The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  Calvin was now slouched behind the steering wheel, as if the Ripple had suddenly changed the composition of the blood in his veins. His right arm was extended so that his fingers just touched the steering wheel, as if he wanted no closer association with it. As if he was despising the wheel, the VW, along with the statement he had just made about rejection. “What the fuck am I getting a college education for? And writing academic papers on reductionism for?” I still did not understand what he was talking about. But he brought the VW to an uncertain stop. We were under a tree. Calvin had told me the name of this tree. They were all over the South; and they cluttered the path through the woods to a building on campus where convocations were held. The first time Calvin told me the name of this tree, he told me about a woman named Billie Holiday. I did not know whom he was talking about; but he started to sing the words of a song, “Strange Fruit,” and we were inhaling the sweet smell of the magnolia trees and the wind was unforgiving in bringing the strong Southern smell to our nostrils. I would have trouble remembering the name of the woman who sang this song, and more often the title of the song slipped my memory. But I remembered one line, only one line of the song about Southern trees. Blood on the leaves, and blood at the root. Calvin had sung the entire song from memory. He sang it off-key. And now, this afternoon, the VW stopped uncertainly because he had never accumulated the thirty dollars to fix the brakes, we were stopped under a tree. I looked up into the thick branches of the trees under which we had walked to the place which served beer in frosted glasses and huge Polish sausages, and only the raindrops accumulated on the leaves dropped into my face.

  “What kind of tree is that? I don’t think we have these trees in Toronto.”

  “The size, or the name?” Calvin asked.

  The mouth of the Ripple bottle was in his mouth. A little of the wine escaped his lips, and it ran slowly down into his beard, but I could still see the rich colour of red, like blood.

  “The name.”

  “Poplar. This be a poplar tree.”

  We were shaded by the tree. And I was beginning to feel great relief from the humidity which embraced me like a tight-fitting shirt.

  Southern trees bear strange fruit.

  Calvin’s singing had not improved in the month since I had first heard it. I smiled at his rendition.

  Black bodies hanging in the Southern breeze.

  We remained in the shade, and I could feel the breeze, making my body cool, as if I was being dipped slowly into seawater. I was comfortable. But Calvin was not: sadness appeared in his eyes. His lips formed themselves into a sneer. He moved his body, and the bottle of Ripple became heavy and caused the seat and the leather to cry out. The leather on the seats of the VW was the most valuable feature of the old rumbling automobile. He moved his body in the small space we shared, and I could smell his perspiration, and his breath laden with the menthol from the Salems, and the sickening sweetness of the Ripple.

  “Dualism, my brother,” he said. He leaned over, took the bottle from me, and drained it dry. “What the fuck? I’ve seen the asswhuppings in Selma, Bamma, Little Rock.”

  The breeze stopped. In the languor of the afternoon we were once more lumbering over the road, which turned to hard, dried, uncared-for dirt. It was sad. The sadness was like the sudden fall of dust under the low-hanging trees, when the scent of magnolia rises like shimmering zzz’s you see, if you kneel down, rising from a hot tarred road.

  “What do you want to be, then? What do you want to make of your life, if not be a scholar?”

  “Miles!”

  “Away from Birmingham?”

  “Miles Davis!”

  I did not know what to say to this: Calvin’s feelings and fantasies seemed to inflate his thin body, making him large and grand and strong as the running back he always boasted he was when he played for his college football team.

  “As Barry White says, bro’, let the music play. Let the music play on. Let the motherfucking music play, Jack! I be Miles. I am Miles. Or, I am Coltrane. Trane. I am Otis. I’m Nina Simone. And I am ’Retha! And I am on a stage at the biggest theatre in the South, but not the Opry, and thousands are out there in the dark screaming my name. My toon. My voice. My riffs. My trumpet. My tenor horn. It’s the same fucking thing, Jack. Let the music play.”

  The smell of Calvin’s Salems, the old odour that had settled inside the VW, filled my nostrils; and with these smells was the smell of clothes that are wet, and drying in the back seat. I could also smell the oiliness of Southern-fried chicken from Chicken Box Number Two. We had eaten chicken many times in the VW, deliberately not eating in restaurants, as if we were still suffering from the segregation of accommodation. Eating in the VW allowed us greater ease of checking out the beautiful women coming out of the women’s residence in their pink shorts, and white shorts, and blue shorts. Perhaps we had left some uneaten boxes in the back seat.

  We were by ourselves on this road of dried mud now, running by a field in which grew something I could not recognize. Corn came to mind, as this place shared the geography of that island where I came from. Corn came naturally to mind, but there was not the lusciousness in the endless spread of green that made me feel we were adrift on the sea; we were alone, although far to the right I could see the smudged whiteness of the pillars and other parts of the architecture from colonial times; and closer on our right, some small houses, and from them sentinels of rising white smoke that turned blue as it reached high above our heads. And still the sun was shining.

  And then in the distance, like the call of my mother’s voice, miles away, but only a few yards from the makeshift cricket pitch we had gouged out of our own mud to play the game, my mother’s voice calling me home for dinner: rice cooked with few split peas because there was a war on, and served with salt fish from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, thin and flat and full of bones, but transformed by the improvised wisdom in these things of my mother, and soaked in lard oil, tangy from the cheap butter it was said we imported from Australia, to us in a commonwealth of nations, friends; and tomatoes picked from our backyard; that welcoming call, that wrenched me from my friends and playmates, disappointed that I had not hit the ball for six, or four, or even a single in the hot, hot-competing afternoon. So did this sound come to me, unanchored in this vastness of living, thriving green, in the rickety VW with a stranger, drinking Ripple concealed in a brown paper bag from the eyes of the sheriff.

  In the blue-white distance I heard the heavy rumbling of a train. A freight train. I followed the train as it wriggled its way like a worm through the greenness on the land, as it moved like a large worm, and in my mind, through the history its approach was unravelling and through the myths of trains, men on the run travelled on them; men fleeing women and wives and child payments hid on them; and men in chains and those who escaped from chain gangs were placed on them. The best blues were written about them. The rumbling of this train, like the rumbling of that train in the cowboy movies of the Old West, seemed interminable as a toothache that comes at sunset and that lasts throughout the groaning night, like a string pulled by a magician from the palm of one hand, like the worm you pull from the soft late grass-covered ground that does not end, and that makes you late to go fishing. I heard a siren. Or a whistle? There were so many sirens I was hearing this summer in Birmingham because of civil rights and fights with sheriffs, that I sometimes mistook the sound. I heard a siren. The siren killed the sound of the train.

  “Police cruiser?” I asked Calvin. “Or ambulance?”

  “In this neighbourhood, could be either. Both. Chitlins and hog maws. One goes with the other.”

  “Cops coming through the grass?” I still did not know what was planted in the growing vastness surrounding me.

  Calvin lit another Salem. The VW was immediately filled with smoke. This lasted for one moment. Then, it was filled with a tingling, sweet, and bitter smell. It was not the Salem that Calvin had lighted. It was not a Salem. But he filled his lungs with the smoke, and the
n shot two unbroken thin and fierce jets of white from his nostrils, making him look, in that moment, like a walrus; speaking through smoke and coughing at the same time as if his thinness meant tuberculosis, and with his breath held, he said, “What can we in the South do, with this dualism thing? Before it fucks us up?”

  “Education could never be so destructive.”

  “Spoken like a true West Indian who knows nothing about the South, and Amerrikah.”

  “Education is freedom.”

  “Spoken like a man who’s never lived in Birmingham, or in any city in the South!”

  “You need education.”

  “We need a black thang. We don’t need no education, brother. A black thang. And a black conclusion.”

  “And what about your seminar on reductionism?”

  “Shit! Can you see me discussing that at my mother’s Sunday dinner table? She be calling the cops thinking this nigger’s crazy!”

  The VW became quiet, still filled with the strange smoke. The words Calvin was using were larger than the capacity of the small “Bug,” too bulging with the possibility of explosion and violence. I went back to the Mexicans on the lawns. I began to have the sensation of being rocked from side to side. But it could have been the vibration of the freight train, which had not yet come to its end from within the tunnel created by the endless fields of growing things. Looking outside through the steam of smoke from Calvin’s fag, I saw pieces of cement and concrete and paper blowing along the narrow sidewalks and into the street. The light here was harsh. There were no flowers. There were no poplar trees. The trees here were stubby, but they did not shade the blinding, shimmering waves that came off the surface of the sidewalk. I wished, at that moment, that I was back in Toronto among the red brick, the dirty red brick and cobblestones, passing shops that sold the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement, and that sold Condor and Erinmore pipe tobacco and French cigarettes and French leathers or letters—I never knew which was the proper term—things I was accustomed to, and knew how to handle, among the buildings that were not so imposing and the short streets. Space there was more manageable. I wished for the softness of streets shaded by small trees, and lined with cars, many of which belonged to students and were broken into; with garbage pails of green and other wrecks; and I wanted the softness of the northern seductive and betraying nights, and to be among the unthreateningness of broken-down homes with cloth at their windows and with unpainted boards nailed across the windows and the doors, derelicts from the nights of rioting in the cities in the North—Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C.; and missed by Toronto.

  Calvin must have been buried in similar thoughts of wanting to be elsewhere, must have come to a conclusion of similar importance, or to some agreeable compromise with his thoughts about education, for he straightened his back, and the vigour and youth of his years came back into his body. His eyes were bright again; and the whiteness in them shone. The dashiki he was wearing made him look noble like an emperor, stiff and proud with knowing where he was.

  “This is the very last time I be laying this paranoid shit on you, brother. You are my guest here in this city. I am a Southerner, and we Southerners ’re hospitable people. I’m gonna show y’all some real Southern shit now, y’all!”

  He had lit a Salem before he spoke. He was the kind of man who could not make a serious statement before he had first lit a cigarette. Smoke streamed through his nostrils, and he looked like a walrus again.

  “I’m an Amerrikan. This is my motherfucking country.”

  “You were born here, man.”

  “I’m a Southerner. So, let’s have some Ripple. Let’s drink this shit.”

  It was a long road. There were no street lights. Dust swirled round the tires of the VW, as it pierced its single weak headlamp through the oncoming darkness. “If the man don’t get me for this Ripple, he sure’s shit gonna get me for this light!” The moon was a dark sliver of lead, far off to the right. Calvin was still in his cut-down jeans and dashiki. But I had changed. I was in white. White Levi’s and a white dashiki, bought from the Soul Brother Store. When I went into the store, dark and musty and smelling of old cigars, the owner greeted me, “Brother, come in, brother!” He charged me twenty dollars more than the price I had seen on the same clothes in two other, white stores on the same integrated street. But I did not divulge this to Calvin.

  “Lay it on me, brother!” Calvin had said in admiration and in approval, when he picked me up.

  “Be cool, man,” I had told him, trying hard to be cool.

  “Gwen’s opened your nose!” he said, meaning that Gwen was educating me in the ways of the South.

  “Shee-it!” I said, hoping it came out right, and heavy, and properly Southern.

  “Shit!” Calvin said. His speech was like a crisp bullet in my chest.

  Now, driving along this road, in the middle, there was no dividing line, and if there was, we could not see it; in the swirling flour of this thin road, cramped in the VW, with the smell of smoke, a trace of leather, and the acrid and sweet languor from the fumes of Ripple, making less speed than the rattle of the muffler suggested, and hitting stones in the middle of the road, the two of us, rebellious and drunk in our joy, were like escaped prisoners; but I, like a man redeemed, Gwen had said, when I was at the door like a gentleman, “Shee-it, you ain’t leaving here to walk those dark streets, at this hour, man. This is the South,” saying it with a pronounced West Indian accent; we were now, Calvin and I, screaming and hollering as if we were both born in the ecstasy of mad Southern Saturday nights in Birmingham.

  Calvin slapped an eight-track tape into the player. “My Favorite Things” came out. The hymn-like introduction, like a chant, coiled around the jazz solo, reminded me of matins at St. Matthias Anglican Church in Barbados, and especially evensong and service. I could picture myself walking in that peaceful sacred light, one hour after the sun had gone down behind the tall casuarinas, trees that reached the sky, in my imagination, when there was slice of a moon, like this one here in Birmingham, and walking between thick green sugar canes in my black John Whites that kicked up almost as much dust as the tires of this old VW. And each time Coltrane repeated the main statement of the tune, I could hear and recall the monotony of the tolling bells. There, my mother walked beside me, in contented sloth of age, of sickness, and of Christianity. Here, I bent my neck to the charmed pull of the music.

  Calvin is silent beside me. This music is his. I have heard this music before, probably, all the places and things and colours that the music is showing me I have faced in Toronto. The tape is scratched badly.

  In the distance, pointed out to us by the weak left headlamp, is a barn, or a factory, perhaps something that was once used as a portable camp for soldiers. Soldiers are always on my mind in Birmingham, this summer. The Civil War, a magazine swears in its cover story, is about to be fought again: white people versus black people. Soldiers with muskets, vertical straps of leather aslant their shoulders, fighting for the other cause. And the flag of their confederation with its own two vertical blue slashes across its broad bloodied shoulder, signifying something different. This building in the shortening distance sits in a square stubbornness in the middle of the single headlamp, with no grace of architecture like the white-painted gazebo. From this distance it is black. It soon looks brown. Light from inside the building is being forced through small windows that are covered by blinds made of sacks for sugar, not for Bohemian style, but from economy. And as we get nearer still, the truth of its dimension, size, and colour, is exposed to us.

  Coltrane’s tenor saxophone reminds me of the singing of old women, repeating the verse of the hymn as if their age has crippled their recollection of succeeding verses. So, I begin to think again of my mother, leading the song at the Mothers’ Union service, going over it again. “Rock of Ages.” This saxophone is not speaking of such desperation, though.

  We are approaching Gwen’s wooden house.

  Calvin stops the VW, f
or no reason; and I realize he’s always doing this, but this time he parks it, and it rocks forward and backward, just before the engine dies. We are now bathed in the light from the naked fluorescent bulb on Gwen’s porch. I did not see this light the night of the party. The rain was too heavy that night.

  “You’re really into Trane playing ‘Love Supreme’!” he said.

  “Not ‘My Favorite Things’?”

  “‘Love Supreme,’ brother.”

  How many other things in this city of Birmingham, this South, in this culture, in this short time here had I got wrong? I had heard a train, but was there a train rolling through the green fields like a lawnmower? I had seen a moon, but now that we were stopped, there was no moon.

  “A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme,” Calvin said. “Nineteen times Trane chants it.” I can see movement in Gwen’s house, at the side, for the bedrooms are at the side.

  Calvin got out, leaving me in the car, slammed the door shut, and stood beside the car. A splattering of water hit the gravel. I imagined steam rising. I could smell the sting of the water. And then I too got out, and shook my legs, each one, to straighten the seams of my tight-fitting jeans. Calvin was still peeing and shaking. Some men can pee as long as horses. But it looked more as if he was being shaken by the peeing, in short spasms of delight and relief. Each time I thought that Calvin was finished, he shook again. I was wrong about the name of the tune on the eight-track. I was wrong about my mother. It was not “Rock of Ages.” It was not even the walk through the country lane going to St. Matthias Anglican Church for evensong and service that had pulled those memories from me. It was I myself. As a chorister in the St. Michael’s Cathedral, singing a song of praise. Was it Easter I was thinking about? Easter? Or Christmas? Rogations Day? Quinquagesima Sunday? Could it have been Lent? O, all ye beasts of the sea, praise ye the Lord. O, all you fish of the sea, praise ye the Lord? Could it have been that? Yes. That was the comparison of the repetition which the beauty of the saxophone ought to have brought back.