The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  But Carl and Mar have grown up within a culture thinkin book-learnin equals bein an Aunt Jemima or an Uncle Tom, a white wannabe, an “Oreo.” Negroes are supposed to be unsophisticated, earthy, plain folk, who don’t speak but spit; who pummel the piano as opposed to playing it; and who are cut-ups in razor-keen comedy or who cut each other up in Sat’day-night razor-blade tragicomedy.

  So, Marina has faced jeopardy in exercising her access to letters. Her Uncle Texas, who’d been railroaded into a New York jail for trumped-up thievery, once tried to throw her books in his stove because, he said, “Why a nigger wench wanna mess with white folks’ words?” He’d clawed one of her Biology texts—illustrated with full-colour anatomical images—and held it just above the grasping flames of the wood stove. He’d sneered, “White folks lynch us as quick as fire swallows these pretty pictures.” She’d wept and snatched at the book, grabbing it back even as it had begun to catch fire: her illustrated human bodies—singed, seared, and burnt—looked like the Invisible Man and Snow White, presented as lynchees.

  If Marina had stayed in Three Mile Plains, some yahoo might have smashed a beer bottle, cut her, and then wrenched her panties down. So, for her to be accepted at Dalhousie University, and assigned a dorm at shale-stone-and-ivy Miramar Residence, was a gesture supporting racial equality—Integration—even up north in Nova Scotia. But Marina is also shadowing the arc of Carl’s aunt Pretty, who, a generation ago, had been the first Negress ever permitted to bunk with the Caucasianesses at the Miramar, the edifice boasting Virginia creeper vines, that hardy ivy.

  Campus life offers one more advantage: Mar can meet male students—mainly the black West Indian dudes, intent on becoming professionals, now registered at Haligonian universities. These men do court local Coloured women, partly cos they can hook em Canuck citizenship if taken to wife. Certes: when the Dominion government relaxed the Negro-immigration ban in 1955, it was to let Carib women disembark as maids and Carib men land as students.

  While Marina is pursuing nursing, then, so are West Indian gents becoming doctors. She can’t be blamed for wondering, Am I better off with a doctor, or with a motorcyclist cum baggage handler?

  To Carl’s chagrin, the answer to the question is his obliteration. So, he is Othello-furious whenever Marina dates a British West Indian—B.W.I.—for that acronym trumps his BMW.

  Though lawyerly eloquent, Carl holds no high school diploma; he just holds down a joe job. Can he compete with a man who will have—just as Marina will have—letters chasing his name? Who’ll be Mr. So-and-So, LLB, or B.Ed., or B.Sc., with a framed degree on his wall and a sugar-plantation pedigree, with an upper-class accent, spiffy duds, swanky accoutrements, plus Sidney Poitier as a cousin? Can he?

  Ironically, Carl is part-Wessindian himself, but he can’t match the Island Negroes now ensconced at Dal: They’re as spanking chocolate as he is; some are gloriously darker. But they’re relatively rich—and they’ll soon be professionals. And he? He only got Belafonte on his turntable, not as a neighbour.

  Carl solves his felt lack of status thus: (1) he’ll be the extra-suave motorcyclist; (2) he’ll be a stalwart African Baptist—to the extent that his Saved status looks legit.

  Naturally, Carl’s Bible-quoting and gentlemanly comportment deteriorates soon as he has a woman on his couch. Then, he’s unhooking a bra and tugging down panties, not quoting erection-shrinking Scriptures. It’s just sweeter to kneel before a woman than to kneel in prayer. Correct!

  As Baptist Youth president, Carl succeeded in seducing Marina over to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace back in March. She’d knocked; they’d kissed; she’d passed him a brown bag full of goodies: two homemade pumpkin pies, two pound cakes, and some peanut butter cookies, all fabulous stuff, baked by her hand. Thus, the lustrous, incorruptible virgin of the Dalhousie School of Nursing entered Carl’s umber quarters. She took his right hand and settled onto the sofa. Accompanying her wool coat, that beige sheath, light white silk scarf, and brown leather gloves and black leather boots, delicately swished off, was Chanel No. 5, a fragrance redolent of Coco Chanel’s delirium for Igor Stravinsky. Mar looked as slinky as a mink. Her auburn hand swished back her coppery strands. Her coppery shoulders showed through her white silk top.

  Carl attacked a pastry. He took a bite of one peanut butter cookie but, soon, every bite was beautiful. The texture was buttery-smooth and rum-moist. He just loved the crumbly sweet taste of Mar’s cookies. He wanted her “barefoot and pregnant.” She even said so, laughing as she read his mind.

  They were supposed to discuss reviving the Baptist Youth Fellowship. Instead, that cold night, kissing the icicle-thin Marina—she “frigid” perhaps—Carl vowed to thaw her out, even volcanically. Under the insinuating effect of the rum he’d served her in coffee “to cut the chill in the air,” Marina stretched out on the sofa, her head upturned on Carl’s lap. He bent to kiss Mar’s lips, and found he was sipping sugar, butter, chocolate, in any mixture, with cream or whipped cream, as two tongues began to taste each other, French style. Carl roved his lips over Marina’s. Two tongues, turning pepper, made honey. As his Pleasure surged, urgent, Carl tried lightly—slyly—to rest his left hand upon Mar’s left breast; he found the tip nicely hard, and he did begin to stroke her nipple, hoping to have her top up, her bra cups off, and two sweet, hard nubs in his lips. But Mar was too much a nursing student—and too disciplined a Baptist—to let happy petting turn hazardous hanky-panky. She withdrew her tongue; her right hand deftly wiped drool from her lips and brushed Carl’s hand from her pointed, heaving tit. Suddenly again genteel, but with strange fierceness, she looked down at her dishevelled waist, and then looked up at Carl and said, “Help me resist . . . my own . . . needs . . . Let’s pray . . .”

  Carl did want to take Mar just then; damn her scruples. Besides, he thought, if I do, maybe she’ll finally be mine; no more nonsense about dating B.W.I. Negroes. But, no, Carl couldn’t just screw this lady he’d like for his wife. It’d not be kosher to pierce through her still-girlish Femininity, so she’d know him as a man, herself as a woman, and then tie tin cans to the rear of Liz II in that rattling, raucous, working-class mockery of highfalutin wedding chimes.

  Though his frustration was palpable, Carl told himself that he’d have Mar next time. He played nonchalant, but his heart throbbed, machine-gun rapid: “I answer to your needs. I care for you. No one else means as much to me as—”

  Marina’d stopped his lips with a quick, noncommittal kiss. Then, ballerina-belligerent, dismissive, she’d twirled fleetly from Carl’s embrace, his hot-and-bothered lap, swirled into her outdoors clothes, blew him a sultry, but airy, kiss, and then, gone, gone-with-the-blizzarding-wind, was his auburn Scarlett O’Hara.

  Carl nominates himself the acme of Negro (Scotianer) masculinity, for he ripples through white Halifax, upright on his machine, a black-leathered, magenta-ridin daddy-o—a violet pimpernel. But his symbolism, per se, is selfish. In contrast, Mar’s entrée to the ivory tower is that of a Trojan mare, to allow other Coloured women to void postmodern slavery, the imposed nursery, and vile Discourtesy. If she were to bear a child instead of taking a degree cum laude, her private fault would fail every black girl. She’d need shotgun marriage, or she’d have to hightail it to Montreal, she fears, to be a nightclub floozy, to hide Humiliation.

  Too lusty to value Mar’s devotion to decorum, Carl’s felt stymied, checkmated: he’d had sugar, not sweetness. Tragically. He thinks, I’m a damn sap to expect Mar to pay me more attention, although she must study so hard. Besides, Mar’s incomparably superior—to all others.

  Maybe. But a winking slut is—sometimes—more desirable than a mincing lady, whether she’s under a man or atop him. And Mar can only flirt, only trifle. Only.

  To assuage his broke heart and broke-down dick, Carl picks up his contraband copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—a cheapo version on bad, beige paper. Smutty writing in sooty ink. But haunting and arousing too. He could be Mellors, a rustic intellectual seducer of a Lady-C
hatterley-like Marina. Carl thinks of Mellors and mistress in their dreamy cottage, a fusion of Thomas Hardy and Laurel and Hardy, and he fantasizes of his belly and Mar’s, coupled, chafing.

  Yep: Carl wants a Greenwich Village, not Africville, existence; to have more than one woman—in more than one colour; to enjoy “Turkish delights” and French ticklers, plus Greek positions—to take Sappho the way that Plato took a lad.

  But, luckily, there is the highway; there is Liz II. There is room to roam and rove, if not to Rome, then at least to Rome, New York. Lovers can be frustrating and the railway job revolting. But the motorcycle attracts fresh, new candidates and delivers Carl always the possibility of fresh, new destinations.

  Neither Freedom nor Love is a given. They must be taken!

  But this proviso can also be taken the wrong way. Too easy it is to make a wrong turn . . . Un virage!

  DETERMINATIONS I

  Even one’s crimes, one’s neuroses, have possibilities of Beauty.

  —ANAïS NIN, INCEST

  Italy Cross still haunts Carl. What went down, down there, in 1950. Not to him. But to someone he could be—if unlucky: a Sambo mid a snow-face mob.

  Having been a paper boy, aged nine as World War II was climaxing, Carl tracked lustily the Red Army’s Rape of Berlin, the pistol-to-mouth fellatio of Hitler, and then Truman’s atomic wasting of Hiroshima. Impressive also was the May 8, 1945, Victory-in-Europe riot, when soldiers and sailors, revolted by the dumb-ass decision to padlock liquor stores, had gangwayed into Halifax, to booze and vandalize and buss upper-crust ladies as if they were bare-ass whores. Survivor troops—in memory of slain comrades—torched trams and paddy wagons. In the Sack of “Slackers” (as mariners dub Halifax), Carl was amazed to see Gottingen Street blazing as much as had Allied-bombed Göttingen, Germany.

  Though his mother, Mrs. Victoria Black, had feared for her son’s safety, to be out and about the boozed-up streets during such a repulsion of Law and Order, Carl found tips showering down upon him, for tipsy troops had spare coin to toss up, now that they needn’t any for alcohol. (Just as their comrades-in-arms had liberated the Netherlands and northern Italy from Axis sovereignty, so had the local soldiery liberated liquor from local—prudish—suzerainty.) And all the coloured glass in the streets, from broken bottles and smashed windows, turned alleys and gutters into desecrated, flattened, cathedral ruins. Instructive was it for Carl to experience lucrative (for him) Chaos one day and then eye it, in cold print, hot off the press, the next.

  The Morning Herald newspaper was also illuminating when it came to “race.” As Negro Yanks trooped back to Dixie, fresh from saving too few Jews and Gypsies from Nazi machine-guns and crematoria, they were themselves, still in uniform, frequently shot down in gullies or strung up from magnolias. Carl did feel grateful that he was in Canada, in Nova Scotia, and not in the Ku Klux Klan–crabby South, where Negroes could be bludgeoned for sport or railroaded—to electric chairs or gas chambers—for the crime of their descent from African slaves whose forced labour had transformed European peasants into U.S. plutocrats. The broadsheet daily also carried stories and pics that clarified that Coloured folks were either comic minstrels—as in ads for Aunt Jemima pancake mix—or mad-dog criminals—as in the case of the wanton hanging of Daniel Sampson, in Halifax, just prior to Carl’s 1935 birth.

  By about fifteen, in 1950, Carl discovered the violent emotions of some white men when contemplating the threat—or visceral treat—of Negro lads lying with Caucasian “lookers.” Often, he’d be asked, “Sonny, ya wanna marry a white girl?” It was safest to shake his head no and exit, lickety-split. Occasionally, he’d hear rumours: so-and-so’s daughter ran off with a Negro, so now she’s disowned; or so-and-so’s daughter had a brown baby and got shipped to Boston. Carl soon realized, thanks to backyard scuttlebutt plus brutal photos in Life magazine—and the coverage of the Italy Cross affair in The Morning Herald—his dark sex was—is—perilously seductive, an enchanting, life-enhancing organ that jeopardizes his life.

  To Carl, delivering The Morning Herald door to working-class, North End door, the star of the front-page Italy Cross tragedy was, amid the drab dots of newsprint, tauntingly lovely. The Germanic, Gothic brunette boasted a sharp-tip nose and phosphorescent eyes that defied the constraints of the newspaper page. Next to the black and white snap of the fisherman’s daughter, as lovely as any one of those provincial-tourism postcard Nova Scotian belles in leotards, heels, and skirts, there was framed a Boston black boxer–type, muscled enough to be a stevedore. Under nappy head and sleepy eyes, his hands dangled gargantuan. Easy to imagine those gigantic hands hurling the lady down onto a bed of slickers in a fish shed. Carl’s own ebony-copper hands trembled as he held the broadsheet open, like a giant hymnal, and surveyed the headline: “Negro Faces Noose for Shotgun Slaying of White Husband.”

  The village of Italy Cross, on South Shore, Atlantic-side Nova Scotia, was outraged: Lusts had been satisfied among fish heads in a shed and maggots in a garbage truck. The black-ass Othello guilty—Peter Paris, eighteen—had to hang. Carl quivered to read this story, not only because he recognized that it could be his neck stretched in that legal noose, but also because he felt pangs of desire for the milk-faced adulteress, Darlene Naas, twenty-five.

  To wit, Paris, the hamlet’s garbageman, had gotten used to exploring the fishwife’s wares while her hubby was at sea with his mates, pitching upon the Atlantic, trying to haul in weighty, surging cod. While Darlene’s husband had been tossing on the water, she’d been tossing under Peter, all the while ignoring the stench of drying cod and the sight of fish eyes avidly ogling their conjunction. The pair’d kept their tryst secret—a deft act in a minuscule fishing village where Peter was a giant six feet tall and looking broad and dark as a Christmas pine. That he had no woman was the belief, for Coloured women were either up north in Halifax or down south in Yarmouth or even farther south in the Boston States. But Darlin (as he called her playfully) and he had found coitus a fit extension to the courtesies they’d exchange when he’d stop his rickety truck to retrieve her household offal—potato peels, carrot tops, newspapers, fish bones. The fish shed proved nice shelter for their jigging jags, for the cod no longer had tongues to speak of, just gaping mouths and bulging eyes, observing the lovers’ exertions with astonished gossips’ looks. (Now and then, they also made use of his truck, as the reek of garbage and the congressing of maggots proved unusual—if awkward—aphrodisiacs.)

  To keep her true love—and true love-life—secret, Darlene’d kept up a pretense of marital Joy. Her act enraged Peter when he was sober and outraged him when drunk. Thus, after sloshing his mouth and throat and almost his lungs with the brightest rum, he’d gotten to thinkin hotly of his white-hot, white-lightnin woman, and how much he had to stick his dick in her, immédiatement, and how her husband had no right to the lusciousness (Luxury) that he had cultivated through bouts of strenuous—if dextrously muffled—congress.

  So, fuelled by Frustration and Jealousy and liquor, Peter’d grabbed his shotgun and barged into Darlin’s home. He crashed into the bedroom of the shack, found his beloved writhing under her sworn groom, and discharged his smoking, steely gun into the man’s chalky back, while Darlene just screamed and screamed.

  Peter knew he’d murdered; the blood was irrefutable. He staggered himself over to the Mountie detachment, surrendered his ass, and X’d a statement, given lawyerless, that was pretty much a death warrant. Although Peter was clapped instantly into a tiny, stone gaol, the dead man’s fishermen pals still rigged up a posse to demand the “nigger” be freed to get his comeuppance, a noose to lasso him from a pine.

  Carl trembled to read these facts because Darlene’s visage reminded him of the schoolgirl that he’d liked from afar, Liz Publicover. At fourteen, Liz and he had been Head Girl and Head Boy at their junior high school, in the smokestack-smoky north half of Halifax, and their his-and-her snaps had unfolded in a newspaper. They’d posed together for the Waterman picture, and Carl
had inhaled enough of Liz’s Sunlight-soap scent, and seen enough of her apple-blush cheeks and the Bauhaus curves of her brassiered tits, that he knew arousal, if not—quite—yet the danger of arousal.

  Then again, Innocence was no longer, for him, now fifteen, a reasonable prerogative. A month before, in April 1950, Carl’d been riding the trolley, heading uptown from a movie he’d seen on Barrington Street (just steps uphill from Halifax Harbour), when a white woman—wild, fiery red hair and lips—sitting across from him, began shouting, “You black ape! Close your legs! All you gorillas want is to jump on white ladies! You just want to dock your big dicks in us.” Carl had looked about wildly; he couldn’t imagine this crazy—but pixie-cute—lady was addressing him. Then the woman stood, tumbled onto Carl, and began to fumble between his legs. She screeched, “You black bastards are the same! You just wanna bang white women!” Other passengers intervened; brusque white men dragged the crazed lady from Carl’s lap, where she had throned herself, despite his efforts to shove her off and protect his privates from her groping, octopus hands. Irritated, the trolley driver yelled, “Hey, get your diarrhea mouth off my bus! You two wanna fool aroun, take a long walk off a short pier!” Carl was miffed that the bus driver blamed both him and the woman for her lewd and crude shenanigans. Another man told the girly gruffly, “Ya must be drunk. Siddown, lush!” But the doxy cursed Carl again: “Black bastard! Baboon! Bet ya wanna fuck me!” She then flipped up her short black skirt to show her pink panties. Now a tall, silver-haired white man barked, “You’re in Nova Scotia, not Mississippi!” Other passengers applauded this geography lesson. The redhead retorted, “Nigger boys’ll stuff their johnsons into any white hole.” Now, the trolley operator stopped the vehicle and twisted round in his seat as he levered open the front door and shouted, “You two: get your scruffy, dirty butts off my trolley. Now!” Carl protested: “I didn’t do anything!” The redhead chortled, “Yeah, but y’all know he wanted to.” The driver snapped, “Trollop, get your big mouth and big ass off my trolley!” As Carl watched, the woman glared at him, sucked her teeth, then sashayed her skirted bottom off the bus, sunlight shimmering on her black silk stockings. As she left, shaking her red head in angry negativization of the universe, the other passengers, though all white, surprisingly clapped and cheered. The trolley driver lurched the vehicle forward again. When Carl reached his stop, at Agricola Street and North Street, he turned and said “Thank you” to the driver, who glared at him as if he were also the guilty party.