George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  Rue loved watching India’s brown hand washfalling through her black, black hair. Truth is, he fell in love with India because of that umber hand and that kohl-coloured hair. Yesss. Rue’s hands wished to odyssey through that ocean of black hair. He wanted his and her thighs to slick and click together with body oils. So beautiful as to be Polynesian was India, with her up-to-date wardrobe, her 1947 couture: blouse, skirt, cardigan, black shoes (slight heel), frills, flounces, ruffles…. Her ensembles coupled cocoa splendour with rococo accessories.

  Rue was quite dreadfully afraid of asking India, whose name he had yet to learn, to come out with him. But he begged Blondola to do him the favour of washing and ironing his best pants and shirt, and then he donned his best Haligonian accent, to style himself as big-city sophisticated. Then he stopped the haughty-seeming beautician on a downtown street to tell her that she was living music who he, as a pianist-composer, had a duty to honour in song.

  India just laughed: “Don’t tell me you’re another Negro jazz player stuck in Fredericton waitin for Duke Ellington to wire you to take the next train to New York.” She walked spikily further in her heels, and Rue felt immediately challenged—smitten.

  He quickened his pace to stay with her impeccable, sashaying form, sunlight turning her skirt filmy, and said, “I don’t need no ticket from the Duke for nothin. I’m superior to him.” Now India stopped and gave Rue her full attention. He had just enough money, cajoled from Georgie, to ask her to accompany him for a soda.

  “A soda? I thought you were a maestro-musician!” India smiled mischievously.

  Rue replied suavely, “Seeing as you’re a beauty specialist, I need to nourish you with drink that sustains beauty—like tonic water.” India was impressed by Rue’s vocabulary. She took his arm, and he took her to bed.

  India? Her bottom lip stuck out like her bum. Promise of piquant sassiness. Her smell was Ivory soap and Sunlight soap, blended. Would one day they’d share sardines, sausages, bread and butter, crumpets and tarts, and wild blueberries, a breakfast of well-peppered Newfie steak (bologna) and excellent onion soup or burnt-onion hash?

  On Christmas Day 1946, India brought Rue some gold sunflower wine. Her gold dress flared around her like flames. She was pure gold emphatically. Her tongue was Cointreau in his yellow sunflower-wine mouth. Frederictonian sunlight, golden, careened around them in the bittersweet kitchen of a too-short afternoon of groans, rum, prayers, rum, kisses, eggnog, longings, nutmeg, kisses, cinnamon, vows, and vanilla. They got into the bathtub together. Rue kissed India—ex-Andalusia, Nova Scotia—right down to her bottom. He didn’t want her to glance into the bathwater, fearing she’d—understandably—fall in love only with herself. Her face, in bas-relief, was gold leaf. Honey hair and skin. She had a quarter of black blood, and looked pure gold.

  You be everythin; lemme call it right:

  blue murmurin guitar,

  dark rum bruising the throat …

  Every minute of the day I think of night.

  They were charcoal mellowing blended with soft sugar maple. And India liked Rufus. She felt girded by his strength, and she egged him on to play piano in Fred Town. But not much work for a Coloured man in this city. And Rue refused to humble down. When’d they ever be free to relax and easily be?

  XVII

  DESPERATE for post-Xmas money, Rue shadowed a pimply-faced soda jerk, Omar Bird, into snowy Mazzuca’s Lane late at night. Rue snuck up behind Bird and bashed him in the back of the head with a rock. The boy wheezed and slumped down, badly bleeding, but hollering worse. His spectacles had flown free and exploded on the sidewalk. Rue felt the glass shards crunch under his shoes.

  He barked, “Shut up!” But a constable, Rex Knox, come runnin, clapped handcuffs on cool, cool Rufus, while Bird sat up, feeling his bleeding scalp and weeping and pointing at the blasé, cigarette-needy man who only felt like smoking, laughing, drinking.

  At his trial, Rue charged Knox’d called him a nigger and that he, Rufus James Hamilton, had been trying to help Mr. Bird, who he’d seen hit by another man, who escaped just as Rufus approached. But everyone hated Rue’s story.

  Rue pointed dramatically at the right side of his head: “I am the real victim of assault here. My bruises be blunt proof.” The judge’s verdict? “Guilty!” Rue’d go to Dorchester Pen for two years.

  The verdict was just a nick to Rue, but it was a knock-out blow to India. She could hardly credit how ridiculous Rue’d turned out to be. Yes, he could dress, he could dress up, and they acted a photogenic pair. Too, Rue had the polish of the boudoir and the poise of the theatre. But in reality he was a pianist who couldn’t play piano in any regular style and who couldn’t play piano because he didn’t have one. To woo her, he had to employ his bumpkin brother’s crummy shack. And did he hold any belief for the tomorrow after tomorrow? After Rufus attacked Omar Bird, India felt he’d attacked her and their relationship too. He’d acted like a dumb coward, and she wanted, needed, an intelligent, heroic Negro. Rather than remain in Fredericton and suffer the poison-darted looks of her sister workers and her family, who would shun her for having taken a convicted bungler to her bosom, India collected her wages, her savings from tips, and bought a train ticket for Halifax. She reasoned that if she couldn’t land employ as a beautician, she’d join a mortician’s enterprise and learn to make the dead look good. She resolved to send Rue no letters. That affair—that love—was now an Ice Age, a prehistory that should be left as blank and fixed as ice. Besides, their union had endured for only a few weeks. Why should she pretend to any loyalty? She was not Mrs. Rufus Hamilton, nor was she his fiancée, nor was she his mistress. She was a singularly glamorous belle, one who deserved a courtier of a courter.

  The train that delivered Rufus to Dorchester in January 1947 insinuated itself, squirming like an eel, into the muddy sea-like landscape that defines Dorchester, which lays in southwestern New Brunswick, between the Nova Scotia border at Sackville and the Acadian-ruled town of Moncton. When Rue could see around him, he saw a penal-colony building that looked like it’d been sliced off from the Houses of Parliament. Here was the Alcatraz of the Tantramar. Dorchester Penitentiary was like a grand hotel—a Château Frontenac of the bleak marsh. The green-copper-roofed Gothic castle sat islanded on a hill, staring down stark, sawgrass marshes and mudflats caked ochre amid little brittle lances of iced-over blue-black water and a river glistening like oil. Now dusk, it was purple ponds and dark woods. Ice flashed in the never-parched land like a series of broken bones. Crows leapt from carcasses in the wet fields. One was tearing another one apart by the remains of a bridge. Mudflats mirrored a craquelure of glazed terracotta, a blood-coloured primeval ooze creased like a crazed brain. Rue’d do his whole stint between January 1947 and December 1948. If he busted out, eluded the snapping dogs and the singing bullets, he’d drown awfully in that abysmal burgundy mud; he’d stand up and get shot down in that mucky, bird-filled, grass-filled no-man’s-land.

  Inside the medieval-musty prison, its stony enclosures detesting light, was Rufus, being felt up and clubbed and called niggerniggerniggerniggernigger like it was his number and his name. Same treatment struck the other twenty Negro inmates in the harsh pen that held three hundred judge-scolded “wicked” men. The cellhouse’s heavy metal doors slammed behind Rue, just as his fist had to slam into other men’s faces if he didn’t want to be raped. He spied the sun between barbed wire and iron bars for two nasty years in a palace of thugs. Luckily, the con who bunked with him, Octave King, was also niggerish, and bad and black enough not to be messed with. He was in for a pickaxe murder, and he was always known to have a homemade knife around his body, somewhere, and no one wanted to find out exactly where.

  Still, Dorchester conjured up Hades. Disgusting insects garnished slop. Inmates made pets of the cockroaches that scuttled over their beds or scraped at crumbs on their lips or clambered down sleeping throats, spurring unfortunate, reflexive vomits that could mean choking to death. Nothing was decent in that prison: n
ot the food, not the soap, not the inmates, not the guards, not the light, not the water. The only fresh air was when cons had to go out into the prison yard, to exercise or to tend to the little farm of potatoes, carrots, lettuce, all of which would be ground down later with mud and served to them as supposed suppers. Of course, there was no piano—busted or otherwise—to think of playing. Rue dreamt hammers hitting strings forcefully. His music was hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer, a stammering thud thud thud thud thud.

  Rufus heard of India’s defection via hearsay, gossip. She had vamoosed from his life, a wreck, before it could further harm her own. He understood he had lain with a phantasm, an evanescent wisp, one who had taken on flesh and its pleasures for temporary convenience. He shut his eyes and conjured India in his mind, but she was no more real than the contours of India on the prison library’s globe. It seemed he had never brushed her lips with his own, never been coddled by her thighs, never heard her laughter in his heart. Her running off to Halifax almost made his blood run cold with sorrow. But, by now, he was accustomed to solo failure and solitary confinement—even outside jail.

  XVIII

  IN FEBRUARY 1947, after Rue’s dispatch to Dorchester, Blondola took pregnant. She and Georgie felt unbelievably prosperous. George just doted on his slender, tender wife. Otho was born in November 1947, and Georgie became Mr. George A. Hamilton, Papa, father of a big, husky baby boy—one born free of any of his convict uncle’s criminous habits.

  When he brought his wife and baby proudly home to Barker’s Point, it was in a taxi driven by cheery Silver, a.k.a. Nacre Pearly Burgundy. He was a short white man, and dapper in his dark limousine, driver-style cap, black wool car coat, and guilelessly courteous, paying clear compliments to Blondola and the baby and being deferential to Georgie. In truth, him and Georgie hit it off right away, because they were both veterans with young families. Silver saluted George as a brother serviceman who was also tryin to improve his self. Silver then showed off snapshots of his own children, while Otho sighed and cooed in his mama’s arms.

  Right after Otho appeared, George was still doin part-time woodlot work and part-time short-order cook and part-time whatever, and he kept at all these tasks through the lush if ice-flooded spring. In April, Blondola took pregnant again. She sang, Otho fattened and grew, and George just smiled and smiled all through beer-smell summer and crisp, busy autumn. He never mentioned Rufus; in fact, he forgot all about the “bad man”—as Blondola dubbed him—rusticatin in Dorchester. Nor was there any letter from Rue. Nor was any sent to him.

  In December, George elected again to go into the woods to cut timber with O’Ree. He worked even harder than he had in December ‘46 and December ‘47, but O’Ree seemed standoffish, and, times, George saw the auburn man lookin at him ornery. But Georgie just shrugged it off. He figured he’d collect his pay, then hie on home and pick up fresh work in the new year. But when the day dawned, O’Ree tendered no cash.

  Instead, him told Georgie, “You’s work’s poor. Ain’t got a cent for you. Scram!”

  George saw he’d slaved a whole week for nothin. So Georgie snatched up all the man’s tools he could carry, and left.

  He got home on Saturday, was arrested for theft on Monday. O’Ree said George was just a thief who ain’t done no work. George said O’Ree was lyin, but Georgie had the criminal record. The Laws confiscated all the damned tools—but not a hammer—that Georgie’d lifted. He pulled the same judge as Rue, but fared better: George got a suspended sentence. His efforts to make Cy pay him by taking the tools as collateral on the outstanding debt had backfired and give him a crooked name in Fton. Blondola felt cross and soured on her empty-headed husband. She threatened to go back to Nova Scotia if Joygee didn’t smarten up.

  XIX

  THEN Rue arrived, with his crooked heart, straight from Dorchester. December 23, 1948. No one happy to see him. And he was grimly unhappy. His brain could still number each single freezing brick of Dorchester—that blizzard of a prison.

  Once more Rue sat, grinnin ruthlessly, in Blondola’s kitchen, despite all her dirty looks.

  His attitude was, “Let a woman weep while a man drinks.” She had to be careful, in her own house, not to get too much on Rufus’s “nervous nerves.” But Blondola was very, very pregnant, and didn’t want Rue infectin her Otho with his smell. She meant every word every time she told Rue, “Go to Hell.” Rue snapped at George, “If Blondola was my wife, she’d keep to her place.” George had to let Rufus backtalk Blondola cause the army hadn’t made George as muscular as jail had made Rufus, and he’d exited the pen in a bad mood. But George’s pacifism worsened Blondola’s anger.

  Christmas 1948 was hardly Christmas. Little cheer in the Hamilton camp (as a judge would later call the house). And there was a hammer on the premises, but no piano.

  As for India, she’d fallen for a dandy, fancy talker in North End Halifax, a sporting ladykiller who’d proven another vapid con. However, she saw his emptiness and saw through his vaporous promises only after he had bade her womb welcome a lifelong customer for her beautician’s art and a fervent worshipper of her taperings and curves. She’d not married her Lucifer—despite his charms—but she had settled all her love upon her child, her daughter, while relegating men, Negroes especially, to the outer limits of untouchability: they were smooth in speech, slick in bed, but too slippery to hold.

  India became a beautician at the Canadiana Hair Salon in downtown Halifax. She took up residence in the room above, with her lipsticks, her perfumes, and her babe in arms. She became adept at fashioning “Canadian” hairstyles—all derived from Montreal. Her customers left the salon looking like film stars, but always ended up with ruffians who looked like they had just left a saloon—because they had. Nevertheless, by looking good, the women felt better about their bad choices. This cosmetic salvation also applied to India herself.

  XX

  BY JANUARY 7, 1949,

  Asa was disappeared in Halifax;

  Cynthy was buried in Windsor;

  Easter was drowned in the Avon River;

  Reverend Dixon was kicked destroyingly in his side by a horse;

  Googie and Purity was jailed cause bawdy houses were “a Communist plot";

  India was a lone parent, toiling as a beautician in Halifax;

  Blondola was fresh in the hospital;

  George was free, but broke; Rue was broke, but free.

  Morning: snow sifted over two mourning, superficially smooth mugs. An ashen omen of snow: too much like two cold boyhoods in Three Mile Plains. It fell like dry and cold flakes of ash.

  On January 7, 1949, there was no money and no food and wood in the house. No rabbits hung from roof beams; no deer carcasses dangled in a shed.

  On January 7, 1949, twenty-two-year-old Rue felt as bad as alcoholics with that violent craving. He was as desperate as them drunks who attack each other, tearing open each other’s bowels and stomachs, hoping that drinking each other’s blood’ll give em the alcohol they crave. He felt his whole life—his future too— depended on moolah and a lick or two of rum—Pusser’s Navy rum, please.

  On January 7, 1949, in that shack on Fredericton’s edge, twenty-three-year-old George Hamilton was a father twice over, with Blondola closeted in the hospital downtown with the latest, and without money. Hear Dog, the rusty-coloured cat, meowing crazily with hunger.

  The brothers was once scrawny, beaten-up black boys. Now, they was thin black men, with black, angular caps and secondhand denim shirts. They was needing so much, beginning with love and respect and ending with beer and cash. They’d have to clip a jerk and swipe his budget. If they had the spunk. If they had such verve, Rue’d extract new clothes now trapped in the cleaners and go to Halifax to rescue India, and Georgie’d retrieve a wife and newborn child now immured in the hospital.

  To snitch and snatch was the answer to empty and used-up. The air was cold in that shack: words could practically be traced in the white mist that cracked their mouths. Not e
ven their blood flowed right in this winter. They had to burn wood—or freeze. All-important kindling dwindled. They was in a jam.

  “The universe is perfect,” thought George, “except for us.”

  Their breakfast did not include fogging oatmeal in a white china bowl anointed with Quebec maple syrup and cream, or butter slathered over gold cornbread, or yellow eggs, pink ham, and green-white onion sighing in the black Eden of an iron frying pan. They did not consume honey and oranges either. Not even no salt pork and brown biscuit—as in the days of the first Hamiltons a sesquicentennial back. The current Hamiltons had only the benediction of hot coffee. (Rue cussed: “Shit! Make it dark black!”)

  If they could’ve starved the hungriness out their bellies, they would’ve. Their day offered no church of holy warmth, no salvation from the hellish cold. There was no Wharf Sale of cold plates, baked goods, produce, or tea. (They couldn’t've bought anything, anyway.) They had a trickle of smoke to keep from freezing. (Fire split the stove: half wood, half flame.) Clothing was no help. They couldn’t sheathe themselves in cotton undershirts, or wool pullovers. Nor were there lambswool coats or leather gloves and boots.

  Rue averred authoritatively, “I’m so hungry, not even wolves could scare me off a meal.”

  George commented, “Why doncha get a job? Bring some loot into the house.”