The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  After the nuptials, Grampy installed Victoria and four sons in a barn behind a house of his on Belle Aire Terrace. (He resided in a manse; his daughter and grandsons stabled in a manger—a disreputable Mary, a long-gone Joseph, and a brood of downscale Christs.) There, Carl grew up, with a floor of straw and newspapers, bedding of rags and cardboard, rats for games of hide-and-seek, soap bubbles for early toys, and gruel, porridge, soup, and tripe for feasts, and eventually four illegitimate scions for siblings.

  Despite his youthful ignorance, Carl sensed that his mom’s apparent Lechery scandalized even Edward VIII–Fan-Club Nova Scotia. Too, Grandpa Waters was somebody, being the most distinguished black minister that Coloured Scotianers had had since Father Richard Preston—also Virginian—had died in 1861. So, Shame shadowed Carl’s childhood. Being Victoria’s only legitimate son, Carl blamed his mother—he blamed women—for blighting the family’s pseudo-heraldic Honour.

  Yet, Victoria had desired, merely, to be able to be—and love—as she wished, rather than kowtow to the bleating of a white world that wanted black women to suckle white children at the expense of their own (who could—and did—bloody well die), and buckle under the tantrums of black men who wanted them to be their slaves, so these guys could posture and pose as real—metaphysically white—men. From her standpoint, her decorated dad was as much a tyrant to her mom as the tavern brawlers were to their molls. She’d rather be poor but proud, and independent. However, as progressive as Victoria’s individualism was, it looked backward—sinful—to others and merited censure: after all, she was raising her family in a barn.

  Carl did see his mother as a trim, tall, molasses-tinted bluestocking, who had to play dumb and grin way too much to garner trade and tips from the scruffy troops whose dirt-slathered uniforms were her gold mine. Carl knew there was more to Victoria than soft soap, hard water, and lye. She wafted chalk dust. Her son could choke on his oatmeal, yeah, but Victoria forbade him to choke on his syllables. It was Verboten, in her barn, to deploy vulgar vocabulary or slipshod grammar. No horse French, no pig Latin.

  Victoria laboured as a laundress through the Great Depression, World War II, and the dawn of the Cold War. A dreadful living, was it; grimy by definition. (Servicemen seldom come spic and span.) If a sailor pressed himself upon her, or bent her over her laundry tub, she could prove flexible. She was the Ophelia of suds, the Cleopatra of ironing, the Juliet of any desirous Jack Tar.

  Yes, Victoria tolerated the sex stains and smoke-reek of the dregs of the ships, the docks, the pubs, the wharves. Whores—the underclass of the underworld—brought her their underthings too. Mondays, the barn looked like a Barnum & Bailey big top, with wet glitz, dripping stockings, gossamer panties, and clothespins dangling show-stopping bras amid the drab, damp darkness where horses once shat and cows once mooed. But Carl and his brothers enjoyed the sight and sound of the gum-cracking, loud-talking, lollipop-sucking sorority of the streets, who always paid well and on time, and who never cursed or drank in front of the boys. They were brownskin or black-to-the-bone, sporting crimson lipstick and blue mascara, so that when they flitted in and flirted with a shy-shy Carl, he felt that tropical birds were caressing him with their feathers. Victoria never hinted that she thought any less of these women than she did of the pale, upper-class ladies who, if they turned onto Belle Aire Terrace, would streak through the dire-straits street, ordering their chauffeurs to brake for no stray dog and no stray pickaninny. As for Carl, the vision of these barnyard lovelies reinforced the idea that women were fanciful creatures, half feathers and half fangs, and had to be tamed if they were to be trusted, let alone loved. A difficult prospect, really.

  The streetwalker seared into Carl’s memory is splendidly sultry, with straight copper hair, freckles, blue-green eyes, and a tan, sullen infant. This “Onondaga Madonna” would sit, smoking and gabbing with Victoria, while waiting for her shimmering undies to dry, and she’d breastfeed her golden urchin with dusty curls and sombre, coal-black eyes. This real-life Nativity—Madonna and Child—erased the picture book tales about farmer-dads and baker-moms, and storks bearing babes to cradles. One day, Victoria had to run errands, and so left the lady, Laxxy, with her own babe, Carl, and his younger brother, Huckabuck. In Victoria’s absence, Carl had got up the gumption to ask, “Laxxy, give me your titty to suck.” To his delight, she’d switched her snoozing bundle from one arm to the other and reached inside her cleavage to give Carl her plump left breast and instantly stiff nipple to tongue. He was ten then and didn’t need the teat but had wanted to test his powers of rhetoric with a woman who was easily twenty. That Laxxy had yielded to his pleading was an object lesson. He had enjoyed her milk and the perfume soap of her skin, while both he and she kept a nervous watch, out of peripheral vision, for the return of Victoria. Disappointingly, after that encounter, Laxxy, who had purred and sighed as Carl had suckled on her teat, never showed again. She found a different and childless laundress to refresh her tawdry glitter.

  Victoria’s slide from high heels to round heels can be traced—in part—to her rivalry with her sister, Pretty, Carl’s aunt—sepia in tint, plump in waist, and posh in bust; with slick, raven hair and a smile of bright, tantalizing incisors. Their preacher-papa, Rev. Waters, had cursed Victoria, but he’d doted on Pretty, whose singing genius had hooked his adoration along with hoi polloi adulation. Too, Pretty wore her name well, while Victoria was book-smart but homely. The sisters traced opposite trajectories: Victoria became a laundress; Pretty a songstress. Victoria was a good-time girl gone wrong; Pretty was a never-a-false-note gospel singer.

  Even as a disembodied voice pulled from ether, Pretty delivers a spine-tingling contralto whose acid dissolves the pap of radio tunes. She exhibits the pitch of classical perfection—thanks to her training by Dr. Ennio Piccioni, Halifax’s star-turn Jewish intellectual exile from Mussolini (and Hitler), who heard in Pretty a voice to rival that of America’s Negro art-song chanteuse, Marian Anderson (nicely not an irritating Commie—unlike Paul Robeson—but comfortably liberal). Dr. Piccioni took Pretty Waters to his bosom, pulled strings, plucked heartstrings, and the scholarships and fellowships came a-tumblin down: soon, pupil and tutor rose mutually from their depressed circumstances, hers suppressed by Negrophobia, his by anti-Semitism.

  Though glamorous globally, with an RCA Victor recording contract, trophies and medals, fur coats and fan letters, superlative reviews in The New York Times and The Times (of London), and, even, in 1958, a third Royal Command Performance—this time before the Queen, Pretty-as-a-picture wasn’t picture-perfect: like Victoria, Pretty also had borne a babe out of wedlock. But, in instructive contrast to Victoria, Pretty left her newborn boy with a childless couple who’d sworn her maternity to secrecy.

  Also, Pretty damn well denies the jealous gossip that says she went from operatic song-sheets to Doc Piccioni’s baroque bedsheets. But her shut-away son was shades lighter in colour than other Waters offspring, and, by age seven, he exhibited a remarkable aptitude for languages and a special affinity for Italian. Pretty’s disavowal of her boy excised him as an impediment to her lauded belting of arias. She could steadily burnish her star and offer her teacher relief from the monotony of Monogamy and the sterility of exile.

  Thus, Pretty’s fame flourished, unmolested by motherhood, while her sister got affianced to a soon-vanished sailor—Mr. Locksley Black—and then consigned to a barn. Victoria had to lave and lave (swish sweat and soap), while Pretty, inclined to propeller in from Carnegie Hall or Royal Albert Hall or Rideau Hall, would bestow upon her sister a discard mink, a throw-away throw, but grant Carl and brethren a Christmas trove of toys and Meccano sets from Liverpool and ukuleles from New York City.

  Carl lamented his mother’s struggle to satisfy her family’s needs. He couldn’t help but eye Pretty’s smooth success, her sunshine gleam, her lolling in glitz. Whenever she appeared in their doorway, she shed an afterglow, a radiation that transformed newspapers into silk and pine planks into gold. Her mere prese
nce nudged Belle Aire Terrace, Halifax, nearer Bel Air, Los Angeles. Carl found it incredible, but ultra educational, that his mom and aunt were so different in material accoutrements, given their not dissimilar morals. (Aunt Pretty is and was as pretty did and does.)

  Despite the grungy drudgery that was her employ, and the sooty dungeon that was her home, Victoria exercised thrift enough to install a phonograph. The instrument of instruments was a godsend (even if classical music was incongruous—surreal—with the sounds of suds foaming or water gurgling as Victoria sluiced away the filth of others). Yet, if chain-gang Negroes had to swing their sledgehammers and pickaxes in time to some antique spiritual or newfangled blues or heartfelt hollers, so did Victoria need to churn through hampers of ordure, buckets of soap shavings or bleach, and mountains of froth while spinning platters of Verdi, Chopin, Puccini, Beethoven, and Bizet. Salvation was hers if she could match her labours to trilling arias. Soiled clothes emerged extra bright if Madama Butterfly was warbling through the barn. If there were bloodstains on a uniform, Carmen was a prerequisite. Later on, even Pretty Waters’s voice, scatting through Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci (1951), seemed to make smears and dirt-streaks scat.

  Grampy Waters never lived to see bad-girl Victoria attain Redemption, for he perished of a heart attack when Carl was five. Still, the pontiff Waters’s majesty attracted the premier of Nova Scotia to his sob-orgy funeral. Here the leader of the white New Scots seemed suitably downcast that the leader of the black Bluenoses was unanswerably deceased. Here, too, the humiliation of Victoria and sons was publicly accented, for they were banished from the first pew of the church, near the saintly grandfather’s lavender, satin-lined casket. They had to look on, from a side pew, a distant pew, as the Paterfamilias got carried out from the church to his sacred slot in spade-opened earth.

  Still, Rev. Waters would’ve been unhappy to know that Victoria’s later uplift was due to her abandonment of one-afternoon or one-eve stands to accept, instead, to be mistress to the black boss of the Halifax Coloured railway workers. Thus, she experienced the identical ascension as did Wallis Simpson, more notoriously: to move from the arm of one man to the superior arm—and bed—of another.

  Thanks to these determinations, Victoria was able to cease being a laundress at about the same time that Carl ceased to be a boy; she became, in a post that flattered her elocution, a telephone operator for Maritime Telegraph and Telephone. Quickly, she moved her boys and her record player into a house that her lover, Mr. Grantley Beardsley, that “black bear,” assisted her in leveraging.

  To Carl, Beardsley was—and is—a fat but vicious cat, looking pampered but with ever-sharp claws and teeth, ready to dissect and digest any wayward mouse. Stout, portly, and the colour of stout or port, Beardsley needs only a derby hat to effect the darker likeness of canny, cagey Winnie Churchill, but one whose V stands for Vice, not Victory.

  As the highest-ranking secular Coloured in Nova Scotia, who had come from the British West Indies, Beardsley needed the legitimacy that a daughter of the highest-ranking (though deceased) divine Coloured in Nova Scotia could provide, even if she was considered, by some, a “fallen” woman. Like many kings before, if he could not be happy with his queen (a sour-faced dame whose mouth spat piss and vinegar), he could choose to elevate his comfort woman.

  For her part, Ma Black was nicely accommodating of “Pa” Beardsley. Her own father had put her in a barn, but her lover had put her in a house—impossible not to notice the bottom-line, top-dollar difference. To get out of the barn was like going directly to Heaven: to go from sniffing definite rat shit to being able to chow down on savoury venison, its spicy flavour not spoiled or turned by underwear stink or vermin-defecate stench.

  In spite of their improved status wrought by the appearance of the benefactor Beardsley in their lives, the continued derogation of the Black family was clarified excruciatingly when a delegation of African Baptist Church women—a gaggle of dour, monocled Gestapo—dared to ring Victoria’s doorbell to tell her that her profitable adultery with Mr. Beardsley, a husband and father, made her unfit to remain a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Victoria kept a steely face; she asked if anyone had thought to ask Mr. Beardsley to address these allegations. (She might have asked how many of her inquisitors had been virgins at marriage or how many had had babes by men other than their husbands.) But the damage—so to speak—had been done: Carlyle Black was now convinced of the unutterable hypocrisy of all African Baptists. Carl realized that he’d been born to a ma who’d just sinned and sinned and sinned—only outside a sorority of sanctimonious bitches. (Hard not to remember all this when he became Baptist Youth prez.)

  So, as soon as he was able to work to help finance Victoria and his brothers, Carl set to institute a stern morality—as if reviving the right dead Rev. Waters. At age seventeen, he changed the locks to Victoria’s house. He hoped to bar patron Beardsley from rendering the new home his extramarital love nest. He kept one key for himself and hid the other. Victoria protested, loudly, her son’s imposing upon her his notions of Chastity. She complained most bitterly: “Bible lessons are Mother Goose tales for adults!” But Carl was unmoved by her upset (induced by her fear of losing Beardsley’s benevolence). Carl thought he could govern now like a Harem eunuch, guarding any entrée to Victoria’s boudoir. He’d decided that five fatherless sons were enough. He would discipline the loose womb that had borne him. So, come ten p.m. each night, Carl locked the door to bar Beardsley’s intended, amorous liaison.

  This regime lasted one week. Carl revelled in his power to lock out Ma Black’s gentleman caller, who dared to rattle, drunkenly, the doors. The son was pushing Beardsley to seek his scabrous pleasure far from Belle Aire Terrace, this shantytown street with a Tinseltown name, this street of crooked, wooden houses, most no better than splinters pinned together with tacks and papered over with Crime reports, painted in riotous colours.

  But Carl’s prudish experiment ended when Victoria offered him the dignity of his own room. He’d guard his space and leave hers to herself and whomever she chose to invite upon her premises. She was damned sure this compromise would hold. Her voice had hissed as her eyes had flamed. Carl scowled, but relented, and he and Victoria were able to access house, home, and rooms as freely as they wished. Yet, Victoria did choose to be more circumspect, arranging to meet Beardsley in sleeping cars stalled overnight at the train station.

  Carl’s teens were improved by the largesse that Beardsley visited upon Mrs. Black & Sons, and his twenties have unfurled as fairly prosperous because Beardsley got him hired at the CNR train station—a plum post, sure. Though his mother has long ceased to favour G.B. with coitus in her home, due to Carl’s puritanical gestures, Ma Black still has the last word, the last laugh: now she trysts, supine for big-boned Beardsley, in their train-station, sleeping-car beds; and Carl launders the sheets that mom and lover besmirch—or, rather, baptize. Too, his paycheque shackles Carl to Beardsley, which is his boss’s sweet policy.

  Carl is conscious, daily, nigh the point of anxiety, that his way-of-life depends on Grantley Beardsley—G.B. “Great Britain”—because he’s merely slotted in, at Beardsley’s discretion, to cover for Burl Bundy, who’s tenuously away to suffer cancer treatment. When—if—Burl returns, Carl will hit the unemployment insurance claimant lines, unless Beardsley wroughts his usual financial-politic magic.

  Carl’s plight is definitely a raw hurt. Beardsley, the B.W.I. ex-officer who loveth Victoria whenever he wants, is Carl’s boss because the man scored the Order of the British Empire medal by recruiting a couple thousand Coloured chaps to serve in the Battle of the Atlantic and get torpedoed, blown up, and drowned, after first being called “niggers”—incessantly—by their strutting, spitting Anglo-Saxon commanders. Likely more than one Caribbean sailor had perished while cursing his bad luck in choosing to defend the Empire rather than back Marcus Garvey’s fascistic Back-to-Africa dream.

  Bad enough that Beardsley’s chief; worse is how he won this
fiefdom. Unlike most Coloured railwaymen, Beardsley don’t ride the rails, not now. Still, the railway has been and is—even for this prime “Uncle Thomas”—a locomotive of Liberty; or locomotion for class upgrade.

  Beardsley started off on the CPR—the “Coloured People’s Railway” (employer of East Indians and West Indians)—working its ships, and then he migrated over to the CNR—the “Canadian Negro Railway”—as a sleeping-car porter. He had to launder white folks’ sheets, shine their shoes, get called “George,” or “boy,” or “Tom,” or, yes, “nigger.”

  Some get rich by distilling; others get rich by stealing. Beardsley got rich by smiling. To wit, whenever a white passenger branded him a “nigger,” he’d answer, “Nigger’s ginger-coloured, and so’s a cent, / Tip me a copper or your nigger’s spent!” This wit won him grins—and coins. Beardsley even told white passengers, “Call me ‘Bojangles’—cause I’s a ‘beau’ and I sure do ‘jangles.’” His jovial jive hit jackpots. Acting the wily vassal, he was soon as successful at shining shoes as Al Capone was in merchandising bootleg. To whites, porter denoted “Negro fool.” To Beardsley, porter denoted “self-employed accountant.” No bones about it. By cagey playing to white stereotypes, Beardsley won black power, royal-purple influence, and pure gold—his own paid-off house plus other real estate.

  Greasy fat, if a skinflint, Beardsley believes in his Negro-go-slow gradualism and his rapid, capital accumulation. After all, he’s witnessed horror: in the 1930s, he found the castrated body of a fellow porter, the erudite Mr. Booker, hanged—lynched—in his porter uniform from a Dixie pine. Weirdly, Booker had somehow maintained his funereal dignity as he floated, crotch still dripping blood, suspended from a rope between the white man’s Heaven and the white man’s Hell-on-Earth-for-Negroes.