“Scotch,” I said, going to the men’s room with my flight bag. “And soda.”
When I came out, Barrington was ordering another bourbon and Coke.
“Shee-it!” he said, motioning the waiter to place another scotch and soda beside my untouched drink, and observing my change of dress. “Cavalry-twill trousers, button-down blue shirt, hacking jacket and suede boots? Shee-it! Where’s the camouflage army outfit?”
“Left it for a chap I saw in the men’s room.”
“You and he had a conversation?”
“He was writing a poem.”
“In the men’s room?”
“Now, when we get back to York . . .”
LETTER OF THE LAW OF BLACK
“Edgehill House”
Edgehill Lane
Edgehill Tenantry
BARBADOS
I am writing this letter to you now, at this rather late time, because when you left the island to go away to Toronto, there was too much emotion in the air, and talk was impossible and talking did not make sense. Most of the things that was said was what I call emotion; all that emotion was good for someone as young as you, taking up a journey in life, to another country which is strange to you, although you may forget that you were born there.
The emotion itself was not complete though, was not real emotion, and it rang a bit empty to me, because I am too old for emotion and passion, and because the one person who could have made the rafters ring for joy, that you her only child, was going to a place where she had so many happy years, and tragic years, was not there. Then, was not the time. Then, was not the occasion to bring back memories, whose only meaning and point in bringing them up would have demanded the bringing up also of the tragedy which define those memories. Your mother.
I waited all these year also, because I wanted to be sure and certain that you got through your first year in Toronto. They tell me, and I am referring to the lawyer-fellow and the vicar who live beside me, that the first year of studying the things you are studying is the most hardest of the four years proscribed for studying. The first year is the hardest and saddest. That is what the lawyer-fellow say. The vicar say that being in the first year, you are free from whatever spiritual responsibilities being at home here, assumes you should carry with you; and you are alone in a new kind of freedom, and that very often you will need somebody with experience and affection, to help you confine yourself within that very freedom. It was the vicar, I think, who used the words “inner spiritualism,” to make the point that I am now making to you, using a summary of his words as I do so. To me, it is a more simple thing. I call it knowing and understanding what freedom really stands for.
And if I remember correctly from my own days in that country while I was on a two-year farm labourers’ scheme working on farms in Southern Ontario, Chatham and London and Windsor, before I forgot to report to the man in charge of the conditions of the farm labourers, and took a leave without leave, as you may say and lost myself in Toronto until they tracked me down, and deported me, a man with my education at the best school in Barbados, and with all my years in the Civil Service here, things which you already know. Before they hounded me down as it was their duty to do, and send me back here, but not before I had amassed thousands of dollars for your maintenance and upkeep, I call to mind that the first year in that country, or in any other country where you are a stranger, demands your complete attention to little details which later turn out to be a damn complete waste of time.
You have to watch your allowance. And the allowance that the government people, and the man in charge of the farm labourers, used to give was nothing you could write home about. You have to watch your allowance, as if you are a banker or an economist. Or as if you are an investor. And the worse thing that happens is that you bound to become, and does, a hoarder and miser. God help you son, that you do not follow in my footsteps, as a stranger in that land, and have to be a hoarder.
For instance, being the son of my loins, you bound to love clothes and women, not necessarily in that order. But as to clothes, you may see a shirt for ten dollars, and you buy it because you think it is a saving. But the next day, you will pass another shop window and see the same shirt, on sale for half the price. And being new, you do not know, and would never think that you could take the ten-dollar shirt off your back, wrap it in a nice cellophane pacel, and return it, and get your money back. Canadians do it every day. They taught me never throw away a receipt, even a receipt for a French letter, if you see what I mean! So, never throw away a receipt from a store, not even a liquor store.
You could tell me if Stollery’s Emporium for Men is still at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge Streets? I spent many dollars and more hours talking to the manager, and getting the wrong advice, and the proper fit from the male clerks. Their shirts are not bad. But the best ones I wore, and still have some of, after fifteen years, were obtained at the Annual Jewish sale of clothes in the Canadian National Exhibition, or at a second-hand establishment, named the Royal Ex-Toggery, near the Anglo-Saxon residential district of Rosedale. So, you see, I took the best, the best of the second-hand, from the best of both Toronto worlds, the two founding races, at the time. The Anglo-Saxons and the Jews. I am talking about the Fifties. Now, as I have been reading from the clippings you been sending down, and from chatting with the old tourist on the beach, the place is a virtual potpourri of nationalities, saddle with something called a new sense of nation, or multiculturalism.
The Jewish man dresses well and elegantly. It is small wonder that Hitler stole his clothes. The Jewish man who dresses, and I knew a few in my time whilst I worked illegally in their homes and in their stores, dresses in good clothes. You can learn something, this and more, from the Jewish gentleman. It is not fit for me, your father, from this distance, to utter to you what you can learn from the Jewish woman. But our own Hitler is here, wagging his tail, brushing out his fleas against my foot as I write this letter to you. Perhaps, I had said the name Hitler aloud as I wrote it, and he thought I was commending him for his companionship, and for guarding the old place and protecting me from the varmints we have down here as Barbadians, now that you away. If he could talk, and had the use of language, he would say hello to you, although if he did have that blessing of speech, years ago he would have blasted you in condemnation for your unmerciful treatment of him, and for your insistence that he lived nothing but a dog’s life. “Dogs amongst doctors,” I used to overhear you saying to him; and then Hitler would give out a yelp, as if trying, in his own way, to inform me that you had kicked that precept into him. A dog’s life, indeed. How empty, and still how full. He is lapping up water from the blue enamel bowl in the kitchen, as I sit at the kitchen table, with the door open, writing you. The pullets have multiplied. The cocks crow and screw from sunrise to sunset. And still, I cannot find a blasted egg laid by these thirty-something hens that the two fowl-cocks master, for the thieving neighbour on my right, and the light-fingered bastard on my left. But God do not like ugly.
Nothing here has changed. I went into your room the other day and dusted off the cobwebs and the dried skeletons of scorpions and bugs off your books. The sea air and the salt in the wind, are the censors of books in the island. No wonder that people in these hot, tropical countries eat up the television programmes from North America, in preferences to the pages of a book, and in consequence do not know their head from their backside. The book, my son, is moth-eaten, just as the morality of politics in this country is decaying. And Mannigheim, our leader, is the biggest, fattest, and most bothersome moth to fly around the eyes, and sometimes to get into your mouth. He is either a moth or a stinging bee.
I happened to notice the titles of your small, but well-chosen library of books. I was pleased to see that although you have read the Classics at Harrison College, you still had time besides all that Latin and Greek, two of the deadest languages I can think of, for good literature. You should, while you are there, and during term breaks and March breaks, look
at the Russians, especially Pushkin, the vicar say. You know, he was one of us! I nearly dropped dead when the lawyer-fellow told me so. He went to school in Amurica, and studied all this black thing that people about here now talking about. If you had stuck me with a pin, not one blasted drop of red blood would have oozed from my stunned body. Pushkin is one of us. By that, I mean, a colonial man, more than I mean the obvious namely that he was black. Even in your position of being in a minority, or as I read in the clippings you send down, a member of the visible minority – as if you could ever be invisible – being in a minority through colour, in a country like Canada, whose immigration policy was pearly white officially, up until 1950, and you can ask Don Moore, if he’s still living, the fact of being a colonial, you young intellectuals would say, “post-colonial,” or “neo-colonial,” but I am old and old-fashioned, and the only university I went to was the University of Hard Knocks, and so I say colonial. The colonial is the fact that transcends blackness. Blackness may change when you are amongst all black students; or it may change when you are in the company of good white people. (Have you had the chance to look up Mr. Avrom Lampert yet, as I have asked you, and pay him my respects? He was extremely kind to me, and most helpful in renting me a basement. It was damp, but that was all right. Things used to crawl on the walls. I have eaten more bagels and latkees – do you spell it so? – in his home during my time in that city, hiding from the immigration, than I have eaten flying fish and peas and rice. I hope he is still in the flesh. I still owe him the fifty dollars he lent me, thirty years ago, to pay a bill. Shirts, I think. And you know, I lost the receipt! However, if you see him, do not mention the fifty dollars, though. Time heals all debts.)
You should browse through some Russian literature. In addition to Pushkin, I would think that Dotsoiefsky’s Crime and Punishment would be worthwhile, as the vicar tell me. One winter, when I was flat on my back with fever, indisposed through heath and threatened with dismissal from my job of being a janitor, and laid up in a small attic room on College Street near where the Main Public Library used to be, where I took out and read Crime and Punishment in two days of delirium and high temperatures thinking it was a detective story, I got worse. They rushed me in an ambulance, with the sirens blaring, to the Toronto General Hospital. They, meaning the two Canadian students who rented rooms next to me that summer, and another Canadian who used to put me on my guard immigration-wise. Dr. Guild, the physician who saw me in the Casualty what they call the Emergency up there, just smiled and told me to get a bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin. I had told him of Crime and Punishment. I hope you would not have that kind of relapse when you seek to broaden your literary horizons. If you were to read Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, as the lawyer-fellow say, even though you are reading it for your degree in Economics and Political Science, if you read it outside your course, they will say you are a communist. You should, if you read those two ideologies, be careful enough to hide their tolerance under your academic gown. Or hide their colour under brown wrappers. But if you are seen on a streetcar or in the subway reading Pushkin or Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy, they will say you are an intellectual. Even if they call you a colonial intellectual, as they have a habit of doing, such as black writer, or black artist, or black doctor, it would be different. You would, by this intelligence, be more dangerous to them, and they would not be able to despise, or worse still, ignore your presence, and call you a visible minority.
Who are these “they?” “They” are all the unspeakable, invisible spies, the unnameable people, people who watch you when you do not know, do not feel they are, or should, who take it upon themselves to be your sponsors. Beware of sponsors. Beware of liberals, too. Beware of patronage. Beware of fools. And beware of Gordon’s Dry Gin.
The only ones you do not have to be wary of . . . I just had a silly thought, the musings of an old man. We can say, “beware of,” and be splendidly and syntactically correct. But we dare not say, “those whom you should be beware of.” English is such a blasted puzzle. Such like a young woman under thirty-three. A woman under thirty-three, who does not know how to make love when she says she is making love, is as unattractive as bad English. I do not know what that means. And I do not know why I said it. Do you? I am not, as you have guessed, talking about all thirty-three-year-old women, girls, up there in that city. I am talking about those who were born in working-class districts, in London, in England and in the East End of Toronto, of West Indian parents; those who grew up in the slums of Brixton, and do not tell you this, when luck or a football pool brings them to you, unprepared for Canada; and when they speak to you in their Bray-tish accent, which if you remember listening to on the BBC World Service radio news, and have been taught, as you were, by Englishmen at Harrison College here, you would readily see that their Bray-tish accent is nothing more refined than the cockney of a braying jackass. They are all lower class. Beware of the lower classes of all races. They spit on you because they grew up spitting on the ground. Spitting was the way of their lives. They were spitted on; and now, they spit on you.
Spitted, spat, spatted . . . spat on. Haaawk! Cah-Chew!
Did I ever tell you of Kay? Why would I have done so? You are, after all, still my son, and while you were here, you were still a little boy, and there was no way I could, or should, have spoiled you by these disclosures, and spilled my love life and escapades in that city of Toronto, to you. But now at twenty-two not quite yet, according to our customs and ethics and culture, at twenty-one, and therefore a man, not yet peeing a pee that foams the foam of manhood; nevertheless, at twenty-one and being away, abroad, overseas in that city which gives you a certain privilege, I shall bend the moral and disciplinary precepts you learned so well at Edgehill House, and tell you about Kay.
Kay dressed well in cheap clothes. She loved clothes, but didn’t have the money for her tastes. Kay talked with a Bray-tish accent. Kay said, “I am not a Canadian. I was born in Bray-ton,” meaning Britain. Kay looked intelligent. Kay was affianced to a Barbadian man of unknown social background; but who had some brains, some luck, and through the emergence of Black Power, the unachieved importance of Eldridge Cleaver and Black Awareness, was given a scholarship to do graduate work at a university, in the Sociology of Violence. The Sociology of Violence! Did you ever hear anything like this? Beware of poor West Indians who, with changing times, find themselves in graduate schools, in second-rate universities, writing second-rate theses in second-rate disciplines. The Sociology of Violence! They are the worst kinds of socialists.
But to get back to Kay. Kay was courting this man, was to be married in the October, when I invited him in the September, to tea one afternoon, when he brought Kay along. She was the most beautiful black woman I had ever seen. I served tea and biscuits, grapes and cheese, and then wine. Chateauneuf du Pape. After tea, we had pickled pig’s feet and scotch. She was very Bray-tish during tea. She held the teacup the wrong way. With both hands. Cupped. And she said, three times, “I like this silver tea pot. These are lovely cups. Chinese? Bone cups? I like these Chinese bone cups. This is very civilized.” We had been talking about West Indian immigration to Britain and to Canada. She said, “I am Bray-tish.” It was the second time she had declared her ancestry. When it came time to eat the pig’s feet, she put up her nose. Her nose is rather flat and broad for that kind of superciliousness. Years later, when I met her sister, and her “half-sister,” as she called her, and her mother, all three noses were flat and broad. But those three flat broad noses understood the ancestral dignity of design. They understood pig’s feet also. Not Kay. “I’ve never eaten pig’s feet. I am Bray-tish,” she said, when her fiancé, embarrassed by the stupidity of her airs, told her about souse, probably to take the reservation out of her palate and taste. He looked at me in one of those quick nervous glances. He was mortified, as mortification mortifies a man of low class, and he told her about his “primary proposition” and about the “point he is trying to make.” Beware of “primary propositio
ns” and “points people try to make.” I had welcomed her because I saw only her beauty. Beware of beauty. I saw her good looks. Her appearance. Beware of appearance.
“Girl, don’t be a stupid bitch, do,” he told her, trying to make the point that he disapproved of her airs. “Woman, what British you talking ’bout? I am doing a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Violence as it affects the West Indian Diaspora in Britain. And I know. I know people like you been eating nothing but shit like fish and chips in Britain since 1950, when the first wave of immigrants washed-up at Southampton. Ackee and bad salt fish. Pig ears. Pig snout. Pig tail and rice. And kiss-me-ass fish and chips! Or weren’t you brought up on Yorkshire pudding? Look, girl, eat the blasted trotters, do!”
That was the first sign I got about Kay’s problem of positive or negative self-identity. She did not tell lies at those times. She allowed people, me and my friends, to make conclusion about her, and spread them, and in turn, believed them, and she kept silence, knowing all the time they were lies.
She graduated from McMaster in Business, we said. She was a trainee at a large commercial bank downtown, we said. She was born, as I have said, in Bray-ton, we said. She had a nanny, we said. She went to private school, we said. She called herself “a banker,” we said.
She was, in fact, a teller. A junior teller. At a counter in a small bank. It was not even the main branch. And she was born in Jamaica. She went, however, to a girls’ boarding school in Clarendon. One day, she called me. She was crying. Her fiancé had met a white Canadian woman, much older than she, much older than he, who had a child nine years old. He told his colleagues in the Sociology of Violence as it Affects department that he was going to marry this white Canadian girl. And he did. And he regretted afterwards. But never apologized to Kay. Never called. Never wrote a letter to save breach of promise proceedings. Never sent a message. Never sent back the three hundred dollars she borrowed on her credit card to buy his wedding suit from Stollery’s store at Bloor and Yonge. Was not mortified by the mortification of the Breacher of Promise, or by the Sociological Violence wrecked on the jilter.
In this City Page 7
