They Never Told Me

by Austin Clarke

  CROWN TRUST COMPANY, INC.

  23 December

  Miss E. Scantlebury

  46 Asquith Avenue

  Toronto 5, Ontario

  Dear Miss Scantlebury,

  We have been patient with you. We think we have been fair with you. You leave us now no alternative. Within the next two days as of this date, our representative and a bailiff will visit the apartment and remove from the premises your possessions in lieu of settlement of your outstanding rent.

  Regretfully yours,

  CROWN TRUST COMPANY, INC.

  The same day this letter come, one come from Dots. Enid was in such a bad mood that she tear up Dots’ letter even before she read it. But when she was picking up the pieces to throw them away, she eyes catch a phrase which wasn’t so bad, after all. So she sit down at the table and piece the letter back together again, and when she was doing it, she laugh out, and say, “Looka me though, nuh! I worse than Humpty-Dumpty! Last time I do a thing like this was when I was a little girl and in love with a little boy in the village…” From the pieces she could make out:

  … But it served you right, because you are a woman with too much pride. Foolish pride is what I call the kind of pride that you have. If you had only opened your mouth in the proper way… We are one girl. We are one and as such we have to stick together… lesson from these Jewish people who stick together to win battles and victories. I understand now what problems you are having because the Telephone people inform me that they had to take out your phone temporarily… but that doesn’t kill. Be-Christ, we never had phones in Barbados when we were growing up, and it didn’t kill us… Enid, honey, forget everything that I said to you in my previous letter, and forgive me. I am going to come down and see you Christmas Eve, and I am going to make sure that I bring you some of my mistress turkey and her husband scotch with me, for you and some mints pudding, and we will stay in your apartment. Happy Christmas, darling, although it hasn’t come yet, but we will have a ding-dong time! I sorry that you didn’t speak your mind to me instead of to my mistress. But bygones be bygones. And don’t forget that the first year when we were new immigrants in this big wealthy country call Canada, we had a nice job and all the eats to eat and drinks to drink, and we were lonely as hell. So keep your tail betwixt thy legs, and wait for me to come down.

  Your dear Barbadian friend,

  Dots, who…

  “Heh-heh-hehhhh!” Enid bawl out, “my God, that Dots is a sweet bitch, in truth! That woman is really a friend, a friend in need! A friend in need is a friend indeed.”

  Enid was so pleased and happy with the letter that she just put her hand out and take up to phone to call Dots and tell she that she sorry sorry that everything went so wrong. But the phone wouldn’t work. This girl’s life now turn into a mystery story. Strange and terrible terrible. The phone ring a few minutes ago, and she answer it, and it was a wrong number. “How somebody could call in and I can’t call out?” This was a next mystery wrapping up her life in this country. And then… footsteps moving about in front her apartment door… and then they went back downstairs. She move the chair she had put to block up the door so the landlord couldn’t break in, in the middle o’ the night and catch she napping. She move the chair and she listen. Few minutes later, she hear a scraping noise under the door. When she look and see the thing, she take in a gasp o’ breath. A envelope. She snatched it and without reading the address it had on it she slip it under she pillow. She went back to bed trying to catch a sleep, because the headache was pounding again round the temples. She force sheself to sleep, trying to think of Christmas Eve back in Barbados, trying to imagine she was in Barbados, in she mother old board-and-shingle house in Westbury Road, on a day like today, the 24th o’ December, Christmas Eve, when the varnishing and the polishing and the cleaning: the fresh fresh white marl from the rock quarry spread in front of the house in place of snow because there never was any snow in the island and nobody never see a thing like snow fall there even on a Christmas Eve and she mother house smelling like Christmas and the smells mixing with the smells of the golden apples of the bananas of the puddings of the cakes great cakes sponge cakes sweet bread baked pork and boiled hams and the rich yesterday-completed material for the new drapes to put at the windows and the window-blinds make in haste by a rattling old sewing machine that went round the whole village like a library book and the voices of the late drunken afternoon singing carols and cursing and laughing and abusing some neighbours who was too poor or too tight to give a rum or give enough rum or enough eats or enough money if they didn’t have none o’ them Christmas things to eat and the voices and the laughing and the cursing moving away from under the early morning window and the rattling old library book of a sewing machine testing the kindness of a next black man or black woman who behave as if his name was Scrooge, and then the tears start to roll down Enid eyes, and she must have cry for hours for time pass from she, and memory pass from she, and while she was sleeping the lights in the apartment went out. Time pass and when she did open she eyes and jump up thinking she was in the old iron bedstead with the flat grass-mattress and she pass she hands over she eyes to rub out some o’ the sleep, and then pass she hand over the light switch, there wasn’t no light. She search round in the dark and find a new bulb. The last one in the apartment. And still there wasn’t no light. A piece o’ panic get in Enid, and she went back sitting on the bed. Time must have pass, she was thinking. She look through the Judas hole in the door where the only light in the place come from, seeing across the hallway, and she eyes catch Mr. and Mrs. Dick Williams coming home with large parcels in their hand wrap in Christmas paper. Mr. Williams’ face was red with the colour o’ drinking, and Mrs. Williams’ face was blandish and vague and it didn’t look real at all although she was wearing mascara and pencil marks for eyebrows and artificial cheeks of red paint and goodwill and Yule and too many martinis which she knew Mrs. Williams uses to drink even when it wasn’t Christmas Eve. Mr. Williams and Mrs. Williams stop at their door. Mr. Williams sag a little bit, he get the key in the keyhole, he glance back at Enid apartment door, he say something like, “Merry Christmas, neighbour!” and he then stand to one side while Mrs. Williams walk into the apartment as if she was dancing a waltz and a foxtrot at the same time. Before the door close behind Mr. Williams, Enid see the sparkling stars of light and silver paper on the Scotch pine Christmas tree and she see two overeating pink children jump from somewhere behind the tree and shout out, “Merry Christmas!” when they see the new presents their parents had in their hands. And then Enid see the door close. And then Enid see Father Christmas head hanging from the Williams’ apartment door over the doorbell, and Father Christmas head had a real stupid smile on it…

  …and time must have pass some more, for a nightmare wrap Enid round its thighs and she thought she had Lonnie in bed with she. But when she realize it was only a dream and she release sheself from the prison of she imagination she was only holding on to a letter which some mysterious hand had push under the door earlier this Christmas Eve evening. She rip open the letter, because there was nothing else she had to do for the whole evening. There was not a blasted thing she had to do, because Dots didn’t come down for Christmas, as she promise Enid she would come down. So Enid read the letter:

  CROWN TRUST COMPANY, INC.

  December 24

  To All Our Wonderful Tenants

  GREETINGS! Crown Trust Extends the Season’s Greetings to Our Customers and Clients. May the New Year Be Even Brighter than the Last. Wishing You All A Very Merry Christmas and A Prosperous New Year.

  CROWN TRUST!

  …Enid didn’t know nothing about time now, and she didn’t really know where she was; here or there; but she find sheself ripping the Christmas postcard and the envelope in pieces no bigger than small postage stamps and she fling them in the toilet bowl, and press the flush. Then it must have been a long time afterwards that she sit down on the toilet bowl to pass water, and as she sit there she cry
and cry and cry out, “God! Where the bloody-hell Dots is with a little piece o’ Christmas cake for me this evenin?. Good God!” When she finish passing water, she get up, and as she flush the toilet bowl she ask God again for a piece o’ Christmas cake and for Dots.

  ON THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN

  I

  He was dressed in baggy pants, in a Harris tweed jacket, and was comfortable with his reflection in the glass, for he looked like a professor: plain, and without fastidiousness about dress. He wished he had a dashiki to wear. And beads and a silver bracelet and silver rings made from a bent spoon or fork of Oneida silver plate.

  He knew his way around this part of the southern campus. It was raining hard. He picked his path through the long grass under cover of the trees, holding his lecture notes inside his jacket, pushed into his waistband, to keep them dry. In this thick greenness, with no one behind him, and no one sharing the path, coming towards him, it was quiet, it was peaceful. He felt safe. He felt safe walking under this umbrella of trees, which he saw as there to partially protect him from the pelting rain.

  As he emerged from the trees, stepping onto the pavement of the walk, the pavement of the quadrangle, the pavement of the steps down from the quadrangle and into a square garden of cement and more pavement, and some flowers that had been bent and broken by the force of the now-stopped rain, he was still alone as he mounted the thirty-five steps to the auditorium. There was something about steps that he’d never tried to divine the meaning of; he always counted them. Going up, going down.

  The auditorium was a poured concrete grey. The walls bore the marks of haste and anger: “Power to the People,” written with the spray of many colours. “KKK is a mother.” “Black is.” “Black is Beau”…aborted. He could never understand why, in this place where most of the people were white, there was not one sign appealing to their dislike of blacks. Perhaps they had been written, and had been erased by the more evangelical hands of the minority. “Black is…”

  All of a sudden, it occurred to him that he might be at the wrong building. There was no one in sight. It was the same emptiness he had known in another town, in Toronto, on Sunday afternoons at five, when the entire population was indoors, and he had roamed the immaculately clean streets where no paper blew on the pavement, where no cigarette boxes were left from Saturday night, where he was lonely as a dog trying to find a scrap of diversion on the pavement.

  He pushed open the door to the auditorium. Noise exploded around him. It stunned him. The auditorium was packed. All white people. A large poster of thick red cardboard, with black lettering, announced his lecture.

  He felt like a prisoner brought into a large court. He was sure he knew no one present. The largest audience he had ever spoken to was a classroom of fifty young men and women.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Willard Snipe, the chairman of the English department, began.

  He stood alone wondering what he was going to do. He remembered he had not eaten for the whole day. His stomach churned. He felt it churn because he had just taken his notes from his waistband, had just unbuttoned his wet tweed jacket, it seemed years ago now, when he was relatively unknown but still the guest of honour at a party held only a few yards from this building; and he had looked at the notes to take his mind off the vast crowd of strangers.

  “…and our speaker tonight,” chairman Snipe said, “who comes to us from Yale University…” There was thunderous applause. “…where in one short year he has established himself as a national authority on Black Literature, will be speaking to us tonight, on the works of the great American poet and playwright, LeRoi Jones…” scattered applause “…specifically, on the play, Dutchman…”

  Up on stage, at the podium, he realized the first page was blank, except for the regular blue lines printed on the paper. The auditorium was silent. He turned the next page, and saw only smudges on the paper; and he continued turning and saw nothing, up to the eleventh page. Chairman Snipe, beak-nosed and long-jawed, was saying “…he comes to us tonight, before such large numbers as are here assembled to justify the nation’s growing interest in, and acknowledgement of the contribution of these people, and I am sure that the professor’s lecture will touch upon at least one salient point, which is, at the risk of paraphrasing him, that the history of the relationship of blacks to whites in these United States does not present any evidence that black Americans, as a group, are any more violent than are whites, or less intellectual, or are more violent to whites, than vice versa… as the professor’s lecture tonight will prove…”

  The applause was as hard and pelting as the rain through which he had just come. The sweatiness under his arms now matched the heavy dampness of his jacket.

  Faces were looking up at him, smiles of strange origin, expectant like the hand of a child held out for candy, raised, and he had no notes.

  “…as he comes to us from the West Indies.”

  There was more applause.

  Just as he was wishing the room were not so hot, he heard the whirring of the air conditioners come on in the four corners. He loosened his tie. The noise from the conditioners was like the whirring of the engines of the plane he had taken from La Guardia.

  These people had come to hear him lecture on Dutchman. He had never spoken off-the-cuff in his life. But he was the acknowledged authority on Dutchman, he was a full-fledged professor. From Yale. And Yale was looked up to by all other colleges in the nation. He was carrying Yale on his back. He wondered how Yale would feel, if he stood much longer, silent, on this empty platform, behind this wobbly lectern. What would Yale care?

  Sirens sounding from outside hushed the audience. They seemed to cock their ears to listen. The sirens grew louder, and then they trailed off; and then there was the humming of the air conditioners. He did not feel any cooler.

  “It is important to know,” he began, shakily, for another siren seemed to rush close by the auditorium, “it is important to know, that in spite of the tendency toward myth, not even the president of the United States can refute the fact that Lula in Dutchman, by confronting the black main character, Clay, is performing an act of violence.”

  The applause that erupted gave him a scare.

  “The act, Lula’s act, is conceived publicly, and officially, needless to say, intellectually, more as a matter of correction, of law enforcement, or even as an act of discipline.”

  He heard applause and other voices, but he was really listening to his own voice. Then he nodded to himself. He said nothing for a few minutes; there was nothing to applaud.

  “The attitude has become a national intellectual one, and it is given its strongest emphasis in Dutchman, the attitude being that the powerful in their relation to the powerless, have the right to chastise and to correct deviant behaviour.”

  The voices had become shouts; shouting approval of the points he was trying to make, or not; he couldn’t tell the difference, could not distinguish one face from another, did not really know what he was talking about, had not planned it this way; had not planned it at all; but was merely drawing upon all the phrases he had heard and heard again, and had read.

  The audience hushed. He did not even hear the voices he thought he had been hearing outside in the town. He saw, for the first time, that he was surrounded by glass, squares and rectangles of glass that had no architectural merit, except that they let in the sky, the dark green trees, shaking and dropping large drops, shaking in more than one direction in the wind.

  The audience was not breathing, waiting for the next thing he would say.

  Something like lightning streaked the dark greenness in through the large glass wall on his left hand. It flashed once more. And then he looked to see if he could see its origin, and he saw that the lightning was diffused: it was not lightning, it was a fire; but it could not be a fire, since the trees and everything else that was flammable had now been drenched for hours.

  “She is a woman with an attitude that is national in its paranoia. She is. She has not offere
d her apple only to a lifeless character, like Clay; in a Clay-like situation, she has offered it to me…”

  There was no breath in the audience.

  He felt he had spoken long enough.

  “…she held the apple in an act of violence before me, and before Clay. It was also an act of power. And it is this powerful act which determines what behaviour is deviant or consistent with the laws that are established for the maintaining of that sexual power.

  “The power of definition is also the power to define.”

  He could think of nothing more to say. He had come to the end. They did not know it. While he struggled to remember what he had been saying, he stood hoping for some considerate gesture, hoping for some way to hide his shame. His eyes went to the back of the auditorium, and there, to his complete surprise and shock, was a lone black man whose hand, his right hand, was held up at an angle of sixty degrees from the floor. The hand ended in a fist, stern, defiant, acclaiming, proclaiming, comic, bitter, improvisatory and in sharp contrast to the white dashiki and white slacks he was wearing – this black man.

  The strong, sinewy black hand glistened under the fluorescent lights; the fist opened and the black man, raised, began clapping in the rhythm of a song by Marvin Gaye, a mocking rhythm, a scornful rhythm.

  The audience, discovering that the only black person among them was showing his appreciation through this rhythm, joined in the applause and started to clap their hands, but unwittingly destroyed the rhythm in their enthusiasm because their hands met on a different beat.

  There was still something he could see through the wall of glass, something in the sky, burning the greenness of the trees, blowing in the wrong direction for symmetry and for rhythm.

  “Right on! Right on!” the black man was crying, “Right on! Right on! Right on! Right on!” above the din of applause.

  He wished he had the courage to raise his own right hand in a salute as the burning light, in its sudden brilliance, revealed the huge trunks of the trees, the light rising with such fierceness that he thought it would engulf the campus, and take the building in which he was standing along in its yellow blazing grip.