Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

The Deacon did his best to win back the audience but it was a losing battle. When he finally asked for a show of hands to see how many Africville residents favoured relocation, only a few raised them.

  The meeting broke up with Mr. Jamieson thanking everyone for their input and promising nothing, and Deacon Johnstone calling on God to bless the City Fathers in their deliberations. As soon as it was over, Lawrence Carter left the church, avoiding the milling residents who wanted to thank him for saying what was on their minds.

  Raymond stayed behind for the sandwiches and date squares, and to watch the adults mix and mingle. O’Sullivan, the MLA, gathered a gaggle of black men, including the Deacon, around him and began telling stories about the goings-on in the Legislature. Despite the tensions earlier, everyone was laughing now. Raymond wondered how they could do that after what had been said—and cheered—earlier. He would never understand adults.

  As for himself, he’d almost raised his hand when the Deacon asked who was in favour of moving the community. He thought it would be exciting to move into a new home with new neighbours. If they ended up in Maynard Square, the public housing complex, that would be okay, too. It would be closer to his new school. He wouldn’t have to get up so early, and he could stay after school for basketball practice. He was going into grade eight and his goal was to make the school’s basketball team.

  “I’d hoped for something more positive tonight.”

  Jamieson and the alderman, Mr. MacPhee, were standing next to Raymond now, drinking cups of coffee from the church china, and talking. They didn’t pay any attention to him.

  “No, really, I mean that. Don’t worry,” Raymond heard the alderman say. “It’s already decided. The deal is done. We’re going to—”

  His words were drowned out by a thunderous roar. The whites looked startled; the Negroes paid no attention. It was the nine o’clock train hurtling through the heart of Africville on its way to Montreal.

  Ward’s first mistake was to be on the wrong playground. At exactly the wrong moment. But how was he supposed to know? It was his first day at his new school and he didn’t know anyone. Besides, Richmond was at least ten times bigger than the school in Eisners Head. The school was so big, he would discover later, that it wasn’t just divided into classrooms but into three distinct sections, each in the architectural style of its era and each housing a different group of students.

  The main building, Old Richmond as it was known, was an imposing early-twentieth-century brick building constructed shortly after the infamous Halifax Explosion of 1917 levelled most of the city’s north end. Old Richmond now housed the principal’s office, the nurse’s office, the library and classrooms for grades four, five and six. The newest addition was a modern, two-storey, glass-and-metal structure that had been grafted on the southern end of Old Richmond just a few years ago. It housed the gym, the teachers’ staff room and classrooms for grades seven, eight and nine. Which is where Ward should have been. But he didn’t know that. How could he?

  His family had only moved to Halifax from Eisners Head the week before. His parents were renting a modest, two-bedroom bungalow a few blocks north of the school. It was the end of May, a strange time to be moving, but his father was eager to get away from Eisners Head. Ward’s teacher had helpfully included a note with his school files, explaining Ward’s situation and outlining his academic achievements. “I’m sure he’ll do well in your school, too, as soon as he adjusts to his new surroundings,” she wrote.

  Ward wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t had time to meet any other kids or even check out the school building before he had to attend his first class. Approaching the school from the direction of his house, all Ward could see was the end of what he would soon learn was the new-old section of the school, a fifties-style, cream-coloured stucco building that housed primary, grades one, two and three, as well as the auxiliary class. Ward had never heard of an auxiliary class before. Back in Eisners Head, the slow learners didn’t get their own space; in fact, there were three or four different grades full of all levels of learners in the same classroom.

  When Ward saw a group of the slow learners—half a dozen boys his own age—huddling together in a far corner of the playground, he assumed he must be in the right place. The fact that all the other children on the playground were much younger didn’t immediately register. As Ward approached, hoping to make a new friend, or at least an acquaintance, before the bell rang, the boys looked up from their huddle, guilty expressions on their faces. Ward could see one of the boys, a tall, gangly Negro boy, shoving a package of cigarettes into his pants pocket.

  “Who you?” he demanded menacingly. He was as tall as Ward and very dark.

  “Ward,” he answered.

  “Where ya from?”

  “Eisners Head.”

  “Da fuck’s dat?” The boy grinned at his friends and then back at Ward.

  “Eastern shore,” Ward said evenly. No point in antagonizing him. “It’s a fishing village.”

  The boy sniffed the air in an exaggerated fashion. “So that the stink I smell.” He was showing off for his friends now. “How much money you got, Fish Boy?”

  Startled by this sudden turn in the conversation, Ward blurted out, “None.” But that wasn’t quite true. He had a quarter in his pocket. He was planning to use some of it to buy a bag of chips or a chocolate bar, at recess. He’d heard you could buy treats right in the school.

  “You lyin’,” the other boy said. “You think he’s lyin’?” he asked the other boys. They nodded. That was their role in this little drama that almost seemed choreographed. “We think you lyin’.” He turned back to Ward. “Show us your pockets.”

  Ward hesitated, scanned their faces for hope, found none. Could he outrun them? He could try. What choice did he have? He reached as if to put his hands in his pockets, then suddenly bolted. But to where? He couldn’t go home. Not now. He had to stay on the schoolyard. The bell was going to ring any minute. Could he last that long? He made for the far end of the triangle-shaped playground as fast as he could, turned, ducked under the arm of his oncoming pursuer and roared past the others, who were trailing in the wake behind the two of them, hoping to see a fight. Ward could hear screams from the little kids in the schoolyard, whether from fear, or excitement, or both, he didn’t know. He saw mothers who’d accompanied their primary school children shielding them from the commotion. Ward did his best to avoid knocking them over, but dodging around the children slowed him down. Finally, the other boy reached out and grabbed a fistful of Ward’s shirt. The shirt ripped, but not enough for Ward to escape. He stumbled and fell hard on the asphalt, ripping a hole in the knee of his new khaki pants. He could feel the sting of scraped skin. He wanted to cry but he couldn’t. The other boy was already on top of him. Ward squirmed to free his arms to fight back, but the other boy was too fast. He grabbed both of Ward’s wrists and pinned them to the ground behind his head.

  “Look in his pockets,” the boy urged his companions, who’d encircled them. “Quick.”

  But the other boys didn’t move. They weren’t even looking at the two of them any more. Instead, they seemed transfixed by something behind Ward’s head. Suddenly, Ward felt the weight of someone grabbing his tormentor and dragging him off.

  “Leave him alone, Jeremiah,” the new boy yelled, shoving him roughly to the asphalt. The new boy was black, too, Ward noticed, but smaller than the first.

  Ward barely had time to digest this new development when a male teacher pushed his way through the crowd. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “Ray hit me,” the boy who was named Jeremiah said. Jeremiah looked as though he was crying, though Ward knew he was faking.

  “Mr. Carter,” the teacher said sharply, addressing the boy named Ray. “I expected much better of you. I guess my expectations were misplaced.” Ray looked as though he wanted to speak, then thought better of it. “Picking on someone like y
oung Mr. Black here. And you a senior student, too.” He shook his head sadly. “You’d better go see Mr. Dunn. Let him sort you out.”

  Jeremiah was smirking as Ray turned and walked toward the school entrance.

  “And who are you, young man?” the teacher asked finally, as if noticing Ward for the first time.

  “Ward Justice, sir.”

  “Oh, yes, the new boy. They sent your files up the other day.” He took in Ward’s dishevelled condition. “Well, come along then,” he said solicitously. “We’d better get you cleaned up.”

  The teacher—his name was Mr. Veniot—dropped Ward off at the nurse’s station beside the principal’s office. You had to go through the principal’s reception room to get to the nurse’s station, so Ward saw the boy named Ray already sitting on a chair in a corner waiting for his turn to see the principal. Ward tried to make eye contact with him, tried to express his gratitude, but Mr. Veniot urged him along.

  The nurse’s office was a small, spare room with just a cot in one corner, a desk in the other and an eye chart and a poster touting the benefits of the Salk vaccine on the walls. Ward remembered getting the vaccine at a special clinic when he was in grade two; he remembered because it was the only time he’d ever got medicine on a sugar cube. The teacher said it was to prevent him from getting polio like Nigel Parsons’s boy, Trevor. Trevor was a cripple who couldn’t walk without crutches. Ward didn’t want to be a cripple, so he would have taken the medicine anyway. The sugar cube was just a bonus.

  “So, what do we have here?” the nurse asked with a smile. She was a short woman, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform, and she spoke with a clipped British accent but in an almost motherly tone of voice. She sat Ward on the cot and used a hot washcloth to clean the dirt and blood from his knee. “Now that doesn’t look too bad, my lad, not too bad at all.” She reached over to the desk and picked up a bottle Ward recognized as iodine. “This is going to sting a bit,” she told him, “but just for a minute.” Ward scrunched up his eyes in anticipation. Then he heard a sharp noise, almost like the report of a gunshot. There was a pause and then the noise again, and again. The nurse looked up, smiled at Ward. “I daresay somebody’s getting a sting worse than you this morning.” Was Ray getting the strap?

  After putting a large bandage on his knee—“You should be ship-shape in no time”—the nurse ushered him into the principal’s office. There was no sign of Ray. “Here’s the new lad, Mr. Dunn,” she explained. “A little the worse for wear, but he’s all right now.”

  Mr. Dunn, who was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt and red-striped tie, was an imposing man, probably six feet tall, with a barrel chest, broad shoulders and biceps that were noticeable even under his shirt sleeves. Ward imagined he would wield a mean strap. Ward himself had never been strapped at his old school, but he knew other boys who had. Ward anxiously noted the black leather strap sitting on the principal’s desk. But Mr. Dunn apparently had no intention of disciplining him. In fact, he was kind, even offering to show Ward around the school “so you’ll know where everything is” before introducing him to his teacher and new classmates.

  It turned out the teacher who’d intervened to break up the schoolyard fight was his grade eight homeroom teacher. The boy named Ray was in his class, too. It wasn’t until recess that Ward finally had the chance to introduce himself and thank Ray for coming to his aid that morning.

  “No problem,” Ray said dismissively. “Jeremiah’s not so bad. Just slow, that’s all. He’s okay by himself, but when he gets with those other guys he just likes to show off is all.”

  “Did you—?” Ward hesitated. “Did you get the strap?”

  Ray grinned. “Yeah, but it’s no big deal. Mr. Dunn, he looks mean but he doesn’t hurt that much.” Still, Ward noticed that Ray kept his hands in his pockets, even when Ray offered him a bite of his Oh Henry! bar. “Nah,” Ray said, and shook his head. “You play ball? Me and Jason McInnes are going to get together a game after school. Wanna come? You can be on my team.” He paused. “You any good?”

  Ward was startled awake by the overwhelming, overpowering noise. Roaring. Coming closer. Another train? There were so many trains here. But no. This was something else.

  Ward looked around, tried to adjust to the unfamiliar surroundings. There were no windows in the wooden shed, just a door made out of planks they’d hooked shut the night before. Dust motes danced in the morning light that streaked in through the spaces between the boards. What time was it? On the other side of the shed, he could see Ray sitting up in his sleeping bag too. Ward tried to read his face. Shocked? Surprised? Scared? All of that. So it definitely wasn’t the train. Ray would have known the sound of a train.

  Suddenly, the roaring gave way to an urgent, angry whine as whatever it was that was out there smacked hard up against something big and immovable. And then it moved. With a cracking, crashing, explosive whoosh of something collapsing in on itself. Ray and Ward looked at one another. Wide-eyed. And all Ward could think was: what would his father say?

  His father wasn’t supposed to know he was there. His mother knew; she’d lied to his father about it, told him Ward was sleeping over at Jason’s house. Jason and Ward were friends, so it wouldn’t seem illogical for Ward to be spending the weekend with him. Ward had already asked Jason to lie about the sleepover the next time he saw his father. The problem was simple: Ward’s father didn’t want his son hanging around with “coloureds.”

  It was his father’s blind spot. Desmond Justice had a thing about Negroes and whites mixing together. “It’s not right,” he said. Ward’s mother tried to excuse it, told Ward his father just didn’t know many coloured people because there hadn’t been any in Eisners Head, and the ones he’d met in Halifax he didn’t like. Desmond was a janitor in a downtown office building where blacks, women mostly, were hired to do the routine cleaning of the offices each night. Ward’s father claimed most of them were lazy and, worse, probably thieves too. “All the coloureds are.”

  Ward’s mother, who didn’t like confrontation if it could be avoided, encouraged Ward to let his father say his piece and then quietly go ahead and do whatever he wanted to do anyway. “There’s no sense in trying to convince your father,” she warned her son. “That’s just the way he is.”

  Ward knew that now. He’d invited Ray home after school one afternoon last fall so they could watch baseball together on the Justices’ new TV. His father hadn’t said anything while Ray was at the house; in fact, he’d treated him with a kind of exaggerated politeness. But that night at supper, after Ray had gone home, he instructed his son: “Stick with your own kind. No good’s gonna come, you mixing with the coloureds.”

  Was this what his father meant? Ward wondered now. He and Ray sitting in a shed in the Carters’ backyard waiting, terrified, for whatever monster was lurking outside to kill them? Would his father be angry? Or sad? Or both?

  Until the beast—that had to be what it was, Ward thought, an inhuman beast—had unleashed its mind-rattling roar, it had been the best sleepover Ward had ever had.

  The strangest part of it all, the part he wished he could have talked about with his father, was that Africville reminded him of Eisners Head. He hadn’t made the connection right away. He’d been too busy trying to keep up with Ray’s whirlwind tour. Ray had met him at the corner of Duffus and Barrington Streets so they could walk the last half mile north to Africville together. Ray carried Ward’s small suitcase; Ward slung his sleeping bag over his shoulder like he’d seen sailors carrying their duffel bags up by the navy base. Though Barrington was a main thoroughfare that ran all the way along the harbour from the very south end of the city through the downtown and north past the naval dockyard along the waterfront to Africville, the pavement stopped just as the street reached Africville. “That’s how you know you’re in Africville. Where the pavement ends, Africville begins,” Ray said, and then pointed to a grassy patch of land sloping dow
n to the water on their right. “That’s Kildare’s Field.”

  As small as it was, every section of Africville seemed to have its own name and purpose. “Used to be a bone meal plant here,” Ray told him.

  “What’s that?” Ward asked.

  Ray grinned sheepishly. “Don’t know,” he answered. “Just know that’s what it was.” These days, he said, people flocked to Kildare’s to picnic and swim.

  Just north of the field he pointed out Tibby’s Pond, actually a shallow, saltwater inlet of the harbour that only turned into a pond at low tide. “When the tide’s partway in and partway out,” Ray told him, “you can walk across the edge of the pond out there like you were walking on water. Just like you’re Jesus.” There were half a dozen rowboats hauled up on shore at the edge of the pond. “We’ll take one later, maybe go fishing,” he said as he led the way to Up the Road, which was what the locals called the main part of Africville, a cluster of perhaps three dozen homes on either side of the dusty dirt road. Ray and his father lived in a small house at the far end of Up the Road. They dropped off Ward’s suitcase and sleeping bag in the empty shed behind the house. “My father says we can stay out here tonight,” Ray said happily.

  Up the Road was just above Back the Field, a gully where some boys were playing pickup baseball. Seeing Jeremiah Black at the plate gave Ward a momentary fright, but then he remembered he was with Ray. Jeremiah knew better than to bother him when Ray was around.

  They followed the railway tracks then, up past clusters of blueberry bushes—“Next month there’ll be blueberries big as your balls”—and over Uncle Laffy’s Hill to Round the Turn, another cluster of houses, where Ray’s mother’s family still lived. Ray introduced him to his grandmother, Ma Jones, who was tending the garden. “Now, mind you boys stay away from the Dump,” she admonished as Ray gave her a kiss and told her they’d be back to see her later. “That Dump’s a dangerous place for little boys,” she said again as they left.