'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  But I conquered that setback, as I have overcome each obstacle and controversy put in my path, beginning with the “court martial” on the windy hills of Walkers in the country district of Barbados. Since that Saturday morning, there have been abrupt “terminations” of most of the jobs I have held: the post office Christmas temporary help, when I refused to be the supervisor’s “slave”; the Timmins Daily Press, as a reporter, when I could not learn how to write a news story, but presented my covering of a Lions Club meeting, as if I were writing a short story; from the Globe and Mail, who hired me — I did not apply for the job — as one of their young, bright, college-educated reporters, an innovative move initiated by Clark Davey — along with Warren Gerard, Barrie Zwicker, and an American, a graduate of Princeton, or Harvard — who had me fired for not getting a story right, when I was sent to take over from the reporter who covered metropolitan politics. I was not briefed about the meeting that dealt with religious education taught in elementary schools, and I confused an amendment to the motion, for the motion itself, and said so, in one of the most beautiful leads ever written by a Globe and Mail reporter: “North York came within a hair’s breadth of having religious education wiped irrevocably from its curriculum.” I hope my memory is correct in this. It was a minister in the Unitarian Church who wrote to the editor, who caused Bob Turnbull, the city desk editor, to challenge me, and my accuracy. I told him that I wrote what I heard. I have forgotten the context. But I have not forgotten the gist — if not the words — of the Unitarian Church minister. “I have been a reader of the Globe and Mail for forty years, and I have always been impressed by the accuracy of its reporting. I was at the meeting reported in your paper, and …” It happened before the end of the six-month probation. And then there was my appointment as assistant editor of Canadian Nuclear Technology! I did not even know trigonometry! I did not get beyond simple equations. But the job was “given” to me when I threatened Maclean-Hunter, then at the corner of Dundas and University, that I would take the case to the Human Rights Commission. So they gave me a job. And the job was such that they knew I could not last in such shark-infested waters; that I was out of my depth. After Maclean-Hunter, there was Industrial Sales Promotion, in Don Mills, driven to work by the editor Dick Flohil, now an impresario of the blues. Dick drove me in his Morris Minor — or is it a Mini-Minor — with blues coming through the 8-track player, educating me in this music, which I had thought was derogatory to black people. In these days, blues was listened to mostly by white people. We blacks listened to jazz: Jimmy Smith, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. To Miles and “them motherfuckers of bebop.” The publisher-owner would send me down to Toronto, a considerable distance in those days, to write articles on subjects that he chose. And he liked me doing this because I could take photographs, a result of having worked for Thomson Newspapers, where reporters are taught to do everything on a newspaper, including fetch coffee, and lay out advertisements for the sale of cars and houses. I would write these articles and hand them in to the publisher. And this went on for some time. Then, one Monday morning, having survived the drive in the Puny-mini, and the sadness of the blues, the publisher’s wife handed me an envelope with a window in it. I opened the envelope, and there was a cheque in my name, in the amount of $150.00. In those days, $150.00 was an amount not to be scoffed at. I announced my good fortune to the office. The publisher heard. And came to me, took the cheque from me, and said, “This goes into the company.” I contacted a friend of mine, a commercial artist, Kenny Craig, that same day, and asked him to design some calling cards and a letterhead for me. I was now going to be AUSTIN CLARKE ASSOCIATED LTD, FREELANCE WRITERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS. And Kenny called the office when the job was done to ask for me — “Austin Clarke, president of Austin Clarke Associated Ltd.” You can imagine what words, what epithets he had to have used to describe me, when the boss told him he had the wrong number. Summarily, I was terminated. And it was this that caused me to be a writer, having vowed never again to work for any man — white or black. But the point about a black employer was moot. You could count on one hand with three amputations, the black employers you would want to work for. There was Contrast newspaper and Share magazine; one real estate broker; and a few hairdressers. And to be honest, you didn’t want to work for any of them. You had heard about them. And about the life and health of “black business.”

  I went on the dole instead. Twenty-eight dollars a week, every Friday, down at the Richmond Street unemployment office, which you got only after convincing the unemployment officer that you had religiously spent the previous four days relentlessly looking for employment. It was impossible for me to get a job. Not only because of racism, but because I really did not want a job. I told them that I was interested in getting an executive position that dealt with the “Econometrics of Supply and Demand in an Undeveloped Country, as those Econometrics affect a Developed Country.” Who had the last laugh? I would get my twenty-eight dollars every Friday afternoon — I think it was a cheque! — and my first expenditure was on a case of beer, which in those days cost about six dollars. The rest I gave to my wife. I was earning regularly, every Friday — twenty-eight dollars. It was degrading, “you on the dole, man!”; and the officers made no bones about letting you know you were the scum on Canada’s unemployment rolls. And then, there was the CBC stagehand crew. I think the CBC is the last employer to have hired me, and to have fired me.

  But what was my resentment to these terminations? Were any of them justifiable? Regardless of my sentiment at the time, I never allowed the disaster of my employment history to crystallize in my mind, sufficiently to make me reckless in my self-pity. Each seemed to have been a determination to go on to another adventure, for I must have regarded living in Toronto as an adventure which would end the moment I got enough money to move family back to the Island; or slip across the border; or take a boat to the Mother Country, where I felt I would be welcomed, and be more successful. I still feel that way. This was before the Notting Hill Riots, number one and number two, and the Brixton Riots.

  It was as if these terminations were water off my back. I did not even try to philosophize about them. I did not allow them to make their definition of me, to coincide with the way I valued myself, as such adversity is defined in Psalm 31:

  I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but especially among my neighbours, and a fear of mine acquaintances: they that see me without fled from me.

  I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.

  For I have heard the slander of many: fear was on every side; while they took counsel together against me, they devised to take away my life.

  I can hear my mother’s voice remonstrating against my puny plots of vindication, reminding me that, “God don’t like ugly! If a man unfair you, or do you an injustice, leave him to God. God will fix him.” But even though this delegates the exertion of retribution to God, I sometimes wonder if God does always give one the satisfaction of being vindicated. The more I think of this, and the more instances there are of persons who have “unfaired” me, the more I believe in this divine intervention. “God don’t like ugly, boy!” But it seems to me that it takes great personal durability, since the same God “works in a mysterious way,” and this entails, if not implies, the pleasure of God’s patience, in giving me the “satisfaction ” as I “become a reproach because of mine enemies, and especially unto my neighbours.”

  One morning I returned from a trip and left the front door open. As I lugged my bags upstairs to the second floor, I heard footsteps in the house; and then saw the fleeing shadow of a black man going back down the steps three at a time, and I in underwear — it was summer — running after him, down McGill Street, Church to Gerrard, down Gerrard, crossing traffic and red lights, right into the park, where men sit all day and dream and drink from a brown paper bag, and swap cigarettes and jokes and adventures. I saw him give the ghetto blaster to a man, and run off, into an alley, east of Sherbourne Street. And
another neighbour, Mike Thompson, driving a BMW, saw me in this wild and demented state, in the middle of the road, in underwear, barefooted, shouting, “Thief! Thief!” attracting no attention, for in this park there are all thieves, and which one was I picking out?

  “Austin, boy,” my neighbour said, “lemme drive-you-back-home, and put on some clothes. We-going-go-after the fucker!”

  And we did just that. Retracing the same route of escape and the same geography of pursuit. And we found him. Cowering under one of the huge trees in the park, and we rushed after him, in the car, to cut him off. But thieves are clever, and creative. And he made his calculation like a mathematician: he saw that the BMW was an older model, and too large to enter the alley he had chosen for his final escape. We watched at the mouth of the laneway as he sauntered off into the declaration and the promise that I might entertain him one dark night, armed with knife or gun, against my wish. The item he took was a ghetto blaster that belonged to the son of a friend of mine from Barbados, attending the University of Waterloo.

  “Can you describe the ghetto blaster?” the investigating policeman said. We were on the street, in that section which is the ghetto.

  I described the ghetto blaster.

  “I would advice you, sir, that it doesn’t make sense to go after a thief of that sort, just for a ghetto blaster.”

  The black man could have blasted my head with a gun. Or stuck a knife in my guts. For a ghetto blaster? Is it worth it? A man in your position?

  I had no position. I was no longer a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, earning about $100,000.00 per annum; I had made no preparation for my re-entry into the real world of the writer, the world of poverty and near-penury; and my frantic applications to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council fell on deaf and I suspected, “prejudiced,” ears and conscience and evaluation. I was faced with the predicament that writers face every day: wondering if I had talent, whether my talent had dried up, whether I had been wasting my time since November 1964 when The Survivors of the Crossing was published and gave notice — in spite of the fact that another black man was daring enough to call himself a writer on this precious soil of Canadian literature.

  At this time in my writing career, I had to acknowledge that I was a man with little talent, unable to compete with the kind of writers who had superseded me in an application in 1996, for an Ontario Arts Council Grant. Of all the names mentioned in the document, I knew only Dionne Brand, my friend; and the juror Catherine Bush. It was difficult for me to justify the phrase “the range of applications within the program” with seven of the names mentioned. But I am not making any other point: except that the letter rammed home the insecurity, the defeat that my life characterized at this juncture. I found the letter in an old rare Oxford dictionary I had bought in 1996 when things were good. I am looking at this letter written on the 6th of February 1996, and I am reading it today, the 27th of March 2005. On the 7th of February, I was giving a reading in the University of Toronto in their series, “Conversations,” a symposium of internationally famous writers. I mention this entirely as if it is an entry in my journal.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When the schooners from the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands, from Trinidad, Cuba, and Dominica came into the Careenage, I would stand up on the city side of the wharf and watch the men, lifting huge crocus bags of things, with perspiration pouring off their backs like black sweat, and try to imagine these vessels piercing through the blackness of night, through the unknown roads of the waves and oceans to enter this small harbour safely, in the bright, sweating morning light. I do not remember what a man, who knew the sea, told me about the flags and pennants running down the main mast and the smaller masts like kites children fly on Easter afternoons; or if all the ships that entered Carlisle Bay to get to the Careenage flew the Union Jack. But there were many Union Jacks flapping loud and unmusical in the wind. They probably flapped with that pride, because on the land, not more than twenty years away, was the hero of their seamanship and valour at sea, Lord Horatio Nelson, standing in one-arm majesty and oldest loyalty, on a pedestal of bronze turning green with age and looking like a sore that had gathered gangrene. But tall and looking out to sea, to the entrance and the exit of the Careenage, probably whispering to himself, “England expects every man to do his duty.” I liked sailing ships and schooners even though I cannot swim: never learned how to; never was taught; never was thrown into the waves at Gravesend Beach, when I was one, and left to float or sink; never wanted to learn to swim, after my mother told all those sad, frightening tales about my uncles, white men, light-skin men, black men, all men from the parishes of St. James and St. Peter and St. Lucy, country men, who were fishermen, who could not swim, who drowned in number disproportionate to the number of fishermen to boats, to uncles, to men who knew the land and the mud of the fields in the country districts, more than they ever learned the ways of the waves and the sea; and who still wanted to be fishermen. They were all Christian-minded men: they read the Bible, and not only on Sundays, or when a cousin died. They had understood the meaning behind the slogan, “I shall make you fishers of men”; and they drew the conclusion that “fishers of men” was a simile for “fishermen.” That’s probably why they never learned to swim. They presumed the efficacy of Christ’s protection from the raging waves outside Carlisle Bay and the Caribbean Sea.

  In Toronto, for many successive years, in the summer, there used to be a display of “tall ships.” This display made me uneasy. These were ships, sailing across the Atlantic with cadets being trained to be members of the navy of certain European countries, countries whose history of sailing took in Africa and the West Indies, and whose cargoes contained presumptions of my history: sailor and slave; captain and driver. And I lost interest in sailing ships and schooners. Some of the recognizable schooners that entered the peaceful harbour at Bridgetown were also from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, PEI, famous for sending “Irish potatoes” that were rejects from the best crops which Canadians ate; and which I ate for the first time, in 1955, when I came to Canada. Yes, sailing ships and schooners have always fascinated me, even though I cannot swim; even though I did not get the training to be a sea captain, by joining the 1st Barbados Sea Scouts, because I could not swim, and you had to be able to swim before you could join the Sea Scouts, and look like little black sailors dressed in the similar uniform as Lord Nelson’s dutiful men. My fascination probably covered other aspects of ships and schooners. The tall ships that docked at Toronto Harbour, with their pennants and flags sluggish in the breeze that was not like the playful teasing laughter of a West Indian wind, were like cards an actor who has not remembered his lines, needs; and as I looked at them, the one time I went out of curiosity, they reminded me too much of the ships that Captain Bligh and Captain Newton and Captain Cook, sailed. And we all know what they were up to: “a thing up to which we would not put!” I imagined that the first cargoes of these “tall ships” were not “Irish potatoes” and saltfish, which were stuffed into the holds of the schooners from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island: scabrous saltfish and PEI potatoes with roots and things growing out of them, because of the length of the journey from Canada in exchange for first-rate rum and molasses and raw brown sugar.

  The stain of history had remained high as a stench from the holds, from the ropes, from the colouring of the wood of the decks, and from the “hollers” of the men and women and children crammed into the lowest class of accommodation, with the greater smell and stain of feces, spit, vomit, and curses. There was nothing romantic in the tall masts of the tall ships.

  And I travelled over many seas and seas turning into oceans, and I arrived in Amsterdam, in Holland, which I had met years before, coming through the speakers of a secondhand Philips radio, short-wave and strong enough to bring distance into the front-house of the grey-painted house on Flagstaff Road, early in the morning, whe
n the only people awake in the Island were gamblers and fowl-cock thieves, and young men learning to be poets. I knew Holland from those sleepless nights. Now, I am in Holland. It is 2002 and my latest novel, The Polished Hoe, which deals with sailing ships and schooners and about slaves, is being translated into Dutch, and I am invited by my publishers, De Geus, to spend a few days in Amsterdam. And here, through the canals and other waterways, I am given a tour of the city of Amsterdam, penetrating it in such a way that I feel I am going through the intestines of a city that fed upon the land and upon the people that came from islands in my part of the world; and in this shocking realization, I am not angry, I am not ashamed, I am not feeling as if I am a victim. I feel I am a partner. A senior partner. It was my “wealth” of skin and sweat and culture that made the “wealth” of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. I like the word, Netherlands. It has a more awesome, mean-spirited meaning underneath its obvious etymology.