I was helped along in this delusion by the power in John Coltrane’s 1963 record, Coltrane Live at Birdland. The same power in Coltrane’s “sheets of sounds” as Nat Hentoff stupidly called Coltrane musical effervescence with notes, not much dissimilar from Charlie Parker’s speed, it was this power, this control over the material being used by these great men, instrument and clay, that drew me to the busts of the Jewish artist Jacob Epstein. I imagined myself as the Black Epstein. And I did something about it. Something realistic. I sought help. First, I had an appointment with a real sculptor, a real Canadian sculptor, a woman named Pauline Fediow. She lived in the Village, which at the time was a small street between Bay and University Avenue, on Elm, in a small house filled with her sculptures and clay vases and works by other Canadian painters — all of them unknown to me — and near Mary Jane’s Restaurant, which catered to the nurses in the nearby hospitals, Toronto General, Women’s College, Mount Sinai, and the Children’s Hospital. At Mary Jane’s you could get Hungarian goulash, meat loaf, and a pork chop with mashed potatoes, and still have money left back from your ten-dollar bill.
“So, you want to be a sculptor?”
Chapter Sixteen
“You’re like a racehorse, boy!”
“You are going to hurt your eyes, with all this reading you reading, boy?”
“You know what you want to be when you grow up? If you don’t know, right now, all I going tell you is be the best o’ whatever you choose to be. Even a garbage collector, then! Be the best, in the whole Island — if you know what I mean.”
“Pass the iron over the seams in your grey flannels, boy! Always look your best! Not as if you went-through a pig’s mouth!”
“Always remember to dust your two arm pits with powder and a drop o’ Limacol, or Bourne’s Bay Rum, one or the other.”
“When you are eating, whether in or out in company, ’specially out in company, always keep your tools on your plate, if your knife-and-fork not carrying food.”
“And, always, you hear me, always hold your head up! Never walk and look-down in the gutter. You not looking for coppers. So, hold your head up, high! Only wurrums, dogs, cats, and centipedes walk with their bodies touching the ground. But you isn’t one o’ them … mammals! Is that what you call them, at Cawmere School?”
“And remember. Manners maketh man. Manners maketh man. What manners maketh?”
I was inculcating my mother’s precepts, preached to me every day, in the mornings before school, and in the evenings after school; and sometimes, late at night, after I had dusted the grains and the dust from my feet, before I climbed up on the bed.
“What I say manners maketh?”
“Man!”
“Yes. I want you to be a good man.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“And wherever you happen to be, here, Amurca, England, wherever … go to church! Sunday is the day you must always put aside for God, hear?”
“I hear.”
“You hear, who? Who you hear?”
“I hear, Ma.”
“Good!”
This conversation, containing ten precepts, as if they were Commandments, comes back to me, on this Friday afternoon, the 4th of March 2005, as if it had been conducted between my mother and me, yesterday, and not sometime in 1939, when war was raging around us, and the Island was resembling more of a county in England, than a carefree colony in the tropics, and we were all little black soldiers fighting for His Britannic Majesty, George the Sixth, and when he died, suddenly, we continued to fight, but for Queen Elizabeth the Second, our new Britannic Majesty, our Queen. Not the Queen of the Commonwealth. But the Queen of Barbados. And Barbados was very proud of this loyalty, and heralded it, in a cablegram, during the war, to Winston Churchill, entreating the prime minister that “Go bravely ahead, Big England, Little England is behind you!”
I was stunned to be told by school friends who went to university in London, and Oxford, that the cablegram, sent by Grantley Adams, premier of Barbados at that time, and knighted later by Her Majesty, who turned him into Sir Grantley, does exist, in the British Museum. It was a moment of national pride. Of loyalty. The flexing of undeveloped muscles in a physical boast, like Charles Atlas smiling from the comic pages of the Barbados Advocate newspaper, as he brags of bigger muscles. Canada and Australia and Africa might be large countries, able to swallow Barbados like a lion swallows a rat, but our voices and our singing of “Rule Britannia” were expressed in the same boastingly patriotic way as it was being sung up in England. And we argued, strong-strong-strong, that since we hadda-been train by English teachers who formed glee clubs, and by English organists who could make an organ roar and groan as deep as any organ in Westminster Abbey, or in Coventry Cathedral … we did always feel that Westminster and Coventry wasn’t really no match for the powerful organ instal in Sin-Michael’s Cathedral Church, in Barbados.
And so, when I see myself in those years in the Island, I accept the image of myself, not the character or the philosophy, for I was not so introspective, even if I was spending most of the day alone, “by myself” as my mother would say, I see this little boy, “by himself” in a world that was kind and safe, and that assured success, since it was driven into me, by word and by lash, from the beginning, that success comes only one way. From hard work. But we worked hard without really being obsessively conscious that we would succeed. It was more a behaviour that was second nature to us. Everybody — or almost everybody — in your neighbourhood, in your school, and in your church, worked hard. We saw the result of hard work all round us. And we never had to be lectured about role models. The term did not exist in Barbados, certainly not when I was growing up; and it never was given the heightened moral and cultural significance that it seems to have in this city, in particular, during Black History Month.
It is 1953, and we are studying The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; and we are imitating the accent and the pronunciation the English master, an American from Harvard, Harry J. McNiff AB, AM (Harvard), is using; and we are enjoying our imitation, and being preposterous, and extravagant in our scansion of the words, showing off our mastery of this fourteenth-century English language, in this hot, small colony, instructed by a twang-talking Yankee. Mr. McNiff (Harvard) was the first American to teach English literature at Harrison College. Our disdain for this presumption turned to adulation, not only at his skill, but more so, at his splendid wardrobe. We started to count the number of shirts he owned — and gave up counting — and we tried to pin down the number of socks he wore, and gave up counting; we started on his trousers, with the same result. And we settled on liking him, as it was he who introduced us to American literature. Hemingway and Faulkner. We had already been washed in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, but we did not know he was not born in England. We assumed that since he was on the curriculum set by the English examiners, he was an Englishman. His works had been in our texts for generations! And nobody told us differently. So, we roamed the playing field, as the cricketers shot the red leather ball through the covers, and knocked down wickets with their fast bowling of in-swingers and out-swingers, and “bumpers” that could knock a man down just as easily as the ball knocks down the five pins in a bowling alley. There was no bowling alley in the entire Island. But we had seen photographs of one in an alley in Brooklyn, in a magazine called Ebony. It was a black bowling alley. And this stunned us.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when we whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar …
We could see ourselves in this predicament, as a variation of our col-onial status, of our being despised, as men with voices that could not yet be heard in any rendition of our future and our ambition, even though we were young men in the Sixth Form. We emb
raced T.S. Eliot as if he were a West Indian politician guiding us by the hand, from colonial dependency into some form of polite, and gradual “responsible government,” ruled over by a governor appointed up in England, but sharing out, because of our “political maturity,” a few insignificant ministries that did not illustrate the same “political maturity” the colonial office had deluded us into believing we possessed. But it was a start. And so, we continued, in our sixth form classroom, which was the reading room of the college library, to recite “The Hollow Men.” We thought of men of straw, doll-babies sold in the stores in Town, with faces resembling those of minstrels we laughed at, and ridiculed as they were American — they were not us: we were English! — and we found their antics degrading. These minstrels, and the people they represented in their caricaturing of black people, were not Barbadians. And we thought of Guy Fawkes Day, the fifth of November, and of other straw men. But most of all, we roamed through the bookshelves crammed with other religions and ideologies of England and English civilization, singing, just as the language of Chaucer had to be “sung”:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men …
And as my mother said, “one thing led to another”; and we used Chaucer’s language of the fourteenth century to daub the personality and character of our colleagues sitting beside us, in the Modern Sixth, at Harrison College. And we gave them longevity and their idiosyncrasies wider scope. And we went through the list of pilgrims, from the General Prologue, and transferred from them, to our colleagues, the identical narrative description that Chaucer had used.
My best friend, Rawle “Briggs” Archer, because the Knyght:
and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To ridden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curtesie.
But since Harrison College was an all-boys’ school, we had no girls on whom we might pin the language of Chaucer to describe their oddities. But we chose the sister of one of our colleagues, and branded her thus:
Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of her smylyng was ful simple and coy:
Hire gretteste ooth was but by Seinte Loy …
These character sketches were my first ramblings into creative writing. I enjoyed writing these capsules of character; and I became good at them; and they made the literary magazine which we edited and published, in the long tradition of Sixth Form boys editing college magazines. But I never did consider them to be the practice necessary to becoming a “real writer.” I wanted to be a barrister-at-law, and use words in a more practical and significant manner: getting a man off from the gallows after he had committed murder. And making lots of money; and driving a black Humber Hawk; and walking about Town, in wig and gown, with my “man” walking behind me, holding a cloth bag of royal, deep blue, a string tied through its mouth, containing briefs, to be introduced by me, in court, in the court of the grand assizes, and in high court, in appeal court, even before the highest court in the British Empire, the House of Lords.
Muh Lud, I cite in support of my argument, the case of Rex versus Chesterfield in the High Court in which the Learned Judge, in the majority opinion stated, and I quote, Muh-Lud … if it pleases the Court, allow me, without prejudice, to remind you, Muh-Lud, that this majority opinion was written by yourself, Muh-Lud …
The language of the law, “of the Lawe,” similar to the language of Chaucer, heavy with the weight of logic and still light of narrative in it.
My shock was insurmountable when I picked up a book about Geoffrey Chaucer, recently, and found it talking about rhetoric, and rhetoricians, and how to present a human being, stating that it was “a technique or figure known to them as descriptio, of which there were at least three doctrines, equally explicit, which were current in the Middle Ages.” The first was Cicero’s, taken from his book, De Inventione, I, xxiv. The book in which I was shocked to see this skeletal technique of writing narrative, was published in 1956, although I did not see the book until January 2005; but it is still relevant. Cicero said, “Ac personis has res attributas putamus: nomen, naturam, victum, fortunam, habitum, affectionem, studia, consilia, facta, casus, orationes.”
In translation, Cicero was saying, “We hold the following to be the attributes of persons: name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents, conversation.” But Cicero gave us more: a paraphrase of these eleven attributes— one more than my mother’s precepts and commandments for the Bringing Up of Young Black Boys into Men — which we may refer to, when necessary; that is to say when we, as novelists, attempt to build a character from a smile, or a hat, from scratch, and are held up in our construction, through doubt, or ignorance. I wish I had known of this formula, when I was writing The Polished Hoe, for I might very well have drawn the characters of Mary-Mathilda; her son, Wilberforce; Sargeant; and the Constable; to say nothing of Mr. Bellfeels; in sharper poignancy and focus. But I might have described them, too.
Cicero’s formula, which it seems Chaucer followed, is:
Nature — Includes Sex, place of origin, family, age, bodily appearance, whether bright or dull, affable or rude, patient or the reverse, and all the qualities of the mind or body bestowed by nature.
Manner of Life — Includes occupation, trade or profession and the character of the person’s home life.
Fortune — Includes whether rich or poor, successful or a failure, and rank.
Habit — Includes some special knowledge or bodily dexterity won by careful training or practice.
Feeling — A fleeting passion, such as joy, desire, fear, vexation, etc.
Interests — Mental activity devoted to some good subject.
Purposes — Any deliberate plan.
Achievements — What a person is doing, has done or will do.
Accidents — What is happening to a person, has happened, or will happen.
Conversation — What a person has said, is saying, or will say.
I won’t argue that in my painting of the characters, Mary-Mathilda, Wilberforce, Gertrude, the Constable, Sargeant, and Mr. Bellfeels, in The Polished Hoe, that I have used the same brush that followed this Ciceronian formula in order to draw the shapes of these “human persons”; but at the risk of being immodest, I feel that I have come close enough to give the impression that I acknowledged Cicero’s warnings. I can now say that I agree with the analysis presented by Nevill Coghill of this aspect of the rhetoricians’ descriptio. But this analysis is based upon the belief expressed by William Blake in “The Mental Traveller,” a belief that I have always held, but could not have expressed so precisely, that “For the eye altering alters all.” Neville Coghill, to give the descriptio full significance, enlarged upon William Blake’s truism, telling us that “Chaucer thought the work of a writer to be something like that of a reaper, and it is with a wondering smile that we hear him say that all the corn of poetry has been reaped already and that only the gleanings are left for him after the great poets have done their work.” I sometimes feel this way when I read the novels of William Faulkner, Ian McEwan, and James Joyce, and the poetry and the “tales” of Chaucer himself.
I have dawdling thoughts concerning the best way to construct a character, in a novel and in a short story; and I have, without benefit of Cicero’s “formula” achieved I would think a fair satisfaction with the character of Mary-Mathilda, in The Polished Hoe, without knowing the fundamentals essential to creating the balance suggested in Cicero’s descriptio. This makes me believe, and believe after many incomplete and detouring journeys, that a writer can end up at the correct destination, even after many digressions, detours, and wrong turns. There is something within the writer’s body, some gadget like a sensor, like a piece of metal which attracts other pieces of metal, or complimentary other metals, that rings a bell announcing destination. My thoughts on this subject are written in Prize Writing: The 10th Anniversary Collection.
&nbs
p; Chapter Seventeen
I find myself sometimes, at odd moments, with no preparation for my recollection of song, nor any indication that the words of the verses have still remained in my memory; but when these snatches of memories come to me, like a spasm of history, I recall most of the lyrics, and certainly that part which must have struck me as relevant, or personally touching, when first the ’membering of the tune struck me. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”
This one grips me by the heart, and throws me back into a moment of love and love affairs when “I was free and young and used to wear silks.” Back to times of sweetness, times when the spirit and the body knew that they were each an operational part of that love affair. This is Whitney Houston singing, soon after she woke up the entire nation of America, one afternoon at a football game, when she sang the national anthem. That anthem was never sung like that before, and since. Whitney’s rendition sent shivers of deep emotional love through the body, and her rendition changed the way future singers would approach the anthem. Whitney’s interpretation was not given to the world exactly in a time of racial pleasantness in America: it was sung like a challenge to that racial animosity which made white Americans retreat from the urban centres and delude themselves that they were living in a different country, in an all-white country. The same racial animosity overcame black Americans, whose cultural antics, like a kind of chloroform, made them feel they were living in Africa, or in some segregated part of South Africa during that country’s period of apartheid; or in the Southern States, those ten states that the Black Muslims had argued for, as the homeland of Negroes, “since Uncle Sam doesn’t want us living amongst him, anyhow,” so said Malcolm X, in the interview I did with him, in New York, in 1963. And the irony of Whitney Houston’s singing “The Star Spangled Banner” was similar to the feeling I had that night in New Haven, when in the rundown bar-restaurant, I listened with the few white clientele, to Ray Charles singing, “Georgia on My Mind,” and how the song drained whatever racial animosity there had been in the breasts of those white men, and transformed me into their “brother,” which is what they called me, and therefore christened themselves with; once more a black American was showing the light to the vast, overwhelming white America, who had to confess that in the matter of this popular culture, they had to defend themselves precisely in these terms of black popular culture.
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