Blood

by Lawrence Hill

  Most people I have met who read Roots don’t appear to care that the family history was somewhat fictional. It was a novel, after all. Roots still stands out as the twentieth­-century literary celebration of the deep ties between America and Africa. It certainly had burrowed deep into my own soul by the time I found myself exploring the streets of Niamey.

  In my first days there, while we stayed at a centre for young people and waited for the signal to begin a rural tree-planting mission, I took every opportunity to slip away from my fellow volunteers from Québec, and to meet one-on-one with the people of Niger. Every morning, I ventured to a street corner to drink the coffee made by a man named Moussa. He was young and friendly, and asked me a million questions, and taught me a few phrases of Djerma, his language. I spent several mornings in Moussa’s company, sipping a bizarre mixture that he called “café” but which contained instant coffee powder, a tea bag, sickly sweet and syrupy condensed milk, and water that had been heated over a three-stick fire. I kept returning, anxious to learn more and more Djerma and to test out a series of salutations on Moussa and his other customers, until suddenly I could return no longer.

  The last thing I remember eating, before becoming sick, was green olives, which some kind person had served to me in his modest home. I suspected that bad water caused my illness, but since the green olives were the last thing I’d eaten, I would not eat them again for decades.

  At any rate, I became violently ill, with a high fever and bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Soon, I could no longer walk or stand. The illness raged on. It is possible that my friends from Québec saved my life when they lifted me into a taxi and took me to the hospital in Niamey. It was crowded, but the staff made room for me. They found me a bed, but as for food and drink — when I would be well enough to have any — it would be up to my friends to bring it to me. This was the case for all other patients too. If you had to be hospitalized, you needed someone to bring you food.

  I remember a doctor saying that I had gastroenteritis. I was so dehydrated that I required an intravenous drip. My blood was tested. The doctor said that my red blood cell count had fallen dangerously low and that I needed blood transfusions. As I now know, the adult body contains about six litres of blood. In the simplest terms, it consists of plasma (which is mostly water), white blood cells for coping with infections, and red blood cells for transporting oxygen. The oxygen transport function is so important that, as we saw in chapter two, elite athletes in endurance events experiment with various means to boost their red blood cell count.

  Many Africans die needlessly of gastroenteritis because of lack of clean water and advanced, affordable medical treatment. My friends and I did not hesitate: we accepted the advice of the doctor. It was 1979. Nobody had heard of HIV/AIDS yet. (I was lucky to have become ill before the disease turned into an epidemic, taking thousands of lives and affecting blood safety around the world.)

  I have always had a mild fear of needles. Before developing diabetes in mid-life, I dealt with it by turning my head away when I had blood withdrawn for tests. (Now I have to look when I inject myself with insulin.) But that summer of 1979 in Niger, as I dropped from about 150 pounds to a skinny 125, and even as fever, nausea, and pain racked my body, I could not stop thinking and worrying about those bags of blood that took all of an eternity to drip into me. I wanted it over and done with in the time it takes to insert and withdraw a needle, but instead I lived with that needle in my arm, with those intravenous bags, and with that blood for hours. At first, I tried not to look but couldn’t avert my eyes perpetually. Next, I stared at the hanging blood bag, which was shrinking by reluctant degrees, in an effort to overcome my fears. It didn’t work. I imagined the person or persons who had donated the blood. African? European? North American? How far had the blood travelled to arrive in the Niamey hospital? Had it been flown or trucked in a five-hundred-millilitre bag in a cooler packed with ice? In my state of illness and anxiety, I hoped that they had accurately tested the blood of the donor so that it would match my own: A-positive.

  Now that I was on a hospital bed with blood to absorb, I no longer felt preoccupied by the idea of having my own heritage — my own blood, or so it felt — accepted by the people of Niger. It didn’t matter in the slightest whether I received blood from an African, an Asian, a European, or an American. What mattered was that our blood types matched. What mattered was that someone — living near or far, I will never know — had provided blood so that I might go on living.

  My friends from Québec took care of me every day, bringing food and water and sleeping on a mattress by my bed. It became instantly possible for me to love and accept them, while simultaneously wanting to discover Niger and its people. One love did not preclude the other. One aspect of my own heritage did not rule out the other. I made a promise to myself: that when I recovered and left the hospital, I would never worry again about how people imagined or interpreted the nature of my blood. Why should I worry about what others might think? I knew who I was, and I knew my family background, and I no longer felt any need to prove or establish it in public. This became the gift of my illness, and of the donated blood that helped me recover.

  The experience of falling ill and receiving blood changed my emotional makeup and relaxed my self-concept. If the donor had been a black man or woman, did the transfusion make me more African? Of course not. My blood had been boosted, and changed, but I was the same person. Its real impact, in terms of my body and soul, was an entirely private matter. Race has nothing to do with one’s true blood, or skin colour, and everything to do with perception — self-perception, and the perceptions of others. I finally came to this understanding in the hospital room in Niamey.

  As far as the body went, the physical changes brought about by the transfusion were locked in my bloodstream. Assuming that the medical diagnosis was correct, the donated blood restored my red blood cell count. I regained my health within a week.

  Thanks to a transfusion that helped me avoid dying at a young age — before falling truly in love, raising children, writing a book, or even understanding the meaning of my first volunteer stint in Africa — my soul shifted. It changed weight. I felt the weight of identity preoccupation lift off my shoulders. I no longer cared who saw what in my ancestry, when they looked into my eyes. I was both black and white, and no longer needed affirmation from the people of Niamey. It’s as if a higher power had been looking down at me and said, “Hey, that coat looks heavy. May I hang it up for you?” The transformation of my blood had its most significant impact not on my body, but on my way of thinking. The confluence of my blood and that of another human was like two rivers meeting. One set of corpuscles merging with another kept me alive, and in the truest sense of the word, made my own blood truly mixed.

  In this chapter, I will explore the meaning of blood, particularly in light of how it defines us in our private and public lives. I will look at how notions of blood affect the relationships we create with our families, careers, and nations. Situations of racial ambiguity tend to expose our unexamined assumptions about blood and belonging, so I will meditate on topics that have held my attention for years: how governments, courts, and social groups have navigated through disagreements on matters of black, white, Asian, indigenous, and national identity.

  Blood has entered our minds as inextricably linked to personality and destiny because our earliest, foremost Western thinkers suggested that was so. It’s an awfully seductive fluid. When it leaves the body, it’s a big deal. People might die. People might be accused of attempted murder, or worse. Even when it is supposed to spill — think of menstrual blood, for example, or of the blood from the broken hymen of a virgin on a wedding night that unfolds according to all the ancient rules — it has power and significance. Maybe it is impure. Maybe it could damage you. Maybe that menstrual blood could spoil food or rob a man of his hunting power. Or maybe it is the blood of the virgin, suggestive of innocence and perfection. In a
ddition, blood acquires holy significance in the world’s pre-eminent religions. Christians consider Christ’s blood to be sacred, and imagine that they drink of it when they lift the holy cup of wine to their lips. Judaism and Islam have intricate rules about how animals are to be bled and how blood must be absent from food.

  Blood filters into our consciousness in ways that surpass any other bodily fluid or any bone or tissue. It has become such a powerful metaphor for personality that we have forgotten that it is an idea — not a reality. It helps us imagine ourselves. But perhaps it helps us too much. We have bought the metaphor so fully that we have come to believe it to be fundamentally true.

  MY FATHER (A HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST) and older brother (a singer-songwriter), both named Daniel (or Dan) Hill, were known across Canada in their respective fields and had each written books long before I wrote novels. By the time I was in my late teens, Dan’s songs were playing on radio stations across Canada and around the world. With his long hair, romantic eyes, soulful voice, bare feet (on stage, at least), arm wrapped over guitar, and gut-wrenching lyrics of heartbreak that a friend of mine teasingly called “songs by which to slit your wrists,” Dan’s voice permeated cafés, the back seats of cars, and wedding halls.

  I adored my brother, and still do, but his fame added to my motivation to leave Toronto after high school and forge my own identity somewhere else. We met up here and there to play squash, go for a run, or share a meal, but even when oceans separated us, Dan followed me. On the southern Atlantic coast of Spain, in a village called Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where I had gone to write and where the only non-Spaniards apart from my first wife and me were two lonely Mormon missionaries who seemed wanted and loved by nobody, I heard his big hit “Sometimes When We Touch.” I heard Dan’s song in a taxi in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where I had gone to work as a volunteer with Crossroads International. Perhaps the most haunting reminder of his omnipresence reached me in Québec City, where I had gone to study at Laval University. Not yet fluent in French, I’d been in the city for only two days and was hunting for an apartment to rent. I was having a hard time of it. Prospective landlords had been hanging up on me when I phoned them to ask about their apartments, and I had taken to the streets to scour for “à louer” signs in the windows of houses and apartment buildings. One man had just made me an offer that, I suppose, he felt that an octoroon — this is what he called me (“octoroon” being an antiquated Southern term for a person who is supposed to have one-eighth black blood) — could not refuse: free rent in exchange for certain “nocturnal services.” I kept on walking and soon found myself hungry and despondent in the Carré d’Youville, near the gates to the Old City. Cars and taxis buzzed about, and pedestrians crowded the tourist shops. But then I walked past a theatre for the performing arts, and there on the massive advertising billboard was my brother’s name and giant face. Figuratively and literally, I felt that Dan’s successes were spiking my own blood pressure.

  Later that day, I found a bachelor apartment to rent. I stayed in Québec for two years, travelled a few times to Africa and Europe, and worked in Winnipeg and Ottawa. With one brief exception, I did not return to live in Toronto until eleven years after finishing high school.

  Years later, my novels and non-fiction books began to find a few readers. One never knows who will show up, or not turn up, at a public reading. At my first literary reading in Hamilton, Ontario, four people attended — the event organizer, the bookseller, the bookseller’s assistant, and me. Committed writers just take it and carry on, so I did too. When people heard that I was a writer and knew of my family connections, they would often say: “You come by it honestly” or “It’s in your blood!” If writing is in my blood, my circulation is awfully slow. I had been writing since my childhood, but had no impression that a knack for writing flowed in my veins. To me, it felt like twenty years of effort finally paid off when Some Great Thing, my first novel, was published in 1992. Eight books later, I still don’t feel that writing is in my blood. It is in my brain, and in my work, and in the hours I have invested and the hours I have yet to invest in the development of my craft.

  People often ask me if any of my five children will become writers. I don’t know. All I really wish is that my children lead rich, fulfilling lives. My own worth and identity are not validated if my children become writers, or negated if the children opt to drive trucks or fly planes. If they do become writers, will it be because the writing gene in my own veins slipped into theirs? I prefer to imagine that it will be because they worked bloody hard at something that they felt was an achievable, ordinary goal. I like to think that they heard me typing late into the night a few thousand times, and that the process of pitching one’s soul onto the page seemed normal to them. If it was part of my daily life, they might think it could be part of their lives too.

  Parental expectations can crush the spirits of children. I sometimes jokingly say that as the son of immigrants to Canada, I understand full well that the last thing many immigrants want is to see their son or daughter become a novelist. They are looking for doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects — any professional career that they hope will protect their children from economic and social vicissitudes visited on earlier generations in the family, in other parts of the world. The expectations can be suffocating when expressed along lines of blood.

  I want to share one episode from my childhood. My father loved my brother, sister, and me very much. We were lucky to have him, and we loved him too — especially after we hit the magic age of seventeen or eight­een and moved out of the house, which made us free to engage with him on our own terms, and freed him of trying to force-feed professional career ambitions down our throats.

  I credit my father’s personality and energy for infecting me with an enthusiasm for life and for writing. But when we were children, Dad never spoke of his own failures, and chose instead to hammer home all of the accomplishments of his ancestors. For example, my great-grandfather, Daniel Hill I, had been born in Maryland in 1860, just a step outside of slavery. He graduated from Lincoln University and went on to become a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. His son (my grandfather), Daniel Hill II, graduated as well from Lincoln, went on to complete graduate studies, and became an AME church minister. Following in this tradition, my father earned a doctorate degree and playfully but frequently drove home that he had a “Phud” (Ph.D.) from the University of Toronto. He perceived that ambition and professional success were in the family blood.

  My father was also fond of citing the accomplishments of our Flateau cousins. He had an older sister, Jeanne Flateau, who lived in Brooklyn with her husband and their seven children. Jeanne had raised the children and managed to keep up her own career as a social worker. I felt close to those cousins, and still do, but as a child I hated it when Dad rhymed off all of their successes. I felt that he was telling us that we had a super-intelligent, high-achieving strain of blood in one branch of the family, and implying that we — the Hill children in Toronto — were of a lesser branch. The Flateaus, Dad seemed to be saying, were in the family arteries. We were in the capillaries. It was particularly confounding because Dad let us know that he did not expect all that much from us, but that anything less than perfection would be unacceptable. This made me crazy.

  One day, while attending Grade 9 at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school), I came home, swallowed nervously, and told my father that the very next day I expected to fail a biology test.

  He looked at me firmly and said, without the slightest hint of irony or playfulness, “Hill kids don’t fail.”

  I did fail the exam, and felt all the worse as a result of what he had told me: that this failure violated a rule of my family blood.

  HOW DID WE COME TO EQUATE blood with the transmission not only of skill and talent but the right to lead and inspire others? How is it that we have bought into the idea so fully that for the longest time we beli
eved that bluebloods had a moral right to rule over others?

  Part of the reason may reside in the physicality of blood; the way it moves, circulating through the body, being sent out and returning — unless it is spilled in the drama of an accident, or is made to spill as the result of a purposeful attack. But as we saw in chapter one, we have also held on to some part of the concepts that Hippocrates developed in 400 BCE, when he theorized that personality and health were determined by the presence and balance of the four humours.

  In The Nature of Man, Hippocrates wrote: “The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; these make up the nature of his body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he enjoys the most perfect health when these elements are duly proportioned to another in respect of compounding, power and bulk, and when they are perfectly mingled.”

  Six hundred years later, the Roman physician and philosopher Galen argued that the preponderance of one particular humour determined a person’s basic personality type. Blood was thought to accelerate the spirit, and thus we have come to employ the word sanguine to describe fundamentally optimistic people. If you are a positive person, Galen led us to believe, it’s because it is in your blood. It’s not a huge leap to assume that talent, and God-given rights to lead or inspire, might also reside in the blood.

  Because of the public successes of my father and brother, I’ve always been intrigued by the lives of people who pursued the same public careers as their famous parents or siblings. When singer-songwriters Julian Lennon and Adam Cohen began to attract attention, I felt that I understood what it might mean to them to have grown up in the shadows of John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, respectively. Their careers might forever be situated in their fathers’ shadows.

  In March 2013, the young Canadian singer-­songwriter Zoe Sky Jordan gave an interview on CBC Radio about the release of her new album, Restless, Unfocused. The interviewer noted that Sky Jordan is the daughter of musicians Amy Sky and Marc Jordan, both of whom have had successful careers performing their own work and writing songs for other recording stars. Early in the interview, Sky mentioned that in her high school years, she had resisted following in her parents’ footsteps, choosing instead to explore other art forms, such as pottery and dance. However, after graduating, she did not feel the call to go to university and chose instead to launch her own career in music.