Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Which was another reason Ward was looking forward to moving into his own apartment in September. That and the fact he’d finally have a place he could take girls. Maybe even this one.

  “So how’d you end up in Halifax?”

  It must have been the wine for her, too. Whatever it was, Vicky Cullingham seemed genuinely interested in Ward’s story, and the more he told her about his father, and Junior Eisner, and the strike, and the blacklisting, the more he felt forgotten filial pride bubbling back up’ from the depths of the black ocean of his subconscious.

  “So that’s my story,” he said, when he felt he’d finally exhausted her tolerance for his tale of woe. “What about yours?”

  She laughed. “B-o-r-i-n-g!’ But it wasn’t. Perhaps because her life story was so foreign to anything he’d experienced or could imagine, he listened with the same rapt attention she’d offered him.

  She’d spent most of her childhood shuttling from boarding school to boarding school because her mother—a forbidding woman who’d met her father in Paris after the war—decided, after a term or two, that each new school wasn’t up to her own exacting educational standards. There was also the reality, Vicky confided, that she also wasn’t meeting their too-lax educational standards.

  She’d got accepted at Dalhousie University two years ago because her father was on the board of governors. But that wasn’t enough to keep her there. She’d flunked every single course her first year, largely because she hadn’t attended one class since October. She’d spent the next year—last year—in happy exile in Europe. “I smoked a ton of dope,” she boasted, “screwed a Greek poet ten years older than me and painted all sorts of pictures of nothing in particular.” A Greek poet? Still around? “And now I’m back. I’m going to NSCAD in September.”

  “Nascad?”

  “Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Used to be called just the Art College, you remember, the place where Anna Leonowens taught? Anna and the King of Siam? The movie? Yul Brynner?” He didn’t have a clue. The wine had him now. She could see that. “Oh, never mind. Anyway, it’s all changed. They’ve got a new president and he’s bringing in all his conceptual artist buddies from New York. Everybody’s stoned all the time. It’s going to be fun.” She’d lost him totally now.

  She reached over, grabbed hold of his tie and pulled him toward her. She kissed him full on the mouth. Just like that. “Why don’t you take off that stupid tie?” she said as she released him. “You’re making me hot.” He thought he understood. “No, dummy,” she said when she saw the look on his face. “Not that kind of hot. Warm hot. Temperature hot. Uncomfortable, stuffy hot. You need to relax.” Ward took off his tie. “Better,” she said. “Wanna smoke a joint?”

  “Sure.” Did he? He’d smoked up. At parties, mostly. But it made him nervous every time. What would getting caught mean to his political ambitions? He now had political ambitions. Ward wanted to be premier some day. Or at least he thought he did. Being arrested for smoking marijuana would not look good on a campaign poster. He wasn’t quite sure why it would be worse than getting caught collecting kickbacks for Jack, or attending, as he’d done twice now, a Members’ Appreciation Night, but he knew it was. And that it was probably even worse to light up on a rooftop balcony overlooking a garden party full of the city’s most prominent Liberals. But breaking the mood of this moment would have been worst of all.

  He watched as she pulled the elasticized top of her sundress away from her skin, reached in and fished out a fat joint and a book of matches. “Storage,” she said as she lit the joint and took a long, deep suck on it. “Bras are good for storage.”

  For reasons that made no sense—he hadn’t yet taken a drag—Ward found this incredibly amusing. He began to giggle. When she handed him the joint and he tried to inhale, he ended up coughing and sputtering, which triggered a laughing fit in her. Pretty soon, they were both doubled over, not sure what was so funny, but trying their best not to attract attention from the revellers below.

  After they’d finished the joint, they sat down on the benches on opposite sides of the balcony, quiet, lost in their own thoughts. Ward’s thoughts were simple. And complicated. Why had she decided to sit on the other bench rather than beside him? Should he go over and sit beside her, show her he was interested, or would that break the spell, end the sweet illusion in his head?

  “What’re you thinking?” he said finally, breaking the silence.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You?”

  “Nothing.” He was lying. He suspected she was too. Was she hoping he would make a move? Or worrying how she would let him down if he did? Perhaps she was remembering what it had been like to fuck her Greek poet. He hoped not. He needed to do something, needed to go and sit beside her, ask her to a movie, or dinner, a drive in the country. He couldn’t. He needed to. He should. He—

  “Coming up.” It was her father’s voice calling from the sunroom below—the warning call of a father who didn’t want to discover his daughter doing something he wouldn’t approve of, even though he knew she probably was. Ward tried to wave away any telltale smells. Vicky shook her head as if to say it didn’t matter.

  “Thought I might find you two up here,” he said as he popped his head through the opening in the roof. He didn’t come up all the way. He turned to Ward. “Ever since she was a little girl, we always knew where to look for Victoria when she disappeared, usually in the middle of a party, even when it was her own. Right, Princess?”

  “Right, Daddy.”

  “The only thing that’s changed,” he added, theatrically sniffing the air, “is what she does up here.” He caught Ward’s surprised look. “Oh, don’t worry, young man, your secret is safe with me.” He turned back to Victoria. “Just don’t let your mother catch you. Anyway,” he addressed Ward again, “your friend, Mr. Eagleson, is getting anxious to leave and he’s looking for his driver. I’ll let him know you’re on your way,” he said as he turned around and made his way back down the circular staircase.

  Ward stood up. So did Victoria.

  Later, when he tried to recreate the moment in his head, he couldn’t decide if he’d reached for her first, or if she had opened her arms to him. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that they’d kissed and held each other like neither wanted the moment to end.

  “Why don’t you come back later,” she said finally. “Come back and I’ll show you my etchings.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips.

  Patrick Donovan stood in front of a third-floor window in the press room at City Hall, looking down on a sea of chanting, singing humanity surging below him along Barrington. To the north, the parade of people—black, white, men, women, young, old—stretched into the distance until it disappeared into the enveloping October night. To the south, he could see the front line of marchers make the hard right turn into the Grand Parade about five hundred feet beyond his vantage point. He tried to determine the number of demonstrators arrayed in loose rows across the street in front of him but the rows kept shifting and he lost count.

  He hurried into the Council Chambers and, standing on his tip-toes, peered out over the heads of a cluster of nervous-looking aldermen who’d gathered to watch the spectacle outside. He could see a crush of protestors in the parade square, and more pouring in, not only from the main group of marchers on Barrington Street but also in ones and twos and groups of a half-dozen or more streaming into the square from Citadel Hill and the side streets above City Hall. He tried again to count them, but there was no order to their array, and no one seemed to stay still long enough.

  Figuring out the size of the crowd was one of the reasons he was there. He couldn’t fail. He turned to Mo, the veteran Tribune photographer who seemed to know more about reporting than many real reporters. Mo was standing on a chair using his wide-angle lens to try to get a shot that included both the backs of the heads of the gathered aldermen and the demonstrators gat
hering outside.

  “How many?” Patrick asked.

  “Four thousand,” Mo answered, without taking his eye from the viewfinder.

  “How you figure that?” He seemed so sure of himself, Patrick thought.

  “Easy,” he answered. “I asked the cops. Cops get the last word. Besides, if everybody uses the same number, nobody can be wrong.”

  Patrick Donovan still had a lot to learn about reporting.

  Getting names right, for starters. He could still feel the panic from three hours earlier when Tom Harkin, the assistant City Editor, had bellowed his name across the newsroom. He was sure he was about to be fired. The day before, he’d written a story mixing up the name of a man arrested during a fair-housing rally with the name of the landlord whose apartment building was being picketed. The land-lord was not amused; he had called to give Patrick shit and warned him he’d be calling his bosses, too, to tell them what a chump they had writing for them. “I hope they fire your stupid ass.”

  But Harkin hadn’t called him over to fire his stupid ass. “You’re going to help Morton cover the demo,” he’d announced. Morton was the paper’s City Hall reporter. There was talk the demonstration would be the biggest gathering in downtown Halifax since the VE-Day riots back in ’45.

  Last week, word had leaked out that the aldermen had secretly agreed to appoint an outsider, a former policeman turned security consultant from Columbus, Georgia, as Chief of Police. That upset Halifax cops, who’d been supporting one of their own for the position. And it angered the local trade unionists, who’d discovered the new top cop had a history of hiring strikebreakers to help his corporate clients rid themselves of pesky unions. It also pissed off black community leaders, who hadn’t been able to find out much about the man’s civil rights record but knew enough to know they didn’t want some white Georgia cracker as their police chief. Not after what the City had already done in Africville. They had put aside their mutual animosities—blacks usually blamed union closed-shop policies for keeping them out of the local workforce; unionists believed blacks wanted to take their jobs; and cops distrusted, and were in turn distrusted by, both the blacks and the unionists for every reason you could think of. The rally would be a show of force just before Council met to ratify its choice of a new chief.

  “Morton’s gonna have to cover the meeting after, so you do whatever he needs you to do,” Harkin instructed Patrick. “You get the crowd numbers for him. Talk to Black Pride and the rest and then feed him some quotes he can use. Maybe even get a little vox pop stuff. That would be good. And if there’s any trouble, I want you right in the middle of it with your notebook. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Patrick Donovan was relieved and excited and pissed off all at the same time. He was supposed to finish his shift at seven, so he’d made plans to meet Emma. She’d said she’d wait for him outside the LBR. Thanks to the province’s archaic liquor laws, men weren’t allowed into places like the LBR, properly known as the Ladies’ Beverage Room, unless accompanied by a lady; ladies, of course, weren’t permitted in taverns at all.

  Patrick looked at his watch. It was past six already. Emma would have left work and, since she had no phone in her apartment, he couldn’t call to cancel. She wouldn’t be amused.

  They’d met nearly a month ago when he’d been assigned to cover the Lions Club monthly luncheon; Emma was the secretary to the club’s president, a car dealer who made her hand out copies of the guest speaker’s talk to the reporters covering it. But Patrick was the only reporter unlucky enough to have been assigned to cover this particular nothing speech by some local doctor just back from Africa. For reasons Patrick couldn’t fathom, he and Emma had hit it off. He’d asked her out. But then he’d had to cancel twice because the desk had decided at the last minute to make him work extra shifts. Luckily, he’d been able to call her at work and reschedule both times. She hadn’t been pleased. After tonight, he wasn’t sure she’d even speak to him.

  Oh, well, he had a story. And not just any story. This could turn out to be the story of the year, especially if, as callers to the radio open-line shows were predicting, the demonstration turned violent. Part of him hoped it would. What would the cops do then? He was just Morton’s legman, of course. Morton would write the story, get the byline. But he was part of it. Not bad for a rookie reporter.

  The Tribune had hired him that spring, ostensibly as a summer vacation replacement. But when the summer ended and no one told him to leave, he stayed. He didn’t drop out of Saint Mary’s University so much as he just didn’t show up when classes began. Not that it mattered much. He joked—though not to his parents—that he was majoring in the campus newspaper, which, unfortunately, wasn’t a credit course.

  Harkin made him spend the first month doing obits, most of which didn’t get into the paper the way he wrote them. He’d progressed since then to rewriting press releases, covering service club meetings and, in the past month, a few small stories like yesterday’s demonstration at the apartment building. He’d only got that assignment—Black Pride had organized the rally to protest what it claimed was the landlord’s refusal to rent to a Negro couple—because none of the more experienced reporters thought it worth a story. And then he’d screwed up. Had the landlord called the desk to complain about mixing up the names—maybe Harkin was just waiting until after the demonstration to fire him—or had yelling at him over the phone been enough to sate the man’s anger? Patrick hoped so. He hoped, too, that somebody from Black Pride would agree to talk to him after the speeches tonight. They weren’t happy with the Trib either.

  The provincial government had made a big deal of announcing the establishment of Black Pride last spring. No one said so publicly, of course, but it was the government’s pre-emptive, pre-election response to what had happened at that “Halifax 2000” conference a few months before, not to mention a way to defuse the fuss black community leaders had stirred up after the Africville relocation. And then there were all those race riots in American cities. The government didn’t want their local Negroes getting any dangerous ideas.

  Officially, Black Pride was touted as an independent grass roots organization, but it got all its funding from the province, and the province chose its directors. The problem for the government was that its tame board quickly lost control. The board made the mistake of hiring local coloured social workers, some of them almost certainly communists. They’d begun organizing protests and making public statements.

  Earlier this summer, Black Pride had even staged a small protest outside the Tribune’s offices, handing out leaflets accusing the paper of having no black reporters in its newsroom. The Tribune didn’t cover the protest, but the CBC (which didn’t have any black reporters either) did. The story even included an interview with a protestor who claimed the paper was “a racist organization.”

  The Trib had retaliated this week with an ostensibly unrelated editorial criticizing Black Pride for being involved in organizing tonight’s rally. “It ill behooves an organization that suckles at the public teat, as the so-called ‘Black Pride’ does, to undermine the legitimacy of elected municipal officials and their institutions by using such bullying, extra-parliamentary tactics,” the paper harrumphed. “We call on the Premier and the Provincial Government, who loosed this scourge in our midst in order to appease Upper Canadian agitators and other do-gooders, to rein in the radicals and troublemakers who pretend to speak for our Negroes.”

  Patrick Donovan wasn’t sure anyone from Black Pride would talk with him after that. Worse, the only person he knew at Black Pride was Ray Carter, the field worker who’d organized the rally against the landlord yesterday. But he was also the one who’d called the Trib racist on TV. Even if he did convince Carter to talk with him, he wasn’t sure the paper would publish it.

  Patrick took one last look out the window. The speakers were gathering near the podium. He’d better find Morton and see if there was anything else he
should be doing.

  They shouldn’t have been having this conversation. Not right in front of the loudspeakers, where they had to yell to make themselves heard. On the stage behind them, an old white folk singer was noisily exhorting the crowd to join with him in one more chorus of “Solidarity Forever.” Ray knew it would be way too easy for some snooping reporter to overhear them. So he put his hand lightly on the other man’s shoulder, hoping to steer him to a quieter spot behind the portable stage. The man slapped his hand away as if it was contaminated, or perhaps, Ray thought, as if it was black.

  “Don’t you fucken’ touch me again or I’ll take your fucken’ head off and shove it up your fucken’ arsehole!” The white man was so close to his face Ray could see the hard drinker’s map lines of broken blood vessels crosshatching the man’s nose and cheeks, could smell the rum on his breath, could feel the man’s warm spittle landing on his own cold cheeks. “Unnerstand?”

  Ray understood. He’d tried to tell Calvin this was a mistake. They should have staged their own rally. So what if it would have been smaller? So what if the newspaper wouldn’t cover it? They wouldn’t get it right anyway. Nothing Black Pride did or said was going to make the City change its mind, so why not think strategically, use the demonstration to heighten the contradictions, to force black people themselves to see the system for what it was? He’d learned that much in Toronto.

  But Calvin and the other board members were still playing Martin Luther King, waiting for the white man to come miraculously to his senses and give black people what was rightly theirs. The white man already had his senses, thank you very much. He had the power; why should he give that up just because a bunch of niggers asked him to? No one gave you power in a capitalist, racist society. You had to take it. Maybe, Ray thought, he should go back to Toronto. It wasn’t any better there, but it was bigger, and there were more people who thought like him. Here, he felt alone.