Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  Dr Paul Wilson, a criminologist with whom I had shared a friendship going back many years, also wrote, warmly and encouragingly. He continued to keep me informed about his work, troubles and travails.

  MumShirl, of course, was unable to write, but not long after my departure David Halpin had loaned her a tape-recorder. This enabled her to hold a long onesided conversation with me, which she recorded over several nights. Unfortunately, when David delivered it in person to me in Boston, he let slip a comment which informed me that he had listened to it first. I decided to discourage MumShirl from using this as a means of communication, and I’d heard nothing back from the occasional letters and cards I sent her, although I was sure she always had one of the many school children in her house read them to her.

  By this time I had begun dating a Black American, Dr Don Ware, a cardiac surgeon who, as well as being on the staff at Bethesda Hospital, which I understood to be somewhere near Washington DC, was also Macy Fellow at Harvard. We had found we shared common interests in health, medicine, politics and dancing, and our friendship had grown from there.

  Don was a bachelor, and almost his first words to me, after inviting me out to dinner, were, ‘Most women I take out to dinner end up trying to get me to marry them,’ to which I’d replied, ‘Well, you won’t have that trouble with me. I have absolutely no intention of staying in America, no matter who asks me.’

  Don sometimes rang while driving back from DC, asking Naomi and me to join him for dinner on his arrival. Naomi refused to go because her idea of a ‘real treat’ was a trip to McDonald’s. So Don would take her there first, and allow her to call her friends on the mobile phone he had in his car on the way. Then he would drop her home with her goodies and, with the neighbours keeping an eye on her, he would take me somewhere where the food was a bit more adult. Don had been a tap-dancer during his childhood, and loved nothing better than to go to one of the few Black nightclubs and get down to some serious boogie.

  He was an intriguing character, who related to me many tales about his past which had resonance with my own. At school, he’d been told by his white teachers and career advisers that, since he was very good with his hands, he should take up carpentry. Instead, he had taken up medicine and become a heart surgeon. This meant that he was still very good with his hands but earned a great deal more money. Racism, we both agreed.

  There was, however, an offside to his personality. He was sometimes very boastful, though also often rightly proud of his achievement. He drove an expensive Mercedes sportscar and liked to relate tales of how white motorists, because of his car, imagined him to be an athlete or a sports star—never a medical specialist. He seemed over-concerned about the acquisition of material things. The concept of spiritual gratification, rather than material reward, did not sit easily with him. While he appreciated the striving towards ‘selfless deeds’ in others, it didn’t appear to be something he aspired to himself. As well, over time, he became extremely and unreasonably jealous. He disliked Naomi and me going to stay with Beverly and Robert, for instance. When it was time for us to leave for Australia, he jumped in very quickly to say he was driving me to the airport when he learned that Beverly and Robert had already offered to take us.

  When his mother flew over from Los Angeles and he insisted I must meet her, I heard the faint peal of alarm bells. Given that I was about six years older than her son, and had been married twice already, I hardly expected her to greet me very warmly. I was surprised, then, when she did. Overall, though, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps my assertion that I intended to return to Australia presented Don with an emotional challenge. Some people yearn for the inaccessible, often without considering whether, if accessible, the object of desire would be their real choice.

  Don told me several times that I was ‘too familiar with white people’ for his liking, that I was not even alert to them when they were around. This made me realise the difference between his world and my own. In Australia, with no Black medical or dental graduates, or funds for capital outlay, we were obliged to go to white people for almost every thing we required—whether it was health treatment, to purchase groceries, clothes or fabric, borrow a library book, or buy a car, keep it repaired or even fill it with petrol. We were all so poor and so grossly outnumbered and out-resourced that we had never had the opportunity to experience any real independence. Consequently, we had been forced to lean towards white people for their services or attention in virtually every situation. Perhaps then, my way of life had become a habit, made more noticeable in America where there were services and information available from the Black community, but I was not in the habit of assuming them to be there nor seeking them out.

  I had enjoyed the friendship of many wonderful people during the nine months of my stay and, as my time in America was drawing to a close, I was concerned that I did not have gifts enough left to give them to repay their many kindnesses.

  In particular, Native American friends had been an enormous source of support—the students on campus and others in the wider community. One such person, Gkisedtanamoogk, a medicine man in the Wampanoag Nation, had very early extended his warm welcome and friendship. Also, he had ensured that I met many other people who, he felt, would appreciate the things I was trying to achieve and the reasons behind my efforts.

  Will I ever have the opportunity, I wondered, to repay these people? I knew they did not seek material reward, but I wanted in my own heart to feel somehow that the value and indebtedness of their gifts of love had been acknowledged and appreciated by me.

  A Native American student with whom I was quite friendly, and who had been working throughout the year on his doctoral thesis, had a sudden fit of nerves towards the end. Fearing that his work might not have been couched in sufficiently academic terminology, he had taken a thesaurus to it, changing more than half the small words to longer ones. The result had been virtually unintelligible, and it was shaping up to be a major catastrophe for him.

  He came to visit, his absolute misery filling the small apartment. How could he go back to his homeland people, who were so desperately in need of qualifications amongst their own, he asked, if his work was not passed. And it seemed in all certainty that this would now be the case.

  Fortunately I had finished all my own work and had a golfball typewriter, which Chet’s friend, John Young, had lent me. So I offered to help put the thesis back into its original form. I had to get him out of my place though, because his tension and distress were more than I could bear. He retired to his own apartment in the building next door, and for the next two days and nights I stayed in touch with him only by phone. He had talked to me about his work before this, so the subject matter was somewhat familiar to me and I was a fast and accurate typist.

  At last the big day arrived—Commencement, as the graduation ceremony at Harvard is called. All students gather in Harvard Yard, with proud parents filling every inch of space. Each student is given only two tickets for relatives or friends, so international students really come into vogue at this time. Rarely having relatives or friends outside the school to ask, their tickets are in high demand by others who have more friends than tickets.

  When we had all taken the seats allocated to us, a huge black mass of capes and mortarboards filling the Yard, we were instructed to stand. The sky was so blue overhead, and the grass of spring so smoothly and shiningly green. Even the ivy which decked the surrounding buildings had been given its annual spruce up for this biggest of all Harvard events. Then, snaking its way through this awesome assembly, came a wonderful spectacle of the most vivid crimson, the doctoral graduates, the princes and princesses of campus, had arrived.

  I breathed deeply with the intensity of the moment. In that short hushed time, when we all craned our necks to catch a glimpse of perhaps friends and acquaintances we knew to be amongst the splendidly attired doctoral graduates, the thought really struck me: I could be one of them.

  My next thought was of how great that colour would loo
k on me. I could not drag my eyes away from this show of pomp and ceremony. Up on the stage, the formal proceedings got under way, with presentations by students especially selected for the honour, congratulatory speeches by the Harvard President and others, and the conferral of an honorary degree on a woman who had made a most significant contribution to American cultural life, Leontyne Price.

  We disbanded, each school’s students then gathering in the adjoining smaller Yards for the individual degree presentations. There we were sorted into the order in which our presentations would be made. The Director and staff from the Native American centre came towards me as I stood towards the back of the long line which had been formed. ‘We know what you did, and we thank you,’ they said, referring to the student I had helped who was also to receive his degree.

  I spotted Robert, looking extremely handsome in his robes, the first time I had ever seen him in other than casual clothing, and Beverly, beaming her pride from the audience. Naomi sat with Australian friends, Phil and Martha Mollison, and their son, Sky, who came along for this part of the ceremony.

  The past nine months whizzed through my mind—trips I had made to New York, walks I had taken in areas famous for their autumn leaves, the mountain of books I had read my way through, and more, all the friendships which this ceremony denoted to be at an end, or at least an end to this phase. I was both happy and sad on the day.

  At last it was my turn to go forward, to be kissed on the cheek by Paul, congratulated by Associate Dean Blenda Wilson, and to be handed that large flat red envelope containing the fruit of my year’s work.

  At home, later, I could barely contain myself for wonderment, teasing my degree out of the red envelope, gazing upon it, putting it away, only to repeat the process. It was so hard to come to terms with the reality of achieving my aspirations of having more than the servant’s life, which had been mapped out for me as a Black child in Australia. I was sitting in Cambridge with my very own Harvard degree in my hands.

  I had arranged for us to leave on the weekend following the graduation, and our suitcases were all but packed. The son of a fellow student had agreed to pick up furniture which I wanted to store, and borrowed pieces had been returned. The apartment was looking really bare.

  Don came by the next evening—he had been kept busy with the presentations at the Kennedy School—to take me out to a celebratory and last dinner before our departure. At the restaurant I was approached by two elderly Black women.

  One woman spoke. ‘I want to congratulate you, dear. I saw you yesterday but I didn’t get a chance to get near you.’

  Complete strangers to me, they told me that they went every year to Harvard graduations, counting Black heads, approaching and congratulating each Black student, making sure that the Black students were aware their achievements were being noted and appreciated.

  ‘But I’m from Australia,’ I said, feeling perhaps I was getting praise to which I was not entitled.

  A Black is a Black anywhere. Go with God,’ the old woman said as she walked away smiling.

  9

  We arrived back in Australia uneventfully. I received a letter from my mother immediately upon my return. ‘I hope you are not getting too big for your britches, my girl,’ she wrote, and I was glad that her admonitions were moving further up my body. It had been my boots she’d been concerned about last time. But what would she say when I told her that I planned to return to Boston, and give her another chance to go off to the Hereafter in my absence? It wouldn’t be long until I found out, because she also announced her intention to come to Sydney the following week.

  Russel was withdrawn and forlorn. He had not enjoyed the lonely routine of coming home to an empty house each day. We had even been away on his birthday, which had fallen just a couple of weeks before we had arrived home. I tried to make it up to him, having brought gifts and holding a late-birthday family dinner. It wasn’t hard to see, though, that he considered this to be a consolation, rather than first prize.

  Living on his meagre education allowance and studying full-time, he had not been able to involve himself much socially, cooking his meals each night with just Catso for company. On one occasion he had treated himself to a tin of pink salmon, opened it then left it on the kitchen table while he went to answer the phone. When he’d returned, Catso was licking her whiskers, having completely consumed the centrepiece of his evening’s meal.

  He had gone to Tweed Heads to visit his grandmother during his vacation, and taken Catso with him. Catso had never been a traveller. She had once torn her claws out on the carry basket I had used to bring her to the vet to be sterilised. From then on, she bolted if she heard a car engine start up.

  Russel had left her loose in the car during the long journey. In return, she had scratched him constantly on the neck as she tried to scramble over his back and out through the small gap he had left in the driver’s window as they sped along. Still, she looked none the worse for it, sitting happily licking her paws at the sight of us all once again gathered in the kitchen.

  I went back to work immediately. We had very little money and I had to start earning once more.

  Naomi pleaded not to go back to the nearby Catholic school, and having witnessed the difference in her that attendance at a more reasonable school could make, I agreed to her requests. Instead I enrolled her in a state high school. I was appalled, however, when I went for her admission interview.

  ‘Naomi will have to go down to a lower class,’ we were told, in response to the information that she had been living in America.

  ‘Naomi attended school in Cambridge, where she was doing fine. As a matter of fact, she was doing excellent.’

  ‘School there is not the same as school here. She will have to go down.’

  Naomi was none too pleased either, when she discovered that neither her teachers nor her new school chums were interested in her overseas experiences and observations. A few of the children eventually asked her in the playground, ‘What’s Disneyland like?’ But they treated anything else to do with her time abroad as though she had merely been sick at home in bed for a year.

  I renewed my old acquaintances, going around to visit them one by one. Naomi Mayers apologised for not having answered my letter requesting funds—she had, she said, already disbursed the rest to other people who had wanted funding to do things. When I asked for more details, what sort of things, she said, ‘Oh, conferences and the like. You know. They come up all the time.’

  Reverend Martin Chittleborough warmly welcomed me, beaming at me as I walked through the door. Yes, the Australian Council of Churches would honour the offer he had made for funding to see me through. Did I have any idea of how long it might take?

  At the Health Commission, my close associates, Marian Simon, Nola Roberts and Bob Jones, were happy that I had returned. When I told them I had been accepted into the doctoral program, they took it with very good grace. They assured me that for a project so important to the Black community, and to my personal development, they would wholeheartedly support my application for additional study leave.

  In the state elections which had been held in my absence, the government had turned over, and Laurie Brereton’s commitment to permanency for Black employees had been instituted. I was jubilant—equality in the workplace at last—though I had no idea of how this would impact on me.

  As part of this process of gaining permanency I was required to have a physical examination, which included a chest X-ray. Fears stemming from the brutal manner in which I’d been dragged off by police from my home in Townsville for compulsory TB testing flooded my mind.

  My friend Marjorie Baldwin had, some years earlier, invited me to a barbecue where I had met her soul-mate, Dr John Thompson, or ‘Thommo’ as he is affectionately known. In chatting with him between his duties of turning the steak and sausages, I learned that he was a thoracic specialist. So in fits and starts between cooking and eating, I had related my tale of horror about my experiences in North Queensland,
that I’d been forced to submit to tuberculosis testing for years and how police had come to get me, even during my pregnancy, to haul me up to the hospital.

  ‘What year was this?’ Thommo asked pensively. When I replied, he bolted off for another turn on the barbecue.

  Returning a short time later, he told me, stammering and obviously embarrassed, that he had been in charge of the Thoracic Ward at Townsville General Hospital during this time. Had I not received three letters each time, asking me to come to the hospital for an appointment?

  ‘No, no letters.’ He loped off again to wave his cooking utensils, deep in thought.

  Later, ‘Well, where did you live?’

  ‘In Stanley Street. In the cutting.’

  ‘That explains it then. Everyone knew that’s where the Blacks lived, and the staff probably thought you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, read the letters.’

  I could see he was stung to the quick as his past complicity in the racism which had been part of everyday life in North Queensland during this period was becoming clear to him. Now, through his relationship with an Aboriginal woman, he had been growing aware of the pain that had been inflicted upon individuals for no reason other than their colour. Our conversation was no doubt another harrowing step for him in this process.

  ‘I signed the police warrants,’ he admitted. At that, it was all we could do to stop ourselves from bursting into tears and holding each other, as the shock of these revelations stunned both of us. Marjorie was one of my close friends, and he was Marjorie’s lover. Something soul-building had to come from all this, for all our sakes.

  I told Thommo that I had not agreed to a chest X-ray since this time, and felt I never would again. He said he would get my files and X-rays down from Townsville and look after me himself. Nothing so terrible would ever happen to me again.

  The friendship between Marjorie, Thommo and my family has grown close since that event. When Russel began studying at New South Wales University and could find nowhere to park his Gemini Grasshopper, Marjorie and Thommo invited him to leave it in their yard, which was close to the campus.