So I turn left, to go home; along those alleys and haunts I used to crawl into during my first initiating days and nights in this city of Tronno … westward along College Street, including the whorehouse where I was dropped off. “It’s a very nice place,” the taxi driver had said. He had driven me from the King Edward Hotel, after the airport bus dropped me off there; and I had felt, for the second time, the excitement and the cool breath of winter air, I stood at the corner of Spadina and College, on the second floor of the sweet-smelling, thick red-carpeted spread of the runner, from my small room, to the room of the woman who slammed her door; and bolted it — I could hear the iron shriek as the key turned — and locked me out of her door, next door. She was unknown to me. I was unknown to her. We were silent. Next door. Adjoined. In our mutual silence.
There was no one to introduce me to her, in her locked adjoining red door. I do not think that I was waiting for her introduction, behind her locked door. And that was how I spent my first night in this country, in this city. In utter silence. And bewilderment.
And I awoke at six the next morning. No life came from the huge building, a men’s clothing store, across from my room, across the street, on Spadina and the corner of College. The two-storyed building was shut. And silent. It was the coldest Toronto morning in my life.
And now, on this equally cold afternoon, three days before Christmas, I am to take a train and go to Timmins. Because I have a job. It is my first real job. In this country. I am a cub reporter. For the Timmins Daily Press. My salary is thirty-five Canadian dollars a week. I think that is what the man said. He might have said thirty-five. Or even forty dollars a week. But I think he said thirty-five.
No one knows that I have a job. I do not know what to do with myself. No one but that man at Thomson Press and his secretary know that I have a job. I have never had a real job. How does a man who has his first job behave? Visit a friend? Tell your wife? Buy new clothes from Honest Ed’s? Or, second-hand clothes from Crippled Civilians? Buy three bottles of beer? But I have no money. That’s why I am walking from the corner of Bay and the Old City Hall to get home. My home is the corner of Grace Street where it meets College.
Back home, in Barbados, I taught at a government secondary school: Latin and geography, English language and literature and The Acts of the Apostles, which we called the “Axe o’ the ’Postles.” And I remember it now, I laugh; but I become more scared that I have a real job; and I become scared, frightened, for I have no one to share my happiness with: I am not happy. Timmins! Timmins? I am scared to tell my wife I have a job in Timmins.
“Where?” She will ask this question when I tell her I have a job.
“Timmins,” I will say, in a whisper.
“Timmins! Timmins?” These will be her two explosions at the news of my success. I can hear her shock and disbelief. And when I tell her that I have to leave tomorrow, she asks, “To go where?”
I can hear the tight timbre in her voice as she speaks these three words. I have no answer to her reasonableness. If she was not a Christian-minded woman, she would, as a Jamaican as she is, she would have something to say about that.
“How are you getting to Timmins? How are we getting to Timmins?
“How are we getting there? What about the child?”
Howard Matthews and Archie Alleyne were roommates in a flat on College Street, just around the corner from Grace Street, where I lived, in a rented house. Around the corner, on College, was the best butcher, they claimed. Howard and Archie were good cooks. They were cooking steaks. And drinking red wine.
“I got a job!” I announced.
“No shit!” Archie said.
“No shit!” Howard said.
It was a Friday. They were preparing to go to the First Floor Club, on Asquith Avenue, which was run by Howard. On Monday nights there were jam sessions, at which all the up-and-coming musicians gathered to practise.
“Where?”
I cannot remember who asked that.
“Timmins …”
“Did you say Timmins? You gonna-be a railroad porter?”
“Shit!”
I think it was Howard who said that. Words flooded my mouth. I was talking. I was telling them where Timmins was; that I would be seeing them every Friday night; that I would drive back to Timmins on Sunday; even by bus, that it would be like I didn’t leave Toronto. It was then that Archie took me by the hand and showed me the map of Ontario; and the dot that was Timmins, and he moved his index finger, down, down, down to the other dot that was Tronno … and I saw the long line that the Ontario Northland Railway would take, to take me to Timmins; and …
… when I entered the front door of the rented of the rented house on Grace Street, wobbling from the number of farewell glasses of red wine they had poured me, as my “going away, farewell drink …”
… and now, I have two days left. Before I depart to Timmins. I have postponed the trip for two days. Students are everywhere. The universities and colleges emptied on the cold leather seats on this ONR train. I am the only black passenger. I am the only Barbadian. And then, a porter appears down the aisle, holding a plastic tray, selling drinks and coffee and snacks. He stands alone. Like an inanimate statue. He is not alone. He could be a statue. I am sitting in the window seat. The seat beside mine is empty. It remains empty until we reach Timmins. The black man is selling things: coffee, snacks, sandwiches, and chewing gum; and he remains silent except to say “good evening,” and “thank you” when a tip, a quarter or a dime, from the purchase is left with the change.
The porter does not speak to me. Not yet. He is too busy collecting his tips, and burying them, the dimes, the quarters, the lonely one-dollar bill, in his pocket. His pocket is hidden under his apron.
The porter has not acknowledged my presence yet. He is abreast of my row of seats now. “Brother,” he says. It is almost a whisper; as if he does not want anybody to know of our relationship. The rumbling of the iron wheels fills the carriage, and then suddenly a voice announces “North Bay!” And seats are rustled, and bags and valises are cluttering, as passengers move to the exits. “North Bay!” a voice announces; and pandemonium reigns. The aisles are filled. New passengers now take up the vacated spaces. Young men and women settle themselves in the seats. I am still sitting, alone, in the seat beside the window. I am looking out into blackness. Blackness spotted by the white, thick snow. I am looking into the thick whiteness of North Bay. The train jerks. The wheels screech. It suddenly becomes silent in the rain. The snow is coming down. I stare into the desolate whiteness of the snow. I cannot see the porter. He is at the far end of the car. The two empty seats beside me are the only two that are not occupied. I look into the thick, white blackness, and try to imagine what life is going on in the silent, thick, falling snow. And then the car becomes silent. The passengers are sleeping … and some are snoring. I am looking into the whiteness of North Bay, going farther north, wondering what Timmins would look like.
The two seats, the middle and the end, are still unoccupied.
And out of the silence that now descends upon the car, comes the porter; and he sits in the aisle seat and says, “Want one, brother? Chewing gum?” And he pours two white gleaming squares into my left hand. They make a soft sound as they drop into my black palm, on my left hand …
“Going to Timmins?” he asks, as if he knows, as if he has seen my ticket. “The mines?” He asks it as if he knows the answer. “Hold on. Coming back to chat … to sit with you.… This is a long trip … to Timmins. I’ll be back … after I clean up a little …”
The two seats to the left of me are still unoccupied. And the distance and the time and the cold that seeps into the car, through the window on my right hand, are now like another passenger, and in this noise of iron wheels and the snoring, and the rattling of time and distance, and the pure whiteness of the snow which has joined the skies, a man emerges. I had not realized that the train had stopped. There was no whistle. No ringing of a bell. Just the heavy
grinding of the brakes; and then the final snort, like a man waking from a deep sleep. And then out of the whiteness, a man emerges.
I can hardly make him out. The colour of his clothes, and the blueish colour of the snow … I can distinguish no relief of colour in his clothes or the colour of the night. A man emerges in this light. Alone. With a bag in his hand; and then the bag is thrown over his shoulder. I follow the deep imprint of his boots. And I feel the silence. And I go back years and years and miles and miles, to place him, as the first explorer of this vast whiteness, and I think of Dylan Thomas’s description of men and loneliness and devotion, and bravery and craziness; and love of adventure: this man of the snows is alone. And he has the thoughtfulness, surrounded by a wall of white confidence. This white wall of confidence reminds him to wave. To say not goodbye. But au revoir. He waves at the windows with lights in them. He waves goodbye. His own goodbye to the world. Goodbye to the comfort and love of loneliness.
Would there be a woman, equally cold, at the end of his journey from the grumbling train, there, to meet him and blow warmer breath into his lips? He looked back one more time. And waved. And continued, as Dylan Thomas would say, into the holy darkness.
In all this time, my wife never entered my mind. Why was I, on this journey into the unknown coldness of Timmins, not thinking more passionately of her? Was it the fear of facing the unknown of Timmins? I wonder if I was erasing her from my present reality, and was like the man who left the train, and faded into the whiteness of the snow and skies, into a different consciousness? Was he a hunter? Or an explorer? To choose to walk in this white desolation and whiteness and leave a train, the only available transportation, and head into a white night?
I saw him drown in his sheet of pure whiteness; and when he eventually became invisible from the snow that ate up his body, I was listening to the slow, soft voice of the porter, now sitting in the seat beside me.
“Forty years … forty goddamn years I been on this run. Tranno to Timmins … and before that Tranno to Winnipeg. I love Winnipeg. Less racism … and I love them goddamn Indians. My people …”
And the rocking of the train, and the silence in the compartment where we were the only two persons awake, and the snoring of some passengers who would suddenly stop snoring, and then stammer in their sleep, as if someone had kept his fingers over their nostrils and held them there, for a while, to make the sleeping man stammer and cough, to make it seem as if bullets were coming out of his throat. And eventually he joined the other sleeping men and women in a deep unmusical snoring.
“I don’t know if you have the same feeling as me … but my gut reaction is that the North is less racist than back-down South … where we live. I mean Tranno …”
I tell him about my job at the Timmins Daily Press.
“Where you staying?” he asked me.
He’s staying at the Timmins Motel. “Porters are put up there.” I am too.
We promise to meet and have a few beers for Christmas. We never did.
“I had to look after a little business,” he explained, after Christmas. “You know how things is?” I knew how things is.
I had never stayed in a motel before. This one smelled of Christmas; and was close to the railroad tracks. I walked from the train, which was breathing like a sea monster, giving off puffs of steam; coughing like a man with something stuck in his throat. It was easy to seek me out: I was the only black person, in addition to the porter, on the train. Tonight, apart from the railroad porter, I am only the second black man in all of Timmins. The other Negro, the second “permanent Negro” living in Timmins, teaches literature at the high school. I didn’t know his name. No one ever thought of introducing us. Or, if we did meet, it was one time, one year, when we walked the same streets of this small town, when I was covering an event for the newspaper. We seemed to have carved out, with mutual precision, the paths and passages we would walk, without the similar desire or accident of crossing each other’s path.
A high school student was assigned to greet me, to show me my office, to take me to the Timmins Daily News, and “register” me: give me envelopes with advance salary; Christmas bonus; weekly salary, and the most reasonable repayment of the loan of advanced salary. Five … ten dollars a week …
I called my wife, and arranged for her to come to Timmins from New Year’s Eve until the day after New Year’s Day. Janice slept on the floor, on top of two thick woollen blankets and covered by one. It is the best Christmas I have spent in this country. The very best.
With the arrival of my wife and daughter in Timmins, Mrs. Jeanne Larcher, a pianist of great skill, did everything to make our lives in Timmins a time of great happiness, and education. She used to refer to us, as “the black population of Timmins.” She counted us on one hand. We were three and a half. She never explained to me who constituted the half. I have never been a member of such a small minority. But I am sure that Mrs. Larcher decided — to suit the circumstances — who would become the half, and who would be members of the larger group of three.
Mrs. Larcher had a popular programme on the local television station and every Sunday afternoon I was the invited guest at her luncheon. Mashed English potatoes with parsley and condiments, roasted chicken in a rich sauce; and washed down by a lovely white wine. And, of course, after Sunday dinner, we stood around the piano and sang the blues and jazz. Mrs. Larcher was a close friend of Sammy Davis Jr., so we sang his songs, too.
I remained the cub reporter for months. I shivered in the Timmins winter. As the junior reporter, my duty was to get coffee for the staff, all day; and this would continue until they had hired a more junior reporter. This never happened during my stay in Timmins. I had been putting off looking for a flat to rent. The comfort at the motel was so seductive. For weeks and weeks I prayed that vacancies did not exist in the whole of Timmins for a flat or a room. But decentness, as my mother called it, was so redoubtable, that I gave in and started, most seriously, to look for a place to rent. I found a flat with two bedrooms and a kitchen, in a house owned by a miner.
My wife, and Janice, and I lived in this flat. Timmins remained cold. The steep banks in front of the house turned one morning in warmer temperature, into spring. I was shocked to see that the high mounds between narrow passages through which we had been walking, in the middle of the street, were the gradual melting of banks of snow. In all this time, months now, I did not lay my eyes on the other black resident of Timmins’ recalcitrant cold. But before the snowbanks melted, our landlord, satisfied that we were good tenants, opened the trap door in the floor of our kitchen, and showed us the flight of stairs that led from our kitchen into his kitchen. On cold-cold Friday nights, we paid the rent in warmth, and with a glass of homemade wine in the warmth of Timmins’ redeeming comfort.
And then my wife rebelled. Would I go down the steps of the trap door, and pay the rent, on the next Friday night? The last time she had paid the rent, going down the sturdy trap door steps, it had taken her three hours to return to our quarters. I did as I was told. I learned what her reservation was. Our landlord, and his wife, and my wife, had been sitting round the table, drinking homemade wine. I welcomed the neighbourliness. But I did not last long in this new arrangement. I went through the back door, down the long, narrow passageway, knocked on the front door, and waited for hours, it seemed, until the landlord unlocked the two heavy locks. There were three locks on his front door. In all these fortnights, I still never rested my two eyes, as my mother would say, on the other black resident of Timmins. Perhaps he had his own trap door, from his flat to the kitchen of his landlord?
And then I was sent to cover my first story. It was a Friday night. It was cold. Schumacher was always cold. The newspaper’s photographer had driven me there. And left me there. The club members loved me. When they served me the second beer, I was seeing straight. The meeting of this service club was in Schumacher, a small town outside of Timmins.
When dinner was served: chicken and mashed potatoes and b
oiled carrots, and of course, another beer, I was in the thick of things. My notes were full. I reported every word the president had said. I took down every word of the disagreements of the members; and I even counted and noted the number of disagreements of the members. It was a brilliant reporting of the details of the meeting. My enthusiasm disregarded the length of the speeches. I wrote down every word, every nuance, every detail of the disagreement. It was a full reporting of the meeting. They even asked me to join the service club: The Lions of Timmins. And I did: I became a member of the service club. I forgot about the other black man in Timmins. There is, now, only one black man in this town: The new member of the Timmins Lions Club.
I think it was the president who drove me back to the newspaper office. I had to polish my language. And I did that. Five pages of the best English prose.
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