'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  “You are cordially invited to attend a Reception for Mr. Stokely Carmichael, on Thursday, December 8th, 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., at the Home of Mr. & Mrs. Ed Creed, 74 Donwoods Drive, Toronto 12, Ontario.”

  As I arrived at the imposing home on Donwoods Drive, after Stokely Carmichael had given a rousing speech at Convocation Hall in the university, as the door was answered, and I entered the large hall, with the art and artifacts that declare and demonstrate wealth and taste, while I was wiping my feet and taking off my black, cheap, ill-fitting plastic rubber boots with the zipper in the middle, from toe to above the ankle, and which was broken on both feet, down the ornate swirling staircase came a black woman. A “domestic servant” — if you’ll pardon the repetition. One of those West Indian women permitted to enter Canada as house servants, under a two-year contract, after which they automatically became landed immigrants.

  She smiled. I could see my mother. She said good evening, and immedi-

  ately I knew where she was born. I remember this woman in all this time, from that cold night in 1963, because she reminds me of another woman, one created in fiction; and I must have remembered the dignity of the way she moved her body, as she came down the polished spiral staircase, the grace and sexuality with which she moved, and I must have been thinking of this woman, forty years later when I was writing the character, the physical and spiritual character of Mary-Mathilda, the strong, powerful, independent woman in The Polished Hoe.

  The irony in this invitation is that a Jewish millionaire with a West Indian domestic extended the invitation to Stokely Carmichael, and also, that it was Stokely Carmichael himself, as head of Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), who had recently in public speeches rejected the moral co-operation of Jews in demonstrating for SNCC, and their monetary contribution the SNCC’s programmes.

  When Stokely arrived, after me, he walked straight up to the West Indian domestic, embraced her in the manner black nationalists greeted one another, and called her “sister.”

  The air in Varsity Stadium was getting close; and as I looked around I thought that the clouds were coming more and more lower, almost touching the field; and then I realized that it was smoke. From cigarettes and pipes. And from marijuana. Applause and cheers, and cries of “Right on!” and some lesser enthusiastic shouts of “Power to the People” were as common at rallies of this kind as the smoking of pot. One went with the other, in a kind of symbiotic relationship of liberalism. Handkerchiefs tied around the head, or around the waist, or wrapped around the hips of women, were worn as badges announcing you were “cool,” you were “with it,” and that you “had your shit together!”

  “Like, man, you were like, hip.”

  And in this “hippie-ness” following the ranting of another speaker at this Varsity “teach-in,” I completely forgot that I had another appointment on this Friday afternoon, miles from the corner of Bedford Avenue and Bloor Street West, miles away, up in the Hickies of Scarborough, out on the highway leading to Oshawa and Kingston, a journey not taken normally except if you were going to Montreal by Greyhound bus. I was travelling to CFTO-TV. To go on a program, one of those popular in this time of games and of singing the mournful folk songs of Josh White and Burl Ives; games that disclose cleverness and spite, idealism and Christian charity. The game this Friday afternoon was about ten survivors, men and women, on a raft, drifting from their sunken ocean liner, with limited water and food, and anticipating that they would drift to an island, where there would be enough food for only two persons. They were locked in a game of deciding the fate of which one — by seducing him or her, to jump overboard and commit suicide — would be left to live and to carry on the race, since it was assumed that the two remaining persons on the raft would be a man and a woman.

  This program was filmed live, in the days when almost everything shown on television was live.

  When I eventually arrived, the program was in progress, and I was urged by the director to “swim” to the life raft and climb aboard. I knew all the men and women taking part in this parlour game. I was being urged to “walk on water” by a young member of the Church, who would substitute for Larry Solway when he was unavailable. This man of God was dressed in his black robes and collar. He was standing by the syke, off camera, chatting with a few other participants who already had been “thrown overboard.”

  “When you get there? Who you’re going to tell them you are?”

  He had heard the director tell me to swim to the raft.

  “Jesus!” I told him. “Jesus walking on water.”

  “Look what they did to me!” he said. “I was the first they threw off. They do not like God, or the Church.”

  I simulated that the studio floor was the sea, and I was swimming on it. I interrupt my narrative to explain that I have never seen this film and no one in my house ever saw it. We did not have a television. But it was a time of great fun and joy and hilarity and creative energies in this city of Toronto, now bursting its seams of restricted and conservative dullness, and burgeoning into a city of life. I have never learned how to swim. But I must have seemed professional, imitating the crawl, knowledgeable in the ways of the sea, because when I reached for the raft with my hand, and pulled myself out of the water and into the safety of the lifeboat, the first challenge to my identity was raised.

  “Who are you?”

  “Jesus!”

  There was no skepticism, no debate, no wonder, no philosophical thought to the possibility that I might have come from a continent where all Jesuses were black …

  I was dumped overboard.

  Going back to stand beside the Reverend, by the light blue syke, with the other dumped survivors, he said, “What did I tell you? This is an ungodly crew!”

  Wendy Michener, the daughter of a governor general (Roland Michener), was in this game. Heather Burton, Dennis’s wife; a Dr. Rich, a psychiatrist who lived near Asquith Avenue, on a small cobble-stoned street going down the hill to Rosedale Valley Road; the Reverend; two others, a man and a woman, whose names I cannot remember; and me.

  The game suddenly got to be like drama. There were now three left. Heather, Wendy and Dr. Rich, who had been allying himself with another man to convince Heather Burton to throw herself into the sea. And he succeeded in ridding himself of the competitor. He is now left to convince either Heather or Wendy to commit suicide. But he had sided with Wendy against Heather in order to dump the last man. Confident that he now had Heather covered, he made approaches to Wendy. Wendy turned against him. Overboard went the good doctor.

  The two women, Wendy Michener and Heather Burton were left — to reach the desert island, with provisions for two, to carry on the race!

  This result was, to me, quite interesting, for the race was in jeopardy of dying out, without the possibility of reproduction. And on an island, inhabited only by two women. But no one amongst us, thrown overboard earlier in the game, mentioned this. This was my private thought, manufactured to fit the demands of fiction which the novelist indulges in as a part of being a novelist.

  The good Reverend cordially invited us, Heather and me, to his home to have a few refreshments to celebrate a successful television program of this “parlour game of survivor,” more than to drink, although a drink on this exhausting day was welcomed.

  And he drove us in his black Volvo, as it had to be, since he was a professional man of some intellectual stature, because the Volvo in the 1960s was the symbol for that kind of sophistication.

  I had not seen Heather since the night of the party at the Kilbourns when her husband Dennis burst into the crowded room to see Pierre Berton dancing with Mrs. Kilbourn; Mr. Kilbourn dancing with Mrs. Berton; Honest Ed dancing with Mrs. Mirvish; Robert Mirvish dancing with a woman I had never met; and Dr. Morty Shulman, at that time a member of Metro Council, dancing with Heather. Dennis was wearing his grey houndstooth suit, handsome in this autumnal sartorial splendour. We all envied him. And he wore the suit like an armour of morality, announcing to
us who knew, that he had had a very successful year.

  The Artists’ Jazz Bann was playing a piece by John Coltrane, who, apart from Miles Davis,was their favourite jazz musician to imitate, not too successfully, I might add. But it was great fun.

  Dennis walked up to the dancing couple.

  He measured distance, calculated target and strength and velocity.

  And when he landed the punch that struck the Good Doctor in his square face, it was the first time in my life, as a fan of boxing which took place on television in the basement the Ole King Cole Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, on Friday nights, it was the first time I had seen a man strike another man who fell flat on his arse from the punch. Not even Sugar Ray Robinson had done that.

  Dr. Shulman fell amongst the cymbals. Gord, the drummer, held his sticks, in alarm, in his hands, wondering at the shivering sound of the dangling cymbals.

  Dennis Burton took his wife to safety outside the Rosedale drawing room. The dancers and the guests were speechless. The cymbals had lost their last vibration, and were silent. The music of the Artists’ Jazz Bann was struck dumb. In this silence, which had an undercoating of funniness, and wonder, and sensuality, Dr. Shulman got to his feet, rubbing his left jaw, more surprised than anyone else in the knowing room. He did not crawl, or walk, to his wife, Mrs. Shulman for succour, and assistance, and said to the room, “What did he do that for?”

  What did he do that for?

  It seemed that the entire room of black ties and long dress, blue jeans and thick woollen sweaters, and the corduroy suit of the artist who had met me at the bar of the Pilot Tavern that same night, lamenting the fact that he was not in the good books of Mrs. Kilbourn, and had received an invitation to this annual celebrity party, he was now drunk down the long hall of the kitchen, in this mixture of money and wealth and brain and brawn — Dennis’s — and beauty and sensuality, and very good Scotch, everyone knew the answer to Dr. Shulman’s unhappiness and difficulty with the answer to the question he himself had posed.

  “What did he do that for?”

  Heather is concerned now, about two years after the boxing match between Dennis and Morty, a match in which there was one aggressor, an unfair match in the drawing room in Rosedale, Heather is more concerned with the “impression” given, the conclusions that might be drawn from her part in the dispatching of Dr. Rich overboard, a choice that left her with another woman to fulfill the demands of “carrying on the race.”

  “I was worried that they would think we were lesbians.”

  The name had not been used before. And the idea had crossed the mind of none of the other participants. But Heather was concerned.

  “Austin, have you ever wondered what happened that night, when Dennis burst into the party?”

  I had not even thought of that, of the things that happened when she got dressed and left for Rosedale from Church and Yorkville; and he was home cleaning his brushes; or putting a finishing touch on the face of the beautiful lady, who had been sitting for him, on commission from her husband, in the triptych he had shown me on the easel on the second-floor apartment and studio; and had she left in her own taxi; and he, alone with the smell of paint and turpentine, his houndstooth suit with the red lining on the hanger on the nail in their bedroom, and felt the shame of not having been invited to the champagne and strawberry party of black tie and tails and long dresses?

  “When he pulled me out the door, I saw the taxi waiting, and he went mad and you can imagine what happened …”

  The Reverend must have been driving a Volvo, for he was that kind of a man, a middle-class, university-educated man, different from the middle-

  class, educated men who were white liberals and a touch artistic, who drove VWs, either the Beetle, or the station wagon; and this was almost a culture: the model of the car you drove matching your profession and, to some extent, your salary. In the mid-1950s, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, wealthy Jews in Toronto were hesitant and determined not to drive the Mercedes-Benz because of their still sharp memory of Nazi Germany, and the knowledge that the Mercedes-Benz was the symbol of Nazi industrial technology. They tended to concentrate on the Cadillac. And the irony of this relationship of the model of a car to the profession of its owner has a humorous reflection when applied to the American Negro of substance, and those who liked style and image, in Harlem and in Detroit, “the heavier cats.” They too, chose the Caddy. Other American Negroes, not of the moneyed class, but who were members of the middle class in the 1950s, favoured the “Bruick,” as they called the Buick 98.

  Tying ends, connecting the strands of stories to complete the action and give the “conclusion” to a scene which opens as atmosphere or as context, I find myself looking at my own life, and coming to the conclusion that I have lived on the periphery of society, as society is used in its best sophistication, taking part in political decisions, commenting on those political matters which affect my life, mingling with persons, men and women of my “class,” meaning men and women who have the same ethics, morality, education, talent, ambition, and desire to succeed, none of this has come into my path in the natural way in which I experienced and lived this sophisticated and civilized life, back in Barbados. I grieve that this is the lot of the immigrant. But I have never regarded myself as an immigrant to this country, because that would be to accept the Canadian meaning of “immigrant,” to embrace an identity of myself as a second-class person, “visible minority status,” a difference, the reservation of accepting the “foreignness” that the immigrant who is white does not have applied to his sojourn in Canada. And this is why I can see, at this stage of my life (and at that juncture in 1963, driving in the black standard-shift Volvo with the Reverend and Heather Burton), that all my life in this country has been lived on the periphery, sometimes, completely excluded from the significant decisions that are made. But the decisions are made on my behalf; and after the decisions are made, there is the assumption that I shall live with them.

  At this stage in my life, in 1963, I am thinking seriously of leaving Canada, for England. America, which is just across the border, and which is living within my political consciousness like blood in the veins, touching my literary awareness, Malcolm X, Leroi Jones, Stokely Carmichael, and James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison are all rejected, and I seek a place, a landscape, a context that is better known to me, through the condition of birth and former residence; and culture. And I chose England. I shall go there and do what I left Barbados to do: get my degree from the London School of Economics, LSE, to which I had been admitted in 1954, and after LSE, enter The Middle Temple, to which I had been admitted in 1963, to be trained to become a barrister-at-law. I was rejecting Canada and America — and Barbados — three former colonies, and confronting the Mother Country on her own soil, on her own terms.

  But I knew in my bones that I had to leave Canada. It was not so much an uncertain future faced by a beginning writer, it was simpler than that. I had outgrown Canada. My patience with having to stomach the indignity extended to me, to have me live on the periphery of compromise. And what had I achieved, as a beginning writer and as a freelance CBC radio broadcaster, to make me give all this up, and make my exit from Canada? I could not go back to Barbados. Barbados does not tolerate partial success. And Barbados does not stomach writers and other artists even though they might be at the pinnacle of their success. I found myself, in my thoughts of voluntary deportation, in the position of choosing another country completely foreign to me, in the sense of having no physical knowledge of living there, only the historical connection of colonialism, and before that, slavery. And it is strange, even now, to think that I had found some solace in going to a country whose history of race relations was equally spotted by violent outbursts as that in the United States. But I was British in the sense of the colour of my passport, and Britain could not refuse me. This was my delusion before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, and who obliterated all that Commonweal
th family relationship.

  I never left Canada for England. And this was before Margaret Thatcher did become prime minister and changed the immigration laws. With the foolhardiness of looking back, and wishing for greater luck, and feeling as if I would have had it, I wonder with the fool’s honesty, “What would I have become had I gone to live in England? Would I have been a barrister-at-law? A schoolteacher, which I had been, for three years in Barbados, after Harrison College, before my coming to Canada? A writer? A frequent visitor to the Old Bailey, to stand before a magistrate, accused for demonstrating and protesting against racial discrimination, as many of my West Indian friends who were writers had found themselves, as I had protested its version in Canada? Locked up? Branded a criminal? Described in the newspapers as an extremist? Just as my now dead friend, Andrew Salkey, and the late Jan Carew, had been branded? Just as Michael DeFreitas, who became Michael X, who became 888, was branded and then deported back to Trinidad, and who killed an English woman, and who was made even more notorious and despicable a figure by V.S. Naipaul, in his novel, Guerrillas?

  Whenever, in these days of 1965 and 1966, that the newspapers were writing about me, either as a broadcaster or short-story writer, they made a point of introducing me as “a friend of Malcolm X.” Or, “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” They never paused to see why I was angry? Or what had caused this anger, if at all I was, really, “angry”? These were after all, not too remote from the days of Senator McCarthy, and widespread paranoia in the United States; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), were even at that time, colluding with the CIA and the FBI.