored him and proceeded to read from the man’s lengthy resume for five minutes. Raymond soon knew more than he cared to about Jamieson’s education and professional acc
omplishments, even that he liked to garden in his “rare spare hours.”

  “Thank you very much for that most generous introduction, Reverend,” Jamieson began when he finally got his turn at the pulpit. “As many of you already know, City Council commissioned me last winter to investigate housing and social conditions in Africville and to make recommendations back to the members of Council by the first of September. I spent two days in Halifax in April consulting with City staff and meeting with community leaders. I met with Mr. Johnstone”—Johnstone smiled, pleased to be acknowledged as a community leader—“and he very graciously escorted me on a tour of this community. So thank you, sir,” he added. The applause was tepid.

  Jamieson became sombre. “I know I don’t have to tell you what I discovered in my investigation. The conditions in Africville are deplorable, simply unacceptable in any community in Canada in the 1960s. Here you have close to seventy families, four hundred people, living in squalor on the very edge of a prosperous city.” Jamieson seemed oblivious to the fact that he was addressing people who called what he called squalor “home.” “They live in homes—shacks, really—with no indoor plumbing, no running water. Because the community is built on rock, most of the wells are shallow and, too often, right beside the cesspools from their and their neighbours’ houses. The result is a health hazard of potentially catastrophic proportions.” He paused to let that sink in. “I don’t think it’s unfair of me to point out that if the people of this community were of a . . . different racial background, this problem might have been solved a long time ago.”

  “Amen,” Raymond’s father said. Raymond was embarrassed. No one else had said a word. Deacon Johnstone looked at him disapprovingly.

  “But that is water under the bridge,” Jamieson continued. “We must deal with this problem as we find it. As you may have heard, my report, which is to be voted on by Council at its next meeting, calls for Africville to be demolished and all of the residents relocated to better and more modern housing in other parts of the city.”

  Old Blackie interrupted then. “Is it true you called Africville a ‘shack town’?” It was obvious he’d been drinking.

  “Well sir, look around you. What do you see? Tarpaper shacks with no foundations. People with no jobs. Bootleggers and worse. There are no paved roads. I’ve been to cities all over North America and Europe, and I can say to you that this is the worst situation I have ever seen. And you don’t have to take my word for it. All the Toronto newspapers, even Maclean’s magazine, have sent reporters down here to see for themselves. And they’ve all said the same thing. Africville is a national and international stain on the reputation of this fine community.”

  Old Blackie wasn’t easily deterred. “George Dixon, the greatest boxer what ever lived, was born right here in Africville. And Duke Ellington’s wife, the jazzman? Her people was from Africville, too—”

  Deacon Johnstone stood up then. “That will be enough, Mr. Black. Please remember that Mr. Jamieson is our guest.”

  But Old Blackie had opened the floodgates, and no one was about to shut them now. “Why do you have to destroy our community and move us someplace else?” a man shouted from the back of the church. “Why not just give us city sewer and water and let us stay where we are?”

  “Perhaps I can answer that, Mr. Chairman.” It was the alderman, whose name was MacPhee. “It’s just too expensive. City staff have looked very carefully at the numbers and they estimate it would take eight hundred thousand dollars to put in sewer and water lines to Africville. The city just can’t afford that. Relocation is a better, less expensive alternative.”

  “Better for who?” It was Everett Dickson. He lived next door to Raymond and his father. “I read in the paper that you’re only planning to spend forty to seventy thousand dollars in total to expropriate all the people here. That’s less than six hundred dollars a family. Now, how we supposed to find a decent place to live on that? If we’re going to be expropriated, we should at least get a house for a house.”

  There were cheers then. Up at the front, Jamieson was beginning to sweat. Raymond could see beads of perspiration on his forehead. It wasn’t just the heat in the room, Raymond was certain. “Six hundred dollars?” he answered uncertainly. “No sir, not necessarily. Some residents—ah, some homeowners, will do considerably better than that. As you know, many of the residents here have no proof they even have legal title to the land they occupy. Rather than just take that land, which it would be entitled to do, the City of Halifax is generously offering all of the squatters”—there were scattered boos at that—“compensation of five hundred dollars per family. That will mean more money in the pot for those residents who do have clear title. Subject to negotiation, of course. As for the question of a house for a house, I don’t think that would be feasible. But Maynard Square is very nice, new . . . a wonderful housing project, and there are more public housing projects being built in the city even as we speak.”

  That’s when Raymond’s father stood up. The room became quiet, expectant. Raymond’s father, Lawrence Carter, was one of the most respected men in Africville, more even than the Deacon. Born in Barbados, he still spoke with a lilting accent. He had arrived in Africville in the 1930s, to teach in the Africville school. He’d married a local woman, Desdemona Jones, and they had five children. Raymond was the youngest, an accident born ten years after his next oldest brother.

  In 1951, when Raymond was just two years old, a fire that started in the chimney destroyed their house. Their next-door neighbour, Mr. Dickson, rescued Ravmond—his father and brothers were at the school—but couldn’t save Raymond’s mother. The fire department eventually arrived, but there was no nearby source of water to connect their hoses to. Ray didn’t remember his mother, but he knew by heart his father’s bitter lament that if the City had provided Africville with water as the community had been demanding for years, there would have been fire hydrants and his mother would be alive today.

  After the fire, the neighbours pitched in to rebuild the house, but smaller this time, just big enough for Raymond and his father. “I want the older ones to get away from this place,” his father explained. “And I don’t want them to have the option to move back.” Raymond’s brothers were long gone now, scattered all over North America, with jobs and families and lives. They were Africville success stories, but they’d had to leave Africville to find that success. None of them had considered coming back. Not to Africville, not even to Halifax.

  Five years after the fire, the provincial government shut down the Africville School in the name of integration and the students were all sent to Richmond, a white elementary school about a mile away in the city’s north end. Raymond’s father wasn’t offered a job teaching there, which was all right because he’d almost immediately got into a shouting match with the principal, who wanted to shunt Raymond and the rest of the children from Africville into the “auxiliary class,” which was the polite name for slow learners who became—if they weren’t already—no learners. Raymond’s father won the battle for Raymond, although some of the other boys and girls weren’t so lucky. Raymond’s father would delight in attending parent-teacher night and showing off his son’s report card to the principal. “Number one in his whole class,” he would marvel. “Some ‘slow learner’!”

  Since Lawrence Carter couldn’t find another job teaching, he filled his days reading books he borrowed from the downtown library and his nights writing angry letters to the editor of the Halifax Tribune.

  Everyone knew from his letters, as well as from his participation at earlier meetings, that Lawrence Carter opposed the relocation. That might have been why Deacon Johnstone only reluctantly recognized him, and only after scanning the pews hopefully in search of someone—anyone—else who might wish to speak.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Ray’s father said with exaggerated politeness. “I’ve been listening very carefully to what Mr. Jamieson has had to say tonight
and I must say he has his answers down pat. But it seems to me he has missed a very important point. My question is this, Mr. Jamieson: Isn’t this so-called relocation of yours just a fancy way of stealing our land so you can use it for industrial development?”

  The Negroes in the crowd roared. “Amen.” “You tell ’em, brother.” “Tell it like it is.” The whites sat on their hands.

  Jamieson looked as if he wanted nothing more than to be on an airplane back to Toronto, to his comfortably appointed office, his loving family and adoring friends. “No sir, that is simply not true,” he said finally, his words belying the anxiety his voice gave away. “This relocation is not about stealing land for industrial development, or more rail lines, or an expressway, or a new harbour bridge or any of the other wild suggestions I’ve heard. It is about urban renewal, about giving the people of Africville the opportunity to live in dignity in an integrated community with equal opportunity for all.”

  While his stirring words were still bouncing off the church walls, Lawrence Carter picked up a report from among the pile of papers he’d brought with him to the church tonight and began quickly leafing through its pages.

  “Well, Mr. Jamieson,” he said, “that’s very interesting but not very comforting. I have in front of me a copy of the 1961 Halifax Development Plan prepared by City staff. Here’s what it says, and let me read it to you: ‘The City of Halifax will construct a limited-access expressway to pass through the Africville district after its residents have been relocated.’”

  “But that’s not my report,” Jamieson protested. No one heard him. His voice had been drowned out by whoops and cheers. Raymond looked up at his father proudly.