He’d imagined it would be different, that Halifax had really changed. Last winter, in fact, when he’d come back for a visit with his father, the city had seemed alive with possibility. Some white liberal do-gooders had organized an event called “Halifax 2000: Facing the Future.” They’d convinced the provincial and city governments to underwrite it, even though Ray was certain the government hadn’t understood it was popping the cork on so much bottled rage. It was supposed to bring citizens together, but it had turned into a week-long confrontation—between black and white, young and old, good and evil, the powerful and the powerless.
The organizers had put together a high-powered panel of a dozen experts, including an economist from Harvard, a labour leader from Toronto, an architect from California, even a black preacher-politician from Atlanta. They were to spend a week in the city, meeting and talking with locals from every social class, and then, at the end, come up with a single report, the sum of their collective wisdom, telling Halifax how it could magically transform its current backward, backwater self into a modern, cosmopolitan city thirty years from now.
During the days, the experts wandered the city, tailed by a phalanx of reporters from the local media and the Toronto papers. The experts would descend en masse on key companies and civic institutions, questioning their managers and leaders in front of the TV cameras about what they did and didn’t do. About everything. And anything. The preacher, whose name was Bartholomew Andrew Jackson III and who spoke in a voice-of-doom preacher voice, asked the manager of the old Capital Fisheries plant near Maynard Square how come he hadn’t seen a single black face on the company’s processing line.
The man shrugged. “We don’t have no coloured folks working here.”
“None!” the preacher thundered. “And why not?”
The manager looked stunned. This was not what he’d expected. “Ah, I guess it’s because none of them ever applied,” he said lamely, hoping the preacher would yield the floor. He didn’t.
“So are you saying then that if a qualified black man applied tomorrow, you’d hire him?”
The manager knew he was being led into a trap. “Well, yes, but—”
“You heard the man.” Jackson cut him off, turning back to the reporters who were furiously writing down every word. “Now I want you all to report what this man said, and then tomorrow, I want my black Nova Scotia brothers lining up outside the gates here asking for the jobs that are rightfully theirs, the jobs this man just promised them.”
The manager looked as though he was about to upchuck his breakfast.
At night, the experts held televised town hall meetings in a hotel ballroom to talk about what they’d seen that day and hear anyone from the community who wanted to speak. The owner of the local private TV station, who was also one of the event’s organizers, had eagerly agreed in advance to broadcast the sessions live. By the end of the first hour of the first broadcast on Monday night, Ray thought, he must have been regretting his enthusiasm.
A long-haired Dalhousie student, who said he represented Socialist Solidarity, stood up at the microphone to denounce “your fucking racist honky police pig force” for beating up on a group of anti-war protestors.
Watching the TV in his father’s living room that night, Ray almost choked on his cigarette. He’d never heard anyone say “fucking” on television before. And “racist honky police pig force”? Who was this white guy? American? Couldn’t be a local. Probably a dodger. The universities were full of them. Even in Halifax.
“Thank you, young man.” The camera was back on the men on the stage now. The black preacher was speaking. The camera zoomed in on him. “You know, I’ve been in your city for three days and you’re the first angry young man I’ve heard. There is a lot to be angry about in this place. Especially for my people. But I hardly see any black faces in this audience here tonight. Where are they? I was told there were black people in this city. But I haven’t seen them. Where are my black brothers and sisters? Why aren’t they here like this young man expressing their anger and their outrage?”
Ray was there. Tuesday morning, he joined a small group of a half-dozen blacks and whites, including the angry young man from the first town hall meeting, who’d attached themselves like barnacles to the panel of experts, trailing them from meeting to meeting.
No matter which group the panel met with, Jackson kept asking the same question. Where are the black people—the businessmen, merchants, legionnaires, naval officers, board members, university students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, reporters, editors, politicians? By the middle of the week, his prey knew to expect it, but not how to answer.
Some organizations, like the School Board, put a few of their very few black employees on display, but they quickly discovered that was even more dangerous. During the meeting with the School Board, Reverend Jackson asked one of the black employees sitting in the spectators’ gallery, to which the chairman had pointed so proudly in his opening remarks, exactly what he did for the Board.
“Janitor, sir,” he replied.
“A janitor?” Jackson appraised him. “You always wear a suit to work?”
“No sir. Principal said I should, sir. Said they want to show me off.”
There was a titter among the reporters. Embarrassment on the face of the Board chairman.
“I see,” Jackson replied. “Wanted to show you off? Tell me, Mr. . . . ?”
“Dickson. Everett Dickson, sir.”
Old Everett Dickson! Ray hadn’t recognized him at first, perhaps because he hadn’t expected to see anyone he knew inside these executive offices and dressed like an executive. But Everett Dickson wasn’t just someone he knew. He was the man who’d literally hauled him out of the fire the day his mother died.
“Well, Mr. Everett Dickson,” Jackson continued, in a tone Ray heard as both friendly and condescending. For the Reverend, Everett seemed not so much a person as an exhibit in his prosecution of the School Board. “Let me ask you a question, since these folks all seem so proud of you. Let me ask you this. How long y’all been working for the School Board?”
“Fifteen years, sir.”
“Fifteen years. That’s a long time. How much do they pay you?”
“One dollar and twenty-six an hour, sir,” Everett answered, bragging.
“One dollar and twenty-six cents an hour,” Jackson repeated, rolling the number around in his head as if trying to recall something. He looked to his fellow panellists. “Any of you gentlemen remember hearing a number like that?” No one spoke. “Ah, yes, now I remember—it was when we met with the Premier. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?” The gentlemen looked nervous, embarrassed, as if they weren’t sure where the Reverend was going this time but knew it wouldn’t be good. It was clear, Ray thought, that the Reverend Bartholomew Andrew Jackson III was on his own among these gentlemen, too. “One dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. The Premier told us that’s the minimum wage in this province. So, Mr. Everett Dickson, you say you’ve been a loyal employee of this here School Board for fifteen long years and you get one cent more an hour than the minimum wage.” His voice rose at the end of the sentence. Then he paused, the silence now all the more electric. His eyes swept the oak boardroom table where his fellow experts and the School Board members sat, and then beyond them into the audience in the spectators’ gallery—to the half-dozen Exhibit A black men in their Sunday suits, then beyond them to the reporters and the hangers on, all the way to the back of the room where Reverend Jackson knew the TV news cameras were now trained on him. He waited, made sure the cameramen had time to get him in focus. “Shame!!” he cried. “Shame on this School Board! Shame on this city! Shame! Shame! Shame!”
“Right on, man.” It was the long-haired young white guy from the first night’s town hall. “Power to the people,” he shouted, standing and turning awkwardly away from the Reverend to face the cameras. Ray and the others cheered and shout
ed encouragement—“Right on!” “Tell ’em, brother!”—as the cameras pulled back to include them too.
Everett Dickson, Ray couldn’t help but notice, was silent. He didn’t cheer. Neither did any of his fellow Exhibit As. Everett looked as though he was wondering what he’d said wrong.
It took Ray two nights to convince his father to come to a town hall meeting, two more to get him to stand up and tell his story of the suitcase.
Though the local reporters had heard it all before, the out-of-towners crowded around Lawrence Carter after he spoke, begging for details. Ray’s brother David told him later the story was on the front page of both The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, “Fucking newspapers,” his brother said, “When it was happening, they were all for it. Clean up the slums, they said. And now they’re all crocodile tears. Fuck the vultures.”
David Carter didn’t like newspapers. He also didn’t want to see or read anything that reminded him he came from Halifax. He hadn’t been back since his father had sent him to Toronto to live with his uncle. He’d been thirteen then; he was thirty-one now, and just as angry as he’d been the day his father told him his mother had died because there were no fire hydrants in Africville.
When Ray moved to Toronto after high school, David, ten years his senior, took him in, showed him the city, helped him find a job at New Word Order, a radical bookstore near Rochdale College. The bookstore was where Ray got his own political education, gobbling through the store’s entire collection of books on Negro history and black power between waiting on customers and stocking shelves.
Soon after Ray arrived in Toronto, David took him to his first Black Hands meeting. The organization had begun in Washington in the late fifties when a group of Howard University students set up a breakfast program for kids in the city’s ghetto. The idea quickly spread to other American cities and, eventually, to Toronto and Montreal. By the mid-sixties, however, the breakfast program was just the public relations face of a controversial political agenda. Black Hands now described itself as the vanguard of the New Africa Movement; its goal was to take over Mississippi and Alabama and transform them into one self-governing, blacks-only state. Ray was never sure how much he subscribed to that objective, but the specifics never seemed as important as the symbolic notion that blacks should control their own destinies. He could certainly agree with that.
Within a year, Ray had been elected the vice-chairman of Black Hands (Toronto), which didn’t mean much since there were only a dozen members. But it did mean he got to attend central committee meetings in Washington, where American Black Hands members talked about how to jump-start the revolution.
It was just talk, of course, but that hadn’t stopped the FBI from recruiting informers. One of them, a social worker from Atlanta named Franklin, whom Ray had met a couple of times in Washington, ended up dead. Black Hands (Atlanta) issued a communiqué blaming the local cops for “assassinating” him. But the rumour Ray heard was that the local branch had discovered his treachery and that the chairman, Tyrone Vincent, had executed him, then pinned the killing on police to stir up anger in the black community.
Strangely, Ray’s decision to return home to Halifax last spring had begun with an offhand question from Tyrone. “You know anything about some place called Halifax?” he’d asked while they were getting coffee during a break at a central committee meeting.
“Yeah . . . What about it?” With the exception of his brother, no one Ray had met in Black Hands—including Black Hands (Toronto), whose members were all either draft dodgers or refugees from one of the Caribbean countries—seemed to have the slightest idea where Halifax was, let alone that black people lived there.
“One of our guys was there for a conference,” Tyrone explained. “Says it’s ripe for recruiting.” It turned out that, unknown to Ray, Reverend Bartholomew Andrew Jackson III was a member of Black Hands. After his week in Halifax, he’d returned to Atlanta telling anyone who’d listen that the city was fertile ground. “It’s where the South was ten years ago,” he said. “They need us up there.” Since no one in Atlanta was interested in taking up the Reverend’s challenge, Tyrone figured he’d pass the idea on to Ray, “since you live in the cold already.”
When Black Pride began advertising for field workers, Ray decided to apply. But, except for Black Hands, which he wasn’t sure it would be wise to advertise to the Black Pride hiring committee, Ray had no qualifications whatsoever. Not even a university degree. “No sweat, man,” one of his bookstore customers, a Rochdale student, told him. “Got twenty-five bucks?”
Rochdale had recently declared itself a “free university.” There were no formal curricula, no classes, no exams, not even any degrees. Since Rochdale’s governing council believed degrees were bourgeois affectations, it decided to sell them as a way of undermining the elitism of formal education and, not coincidentally, raising money. You could buy a Rochdale B.A. for twenty-five dollars, an M.A. for fifty and a Ph.D. for a hundred. To get the B.A., you had to answer a skill-testing question of your choosing. Ray’s question: “What was the name of the black community Halifax City Council destroyed in the sixties?” He only hoped no one in Halifax had heard of Rochdale.
Ray did get the job, but not, as he later learned, because he’d faked his credentials. Calvin Johnstone, the Deacon’s son, who was the head of the hiring committee, knew Ray hadn’t gone to university. He even knew about Black Hands. “Wouldn’a mattered if you claimed you’d been one of them moon-walkers,” he chuckled later. “We’d a hired you anyway. I told the committee, I said, ‘We gotta have at least one guy from out home.’ And nobody else from Africville applied.”
The province had chosen Calvin to be the first chairman of Black Pride’s board of directors, partly because he was the son of a politically well-connected moderate black religious leader who taught high school history, lived with his wife and two children in a small bungalow in a new suburb outside the city, was active in his local church and chaired his neighbourhood improvement committee—and partly because he seemed so unthreatening. And, up to a point, he was. He preferred to go along and get along. But Calvin also knew the best way to get what he really wanted was to appear to be the lesser of the evils. In order to be that, he needed . . . well, a greater evil. Ray Carter filled the bill.
Ray’s protest about the Tribune’s lack of black reporters, for example, had generated a torrent of phone calls from other businessmen practically begging to meet with Calvin to talk about how they could find more qualified Negroes to work in their shops and offices. And, thanks to Ray’s highly publicized rally against the landlord who wouldn’t rent to a black family, Calvin would meet next week with the Municipal Rental Property Owners’ Association to talk about a voluntary code of ethics for landlords.
So Calvin had been more than willing to let Ray stir things up. Up to a point. He wasn’t so sure about Ray’s latest scheme. Ray wanted Black Pride to sponsor a visit from the Black Hands’ new secretary of state, Tyrone Vincent, so he could talk about the organization’s plan for a blacks-only state in the United States. “You do like to stir up the shit, don’t you?” Calvin laughed when Ray had broached the idea a week ago. “Let’s just get this rally out of the way first.”
Ray had been Black Pride’s representative on the organizing committee for tonight’s rally. He thought everything had been settled, but now Spittle Man, one of the union reps, was telling him plans had changed. “We’re runnin’ late,” he’d told Ray, so instead of two speakers—Calvin and his father—Black Pride could now have only one, and he could only speak for five minutes.
None of the speakers for the unions—there were four of them, plus the president of the Trades Council, who was acting as emcee—had been dropped from the speakers’ list or had a time limit put on them. And there should have been time, Ray knew; none of the provincial politicians they’d invited had shown up. Nova Scotia was in the middle of what everyone said was going to
be a very close provincial election and none of the candidates wanted to have to take a stand on such a controversial issue.
But Ray’s protests had been in vain. Standing now, toe to toe, eye to eye with the union rep, Ray wanted nothing more than to take one good roundhouse swing at his fat, ugly, drunken white face. But he couldn’t. Not here. Not now.
“Fuck it, and fuck you,” Ray muttered finally, then turned on his heel and walked away. He would have to find Calvin now, tell him.
“Ray . . .” It was a woman’s voice. Calling. From behind him. “Ray.” He turned back toward the sound. It was Rosa, the Deacon’s daughter, Calvin’s little sister. Ray hadn’t seen her since he’d left for Toronto three years ago. She’d been twelve then, an awkward, pudgy, preadolescent girl. She wasn’t twelve any more! Now, she’d grown into her woman’s body; the curves were all where they should be. Ray’s eyes swallowed her full breasts, which were pushing out against the tight fabric of her white sweater.
“Daddy wants to know if he can speak first,” she said when she caught up to him. “His breathing’s bad and he’s getting cold.”
Ray ripped his eyes from her chest and focused on her face. It wasn’t so hard. Her smooth skin was the colour of dark chocolate, which only made her eyes seem brighter, her perfect teeth whiter. But it was no easier to concentrate on what she was saying. What? Her father. Speak. First. Shit. Should he tell her? He didn’t want to, but he didn’t want her to go, either. Keep talking.
“There’s a problem,” he said. He didn’t need to tell her about Spittle Man. “Things are running late so they’re trying to cut down on the number of speakers.” Ray knew Calvin, as chairman of Black Pride, had to talk. “So I don’t think there’s going to be time for your father tonight. I’m sorry.”
She laughed. “He’s not going to be happy when I tell him that.”
“Do you want me to come with you? I can tell him if you want.” Ray just didn’t want her to leave.
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