'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  The ancient windows and the floors of Harrison College, reliable thick floors, made of oak, because in all the books we read about steadiness, strength, long-lasting usage, sturdiness, the strongest things in the world: ships, boats, oars, the doors of fortresses, were all made of oak. There was not one oak tree in Barbados. The walls were made from the limestone cut by prisoners in the broiling hot sun, with an iron drill, almost as tall and almost as heavy as the prisoner himself. For all the time of my life in Barbados, I walked past rock quarries and saw the perspiration like righteous priceless pearls pouring down the black shining face of Mr. Mawn, standing erect in the rock quarry, with the shining iron drill, hitting the earth, metal hitting stone, like a muffled cry of shame, a cry of sorrow, cutting sense and dimension and beauty out of the ugly, white, tough rock. When you met Mr. Mawn on the road from the quarry to his house, you greeted him loudly by his name. And you moved away from his outstretched hand. You would have shaken his hand, once, years before. But the warts and corns and muscles and hard stumps started appearing in his right hand, and they crushed your own soft greeting; and caused wrist-snapping pain for hours afterwards. This kind of rock mined from a quarry in our Neighbourhood of Clapham, helped, years before Mr. Mawn was born, to build the sturdy walls of Harrison College, in 1733. And the prison. In Deo Fides, Harrison College boasted. The Latin scholars of the college never were able to agree on the correct translation. One side said it meant, “Trust in God.” The other side argued that the translation is, “There is trust in God.” Whatever the nuance you accept, I modelled my philosophy, when I was big enough to know that such things may be called a philosophy, after the first translation: “Trust in God.”

  “Appendicitis!”

  I said this to the doctor, in the appropriate tone suggesting alarm, fear, pain, and doubt of being treated successfully by him, Dr. H.G. Massiah, who also was educated at Harrison College. He was an Old Boy.

  I was holding my left side.

  “Appennicitis?” my mother screamed, holding her own stomach. She was realizing the danger; searching in her mind for that day when she might have fed me the wrong thing to cause the calamity of this disease “Appennicitis?”

  She had taken the correct steps; had fed me the correct things. She was relieved. We were in Dr. Massiah’s surgery as he consoled her. The cold fingers of his cold hands dug deep into my well-conditioned stomach, on this side and on that side — he alone amongst the three of us, knew which was the correct side to feel for the “appennicitis.” And then he got it. On the right side.

  I had held my left side. The side near the heart.

  “This blasted boy, eh? Trying to fool two big people like we, that he got a blasted ’pendicitis, Mistress! This blasted boy let down the whole school, the whole Island, the entire College, a place built in the year 1733! He let down the college. He is a disgrace. This boy who let down the blasted college, last Friday at the Inter-school Sports, don’t have no blasted ’pendicitis, Mistress!”

  It was not a time for rejoicing. Not for me. I had already told the newly appointed games master, Mr. Stanton Gittens, that my health was cleared. Stanton had been chosen to accompany a team of Harrison College boys to Trinidad, to compete in cricket, football, and athletics against Queen’s Royal College, QRC, our arch enemies, in Port-of-Spain. I had blamed my appendicitis for my dramatic failure in the 880. “Appendicitis, sir,” I had told Mr. Gittens, limping off the track. But now my health was cleared. My appendicitis had suddenly disappeared. Been dissolved.

  But I was aware of the weight of disappointment and disapproval that followed the collapsing act that caused so much sadness. The race became legendary. Twenty years later, in 1971, the old boys of Harrison College still talked about how Glasgow beat me in the 880; and then he would talk about having just the two of us re-run the race; and some, like myself, in more critical attitude, would use my defeat in that race to symbolize the end of my athletic career.

  “And he could have gone to the Olympics!”

  But it was more than the end of my athletic career. That defeat was like the repeating whirring sound of a tightly wound-up spring you hold in your hand and try to steady, and control, but the spring has its own mind, and reverberates against your will. This whirring followed me for years: after leaving Harrison College in the Sixth Form; after teaching for three years in a government secondary boys’ school, The Coleridge & Parry School, in Sin-Peter, in the country; and into Canada, in 1955; and still, the wound-up spring does not unwind; and the pain did not abate its reminding, monotonous whirring of my moral weakness and obvious lack of physical fortitude; and the repetition of thinking about it, that this “weakness” could raise its head of reminder to illustrate that I might never complete any important endeavour, task, wish, prospect, or ambition. That unfinished race marked the end of a career. Forever it dogs my footsteps in whichever journey I undertake in this country. And the mechanism of doubt continues like the unending whirring of a spring.

  So, the afternoon that I ventured into that basement room, in Varsity Stadium, at the corner of Devonshire Place and Bloor, and read the “best times” of the University of Toronto athletes in 1955, I suffered the pang of defeat once more, with dramatic immediacy, reliving that 880 yards race, four years before; but even in this melancholy, I was aware that I had beaten most of the times posted on the board. And why, why did I not sign up for athletics? Was it that there was no one who welcomed me into this basement room? The basement and the feeling I had while I was there that afternoon, was similar, if not identical to that feeling of fear that came over me when Captain George Hunte told me, back in that other basement below the Pavilion in Barbados, “You have to come first, Clarke! The weight of this race is on your two shoulders!” And he said it again, that I had to come first, that I had the weight of stone, and solid beams of oak, and Harrison College itself, in deo fides, on my shoulder — or to be more precise, in the muscles of my legs.

  Or did I not put my name down, “to run track,” because I could taste the veneer of racism in that basement? In these days, in matters other than academics, business, the quarterback in a football team, in activities that demand excellence, it was felt, generally, and kept silent about, in profound immorality of gentlemen’s agreements, that one could not really expect too much … too much intelligence from a Negro, for this intelligence was the bulwark and the characteristic, “as a matter of fact,” as a matter of nature, in white people only.

  Perhaps, it was racism.

  Perhaps, it was the repeating aftermath of that last 880, back in Barbados. For years, I could not watch athletics on television. I would relive my own defeat, and failure and fear and tenseness and nervousness. For years, I could not watch the sprints without experiencing the feeling of emptiness that inhabits the stomach, I almost said the guts … for it is all guts … as it had been guts at the beginning of the last 220 yards, when, in all the previous races, no one was within sight, when I glanced over my right shoulder; and to find someone on that Friday afternoon, in my final race, was misinterpreted by me, as defeat.

  Years later, in a banter of reminiscence, Glasgow told me, “Man, Tom, if you had taken another stride, just one more, I would have collapsed. Not you!”

  Guts. I see it all the time, in athletics especially; but in all sports; and certainly, in my life as a writer, which I had not intended to be, a life that is encircled with uncertainty, with no objective way of measuring my talent, with the pervading attitude of suspicion and the feeling that my contribution, defined as black, might bear an inherent inferiority to other social endeavours, such as being a stockbroker, or an engineer. There is no regard in this country for the dignity and the inherent contribution of the arts to the social fabric of the country. The crudity of modern-day life suggests that any viable contribution to society in which we live, is to be measured in dollars and cents.

  Guts. That I know I am the best. That I have been taught by my mother to believe I am the best. And if I have tr
ansferred this belief in the sinews of my physical and mental training for the 880, then I ought to think, that running is a thinking man’s game — or woman’s game! — that there is no surprise if a competitor draws up beside you, when you already know the amount of energy he has lost in order to draw so close. It is your guts against his physical power. Training, and energy, and muscles and massaging of those muscles now rely upon one factor. Guts.

  Imagine, over fifty years later, I see the repetition of my own defeat in the tragedy at the finals of the ladies’ 100 metres hurdles, at the Athens Olympics, when the Canadian hurdler, acknowledged to be the best in the world, stumbled at the first hurdle. Stumbled. Without being pushed. Stumbled from her own mistake. Or, was it bad luck? It suggested to me more than the physical act of having struck the hurdle at the wrong point. Stumbled? A world-class hurdler? It was the culmination, I think, of the days of pressure — and fear; and questioning of herself — against the declarations in the attention the media was giving to her, even before the race was run. And my advice to her, which I gave to the nearest friend with whom I watched on the days that included her heats, her semi-finals …

  … I think she is giving the media too much time; talking to them too much; dissipating her energy, both moral and physical; and being “sucked in” to believing that the race had already been run — and that she had won. The “stumble” was caused by the sudden fear that she might not be the best, the fear of coming second.

  Chapter Seven

  Many years later, when the demonstrations and protests, the violence of American sheriffs and police, in urban ghettos and small towns of the South, the delusion of inter-racial peace had settled on the land, including Canada, and “we were moving on up,” as the weekly sitcom later said, adding further to the disillusionment that the civil rights movement had erased the hatreds and the disparities that characterized black life and white life. And I had now put aside active participation in civil rights. It was no longer an aspect of my life, because I had found that there was a close linking of my freelance broadcasting work, interviewing all the important leaders participating in the movement, to my writing; and it was not a linking only, but an open association, approaching a conclusion that I held the same thoughts as the men and women I interviewed. I was now being introduced as “Austin Clarke, the friend of Malcolm X.” I did become more acquainted with him before his death in 1965, but I would not presume to have been his friend, not at the time I left Toronto by car for New York, where I interviewed him.

  So, it was years later that I found out the meaning of the second sentence in the letter from Mr. W.R. Martin, registrar of Canadian Citizenship; and not only its meaning, but the source that contributed to Mr. Martin’s conclusion: “The information on which the decision was based is confidential and it would not be in the public interest to reveal it.” And even though this “information” was without value to have brought about that decision, it must be remembered that during this time, the American and Canadian agencies that looked into these matters, saying there was national paranoia toward any black person, citizen or immigrant, who raised a voice against the waves of racial discrimination, against the killing of Negro demonstrators, against the burning of churches, and the lynching of black men. And of course, part of this sentiment related to the merciless and senseless beatings of blacks by the police. “Racial profiling” had its origin in these flinty days.

  “The information” on which my unsuitability to be a Canadian citizen, came from a letter written by a white Canadian woman, in response to the article I had written for Maclean’s, which the magazine published under the title, “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” I suppose since the article contained no treasonable thoughts, the author of the “information” detested black men who are angry about the treatment they got from white Canadians.

  But there are other “crimes” that I committed, which must have given point, in the context of the times, to the 1968 letter of “rejection.” And these are, in addition to demonstrating against Garfield Weston’s racist comments about South Africa, and the demonstrations and sit-ins in front of the U.S. Consulate General on University Avenue, and marching with Rabbi Feinberg regarding the assassination of Medgar Evers, who had led the Mississippi integrationist movement; marching against the welcome given to Governor Wallace by Mayor Givens. I had been involved in the following anti-Canada activities.

  I stood up to a policeman for a Jamaican taxi driver. The taxi had stopped in front of the Bank of Nova Scotia, on Bloor Street, just a few doors west of Frank Stollery’s menswear shop. In a “No Standing” zone. The policeman said, “Move along,” even before I had got completely out of the taxi. And he continued to harass the taxi driver as I was walking toward the bank. I stopped. I went back to the frightened taxi driver and told him, “If this policeman gives you a ticket, I’ll be your witness.” And to the policeman, I said, “Where did you want the man to stop, to let me off? At the corner of Bloor and Yonge?”

  You did not talk back to a policeman in those days. You might be taken into a dark lane, or down Rosedale Valley Road, in the greater darkness with trees and graveyards, and no street lights, and told a few simple home truths, with a policeman’s fist, or billy club.

  This policeman got on his walkie-talkie. And called somebody. Backup, most likely. I prepared my body and my mind for the confrontation. There were many confrontations in these days. Some ended mortally. Some ended with arrest. Some ended with broken bones. Some ended with a warning about those things. “I am going to this bank. Where should he drop me off?” He asked for my name. I gave him my name. My address. My telephone number. Just then, out of the blue, my friend, colleague, permanent guest, universally regarded as a man who could smell a party miles away, but to me, an intellectual and bibliophile, Mr. Kenneth Reid, of Dublin, Ireland, was passing. On his way to the Pilot, or to my house. He would pass by the Pilot, or my house, on Christmas Day, on Easter Day, or Good Friday. I went up to him and whispered information into his ear. My stepfather, a policeman back in Barbados, had taught me a few tips of wisdom about protecting myself against policemen who were quick on the draw with a billy club, or their fists, or a gun. He was teaching me how to save myself. I knew that the police knew who I was. Something in his body language spelled it out for me. The policeman walked away, along to Yonge Street. I walked into the bank. And withdrew twenty dollars. My spending money for that Friday, for Saturday, for Sunday, Monday, and for Tuesday …

  It is Christmas, 1960. I have just returned from Kirkland Lake, where I had been a reporter for the Northern Daily News. A painter I met there, Fred Schonberger, an immigrant from Holland and his wife, comes down to spend Christmas with us. Fred and I take the chance and sneak out of the busy, turkey- and pork-smelling house, to visit a friend, promising to return before the first cut was to be made into the breast of the turkey. We go to Bedford Road, the street of horrors on which the Department of Immigration is located. The wine that year is Zing. It is a lovely name. A most un-French-like name, exposing you to the oblivious when it is sipped, with ice cubes in a plastic glass, with a Christmas motif on it. And on an empty stomach, you experience the full “zing” of Zing. Well, from one zing to another, Fred and I stumble out of the apartment on Bedford Road, and wind our way to Dupont, looking for a taxi. A taxi stops. We get in. It is not a taxi. We immediately try to get out. But the doors are locked. And then they are unlocked. We get out.

  The colour of the cruisers of the Metropolitan police was identical to that of the Metro taxicabs. We had been sure that when we hailed the first car coming through the driving snow toward us — at the corner of Dupont and Bedford Road — that we were hailing a Metro cab.

  We stand in the road, looking stupid and appearing drunk. Our two breaths creating small clouds and mists and vapour in the policeman’s face. It is cold. It is December the twenty-fifth. It is snowing. Snow in the sixties was still powdery and thick like ice cream. And it came thick. And it rose up to your knees. Somet
imes. Not only in snowbanks. It is snowing like this. All of a sudden there are two more police cars. Two men in each.

  One of the things my step-father had advised me about policemen was “… never, never, never-ever taunt a policemen. Particular if he is accompanied by a next policeman. One against two, boy. One against two, don’t make sense!” And he added, “Particular if it is a dark night. Or if they have you in a one-way alley!”

  It was the Zing. It was the cold. It is the fear that the white snowing day had produced two more policemen. They get out of the car and surround us. Two policemen can surround two big strapping men. Particularly if they have been drinking Zing.

  “Tell your friend to take his hand off my uniform.”

  It is a policeman who says this. But I do not know to whom he is referring. Whose hand was touching his uniform? Mine? Or Fred’s?

  But I remember that I was pleading with the policemen. And as a West Indian, we gesticulate and touch the shoulder, touch the skin of the person we are addressing; and slap him on the back.

  “Tell your friend to take his hand off my uniform.”