By now, I realize I was the “friend” who has been putting his hand on the policeman’s uniform.
They decide to arrest my friend. For drunkenness, “in a public place” — namely the street, Dupont, at the corner of Bedford Road. And they give me a ride to the police station. I think it was west of Bathurst Street, on a back street.
“Leave him here for a couple o’ hours, till he sobers up,” the station sergeant says to me. “And by the way … happy Christmas! Come back for him in an hour …”
I take a taxi. I rush back to Asquith Avenue. I whisper to my wife to hold the Christmas dinner for an hour. Fred is in a little difficulty. We’ll be back soon …
And she suggests I get my friend, Michael Sylvester, a second-year law student at the university, to “defend” me, in case I need defending. I get Mike. In all his imposing, handsome height, walking like a lawyer, talking like a lawyer, acting like one, Lawyer Mike accompanies me back to the police station, to face the station sergeant. Mike stands at his tallest, full lawyer’s height, and gives the station sergeant a lecture on habeas corpus. On torts. On common law. On the Bill of Rights. On the Canadian Constitution. And he concludes his defense of my friend by telling the station sergeant, “You’s a racist. Toronto is racist. Canada is racist, and …”
“Geddouttahere!” the good-natured station sergeant says, not in a loud or in a cruel manner; but in a firm voice. “Before I put you in one o’ them cells … and keep your friend till New Years!”
It is all a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding made worse by blurred vision. And the blood-freezing wind. The snow is coming down like a curtain of voile cloth at a window. The wind is blowing the snow like flakes of shaved ice into the face.
On the appointed hour, I take another Metro taxi and go back to the police station, to get my friend, and take him to my home, to Christmas dinner.
“Get-him-outta-here!” the pleasant station sergeant says. “I can’t stand more of his damn singing!”
Nobody could have had a merrier Christmas! — to paraphrase Dylan Thomas.
Chapter Eight
December 1959, cold, unemployed, the burden of poverty, made heavier because this is the Christmas season, the holly and the ivy, drinks being bought and assembled, in hiding places from myself; one-by-one; wishing I was back home, reliving the warm blood in the sun in the West Indies; and standing up to the supervisor, who had me moving tons and tons of mail … so it seemed … in this gadget which I had never seen, nor driven before, in my life … “If you don’t like it, you can leave!” I think he had a fat cigar between his teeth. His teeth were slightly brown from the strong tobacco smoke. I did not consider Christmas. Six days to come. I did consider my slowly accumulating bottles of liquor, Barbados rum, one bottle of Scotch, one bottle of red wine — with LCBO gouged out in unromantic letters on its white label; none of this had entered my head when I left the main post office. I was at the bottom of Yonge Street. On the first floor; of the first building west of the O’Keefe Centre; and I was facing the long walk up Yonge, turn left at College and walk to Bay; walk farther west on College, looking at the Christmas decorations on stores in the windows of businesses, and drugstores, and the men and women going in and coming out from banks, and banking, with a smile on their faces, pass the hospitals on the left; and the police headquarters; and the university on my right; and the school whose floors and walls and inkstands and blackboards and toilets I had cleaned for weeks, one Christmas season, and after the first two weeks in the New Year … after the Old Year’s bank holiday; and thinking of the Christmas facing me, for no reason that was obvious or that was relevant, into my mind came:
… I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six night when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six … all the Christmases roll down …
I was admiring the stores and restaurants on College Street, just before I came to the Tuberculosis Centre, where, once a year, you coughed up sputum while a nurse held an enamel cup, or a chipped white enamel pan in the shape of a kidney, and you were asked to spit into the enamel cup, to check that you did not have TB; or that you had not contracted TB since your last visit two terms ago. My head was not registering sense or common sense, and I gave up mentioning to myself the names of the streets I was passing. I continued, just walking, and repeating in my head, what words I might use to swallow up and contain and absorb the anger of the woman waiting. My wife. And what explanation would satisfy her expectations. Even of a meagre Christmas. But a Christmas, nonetheless. She was waiting at home to greet me.
“How it went?” she asks me.
“Fine.”
“You like the job?”
“… all right.”
“What is it?”
“Well …”
And I told her. And her eyes got larger. And redder. And she said something.
I was not supposed to hear what she said. It was the flash of her eyes she wanted me to observe. And I found myself, like a child, telling her all the things I did not intend to tell her; and she listened with patience, listened as she would listen to her children, knowing that what they were telling her not the whole truth, but were little while lies, while their countenances protested innocence.
“You left the job you had? The only job? And Christmas coming?”
She did not have to say any more. But she did. “Christmas coming … and you left the only job you had, at the post office, and and …and … Christmas is one week away?”
She handed me my coat. And said unnecessarily, “And put your coat on properly. It’s cold. What they said the temperature was going to be today?”
“Ten,” I told her. “Ten.”
“Put your scarf on properly. And keep out the cold. I expect you to find a job before-you-come-back-in-here …”
There is a black man standing at the corner of Bay and Queen Street, across from the Old City Hall, where there are cells, where men and prisoners, and weddings are held; on this cold afternoon, so close to Christmas, this black man standing lost; trying to make head, or tail, but making neither; seeming to have no reason for his standing up here, standing in the midst of people, all white, and staring across the intersection at the tough, solid buildings that have one planted stone slobbered in cement, one stone exactly above the other, in measured calculation; and upon the other, on this cold afternoon, when the chimes of the City Hall clock is confusing him, making him feel, because Christmas is around the corner from here, from this spot. And he has no plans for Christmas.
The chiming of the clock wakes him to his present reality. Here, where the chimes bring him back to the consciousness of time, and to the consciousness of the hour …he has been standing now for fifteen minutes, in the same spot, like a policeman directing traffic from the throne of his box … the chimes which tell him he must move; give the impression he is not a thief checking out the neighbourhood, that he has “business” here, at this intersection of Bay and Queen. But he must move on, before the black-dressed policeman, mournful in his uniform, frightens him, for loitering …
But he is waiting for the lights to change, although they have changed ten times from the cold moment when he walked from corner to corner, for the first time, making his mind up with the question: “Go up the elevator?” And face the interview? And face the interviewer? And hear how much the elevator-man likes the sand and the surf of the beaches in my small country? And how he likes that dark Mount Gay rum? And the women? And, my god, boy, those women? Why would you want to leave that heaven, that Elysium? And come to this goddamn cold place? …
“Or go home?” but “home” is not Barbados. I dream of laying-down under the next streetcar that comes. Under a coconut tree on the beach. Having the winds from the Caribbean Sea, and, if I am lucky, catch the wind off the Atlantic Ocean, which brings into port, dead crab, and dead sea-eggs, and dead fish … and the freshness of new life in the breath of a bottle of astringent Limacol, to daub my face? …
to change my breath. To put a better smile of scent on my face?
I am nervous. I do not remember if I gave the secretary my cur-riculum vitae. I am not sure that I have cleaned the corners of my eyes. Inside? And out?
“What can I do for you, young man?” And he seems to forget what he has just said, and he calls the name of his secretary. And she comes into the room, and stands dutifully beside his huge mahogany desk. On the left side. Her hips touch the desk. On the desk, on the right side, is a dried coconut shell, cut by a beach sculptor, in the shape, in the artist’s imagination, of a calypsonian; and he imagines that the head of the man is singing the calypso, rum and Coca-Cola; and he finds himself carrying the tune, and tapping his foot on the thick, rich, beautiful Persian carpet. There is no sound from the carpet. The vent brings in the cool air. Not cold. He thinks he smells perfume. Or incense. “Thank you,” he says to the secretary, “for Mr. Clarke’s CV …”; and he flips each of its four pages, and on his face is no hint, no indication that he is enjoying the music in the room; nor, with the melody he has imagined is in the tune coming from the coconut shell. Rum and Coca-Cola. He wants this to be the song coming through the lips of the coconut shell …
“So, what can we do for you?”
The room becomes quiet. I go over each detail of the way I am dressed. Earlier this morning. Did I drag the Lipsil over both my two lips? Did I wipe the corners of my two eyes? Did I rub enough underarm deodorant through the thick hair under my two armpits? Is my shirt buttoned up properly? None of my white vest is showing through the buttons, I hope? I hope my voice does not tremble when I have to answer a question he is sure to fire at me. What will I say? What will he ask me? Will he say he likes Barbados? That Barbados has the highest literary quotient in the whole world … well, if not the whole world, at least the whole Third World … which it has …or which is what they say it has …
He is looking at me. I wish he could take a cigarette from the silver cigarette case on his desk, and let the light from the glass in the window reflect on his face, to give me something to do, something to think of doing, some thing. A gesture. A smile. Anything to melt the military silence in the room. I wonder if the coconut shell sculpture will talk? Or, will sing? Even sing rum and Coca-Cola. Or, even “Beau-ti-ful, beau-ti-ful Barbados …”
“You’re from Barbados, I see. Beautiful place. I know it well …”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you ever worked on a newspaper?”
“School newspaper, sir.”
“Good. That’s good enough. Now. Suppose. Suppose you had to cover a fire. How would you write it up?”
I had heard men in the Pilot Tavern talking about the four W’s and the H, in the writing of news reports.
But before I could tell him how I would write the report …objectively, using the four W’s and the H … or was it the four H’s and the W? He interrupted me. “Good, good. Good.” He buzzed his secretary. “Mr. Clarke will be joining us … Timmins … you’ll arrange for his train ticket … one way … leaving tomorrow … and temporary accommodation at the Timmins Motel … near the ONR station. Well, welcome aboard!”
The handshake he offered nearly broke my fingers.
“Welcome aboard! And don’t miss your train tomorrow night. Welcome aboard … you’d better have a chat with my secretary … and season’s greetings! My secretary’ll take care of the details …”
TIMMINS! TIMMINS? TIMMINS! Did I just accept a job as a cub reporter on the Timmins Daily Press? In the frozen North? Cold? And free? And if you happened, at this moment of joy and happiness, to be passing the corner of Bay and Queen Street, and was attracted by the loud laughter of a black man, and you were watching him dance … dancing foolishly … by himself … with no recognizable reason and cause of this merriment … for there is no cause for this jollity you see, you would still have to wonder, “Is this black man … this Negro … this man … has this man been just-released from one of the small holding pens, buried deep in the basement of City Hall?”
There is music in his legs. Christmas can come. There will be rum and presents and gifts … and he will get to learn how to use the correct Canadian word for things … with jingle bells for his daughters, and the scarf that his wife, on many window-shopping cold nights had stood with her nose pressed against the cold display window of the Eaton’s store, smiling at Santa Klaus, under a shower of snow while listening to Jingle-bells, jingle-bells … she had stood and had watched how the black, smooth leather — was it felt? — in the display windows of the Simpsons-Sears store had shown her the wrestling of bears, and how she imagined tickling them under their chins, and jumping on the backs of large dogs who carry casks filled with Mount Gay rum, exchanging the heavy, thick red Santa-Klaus robes for her lightweight raincoat, and she, and the children, and him, the four of them singing at the top of their voices, bursting their lungs, singing We Three Kings of Orient Are … and remembering what Harry of Town Records had told me:
There’s a Black Man in the Ling
In the ling, in the ling
Yuh thinkn I mekking funs …
There is a black King, a black Wise man on a camel, carrying myrrh to Bethlehem …
We three Kings of Orient are
bearing gifts we traverse afar
field and fountain, moor and mountain
following yonder star …
There are no stars for me to follow; only the telephone wires, and the cables of streetcars overhead, and the grey skies and the breath of the cold afternoon; cold and the grey clouds and the silence of the streets that meet me at Bay, tributaries; and the Old City Hall; and I move my right hand over the one-way train tickets on the Ontario Northland Railway, from this same street where it begins at the train station; and I think of the three wise men, and I substitute the black king and place myself on his camel, riding in a different rhythm, humpety-dumpety-dump; up and down until I become the third king. My hand is still on the smooth ONR train ticket; and I draw towns on it with my fingers, and I see rivers running beside the cold steel of the rails. But I have to remind myself that I am the third king, travelling in jerky majesty on the hump of a camel; with a box that contains myrrh, heading to the new destination in my life. To worship a king who is still an infant, just-born. My finger holds the stub of the train ticket more firmly. I must keep this train ticket forever, for a lifetime, to demonstrate my new success; to wave it, in victory, like a man not accustomed to victory, in her face, not disrespectfully, to let her face the sweet, soft breeze of my success.
My life changes now. I see things I have been taking for granted, things like the wombs and “wemms” of lashes delivered and taken as if they were rewards for indolence, and “bad luck.” It must be my ascension to the throne, the throne of magic and imagination and luck, that is in my pocket, my side pocket, “on the left-hand-side, nearest to the heart, boy!”
And the streets that come now to greet me, as if I am a tourist, I pass them as if I am a real tourist, confusing history for beauty, like a man who has been walking with his eyes closed, and when they were opened, through accident or desire, all that he can grasp are outlines, vague, faded objects. But the touch of the hard paper of the train ticket on the ONR train, tomorrow … tomorrow? One day away? The material on which the ticket is printed, with my name on it, and my port of disembarkation, TIMMINS!
Where is Timmins? Where in the far North? Bears, whose skin is the same colour as mine: but more ferocious. And other wild animals that you trap and eat. And those that eat you: more easily; more often.
From this Thomson Building, here in Toronto at the corner of Bay and Queen, I open my right hand in my pocket, and I spread it flat over the ONR train ticket, and I feel the sudden thrust of that movement, the banging steel fitting into the joints of links, a sudden start of my journey up north. Timmins! And I get cold all of a sudden. My clothes feel wet. And thin. I think of mines; and falling into them. I think of bears. Why am I thinking of bears? Because I look like a be
ar? In size? Or, in attitude? Rrrrrrr! Rrrrrrr! I think of other wild animals … and I can’t remember their names and their ferocity … wild animals which men hunt; and are unlucky and unrequited from sitting all day on a hole, as if they are sitting on the bowl of a toilet, exposed to the snow and the ice and the jaws of bears … and eaten alive … as if the dinner they were spying on through the hole; in the ice; and which I will be invited to help hunt, and catch a fish swimming below the mouth of the hole; and trap and trick the fish into the lens of our guns.
I am thinking of all this snow. Snow. Snow, snow, snow. I am thinking of the first afternoon, in a November when the first pieces of fur fell soft and light into my hair, and I opened my mouth and swallowed them. They had no taste. I thought they would have tasted — the snow-drops, that is — like an ice-cream cone, with its red-and-white sugared cones that sting your taste and make your hands wet and sticky. Snow. Rich, and royal; and thick like new friendships. And I think of losing my way back home, to the house I am renting, at the corner of College and Grace Streets, near Christie Pits, where the neighbourhood boys play baseball; and talk to girls; and I think of rubbing my hand, which is now sweating over the plastic ONR train ticket that will send me, one way, into Timmins. Three days before Christmas. To live in all that snow? To travel all that distance?
I imagine I am still following that star, pointing to Bethlehem, as I undertake this new journey, riding on the hump of a camel, bearing a gift of myrrh, in a box. I do no know what myrrh is. Or what it looks like. But I feel that as a black man in this city of whiteness and snow, the mystery of the origin of myrrh … I joke with myself and call it “mirth”; although I do not know the difference between myrrh and mirth … I turn left, and I face the recognition of the police headquarters, and supervising chief janitor; and the smell of disinfectant, and stale perspiration and the richness of background and illustrations, globes, maps of the world, the English world, painted red, to remind me and the supervising janitor that England “never, never-never-never shall be slave”; and I am passing the imposing building across the street from the main library, at the corner of “Sin George and College” that the sun shall “never, never-never-never set on the British Empire!”; and I clear my throat, just to be certain that there is no hidden rumbling deep into the thorax of my body, no clue to give them cause to test me a second time for TB.… Then there is Sin-George Street, and the Saturday-night “penny-hopping” dances where we danced to calypso old as last winter’s snow; and ate badly cooked West Indian food; and we danced to the tinny music of beaten and battered old calypsos, “until morning come,” and relished into the old calypsos. “Brown Skin Girl,” and “Mr. Twirly and Mr. Twisty Were Two Screws”; and “Beautiful, Beautiful, Barbados,” old and reliable as leather shoes, and Harry Belafonte!
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