Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  Behind my mum stood a plump young woman with blonde, bobbed hair. Her ruddy cheeks framed a nervous, uncertain smile as my Mum introduced me to my sister Sally-Ann. Polite embraces were made, but I sensed a wary distance. Normality reasserted itself, as our luggage was piled onto a cart that Sally had found and Mum paid for a car park ticket. The moment that I had waited a lifetime for had passed and now everything that happened seemed so prosaic, so curiously underwhelming, as if nothing else could match the intensity of that first mother and daughter meeting. I felt as though I was observing everything, not in it or of it, but out of it, looking on. I couldn’t shake this feeling on the short drive to my sister’s house, a neat one-storey home she shared with her husband Greg in the Sydney suburbs.

  On arrival, my mum’s husband Cornelius, ten years her senior, was waiting at the house and immediately enveloped me with pure spontaneous love, murmuring my name ‘Belinda’ in his soft Irish brogue, his accent undiminished even after thirty-eight years in Australia. His warm, emotional reaction to Terry and me was totally unexpected. Under the circumstances, I thought that he might appear a bit standoffish, but not a bit of it. He was so happy, he cried like a baby. Then everything settled down for a while as presents were exchanged and cups of tea made and drunk. A short potted history gushed forth from my mum, about how different society’s attitudes had been when I was born. How her family hadn’t been equipped to have her and her new baby at home. It was like listening to a fairy story, a different fairy story than I’d been told by Ivy, my adoptive mother, but still a fairy story, albeit much closer to the truth. I felt that it was being said more for Sally’s benefit than for mine.

  Then it was off to Wollongong, ninety kilometres south of Sydney, to my mum’s house. A small house, with perfectly tended gardens front and back, greeted us. Everything was spotlessly utilitarian throughout. Back then Terry and I both smoked and my mum wasted no time in telling us that Jehovah’s Witnesses did not smoke. If we wanted to smoke then it would have to be done in the back garden. Fortunately, much of the Australian lifestyle is spent in the back garden, soaking up the sun and barbecuing large slabs of raw meat accompanied by a few bottles or ‘stubbies’ of Toohey’s beer. Our need for nicotine was so high that Terry and I spent much of our visit in the garden, only entering the house for ablutions or sleep.

  My mum and her husband, Big Con

  For the next month my mum and I attempted to bridge the yawning gap of forty-two years and establish a relationship. ‘Just be yourselves,’ she had said to both of us on arrival.

  Easier said than done. I wasn’t sure who ‘myself’ was any more. Normally our chosen line of work defines us for others, but I found it difficult to talk about touring with The Selecter. My oldest cousin Gavin, Aunt Jeanette’s son, who bore a distinct resemblance to the pony-tailed actor Steven Seagal, had usefully found a ‘live’ version of me singing one of The Selecter’s hits, ‘Three Minute Hero’, where I insert the word ‘fucking’ into the lyrics. On the same CD was a version of ‘My Collie (Not A Dog)’, extolling the virtues of smoking copious quantities of sensimilla. Hardly heinous crimes, but he wasted no time in telling me that a degree of consternation had been engendered in Mum and Aunt Jeanette when they had heard these songs.

  I don’t think that there was much love lost between him and my mum. Once he had been a staunch Jehovah’s Witness. His Chilean wife had reared five of his children, but he had also fathered another out of wedlock. This and his general louche conduct around town were too much for the local Kingdom Hall members who, after repeated warnings, had delivered the ultimate punishment and dis-fellowshipped him. When I turned up out of the blue, my cousin decided that his previous behaviour was as nothing compared with the uncovered hypocrisy of the family’s older generation. He told me many things that I did not want to hear, but I understood why he felt the need to tell me.

  He said that Little Con had eschewed the faith in his teens and left home to live in the seedier districts of Sydney. He joined a punk band, much to the dismay of Mum. Unfortunately, the lead singer of this band, the son of good friends of Mum, had turned into a heroin junkie somewhere along the way. Therefore bands and drugs and bad behaviour were inextricably linked in her mind. The fact that The Selecter had been relatively successful and had a small but significant worldwide fan base was of no consequence to her, because as far as she was concerned the subject matter of the songs left much to be desired.

  As if to illustrate how Mum wanted to present me to her friends, a large framed poster which I had sent her, of me dressed as Billie Holiday, singing into an old-style, square, 1950s microphone, advertising the All or Nothing at All production, hung in pride of place on her living-room wall. This was my acceptable face, not the be-hatted and suited, gender-bending stage persona of Pauline Black of The Selecter, photos of which I had also sent. The strange thing was that neither of these personal constructs was essentially me. Whoever that was seemed to have been temporarily lost over the Indian Ocean.

  I was eager to show her the photos of my new Nigerian family, which had now expanded to include seventeen half-siblings and numerous aunts and uncles. She visibly blanched when she saw photos of my father, but she gamely entered into conversation about her recollections of him and even showed the photos to visiting relatives and friends. She tellingly recounted her first meeting with him: ‘He followed me all the way home to Dagenham Heathway station. I knew I couldn’t take him home.’

  I didn’t pry any more after that.

  Little Con arrived five days later, flamboyantly clad in a full length Drizabone coat, white T-shirt, tight black trousers and black winklepicker boots, with my young niece Cree, in a noisy blue pick-up truck that Aussies refer to as a ‘Ute’. He sported an Akubra hat on his dirty-blond, mulletted hairdo and carried a large plain wood didgeridoo under his arm. What an entrance. We hit it off immediately. He was a huge bear of a man with a jaw like Desperate Dan and hands like shovels, a typical Aussie from the outback. He smoked, drank and stayed up late. Terry and I had dutifully found ourselves in bed at about 7.30 p.m. most nights prior to his arrival, because that’s when Big Con and my mum retired. The size and layout of the house precluded making too much noise if people wanted to sleep, so if we tried staying up later we were reduced to whispering to each other in a darkened living room. When evening arrived on the first day of Con’s visit, he had none of this and kept the television blaring into the small hours. The following day he dragged us out to a local pub to meet up with Gavin, who introduced us to his impish younger brother Robert. The two cousins and Con were like a comedy act, constantly telling jokes and irreverent family stories. Having been in a pressure-cooker environment since our arrival, it was a welcome chance for Terry and me to let off steam.

  The following morning, I finally persuaded a hungover Con to play the didgeridoo. Fascinated by the strange, unearthly sound of this fine Aboriginal instrument, I purchased another. We spent hours blowing into our respective carved wooden tubes, much to the curious wonderment of the staid neighbours. It was almost like a primal bonding ritual.

  I met nobody on the entire visit who expressed anything less than joy and admiration at our story. After a while I even got used to everybody calling me Belinda. It was strange at first to be renamed, particularly after so many years had gone by, but we were starting again, so it felt right to start with a clean slate. Fourteen years later, my mum has finally been persuaded to call me Pauline instead, but I know it doesn’t feel natural to her.

  I have visited the family four times in Australia in the intervening years. The more I have got to know my mum, the more I can see myself in her. We don’t look similar, but we share a few idiosyncrasies. We laugh exactly alike, routinely slip from one accent to another, sometimes within the same sentence (I have no idea why, it just makes talking more interesting) and enjoy casually standing in the third ballet position. Silly things, but like somebody once said, ‘It’s all in the detail.’ In 2009 Mum finally saw me perform
on stage in Sydney when I toured there with the Neville Staple Band. I felt very proud that night and I think she did too. Largely we have succeeded in avoiding discussions about religious faith or politics. Tolerance about such issues has been intermittently tested in both hemispheres but has withstood undue pressure so far. As my mum once said, ‘Life is a journey and we are in it for the long haul, Belinda.’

  Rob Hamilton (cousin), Aunt Jeanette, Mum, me, Gavin, Terry, Karen and James (Rob’s wife and eldest son), 1996

  Terry and I no longer smoke, so I suppose more of her way of life has rubbed off on us than ours has rubbed off on her. It’s been an interesting journey so far. I am eternally grateful to both of the people who have mothered me in their different but ultimately loving ways. I am a product of their collective nurture and both of them did the best they knew how.

  Often I find myself studying a small photo of my father that Irene kindly gave me at our first meeting. He looks so handsome, like a young Eddie Murphy in the movie Coming to America. He is dressed in a pure white lace dashiki suit with a matching kufi on his head. Even though he is shaking somebody’s hand by way of introduction, his imperious gaze is directed at the camera lens. I always have the unmistakable feeling that he is looking at me. The kinship between us seems almost tangible. For a brief second I can feel myself under his skin, as if we have become one. It is an unnerving moment, when it happens, but one that I have come to welcome over the intervening years. It’s almost as if he comes to visit, just to remind me that I am his. But the feeling is fleeting and soon gone. Perhaps it doesn’t really happen at all?

  Without his physical presence, the only way I can ever know about his personality is from what others who knew him choose to tell me. I must trust that he was a good man, despite the fact that he was already married when he made an attractive, flame-haired sixteen-year-old pregnant with me and then abandoned her to her fate. I find it hard to love this man, because he showed no love to me or Mum, but listening to Irene’s stories about him, I can tell that she passionately loved him.

  When I think about my journey so far, I am reminded of a discussion between two toys in the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

  ‘What is REAL?’ asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. ‘Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?’

  ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.’

  ‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

  ‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has dropped out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’

  It has taken a long time, but the more I have learned about my families’ histories and where I fit into the puzzle that I had been trying to solve from the age of four, the more real I have become. There isn’t a neat ending to my story. Allowing strangers with whom I share my blood into my world hasn’t healed all those early wounds, but it has made sense of what happened to me.

  You see, my story isn’t just about finding my real identity, although that was very important. Knowing my true origins made me feel better about myself, answered some fundamental questions at last and offered yet more people to feel a sense of kinship with on this earth. Primarily, this story is about a search for love, the search that all of us have to make, and in my case the search for the unconditional love that is the birthright of all children. That love is usually given upon entering this world, but if it isn’t, or is taken away for some reason, then some of us are impelled to find it, if at all possible, and in so doing maybe make hard choices and change ourselves along the way. I was born mixed race and because of my circumstances, mixed up, but rather than have my somewhat inconvenient origins airbrushed out of existence, I chose to embrace that part of my heritage in as much of my life as possible. I have never regretted that decision. The racial identity that marks me out in society is worn beneath my skin every day. My father’s colour envelops me and that is unconditional love of a kind. Indeed, one almost might say black by design.