'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  The Island was becoming de-colonized. And even though we were too young, and too uninterested in this political ideology of independence — even though the fervour of freedom was surrounding us like the sea, lapping at our consciousness, from the shores of Trinidad, from Jamaica, right down in the south, into British Guyana, and as far away as the African countries colonized by the English, Mau Mau and Zulu, countries whose names we could not even pronounce — still we knew, through instinct, through the new behaviour expressing independence, and through the self-assurance of the sound of the domino seeds being pounded in the Masters’ Room, by young Barbadian men not much older than ourselves, we knew in our blood, and through instinct, that something very important was happening.

  It seemed to us as if the Caribbean Sea had changed into the Atlantic Ocean, washing us with the skeletons and bones and myths of its importance as a conveyor of men and women in bondage, but being cleansed by the currents and lashing of that ocean, against our bodies to make us alert to the changes happening round us. We were once more living upon the waves of an ocean. The Atlantic Ocean.

  But in a real sense, and being able to point a finger at our own self-discovery, in an individual manner of defining ourselves, in apposition to the white Englishman, one by one, we still did not know — even those of us who were prefects, and house captains and definitely, as the Head Boy — we did not really understand, at that time, why we were being singled out by our masters, and given this new authority to “take their classes,” to “run things” while they continued their arguments with dominoes and white rum mixed in with the diminutive bottles of Coca-Cola, imported from America, or diluted in lemonade sweetened with white sugar, and made from limes growing in their backyards, close to the outdoor WC, and the prolific tree that dropped green and ripe pawpaws, good for purging the bowels and making us regular; and of course deliciously diluted in fresh coconut water. Not many of us had running water in our homes, bursting through lead pipes, fizzing just like the refreshing Coca-Cola. In England, our Mother Country, many years after these humid afternoons at Cawmere School for Boys, these same WCs, or outdoor toilets, were prevalent in London, adding surprise, and irony, to our wholesale imitation of English customs.

  On those Friday afternoons, acknowledged to be periods when no significant work was expected to be done, and the concentration of energy was pointed to cricket practice in the nets, or training for athletics, or just talking on the edge of the playing field, watching boys pretending to be Frank Worrell, or Jesse Owens; not many amongst us could really make the connection between taking a class for a master, keeping his pupils disciplined, and the greater significance of that assignment, that a boy was acting for a master: that it was what is called nowadays “training for leadership.”

  I wonder if the 14th of February 1955, is a Friday. It won’t take me much to look it up, but my hesitation, even in this small point of inflated significance, was born by the fact that at Cawmere we were not taught history. In more than one respect, Cawmere was a “secondary” government school. But the date is important. It is the day a Mr. C.D. Solin, assistant dean in the Faculty of Arts & Science, of McGill University, wrote me the letter of my acceptance, addressed to Mr. Austin A.C. Clarke, Flagstaff Road, Clapham, St. Michael 22, Barbados (there is a typographical error made by Mr. Solin’s secretary — she had typed “Bargaros,” and her eraser did not conceal her error!) — B.W.I.

  Dear Sir,

  I am glad to inform you that your application for admission to the first year of the course leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts has been accepted for the 1955–56 Session.

  There is a space, larger than the normal space between words, that separates first and year; and between of and Arts and Arts and has, as if either Mr. Solin, or his secretary were in two minds about my admission. The letter goes on to enumerate certain regulations:

  All students entering this Faculty for the first time are required to attend a meeting in the Sir Arthur Currie Gymnasium on Wednesday, September 21st, at 9 a.m.

  Incidentally, I never did get to the Sir Arthur Currie Gymnasium, for on that very day, and for days before and after, my small Island was in the clutches of a hurricane, named Janet. And I never did go to McGill. When I eventually arrived in Canada, on the twenty-ninth of September 1955, I came to Toronto, instead. This now becomes ironic, and speculative: I would be bilingual today; and probably a separatist, had I entered McGill in 1955. Certainly, in the nationalistic political theology of the 1960s in Montreal, I would be a “black white nigger of Canada,” if you can pardon the tautology.

  Mr. C.D. Solin, thought it prudent to warn me, that:

  This letter is your Official Acceptance. It must be presented at registration as your authority to register. It does not, however, constitute an acceptance to any other Faculty of the University either now or at some later date.

  Yours very truly.

  In other words, I cannot ask, at this late stage, to be admitted. I cannot journey to Montreal and take an intensive course in French, I cannot qualify as a “black white nigger of Canada.”

  But I am still concerned by what had gone through the secretary’s mind, when she came to write the name of my Island, Barbados. Why did she type Bargaros, and did not succeed in concealing her error, even though the eraser and the heavier striking of the two convicting letters, g and r were, unsuccessfully, pounded out into erasure, by striking those two keys to do the job which the rubber could not?

  In Calgary, in May 2002, forty-seven years later, a similar confusion was made in the pronunciation of the name of my Island, Barbados. The woman introducing me to an auditorium filled with third-year students of English, said, with characteristic Canadian confidence, “Mr. Clarke is a Barbarian … and he had a Barbarian education at the best schools in Barbados.”

  This slip of the tongue did not much offend me, as there were no sniggers, making it seem that this woman introducing me, a chairman of the Department of English, at the college I was visiting, did not realize her slip. But I have had enough time after the first slip in spelling, to see that there was … could be … an element of the psychological, something hidden beneath the slip, something exposing the attitude of the chairman, as with the secretary, that was more unmentionable than the separatists of Quebec seeking emotional and cultural brotherhood with their myth of my person, by presuming a symbiosis, and calling themselves “white niggers,” and by extension, calling me a “black white nigger.” At least, it is less deadening than the greetings of “Look the nigger!” Or “Spook!” that I received on the subway, on the streetcar, on the streets of Toronto, during that first year in 1955. What would the Quebec Canadian have called me, then?

  But before there was an opportunity by Canadians living either in Montreal or Toronto, to give me my new identity, defined in racial terms: “nigger,” “monkey,” “Spook,” “Did you know they have tails? Look good behind them, when they walk” … I had first to leave Barbados, as a student, or as an immigrant. But Canada was, like us, only a colony; and you didn’t leave your own colonized life, with its un-understood meanings, and seek refuge in another colony. It was the Mother Country that called all of us. We would show the Mother Country, to use the words of Frantz Fanon, a Martinique intellectual who wrote of race and phobias in his groundbreaking book, Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1967. And I would have to do better in the Mother Country, better even than those bred and born in the United Kingdom. So, we practised this encounter with the Mother Country, even before we had sat our school-leaving examination, which was set, characteristically, and colonially, in England, and graded by professors, presumably at Cambridge. The examination was the Senior Cambridge University School Certificate. We gave ourselves passes in this examination and we took the next step and gave ourselves admission to universities in the United Kingdom — to the best universities. I chose Cambridge University, using its Latin name, Cantabria. This sounded more impressive than Oxford, or Oxonensis. I became, in the stroke o
f a pen, A.A.C. Clarke, BA (Cantab), MA (Cantab), MPhil (Cantab), PhD (Cantab), DPhil (Cantab); and in case I was missing something, I conferred upon myself, LLD (Oxon). No other boy in my class could therefore match my academic degrees.

  And so I left Cawmere well-endowed with these academic degrees that I had conferred upon myself. I also left as Sergeant-Major, the highest rank a schoolboy could reach in those days. And according to The Combermerian, the school’s magazine, for the year 1948, under the heading “Athletics,” for my house, Set C, is this comment:

  The Set has some fairly promising athletes; nevertheless it achieves the last place at every inter-house … In the senior division we saw Hal Brewster,“Tom” Clarke of Class II and I respectively, outrunning their colleagues. Brewster is an athlete of great promise and is capable of being the 1950 Victor Ludorum [champion of the games] … Clarke who was Victor Ludorum for the 2nd year, was a Class I champion at the last inter-school Meet, with the Husbands brothers of Harrison College. We are anticipating good results from Brewster and Clarke at the coming Inter-School Meeting.

  I was looking at The Comberemian magazine recently, and had to wonder why as a school boy there, from 1944 until 1949, I never noticed the association of this secondary government school, founded in 1819, with the topography of the Island, that is to say, with sugar cane and all the things associated with the culture of sugar cane: hard, back-breaking labour in the fields in the hottest of suns; with the sun and the rain; with sweat, and sex; and with slavery.

  The motto of my school is Religione, Humanitate, Industria. Three concepts consistent with a colonized society. The school crest itself is oval in shape, and inside a double-lined oval, is the name COMBERMERE SCHOOL. BARBADOS. And inside that oval, are two pieces of sugar cane with the blades, or leaves attached, in the middle of which is a book opened at the middle, and below which are, on the left an opened bottle of ink, the kind in which people like Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys, Goldsmith, and prime ministers would dip their quill pens; and at the right, is a quill pen itself. But it is the irony in the motto, juxtaposed with the reminder, and the precept that would have been driven into the head of the slave, just as the whip had been driven into his back, to make a point to him, to remind him of his place, and of the “commandments” of Religione, Humanitate, Industria. But Combermere was established for the education of poor whites, whose parents could not afford the more expensive and upper class institutions of Harrison College and Queens College. Those lower-class white boys would have got the same lesson about their status in the society of the Island, as a black boy in 1944.

  I am mentioned again in the 1948 issue of The Combermerian, under the heading, “The 1948 Inter-School Athletic Meeting”:

  A.A.C. Clarke of Combermere won the 880 yards event in a style that gained him much applause. E.R. Cumberbatch of College seemed to have the race in hand in the first stages, but Clarke coolly kept himself in hand and set a tremendous pace near the end.

  Incidentally, I ran that 880 in 1948, in two minutes, twelve and a half seconds.

  In 1955, when I compared my times in the Island with the records posted in the Athletic Department of the university of Toronto, I was surprised to see that almost all the times I had done in Barbados as a high school athletic were better than the university’s. And I wonder why I did not get involved in athletics at the university?

  One afternoon I wandered into a basement room at Varsity Stadium. And I remember the feeling of confidence. And I remember the feeling of being out of place, being in the wrong place, as if there was some unwritten directive that I should have known, smelled, intuitively understood. In 1955, there were not, to my recollection, any black students on the university’s athletic team — perhaps not even on the college team, not to mention the varsity team. A few of us kicked about the football, for our colleges. A smaller few played soccer for the university. If my memory serves me correctly, the university record in 1955, for the 100 yards, was eleven seconds. I had done it in ten seconds flat in 1949.

  In the same issue of The Combermerian, is another reference to my athletic ability, and, as I read it now, I wonder what happened so soon after my schoolboy successes in track that I neglected athletics when I came to Canada in 1955? Was it that I expected to have been “approached” by a coach and asked to compete? Was it that I did not know the protocol required to be admitted to the varsity track team? Was the university’s Athletic Department racist?

  The School Athletic Meeting. A.A.C. Clarke — Victor Ludorum.

  The conclusion of the annual Athletic Sports Meeting of Combermere School, found A.A.C. Clarke Victor Ludorum for the second year in succession.

  Clarke won three events, came second in one, and third in another to pile up nineteen points, the highest of the meeting. He was winner of the flat races 220 yards, 440 and 880. He turned out for Division I of which he also emerged champion.

  My times for those three races all run on the same afternoon: 24 and 3.5 seconds in the 220; 58 and 4.5 seconds in the 440; and 2 minutes, 12 and 2.5 seconds, in the 880.

  At Speech Day that year, the headmaster, an Englishman — noted for his proficiency in French, as well for his proficiency in conducting “public floggings” — in his Report to the Board, under the heading, “Corporate Activities, section 28,” said:

  In the Inter-School Athletic Meet held last Easter we came into Second Place, after Harrison College, and one of our boys — A.A.C. Clarke — tied with two Collegians for the honour of Victor Ludorum. I would remind you that the Second-Grade schools [of which Combermere was one], are severely handicapped by virtue of the age-clause operating which turns our boys out at 18 plus, whilst the First Grade Schools, [Harrison College and The Lodge School], may go on for a further two years. We are therefore compelled to compete in all branches of Sports and Athletics under a possible age-handicap of two years, with all that is involved in terms of greater physical development and stamina.

  My headmaster’s concern for the disadvantages of age and physical development as I competed against Harrison and The Lodge School boys, though admirable, was never a real indisposition. And what was ironical in his statement of good faith, was the fact that the very next term, I was “going over the fence” to Harrison College, into their Sixth Form, in a first-grade school, and would compete against them and also against Combermere — for I was labelled, not a Harrisonian, but “a transfer from Combermere School!” — an appellation and an identity similar to the “dog tags” worn by U.S. Armed Forces, men and women, round their neck! — and this appellation followed me through the two years I attended Harrison College. The distinction was understood, was etched in the mind, indelible as a wound that caused a mark on the black skin, like a birth mark.

  “One of our boys,” the headmaster’s term, a term with a somewhat double entendre that might cause resentment and reservation, became “a transfer from Combermere,” a term implying greater invisibility, implying encroachment and non-belonging. It was as if the headmaster of Harrison College was saying that I had, physically and morally, “climbed under the wire,” which separated Combermere School from Harrison College, and thereby had committed an act of trespassing.

  Chapter Two

  I can still see the small pebbles in the playing field, like rubies or diamonds, although I had never seen a ruby or a diamond, not even in a magazine of Technicolor conspicuousness; and I can see the small black pellets from the sheep as they roam the desert of a playing field, similar to deserts I had learned about in geography class — deserts in Africa; deserts in Australia; deserts of ice in the Alaskan wilds of Canada; sheep trying “to get blood outta stone,” as my mother would characterize their determination and resolution, to graze, which caused me to remember the only lines I remembered in class, of Proverbs quoted in my Wordsworth school book:

  Go to the ant, thou sluggard,

  Consider her ways and be wise.

  And I am now at the end of the wire, the boundary that separates the tough neighbour
hood of Carrington’s Village, which is not a village, for there is no grass, no paved road, no running water, no trees except the few pawpaw trees, which, with their closeness to the outdoor WC, seem to be planted there deliberately to suck up the nourishment from the feces; this boundary is a wire. We place our well-polished brown shoes on the bottom strand and widen the space that already exists, and make it larger, large enough for our bodies to crawl through, without touching the desert of the playing field, littered now with broken pieces of bottle, with the droppings of the sheep that grazed the green with the efficiency of a gentleman’s straight razor, with the “diamonds” and “rubies” or stones spread throughout the brown, unwatered grass, and, after a quick wash of the face from the public stand pipe, I walk along Hall’s Road, incongruous with the general appearance of these poor men and women, crawling on their bottoms because their legs have disappeared from amputation, the crippling result of sickness, too much sugar in the blood, deformity at birth; and the women dressed in their see-through cotton frocks that look more like nightgowns than dresses to be worn in the daytime, and I come to the quieter, more village-like section where Halls Road meets Constitution … Constitution is up from Queen’s Park, known as the Park. Spartan Cricket Club, whose members are middle-class and brown-skinned, play cricket and football on this playing field. Queen’s College, still predominantly white and upper-class, and “light-skinned,” is situated here. It is a bastion, a fort, a boundary, an example of excellence in the brains of women. And to complete the triangle of power, Harrison College, where the guarantee to your success rests confidently in its classrooms, especially in the Classical Sixth; and should you be bright enough, or white enough, or rich enough, or lucky enough — if you had possessed none of the qualities or “qualifications” for entrance — if you were lucky enough to have an aunt, or an uncle in America, who could send you five Yankee dollars, in a money order, once a month, you too could squeeze through the iron gates of Harrison College, on which the motto In Deo Fides is emblazoned. “Wukking for the Yankee dollar!” my mother said, as if she was characterizing whores. But whores have always been with us. The Waterfront is painted with them: young, brown, luscious, lipsticked in red, smeared in that dangerous colour round their mouths, which are always just, barely, seductively open, to let out a breath, to let out a kiss, and have it travel its imaginary short journey from those lips to your groins. And with those thoughts of ambition whirling in your head, you come to the last monument against whose walls, in whose desks, on whose playing fields, and in whose hall, your name — if you are a woman — may be scrawled. St. Michael’s Girls School. A secondary government school for girls.