Carols the radio was playing, having for a long time now, become an unending drone, like the sound of the horn of the mine. The silence of the darkness is heavier with the drone. And still she sits and waits, with the untouched expensive mug of sherry beside her. Her mind goes back to those sleepless Christmas Eve nights tramping down the wooden stairs, just as dawn was about to break and the light of morning was similar to the colour of the sky she saw on the Christmas cards, and like the sky she saw in the window of Simpson’s nativity; creeping in her flannel pyjamas, the kind she was wearing now; the hand of each brother in each hand; feeling the stickiness of her palms, as if they had gone to bed with chewing gum in their mouths and in their excitement, too; crawling under the seven-foot Christmas tree, higher than any tree in the forest before it was stolen, like two wise men and a female angel; and opening their presents, countless as the stars, before it is time. And one Christmas Eve, she had to open ten large boxes, wrapped in red or in green tissue paper, before she could assemble and make sense of her gift: earmuffs, scar, pin for the scarf, tam-o’-shanter, mittens, inner gloves for the mittens. On the floor, these gifts of limbs were finally skeletoned into one body, when she ripped open the green box that held the thick, green, flesh-crawling, acrylic leotards. And they would sneak back over the skeletons, having walked over the trunks of one dress her mother could not finish. And the smells, more than any other reminiscence, of the untidy Christmas morning house.
The apartment is spic-and-span; clean and immaculate. She sits and waits, and then her waiting and the silence are broken by the heavy breathing of her slumber. The blue Christmas-card light comes through the window, which she does not see. The clock-radio is awake and wishing “Merry Christmas” to its listeners; and it says that the day will be cold, and there will be no snow, and that Bing Crosby will sing “White Christmas;” and there is a church service, and talk of turkeys and presents . . .
“How many did you get?”
“Hundreds.”
“How many, stupid”
“Five.”
“Me, I got ten.”
“Ten?”
“I opened ten presents to finally find all the pieces of one lousy new outfit!”
“I wish I had brothers and sisters.”
. . . and mince pie and pudding and funny hats hidden inside bright crackers, and more carols sung by a choir of boys in a cathedral somewhere in England.
She is sitting at her father’s table and he has just plunged the hunting knife into the turkey where its kidneys would be, if a turkey has any kidneys; and the smoke is just clearing from the log forced into the cast-iron stove and the meat of the moose is still tough and red, as if the gallon of wine in which it has been soaked for days is its own blood; and the galvanized pipe is red, and the sparks fly, in wrong directions . . .
“Get a bag! Wet it! Wet it!”
. . . and she can hear, between sleeping and waking, emerging from that netherworld, twigs crackling like an anxious voice. And the crackling in the stove becomes the sound of her name being called out, which pulls her from her sleep, which pulls her from the mattress on the floor; and in this state, fluid and unpunctuated as a sleepwalker’s, she goes to the door and opens it, a thing she has not done before, in this city with all its creeps and men abusing women.
It was when she looked into the man’s eyes, and ran her eyes over the apparition of his body, trousers of green plaid, red woollen shirt thick as a lumberjack’s, and red sweater, dressed as if he is going into the busy, did she look at herself, to see that the top of her grey pyjamas is unbuttoned, for three buttons from the top, and the pants on which the white daisies are more numerous and visible on the rumpled material, and always bought too large, even from childhood and for economy, have sagged down her hips. But the man was not examining her body.
“Get dressed,” he said, looking at her feet. “Get dressed! Patricia and the kids’re downstairs, waiting in the car.”
INITIATION
Click! Click! Click! Click! Click! Five bolts and locks, and pieces of light artillery, machinery and equipment made this sound of entry. It was like heavy equipment clanging on the Toronto waterfront, or on a construction site. Five anxieties that meant, in this section of the city, protection and safety and secrecy for whatever was going on, “was going down” behind the red-painted glossy door, was not to be exposed to any and every visitor, and certainly not to the man.
“My man!”
The door was open.
“Hey, brother!”
“What’s happenin?”
“Ain’t nothing happenin, brother.”
“What’s happenin is happenin!’
“Right on!”
“This here’s my main man!”
He introduced me.
“Right on!” And he burst out laughing.
“This be a cool motherfucker! This motherfucker be West Indian-English, brother!”
“So, what’s happenin, mah man?”
“I’m cool. Things cool. Every thang’s cool!”
“How’s everything, bro?”
“Right on!”
“Yeah!” Barrington said. “Meet my main man!”
I was introduced a second time.
“Is this brother into the revolution?”
“Prof at the university.”
“Motherfucker! Shee-it! Ain’t this a motherfucker! Prof, eh? The Ivy Leagues, eh? Gimme five, my man! Revolution needs some heavy brothers, professors and shit! Heavy!”
The full, strong, powerful and deep tone of the saxophone, which I recognized as John Coltrane’s, came like a wave of rescue and destruction over the room. The music was like a thick layer of nurturing blood. It was as if the music was a synopsis of all I had been exposed to outside on the street in this section of the city, Jane and Finch; and a summary of what was going on in this room. A synopsis of the smell, the hope, the fear, the joy, the liquor I had drunk, and the women, and the power of the city itself.
“Yeah, my man! What’s happenin on Bay Street and downtown? Yeah!”
“Ripped off these magazines for you, bro.”
“Right on! Revolution needs documentation, brother. Power to the people! Yeah!”
“Got a little surprise for you. Outside. Some wheels.”
“Right on! Vinceremos, brother, vinceremos! ”
“Some serious shit!”
“Where’s the brother from?”
“York.”
“Where’s he from? Where’s the brother’s aesthetic-cultural roots, man? The South?”
He looked at my American army fatigue bought on Jarvis and Queen, and worn while I was teaching a summer course in Black Literature, and I wasn’t sure whether his strong gaze suggested astonishment or complete dismissal. He was the size of Mohammed Ali, with the same lightish complexion, and his eyes were grey and piercing. They went right through me, and this determination of gaze made him more powerful, and me, withered against his disapproval. He was dressed in skin-fitting blue jeans and a long black robe that reached to his knees, with three embroidered lines round the collarless neck. Red, black and green. I had just arrived from New York and my student, who was now standing uncertain between the two of us, had picked me up at Pearson International Airport. Barrington’s arrival in a maroon late-modelled Mercedes-Benz was as incongruous as my introduction to this man in this apartment in the heart of Jane and Finch was uncomfortable. Barrington wore blue jeans at York, with holes at the knees and in the seat; and he gave me the impression for the first semester I was his professor in Black Literature that he was a neglected, indigent, fatherless and motherless product of Jane and Finch. “Product of the ghetto” is the phrase he always used to describe himself, to me and to the other black students. But they seemed to have known the truth. I was accepting his definition of himself, romanticizing that definition and making my friendship with Barrington and my own understanding of him more easy to swallow. I was going to spend a few hours with Barrington, meet his aunt, he said h
e had no mother, and check out the scenes in this section of the city, and visit the places which I had read about in the Star newspaper and in magazines, and which I had lectured about in Barrington’s class. This stop was not on the tour. And I was not moved by the investigative introduction I was being put through: for my mind was on the booze can and a chicken-and-waffles place and the barbecued fish and jerked chicken I had been reading about. I loved my outfit. When I arrived in New York in early June, I was wearing a three-piece suit, college tie of Trinity College, and brown suede shoes.
“Where’s the brother’s roots?”
“The islands.”
“West Indies?”
“The brother’s a Carbean man.”
“Yeah!”
The tall man, who looked more and more like Mohammed Ali the longer he stood before me, was rocking on his heels as I had seen Texans do, as they stood at the bar in the restaurant where I went once to have southern-fried chicken at Chicken Box Number One. “Gimme five, brother! Afro-West Indian. Yeah! Gimme some skin! Yeah! Marcus Garvey. Yeah! Padmore. Yeah! Peace and love, brother!” With each “yeah” he shook my hand stronger. “Paul Lawrence Dunbar! Dunbar. Yeah! If I should die, let me nobly die. ”
As we stepped farther inside the room, I saw that it was haze with blue smoke. And I could remember, in that instant, waking in the early mornings in Barbados, when the mornings were the same colour, and I could not tell whether it was the wind blowing the dying gasps of a cane-fire that had raged during the night, whose smoke was now fanning us into our unexpected safety, after a night of unknown disaster. Not really sure whether the morning light was married with the blue low clouds, taking in the colour of the canes themselves and the sea a few miles down the hill. And there was a smell to the haziness of the atmosphere. I did not see nor notice any lamps burning. When we came up in the elevator, it was late afternoon outside. Early September.
And like the morning haze which moves slowly towards you, and envelops you in its harmless embrace, so too did the room of this strange man take me into its arms. John Coltrane went into a roaring, untamed straining and screaming, making his instrument sound like the voice of a lion taken out of its veldt and placed against that tradition transported out of the jungle and put into a cage for eyes to see; and the iron in the cage; and against the restriction of chords laid down by gamekeepers and by tradition and others who said that those chords could not be broken I began to think of the shouts of black power which I had been hearing around me, at York, and that time in Texas, two improvisations on the original theme, and here in Jane and Finch so different from where I lived in this same city; still the same words, shouted at me as if the men shouting them felt that I was as unbeliever, a West Indian man and not one of them. But I kept coming back to the shouts and the meaning I got from the shouts when they were not too confused by the spit of their own violence. And I began to wonder if this is the meaning, the quintessence, of the new blackness taking root in this city. I was beginning to feel I was in Harlem.
“This is some heavy shit,” Barrington said, using a language and gesture I had not heard nor seen in months at York. He was searching for a place to sit down.
“Trane’s heavy shit. Let me nobly die!” the host said, screaming the words out, as if he too was a musician with an instrument, accompanying the sounds erupting from the speakers. He made his voice seem like the instrument, as he repeated the words, Let me nobly die!
“We got a deal?” Barrington said. I was beginning to doubt that I knew this young man who had come to my office and my downtown home so often to discuss his assignments which were always late, but which, when finished, were of exceptional insight and solid intellectual organization; this young man whom I had pitied because of his deprived background in a small apartment somewhere in this section of the city, beaten down by reams of features in the Toronto Star and by second-year sociology students, inquiring to understand this black community where we were now, without father and mother, and occupied by strangers who came to visit his aunt, whom he said, apologetically, “was involved in some mean things, motherfucker.” I did not know him at all, as he stood bargaining with this tough, heavyweight champion of a man, whom I could see fitting as easily in the Kingston Pen or the Don, as I was seeing him now in this gloomy, lampless apartment whose windows were closed against the life outside on the September street, filled with colour and life and noise and large automobiles which blared the latest in reggae and dancehall, blowing their horns when even an ant came into their shined, slow-moving path.
“Do we have a deal, brother?” Barrington said.
“Baby, you come into my crib,” the man said, speaking a different language, as if he was in Harlem and not Toronto, “and with a brother who’s into the revolution, being a brother from the Ivy Leagues, and you ask me if we have a deal? Shit, baby, we been dealing . . .” He did not finish his thought. He put something to his lips, the room was darker now; and closed his eyes, and the steely grey eyes disappeared; and he inhaled deeply, and in an instant of exhaling the room became bluer. He started to cough. Something was caught in his throat. “Shit, baby, we got a deal! Check this out,” he said, handing Barrington the thing held between his thumb and index finger. “Try some o’ this shit, my Afro-Westindian brother!” There was a large X, in gold, on the cap he wore.
Barrington acted for me, and spoke for me.
“Whoooooo!” he said. He returned the thing the same way the host handed it to him.
“Vinceremos, compadre! Vinceremos!”
“Latinamericano,” Barrington said, with a Spanish accent.
I did not know Spanish.
“Fidel!” the man screamed.
“Fidelito!” Barrington said, as if he was in Cuba.
“Castro.”
Barrington passed the cigarette to me. I panicked. But I knew that the etiquette and the protocol of this room demanded that I take it. I had never smoked a cigarette like this before. Although I did not know what it really was, I still knew what it was. It was thicker than any I had seen for the past few months, hand-rolled by the old men in the streets of Harlem, who sat on wooden benches under the canopies of old, almost derelict stores, or on the park benches which seemed to be placed everywhere, every three steps that an old man could take, in the hot, never-ending New York humidity. This one was wrapped in brown leaf.
I wanted to be accepted, and regarded as cool, so I accepted it. I did not exactly know what to do with it, and how to use it with the same coolness Barrington had employed.
“Castro!” I said too loudly to be cool, which I wanted to be, and in a voice I knew had embarrassed my student, and was suspicious to my host. But they ignored me. I had heard my own voice come out like a bellow as I spoke. And I knew that it jarred their sensibilities; and was inconsistent with the candles which I now saw for the first time; and the incense which made the place seem like an altar in a church of the holy spiritual Baptists. The incense and the candles gave off a blue haze. The room was mysterious, like a mission-house for brotherhood, like a church.
“Owwwwwwww!” Barrington said. As he exhaled and as his voice came out with the exhaled breath, he sounded as if was a dog.
“Ain’t this a bitch?” the host said.
I could make out a colour photograph on a wall. Through the haze, I could barely make out a man in the uniform of the Canadian armed forces. The man in the photograph was holding a gun.
“Brothers in Latinamerica sure have their shit together!”
The haze from the candles and the incense and the thing we were smoking made us all soft in the room; and made the room itself smaller than it was; and clothed us in a peace which took away the dilapidation, the noise, the fatigue I was feeling, the anger and the loneliness I had seen and had felt on the faces of the people below in the street.
“How much for the wheels?”
“Four bills.”
“Shit, baby, this is colonialism!”
“Four bills.”
&nb
sp; “I got to get the motherfucker off my hands in two days!” His manner was not complaining. It was boastful, informing me of his prowess in the transaction. I still did not know what was going on.
“Three bills then, motherfucker.”
The man took a roll of bills from his pocket, round and the size of a coffee mug, and rolled off the amount. Without counting, Barrington pushed the notes into his jacket pocket. The suit was silk with narrow shoulders, and expensive. It was the first time I had seen him dressed like this, like a junior stockbroker. But I remembered his summer job was on Bay Street. He did not look at me while the transaction was being made. I was not supposed to see, or know. John Coltrane was now playing as if he himself had witnessed this, and was approving it, and was blowing a benediction. I could think of nothing to cause me to be so contemplative. And I was thinking if, as a party to this deal, I was entitled to a cut; and I was thinking that if it was a deal, an illegal deal, and my student was caught, or the man had second thoughts about the deal and went to the police, if I would be involved as a witness, and as an accessory. And seeing all this money, and being in Jane and Finch which I had read about, where money grew on trees, and had lectured about; this area, with all this bigness and strangeness and mystery and excitement, whether I should not demand my cut. And then these thoughts went from my mind, and nothing else seemed to be of meaning, seemed to exist, nothing but the smell and the twirling, the small fragile vulnerable rise of the smoke from the incense and the candles. Nothing else in the room seemed to exist. There was nothing else. This room was nowhere. And still, it was in this city. But it could be anywhere. It was wholesome nevertheless because what was being done, could be done. And it was ugly because of what was being done, in my presence. And I was the witness. But I no longer wanted to be a witness. I had been placed on this threshold since I came to Jane and Finch, and I wanted no longer to be left out. But I knew I could not be a part of this Toronto. This room was Toronto: good and bad. And in the way we were being defined, not that I felt that Barrington and the man were aware and concerned about this. I was now relaxed. I came close to being a part of things. The weight of my journey from New York came off my shoulders, and I was light; and the hunger that had gnawed at me, anticipating the chicken and the jerked pork from the barbecues of the booze cans on Oakwood and on Vaughan, was now abated; and the distance at which I had stood from my student and from this man was squeezed into the closeness of brothers. I continued to look around the small room, trying to find some object which might give me balance, a context, and be able to place myself in this room. I was not offended by what was going on, and I did not feel that initiating me into this, by my student, was an offence. And I began to feel as if I was a black man born deep in Harlem in America, and was no longer West Indian, as they had painted me at the door by their introduction. I was beginning to feel like a brother. And I must have become one, for just as I accepted this image of myself, I began to see what was happening around me. There were three other men in the room with us. They had been there all the time. They were sitting in a far corner, on couches low to the floor, like Japanese furniture. And they looked that way, because the couches had no legs. They were sawed off. There was another colour photograph of the man, my host, in uniform, hugging a woman whose face looked Chinese or Japanese. The darkness in the room made the distinction impossible. I studied the woman’s face and decided she was Vietnamese. I found the context of the room, and the place. We were four men.
In this City Page 4