Beside the Grand & Toy store on Bloor Street, east of Yonge and before Church Street, an arrow’s shot from my house on Asquith Avenue, there used to be a Loblaws supermarket store. A report was published in the Toronto Star about a man named Garfield Weston. Mr. Weston, I knew, owned a bakery somewhere in the west end, perhaps on Dupont Street where it becomes Davenport Road; and as we discussed the statement Mr. Weston was alleged to have made in South Africa, I was told that he owned Loblaws, too. Mr. Weston was a very wealthy man. He was also a man who had vast investments in South Africa. South Africa in the fifties was a country that boasted of its racial segregation and its demonization of black people. We in the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Committee were boycotting South African goods and South African athletes in international sports competition, like cricket and the Olympics. Not many nations supported all the boycotts.
In these times, we inspected the labels on wine bottles to see if the wine was made in South Africa. And also the labels and the advertising print on oranges. And then we felt our hearts skip a beat when we discovered that the oranges that before the boycott might have been imported from South Africa, had disappeared from the shelves of supermarkets, and had reappeared as oranges from Israel. It was the identical orange now packaged as a “product” of Israel. Our intelligence wondered if an arrangement to switch the labels had been made between Israel and South Africa. Until we realized the dissimulation, we had been eating South African oranges with Israeli stickers on their fleshy, beautiful skins.
But to get back to Mr. Weston: in one of his meetings, as a board member of an important enterprise in South Africa, he made a statement that was felt to have demonized not only black people in Canada, and in South Africa, but throughout the world. The statement was: “Every black piccaninny or black mammy can call on the government for solutions to every social problem.” When I read the statement in its full context in the Toronto Star, I could not believe my eyes.
Mr. Weston used to produce in his bakery on Davenport Road, a loaf of bread called Wonder Bread. The slices were cut to precision. If you held a fresh loaf of Wonder Bread in your hand, and squeezed it, it seemed as if the size of the entire loaf could be reduced to almost the thickness of one slice of an ordinary loaf. All Toronto children, including Janice and Loretta, grew up on this bread; and many of our wives and husbands worked for Mr. Weston.
We were in a quandary about what to do in protest of this raw, stupid, new expression of the disregard for black women’s dignity.
First of all, I stopped buying Wonder Bread for my children. And I spread the word amongst like-minded members of the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Committee, headed by a gracious, intelligent Canadian Negro (to use the contemporary term), Mrs. Jean Daniels, to make more firm and illustrative our disapproval of the allegiance and the support that Canadian businessmen, and the Canadian government itself, during this black time of apartheid, had been giving, through duplicity, to the Verwoerd government. The University of Toronto also had huge investments in South Africa at this time. So, Israel was not alone in its furtive financial support of South Africa. Nelson Mandela was still in prison on Robben Island and we assumed he would rot in that incarceration. Margaret Thatcher was a staunch supporter of the apartheid government of South Africa.
We decided to hold a demonstration at each of the Loblaws stores in downtown Toronto, at which we could muster picketers. But with our small membership and number of supporters, there were too many stores and we could not cover Mr. Weston’s domain with picketers. In times like these, many dramatic things go through your mind: fear of police brutality; the police insisting that we were blocking the right of way of “legitimate” customers entering the store; recruiting and encouraging enough persons to make the demonstration significant, and hearing their reservations about joining, and about having their photographs taken by the newspapers, and secretly by the police on rooftops, for the number of demonstrators was the main — and the only — factor on which the newspapers evaluated that the demonstration was significant and had achieved its purpose. The newspapers were not necessarily our allies. In these days I conducted a running quarrel with Toronto’s newspapers, accusing them, with justification of evidence and occurrence, of blatant racism. And not least of which was the example of their own hiring practices. There was not one black reporter on staff at the Star, or at the Telegram. There was one at the Globe and Mail. Newspapers counted only the number of picketers, disregarding the morality of the demonstration, before they decided that black protest against racism was worthy of coverage.
But we could do nothing to increase our membership. And when I say membership I refer to a ragtag group of very intelligent men and women: Canadian-born Negroes, African-Americans who had crossed the border in protest of the Vietnam War, Africans from South Africa itself, and Jewish people. My greatest support in all the demonstrations that Rabbi Feinberg and I organized and led, came from Jewish people. This is another aspect of the allegiance, the brotherhood that used to exist between Negroes and Jews.
Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, during the worst, black days of segregation in America, made the strategic decision to exclude Jews from participating in demonstrations organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). But here in Toronto — and in Canada — there was a demonstrably supportive allegiance, something approaching a symbiotic reaction of Jews to the horrors of the racism that stunted Negroes. After all, in 1955, we were only ten years past the end of the Second World War. And in our midst all of a sudden, were all these Germans and Hungarians, and some of whom we got to know were Jews from Europe. Who did not, in moments of great brotherhood, and closeness, see the blue-veined penciling of the tattooed number on the flesh of a man’s right arm, or in the softness of a woman’s arm? When I saw the tattooed number for the first time, it was on the arm of Gershon Iskowitz, a painter of heart-wrenching social realism. He wore his number exposed in summer, exposed in defiance and dignity about that experience, and he wore short-sleeved shirts, to let the world be the witness.
And so it was, that with the decision to deploy — the usage of military terms in our demonstration is ironical and deliberate! — the puny ranks of protesters (we sometimes had one person only) to stand in front of a Loblaws store on that Saturday morning. The wind was chilly and had already heralded the arrival of winter, and we did not have numbers to shield us, through rubbing shoulders and bodies against the onslaught of the weather not much different from the political weather in South Africa. In these days, the name in our minds, on our lips, was Chief Albert Lutuli — not Nelson Mandela who was “forgotten” in prison. Nor Bishop Tutu, who was not, then, even immortalized by Miles Davis in the beautiful, mournful epic, “Tutu.”
Some black women walked up to us, looked at us with disdain, with pity, but also with anger. We were embarrassing them. And I did not understand their embarrassment at first, but later knew to be the embarrassment of the victim, exposed publicly by this demonstration. It seemed as if we were reminding the public that these black people in Toronto were without rights; and people without rights do not wish the limitation to be too publicly noticed, or protested. Besides, Loblaws stores did not prevent them from shopping at any of their stores, as was the case in America — with restaurants, water fountains, barbershops, and hotels — but here was this “nigger” (Negroes called us that to our face, loudly, sometimes) “making things bad for everybody.” Making things bad for everybody. This was the conclusion. This was the reaction to visible protest against racial discrimination — by letters to the editor, by speeches, by marching in a demonstration, such as the one against George Wallace, who was given permission to speak at the Maple Leaf Gardens, by a mayor who was Jewish, Mayor Philip Givens. “You West Indians’re always making things bad, for everybody!” I got the impression that I could best bear the brunt, and defeat racial discrimination, personal, collective, individual or systemic, if I kept my “damn” mouth shut.
That way, they argued, nobody would get hurt in Toronto, racially or physically.
Some few black women saw us picketing, sometimes no more than two at a store, and read the words on the placards we held like crosses in a procession down the aisle, remembering South Africa, remembering Sharpeville, remembering the burning of the pass books, remembering graphically, the slaughter, the merciless, brutal slaughter of black people throughout all of South Africa … and Rhodesia, too! And Congo! And postponed their shopping, for the day. Some smiled with us. Some said, “Right on!”
And some, whites only, spat their condemnation of us, in the glare of their looks. My mother, had she been with us on that Saturday morning, would have characterized their disapprobation, by “cutting their two eyes at we.”
Our demonstrations, and our letters to the editor, and my own columns published in the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star, did absolutely nothing to lessen the incidents of abuse caused by racial discrimination. So, when Mayor Givens gave Governor George Wallace permission to speak at Maple Leaf Gardens, a man who at the same time, only yesterday then, had been leading the political force and the raw physical violence in support of racial segregation, in his state of Alabama, personally; and advocating it throughout America, culturally and morally, extolling “serrigation now, serrigation tomorrow, serrigation forever” — he did not need to add, “over my dead body!” We were appalled at the mayor’s insensitivity.
So, on the bleak afternoon, perhaps it was also a Friday, since as I have said, Friday is the most ominous day in all my life, on that Friday, I was at the head of a phalanx of protesters, Negroes and Jews, going westward from Church Street, along the north side of the Gardens, on to Wood Street, when, out of nowhere, I see this man, bigger than a lumberjack, wearing a ten-gallon hat; looking like a Southerner, thick in the shoulders, his eyes covered in dark glasses, jaw firm as steel, and his hand, through the custom and instinct born in his home down in the Southern pines and magnolias, he was caressing his holster; this man who moved silently, like a ballet dancer, like a cobra, with physical power coming even from his eyes, this man could land a blow with his body that could land me in the gutter; or with his butt. He was now a blocker, or better still, a guard. And his moves that he must have practised, like moves over the football field, schooled in many marches and protests and demonstrations; and now to “put them down,” in support of racial segregation, this Southern visitor hit me with his body. Once. Fast, and impossible to see. The cobra’s strike. And I went, “cat-spraddled,” into the middle of Wood Street. The man was dressed in a well-tailored suit that hid the bulk of his “piece” from the eyes of witnesses, even those walking beside me.
Governor Wallace moved freely, safely, through the thin line of protestors to enter the Gardens. And Mayor Givens was waiting, relieved and safe inside the thick walls of Maple Leaf Gardens, where bigger, more bruising, blows were delivered every “Hockey Night in Canada,” by the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team.
Governor Wallace gave his speech. I did not hear it. I did not read the Star or the Telegram or the Globe and Mail the next day, so I wouldn’t have to see it. But I could guess that it was peppered by the words in his philosophy of inequality: “Serrigation now, serrigation tomorrow, serrigation forever”
And many years after Governor Wallace’s visit to Toronto, I am just leaving Silver Springs, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., on another Friday, leaving the home of a former colleague at Yale University, coming back home to Canada. Over the radio comes a bulletin. It cuts into the jazz I am listening to.
“… and Governor George Wallace, Democratic candidate campaigning for the presidency of the United States, has been shot … he is believed killed, and …”
There was only my wife in the Mercedes-Benz with me; and not even she knew the words I uttered at the news. We looked at each other. And said nothing. We could only listen. “It is believed, police say, that the would-be assassin is driving a foreign-made car …” She had not been in the demonstration outside Maple Leaf Gardens, years before. Did I remember the words Malcolm X spoke when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, sentiments that got him — so it is said — into trouble with his leader, the Honourable Elijah Muhammad head of the Muslims in America. Malcolm’s comment on Kennedy’s assasination was based on an old Negro philosophical saying: “… chickens coming home to roost.”
Or, it could be clothed in the homonym, in imitation of H. Rap Brown, that “Violence is American as apple pie!” Philosophies and rage, political retort testifying to church bombings in Birmingham; the Southern Negro Churches’ flaming graves of children; the attempt to register Negroes to make them eligible to vote in elections hijacked by the kidnapping, the torture, the murders, and the burning of three bodies of civil rights workers: one black, one white, one Jewish, the exact reflection of the largest racial groups in America. The irony of it all. And the man known to have been the ringleader, tried in a court of law, as recently as June 2005, and sentenced shortly afterward, in one day, or in two days, to thirty years in prison, for each of his three victims. The man is in his eighties. It took the American “justice system,” which I sometimes felt was not only blind, but lame, forty-something years to catch up with a man in a wheelchair, crippled by his personal history.
He became a lay preacher, because no established church would have him, because he needed the space of the evangelist; and he put his body and soul in the hands of Jesus, just as Captain John Newton, for years had sailed the Atlantic Ocean, bringing slaves from Africa to the New World; and who had, suddenly sought grace, and redemption. Captain John Newton became a born-again slave-catcher, and a devout church-going composer, and who gave us “Amazing Grace.” It became a song whose lyrics describe the beauty and the pleading for grace, which now has its fullest aesthetic and moral voice in the mouths of black Americans, singing Amazing Grace!
“The fact that you are eighty years old, an old man, who will probably die before you have served your sentence,” the sentencing judge seemed to be saying, “does not save you from having to serve thirty years for each of these murders.”
Can grace and the plea for redemption find their moral justification to forget the March on Selma, Alabama, one hot weekend?
And then, there was another bulletin: “… the attempted assassination of Governor Wallace, who was giving a campaign speech in the Maryland suburb of Silver Springs … police have informed this station, that the suspect is believed to be heading north, in a foreign European car …”
What will I say to the State Trooper, when I come to the next stop, at the next toll, at the next point where money is taken from you to let you pass into another state, another country? How much will it be? One American dollar bill? Do I throw two quarters into the tray and speed off? Or, is it five Yankee dollars? I am confused and frightened. He will see my “foreign European car.” But why would an assassin choose such a conspicuous car to get away in? To flee to Canada on a modern-day Underground Railroad? Because of its engineering?
Rabbi Feinberg and I continued to lead demonstrations, and we changed the intensity of mood, of obsession, of evaluation, of all this work, all this intellectual, contentious argument about racial discrimination and segregation, and we found our temporary solace at the Jewish restaurant on College Street, just west of Bathurst. And then we would walk farther down Spadina Avenue; going south; and the Rabbi would introduce me to a friend of his who made cigars. We would blow the thick blue-white smoke from our cigars into the air to mix with the low-hanging clouds. Our cigars were from Havana — Cuban cigars. The Rabbi, who liked the thin ones, not much larger than a cigarette. And we praised God and Javeh, and Fidel Castro that we lived in Canada, and that we did not live in America, and that Canada had not banned Cuban cigars or Cuban rum.
But in spite of the soothing intoxication of strong, Cuban cigars, the chats about jazz, and snippets of autobiographical ’memberings, the nourishing food from the Bagel Restaurant on Spadina Avenue and Col
lege Street, we were just, only two men, too weak, in spite of our commitment to “racial integration,” too poor in influence and resources, we were still powerless to make any real change. And we went about our other lives, the Rabbi to his congregation at Beth Tzedec Temple, and I to the beginning toil of wanting to be a writer.
Chapter Five
I had recently moved from a two-bedroom apartment on Vermont Street, the first street south of Dupont, and west off Bathurst. In those days, you could count the number of black residents in this area on your left hand. From Vermont, we moved to Rosedale. Rosedale! Glen Road, north of Bloor Street, east from Sherbourne. In a basement apartment.
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