A SHORT DRIVE
This Saturday afternoon at three, with the first real light, and the first cleansed skies washed so blue after the rains, there was a constant breeze and upon the breeze came the coolness and the strong smell of patchouli and summer flowers. It was tantalizing as the smell of saltness and of fresh fish brought out of the sea on a beach in Barbados. Gwen was a woman with a touch of this saltiness on her breath. And the woman back in Toronto, on Lascelles Boulevard, she too carried a trace of that smell; but her real smell was of Lavender.
Calvin sat nobly and like an emperor, stiff, with the pride of new ownership, behind the steering wheel reduced to the size of a toy wheel against his imposing size, of the Volkswagen which he had just bought, “hot,” he said, for seventy-five dollars. He called it his “Nazi bug.” And he too looked clean as the skies. His skin, on his arms up to his elbows; his neck, right into the V of the black dashiki; his legs from below the knee and down to his toes, all this flesh was “oiled, Jack,” he said. He had shampooed his round-shaped Afro, and it was glistening although he had used Duke Greaseless Hairdressing for Men. He had given me some, but my hair did not accept the same shine as his. He looked clean. And he looked like a choice piece of pork seasoned and ready for the greased pan and the oven. He would not like this comparison. But I have to say he looked clean.
His legs were thin and had no calves. This was the first time I had seen Calvin dressed in anything but grey-green plaid trousers and blue blazer. Today, he was in cut-down jeans, which gave me the first glimpse of his legs. I could not believe his long stories, over beer in frosted mugs and Polish sausages, about playing running back for the college football team. The black dashiki, with its V-neck and sleeves trimmed in black, red and green, tempered somewhat the informality of his casual dress.
“Pass the paper bag. Glove compartment. Take a sip, brother,” he said, holding the steering wheel with his left hand, and a Salem in the other. “And keep your motherfucking head down in case the man . . .”
The puttering VW rollicked over the gravel road at a slow pace. Its dashboard was cluttered with additional things which Calvin had installed. Cassette tape deck and 8-track tape deck; FM-AM radio and a short-wave radio, a contraption which looked like a walkie-talkie, and two clocks. One, he said, gave the time in the north-east, and the other, the time of the South, of the city of Birmingham, Alabama, where we were, and had been together since the beginning of the summer semester. Looking at this dashboard, I was reminded of the glimpse of the cockpit of the plane in which I had travelled two months earlier from Toronto to teach the summer course, in which Calvin was an auditor. I had never heard that term before. But Calvin was my student. And as the lonely heavy southern nights spun themselves out into greater monotony, he became my guide to where the action was, and almost my friend. The noisy VW moved slowly over the rutted road, and I could see in the distance the sights and substance and large properties, the grace and the southern architecture in the residential exclusive district we were passing on our right hand. We were driving so slow that I thought it was a mistake, that Calvin lived in this district, and that we would turn into one of the magnificent gates any minute now. One of these mansions I had passed, in the dark last night, searching in vain for Gwen’s apartment. I now could see the structure I had mistaken for the house. It is a white-painted gazebo with Grecian pillars. And in the gazebo is a child’s swing and a white-painted iron chair and iron table. There is no child in the swing.
“Ripple,” Calvin said, after a large gulp, and wiping away the evidence with the hand that held the Salem, just in case. “This is the real shit.” Last night, at the bar with the frosted beer mugs and huge Polish sausages, Calvin ordered two gigantic T-bone steaks and two bottles of Mommesin red wine, both of which I paid for. This Ripple wine, which cut into my throat like a razor blade dipped in molasses, must have been a ritualistic thing to go with his cut-down jeans and the dashiki. Or it might have been cultural. I took a second swig at the bottle hardly concealed in the brown paper bag, and squeezed my eyes shut, and shook my head. “This is the real shit,” he said, disagreeing with my reaction.
On our left hand, I was passing men, slow, as if a shutter speed were set to afford a sense of the whiz of movement, men bent almost in the shape of hairpins, doubled-up, close to the grass which was so green it looked blue. And from the short distance I was, these men resembled gigantic mushrooms painted onto the sprawling lawns, and wearing broad-brimmed hats necessary to protect them against the brutal heat of the sun, and the exhaustion that the humidity seemed to sap from their bodies. I could see them move their hands as if they were playing with the grass, but at the completion of each piston-like action, the effort in their movements appearing slowed-down by the encompassing grandeur of the afternoon, when this act of slashing the blades of grass was complete, a shower of grass lifted itself on impact, a blade of steel flashed like lightning and the grass was scattered harmlessly over the lawn.
“Mexicans,” Calvin said as if he didn’t like Mexicans, and with some bitterness; and as if he was pronouncing a sentence not only on them, but also upon their labour.
They were soaked to their backs; and their shapeless clothes made them look Indian to me. But the formlessness of their shirts and pants was, to me, the designer’s label and trademark of hard labour. They could have been Chinese standing up to their ankles in water and growing rice.
“Amerrikah! Home of the motherfucking free, Jack!” Calvin said. “This South’s shaped my personality, and this university’s fucked it up, with the result that I don’t know who I am. I was happier in Atlanta on ’Fayette Street in the black area.” I did not know what he was talking about. I was admiring the Mexicans. They looked now like figures in a tableau, painted against the blue-grass lawns. And the manner in which they had thrown out the commercial proficiency of the power mower and the precision of mechanization by the bare power of their hands made me deaf to Calvin’s protestations. And it seemed that they were showing the superiority of their knowledge about nature and things and their own past in this temporary but scorching menialness of labour; and expressing their own protest, as Calvin was with words, with the violence of their muscular arms.
Calvin was now slouched behind the steering wheel, as if the Ripple had suddenly changed the composition of the blood in his veins. His right arm was extended so that his fingers just touched the steering wheel, as if he wanted no closer association with it. As if he was despising the wheel, the VW, along with the statement he had just made about rejection. “What the fuck am I getting a college education for? And writing academic papers on Reductionism for?” I still did not understand what he was talking about. But he brought the VW to an uncertain stop. We were under a tree. Calvin had told me the name of this tree. They were all over the South; and they cluttered the path through a woods to the building on the campus where convocations were held. The first time Calvin told me the name of this tree, he told me about a woman named Billie Holiday. I did not know who he was talking about. But he started to sing the words of a song, “Strange Fruit”; and we were inhaling the sweet smell of the magnolia trees and the wind was unforgiving in bringing the strong Southern smell to our nostrils. I would have trouble remembering the name of the woman who sang this song; and more often the title of the song slipped my memory. But I remembered one line, only one line of the song about Southern trees. Blood on the leaves, and blood at the root. Calvin had sung the entire song from memory. His voice was off-key. But that afternoon I looked up into the thick branches of the trees under which we were walking to the place which served beer in frosted glasses and huge Polish sausages, and only the raindrops accumulated on the leaves after the downpour dropped into my face. And now, this afternoon, the VW stopped uncertainly, because he had never accumulated the thirty dollars to fix the brakes, we were stopped under a tree.
“What kind of tree is that? I don’t think we have these trees in Toronto.”
“The size, or the na
me?” Calvin asked.
The mouth of the Ripple bottle was in his mouth. A little of the wine escaped his lips, and it ran slowly down into his beard, but I could still see the rich colour of red, like blood.
“The same.”
“Poplar. This be a poplar tree.”
We were shaded by the tree. And I was beginning to feel great relief from the humidity which embraced me like a tight-fitting shirt.
“Southern trees bear strange fruit.”
Calvin’s voice had not improved in the month I had first heard it. I smiled at his rendition.
“Black bodies hanging in the Southern breeze.”
We remained in the shade, and I could feel the breeze making my body cool, as if I was being dipped slowly into sea water. I was comfortable. But Calvin was not: sadness appeared in hi eyes. His lips formed themselves into a sneer. He moved his body, and the bottle of Ripple became heavy and caused the seat and the leather to cry out. The leather in the seats of the VW was the most valuable feature of the old rumbling automobile. He moved his body in the small space we shared, and I could smell his perspiration, and his breath laden with the menthol from the Salems, and the sickening sweetness of the Ripple .
“Dualism, my brother,” he said. He leaned over, took the bottle from me and drained it dry. “What the fuck? I’ve seen the ass-whuppings in Selma, ’Bama, and Little Rock.”
The breeze stopped. The languor of the afternoon was heavy, and we were once more lumbering over the road which turned to hard, dried, uncared-for dirt. It was sad. The sadness was like the sudden fall of dust under the low-hanging trees, when the scent of magnolia rises like shimmering ZZZs you see, if you kneel down, rising from a hot tarred road.
“What do you want to be then¿ What do you want to make of your life, if not a scholar?”
“Miles!”
“Away from Birmingham?”
“Miles Davis!”
I did not know what to say to this; and so Calvin continued to let his feelings and fantasies come out of his thin body, and the coming out made him large, and grand and strong as the running back he always boasted he was when he played for his college football team.
“As Barry White says, bro, let the music play. Let the music play on. Let the motherfucking music play, Jack! I be Miles. I am Miles. Or I am Coltrane. Trane. I am Otis. I’m Nina Simone. And I am ’Retha! And I am on a stage at the biggest theatre in the South, but not the Opry, and thousands are out there in the dark, screaming my name. My toon. My voice. My riffs. My trumpet. My tenor-horn. It’s the same fucking thing, Jack. Let the music play.”
The smell of Calvin’s Salems, the old odour that had settled inside the VW, filled my nostrils; and with these smells was the smell of cloths that are wet, and drying in the back seat. I could also smell the oiliness of southern-fried chicken from Chicken Box Number Two. We had eaten chicken many times in the VW, as if we were still suffering from that segregation of accommodation, although it was our manner of checking out the beautiful women coming out of the women’s residence in their pink shorts, and white shorts and blue shorts.
We were by ourselves on this road of dried mud, in a field that was growing something I could not recognize. Corn came to my mind, as this place was in the same part of geography as that island where I came from; so corn came naturally to my mind; but there was not the lusciousness in the endless spread of green that made me feel we were adrift on the sea. We were alone, although far to the right I could see the smudged whiteness of the pillars and other parts of the architecture from colonial times. And on our right, not with that distance, some small houses, and from them sentinels of rising white smoke that turned blue as it reached high above our heads. And still the sun was shining.
And then in the distance, like the call of my mother’s voice, miles away, but only a few yards from the make-shift cricket pitch we had gouged out of our own mud to play the game, my mother’s voice calling me home for dinner: rice cooked with few split peas because there was a War on, and served with salt fish from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, thin and flat and full of bones but transformed by the improvised wisdom in these things by my mother, and soaked in lard oil, tangy from the cheap Australian butter, it was said, we imported from Australia, to us in a commonwealth of nations, friends; and tomatoes picked from our backyard; that welcoming call that wrenched me from my friends and playmates, disappointed that I had not hit the ball for six, or four, or even a single in the hot, hot-competing afternoon. So, did this sound come to me, unanchored in this vastness of living thriving green, in the rickety VW with a stranger, drinking Ripple concealed in a brown paper bag, from the eyes of the sheriff.
In the blue-white distance I heard the heavy rumbling of a train. A freight train. I followed the train as it wriggled its way like a worm through the greenness on the land, as it moved like a large worm, and in my mind, through the history its approach was unravelling and through the myths of trains: men on the run travelled on them; men fleeing women and wives and child payment hid on them; and men in chains and those who escaped from chain-gangs were placed on them. And the best blues were written about them. The rumbling of this train, like the rumbling of that train in the cowboy movies of the Old West, seemed interminable as a toothache that comes at sunset and that lasts throughout the groaning night, like a string pulled by a magician from the palm of one hand, like the worm you pull from the soft late grass-covered ground that does not end, and that makes you late to go fishing. I heard a siren. Or a whistle? There were so many sirens I was hearing this summer in Birmingham because of civil rights and fights with sheriffs, that I mistook the name of the sound. I heard a siren. The siren ended the train.
“Police cruiser?” I asked Calvin. “Or ambulance?”
“In this neighbourhood, could be either. Both. Chitlins and hogmaws. One goes with the other.”
“Cops coming through the grass?” I still did not know what was planted in the growing vastness surrounding me.
Calvin lit another Salem. The VW was immediately filled with smoke. This lasted for one moment. Then it was filled with a tingling, sweet and bitter smell. It was not the Salem that Calvin had lit. It was not a Salem. But he filled his lungs with the smoke and then shot two unbroken, thin and fierce jets of white from his nostrils, making him look in that moment like a walrus. Speaking through smoke and coughing at the same time as if his thinness meant tuberculosis, and with his breath held, he said, “What can we in the South do with this dualism-thing? Before it fucks us up?”
“Education could never be so destructive.”
“Spoken like a true West Indian who knows nothing about the South, and Amerrikah.”
“Education is freedom.”
“Spoken like a man who’s never lived in Birmingham, or in any city in the South.”
“You need education.”
“We need a black thang. We don’t need no education, brother. A black thang. And a black conclusion.”
“And what about your seminar on Reductionism?”
“Shit! Can you see me discussing that at my mother’s Sunday dinner table? She be calling the cops, thinking this nigger’s crazy!”
The VW became quiet, and filled with the strange smoke. The words Calvin was using were larger than the capacity of the small “bug,” too bulging with the possibility of explosion and violence. I went back to the Mexicans on the lawns. I began to have the sensation of being rocked from side to side. But it could have been the vibration of the freight train, which had not yet come to its end from within the tunnel created by the endless fields of growing things. Looking outside through the steam of smoke from Calvin’s fag, I saw cement and concrete, and paper blowing along the narrow sidewalks and into the street. The light here was harsh. There were no flowers. There were no poplar trees. The trees were stubby but they did not shade the blinding, shimmering waves that came off the surface of the sidewalk. I wished, at that moment, that I was back in Toronto among the red brick, the dirty red brick and cobbleston
es, passing shops that sold the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement, and that sold Condor and Erinmore pipe tobacco and French cigarettes and French leathers or “letters” – I never knew which was the proper term – things I was accustomed to and knew how to handle, among the buildings that were not so imposing, and the short streets. Space there was more manageable. I wished for the softness of streets shaded by small trees, and lined with cars, many of which belonged to students and were broken into; with garbage pails of green and other wrecks; and I wanted the softness of the northern seductive and betraying nights; and to be amongst the unthreateningness of broken-down homes with cloth at their windows and with unpainted boards nailed across the windows and the doors, derelicts from the nights of rioting in the cities in the North – Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., and Toronto.
In this City Page 14
