'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  “Where were you born, ma’am?” the immigration officer asked. She had the window rolled down before the American official had reached the car. There was a smile on the American’s face. He looked past her to the back seat, and saw what he saw, and I did not know what it was that he saw; and with his eyes, he asked me the same question he had asked her, and she, in whose hands we were now languishing, she answered for me, and she answered for him, her boyfriend. She answered for the three of us.

  “Trannah!”

  “Have a good weekend.”

  “Incidentally,” she said, “what is the best way to get to New York?”

  “Take the 95 South, then the 96, then the 93, then back to the 95 South, ma’am, and after that, plain sailing,” he said, calling out highways, as if he were calling out numbers at a bingo game.

  “Thanks very much, sir!”

  “Drive carefully, y’all. And y’all have a good weekend, now …”

  “You’re welcome!” she said.

  In our boisterous self-congratulations, with the window closed, we rocked in the rocking car, and Beethoven was switched off, and the Buffalo radio station WLIB, was turned on and turned up; and, through the tinny speakers straining under the volume, came the voice of James Brown telling us to shout and shimmy.

  “Let we stop at the first bar, and celebrate.”

  But we did not find one from amongst the maze of streets and roads and lanes which all seemed to be one-way streets, going in the direction away from our thirst for a sip of celebration. And like this, buried in the silence that came back and inhabited the car, in our regained confidence, we headed in this interminable, black, cold Friday night, to New York City.

  That inability of my Trinidadian friend, a man knowledgeable in the polite brand of racism, was repeated and crystallized two times each year when we visited the immigration office on Bedford Road, a spit’s throw from Dupont Street, an address that gained fame, or notoriety, when it was associated with the 1994 Just Desserts murder. But in those days, in the mid-fifties, it was a desolate, nondescript place, like a huge suburban parking lot with no cars, but with buildings more suitable for soldiers to learn how to use rifles and bayonets, than for frightened, insecure, discriminated-against students from the West Indies, to put their future in the hands of an immigration officer, whom we learned had more power than the regulations — if there is such a manual of rules in a manager’s desk — outlined, or suggested. As foreign students attending university, we were not permitted to have even part-time employment. But everyone — including the immigration officer holding our file in his hands — knew that you had to have a job, to help pay your fees, to pay your rent, and to buy food; and the occasional bottle of rum, not even Mount Gay Rum, from your own country; or a bottle of Coca-Cola, and pray that the West Indian nurse you were dating, or that you knew, would remember to procure for you, an equally large bottle of rubbing alcohol: I learned this tactic from a student from Jamaica. He was in first year medicine. You mixed the rubbing alcohol with the Coca-Cola, in proportion to suit your tolerance for alcohol, and that increased the liquor supply to assist in the limping of your party into success.

  But each time we presented ourselves to the biannual interview, to reassure the authorities that we had not failed our year, that we had not wandered into delinquency, that we were still law-abiding, and that we had not taken part-time employment, we arrived at the nondescript offices, beaten, paranoid, visibly shaking, and really frightened by our imagination that at the end of the curt, aggressive interview with the smiling immigration officer — reminding me of my mother’s repeated warning, “Boy, every skin-teeth is not a laugh, you hear?” — we soon realized that there were traps, buried devices that could explode when you stepped on them and pelt you back in the explosion, deported to the Island from whence you came; land mines laid to trap you into confessions, pulled into candour by the smiles of the man sitting before you, to confess that, “Yes, when you come to think of it, I did take a little job, part-time, mind you, washing dishes at the restaurant on that Harbord and St. George”; and yes, that you had broken the immigration law of Canada.

  And I must say, for emphasis, that in those days of the fifties, West Indians were the most law-abiding immigrant group in this city, if not in the entire province of Ontario. Perhaps in the whole country.

  In those days, it was an irrevocable act of great shame if you got a parking ticket. But the suspicion was that you had broken the law; had accepted illegal part-time employment, serious blots spewed against your clean West Indian character. Or that you would marry a Canadian woman, and side-step the regulations about becoming a landed immigrant; your first steps in the long training-to-walk journey toward the altar, and the first steps to becoming a Canadian citizen.

  “I see you have passed your term exams.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And of course, you know the rules about not working.”

  “I know the rules. I have never worked, sir.”

  “Well, if you have never worked, how you pay your fees?”

  “I am on study leave. Teachers’ leave to study, with pay.”

  “You are not to work. Remember. But I don’t see how you can study at the university, without a scholarship, or something … I don’t know about study-leave … and still pay fees in Canadian money!”

  “My leave with pay covers that.”

  “Did you say full pay, or half pay?”

  “Half pay.”

  He stamps the extension into my passport, does not smile, and gives it back to me.

  “See you the end of the term!”

  I wait on the stairs for the Trinidadian who did not learn how to say “Trannah” like a Torontonian, to compare what his experience with his examining officer was. You never went to this immigration office by yourself; you never went into a strange restaurant by yourself; you never went to a jazz club on Yonge Street by yourself; you never went to a white barber by yourself. You always went with a friend. In case. You might need the evidence of a witness … he had to witness, and to report your deportation to your parents — and whether fate would underline the date of his deportation, should he have been found guilty of working part-time at Gooderham & Worts Distilleries, and in the post office at Front Street East across from the new Hockey Hall of Fame, in the rushes to deliver mail, at Christmas and at Easter; and in the previous summer, on the Canadian National Railway, as a porter. Sel was a very serious student. He was the last person to leave the Wallace Library, and the first to arrive after dinner; and it seemed that when he finished his shift at Gooderham & Worts Distilleries, at nine o’clock in the night, he went straight to the Wallace Library.

  “Jesus Christ, boy! Guess!”

  “Deportation?”

  “Permission to work! He tell me, how the ass I going pay for graduate school, if I don’t work? This is a democratic country, he tell me. Get a job, he tell me. And then he stamp my passport. ‘Immigrant recu,’ in your ass, boy! Eh-eh! How your interview went?”

  “I can’t work.”

  “The information” on which the decision to deny me Canadian citizenship was based (not that “decision” in the letter W.R. Martin wrote to me in October 1968, twelve years later) that information could not have been “confidential,” and it could not “… would not be in the public interest to reveal it.”

  Years later, just before that trip to America to interview James Baldwin in 1963, as if that journey, almost aborted through the mispronunciation of an insignificant city in the eyes of the Americans (for they insisted upon having visas from us in order to visit the United States for a weekend), as their aggressive interviews of us at the border suggested, they suspected we had no intention to return to Canada. America has always been a lure. But who in his right mind would have wanted to immigrate to America in the 1960s, during the virulent times of the riots and other civil rights demonstrations? And during the protests and the draft-dodging days of the Vietnam War? So, Mr. Martin’s letter o
f rejection in October 1968, to my application for Canadian citizenship, was not surprising. It would be a disappointment if I was not able, because of the denial of Canadian citizenship, to take up the appointment at Yale University. As the almost tragic rejection of entry at the border at Niagara Falls, about five years before Mr. Martin had to write his letter, bears an ironic relationship to the tragicomic evening in 1963, when my fortune was almost fractured by one Trinidadian’s un-ethnic pronunciation of the word Toronto.

  Chapter Four

  In Toronto at this time, in the firmament of the civil rights movement in America, and which spread throughout the world, there was an easier, and closer relationship between black people and Jews. This relationship has its historical roots in the days of the Depression; and apart from the predilection of the two groups toward a socialist and Marxist philosophy, this closeness was fostered significantly through the profession of writing. Jews, such as Saul Bellow, encouraged black American writers through the various creative writing programmes paid for by the American government during the Depression. The bond was formed, and it became stronger, with the publication of such black American novels as Native Son by Richard Wright, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. In the vanguard of this African-American–Jewish literary brotherhood, was the leading literary critic, Irving Howe. This alliance suffered, from time to time, by the exigencies of the nature of the civil rights movement, juxtaposed by the rise of Black Cultural Nationalism. And it found its weakest links toward the old brotherhood, with the popularity of Malcolm X.

  In the sixties in Toronto, I formed a friendship with Rabbi Feinberg of the Beth Tzedec Temple on Bathurst Street. Rabbi Feinberg, side by side with me, led the demonstration from his temple, I think, right down Avenue Road to Queen’s Park, where we both spoke against the “assassination” of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers. It was one of many demonstrations Rabbi Feinberg and I would lead, including lying on the cold concrete sidewalk in front of the U.S. Consulate General on University Avenue, when the “sit-in” — as the “sleep-ins” — was all the popular rage, and the expression of peaceful protest. Historically, the important aspect of these demonstration, which would take place almost every weekend, for these were hectic days when we felt that the moral obligation of Jews and Negroes (to use the contemporary term), we had, for the very sake of our lives, or our physical safety, to form this coalition, this partnership, and encourage this symbiosis. What had begun in America much earlier, during the Second World War, and that was concentrated on writing and the arts, now found its resurrection in Toronto, in social issues regarding racism, segregation, and violence against minorities.

  Out of the blue, years earlier, coming out of the West of the country, like a thunderbolt, or rather, a Chinook, were the candid, explosive, and embarrassing articles and columns written by Pierre Berton, who single-handedly threw this embarrassing light upon the Canadian version of a respectable, silent disposition of racism, regarding the renting of cottages in the Lake Muskoka District, “cottage area” to Jews; and the refusal of membership in the Granite Club (I am sure in other clubs, too) to Jews. The Jews built and opened their own club, the Jewish Club. From Pierre Berton’s justified exposure of the racism in renting cottages, which was sometimes hidden, and always embedded in the silence of a gentleman’s agreement, I was informed that there were quotas on Jews entering certain professions, such as law, medicine, and dentistry. But this could well have been before I came to Canada to attend university; and we were embarrassed to assert, even if with a pinch of dishonesty, that this condemnation should have come from a Canadian, much earlier. For I am living, with Rabbi Feinberg, in the sixties, in the atmos-phere of great physical fear, of the expectation that a policeman might shoot me — bang-bang, you’re dead, dead — of being refused the renting of a basement room, or an apartment in a public building, that I would find myself standing noticeably longer than other customers at a counter in Eaton’s store, at the corner of Yonge and College Streets, that I might be thrown out, sometimes physically, from a restaurant, or a nightclub, as Oscar Peterson was, and face the embarrassment of being told by a barber that he does not cut niggers’ hair. This is my Toronto. When I joined the happy band of artists, or “artists-to-be,” mainly painters and sculptors, some of whom were still attending the Ontario College of Art, in those days a magnificent, desirable place to study; and a handful of actors; and an even smaller handful of writers, men and women, playing they’re serious writers, musicians who are always there, whether following the social footsteps of the artists, which was the name we called painters — nobody called me “a black man playing I am a serious writer!” — by the name of “artist,” for those days were days of love, and “love-ins,” of nights of “paint-ins,” days when we welcomed the dramatic huge influx of German immigrants, whom I did not know, or could not at that time have known, why they were all Jews; and these women — we ignored the men! — were all blond and beautiful, and spoke English with a sensual sweet destruction of the language, sometimes ignoring the fundamental laws of syntax. But who cared? They knew their jazz. And we who accompanied them to the First Floor Club on Asquith Avenue, where I lived opposite; or to the Towne Tavern, just east of Yonge Street on Queen, in a toned-down lighting atmos-phere, seductively soft, because we were listening in these sweet times, “when we were free and young and we used to wear silks,” to cool jazz. “Dear Old Stockholm,” “Round About Midnight,” where the music was more American and international; or to the Colonial Tavern on Yonge just up from College and Yonge; and this riff-raff of souls, wearing blue jeans, professionally daubed with the oils and charcoal and crayons of their specialization, aiming to be the new Picassos, or another member of the Group of Seven … abstract art and cool jazz … we the riff-raff in the most pleasant sense of that term, were dressed in thick home-made sweaters, deliberately torn in places to appear casual, and “artistic”; and Clark desert boots, or black leather boots, and scarves like the one given to Dylan Thomas when he was a child in Wales, “that could be tug-o’-warred down to the galoshes.” We wore galoshes made of black rubber, with badly installed zippers that tore off your flesh so easily and so often as they tore off your trousers legs. But in winter, which I have always felt to be the season of social occasion, and dressing up, and parties, in winter, if you were cool, and an artist — and which artist is not cool? — you wore a discarded, second-hand, war-surplussed duffel coat, preferably one from the British Royal Navy, in light brown, almost tan, coarse cloth like a horse blanket, and with pieces of stick, or bone, like large animal fingernails, or small horns from a small animal, for buttons, that you took from the flimsy wire hangers in the section of men’s used clothing of the Goodwill Store on Jarvis Street, at Richmond, near the St. Lawrence Market, where after three o’clock on Saturday afternoons, most everything was sold at half price; near the St. James’ Cathedral Church. The Crippled Civilians was the name in those days of the Goodwill Store. And you kept your hood off, to fall on your shoulders, to expose the home-made knitted sweater that a lover or a wife had given you the previous Christmas. And this merry group met every single night, in varying number, in the Pilot Tavern. The moving aeroplane from the First, or Second World War, whose lights symbolized the flights from disaster, or victory, and the pilot himself with his airman’s cap, “showed us the way to get home,” as we used to sing, in our mild drunkenness, back in the Island; but here at the corner of Bloor and Yonge, not so drunk, because we were artists, and therefore were broke, penniless most of the time … one beer could be nursed from nine until closing time at eleven, sharp! “Come, drink up! Drink up! Last call!” Or, if you had sold a painting, or had been given a commission such as Graham Coughtry, or his brother Arthur, the photographer, got with regularity; or, had been promised an exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery just up the street, almost opposite Asquith, across from the Toronto Reference Library; or if you had sold a poem or a short story, to Robert Weaver, for CBC Anthology; or a story idea to Harry J.
Boyle, for Project ’68 … or, if your girlfriend has lent you five dollars from her small wage on a Friday afternoon, you splurged on a whiskey and soda; or you stayed longer at the black-topped square table and drank three beers instead of one, without nursing them. These artists sat at the back, just one step up from the hoi-polloi of respectably employed stores clerks, bookshop assistants; and men who worked in the CIBC bank at the corner beside the Pilot, who refused a loan to you because you were an artist, reminding you that you were a “risk” because you were unemployed, meaning that they were one and the same thing. The artists sat mainly on the south wall of this section. The chairs on the north wall were occupied by the riff-raff artists, meaning men and women “playing they were serious writers,” by the actors; and the remaining riff-raff sat in the centre row of chairs, at tables. The seating on the south wall and the north wall were high-backed, long, upholstered chairs. Each wall was taken up by one chair; and the chair followed the shape of the room, and curved on both walls to face the cash register, or face the rest of the patrons. You did not dare enter the Pilot, walk past the row of leather-bound chairs stood at the bar, walk past the black-topped, square tables opposite, arranged in booths in which you could have a private conversation of seduction, pass all these customers, mainly the respectably employed, and walk past the owner at the cash register, holding his fat hands deep into the coins and dollar bills, playing with them, like a child at the seaside, playing in the sand, like a big, congenial, happy father, an uncle, a teddy bear of a man. From Greece. Bill. Only Bill. Because we never asked his surname; and probably if he had told us, we couldn’t pronounce it. The Danforth was not so Greek in those days. So, you would not walk all that distance from the entrance on Yonge Street, and presume, because this was a public restaurant and bar, to be able to sit where you chose. Certainly not in the company of the artists. The artists ruled the waves of beer, draft and bottled, and the economical sips of the rare glass of Scotch, or Canadian Club, or dark rum from down East, Nova Scotia, since many bars in Toronto, in these days, had not yet discovered Barbados Mount Gay Rum, or Jamaican Appleton’s. There were drops of Cuban Bacardi, and that terrible rum from Puerto Rico.