They Never Told Me

by Austin Clarke

  … how long shall they kill

  our prophets,

  while we stand aside and look…

  “Who’s in there, that place?” a policeman says.

  “Me no business with who lives up there, sah!”

  “We need to know who is slipping and sliding, who comes and goes these days.”

  “Me say, me nah-know, suh!”

  But I know the stories of recent days in the newspapers, I have seen the thick headlines in black, with photographs in colour, headlines that have reproduced the anger and the blame, and the blood pouring down the faces of black people… “the black English”… while I passed the time of those evenings sitting silent in front of the television set, hearing the BBC giving Inglun a bad name on the “whirl-news,” hearing Big Ben banging in the background, hearing the national anthem, God Save the Queen, played before and after the news like the grace that was said before and after our island meals, voices that used to seduce us, my mother and me; voices that I had been schooled to; but now, in her letters posted from Barbados, my mother says, as often as she says grace, “Thank God you wasn’ foolish enough to say you emigrading to go up-in-there, in Inglun, in preference to Toronto, a more better place for black people to find employment… even though the damn money so-blasted small!”

  Now, this morning in this Brixton flat, having said my small piece at the conference, which was not a word of peace but perhaps could even have been taken in these electric times as a word of incitement, at least an incitement more than I had intended, I wonder where this mechanic below had spent those fiery nights. And who had stood with him in the singing of “songs of freedom.” And who had helped him through the dark burned-out alleys of this city flowing in rivers of blood. And who it is who is needed now to help him find his way, as another kind of help is being threatened by the police who are hovering close by his side.

  I hear the old elevator in this house of flats shudder to a stop. Another shudder tells me the door is open. The door closes. The closing sounds like a bullet fired into a cloth pillow. Or, into a man’s chest. I can hear the elevator going down, down… as up comes Bob Marley again, pleading to the two mechanics and to me to answer the call; to be counted; to “… help to sing these songs of freedom.” The plaintiveness in Marley’s high-pitched voice seems more urgent and accusing. And, given my natural inborn and bred gift for caution, or more accurately, my well-nurtured airs of decorum, my need to always stand aloof from the crass abrasions of condescension and ma-fucking rage, I feel deeply the touch of danger, the cold hand; and I hear the policeman’s voice again; inquiring, as he takes a warning, threatening tone, “Who doing what here?” drowning out the softer-voiced men who are working through the resurrecting clatter of car tires and metal rims.

  Suddenly, it is cold; I am shivering; I am very lonely. More than lonely, I am alone. Fear clutches me. I do not know anyone in the yard, in the shop, in this house, in this neighbourhood. The two policemen are in their car, coming round to the front door. Their End-of-Times light on the roof is spinning and I anticipate one of the policemen will draw his gun, and will be standing close enough to me so that I am smelling his breath, while his gun is in my belly, and his voice, which sounds like a shout far out from sea comes to me over the waves: “You. What you doing here?”

  “Me say, me nah-know, sah!”

  This man and his kin, my brothers in a complicity by complexion, living here in Brixton, living here since being a boy; anger and hatred has raged all his nights, running through him like a cane fire – Everywhere, everything burn down… Only ashes leff-back. Duss to duss. Ashes to ashes – always on edge, in his small clinic for cars, bringing back to life punctured tires, the wheels of travel back into place; this man who had spoken with me briefly, spoken of danger; and the police and “skinhead” boys who wear tight-fitting trousers, with black boots whose pointed toes are implements of war, reinforced with lead, made on a blacksmith’s anvil, to disfigure a black immigrant’s face. I am absorbed for a moment in the lilt made in my mind by a litany of battles fought on the anvils of these island grounds: Bannockburn, Hastings, the Battle of Culloden, Naseby, Touton, Stamford Bridge and Stalling Down… bound as I am by a responsibility of blood to this newest history, these latest chapters of how and what the piratical are doing: the Riots of Notting Hill and Notting Hill the Riots again, the Riots of Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, the Riots of Bradford, Leicester and the Riots of Leeds…

  Through the whole of this kiss-me-arse week of conferencing, I have been here walking these Notting Hill streets, through the whole of this time of tedium, these Commawealth Conferences, speaking and reading aloud all sorts of such shite in the Reading Rooms of the facking Commawealth Institute… in all of this time I have never stepped out in the streets to bloody my nose, to brave the boots of these old robber pirates and their offsprings, and by so doing to help sing these songs of freedom… and as I accept the accusation implied in that cry for aid and help, I am scrambling into my underwears, and my shirt pressed so fine and my tie, my university blazer, and my Burberry, preparing myself to duck out down the back stairwell, the stairs smelling of wine and wastage, each floor landing single-lit by a bare bulb, so that I can make my exit through the heavy steel back door that has no outside handle; no outside handle to advantage the police or transient interlopers; and then I am walking fast fast down the cluttered laneway, having given the slip to the police who are at the front door seated in their car scowling under the whirling red apocalyptic roof light, coming out on to the main thoroughfare of Brixton Road heading in the direction of the Brixton Underground to escape the nausea of guilt that “Redemption” has poured upon me, “Redemption” that is asking me, bluntly, in full sunlight, to my face, into my ears,

  How long shall they kill our prophets,

  While we stand aside and look…?

  I know I am going in the right direction. Before me is the same man who one day, and perhaps for all of these days of duss to duss, has been here preaching the Gospel of the Downfall of London Bridge, his voice hoarse and filled with pebbles from repeating his Gospeller’s promise of damnation, to the city, to me.

  “Repent, London, repent England,” he is screaming. His pulpit is at his feet, a cloth hat, nine coins. Two two-pound bank notes.

  He is standing today in his same footsteps, preaching, preaching for hours now.

  “Repent ye, London and England. London Bridge is falling down.”

  He breaks into song:

  Falling down, falling down!

  London Bridge is falling down,

  My fair lady…

  “Down-down-down… man-against-man… down… and the children against their mother… father ’gainst step-father… Jesus-Christ-in-Heaven, London tumbling to the ground… repent ye…”

  I go down into the Underground, to lose myself in this darkness of people, in this blackness, although the escalators are lit in a dim fluorescence, descending slow, steep, moving stairs through darkness, the living darkness of this Underground, deep into this unspeakable safety.

  FOR ALL I CARE

  She sits like a queen. Thick around the hips. Solid around her breasts. Thick and strong down to her long fingernails. With her eyes closed, silent, taciturn, a woman sitting dead still in a wooden straight-back chair.

  “Just studying my head, boy,” she says to me, her son, her only child.

  Her hair is white in the severe “part” that is so perfectly drawn, and the teeth of her large horse-comb, standing in the plaits of her hair, is made of tortoiseshell.

  It is a Wednesday afternoon, the sun still strong through the jalousies in the Dutch-window, strong on the pages of my exercise book. GEOMETRY, capital letters printed on the maroon-red front cover of the book. Isosceles triangles, squares, and circles and whatnot squared to prove what needs to be proved in this book. She had asked me what these proofs are, and I have explained them to her, but when she tells her best friend, Mistress Gallup, about isosceles triangles and
angles at 45 degrees, they both rest their wet mops in the buckets of soapy water that smell of disinfectant, the smell coming from the blue soap they use for scrubbing the floors of the Marine Hotel for tourisses, where they work.

  They put their hands on their waists, and shake their heads in pride. They know, though they cannot explain to themselves, or to their neighbours, what degrees of 45 at an angle or isosceles triangles do to enrich their lives, but their instinct reminds them that the knowledge that is spoken in their presence is something to be proud of, something that they will always be proud to remind themselves and the entire village of, this blessing.

  I am her young man of seventeen who reads and studies “big books,” and books written in foreign languages, and I have exposed her to these important things: a circle within a square, isosceles triangles, and Latin. “Imagine!” my mother says to Mistress Gallup. “Imagine.”

  It is about fifteen minutes after three, on this Wednesday afternoon. In plaits, her hair looks like a dark brown centipede. She says she imagines the sound its centipede body would make if she were to stomp on it. Mother rips the comb, made from the tortoise shell of a land turtle, free to loosen her plaits. She taps the teeth of the comb hard against the top of the wooden table, picking up the rhythm of a popular calypso that the village is singing.

  The comb is brown. The villagers call it a “horse-comb” because it is larger and stronger and more polished than an ordinary comb, with colours running through it like smears of blood. Sometimes, Mother will plant the comb in her black hair, and leave it standing in a thick tuft, like an agricultural fork left in the fields, left amidst rows of green sugar cane stalks. But now the tapping of the comb against the table makes the sound of large red lima beans falling into a white enamel bowl, a tapping that is slower now, a slow dirge march, meditative.

  “Boy! The Book! Bring me my Bible!”

  Her voice is made strong by a touch of sudden joy: it is “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” joy.

  “Yes, Tawm,” she says, “coming, for to carry me home!” I take the Bible to her. The black leather cover is torn. The condition of her Good Book does not worry her, does not challenge her disposition, or her love of God. She lowers her voice. She places the Book against her breasts, and says, “God’s voice, Tawm-boy!”

  I stand apart from her with my foot between the door and the jamb, to prevent the door from closing, and watch her as she runs her hands caressingly over the pages of the Bible. And I listen to her as she holds the Book up over the white tablecloth she had woven by herself, wiping it clean. With her left hand. She does many things using her left hand: combing her hair, adjusting her gold bangles and her gold necklace, tying her shoes, and slapping me across my face, to remind me that she is the “damn boss inside this damn house, small as it is, boy!”… though she is not left-handed. And talking out loud to herself, and perhaps to her God, who, as the Holy Ghost, she said was always with her…

  “… and here I am thinking thoughts I thought was forgotten, these thoughts coming back to trouble me like stains in a dress that wouldn’t come out, no matter the amount o’ detergent that I use, and I use blue soap and stain-remover and still the damn stain won’t leave my dress at all at all. Or, it could be a silk nightgown that I am washing. No matter the material, no matter how hard I rubbing-out the nightgown or the dress on the jucking-board, no matter how long I leave the nightgown or the dress soaking in the water with the blue soap… what with all the things that I have on my mind, I was sure sure that by now today, the fourteenth o’ March, that I would have-emptied-them-out from my mind, from my memory, years ago…

  “… that boy out there, who I don’t know what I am going to do with, he getting to be a man, and I still feel that I born him only yesterday, the way I have to feed him, wash him, starch-and-iron his khaki school-uniforms, feed him his food that is nutritional. Barley soup. Chicken two times a week. ’Specially on Sundays. And beef-broth every Wednesday. Enough and regular. Keep the chicken for special occasions. Birthdays and Easter… not to mention Christmas. My God, how I going manage? That boy out there going eat me out of house and land! But he is my child! My only child. A good child. I have to give him good food. And enough good food to hold all those damn difficult hard heavy books, the Latin and the Geometry books, which he tell me so hard to learn. But what is this Latin business? Why does a young boy, in this bright island, have to learn Latin for? After trying so hard to learn to be who he is in English? And talk like a white man? And speak like a white man? His teacher at Harsun College is a white man. So that when he talk, the Englishman who is his teacher, would understand what the hell he want to convey. He has to learn how to convey what he want to convey, from what he actually say…”

  I stand outside the door, out of her sight, but following her whisperings. I see what she is thinking, and what she has been concealing from me. But it is her life, and I am just her son. She has the right to keep these feelings, these secrets from me. She does not feel the need, and has never been burdened by the weight of confession, to tell me what is in her thoughts. Here she is, sitting in her straight-back chair, in the four-o’clock afternoon sun, with the sun shining on her face, shining as if she has rubbed it with Vaseline.

  “… that boy out there, he, like the rest o’ we, have we-own way of expressing what we want to express. We have our own own way of speaking. In arguments. In speaking-out our guts. With the truths. Or explaining what in our hearts. Important things. But the thing is, the thing is, that we does understand what we say to one another. And the person to who we speak, he or she, understand what we are saying to them.”

  She has turned her rocking chair around to catch the weakening sun, to catch the softening rays dying on her face like moths, that dying sun a pale sepia pink. She looks younger with the sun on her face like this. It makes her look more beautiful, closed eyes, slightly pouting lips in full satisfaction with the sun caressing her face. “Let the sun shine in! Let it shine always. ’Specially on your face, boy!” But where I am standing, away from the open door to the front-house, there is a growing scab of cloud threatening the afternoon with rain.

  “… because you don’t know… you never know… nobody knows, since it is a private thing that I never broadcast ’til today. And I ask myself, Why today? Why pick today? This damn letter causing me to suffer insomnias, the whole night, just arguing with myself, all night long until this afternoon, my two lips been closed, suppressing… so I never whisper a word of it! That boy, outside there, with his head buried in the Latin and the Geometry… books that is so hard for his poor brains… day in day out I walking with this cross that I bear and can’t escape the burden of, walking with this cross, sending him to Harsun College where the school fees so blasted high I could buy enough lengths o’ lumber to build-on another roof pon this lil chattel-house we living in. Private lessons and extra tuitions. Preparing him to make something of his self. He reading. Reading. And more reading. And all I can say to explain my situation is: if you only had a father. I mean it. It is obvious that that boy out there have a father. Had. Else, how he would have born? What I mean is this: I know that I didn’ fool myself concerning any immaculate conception. I not meddling with that!

  “But his real father… that blasted man… with all his sweet talk… I blame myself. All I could say now, is that it serve me right! To let him take the advantage of me that he take. I paying now, for it. The price of my softness o’ heart. And my transgressions. The price for being friendly towards that brute!…

  “I will never… never ever, as long as I live… never, until the day God take me from this earth, until I dead, I will never forget that blasted man. But I keep my word to you, Father! And praise God… praise you Father!… for helping me to keep my word. To never let that blasted man’s name pass my two lips. Nor mention it inside this house. Nor divulge it, in the hearing of that boy out there!… so quiet out there? In all these years that pass. In all these years! From that Monday morning! When me and him was
lock in that fight, that morning by the Stand-Pipe. Like two cocks. Ripping out their guts. Feathers. Drawing blood. Me and him. For the whole neighbourhood to see. And hear. Such a worthless public display. At the Stand-Pipe. The corner o’ Flagstaff Road, where it touch the White Road… that stretch o’ road, out the Front Road, where only… or mostly… the white people does live. And in full view of all the people. Black and white watching me and watching that bastard. Black and white. And laughing. The two o’ we. A coloured man and a coloured woman. Fighting like shite! Pardon my language, Lord… fighting over the legal ownership of that boy… my first-born son… out there, doing whatever it is he doing… on the sly… I can’t put nothing past him!

  “From that day that he born, premature, I may as well tell you… from that Monday morning… right up to this day… seventeen years… thank you, God! For giving me the strength to not ever let that blasted man’ name pass my two lips… neither in abuse, nor certainly not in praise either… that son-of-a-bitch… not one day… in seventeen years… have his name ever pass my two lips. Seventeen years! Count them. One, two three… fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. And seventeen. Praise God…”

  I hear her horse-comb hitting the table top. Dot-dot… dot-dot, her shaking her head from side to side; taking up an envelope, putting it back on the table in the intervals, in the spaces, the silences, between her words, between her whispering.

  “… and from that Monday morning, when that blasted man and me had that tussle over you boy… deciding the rightful ownership of my child… that blasted man’s name, never ever… never never never… not once!… that blasted man’s name never pass my two lips. And I thank God for not causing me ever to be in a position to have to call his name. Or, to see his face. In person. Alive. I do not think either that I will be walking behind his coffin. Or visiting him in the Parish of Sin-Michael’s Almshouse. Nor on his death bed, neither. But thank God… in the fifteen years that I married to Daddy, now my legal husband, my loving husband… your stepfather… I have never ever had the occasion, nor the inclination, to mention your father’ name, Daddy treating you as if you is his own own son.