In this City

by Austin Clarke

  Africa stood alone. It was the same thing with the piece of silver attached to a strong string of leather, hanging from the neck of the man who had spent the whole day in African time, doing a deal with Barrington, for a car he was reselling. His name, Barrington had told me afterwards, when we were eating chicken and ribs in a West Indian restaurant at the corner of Bloor and Sherbourne Street, Stingray’s, where the air was fresh; Barrington told me his name is Ali Kamal All Kadir Sudan.

  “Ali Kamal All Kadir Sudan?” I had asked. “Like the country? Sudan?”

  “Motherfucker was born Terrence Washington Jefferson Lincoln Lucas, the Third!”

  His mother was a new Democrat?”

  “Father, too!”

  “Named after three American presidents.”

  “Motherfucker left York, with two BA’s and a PhD!”

  “One for each president?”

  Africa stood alone.

  “You was rapping like a motherfucker, Jack! You got into some heavy Black Muslim shit, too!”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “That they can’t be Black Muslim ’cause ontologically, you say, there can’t be white Muslims and black Muslims. Shit like that. You laid some heavy shit on those revolutionary brothers!”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “My man! My main man!”

  “I can’t remember that.”

  “Gimme five, brother. You talked like a bitch, and you was so hip that that made the brother, Mr. Ali Kadir Sudan, lay two more bills on me! I be in good company with the right revolutionary rhetoric, and shit like that.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And we went into two booze cans. After we checked out the strip joints.”

  “Nor that.”

  The night was heavy. The night was swirling round me. The night was a dream. In beauty and in the images that wound themselves around me. And even in that half-consciousness, that disorientation, I still did not remember. I could not remember anything.

  “We took a taxi to my place. You told my aunt what a brilliant student I am, that you wished I was your brother. I changed cars at home. My old aunt was pissed off that I took her Benz. I am driving my car now. The Mustang. The one I’m selling to Ali Kadir Sudan.”

  “I can’t.”

  But I was trying to recall, through the haze of my dream, watching a small black man standing at a door of the entrance to some place that was full of men and women; and the man standing at the door was wearing an army uniform; and I remember hearing something bad said about Korea and Vietnam; and then the music began to pour out of the humid place; and when I went in, or was led in by Barrington, I saw smoke, smoke was the only thing I remember clearly, smoke was the only thing I was seeing with clarity of definition; so when I was led in, I saw a man at the mike, standing like a king from some part of the outline map of Africa, a chief-tain or something; and he was singing “I’d rather drink muddy water, than . . .” And I knew I had heard this song before, in Harlem; and thinking about that got me thinking of the number of hours and days I had been resurrected from the clutches of Harlem and New York. I was trying to remember.

  “Silver Dollar,” Barrington said. “This is where it all started, my man.”

  I had not been sober enough, nor clear-headed enough to see what had been going on around me, but I did see, through a haze of disorientation, the face of the man, the singer, the chieftain, turning slowly around in time with the blues he was singing; and I had tried to follow the revolving of the man’s face, as if I was testing my eyesight and my power of concentration, like reading the name of a song printed on a gramophone record turning at thirty-three and a third revolutions a minute; so the blues singer was turning his face, and then all of the faces in the packed, smoked room were turning, as if they were faces painted on to the label of the 78; and suddenly the room was out of control.

  “You talked like a motherfucker! You put down some heavy shit on the brothers. And brothers who fought in the Korean War and were still fighting in the Vietnam War. Some heavy shit. I really don’t understand why the goddamn staff sergeant, with his chest full o’ ribbons, didn’t whip your ass for calling him an unpatriotic Canadian, and didn’t whip mine, for standing beside you. Shee-it!”

  “What’s the time?” I asked. There were clocks on stores, clocks that were turned into running illuminated numbers, running from one end of a sign to the next, like a child’s train set. There was time all round me, and still I asked the time.

  “This is Spadina Avenue!” Barrington said, giving me the time. “The heart of the city!”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, you are six servings of raw oysters. Six. You’re freaky!”

  “What time is it?”

  “We went to a booze can. You been talking about booze cans all the time. So we went and heard a Garveyite nationalist speak, ’cause you said you gonna hold a seminar on the nationalists when we get back to York, so we went to hear one. But the Silver Dollar was something else again. I never seen a man vomit such shit all over a Spadina Avenue jazz club before. You vomited like you was ripping out your goddamn guts!”

  “I vomited in the Silver Dollar?”

  “I washed you off in the men’s room, shit!”

  În the men’s room at the Silver Dollar?”

  “Those oysters had castor oil in them.”

  “Did I get the impression that your parents came from Barbados?”

  “You remember all that shit about the highest literacy rate in the world, and how it doesn’t surprise you that I’m at York, and my old aunt got into that elitist shit, segregating me from the brothers in Jane-Finch and on the street?” You remember that? You really don’t remember any of this shit, do you?” Barrington shook his head, disbelieving. “If York could see you now!”

  “Fuck York!”

  “Right on!”

  “Fuck it!”

  The woman in the Red Rooster bar, in Harlem, had come into my mind. She had talked like this. Tough like this. It was the first time I had heard a woman, a lady, talk so tough. I picked it up from her. This tough shit-talk. I must open her gift. It was still wrapped in the gold paper, tied with a blue ribbon, in my briefcase. And I must track down that other woman. But I couldn’t remember if I had met that other woman in Harlem or at the New York City College.

  “Where did you pick up this heavy shit about revolution and revolutionaries? Man, I can’t believe that you, a West Indian academic, saved my ass from a stomping by that staff sergeant with his chest full o’ combat ribbons? Where did you study this black revolutionary shit? All this shit about Harlem, and shit? Your intellectualism on the revolution caused the brother, Ali Kadir, to lay two more bills on me for this beat-up Mustang. Shit! Harlem!”

  “Spadina!” I said, wishing it was Harlem.

  And here we are. In spirit and in wish. There are hundreds of people, mostly men, in the road. Cars are parked three deep on either side. As Barrington slows down, I can read the names on stores and shops. The House of Proper Propaganda covers the width of a bookstore. And more people are going in and coming out of it than the audience at the Apollo. This name I can see clearly above the heads of the crowd. No one in this crowd is moving. It is a sea at rest, calm, but tense, as if the winds that shall turn into a hurricane are still on the horizon. I can remember it now; and I can see the tip of the long broomstick that holds the Flag. Barrington parked the Mustang beside Young Lok’s Chinese restaurant. He makes it four deep now, in the crowded road. The closer I get to the crowd, the more frightened I become. The wind off the horizon is getting angrier. There are two many people. I feel nervous. There is tension and a kind of anger in the crowd, as if it is a crowd standing before a man hiring people, and the crowd is ten times the size of the number the man can hire, and after those lucky ones are led in through the wicket gate, hell breaks loose; there is tension and a kind of anger, as if the man on the two-tier platform, made from two boxes, is going to tell this crowd things they know an
d things they hate to know. Behind me, I can remember this now, is the Theresa Hotel; “Castro stayed there when he came to America, the week after he kicked Baptista’s ass, the 26th of July, 19-something, vente-seis Julio”: which happens to be my birthday; I know the Theresa Hotel; and close by, the Apollo Theatre. Even back in Barbados, when my mother said I was “knee-high to a grasshopper,” before I was old enough to identify a grasshopper, although there were thousand hopping around in the bush near our house, I had heard of the Apollo, for Miss Ella Fitzgerald was singing on Re-diffusion Radio every evening at six , “Evening shadows make me blue . . .” and forty-nine listeners had requested that song the evening I first heard her sing it; and from that grasshopping time, I had linked the two names, Apollo and Ella Fitzgerald, just as later on I would link Jekyll and Hyde, Abbott and Costello, Jesse Owens and Adolph Hitler, chalk and cheese, meat and potatoes, cou-cou and salt fish, and jerk pork and festival.

  “When Castro stayed at the Theresa,” the Harlem woman had told me, drinking bourbon and Coke; and she had been talking about Castro and the Theresa a long time before I paid attention, “when Fidel drove up to the Theresa, niggers in Harlem went crazy. Niggers who could hardly speak American-English was brabba-rabba-ing in ’spaniol. Cats who only smoke Salems and the weed was walking on 125th, chomping the biggest goddamn cigars you’d ever seen. And for a long time after that, every black man in Harlem was pro-Castro, and anti-American and talking Spanish. Marxist-Leninists like motherfuckers! The House of Proper Propaganda sold Spanish dictionaries to cats who couldn’t even read the writing on a numbers’ ticket, or the words off a goddamn traffic ticket! It was a motherfucking beautiful time, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to be cool, and claiming book knowledge about these things. “The Harlem Renaissance happened right here where we are sitting in the Red Rooster, all round here. Countee Cullen, Dunbar, Langston Hughes and if I should die, let me nobly die.”

  “Right on!”

  “If I should die.”

  “When I grew up around here.”

  “I respect you for that. Roots.”

  Wasn’t shit!” Venom in her words.

  “You’re on sacred ground. The Harlem Renaissance, poets, artists, painters, playwrights and novelists. Sacred ground.”

  “It’s a motherfucking slum, honey. A ghetto, and . . .”

  “Ghetto with a difference.”

  “ A ghetto. Harlem ain’t no Renaissance, sugar. You only read that shit in books written by Carl Van Vetchun.”

  By the time we reached the edge of the crowd, I was steeped in a revision of the history of these streets. The Southern leather of my boots, my cowboy boots, not quite cured and accustomed to my kind of feet, was making my corns rebel. The crowd is moving in to the man on the box with the Flag fluttering, as if his words are a magnet, or is the sucking wind blowing in from the horizon.

  “He’s on this same soap box every Sunday. Been hearing this shit every Sunday since I was ten. It’s like a blue number, or a Billie Holiday solo. Lasts for hours. It’s for the tourists, honey.”

  “I am a tourist.”

  “Not that I’m putting down the brother. But it’s all for the tourists. How can you be a serious black nationalist rapping this revolutionary shit, standing on a soapbox with the American Flag beside you? At least you taught me to see the lack of logic in those symbols.”

  “College is college. And there’s logic and there’s logic. This is Harlem. The Harlem revolution.”

  “The Harlem Renaissance, sugar.”

  We are close enough to see the man on the box, and his eyes, and traces of saliva that spit with his anger from his mouth. He is dressed in a black suit. It looks like the one Barrington was wearing, but this is Brooks Brothers with narrow shoulders and three buttons, and lined in silk. I turn my head to see if the dream is enduring, to see that Barrington has changed into his campus uniform; blue jeans, army surplus jacket with three stripes turned down, a sergeant; and brown expensive leather boots. The man on the box has a military bearing. Perhaps he too was in Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps the Second World War. His hair is short, reminding me of U.S. Marines and the Canadian army sergeant, and his body has gone through the rigour of that kind of boot camp, and is as lithe as that of a tennis player.

  “. . . so, we’re living in troubled times, brothers and sisters. We’re living at a time when anything can happen.”

  “Teach!” a man shouts.

  “Brothers and sisters, a couple years ago it couldn’t happen unless Uncle Sam said so. Or Khrushchev said so. Or DeGaulle said so. But now, it can happen any time.” I wonder where I am: in Harlem, or in this city?

  “Right on!” the crowd agrees.

  “The man also knows that the only way we’re gonna do it is through unity. Through unity. So, they create another trap. Every effort we make to unite among ourselves, on the basis of what we are, they label it what?”

  “Racism!” the crowd answered in a unified shout.

  The wind from the horizon was coming in.

  “Yes, racism. If we say that we want to form something that’s based on black people getting together, the white man calls that racism. Mind you, that is right. And you have some o’ these Negroes in Harlem, these white-minded Negroes running round here saying, ‘That’s racism.’ I don’t want to belong to anything that is all-black.”

  “Say it! Say it!”

  “The worst trick the man played on us is when he named us Negro, and called us Negro. And when we call ourselves Negro, we end up tricking ourselves. Whenever you see somebody who calls himself a Negro, he’s a product of Western civilization . . . not only Western civilization, but Western crime. One of the main reasons we’re called Negro is so we won’t know who we really are. ’Long as you call yourself a Negro, nothing is yours. And nothing is you. No language. You can’t lay claim to no language, not even English. You already messed that up! You can’t lay claim to any name. Any type o’ name that identifies you as something you should be. You can’t lay claim to any culture, as long as you use the word Negro to define yourself. And you can’t lay claim to any land, ’cause them ain’t no country named Negro- land!”

  When he said this, confusion broke out. The rest of his words were drowned in the angry rushing of the wind over the waves. Comments that sprung up like small whirlwinds, from the truth in his words, and the shame buried in those words, and applied to the crowd, made the crowd become one voice of protest.

  “They listen to this shit every Sunday,” the woman said.

  One voice of frustration. And one tremulous voice of unfulfilled dreams.

  “Dream deferred,” someone shouts.

  “Burn, baby, burn!” the crowd screams.

  But no one in the crowd of rustled waves moves an inch from the man on the box. And the man on the box does not take a pack of matches from his Brooks Brothers three-buttoned suit to show it to his audience’s rage, in a gesture if only that, of fruitless symbolism. The crowd waits. It is like waiting for the full blast of the wind from the horizon to come in and smash the fishing boats and the schooners at anchor. The crowd waits, and takes the remaining punishment in the words of the man on the soapbox, standing military, and noble, and proud, and black, beside the Stars and Stripes. The eagle, on the tip of the broomstick that held the Flag as upright as its age could do, was tarnished and a piece of one wing had been chipped off.

  “. . . and you could walk around here calling yourselves Democrats, and voting for Democratic presidents . . . ?” The tide was rising. “Well, a Democrat is nothing but a Dixiecrat without his sheet.”

  “We better split,” the woman had said. “We better split.” This time I heard the words from Barrington, anxiety in his manner. “Gotta get back to York in time for dinner.”

  We were already beside the old Mustang. I could still hear the crowd so far from here chanting, “Burn, baby, burn.” But we were the only two waves, the only two undulations in the powerless swelling tide on Spadina Avenu
e, which remained as if the wind from the lake had added no tide, and no fuel, to this great black vastness of three-laned road.

  Verrrooommmm! Verroooommm! Verroooommm! Verroooommm! The voices of the crowd, even from that stationary distance, almost drowned out the stuttering automobile, while Barrington said, “Motherfucker, motherfucker,” over and over. Verrooommmm! At last it started. It had taken five attempts to move me from this threatening avalanche of remembered words. I wished Barrington had already delivered this Mustang jalopy to Ali Kamal All Kadir Sudan; and I wished that his Barbadian-born aunt did not need the Benz to drive to Florida with her husband. And I wished that it was still summer, and that we could . . .

  We got out of Spadina Avenue heading north. The trees were in their first change of colours, and I could see autumn in the yellow and the gold of their leaves; and I could see oranges piled in undisturbed anticipation for the women walking with small dogs in furs, and the men in black suits walking with alligators in the workmanship of their briefcase; and the avenue became wider and only one line of cars, like Barrington’s aunt’s, was parked in the lazy wealth and safety of Avenue Road; and we ducked under a bridge and came out, on the wrong side, through the campus, Queen’s Park, and turned left and came to the Park Plaza Hotel; and I saw, along Avenue Road, all the mangoes and golden-apples; avocado pears and paw-paws; green peas in shells, sweet potatoes and fish still wriggling in bins as if they had forgotten they were no longer in the deep blue sea; and men selling, impervious and resentful of the change of weather, wearing shorts and shirts the colour of the horizon when a storm is coming, or when the sun is setting. And then we were in Forest Hill Village. Barrington stopped the old Mustang, now running like a charm now that we were out of Harlem’s harm and Spadina’s crowd, and we were inside this bar, which had nine circles drawn in its hanging advertisement; and I went back to the car, parked like the others, in one line, and took my overnight bag, with which I had travelled to New York and stayed for three months.

  “I’m having bourbon and Coke,” Barrington said.