Coltrane was finished.
“This is a Man’s World” came on next. But it had really been playing for some time. And this is how I might have got the analogy with the men. But is this what the singer had in mind? Strong men? And whose world was he singing about? I had looked throughout my three months in New York at the men and the world those men controlled. Were the men in this room, and their world, of four different sizes and complexions, the men James Brown was singing about? They had one thing in common, these men. Barrington and I stood out from them. But they had one thing in common, common to them all. Their image. Their dress. And their behaviour. Not their behaviour, because it was not behaviour. It was posture. Their posture. Their trousers fitting them like an extra skin, to their thighs. They wore brown leather boots. They were all dressed in various patterns and designs of Afro shirts. Dashikis. Round their necks were necklaces of cured, lacquered vegetables and beans, and peas. But more than this powerful image they had taken on, was the smell of the room. It fascinated me, the smell of their perfume. It was Youth Dew by Estée Lauder. It was a smell I had come to know musicians wear. And that other smell. The slow-working, insistent smell of the gift from the revolutionary brothers in Latin America.
I knew I was conspicuous among these men. I knew I stood out, in my army outfit which was nothing more to me than a summer costume; a costume like their own costume which was manufactured to make them look more African and tie them into an international black brotherhood. And Barrington, straight out of the pages of fashion and Esquire magazines, in his “Harry Rosen and Hazelton Lanes syndrome,” as he liked to refer to his style. But I was not embarrassed by my outfit because, as Barrington himself said, “It ain’t nothing, brother.” This was the first time he called me brother.
His former self-assurance, his buoyancy, his blackness and style were now dulled in the haze of the two blue smokes rising, the menthol of Salem cigarettes and the Colombian grass. Coltrane was on again. It did not take much for his saxophone to make me forget James Brown: and his mellowed melody to “Acknowledgement” was like a statement of joy mixed with anger, and I felt that he was saying to all of us that if the joy in our lives might be lost, then we could always revert to our black anger. The other men in the room wore caps with Xs on them.
There was a round table in the middle of the room. The host had pulled back the deep, rich crimson velour blind at the window facing the street, and the light poured in, and made me feel I was waking from a dream. This table in the middle of the room had once been taller. It had been a dining table. Someone had cut its legs off. In the middle of the pullout couch which had no legs, and where I was now sitting, there were large grease stains on the back. And on the cushion beside me were many other stains almost circular. I pondered on the mysteriousness and origin of these smaller stains. The couch was well used. One of my legs was under the cut-down dining table. I was becoming impatient for the business to be transacted. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. The other men in the room had not said a word to me, and they sat staring at the wall before them, waiting and staring. And not moving. Every day during my time in New York, I was reading in the newspapers about raids, and of black men being manacled and thrown into paddy wagons; and the newspapers carried photographs of the men; and one showed the house from which the men were taken. It could have been this room. I was impatient; but I did not understand the full etiquette of these kinds of transactions.
“Let me lay some o’ this tea on you, brother, before you split. This tea’s like gold. From the famous Colombian Aztec mines, where the brothers labour under the lash of the whip. Yeah! Let me nobly die, yeah!” I was becoming a little confused by this man’s sense of history and of geography.
“This is my main man,” Barrington said. I could not understand why he had to offer that stamp of approval for my presence. “My main man.”
I gave up. I could feel that the night was going to be long. In all this time, I had no idea of how many hours had passed; and I was not certain which day it was. It was as if we had spent days and nights rolled into one, as it used to be at a poker table. I had spoken one sentence in all this time. Barrington’s talk and the other man’s banter were like snowflakes on my head. I was thinking of home. But the snowflakes were covering my head, and making me chilly, making me hunch my shoulders as if I were outside in the snow. Toronto is cold at this time of year. And while they were making preparations to smoke the Colombian Aztec gold, and were fixing a tube out of a piece of Reynolds Wrap, and were no longer talking, their own words which had been like the snow, melted. And the skies were clear again. Light was coming through the window. They were all sitting round the chopped-down table now. I had grown accustomed, acclimatized to this room; and in one corner I saw another table. There was another table, large, oval-shaped, and made of mahogany. In the little space left over from the piles of books, it was polished to a high sheen. All the books were about the black race, stretching from Africa and ending in America . Dutchman & Slave: Famous Men of Color; Up from Slavery, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Wretched of the Earth were among them. Standing on Wretched of the Earth was a colour photograph of a man, in uniform, walking under a ceremonial roof of swords. Beside the man was a woman in a wedding dress. She was showing all her teeth in a grin of achievement, so it looked. Her teeth were even and beautiful and white. The two of them in the photograph seemed in a hurry to get out of the rain. The woman had a Chinese face. There was no rain falling in the photograph.
Barrington loosened his tie. I knew that night, perhaps midnight, would catch us here. In my resignation, as when your impatience gives way and the hour against which you had gauged your departure has come and gone, and you plan for the next day, I looked round the room, making the most of this situation that time has no meaning, “time is money!” And I saw with some shock that the walls were lined with books, and above the bookshelves were more photographs and paintings, all of black people. I could be in Harlem, or Africa. All the books dealt with the black race. I did not know that there were so many words written about this black race, in these times, in the North and in this city, when black men, and the educated ones, were cursing and screaming and making speeches about the lack of history and things written about black people and wanting to go “home” to Africa, and calling themselves African Canadians, without the hyphen.
They were not interested in me, had ignored my presence, as they gathered in a tight knot round the Reynolds Wrap and the gold from the Aztecs. So I moved round the walls, as if I was in an art gallery, as I had promised to do and had done when I was taken to the Schomburg Collection in Harlem, which was nearby to the city college where I had been teaching; and I read the titles of these books, history, sociology, anthropology, science, literature, biographies of musicians, waiting to find one that had a subject matter not about blacks. In the shelves on the first wall, the books packed neatly name by name, in alphabetical order, as if the room was in a library, I came across titles I had never seen. They all dealt with black people, with coloured people, with men of colour, with niggers, with Afro-Americans, with Negroes, and with African Americans and black Canadians. I saw leather-bound copies of Othello and The Tempest.
“Shakespeare?” I said. The discovery of this error made the word explode with the gratification of finding that your lover is a liar.
“He’s a brother,” the host said.
I had heard talk by some radicals at York and by some professors about the Sonnets, and a dark lady; and I was sure that the epithet referred to the velour that ladies wore at fifteenth-century dinner parties. The second wall of books was monolithically black and did not divulge the inconsistency of the first wall. Barrington unbuttoned two of the three buttons on his Harry Rosen jacket and relaxed completely, sitting on his back, slouching. “Yeah,” he said. The other men said “Yeah,” with profound contentment. I move on to the third wall. Someone behind me got up and adjusted a reel-to-reel tape player, and a voice came out, talking as if i
t was singing. Singing as if the voice was an instrument. And then there was a scream from the voice. I did not know what was going on. But I wished I knew more about black American music, and about black Canadians. It was not the blues. I knew the blues. And it was not gospel. I listened to gospel every Sunday morning on a University of Toronto radio station that beamed it in from the South, and when I was home in downtown Toronto I could barely get the blues from Buffalo. This solo, this chanting of words, was like nothing I had heard before. But I strained my ears and my attention, and tried to concentrate. And then I knew what it was. I knew it. It was a poem. But the way the poem was being read was like jazz being played. I wished I knew more about black American music and about black Canadian style. And I wanted to do something about it the moment I escaped from this blue-hazed, turning room, the moment I escaped from this Toronto version of Harlem, back into my condominium in Rosedale Valley Road.
“Yeah,” the host said.
“Yeah!” another man said.
“Chuck the brother out,” the host said. “Right on!”
I was too buried in the lyricism of the voice; too much was happening for me to recognize the poet. Some of the brothers, for I had begun to regard them as brothers, began to snap their fingers in rhythm, and this made me feel that I had heard the poem before.
“ This is what’s happenin, brother,” the host said.
“Brother’s into some heavy shit.”
“Roi!” Barrington shouted.
His voice scared me.
“The Imam,” the host said, as if he was introducing me to the poet who was in the room with us. “The Imam.”
“. . . no love poems written
until love can exist
freely and cleanly.”
“Check it out,” one of them said.
“. . . Let Black People Understand
that they are the lovers and the sons of lovers and
warriors Are poems and poets and
all the loveliness here in the world.”
A drum was beating an African rhythm in the background. It was not a professional drumming. It was someone’s hands on the chopped-off table. I know drums. But it was adequate and appropriate. The voice in the tape player was screaming now. It was in the room with us.
“. . . We want a black poem. And a
Black world.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And let all Black People speak this poem Silently
or LOUD.”
At this final word, the voice has risen to a chilling scream. The drums rolled. Fingers on the oval-shaped mahogany table were like bongos joining in a rolling crescendo. And then, just as suddenly as the voice had screamed from the tape, so suddenly, too, did the voice disappear. The light was coming in from the street. And the voices of all the men in the room went dead. All I could hear now was their breathing and an occasional “Yeah!” and the noise of the tape spinning and spitting off bits as it came to its end.
“Brother Roi is a bitch!”
I could not tell who said that.
“Have we ended our transaction amicably?” the host said.
“Deal,” Barrington said.
“Gentlemen’s agreement,” the host said, a new man. “Let us shake.”
“Vinceremos.”
“Who did you say this brother was?”
They had forgotten me again. I did not exist any longer, against their tight ritual and understanding.
“It’s my main man.”
Barrington said it with less conviction than when we had arrived.
But they had treated me as royalty, in silent adoration, all during the time they had been listening to the poem, and up till the conclusion to the transaction. Over and over, they had said, “My man, my main man.” And sometime during that time, they had handed me the Reynolds Wrap, and I had done the obvious thing with a tube, never mind that that tube was made of foil. I had blown into it. Bubbles raged inside the glass pot, like one used for making coffee, like a storm off the rocky coast of Bathseba in Barbados. At that moment of torrent and torment, the men had fallen dead, mesmerized, in silence and bewilderment. Masks of shock and recrimination came to their faces. Profound unbelief. And a smile of compassion brought life into the masks.
“My main man.”
I had tried a second time, taking their disapprobation to heart, and had blown harder, taking it in, with my eyes bulging against the intake of breath and water and fumes, against the storm of bubbles, and the hurricane about to erupt inside me.
Barrington had become serene with approval.
“Yeah!” the men said. It was a chorus of joy and of initiation.
“My main man,” Barrington had said, aware of his value now in this circle of brothers, who seemed on the point of murdering him for bringing an interloper into this circle of brotherhood and stealth and danger; uncertain of what he had been shouting to me every day last semester at York, about “his racial credibility.” “Yeah! Like you breathe it in . . .” He had ended his advice in the way you would ask a question, with your voice raised.
I had smoked my pipe. Smoking my Reynolds Wrap pipe, and trying to follow the blue wisps of smoke from the bowl that looked like a coffee percolator, I had never experienced such peace and exhilaration; and I had begun to talk; and as I talked, I had had no feeling for the words which tumbled out of my mouth; and I could not hear my own words as I had talked; and I had begun to see them as if they had been suspended between the shelves of the bookcases, marked in large characters, plain enough for a dunce to follow, like it had been back in Barbados in Standard Two, when I was first taught how to hold a pen and dip it into the inkwell, and write the ABCs and “the cat sat on the mat”; and I was back in the island, and was talking with my words multiplying; and the ideas I was expressing became thick and entangled themselves in my mouth like saliva, like molasses, like syrup from the sugar cane; and some of the words dropped off the lines in the copybook and were stuck onto the lines gouged into the blackboard with a nail by the headmaster’s practised hand, just as my infant’s handwriting used to climb mountains away from the guiding lines on my black borderless slate; and I had got up from the couch that had no legs, and I had used my fingers to get the words back between the double lines, back into place, subservient to my desire; back into objectivity; back into clear apprehension; but my words had remained suspended, like the writing of a man who never learned to write when he was a child.
On the wall facing me, as I had turned to get balance, was a large map of Africa, in outline, painted green, black and red, in alternating lines round its border. It was drawn by a hand that knew more about symbols of nationalism and black power than about geography. So, Africa had become in the hands of the cartographer, the shape of a cutlass, or a bill. But I had known, even before I had pulled on the tube of Reynolds Wrap and had got my perceiving fuzzed by the power of the gold from Colombia, that I had been in the midst of fierce, black beliefs; and that one of these beliefs was an acclamation of Africa as voluble as the screams in the poem. So, if it was indeed Africa that was being represented, I knew that I had not smoked too much of that shit not to have known that it did not matter that the cartographer had not used the child’s prank of tracing reality with a piece of tissue paper, and that what had been drawn from the myth of memory did not require the technical and geographical authenticity as if the black map-drawer was trying to prove that the world is round. I knew drums. So, I knew something about Africa, and about African sculpture; and how African artists had fucked up proportion and perspective and people like Picasso and other Frenchmen with their égalité, humanité and democraté shit, had used the tracing paper, thrown out the original and called it “cubism.” “Them African brothers are some mean motherfuckers, proportion-wise, and perspective-wise.” I think it was I who said that, some time, in some seminar, at York University.
This man of Africa on the wall, facing me, “who’s the fairest of them all?” has no rivers, and no mountains, and
no lakes, and no faults, and no waterfalls, and no towns, and no townships, and no cities. “Where Timbuktu is, brother?” and no borders and no neighbouring lands with no neighbouring unneighbourly tribes. Africa stands alone. And the black cartographer has made Africa his new home. “Carry me back to ole Virginnie? You be crazy, nigger? Bereft of people, bereft of vegetation, so there ain’t no motherfucking Tarzan, Jack!”
In this City Page 5