Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Instead, she hired a Thai woman recommended by a reporter at the paper who’d interviewed her for a story on new immigrants. The woman, who called herself May, had supposedly been an English professor in Bangkok but couldn’t find work in Halifax, perhaps because her conversational English skills, while impressive at home, were modest at best. Still, she was a godsend. She not only took care of Patrick, even reading children’s stories to him in her native language—he gurgled appreciatively and seemed, to Moira at least, to understand every word she was saying—she also cleaned the apartment and prepared delicious Thai dishes, which she left on the stove for Moira each night.

  That made Moira suspicious. During the three months she’d stayed at home with Patrick, she’d never found time to clean and rarely to cook. Was this woman spending enough time with her son? What did Moira really know about her? And how much of that was true? What if . . . ?—She had to stop herself.

  Being back at work was difficult enough. She’d lost her edge, that delicious thrill that comes with finding a person or a fact or a document no, one else knows about. It had disappeared completely during the last months of her pregnancy, and it had not returned. Instead, she now filled her days at work trying not to work, doing any interviews she absolutely had to do by phone instead of in person and taking as long as possible on each assignment so Michelle wouldn’t hand her another. It was working. She was, she’d told the City Editor that morning, “still waiting for a couple of callbacks,” one on a story about plans by the local Voice of Women for a protest against the American invasion of Iraq, the other about local

  medical supply stores that were inundated with people wanting to buy respirator masks to ward off a possible SARS outbreak. Michelle left her alone after that.

  The truth was it was unlikely Moira would get any callbacks since she hadn’t yet placed any calls to anyone. She was glad she’d switched from courts to general assignment, where it was easier to pretend you were working.

  She looked at her watch. Just after eleven. Seven more hours until she could go home to Patrick. Why was the damn phone still ringing?

  “Daily Journal, Donovan here,” she said, in the clipped voice she used to use when answering the shared phone in the press room at the Law Courts.

  “Moira Donovan?” A woman’s voice. Tentative.

  “Yes.”

  “The one who’s covering the Howe case?”

  The Howe case? She couldn’t remember . . . Oh, right. “I was. But I’m not covering courts any more. I can put you through to the City Editor, if you like.”

  There was a silence at the end of the line, as if the person was trying to figure out what to say. “I have some information, not about the case so much as about one of the participants. Would you be interested?”

  “Depends,” Moira replied. She wasn’t sure what it depended on. “What’s the information?”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it over the telephone, but it’s got to do with the judge who’s hearing the case.”

  Justice Justice! Moira felt guilt give her stomach a sudden wrench. She’d never done a thing with that tape of the judge telling racist jokes. At the time, she’d been too tired to pursue it. Since she’d returned from maternity leave, she’d avoided even mentioning it to Morton or Michelle because she knew they’d want her to tackle the story. And Moira wasn’t keen; it would take too much time to corroborate. If it was even true. Still . . .

  “Are you there?” It was the woman again.

  “Yes, yes, I am,” Moira said. “So what is this about the Judge? Can you tell me more?”

  “Just that you won’t be sorry. It’s big. But I need to tell you in person.”

  “Okay.” At the very least, Moira thought, this would get her out of the office for a while, convince Michelle she was working. “So how do we do this?”

  “Why don’t we meet for coffee this afternoon,” the woman said. “Say, around three?”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a little diner on Gottingen Street called Calhoun’s.”

  “I know the one.”

  “So three o’clock?”

  “See you then.” Moira hung up the phone. She wasn’t sure she was ready for a real story yet.

  Shondelle Adams hung up the telephone and glanced quickly up and down Barrington Street before walking away from the phone booth. She could still back out, not show up. The woman would never know. And neither would Uhuru. She glanced down at the manila envelope that contained the papers she’d photocopied last night. She hoped Uhuru wouldn’t be angry with her.

  The air was heavy with the fresh-smoked smell of marijuana mingled with the apartment-hallway odour of cooking food and the locker room-stale stink of piss and sweat. He would need to take his suit to the dry cleaners to get rid of the smell. As he waited in one of the jail’s glassed-in lawyers’ cubicles for the guards to bring his client from the cells, Uhuru Melesse tried not to think about that, or about the fact that cash was so tight he couldn’t really afford to have the suit dry cleaned.

  J. J.’s case had transformed Uhuru back into the man-to-be-reckoned-with he hadn’t been since the best of his Ray days at Black Pride. He’d been in demand during this year’s Black History Month celebrations: keynote speaker at the Black Cultural Centre’s fundraiser, presenter at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast on the changing face of Halifax, moderator of a panel discussion on the role of black professionals in social change, special guest at a Black Law Students’ Association reception and a Nova Scotia Multicultural Association cocktail party, even a celebrity competitor on CBC Radio’s black history trivia quiz.

  “’Ru man.” J. J. Howe offered him a grin and an aired high-five as a guard opened the door to allow him to enter the consultation room. Uhuru wasn’t the only one who’d changed. J. J. swaggered now. Since he’d been in jail, J. J. had shaved all the hair from his head and grown a full beard that seemed designed to make him look menacing. It didn’t. Despite putting on fifteen pounds from the jail’s starchy diet—“Freshman Fifteen,” the guards jokingly called it—J. J. had only gone from emaciated to skinny. With his still-bulging eyes and goofy grin, he looked more like another J. J.—Jimmy Walker’s character on the old Good Times TV sitcom—than a scowling Mr. T.

  But there were other, more significant changes, too. The first few times Uhuru had visited him in jail, J. J. had worn the haunted, frightened look of a man who’d been thrown into a cage with hungry lions. But then one day, at least as Uhuru heard the story, J. J. had openly challenged some arbitrary dictate—Uhuru still didn’t know what—from a particularly nasty guard and taken his righteous complaint all the way to the superintendent. The guard was suspended, and J. J. became a jailhouse celebrity, the man other prisoners came to with their complaints about guards, about food, about overcrowding on the bus to the courthouse. J. J. began writing letters to the editor of the Daily Journal detailing their complaints and calling for a public inquiry.

  Uhuru did his best to dissuade him—he was afraid potential jurors might be turned off by his client’s combative prose—but J. J. wasn’t listening to his lawyer any more.

  In the year since he’d been charged, J. J. had gone from almost reverentially addressing Uhuru as “Mr. Melesse” or even “Sir” to greeting him with a gratingly familiar, almost dismissive, “’Ru man.”

  Perhaps that was because Uhuru himself sometimes felt like a messenger boy. He often brought interview requests—from a researcher at the fifth estate interested in doing a documentary on his case, a reporter from The Toronto Star, a couple of local TV reporters, a student at the journalism school who was working on a school project. A literary agent had written to J. J., care of Uhuru, asking if he would be interested in participating in an autobiography project the agent would broker. “I represent a prominent author who would like to tell your story,” the letter explained. “We see this as a kind of Robin-Hood-meets-Russ
ell-Crowe-in-The-Insider book.” The agent had already held discussions with several major publishers. “Our movie rights division is very keen on the project. At the very least, they tell me, your story has great potential as a movie of the week.”

  Uhuru counselled against it. “Wait until after the trial,” he said, though he could tell J. J. wasn’t listening. “Reporters make you say things you shouldn’t.”

  “Who was that I saw on the news last week?” J. J. demanded accusingly. “How come you can talk and I can’t?”

  “That was different,” Uhuru replied. But was it really? It had been a routine hearing to set a date for pretrial legal arguments. Uhuru could have begged off requests from the TV reporters. He didn’t. Instead, he’d played to the cameras, done his now-standard my-client-is-not-a-criminal-but-a-man-of-principle-as-will-become-clear-in-the-fullness-of-time routine, for no good reason other than to be on television. He didn’t say that to J. J., of course.

  “It’s my job is to represent your best interests inside the courtroom and out. My job is to know what I can say—and what I can’t.”

  “Tell the guy from the fifth estate I’ll talk with him,” J. J. instructed. “And give me the address of that agent. I’ll write him back.”

  Today, Uhuru carried no messages from the outside world. Instead he reached into his briefcase, pulled out a business envelope, took out a letter, unfolded it and slid it across the table. “We need you to sign this,” he said. “It’s to your father, asking him to meet with us. We may want to call him as a witness for our pretrial motion and we need to interview him. So far, he’s refused.”

  J. J. looked uncomfortable. “What do we need him for?” he asked.

  “He’s the missing piece of the puzzle, J. J.,” Uhuru replied. “We’ve lined up other witnesses—elders—to tell the judge what life was like in Africville before the relocation. And we’ve got Calvin Johnstone all set to testify about the City’s refusal to deal with the compensation issue for all those years. But we need someone to show the court how the relocation affected the children. Your father is the best evidence we have. Or your mother. But no one knows where she is.”

  “Why does it have to be them?” J. J. wanted to know. “I mean, I was there too. I could testify—”

  “I’m not going to call you as a witness.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that would open you up to cross-examination. We don’t need them muddying the waters, focusing on what you did instead of why.”

  “You mean I’m not going to testify at all?” J. J. sounded offended.

  “I’m not planning on it.”

  “But don’t I have the right to testify?”

  “You do, but, as your lawyer, I’d advise against it,”

  “But . . . if I want to?”

  “Look, J. J., why don’t we see what happens?” Uhuru was trying not to get impatient with his star client. It wasn’t easy. “Right now, what I need you to do is sign this letter . . .”

  J. J. picked up the letter, slumping back in his seat as he read the words on the page, boredom painted on his face. He finally took the pen Uhuru proffered, signed the letter and slid the piece of paper and pen back across the table.

  “Hey!” J. J. brightened suddenly. “I just remembered. I got something for you, too, ’Ru man.” He reached into the breast pocket of his Corrections Services jumpsuit. “My agent says I got to get you to sign this.”

  Uhuru took the paper, unfolded it. It was a release form, essentially allowing the still-unnamed writer to portray Uhuru in the book in any way he saw fit and the director to do the same in any film version that might be made of “Black Robin: The J. J. Howe Story (working title).”

  “Your agent really thinks this will happen?” Uhuru was more interested than he let on.

  “He says it’s a sure thing . . . long as we win the case.”

  “Well, let’s hope on that one,” Uhuru said, and meant it.

  “That’s why you should put me on the stand,” J. J. said. “What’s it going to look like for the movie if I don’t testify? . . . Hey, who do you want as you?”

  “What?”

  “In the movie. Who do you want to play you? I’m thinking Snoop Dogg as me . . . or maybe k-os . . . that rapper from Toronto. My agent says he’d be good . . . probably even write a song they could use for the soundtrack. For you? . . . I’m thinking that guy who played Malcolm X. What’s his name?”

  “Denzel Washington.”

  “Yeah, him. He’d be great as you.”

  “Listen, J. J., have you had anybody go over the contract with the agent?” Uhuru asked, changing the subject slightly. “To make sure you’re getting the best deal?”

  “You mean like a lawyer?” Uhuru nodded. “I figure I can read as good as any lawyer. I been doing a lot of reading about the law since I been in here. I’m thinking I might go to law school after. And then they could do the sequel about that.” He laughed. “Seriously, ’Ru man, don’t worry. I know how to look out for myself. It’ll all be okay. You’ll see.”

  Uhuru hoped so. If someone did make a movie about the case, J. J. would probably get enough money to pay for his own defence. Uhuru didn’t say that, of course. “Let me take a closer look at this,” Uhuru said, tapping the release form. “I’ll bring it back next time I come see you.”

  If Aucoin was curious, he kept it to himself He had that blandly unrevealing face and manner Ward associated with police officers. In fact, Aucoin was an ex-cop, a private investigator who specialized in finding people who didn’t want to be found. He’d come to Ward’s attention a few years before as a witness for the defence in a criminal case. Ward had been impressed by both the apparent thoroughness of his investigation and the matter-of-fact way in which he presented his findings. The jury had acquitted the defendant based largely on Aucoin’s testimony.

  So Ward had called him last week, arranged to meet this morning. He’d decided Aucoin should come to his house rather than meeting with him at either of their offices. Others might be more curious than Aucoin about why a judge wanted to hire a private investigator.

  “More coffee?” Ward asked.

  “Sure. But just half a cup this time, thanks, Judge. I drink too much coffee. Bad habit.”

  It was not his only bad habit. Ward could smell the stink of cigarettes on his clothing. Ward tried not to breathe in as he got up and slowly made his way across the kitchen to the coffee pot. He was, all of a sudden, an old man whose walk had become a foot-dragging shuffle. How long before people at work would begin to notice? Perhaps they had already.

  “So Judge, what can you tell me about this person . . .” He flipped back to the first page of his notebook. “This Rosa Johnstone? Just to get me started.”

  Ward waited until he’d returned to the kitchen table with Aucoin’s coffee before answering. He was having trouble walking and talking at the same time now. Besides, he needed time to decide how much to tell the private detective.

  “I can’t tell you a whole lot, Mr. Aucoin,” Ward said finally. “I can tell you she was born in Africville”—Ward tried to read the detective’s face; it was as unrevealing as ever—“sometime in the mid-fifties. Her father was a minister in the church . . . No. A Deacon, that’s what they called it. She grew up in Halifax, went to Queen Elizabeth High but dropped out before she graduated . . .” He paused to catch his breath, to decide what to say next. “Sometime around 1976 she left town, and that’s the last I know.” He stopped again, choosing which story he would tell Aucoin from the variations he’d been auditioning in his head. “I knew her when I was a kid,” he began. “We grew up in the north end and our paths crossed a few times. But then I lost touch with her. Last week, I was going through some stuff in the basement, trying to clear out old junk, when I came across something of hers I thought she might like to have. So I called you.”

  The story w
as lame, but Aucoin’s face remained unreadable.

  “Once I find her, do you want me to make contact, let her know you’re looking for her?”

  “No . . . I mean, that’s not necessary, Mr. Aucoin. Once I know where she is, I’d like to be the one to contact her, surprise her.” She would be surprised.

  “Sure, no problem,” Aucoin replied. “What’s the timeline on this, Judge?”

  “Well, it’s not urgent”—except for the fact that I’m dying, he thought to himself—“but it would be nice to find her and, uh, get her stuff back to her sooner rather than later.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Aucoin said again. “I got a couple of insurance frauds on the go, but I should be able to wrap them up next week and then . . . This doesn’t sound too complicated. Shouldn’t take me long to find her.”

  “Great.”

  “Should I bill Justice, or is this personal?”

  “Personal,” Ward answered. “And please bill me at my home, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “No problem, Judge. And I’m guessing this is confidential?”

  “Yes, confidential, absolutely.”

  Chapter 10

  1976

  The question was reporterly enough: “Mr. Minister, you’ve been ‘Mr. Minister’ for two years and, I was just wondering, what has surprised you the most about your job?”

  Ward eyed the young man sitting opposite him this morning. He was not so young, in fact, probably a few years older than Ward, but being a Cabinet minister had a way of making a man seem older, even to himself. The man was a Legislature reporter from the Tribune. He’d called Ward a few days ago to ask for this interview. “A profile. For the Saturday paper. Our readers have been hearing a lot about you—youngest Cabinet minister, rising star, the two-hundred-mile limit and all—and my editor thinks our readers would like to know more.”