The Canadian she get in the motorcar, cause driving in a Galaxie more better than walking behind a Cadillac, and she sit down so comfortable that it look like if she own the car and she was giving Calvin a chance to try she out, and that it wasn’t Calvin own own money that pay-down pon the car. Calvin didn’t like that at all: he want she to sit down in the front seat like if he own the motorcar. But Calvin gone up Danforth with new motorcar and white woman beside o’ him, like if he going to a funeral; “Got to break she in gently, man”; though the horses under the bonnet roaring like hell. Well, they drive and drive like if they was two explorers exploring Toronto: through Rosedale where the Canadian thing say she would just love to own a house; and in his mind, Calvin promise she she going get one in Rosedale; through the Bridle Path where she say the cheapest house cost a million dollars; through Don Mills where they see the big tall Foresters’ Building, all up there by IBM; “You should get a job at IBM, dear” (“Doing wha? Cleaning out the closets?”… this Canadian thing like she is the wrong kind o’ woman for me. Calvin thinking: I hads better get a black woman!); all this she talk as they driving back on the Don Valley Parkway. The highway nice. The motorcar open a new whole life to Calvin, and he love Toronto even better. Damn good thing he leff Barbados! The Galaxie like a horse, prancing pon the white man road. Night fall long time as they travelling, and Calvin experimenting with the dip-lights and the high beam. It nice to play with. The FM radio thing ain’t working good cause Calvin never play one o’ them radios before, and he forget to practice pon it when he was visiting the car in the lot after he pay-down something pon it, so that the salesman would keep it for him. So he working the AM thing overtime. A nice tune come on. Before the time come on, he thinking again that the Canadian thing may be the right woman for him: she nice, she tidy, and she quiet. And he raise-up liking quiet women; his mother tell him never marry a woman who ain’ quiet, and like church. The tune is a calypso, man. “It’s a nice calypso,” Calvin say. “Sparrow, in your arse!” he shout, and he beg pardon, he excited because it is the first time he hear a calypso on the radio. He start liking Canada bad bad again. “Look at me, though! New car! A Galaxie, and you beside me…” The Canadian thing start working up she behind beside o’ Calvin; she start saying she been going down in the islands for years now, that she have more calypso records than any white woman in Toronto, and she wish she had the money to take them outta storage and play one or two for Calvin. She start singing the tune, and Calvin vex as hell, cause he don’t like no woman who does sing calypso, his Old Queen didn’t even let him sing calypso when he was a boy in Barbados. And he was a man! Besides, the calypso that the Canadian thing singing now is a thing bout “…three white women travelling through Africa!” and something about “Uh never had a white meat, yet!” and this nice woman, this simple-looking Canadian girl know all the words, and she enjoying sheself too, and Calvin thinking that Sparrow watching him from through the AM radio thing, and laughing at him, and he vex as shit, cause the calypso mean that certain white women like black men to lash them, and… “Don’t sing that!” he order the thing, as if he talking to his wife; and the Canadian thing tell him, in a sharp voice, that she isn’t his damn wife, so “Don’t you be uppity with me, buster!” Well, who tell she she could talk back to a Bajan man like Calvin? Calvin slam on the brakes. The motorcar cry out screeennnnchhhhhh! The Canadian thing head hit the windshield, bram! And she neck like it break in truth. The motorcar halfway in the middle o’ the highway. Traffics whizzing by, and the wind from them like it want to smash-up Calvin new Galaxie. Calvin vex as shit but he can’t do nothing cause he trembling like hell: the woman in the front seat turning white white white like a piece o’ paper, and the blood gone outta she face; Calvin ain’ see no dimples in she face; and she ain’ moving, she ain’ talking, not a muscle ain’ shiver. Traffics whizzing by and one come so damn close that Calvin close his eyes, and pray. “Look my blasted crosses! And my Galaxie ain’ a fucking day old yet!” He try to start up the motor and the motor only coughing like it have consumption. The woman like she sleeping or dead or something. The calypso still blaring over the AM radio, and Calvin so jittery he can’t find the right button to turn the blasted thing off. And sudden so, one of the traffics flying by is a police. Calvin hear, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn! Sirens! A police car in the rear-view mirror. Calvin stop shaking sudden sudden. He start thinking. White woman deading in his new motorcar, the car new, and he is a stranger in Canada. He jump out and lift up the hood, and he back his new jacket, playing he is a mechanic. The police stop. He face red as a beet. “What’s holding you up, boy!” Calvin hear the “boy,” and he get vex, but he can’t say nothing, cause they is two gainst his one, and he remember that he black. But he ain’ no damn fool. He talk fast and sweet, and soft, and he impress the police:… “and Officer, I just now now give this lady a lift, she say she feeling bas, and I taking she to the hospital, cause as a West Indian I learn how to be a Good Samaritan, and…” The police ask for the licence, and when he see that the ownership papers say that Calvin only had the car this morning, the police, he smile, and say, “You are a Good Samaritan, wish our coloured people were more like you West Indians…” They lift the Canadian thing with she neck half-popped outta the Galaxie and into the cruiser, and Calvin even had a tear in his eye too. But the police take she away, and the siren start up again, weeeeeennnnnnn… Calvin manage to get the Galaxie outta the middle o’ the road, the traffics still flying by, but now the new motorcar safe at the side o’ the road. He put back on his jacket, and he shrug the jacket in shape and it fit pon his shoulders, he turn off the AM radio thing with the calypso, another calypso it was playing now, and fix the seams in his trousers, look back on the highway in the rear-view mirror, and start up the Galaxie. He driving slow slow on the highway and the traffics blowing their horn to tell him get the fuck outta the road, nigger, but all the time he smiling and holding his hand outta the window and waving them on. He outta habit bout to say something to the Canadian thing beside him, forgetting that she ain’ there no more, and he still say, “This Galaxie is car for so! And godblummuh, look what a close shave I had!” He see the Canadian thing handbag open on the seat beside o’ him, and he run his hand through it searching. It had in it five single dollar bills. He snap the handbag shut, touch the automatic window-winder, and throw the blasted handbag out the Don Valley Parkway, pon the road.
WAITING FOR THE POSTMAN TO KNOCK
That poor girl, Enid! The whole week Enid lay down in she bed, waiting for the postman to knock. The sheets and the blanket which the Jewish woman she was working for give she for Christmas last Christmas was wrap over she head, and she was in pain from head to foot. Enid wet her pillow, I tell you, with tears of blood. She had just been discharge from the General Hospital, but she was still weaky weaky and poorly. And not a dollar to her name! I ain’t telling you no lie. This is a true, true story! Two times for the whole week she manage to get outta bed, to rub she arms and legs with some Canadian Healing Oil which she mother had send up for her last year. Enid was so sick that she was barely able to wash she face and hands. When she move in the bed the pain, child, the pain increase a little more. And water was coming outta Enid eyes like Niagara Falls self.
Winter, child, snow was outside like if somebody had paint the whole world white. And sadness dwelling inside Enid bedroom. Enid cry and cry and all the time she crying she cussing sheself that she ever was foolish enough to say she emigrading to the terrible place call Canada. Not a blind soul to make a cup o’ tea or coffee for she; nobody to run to the corner store to buy a bottle of ginger ale, a pack o’ chewing gum, not even mensing pads, then! Is so Enid lonely in this big country. You could imagine what it was for Enid, because even when she was strong and in good health she always uses to say how hard it is for a black woman living by sheself in this damn country. I hear with my own ears one day, as Enid curse God and Canada, and say, “Be-Jesus Christ, it isn’t no bed of roses for
a black woman living in this blasted country.” Enid wait and wait for the postman to knock, and whilst she waiting, she decide to write a letter to the landlord. But the exertion nearly kill she. Anyhow, lissen to the letter Enid write:
46 Asquith Avenue
Toronto 5, Ontario
18 December
Dear Mr. Landlord,
I am a sick woman. I barely crept out of my room yesterday to go to the bank to see what happened to that cheque I wrote for you. Well, I can tell you, Mr. Landlord, that I don’t understand how my money could disappear so fast from that Royal Bank. The woman behind the desk looked at my card, and she told me I have two dollars to my name. One dollar and eighty cents to be exact. I know I still owing you the rent, but I am not going to run, for as I say, I am a sick lady. I only told you that to tell you this. This morning before I even crawl out of bed, somebody was knocking down my door. I didn’t even open my eyes yet, nor say a word to God for sparing my life at night. But I open the door. When I open the door, facing me is a man from Beneficial Finance Company of Canada. He come for cash. The next few minutes it is the postman. Registered letter. The Bell Telephone people start writing me threatening letters. I owe them nineteen dollars, nineteen stinking dollar and they hounding me as if I am a Mafia-woman. The Hydro people called up on the same phone and threaten me that they going cut off my electricity. I do my cooking by electricity, Mr. Landlord. I live by electricity. Electricity lights up this little room that I renting from you, when the nights come. If those Hydro people does cut off the electricity as they threaten to do, how am I going to see? And on top of all that, you now come telling me that I must vacate your premises? Well, Mr. Landlord, you listen to me now, sir. I am only telling you a few of the things that happens to black people in this country to let you know that it ain’t no honeymoon living in this place. I came into this country as a decent middle-class person back in Barbados. I did not pay any racketeer to get me here illegal. And I did not come into this country on no underground railroad, neither. I came in legal. And I came in clean. And I came as a landed immigrant. It is written down on my passport. So I am saying this to you, to let you know that it is only in Canada that I am known as a labourer, or a working woman, as it is called in this country, because back home I never lifted a straw in the way of work, for my parents were rich people. We had servants back home. And if I wanted a glass of water, our maid brought it to me. I have spent the last five years up in Forest Hill working off my sweat for a lady by the name of Silverstein. And the sad thing is that I do not have anything today in my hour of sickness to show as a testimony to that hard work. So you can’t treat me as if I am any D.P. person. I am a human being. And I am not writing this to you as if I do not like work. I know I have to work for my living in this country. But it is the conditions that I am talking about. And I want you to know too that I not writing this to you to beg you for nothing. I was not hiding from you, Mr. Landlord. I was not hoarding up my money in the Royal Bank, and telling you that I broke when you come for your rent. I was flat on my back in the Toronto General Hospital bed. Six weeks run into seven, and I was still there sprawled out in something called a semi-private. My temperature was all up in the hundreds, and I was roasted up night and day. All my savings I had to pay out in Blue Cross, Red Cross, PSI, doctor bills and I don’t know what. So because of all these troubles that I face in your country, I am asking you now, as a human being, to let me live in this room a next month until I can get my hands on a piece of change. Somebody told me of a job up in Cooksville, which as you know is not close to Toronto, if you don’t have a motorcar. And the moment I pacify these pains, I intend to go up to Cooksville. I am not a lazy person. I never was. Christmas is just round the corner. I have gifts to buy and send back home. And today, on this cold-winter-day, I do not even have a dime to buy a postcard with, to send for my mother for Christmas, in Barbados. And you come telling me about vacate?
Respectfully yours,
Miss Enid Scantlebury.
Child, that is the letter Enid write to the landlord-man. God, that girl have heart and she have guts to do a thing like that.
Well, the very next day, a special-delivery letter come back from the landlord-man. It say:
CROWN TRUST COMPANY, INC.
19 December
Miss E. Scantlebury
46 Asquith Avenue
Toronto 5, Ontario
Dear Miss Scantlebury,
We are in receipt of your most recent letter dated December 18. We regret to inform you that due to the heavy arrears of your rent, we find it impossible to extend your tenancy of the room at the above-mentioned address.
We urge you not to correspond further with us on this matter.
Yours faithfully,
(Signed) CROWN TRUST COMPANY, INC.
PS. Please note that our proper title is not “Mr. Landlord,” but the Crown Trust Compoany, Inc., c/o Mortgage Department.
As you can expect, Enid gone mad now. Mad, mad, mad as hell! Everything turned out wrong, and the pain working now from in her shoulder blade all through her right side. And you know what women in the Wessindies does say when a young healthy woman start to get them kind o’ pains! Enid tell me she start thinking bout home, bout Mammy, which is what she calls her mother, bout her boyfriend, and she sorry as hell that she didn’t send for him when he did first ask to come up and married she. Well, thinking bout the devil, bram! a letter push under the door, from guess-who? Lonnie! Lonnie write to Enid and say how things back home really bad with him. Look, I going to read the whole letter, cause it is something to hear:
Haggatt Hall
Bridgetown
Barbados
The West Indies
16 December
Darling Sweetheart Enid,
This is Lonnie. I writing you because Christmas soon here, and things down here still rough rough with me in Barbados. The sugar cane crop season was a real bastard, and the estates been laying off men left and right like flies. Furthermore, a piece of sickness had me flat on my backside last month, and I had to give up the little picking a fellow by the name of Boulez from up in Christ Church parish had get for me. It was a real part-time job. I work for three days. Things real rough as I said, down here in this island, although we have independence and things like that. We have a Hilton hotel here as you know and now people talking about building another big fancy hotel call the Holiday Inn. Both of them places build on Gravesend Beach where the sailors from the Boer War is buried. And where me and you used to go and bathe on a bank holiday and on Sunday mornings. Men walking about in Bridgetown like ants, unemploy. You have to be a craftsman to get a job these days. And as you know I am not no blasted craftsman, because I think that things like carpenters and masons is low jobs for a man in my position. Christmas soon come, and I would like to go to church five o’clock Christmas morning, at the Cathedral, because the news is that the new black bishop going to preach there. But I do not have my Christmas suit yet. The one I wear to the airport to wish you goodbye when you were leaving do not look good anymore. I buy a piece of cloth some time back, dark with a pin stripe, from Cave Shepherd store, about three months pass, when things was selling out. But Cuthbert the tailor fellow, since he come back down from up in the States and Northamerica and places like that, he now charging everybody a hell of a lot of money to make a suit and he adding on something he picked up up there in the States called “sales tax” and “luxuries tax.” And nobody down here don’t know what Cuthbert really mean by those two terms. But if you don’t pay them, you can’t touch your own suit when it finish made, if it made at all. So, darling love, Enid, I beseeching you, to please send a little something for me for Christmas. I want that suit bad bad out of Cuthbert hand, because I have not been near to a church since that Sunday when Trevour was christen.
Your loving man, Lonnie.
Child, there is a kind o’ Wessindian man who just loves to live offa women. And Enid is such a kind-hearted person that she would give a sinner
the dress offa her back. But Lonnie? Well, he is something else, a diff’rent story altogether!
Enid say she know now, long-time, Lonnie is the wrong man for she. Enid cry and cry and cry. She there flat on her back, trying to catch her strength and a man write her all the way from Barbados asking for money. When she read Lonnie letter, she tell me, she could only crawl outta her sickbed, stumble in the bathroom and look at her face in the mirror whilst she was crying. Child, you does read these things in certain magazines, but you never never think that life is really like this! Enid wipe her face and dust some powder on her face, and try to smile, cause it looked like whatever the hell she do, is only misery and sufferation coming her way.
Well, not that Enid didn’ love Lonnie, at least once upon a time that was the case, as Enid tell me. But getting that letter from Lonnie, the man she had in mind to marry, threw her back, poor soul, right on another letter she had receive from Mammy some time back, before she went in the hospital. This is what Mammy write Enid, part of it:
I have received the few bills of money that you posted to me in March gone, this year. And I have been reposing myself down at the front window that you used to sit down at, and sing those lovely refrains you learned at the Fontabelle Christian Mission Church, waiting for the postman to ring his bicycle bell and then knock. Every time I see the postman pass across on his three-speed bicycle, my heart gives a leap and tears come to my eyes, because I know you have not send me anything. You have not remembered me. Nothing. Your own child, Trevour, have been sick every day for two weeks. Lonnie does not come around and even say, Take that, to the child, meaning common coins. All he does come round for is to ask, Enid send the thing? Child, you are my only child, but I have to tell you that I don’t see the wisdom in you worrying out yourself behind a man like Lonnie. Lonnie not good. Lonnie, since you left here for Canada, have been running behind everything wearing a skirt. Lonnie does not even remember to take Trevour to Gravesend Beach for a seabath, even although the place full-up with tourists and hotels and foreigners. Not even on a first Sunday, then, Lonnie come round for Trevour the day after you left, to take Trevour to the Race Pasture. Trevour came back in here nine o’clock in the middle of the night. Nine o’clock. You know that I puts Trevour to bed, every single night, at six o’clock. Nine o’clock in the hands of a police who says that Trevour was loss. Trevour, my only grandchild loss in Barbados? The police say they only guess and by luck, they find out who owns Trevour. Is that the man you sending money-order after money-order to? Lonnie walks about here telling everybody that he have a woman up in Canada supporting him. He tells people that. But I am only your mother, and you don’t have to support me. And I am not even going to ask you for a cent. I will not lowrate myself to that, to ask you, who I bringed in this world, to put yourself out and send me one farthing. I brought you in this world. I send you to school. I didn’t have the money in those times to send you to high school and Queen’s College, so I did the next best thing; I send you to learn needlework at the best dressmaker in the island, Miss Wharton, and you learned with her till you became the best dressmaker in Westbury Village. I turned round and joined you in St. Mary’s Church, and you have sang more than one solo, at Easter and Christmas in the choir. And you sang so pretty one Christmas morning, that even the white man from England who used to be the sextant in those days, had to shed a tear in my presence and to my face after the service, and say, “Mother Scantlebury, your daughter may be poor, but she have the voice of an angel.” That is the kind of mother I was to you. If I were really a woman of means, if I have the wherewithal, do you think you would be any blasted needleworker today? I would have send you to Queen’s College or St. Winifreds, and make sure that today you would be back here in Barbados where you belong, and you would be a high school mistress, or a doctor or a lawyer, anything but being in that cold ungodly place, Canada, working for white people and servanting after people who don’t know how to treat you as a human being. For no matter how poor we were you know that we always had a maid to bring you a cup of tea if you wanted one. And I want you to know now, and remember it, that after your father walked through that door, that sad Saturday night, you was only a babe in arms. You must always remember that. And you will understand what a struggle it was to raise you, and I accomplished that, through thick and thin. I am going to warn you this last time. If you don’t intend to get a message through some of the decent friends you have down in Westbury Road, that your child, Trevour, spend this coming Christmas in a Almshouse cot, and that I had to spend it in the Poor House, you hads better get up from off your backside fast, and send down some real cash down here, real soon.
They Never Told Me Page 2
