“Every time I hear Trane playing ‘Love Supreme,’ I gotta have me at least one smoke, and . . .” He seemed short of breath, all of a sudden. His words were cut short. Nevertheless, there was a lingering, a drawing out of the enunciation of his words. His words would be cut off. In mid-sentence. As if he were struggling. For breath. And trying to talk at the same time. The middle door on the porch opened and light flowed weakly out, and I could see Calvin’s eyes, now red and fierce and, at the same time, peaceful, and filled with water. But he was not in tears. He was happy. “Want a joint? Can you handle this shit, brother?”
“I’m cool, man.”
“Shit’ll kill you. It’s a motherfucker. It kills the black artist, and the black musician.”
“I’m cool, man.”
“Know something? Let’s not waste time with these chicks. Forget Gwen.” I was wondering what kind of a man Calvin was. “Let’s talk, brother. You’re going back up to Toronto, next week, and when you’re gone, ain’t nobody I can talk to, nobody on this campus, in this city, in this fucking country. Let’s talk. And I gonna cut out all these ‘motherfuckers’ and ‘shits’ in my speech, and just talk.” I was sure he was reading my mind. But I was getting accustomed to his speech, peppered with this Southern or American violence. “I’ve been checking you out back there, while you were talking to yourself, as Trane was grooving. Bet you didn’t realize you were talking to yourself? ‘Love Supreme’ is a motherfuc—is a fantastic piece, freaks me out too, every time I listen to it. At least five times a day. And if I have a joint, shee—well, it’s fantastic.” He took the last, deep, noisy pull on the cigarette, now no longer than his fingernail. “‘Love Supreme’ brings back memories of something my grandmother used to hum, just after she lit the kerosene lamps every evening. Some white folks calls this shit a canticle. Took me years to stop confusing canticle with cuticle. Heh-heh! But, anyhow. This canticle thing has a Latin name. Man! I kicked more ass, I was superior to everybody in my class in Latin in high school. Hate the thing now, though. But I know it all, by heart. Had to learn it by heart. Been learning it by heart from hearing my grandmother, singing it for years. Listen. O, all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him forever. Want to hear more?”
“Didn’t know you were Anglican.”
“Baptist! To the bone. But I read that shit in a book that had words like works, nights, days, whales, water, etcetera, etcetera, and all were spelled with a capital letter. Isn’t that something? The English be strange motherfuckers. Strange people. In the South, right here in this city of Birmingham, we worship the English, culturally I mean. The English use colons like Coltrane uses the E-flat! Baptist to the bone! Baptist to the bone. And anti-English, except culturally.” He threw the marijuana cigarette, now smaller than his fingernail, through the window. The VW’s engine started as if the whole car was about to explode. It stuttered, and finally, it turned over. “Life is better without chicks around. Sometimes. We’re going to the Stallion Club, where there’s the best rib sandwiches and fried chicken in the whole city of Birmingham! If not in the whole South!”
Pandemonium, sweet as pecan pie and ice cream, struck me full in the face, the moment the door of the Stallion Club was opened, when Calvin pushed me inside, first. The room was dark. Bodies were moving. The laughter was loud and sweet and black and jocular and exaggerated. Smoke was rising and swirling. And above the lighter darkness of the bodies in the room, the smoke remained there like halos. The music was climbing the walls. Music such as this I had never heard. It was like a baptism, a final submergence in the hidden, secret beauty of the South. Loud and full, enunciating each vowel, each nuance possible of behaviour, each instrument, each riff. I heard a voice pleading, “Didn’t I do it, baby? Didn’t I? Didn’t I do it, baby?” and I looked towards the stage, in the deeper darkness there, through the large, slow-moving dancers, expecting to see Aretha Franklin in the flesh. What a victory it would be, to know her, in this thick-fleshed Southern, warm night! I was overcome by the music. I could feel my entire body relax. I could smell the odours around me. I could feel my blood. I could feel the difference, and the meaning of my presence in the South. The fried chicken. The barbecued ribs. The tingling, sweet nausea of burnt hair. The cosmetics and lotions in the glassy, bushy “pompadoos,” as Calvin called them, on the fat, healthy jowls of the men and women dancing. I could feel my own body give off a stifled exhaust of smell. I could feel the sweat and the excitement under my armpits. A housefly was in the room. It came and rested on my top lip, and I did not brush it away. I was, for the first time, at home in the noise, the smells, the fragrance, the sounds and the voice of this city of Birmingham. And they all made me nervous, as they made me good. “Didn’t I do it, baby? Didn’t I . . .” I was like a man drowning in this foam of a wave that one moment ago had been wafting me in its freshness; I was moving towards the front of the swaying crowd that was coupled in its own sweetness. I looked into their faces. And those faces that were not buried into the necks and shoulders of men and women wore flat expressions. Masks. No one was smiling. No one was grinning. No one was laughing as he danced. No teeth showed in this relaxed, coagulating, heavy, and soft coupling of the music with the voice. It was as if the voice was giving them a message they all knew and desired. I could feel and taste the powerfulness in the large room. It was like a country. A country of men and women, all of the same colour, the same breathing. And this became my baptism: I had never imagined it was possible to be in a room so large with only black people. Never in Toronto. Never even in Barbados. I looked around to see, just in case. And there was none, not one white person. It was a beautiful sensation, and it frightened me. This is why I thought of powerfulness. And now I knew what it meant. I could feel it in my blood. Two large women, heavy in their thighs, heavy in their bosoms, heavy in their arms, heavy in their waists, each one about fifty-five years old, were tied together in the slow almost unmoving dance; their breasts pressed against each other, thighs glued together beneath their miniskirts, looking like logs of mahogany polished to a high magnificent sheen, arms lassoed to arms like tentacles, or in a Boston crab, and with the weight of their waists pressed together, begrudging space and denying any man’s hand from forcing itself between their impenetrable love, close as if they were Siamese; love for the music and for the voice that pumped this love from one into the other, blood through veins, these two women moved in their heaviness like oil on shining glass, oblivious to the fact that there were hundreds dancing along with them. They moved as if they were on ice. They moved, only because I had seen them leave one spot small as a dime, and occupy another dime’s area, not that they themselves could ever know that they had moved. They were close to me now, and I stood for a moment and watched them. I watched them grinding out their satisfaction and their ageless joy in this heavy, segregated world, in this black section of this city, safe amongst numbers, and amongst blackness created through the dance. Didn’t I do it, baby?; a black world and a black poem which the dance itself had formed and had drawn a circle around. “This is a black world,” Calvin said, having to shout to be heard.
I was now only three paces from the stage. I stood. I had to stand, for the bodies were not moving now. They were grinding. I was the only one who moved. I was the only one out of the rhythm. Inching to the stage, I was the only one out of place.
“Didn’t I do it, baby?”
The face of the singer was bathed in black perspiration. It was like the water of baptism and of revival. And it was growing out of the body, like strength. Not dripping like an exertion. The thin, tight body looked as if it was being tormented. I could see this through the slits of space in the crowd as the dancers moved. I could see it as a slice of a fish, a slice of a human being, slithering in the shimmering sequins on the long dress that was like an extra skin. She was bathed in the white material of the dress, like a dolphin. “Didn’t I do it, baby?”
“This sister can whup Aretha’s ass any . . .” And Ca
lvin’s voice was blocked out, for a moment, by the passing of the two women between us. “. . . any mother—any day!” Here in this room, I needed space even to hear. The song came to a perspiring end. It was a soft end. And it was followed by an explosion of applause. Handkerchiefs, fingers, and Kleenexes came out to repair the cheeks, and wipe away the beads that had damaged the neckline and the collar and the forehead for the duration of that lovemaking rendition. And before the women and men had completed the renovation of their cosmetics, the mermaid of a woman on the stage began another song. “A midnight train to Georgia . . .” Without warning, without even a desire to join in this dance and in this circle, for I was out of place, inarticulate, foreign, without speech and gesticulation, one of the fat ladies took me into her arms. It was like a mother knowing before the expression of pain is moaned, how to take her child into the safety of her breast and bosom. I sank deep and comfortable in the billows of her love, as her arms wrapped my smaller body in embrace so much like my mother’s that I felt I could fall off into a sweet slumber and surrender myself to her; except that the song was raging through the magnolia and pine and poplar woods of a land that held such frightening memories. And Calvin was there to witness my surrender, and perhaps, in a seminar on black behaviour, live to tell the story. But she held me close. She held me tight. She held her left arm round my waist, and her right hand on the softness of my bottom. I began to travel all those miles between the never-ending rails of steel, going from one place I did not know, to a place which was even farther removed from my present; but to a place which was identifiable, as I was able to know where I am now. And so, I buried myself in her flesh, her perfume acting as a mild chloroform, and I found that Gwen and the woman in Toronto climbed into the sweet delirium along with the woman holding me, and I paid no regard to those two encumbrances, and allowed myself to be moved so very slowly by her, by her body that was guiding me, and by her blood which I thought I could taste. But that would have been, in addition to the unseemly, unnatural acts, incest. I was dancing with my mother. The smell of her body, and the strength in her legs, which were tightened round my left leg, was like the tightness of a thick towel after a bath deep in winter. I could hardly breathe. But I could just as easily have died in her arms.
The housefly I had seen earlier returned and lighted on the woman’s mouth. She pursed her lips, unwilling to release one hand and let go of my body; and the fly fled. It probably had learned, through its ugly leaden antennae, what thunderous violence her anger would give rise to, in the slap the woman would have used.
Her lips were rouged in a deep red. Like the blood inside her body which I felt I could feel and taste. But I was not entirely passive in my enjoyment. My eight fingers were pressed deeply into her soft flesh. With difficulty I tried to move to the music, in my own slow, sweet time. It was like poetry; and I thought of poetry. And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman . . .
“Are you screwing me, nigger?” she asked. And then laughed. A breath of Jack Daniels came to my nostrils when she spoke. I could feel her weight. I had made a wrong step, and her weight fell upon me. And I wondered what it would be like, if by accident, I were to make another wrong step, and she were to fall on top of me. “You want me?” She whispered this into my ear. I smelled her lipstick. I smelled her Jack Daniels again. “You’re screwing me, ain’t you?” Her mouth was at my ear. I smelled her perfume, and the cosmetics and the treatment in her processed hair. She tightened her grip on me. She tightened her grip more. My breathing became more difficult. And then she groaned, in a short spasm. My wishes raced through the house-high hay, and nothing I cared . . . that time allows. “You like me, don’t you, small-island man?”
Whatever Georgia was, whatever was the ruggedness of its landscape, whether of rocks or of stones, green fields of sugar cane or of cotton and corn, the concluding journey was before me. The singer was washed in perspiration, pouring out of her body with a sensual righteousness; the sequins in her dress moved as she breathed, from her ankles to her covered arms, like pistons on the very train that was pulling into Georgia, long after midnight. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of her means, time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea.
“I want you, nigger. I have to have you.”
I could feel it. I could feel the soft inside of her thighs. I was hard. The singer was coming home. Two sequined arms dropped at her side, in victory like that which concludes exhaustion of the flesh. And sudden so, the strong feeling thundered down. The rain had arrived.
“You want me, don’t ya? I want you.”
“No, I don’t want you,” I said.
“Well, fuck it! Nigger, you’s mine!”
“Clovis!” It was Calvin, like a referee forcing himself between two locked boxers. “Clovis! Take your motherfucking hands off the brother! The brother’s with me, motherfucker!” And Calvin ripped at Clovis’s head, as if he was delivering a jab to the face. And when Calvin’s hand returned from the face, in it was the wig which had contained such allure and fragrance of Duke Greaseless Hairdressing for Women. His head was shaven bald, and was shining, and he was shaking with anger; and he said in a huskier voice, “Shit, Cal! I thought the nigger was mine!”
“Motherfucker!” Calvin pushed him off.
A few men and women danced close to us, looked at me and danced away. I stood looking at Clovis’s shining head.
“Motherfucker, this is a Yale professor!”
“I could’ve swear, Cal, honey, the nigger was mine. I am very sorry, sir, I am very sorry,” Clovis said, offering me his hands. I remembered his hands were very soft. But by this time, I was feeling the eruption in my bowels; and Calvin, sensing this, and intent upon freeing me from this assault, this offence, and knowing that I had lusted after the wrong person, was easing me with some force through the thick of the crowd, to the entrance. On the way out, I barely recognized Clovis’s voice, as he stood where he was, saying, “I knew the nigger looked strange, as if he didn’t belong here, weren’t one of us, weren’t from the South, so what the fuck was I supposed to think?”
I could not wait until I was on the gravel patch in front of the entrance of the Stallion Club, before the vomit spewed down on my white dashiki, onto my white cotton Levi’s, into my shoes, with the noise and the slime and the bad taste, and Calvin talking and talking.
“Shit, brother, couldn’t you tell?”
“How?”
“Didn’t you see the motherfucker didn’t have no breasts? Couldn’t you see?”
“How? I was mesmerized by the woman singing ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’”
“That motherfucker was a man too, brother!” The vomit punctuated whatever else he was about to say. It was coming out with pain and with violence, as if I was trying to rip something awful, something vile, some sin, some hurt clean from my insides.
“I was in love with the woman singing ‘Midnight Train.’”
“The woman singing is also a man,” Calvin said. Pity and disappointment in me registered in his explanation. “The woman is a motherfucking man, brother! This be the South. Birmingham. In the South, it be so fucked up, you can’t tell one motherfucker from the next.”
“I thought the man was a woman.”
“It’s a motherfucking man, Jack! A man!”
He lit a Salem. “Sure’s hell ain’t Toronto, Jack!”
GRIFF!
Griff was a black man from Barbados who sometimes denied he was black. Among black Americans who visited Toronto, he was black: “Right on!” “Peace and love, brother!” and “Power to the people!” would suddenly become his vocabulary. He had emigrated to Toronto from Britain and, as a result, thought of himself as a black Englishman. But he was blacker than most immigrants. In colour, that is. It must have been this double indemnity of being British and black that caused him to despise his blackness. To his friends, and his so-called friends, he flaunted his British experience, and the “civilized” bearing that came with it; and he
liked being referred to as a West Indian who had lived in London, for he was convinced that he had an edge, in breeding, over those West Indians who had come straight to Canada from the cane fields in the islands. He had attended Ascot many times and he had seen the Queen in her box. He hated to be regarded as just black.
“Griff, but you’re blasted black, man,” Clynn said once, at a party in his own home, “and the sooner you realize that fact, the more rasshole wiser you would be!” Clynn usually wasn’t so honest, but that night he was drunk.
What bothered Griff along with his blackness was that most of his friends were “getting through”: cars and houses and “swinging parties” every Friday night, and a yearly trip back home for Christmas and for Carnival. Griff didn’t have a cent in the bank. “And you don’t even have one blasted child, neither!” Clynn told him that same night.
But Griff was the best-dressed man present. They all envied him for that. And nobody but his wife really knew how poor he was in pocket. Griff smiled at them from behind his dark green dark glasses. His wife smiled too, covering her embarrassment for her husband. She never criticized him in public, by gesture or by attitude, and she said very little to him about his ways in their incensed apartment. Nevertheless, she carried many burdens of fear and failure for her husband’s apparent ambitionless attitudes. England had wiped some British manners on her too. Deep down inside, Griff was saying to Clynn and the others, Godblindyougodblindyou!
“Griffy dear, pour your wife a Scotch, darling. I’ve decided to enjoy myself.” She was breathing as her yoga teacher had taught her to do.
And Griffy said, Godblindyougodblindyou! again to Clynn; poured his wife her drink, poured himself a large Scotch on the rocks, and vowed, I am going to drink all your Scotch tonight, boy! This was his only consolation. Clynn’s words had become wounds. Griff grew so centred around his own problems that he did not, for one moment, consider any emotion coming from his wife. “She’s just a nice kid,” he told Clynn once, behind her back. He had draped his wife in an aura of sanctity; and he would become angry to the point of violence, and scare anybody, when he thought his friends’ conversation had touched the cloud and virginity of the sanctity in which he had clothed her: like taking her out on Friday and Saturday nights to the Cancer Calypso Club, in the entrails of the city, where pimps and doctors and lonely immigrants hustled women and brushed reputations in a brotherhood of illegal liquor. And if the club got too crowded, Griff would feign a headache, and somehow make his wife feel the throbbing pain of his migraine, and would take her home in a taxi, and would recover miraculously on his way back along Sherbourne Street, and with the tact of a good barrister, would make tracks back to the Cancer and dance the rest of the limp-shirt night with a woman picked from among the lonely West Indian stags, his jacket let loose to the sweat and the freedom, his body sweet with the music, rejoicing in the happy absence of his wife in the sweet presence of this woman.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 58
