What Victoria had been looking for was her husband’s family history. When the archivist had failed to find any trace of Desmond justice’s ancestors, Victoria had even gone to visit her father-in-law in the senior citizens’ home in Antigonish where he’d been living for the past ten years.
“Good morning, Da,” she said, falling into the name Meghan used to call her grandfather before she could pronounce the word. He lay on his bed staring at the TV. The volume was high.
“Good morning, Da,” she shouted this time. Why wouldn’t he get a hearing aid? He looked at her now, did not smile. He didn’t smile often, not since Ada died and his son and daughter-in-law forced him into this home with people he didn’t know. But that was another battle line, one Victoria knew was no longer worth defending.
“How are you?” He shrugged. “I wanted to ask you some questions. I brought a tape recorder.” She took the remote, turned off the TV, pulled a small black recorder the size of a cigarette package out of her purse, put it carefully on the night table, pressed the play and record buttons, then asked, “Is that okay?” He shrugged again. “Da, I’m trying to put together a special gift for Meghan”—he smiled for the first time; she noticed he hadn’t put his teeth in yet that morning—“for when she gets married. A family tree. And I need your help.”
Now he scowled, waved his hand dismissively at the tape recorder.
“I just need to know some things about your father, what his name was, where he came from, how you got to—”
“The coloured girl, the one that cleans the rooms, she stole my slippers,” he said suddenly, cutting her off. “I want you to get them back for me.”
Damn, she thought, he’s getting worse. Could it be Alzheimer’s, or some other form if dementia? More likely, Desmond Justice was simply being his usual curmudgeonly self. Over the last few years, her father-in-law had spiced up his contrariness with paranoia. Everyone was out to cheat him. The nurses, attendants, cleaning staff, even the doctor from town who came to visit him once a week, were stealing his belongings. Or his food. Or his photos of Ada. Sometimes Victoria was convinced the old man was simply acting out his anger that she and Ward had forced him to move out of his house and into this seniors’ home in the first place. Whatever, it made her especially uncomfortable when he started talking, as he too often did, about the “coloureds” who’d done this or stolen that. What if someone overheard?
“I’ll take a look for them before I go. Promise,” she offered, hoping to win back his attention. She pointed to the tape recorder. “I tried looking up the Justices in the archives but there wasn’t much there, so the archivist asked me to ask you about your father and mother, where they were living when you were born—”
“What’s it matter? Doesn’t matter.”
“But I’m doing a family tree for Meghan and I want it to be complete with both sides of the family on it.”
He shook his head. “I left, gone, good riddance, long ago. Why go back?”
“I’m not asking you to go back, Da, I just want to know where you were born. So the archivist can follow the family tree back. That’s all. No big deal—”
“You’re making the big deal. Your questions. Don’t ask me questions.”
This wasn’t going the way she’d hoped. Desmond had become even more difficult ever since Ada died. Sometimes, it seemed, he couldn’t have a conversation with his son or daughter-in-law without turning it into an argument. Perhaps that’s why they visited so rarely.
“I’m tired,” he announced suddenly. “Go find the coloured girl. Get my slippers back.” He rolled away from her then, faced the wall, dismissed her.
That was a year ago. Victoria had tried to talk Ward into pressing his father for information but gave up when he resisted. At the rehearsal dinner before the wedding, she’d given Meghan and Brad a binder full of artfully arranged notes and pictures from the Cullingham family tree. “I’m still working on your father’s side of the family,” she said lightly. “It’ll be your first anniversary present.”
But she hadn’t done anything about it since. She’d moved on, forgotten. Until the archivist called again.
David Astor glanced over now at the woman sitting on the other side of the table, a slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth. What was Mrs. Cullingham thinking? Of course, she wasn’t Cullingham any more. It was a hazard of his trade, always at least a generation out of sync with current events. He tried to read her face. It was blandly unrevealing. Must be a product of her upbringing. Politician’s daughter, judge’s wife. They must need to practise that nothing-surprises-me look for cocktail parties and receptions. What was she thinking?
What Victoria Justice, née Cullingham, was thinking was that David Astor really did look like a weasel. Just as she’d described him to Ward. She thought this, not because it mattered, but because it gave her time to rearrange the expression on her face, to let him know none of this surprised her. It did. It made no sense. And yet, perhaps it made perfect sense. The hair, the features . . . If you looked at his face in a certain way, from a certain angle, you could . . . And then there was that woman. She had never understood that. They’d never talked about her again since that day she’d called. But Victoria had never stopped thinking about her. With revulsion. With anger. With curiosity. Even, perhaps occasionally, with envy. What was it about her that had drawn him to her? Perhaps this was what it was, something about him. Not that any of this should matter. It changed nothing. And yet it changed everything. What if she’d known this when they’d met? Would it have made a difference? It certainly would have changed her parents’ perception, his good politics and prospects notwithstanding. And how good would those prospects really have been if . . . ?
She would have to reorder her thinking about so many things. The children! She had a moment of panic. Sarah might think it exotic; when she was a little girl she’d told her teacher she was Spanish because it made her seem more interesting. But Meghan, who wanted nothing more than to fit in, and with the right group, would be appalled.
All of these thoughts ricocheted through her mind, pinballing off one another, during the instant it took for her to rearrange her face. Victoria knew immediately what she had to do. She turned her attention back to David Astor, who was still babbling excitedly.
“. . . very interesting but not as uncommon as you might think. I mean, there was Wentworth. We know all about him. And there have been others, less well known, granted, but the situation is the same, if you see my point. Anyway, I was thinking this might make a great article for the Nova Scotia Historical Review. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that publication, Mrs. Justice, but it’s very prestigious. And I would write the article with the appropriate discretion . . .”
Suddenly, Victoria looked down at her watch, then, apparently startled by what she’d discovered, up at David Astor. “Oh dear, I had no idea it was so late. I shouldn’t have, I realize now, but I didn’t know your news would be so . . . interesting. So I scheduled another appointment for this morning and I’m already late.” She looked at the photo still clutched in his hand. “Do you mind if I borrow this?” she asked. “I’d like to show it to my husband.”
“No problem,” David Astor replied, his voice betraying disappointment. “I made that copy for you anyway. The original’s still in the files.”
“We’ve known all along,” Victoria lied, feeling the need to explain herself to this strange man, “but I don’t believe my husband has ever seen a photo. I’m sure he’d be fascinated.” It was all a lie. There was no appointment Victoria was late for. She’d known nothing of what the archivist had discovered and, she was certain, neither did Ward.
She saw the crestfallen look on David Astor’s face as she stood up. “I’ll give you a call next week, David, and we can talk some more about your idea of an article, which sounds very interesting to me. I’m sure Ward will think so, too.”
&nb
sp; That was a lie as well. Ward wouldn’t think so because she wasn’t going to tell Ward, or anyone else, what David Astor had discovered.
The classroom had the familiar smell—musty paper, pungent cleaning solvents, sweaty sneakers—Uhuru Melesse associated with his own school days. Late again. He tried not to draw attention to himself as he struggled to squeeze his oversized body into the undersized desk. It was hopeless. Some in the audience turned to see who was causing the fuss. A few smiled and nodded in acknowledgement before turning back to the woman at the front of the room.
“No, that’s exactly right.” Shondelle Adams resumed her explanation, doing her best to ignore Uhuru’s late arrival. “The City hasn’t offered one penny in direct compensation to any of the former residents. What they are offering is what they’ve been promising—but not doing—all along: rebuilding the church and setting up some sort of scholarship fund. But they can’t, or won’t, tell us how much they’ll put in this fund, or who will be eligible, or who is going to decide who gets these scholarships. For our part, we have said there must be financial compensation for every surviving Africville resident, similar to that given the Japanese for their internment during World War II.”
Uhuru’s eyes swept the faces of the two dozen black men and women, all seated as uncomfortably as he in the horseshoe of student desks facing the front of the classroom. There were faces he recognized, Africville elders like Aunt Annie and Everett Dickson. Calvin Johnstone, the chair of tonight’s meeting, was seated in a more comfortable chair behind the teacher’s desk to the left of Shondelle. Though he didn’t recognize anyone else, Uhuru would catch occasional glimpses of other elders in the faces and features of their now thirty-something children. This was the first generation to have grown up outside the comforting embrace of Africville, the ones Uhuru needed to talk to.
But not these people. These were the successes, the teachers and civil servants, entrepreneurs and social workers whose middle-class achievements—neat, vinyl-sided bungalows in Sackville, driveways filled with SUVs and Mom’s Taxis, children studying computer science or commerce at college—could be bent and twisted to justify the City’s decision to raze Africville and disperse its residents so they would have an opportunity to build better futures for themselves and their children.
Uhuru needed to talk to the others: the junkies and the jailed, the hustlers and the hookers, whose failures could be bent and twisted into an equally convincing justification for J. J. Howe’s decision to play Robin Hood.
“You really are a cynic,” Shondelle had said when he’d made just that point in her office at the university two weeks ago. They’d met at her suggestion to discuss what to do with his father’s diary and, more generally, what she might do to help him with J. J.’s defence.
“Not a cynic, a realist,” he’d replied. Her certainties made him want to play the contrarian. “You want to pin every bad thing that’s ever happened to anyone from Africville on the relocation. But the fact is that a lot of us”—he emphasized the us to make it clear she was still a them—“turned out okay. Some people might look at me and say that I’m a success story . . .”
“Others might look at you and say you’re a sellout.” She said it with a smile. “Seriously, how can you provide J. J. with a proper defence if you’re thinking that way?”
“Because I need to think like them if I’m going to win this case,” Uhuru shot back. He was enjoying this. A good argument with a colleague. It was like being back in university—or it might have been if there’d been more black students studying law back when Uhuru was a student. In reality, this was a new experience. So, of course, was having a case worth arguing about.
Shondelle wanted to mount a defence of necessity. “J. J. had no choice,” she rehearsed the argument aloud to Uhuru. “The City had more than thirty years to provide fair and reasonable compensation to the residents of Africville for the illegal and unconscionable seizure of their lands. It didn’t. So J. J. Howe, a courageous young man who had experienced first-hand the impact of that failure in his own family and who saw its effect played out on the streets of his city every day, finally took matters into his own hands, not for himself but for his people, and began to redress the wrongs. He had no choice.”
“Isn’t that an argument for sentencing?” Uhuru countered. In fact, he. wanted Shondelle to convince him otherwise. “I mean, there’s no question he took the money. And there’s no question the law says that’s wrong. So how he used the money is irrelevant . . . except when it comes to sentencing.”
“Unless we can turn it into a Morgentaler,” she replied. “Everyone knew Henry Morgentaler was performing illegal abortions. But the courts couldn’t get one single jury to convict him. Why? Because everyone also knew the law was wrong and that he was doing the just thing.”
“Yes, but you’re presupposing that we”—when had I become we, he wondered?—“will get to make this argument in front of a jury. What judge is going to allow us to claim justification?”
Shondelle had been waiting for that. “Certainly not Justice Justice,” she said. “Which is why the first thing we need to do”—we again—“is file a motion demanding he step aside. After that first day in court, it’s a slam-dunk.”
Uhuru resisted; he wasn’t sure why. Except perhaps that, unlike Shondelle, Uhuru couldn’t buy the now conventional wisdom that Ward Justice was a racist. Since Ward Justice was one of the few white men to have experienced Africville close up, Uhuru believed, he might even be more sympathetic to their arguments . . . if indeed those were their arguments.
They agreed to disagree—for the moment. “We’ll come back to this,” she said.
What they decided was that Uhuru would read his father’s diary looking for material, especially from the time of the expropriation, and share with Shondelle any entries that might prove useful for the civil suit. And that Uhuru would attend the next meeting of ADA to see if there were ways in which the association could support J. J.’s defence.
“Money would be nice,” Uhuru said.
“Money’s overrated.”
“Easy for you to say, Professor.”
She smiled. “So would you rather I took this burdensome case off your hands then?”
“No.” He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to do the sane thing and walk away, but he didn’t. And he didn’t want her to go away and leave him to handle the case alone, either. Perhaps it was because she prickled him in ways that annoyed him at the same time they invigorated him. It wasn’t in a sexual way. Or was it? Could it be other than sexual if it was between a man and a woman?
“Now, I appreciate all you done for us, Mrs. Adams, we all do . . .” It was Everett Dickson. Uhuru tried to pull himself out of his reverie, concentrate on the conversation. “But the thing of it is I’m eighty-year an’ three. My wife’s gone. My boys is both dead. And I ain’t got no grandkids. So money don’t mean that much to me. What I want—all I want—is to go home to die.”
There were nods and murmurs of support around the room. Uhuru had heard about this idea during the Reunion Weekend. Many former residents, especially the elderly, didn’t want monetary compensation for their losses; they just wanted their land back, complete with new houses the City would build for them on the spots where their old ones had stood. Uhuru danced the idea around his head. The relocation had not turned out to be the romantic adventure he’d envisioned as a teenager. In his own life, in fact, it had marked the real end of his childhood and the beginning of his estrangement from his father and his community. But could he—would he even if he could?—turn back the clock to a time that was now as much imagined as real?
“. . . so, Mr. Dickson”—how long had Shondelle been talking?—“I think, and the executive of ADA believes too, that arguing in favour of a house for a house, no matter how appealing that might be, would just be a recipe for an impasse that could drag this thing on for many more years and mean you
and the others would never get redress of your legitimate grievances.” She paused, looked around. “Does that answer your question, sir?”
“Indeed it does, Mrs. Adams,” Everett Dickson said. “Unlike a lot of the lawyers we had here, you at least been honest with us.”
There were “Amen”s and “You tell ’em, brother”s.
“Well, then, on that note, and if there are no other questions, I’d like to introduce another lawyer, another honest lawyer”—laughter—“who wants to ask for our help with a case he’s working on. Most of you already know Mr. Melesse, and you know the case I’m referring too, so without further discussion, let me turn proceedings over to Uhuru Melesse.”
The applause seemed heartfelt. And there were murmurs of assent as he laid out his plan—Shondelle’s plan—to mount the Robin Hood defence. “We’ll need to show two things,” he explained, more confidently than he felt. “One, we must show that the City has failed over the course of the last thirty years to negotiate with us in good faith, and two, that our people suffered real harm as a result of the relocation.”
Only Aunt Annie raised any objection. “I just hope you’re not gonna call us down in public like the white folks, Raymond. They make it sound like all our kids got hooked on the drugs or ended up in trouble with the police and such.”
“No, Aunt Annie, I have no intention of making our community look bad,” Uhuru fudged. “I want to show what our community was like before and what happened after . . . the good and the bad.”
Which was how the members of the Africville Descendants’ Association came to agree to provide Uhuru Melesse with copies of all the affidavits Shondelle Adams had already collected, along with contact information for other former Africville residents she hadn’t yet managed to reach. The motion, moved by Aunt Annie and seconded by Everett Dickson, was approved unanimously.
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