'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is about more than physical love, although it embraces that, too: this is about patriotic love, national love, a respite from the bull whips, the high-powered fire hoses, the beatings, the spilling of blood, the terrorist behaviour of the white American man, during Selma.

  It was always in May, before the coming of summer, but enough of a change from the stranglehold of winter in the joints and in the mind, that I would pass this house on a street in Toronto, conspicuous for its green-painted door, cut vertical into two halves, so that only half opened to let you enter; and this house has stood out in my attention because of the way the lights settle on it, in a soft sensual sensation. This house pulled me toward it, in a trance-like communication, to face the spirits and the myths of my history. Following a visit to Italy, in the northern city of Vicenza, I saw that the most important element in Italian paintings of the landscape was the light; and the way this mesmerizing light was manipulated by the artist. It was as if the light controlled the way the artist used it: and not the other way round. And so, this old two-storey house in the dilapidated section of Toronto, close enough to Regent Park to give no comfort; butting-and-bounding with derelicts, drunks, prostitutes, addicts, and with a park that is filled day and fore-day morning with pimps and drug-dealing users, who move stealthily, making no noise on their bicycles the size of children’s training bikes, moving over the snow, over the grass, over the mud of spring in pools of brown water, this house stands out in the new light of life, as spring claims the park, as the sun strikes it at the four o’clock angle of romance and seduction. Always on a Saturday afternoon, and a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps it is that I travel this street only on the weekends, returning from a sleepless night of poker in a rent-controlled townhouse where the tenant — who is also the host — plays and cuts the pots to face the landlord early on Monday to pay the rent controlled by the City, which he finds to be beyond his control to pay. This weekend slant of the sun on the house intrigues me. The sun shines on this house, only.

  But the light in Vicenza was painted on fields, and lines of cypresses, rigid as guards of honour, and on the wall of the palazzo, built according to my memory of Roman numerals, in MXLXMII — the year Christopher Columbus “discovered” me in Barbados, and others like me, in the Caribbean. In 1492.

  One afternoon, as I walked through the wicket gate of this house in Vicenza, built in 1492, when the waves in that sea, the Caribbean Sea and that ocean, the Atlantic, were the colour of blue, the same waves took me to Cuba, many years after Christopher Columbus’s “navigational error,” which caused me to be branded “Indian” — from the West.

  In Cuba, in Havana, I am being driven along the Malecón, which has the water on one side, and a line of buildings on the other side. The Malecón is noble; and you know that when the sea is rough, that the Malecón could be tragic. We who live on islands have a different respect for the sea from the daring masculinity of North Americans. On the other side from the sea, there is still the stately and impressive architecture, apartments from a more blessed and favoured American past, the era of dictators, stately even, though a more recent hurricane of wind and turbulent water from the sea had combed the delicate grandeur of these same buildings, like a mother combs the hair of her child. But the tidiness and the majesty are still observable in the decay. These five-storey buildings that line the Malecón, look out across the water, the same water that Christopher Columbus travelled, the same water that is the Caribbean Sea, that is part of the Atlantic Ocean. These beautiful buildings, crumbling from neglect and from political “embargoes” and national poverty, are like old men, former elders, now stripped of their dignity: their trousers no longer fit, even though they wear leather belts to keep them up; and their frayed shirt collars have collected dirt each time they scratch their hair and their brow to suggest thought and intellectual consideration of their situation, but these men are remembering nevertheless, a time when time was pride and style, and the profits made from the Atlantic trade that came across the Atlantic Ocean, that England, France, Holland, and England had their hands into, and from it, became wealthy.

  And soon after this, I find myself in Venice. “See Venice and die!” is a saying I heard first, and used first in Barbados. The saying fit. Barbados was our Venice of the West Indies. In Barbados there are no castles. There is a hotel that is called Sam Lord’s Castle. But there are no castles, palazzos, or five-storeyed apartment buildings. Or Italian villas. In Barbados, everything is flat. You do not “see Barbados and die!” But in Venice, with Shakespeare on the mind, with Portia and Shylock, justice and racism returning in the camera lens with more dramatic irony than on a stage at Stratford in Canada, I see the “Bridge of Sighs.” And I hear the lamentations of women forlorn for husbands lost in prison and bent out of shape on racks; and I walk through the thickening crowds, tourists from Mississippi, Selma in Alabama, Washington and Harlem; and Canada, buy fake leather from illegal African immigrants waiting to be branded with the new curse as “refugees” — refugees from the slave trade, buying postcards that show you in worse light, exactly what you are seeing, as they repeat the sorrows and sighs of Portia, sighs that bring the Square into my hand, as I am surrounded by the magnificence of palaces, and palazzos and Palladian villas. And built on water! Contradicting the ground rule of common sense and elementary architectural science, and the wisdom of the Old Testament. “Build your house on a solid foundation.” But by another wisdom this is contradiction of the building trade. And I am, by this stubbornness against wisdom, back in Barbados, moving over water, scummed with dirt as the water of a harbour is: dead bodies of small animals, and dead bodies of men, and fishermen, travelling over these waves that have no current and do not move. And I see the Barbados Harbour Police, dressed in the times of Lord Horatio Nelson’s British Royal Navy, pulling the same oars, taking men across the waves of this journey that history gave a different name to, from what tourists call it by.

  Where did all this Venetian wealth come from? From how many Shylocks? Or, how many Brabantios? Venice, to my mind, does not manufacture Ford SUVs, nor does it have an assembly line of Pontiacs. Venice has no iron ore. Venice has no coal mines. The wealth that floats brazenly around, on the stagnant water, conspicuous as the naval uniforms of the gondoliers, the spitting image of the Harbour Police of the Island, moving into Carlisle Bay in boats that move with oars, was obtained in trade and through trickery. And trade and trickery over these waters that move hardly enough to give birth to a wave from the oars, and carry the songs that the gondoliers sing, in a language that I do not understand, that trade and trickery “was the slave trade.”

  This magnificence of the buildings surrounding, was obtained from the sweat of slaves and the lash on black bodies. “The Trade. The trade in slaves”: and also the Pyramids and the palaces of Venice. But this is speculation. I do not have papyrus and old tomes to check against my fancy, and my fantasy. My narrative is built upon the strong foundation of myth. But there is the same pull, the same importance of light, the same hidden spirits in the buildings that surround me, in Toronto; and on the Malecón, and here in Venice. Who has the ownership of this history? And who — meaning the descendants of slave owners — would wish to divulge one bone of guilt, from a skeleton preserved in a vault with the silver, ill-gotten from bargaining and bidding and auctions; and the handshake of a gentleman’s agreement?

  My next journey had taken me, surprisingly, to France. “Boy, go to France!” This exclamation expresses precisely that. It also means, go to hell. What lie are you telling me? Get lost. But the handshake that France offered, in the city of Bordeaux, was like the embrace given to a prodigal, a man who had been lost, who had lacked direction, but who is coming home now, to a house he did not know existed before his departure seeking adventure; seeking escape from family; seeking loneliness.

  A barbaric veneer on my sensibilities during my first visit to France, and my four-day stay in Paris, might be reasonably used to ex
plain why in the two days before Bordeaux and Toulouse, and the two days after I had visited those cities, with the courtesies extended to me, the choice of hotel and the choice of address of the hotel, across the narrow street from the Sorbonne III, Paris; and in the district known worldwide as the Latin Quarter, an area similar in its ambiance and its smell, its pace and its excitement, to Greenwich Village in New York during the early 1960s, or Church Street in Toronto, with all this applause and celebrity, recognition, and friendship, I did not feel the “cultural need” to visit a café in the street next door, or walk farther along the main street, to sit in a café and watch the French women pass, and dream, of conquest and of love; and compare “anthologies”: my choice of drink, and my choice of chair where it is positioned and placed, for better vantage; what postcards to buy and write on and what notes to declare of my “arrival”; and whether Paris could ever be my home. Paris is the romantic home of many writers, significantly and dramatically, writers who have no relation, culture, geography, frame of mind, to France or to Paris. But I did not enter Paris with this kind of baggage, with this kind of anxiety about appropriate tourist attitude. I do not have the language. But in my lack of “civilized” sophistication, I carried the English sense of superiority regarding language and the speaking of a foreign language in the company and in the country of that language, this is an ironical egotism; and I believed without being arrogant or egotistic, to state to the strangers around me, that I speak English, because “English is the language of the universe,“ meaning the civilized world. I still do not, even if I harbour such thoughts of superiority and priggishness, behave like the ugly Canadian in the company of my host. So, in a way, equally ironical to the presence and the history of black people, artisans and artists fleeing their countries, America and the West Indies, and seeking and consoling themselves that they have found peace and freedom, and respect, in this country of France, France who had one of the most repressively violent regimes of slave plantations (witnessed and written about by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins), whose treatment of Haitians seeking political freedom in the mid-1800s, Toussaint L’Ouverture and others, was abominable, yet I still did feel, in the four days I existed in Paris, that I was home. Home in the sense, that when the café is closed, when the last Armagnac cognac is served, when the napkin large as the tablecloth is removed and thrown into the bin with the other dirty, soiled things, and there is no one else left to talk with, when the lights are dimmed in civilized anticipation to urge my departure, and I get up, uneasy on my legs, I feel that I can walk, or take a taxi, and pass all these foreign reminders on the landscape, streetlights, statues, the name of a street or a building that goes back in history, I still can feel that I am home. I am home in Paris because Paris reflects a relationship, that, in spite of its viciousness and its inequalities, it was a relationship that involved me, in presence, in colour, in voice, and ironically, in labour and the profits made from my labour. So, even if I may be regarded unimportant in my invisibility, the enormous, record-breaking profits, shekels, pennies, pesos, francs, pounds (shillings and pence), render that invisibility hypocritical. But the hypocrisy observed in my presence, in history, in European cities of power, has been as characteristic of my existence and the attitude to me, as the cruelties that have marked my black skin in my “captivity.”

  So, I think of the most foreign and unusual cities, as home. Havana. Toronto. Venice. Manchester. Bordeaux. Toulouse. Amsterdam. Paris. Never New York. Never Atlanta. Never Boston. Never Selma. And definitely not any city or town or county in the United States of America. But, Paris. And this conviction arose in me, as an intellectual consideration, before it gained fruition and was a passionate sentiment.

  The “welcome” of Toussaint L’Ouverture in France was so unwelcomed, and so regarded beyond the shores of France, that the English poet, William Wordsworth, was moved to explain the heinousness of the deception that brought Toussaint to France:

  Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

  Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

  Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

  Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den! —

  O miserable Chieftain! where and when

  Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

  Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

  Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

  Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

  Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

  There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

  And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

  My host is a professor. A Frenchman. He is the man who told me to meet him in the Bordeaux train station; that he will be under the sign, Pont de Rencontre. I did not meet him under that sign. I met him under another sign outside. Men’s toilets. He was lost. He lives in Bordeaux. I met him under a sign that said these other things. It turned out to be the public urinal.

  Driving me from the train station, with the water on my right — river or lake or sea? — certainly a harbour, with ships that look like luxurious hotels, or like castles built on water, to cross over the Atlantic Ocean, carrying the new “slaves” of pleasure back to the Caribbean, to sit on beaches and turn the body over one time every fifteen minutes, to face the sun and turn it the colour of lobsters, and turn the pages of a fat paperback novel, which make us admire this scenery, and wish we were on them. It is almost Mediterranean in its beauty. The light that the artist depends so heavily upon, hits these buildings, and the hotel-boats, in the same way as it lands on the green-door house. These Bordeaux buildings, matching in magnificence the palaces in Venice, and the dilapidation of the Malecón’s architecture, are built from the same blue print of a disposition, from the same state of mind.

  “There is a house in Toronto with a green door,” I say to the professor. “The way the light hits these buildings we are passing, reminds me of some on the Malecón, in Havana. It makes me feel I’ve been here, before. And I know I have not been here before. In a different sense. But I also know I have been here, before. There is something about the light, and the way it strikes these buildings. There is something about this light, and these buildings. They make me think of Venice. I bought the house I was telling you about. And I added a green awning over the green door.”

  And then my host, the professor, said, without prompting, something that took me by surprise for its frankness. I was shocked also because of its presumption that he could, and did, read my mind. He said, in the most non-dramatic voice, “These buildings you’re seeing, all along this way, are the profits from the slave trade. We in Bordeaux admit it, fairly openly. But in Toulouse, where you’re going after your lecture here, they are a bit more embarrassed of their past.”

  Into my mind comes the architecture of a building in Toronto. The St. Lawrence Hall. This was the meeting place of abolitionists, in council to debate, and to glance at the black faces which lined the neighbourhood, and which surrounded the landed gentry, just as today the drug dealers surround the homeless and the tenants and owners of the Victorian and Georgian townhouses. This neighbourhood, rotting and decaying like bad teeth, is now called, officially, the Garden District of Toronto. Some garden! The Garden District is no garden. It is inhabited by the homeless and the hopeless — most conspicuously. And I am thinking that this house, the one with the green door, built in 1863, could have been the residence of a man who fled to Canada, on the Underground Railroad, and who became “a shoemaker.” And I turn the pages of history and of speculation faster, in order to get to the narrative of myth grounded in truth. And to see whose truth I am using; and whose truth it is. The man in the house with the green door is more than a “shoemaker.”

  “These buildings in Bordeaux haunt me,” I tell the professor. “I feel that I have been here before. When I bought the house w
ith the green door, not because it had the green door … incidentally, Indians love the colour green!… It’s religious, isn’t it? Or cultural?… When I bought the house, and entered the door for the first time, I felt that a black man had lived there, before …”

  There was a very strong presence of this man. Like a lingering smell of perspiration coming from a woollen undershirt that was soaked in the sweat of labour; or like the smell of incense. The man back home in the Island, who drove the iron drill into the coral stone in the rock quarry, from six until six, had this smell, this smell that was like the smell of a man’s breath. Not a sour breath, or a sweet breath, just the smell of a man’s breath. And it was after these thoughts of remembering and going backwards, that I found the framed Xeroxed page, a narrative taken from a page in an archive that was recognized to be more reliable than speculation, a narrative saying what it said about the first owner of this house built in the year 1863. The year of the signing of the Proclamation of Emancipation. And this was what caused me to take the presumptuous position that what had been drawing me to this house, with the light on its green door, making the green emerald, a precious stone, a valuable rock mined in places with quarries where slaves came from, the association of the building of the house with the year of Emancipation, made me sure that when I stepped inside that door, the first time, there was a spirit from my past inside the house, appointed to greet me.