Colleague-rescued by saviour. Gratuitous-understanding-looks exchanged.
Reconscioned! Saved!
Expositioned:
Former-suited — addresses nullified and void. Shocking revelations. First-named-spidered-pest knocked off the beam … hated, despised.
Semi-relieved-heart-beats ’gainst jawboned-compressed-mouth.
Exclamation, open-mouthed!
Stimulated-grimness. A lapse.
Interim-icecream-entertained. Fervid heart turned chilly … death-cold.
Ticking-mantlepieced-contraption declaring “eight,” farewell-kissed; lark-happily omnibused home.
Now that I have read this over, after sixty-four years of its “creation,” using “creation” in its greatest clemency of critical evaluation, I think I am reminded that my ambition was to have been an English-trained barrister-at-law. This realization is most consoling when I see that in this one-paged short story, I have broken all the “rules” I have made for my students in creative writing classes, at the University of Toronto, at Yale, Brandeis, Smith, Williams, Duke, and the Universities of Indiana at Bloomington, and of Texas at Austin. And I’m glad that they never saw this early example of their instructor’s writing.
It must have been something in my mind, in my makeup, in my experiences at this young age, that always made me see humour in situations of great horribleness. And this is the way I looked at it, lived in it, and became the main character, the tragic hero … Macbeth. We were studying Macbeth for our Senior Cambridge School Leaving Certificate. The three “characters” were mixed into one: witness, observer, and victim. Years before, or it could have been only weeks before, I had seen the movie, The Life of Emile Zola, starring Paul Muni, concerning a senior ranking officer in the French Army who was court-martialed for his political views. And even though my misadventure did not have that tragic significance, and could not have harmed the court of either Combermere School or Harrison College, no one was concerned if I had proved to have been disloyal to King George the Sixth, but the dramatic ripping off of Dreyfus’s gold-braided epaulettes of “scrambled-egg,” attesting to his former importance, and then the deliberately slow but dramatic and vicious ripping of the medals off his chest; and then, when it was over, there was a silence in the cinema, in that parade square somewhere in Paris, and here in Barbados at Walkers, bright and early, at nine o’clock, it seems that I faced my new nakedness, the three khaki stripes above which was the Imperial Crown, making me a sergeant-major; I was reduced in rank, in confidence, in status, in shame, and in the calculated vengeance of my “enemies” at Harrison College, even before I entered this school, to a naked boy.
A.A.C. Clarke, Private, Company 3, Combermere School Cadets.
Through my mind, on that morning in the bookstore of the University of the West Indies, at Cave Hill in Barbados, induced by the comment of the former Harrison College second lieutenant, I was remembering a history that bound me to customs and to the drama of seriousness, which I could not really understand, in my circumstances that were so different from the disposition of my masters; and I used the word in both senses: those who were appointed to teach me, and those who appointed themselves, through wealth, status, colour, or meanness, to teach me. In the first case, teach me Latin and English literature. In the second case, manners. “Manners maketh man.” It was driven into me from my five-year-old days on the backless, hard, wooden benches at St. Matthias Elementary School for Boys.
Master and the headmaster were taking life more seriously than me. To me it was a case of not leaving my best friend in a lurch, or insisting upon that kind of allegiance; of daring the command culture of the “Mock Soldier” establishment. Board guns and blanks, and road marches, and singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “John Brown’s Body” (without knowing its racial application to me, and to the majority of these “mock soldiers,” from homes in the villages and neighbourhoods, and not from Belleville and Stratchclyde, known as “esplanades” and “terraces”), and “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?”
Years later, in the writing of The Polished Hoe, published in 2002, more than fifty years after my fall from rank, I remembered the songs we sang as “mock soldiers,” and the hymns my mother sang following my fall, and military court martial. What I thought was a comedy, a pageant, inferior in its significance to a Shakespearean comedy, that it was a long vacation holiday, when we would play impromptu and invented games of cricket — “marble cricket” — to suit our world, in place of first-class cricket for organized teams; what I had thought was a pageant, and could therefore not touch me when with any serious scolding or detentions, was actually harsh reality. When we became more studious, entering the Sixth Form, when I entered the Modern Studies Sixth, to study Latin, Roman history, English literature and language, and religious knowledge (as a pass subject), preparing for a real life, overseas; to the Mother Country; or immigrating to America, Canada completely out of the picture, because Canada was, like us, a colony, and did not play cricket, and was lock-jawed in cold more bone-chilling months, than the life of a summer; and who had gained our wrath by receiving premium rum made from our sugar cane reaped amidst violence with the sun, cow-skin, rape and sweating labour, for boxes of thin, bony, “white-skin” salt fish, called cod, from the Grand Banks. No wonder then that my mother increased the intensity of voice and punctuation, when she sang “Nearer My God to Thee.”
I resigned from the cadet corps and concentrated my extra-curricular activities to athletics, dabbling on Friday nights in writing poetry at the home of a senior civil servant, Mr. Hope, along with Magistrate H.A. Vaughan, from a hill in the neighbourhood of Britton’s Hill. I spent time listening to their more mature and professional poetry which sounded more like the poems we studied in Sixth Form, the poems of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Chaucer, than they sounded like any home-grown versifying or poetastering, since in those days, the early fifties, the BBC’s “Caribbean Voices” radio programme, which slammed against our ears, every Sunday, to wake us up into the unbelievable recognition that we had something important to say in our short stories, in our poems, in our literary journeys about ourselves. And that what we heard, edited, and judged and sent back to us, in better estate than Canadian salt fish, by the English, still was able to give us that less shitty end of the stick of colonialism.
With this new origin of our Island’s creative talent, and its winning the approval of the BBC, we, individually, and in “writing clubs,” became more brave, more creative, more licentious with the English language; and from those Sunday evenings in the fifties, we abrogated the English language and used it as our own, and enriched it in the process, with the help of Samuel Selvon, Earl Lovelace, V.S. Naipaul, Dionne Brand, Derek Walcott, Archie Markham, Caryl Phillips, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, Martin Carter, Mark McWatt, Fred D’Augiar, Tessa McWatt, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Lionel Hutchinson, and many others who came later.
Nearer, my God to Thee,
Nearer, to Thee.
In times of stress, in times of sadness, no credit extended at the shop by Miss Edwards; the delay in the arrival of the U.S. postal money order making my mother have “bad headaches,” that begin in America, and are coming all the way from Miss Eloise Clarke, Ancon Post Office, Canal Zone, Panama, Central America; the accidental burning of the white rice she is cooking, to be served with steamed flying fish, all these “calamities” were best illustrated by her soprano voice, in an off-tune improvisation of “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Gillie went on to take a degree in classics. I never found out whether he too resigned from the cadet corps of the Lodge School; or whether he remained, and stared them in the face, and re-climbed the ranks, and reached second lieutenant.
I had to face the headmaster of Harrison College, and face captain George Hunte, almost every day, the latter of whom, in his twin capacities — commanding officer of the cadet corps, and games master, even though the latter was still an informal ar
rangement. About the first, I resigned; about the second, I was determined to use athletics as an avenging weapon, to be Victor Ludorum, for the two years I would be “the Transfer.” I remained in all this time, “the Transfer.” Was even identified as such in my school-leaving testimonial:
A.A.C. Clarke entered Harrison College as a transfer from Combermere School. He is at present taking the Oxford & Cambridge Higher School Certificate, at Scholarship Level. He is an outstanding athlete, and shows a flair for literary writing. Signed, J.C. Hammond, M.A. (Cantab), Headmaster.
On your school-leaving testimonial, a document without which your prospect of getting a job; a document which like a police record is negatively as important in your not getting a job; a document in which your headmaster does not mention, not necessarily in blazing comment, a word of your deportment, your promptness, your tidiness, your extra-curricular activities, your manners, your academic record in detail, and whether you were a prefect, Set Captain, or Head Boy, and your punctuality — without this document saying all these things, you are lost; washed up on the beach like a high-smelling carcass of a fish that the sea and larger fish have nibbled at. You are dead, you are lost: court-martialed, stripped of any possibility. You are better off to leave the Island, and “emigrade to Amurca,” England, “if yuh can’t do any better.” Or even Venezuela. “You could-even learn to speak the brabba-rabba of the Spanish language.” The size of the Island, and its predilection for gossip and general knowledge would make it impossible for you to hide this wound to your spirit.
Chapter Three
Mr. W.R. Martin, the registrar of Canadian citizenship, in the Department of the Secretary of State, wrote me this letter on October 30, 1968. It is written under File 30533-68; and it is addressed to me, at 46 Asquith Avenue, Toronto 5, Ontario. (In 1968, 46 Asquith Avenue was opposite to the First Floor Jazz Club, run by Howard Matthews; and at which Archie Alleyne, Wray Downes, Dougie Richardson, P.J. Perry, Gerry X — who died recently — Nobbie Watanobe, and the Thompson brothers, one on tenor saxaphone, the other on string bass — which we still called “ the mother-fiddle” — and at the corner of Park Road and Asquith Avenue, cutting each other at right angles, was the Oscar Peterson School for Jazz, where Ed Thigpen and Ray Brown were instructors.):
Dear Mr. Clarke;
I am very sorry to say that the Minister has found it necessary to reject your application for citizenship.
The information on which the decision was based is confidential and it would not be in the public interest to reveal it.
Section 14 of the Citizenship Act provides that you may again apply after a period of two years from the date of rejection, October 29, 1968.
Yours truly,
W.R. Martin
Registrar of Canadian Citizenship.
In the same way as I had refused to see the seriousness with which certain persons viewed behaviour, even when I myself was the subject of that behaviour being discussed, I do not often take the censure that was bound to follow, seriously enough, believing that as I have said, I was protected by some Fate, by the Three Weird Sisters, by God, perhaps, to overcome what my mother was certain was “lack o’ decentness on their behalfs.” So, the glancing blow of racism on the part of the headmaster of Harrison College — or was it his succumbing to the culture of class that surrounded him, a stranger to the Island’s code of behaviour? — in his attempt to bury my ambition and my possibilities, in my own Island, whose culture, myths, and modus operandi mystified the smallness of his stature, physically and morally (he was four feet ten inches short), could not have touched me in the Island. It turned out that his testimonial, with all its innuendo and glancing irony and sarcasm, was futile in achieving the result it was intended to have, by its curtness of language. I was the champion schoolboy athlete for seven consecutive years. And as we know in Canada, and in America, and in the United Kingdom, “star-boys” in sports have a way of squeezing through and walking around certain encumbrances put in their way, when they deserve to be curbed by those reservations, like the bars placed in the path of the hurdler, who is to clear them, or be confounded by them, as we all saw at the Olympics in Athens, when the Canadian champion hurdler Perdita Felicien misjudged the height of the first hurdle, something she had not done before. Misjudging, caused, perhaps, through overconfidence, or her belief that adversity will not strike her.
A hurdle was placed in my path. And as a champion athlete, a schoolboy notwithstanding, I had been acquainted personally with adversity. So, it must have been this determination to win, which is utilized so economically by the champion athlete, which caused me — in my reaction to the court martial and to the testimonial — to disregard their intended disastrous meaning. Friendship and loyalty to Gillie, and to my neighbour, who was guarding the gate, even though on that night at Walkers, he was, as the cadet on guard duty, a declared “enemy” (he was a Harrison College boy, wasn’t he?), that placed me in that predicament. And then, in 1968, living in another landscape, to face this tricky hurdle to Canadian citizenship, based, as Mr. Martin’s letter stated, upon “information” that is “confidential,” and “not in the public interest to reveal …”
What does Mr. Martin mean by the “public”? And what is the meaning of “information”? Does Mr. Martin’s information mean “facts”? The information-gathering agencies that I know of are CSIS, MI5, the CIA, and the FBI. And everyone knows by now, from the publication of these “confidential” pieces of “information,” that much of this “information” cannot be accused of accuracy; but is prejudiced. I have never been so curious that I needed for my peace of mind, to inquire and investigate each statement, each act in which I am involved. I can keep gifts at Christmas and birthdays wrapped for months after they have been given, without feeling the tug of wonder enough to want to know their contents. This is not a lack of regard for the felicitation behind the giving of the gift. It is probably based in history, a history of not expecting too much, goodness, reward, assistance, gifts, that I have developed this cynical attitude to things and to matter, persons, and friends, from whom I do not expect unquestioning loyalty, that Mr. Martin’s letter, written at a time when I was going to Yale University as a visiting lecturer, in the midst of the civil rights movement in America, at a time when it was important to me, as a man, as a black man, and a beginning writer (by 1968, I had published only The Survivors of the Crossing, Storm of Fortune, Amongst Thistles and Thorns, and The Meeting Point). And I was in a hurry. The terrible times of segregation, police violence against black people, the snarling of dogs trained to snarl, and the thunderous, limb-breaking force of water hoses used more suitably by the fire brigades of America’s Southern states, than by firemen bent upon cutting off the limbs of non-violent protestors for freedom; most of these hoses levelled against the spread of women’s buttocks, against their breasts, tore their panties off in full view of jeering policemen and sheriffs and marshals, these terrible times in America, and to some extent modified in their application and moderated, in Canada, too, the times caught my intellectual interest — my cultural and social interests were axiomatically already engaged — and it became imperative that I go to Yale, and to America, and see first-hand the torment which “the brothers and the sisters” were being put through, and to see, by breathing in that American animosity, “what’s happening, baby?”
Maclean’s magazine had published a subjective piece I had written about my experience of racial discrimination in Toronto — and in Canada. My piece dealt with personal experience between 1955 and 1968. Maclean’s magazine, imitating the brusqueness of headlines that we were all reading in the American papers, headlines that warned of a black-white race war, or the second American Civil War, headlines screaming about large-scale lynchings, in other words, of Armageddon … Malcolm X was coming into prominence as a “firebrand” and a “racist extremist” … inducing James Baldwin to give the title of his book of essays The Fire Next Time, which every thinking man and woman, black and white, expected
to descend upon the land, at any moment, Maclean’s magazine took the occasion of the publication of my piece about Toronto’s and Canada’s version of segregation, to use the headline, “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” I had earned a label. My position and my presence in Toronto were therefore categorized and dipped in the ink of unworthiness to be a citizen. “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.”
The “angry blacks” of America and of this world, were the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, the Black Nationalists, who were all, in the eyes of the press, meaning the white press, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Telegram, the Toronto Star, the Financial Post, all black racists. They did not care to admit to their monotheistic racism, by failing to explain that everyone who was black in those days was not a member of the Black Panthers, or the Black Muslims — even though the reality of their lives might very well induce them to taking out membership! But, by the 1960s, we all knew — both black and white — that “all blacks look alike.” Angry and black, both at once? And the euphemism “Canada’s angriest black man” did not faze any thinking person. The hidden meaning was simply “Canada’s most anti-white black man.” But the sadness was that I was given no opportunity, in the minds of the readers of Maclean’s magazine, to say why I was an angry black man — not to mention “the angriest” in all of Canada!
The truculence in the photograph of the face of “Canada’s angriest black man” and the scowl on his face that the photograph focused on, is similar to the visage of a newspaper photograph of “the last man black man to be hanged in Canada,” Mr. Arthur Lucas! The photograph of me was published after the gallows snapped Mr. Lucas’s neck in 1962 … pop!
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