The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Though bizarre and destabilizing, the event had also been undeniably stimulating. When the tart had yanked on his manhood, Carl’d felt a curious frisson. Too, she was sweet to eye—brief skirt, long legs, and tits that’d heaved in his face as her fisting, ivory hand rooted between his thighs. Despite Carl’s exact grammar and rigid posture, his guessed-at sexual prowess had been, briefly, everyone’s interest on a public trolley. From that instant, he knew himself as a Negro man, desirable to dark-complected and light-complected females. But he also now saw that he was a clear-and-present threat to the albino racialists who controlled Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the British Empire, and the larger Caucasian European world, which, this 1950 A.D., bossed 99 per cent of Africa and 100 per cent of the Caribbean and the American South. He understood now, even as a Coloured youth, that he had to negotiate the Gehennas of moneyed Caucasian privilege and the traumas of chalk-faced Christian fear.

  Carl could realize one feeble relief: Halifax generates endless Negro versus Caucasian slugging bouts, but lynch mobs are rare.

  Carl did early encounter White Mischief. At four, he’d been playing with his younger brother, Huckabuck, in front of their barn—or manger—on Belle Aire Terrace. They’d been horsing around, in dust and dirt, or using twigs to divert ants from one bizarre destination to another, or using shards of glass to concentrate the sun so as to cremate tiny ant heads or thoraxes. (Fascinating it was to see whiffs of blue smoke waft from a thrashing red ant head or body.)

  In late spring, 1939, just as chalkboards were being nixed by swimming pools, three older white boys had darkened the paths of the playful Coloureds. The schoolboys stooped to pick up stones and fling em at the “Niggers!” Thanks to comic books, Carl knew that he should pick up whatever pebbles his small hands could carry and fire them back at the kids, and he did so, naming them “Niggers” too. The volleyed imprecation startled the pale lads as much as did Carl’s puny missiles. But their assault—their insults—only ended when Mrs. Black appeared and commanded the abrasive kids to abscond. The junior thugs scrammed, and Victoria Black, the work-at-home laundress, bore, at her hips, her two youngest sons indoors.

  Carl feared his mom would whip him for using a word he sensed was foul. Instead, as she’d done with their three older siblings, his mom propped Carl and Huckabuck on pillows before a mirror. Next, she set down two china sugar bowls: one held brown sugar; the other boasted white. Mom then told her sons, “Look at the mirror and look at yourselves: you are brown like the brown sugar; those boys who were shouting that ugly word are white like the white sugar. Some white-sugar people do not like brown-sugar people, and they use that evil word to try to shame us.” Carl digested the news as if it were a sugared poison pill.

  How could Carl know, only aged four, how nasty some Nova Scotians could be toward Scotianers, as the Coloureds now dub themselves? Yes, they’re a unique people. Some descend from slaves that New England Yanks had carted north in 1760 when they scrambled to grab the plush pastures of the kicked-out Acadians (“Cajuns,” y’all). But most are the offspring of True-Blue Blacks who sided with the Crown during the American Revolution, and, having lost, were granted empty pockets and stony land in Nova Scarcity. Still others look back to ancestor slaves that British Marines had freed at gunpoint during the War of 1812 and then packed north to the peninsular (or penal) colony, whose beaches were ice-fringed half the year.

  Sad to say, but . . . By the time that teen Carl began to fantasize, pantingly, about bedding pink ladies, Scotianers had survived two centuries as either dirt-cheap, dirt-poor labour for condescending whites, or they’d vamoosed—smartly—to the Boston States. Cos their N.S. lives were pinched. They could be servants, maids, and handymen; they could rake pebbles in a pretense of farming. Their static mobility was to shuttle daily from black warrens to white burghs (where they could own no property nor travel after sundown) and perform heart-crushing toil for minuscule coins.

  That snapshot captures the whole province: in 1959, Nova Scotia is white towns serviced by slapped-together black villages, while each white-ruled city fields a black shantytown. New Scotland is just a frosty, salt-spray South.

  Every day, Negroes exit rude shacks to pick up garbage or shine shoes, while Negresses go into homes and clean toilets and cook meals and pop their dark nipples into pale infants’ avid mouths. A regal few men porter on the railway, but they’re “on the road,” tending to whites, more than they’re home, caring for their own families. Others wanna bear arms for King and Queen but are ordered to peel potatoes and scrub latrines. In Nova Scotia, Coloureds have the right to vote, the right to marry whites (and face disgust if they do), and the right to starve—or to sweat to eat a peck of bread, a splash of rotgut, some maggot-polished bone.

  So, Halifax hosts a lost African civilization—a populace lost at sea, swamped like Atlantis. Coloured Haligonians waft scents of Coca-Cola and pipe tobacco, rum and ale, coffee and cigarettes, chocolates and crisp Bible pages. Machetes of laughter rip open their faces and their hovels’ matchstick walls. (The North End needs a marché nocturne, peddling coffee, chocolate, dark rum, molasses, blood pudding, tar, iron, black tea, licorice—only black goods).

  Their African Baptist Church got no choice but to espouse a people’s gospel: You get born in sin; you suffer disappointments; you die in pain; and, if you have not, in life, cried out to Christ for Deliverance, you burn forever, while fully conscious of your living wrongs. Heaven is as distant a promise as Hell is an ever-present threat.

  (Theology be no damned good: we’re defined by what we defile.)

  Carl gleaned these beliefs from the sailors who brought their dirty drawers and soiled shirts to Mrs. Black to scour; he gleaned this sociology from the Tars who stayed on, after picking up their laundry, to pour a taste of this and take a sip of that; he got to know all about the harshness of Negro Scotland as he chased titanic rats about the homely abode, the barn to which her bookish preacher pa sentenced Victoria for whelping too many fatherless sons and so—in his mind—soiling her original surname. So, Carl had to outwit rats, catch em by the tail, screeching, flailing, and brain em dead with a bible. Justice!

  (Always too much black and white in that once-stable with the Dutch doors: rats, coal, hair, ink, iron, rubber, Bible, LPs, char, pencils, pepper, polish, tea, belts, licorice, shoes, coffee, smoke, gangrene, June bugs, tar, molasses, typewriter ribbons, ants, nails, and hats versus cotton, skirts, milk, paper, sheets, worms, salt, pus, uniforms, pine, candles, starch, china, soap, lye, bleach, suds, flour, nail clippings, cobwebs, wine, dresses, cigarettes, porridge, shirts, chalk, bread, piss, and sugar. Sometimes snow and soot got miscegenated.)

  Carl’s roots suck Sargasso Sea routes: houses no better than dressed-up kindling or painted-over splinters; cats curled atop tombstones and shitting upon graves; a gaunt white dog dashing from an alley, a giant, fleshy chicken leg clamped in its jaws; gulls plastering everything with guano nougat. Haligonian whores’ coos conjuring more pleasure than love ballads. The poor—barking like dogs, squealing like rats, squawking like gulls, clucking like pigeons, caterwauling like cats. Brothels multiplying, furtive, hidden among churches; sailors rasslin a hefty lass, a chunky-bottomed and sassy gal. Say they, “Thank ya, mamzelle, most kindly.” Doff cap, drop drawers.

  North End Halifax schoolin was red eyes gogglin dirty pictures, plus black eyes winning in sports. A hockey stick could slice open a throat or wreck a tooth; a baseball bat could bash a prodigy into an imbecile—by accident; the gymnasium was where hateful weaklings strove to become idiots-with-badges-and-guns. The schoolyard was, itself, more boxing ring than playground. Snotty noses became bloody noses; cocksuckers got sucker-punched. Tears trickled like blood; blood spurted like semen. Some lads got beat so bad, shit was their underpants. Girls’d grab each other’s hair and yank, and scratch, and bite. (In Primary, angered by Carl’s teasing, a Coloured girl raked his short-pants-bared legs with fingernails that felt like ten razors. Gee-zus!)

  Because
Halifax is a naval base, bristling white power and whistling black servitude, boxing counts as Anger Management and a grab-moolah-quick scheme. Lookit: Some Negroes just gotta hit others. If they’re good-fisted, they can brawl a room empty. So, “Nofaskosha” spawns champ upon champ. White chimps and chump blacks tussle for everything. Grade-school graduations feature a beat cop warning pupils that brawn is better than brain, that they should toss away books and pick up boxing gloves. “Forget about Doctor Dolittle, that smarty-pants who can chat with dogs. Ha! Darwin is tops.” For statements like this, the uniformed dropout won lavish applause, even while students intelligent enough to win good test scores had to shrink in their seats, ashamed to know how to read, write, and rithmetic.

  Carl had been one of those schoolboys made to sweat for knowing that numbers were for things other than baseball innings or shots on goal. Still, like all Scotianers, he took pride in Molasses Jones, that ex-bouncer at The Black Bear Tavern in wax-face, red-brick Windsor, who beat a bunch of pale sailors into red pulp and got to be the Middleweight Champion of The Dominion. He’d always had his two leather-puffed mitts in some patsy’s suddenly bleeding face. Then, Jones loco’d to Montreal to fight Murray Sparks for a payday, but got slain by a demonic punch, one that even the referee could not describe because it had come from Hell. At the funeral, Clyde Gray—no slouch himself—laid two brand new, red boxing gloves on the casket.

  Being a paper boy, delivering each day’s narrow obits, doom-n-gloom headlines, and sports scores, Carl learned the ways and means of Bluenoses and Scotianers. Okay, he was merely passing the daily gossip, rolled tubular, to subscribers or to passersby. But news reveals august truths.

  On his rounds, Carl got to eye mothers, wives, gals, and also call girls. On Fridays, collection days, if he were lucky, a belle would open her door but forget to sash her housecoat. While a cigarette protruded from grimacing, garish lips, she’d count out coins to Carl’s cupped palm. Her nipples, brushing against thin fabric, would harden, exciting the lad as he squinted surreptitiously at her chest. Once the lady-of-the-house’d paid him, she’d smile, or dismiss him coldly. He’d pocket his coins and savour the memory of her yawning, puffing, sipping a drink, or lounging so carelessly on a sofa that he’d glimpsed her sex.

  (Carl’s weekly reckoning amounted to a lion’s share for The Morning Herald, but a tally for himself. Thus, he splurged on comics, pop, records, a baseball glove, a book, a movie ticket. But he volunteered a portion of his profit to his ma, to better the poverty of the barnyard-domiciled clan.)

  Carl viewed his route as a straggly mission among beer-perfumed dives and oil-scented alleys. He stopped at several taverns, seven rooming houses (three that doubled up as brothels), and three-storey houses that were virtual hospitals due to all the blood shed on their beds and floors and walls, thanks to razor blades used as scalpels and broken bottles used as saws.

  Childhood is clean, yes, but no one gets out of childhood cleanly. It’s even tougher to do so in Halifax, where sailors’ Poesy—smut—passes for literature, impossible to avoid. In fact, in Halifax, Adult Education teachers swear that it is profitable to use sex positions to help illiterates learn to draw Roman letters and add and subtract Arabic numerals.

  Corruption’s inevitable here. “Cocksucker” is to Halifax what “motherfucker” is to Harlem. So, Carl eyed cock-and-cunt graffiti, riffled Tijuana bibles. He digested sweaty scripture—Porn.

  It is disreputable Art, yes, but it depicts a desired life—as lurid as a corpse and as honest as a babe. (Truth be told.)

  Carl saw its radical, dizzying beauty—how it joins unlikely persons. In smut, any pairing be a couple—black/white, young/old, hockey player/ballerina, blacksmith/nurse, chimney sweep/bathing beauty. There’s no respect for person; every body can ply Pleasure, if comfort—or commerce—can be arranged.

  On his newspaper circuit then, finding crumpled pages near a church, Carl chanced upon sordid, glaring photos: a mechanic and a nun; a cowboy and a figure skater; a lumberjack and a society lady. (Off and on, Carl repented for ogling such scenes, but he never felt guilty enough to quit this wicked delight.)

  His favourite reverie recalls that crime at Italy Cross: In one scrofulous volume of snaps, a charcoal Negro pounds a sunshine blonde. He screws her so hard that any baby born will have a dent in its head.

  Carl finds these sagas irresistible. No way to launder these besmirching images from his head and heart.

  At twenty-three, Carl leagues with guys in shuttered garages down gravel driveways, or he descends into off-limit basements. To cheer on Hollywood–Las Vegas striptease strips—those looping, grainy, unreeling films of fat girls, garishly made up, being fucked—or flogged—by white men in black masks. More rarely, Carl glimpses close-ups of dark phalloi filling ivory-face, pallid mouths, and black-bushed scallop-pale sexes. A grave Joy.

  In some flicks, circulated underground (for they’re notoriously liable to confiscation or censorship), the camera cuts from a biker to a bedroom, from a man aboard a bike to a man aboard a broad. The man always arrives as an avenging angel, and never a pacifist. The hero is either gunning his bike or “shooting his wad.” A model is either so skinny that she always seems to be in profile, or so fat that ordinary mirrors bulge just like funhouse mirrors.

  Wisdom: the only public history that matters is military; the only private history that counts is sexual.

  Though a minister’s daughter, Victoria—never Vicky—Black had her five sons by five different Negroes, whose tints range the spectrum: a multi-hued brood. The first-born is Granville, whose father had been an army bugler with a cracked horn and a crooked jaw, and who perished due to a doxy who cut his throat because she couldn’t stand his squawking. Next came the twins, Premiere and Encore. Their father earned a medal in Great War France because, being stone-deaf, he couldn’t hear the machine-gun firing as he charged and bayonetted the Kraut gunner. Following Carl, the youngest boy is Huckabuck, whose father is, sayeth Gossip, Buddy Sun, the Negro milkman. Unlike his brethren, Carl looks coppery, mahogany-like, not jet-black or ivory-yellow.

  Née Victoria Waters, Carl’s mom had slid from well-bred Negress to common laundress, a genealogical disappointment who scoured the dank drawers and scrubbed the stained shirts of the Tars and Tommys who trooped to her home (and, if they had a spare drop to drink, could stay the night—and not spare her bed). Cleanliness—fake purity—was now her vocation. Despite her austere hauteur, despite her flawless German, Latin, Greek, and French, and perfect English, a lingua franca that she flaunted with the elocution and enunciation of a natural-born Royal, this ebony woman was always elbow-deep in bleach-stinging water and caustic soapsuds. To erase—from linens, lingerie, and livery—the remnants of semen, shit, piss, vomit, wine, coffee, beer, nicotine, snot, and blood required such scrubbing, such personal degradation, that Victoria’s tears surged and merged—not infrequently—with her sweat and soapsuds.

  Unfortunately, Victoria’s expert governance of lingo was no match for her unruly heart. She had a yen for Coloured veterans who’d seen too many horrors in the Great War, and hardly any love. She herself had felt unloved; she wasn’t pretty; she couldn’t sing; she couldn’t aspire to be a man’s darling or a showbiz queen. There was no room in 1920s Nova Scotia for a black woman who could backtalk in five languages and rewrite musical notation upside down and backward. So, unable to bow her head to Dalhousie University or, say, Wellesley College, she took betwixt her legs, instead, local Negro grandees, much to the pitiless chagrin of her most distinguished and decorated sire, Rev. Dr. Capt. Victor Oliver Waters, O.B.E., B.Div., D.Div.

  Impossible was it, then, for Victoria’s 90 per cent high school grades to cancel out her dad’s dismay at her fetching home one pregnancy, and then another, and then another. Although innocent of Freud, the Rev. Dr. Capt. Waters did suspect that his daughter’s generosity to the soldiers he’d once chaplained and chaperoned enacted her rebellion to his strictures as well as her revenge for having been spur
ned as being too dark in colour and indelicate in feature. Victoria Waters had thus determined to be a better flapper than she was a Baptist. Shortly, her pressed hair was bobbed; she took up cigarettes and rum; if she couldn’t have a groom, she could at least have “pets.”

  Discomfited by his backslid daughter’s embarrassment of his sermons, the African Baptist pastor hit upon a save-face (if not save-soul) solution. Knowing that few selfish men would want to marry a woman with three boys already by three strangers, the Rev. Dr. Capt. Waters plotted to affiance his daughter’s lust to a poor man’s money-greed. His scheme: Fix a concordat between Victoria and a B.W.I. sailor surnamed Black, who hailed from either Barbados or Barbuda. The sailor seemed as dodgy as Don Giovanni. But if Mr. Black would take Miss Waters as his (temporary) Mrs. Black, in exchange for two hundred dollars, he could weigh anchor and steam off to seduce veritable virgins and swear new betrothals elsewhere, his in-good-time exit never to be questioned.

  Thus, Mr. Able Seaman Black gifted Miss Waters with the respectable title of Mrs. Black and a new son—Carl, born in 1935, the Year of the Pig, and in May, thus rendering him a Taurus, bullish. Papa Black then disappeared. Either he decamped chilly Halifax for the sunny Caribbean to start a new family; or, he became an unsung martyr of the Battle of the Atlantic, dying, as it were, for the ex–Edward VIII’s sick-to-death brother.