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THERE ARE NO ELDERS
Austin Clarke
Publishers of Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Drama, Translations and Graphic Books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Clarke, Austin, 1934-
There are no elders / Austin Clarke ; introduction by Leon Rooke.
(Exile classics ; no. 5)
Originally published 1993.
ISBN 978-1-55096-092-1
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8505.L38T46 2007 C813'.54 C2007-901994-3
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Copyright © 1993 Austin Clarke
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CONTENTS
If the Bough Breaks
Ship, Sail! Ship Fast!
In an Elevator
Beggars
Not So Old, but Oh So Professional
Just a Little Problem
They’re Not Coming Back
The Cradle Will Fall
INTRODUCTION
One of the fascinating things about this fine collection of stories by Austin Clarke – no, better make that superb, and make it a cycle too, for these stories (each one lovely) work together like a dream . . . one of the things I most relish, anyway, is the extraordinary presence in the book of the author himself. Frequently he strolls the page in luminous dignity, honey in motion, your friendly correspondent wearing no disguise whatsoever. More often he goes undercover – jabbing, feinting, poking and prying, orbiting his way through a story’s hidden warrens with the finesse of the original Artful Dodger. In few works of fiction is an author so reliably and engagingly present. The way he’s there creates a reader/writer bonding that is rare in its intimacy and its warmth; this deepens our response to what is painful here and what is joyful, adds another layer to it all, takes nothing whatever away (for that’s what these stories are: the writer in motion, lapping up his very particular world, looping his way through it). And it provides great fun, I would think, whether one knows Austin or comes upon him here as a stranger might.[1]
These are Toronto stories, and they are stories of the West Indies. In the last story in the book, for example, we have Toronto in the now (our man trudging through the snow, riding his train) and Barbados back then (our boy sitting on the sand, staring at a ship or at a “black, patched tube,” a lifesaver that is drifting out to sea). The book’s last sentence – spoken by an old, old friend not seen in fifty years, once the boy he sat with on that beach, now come upon by dazzling chance on Yonge Street, another successful island man who’s apt like him to be awash in memory and martinis – is “Goddamn! And you still don’t know how to swim!” But swim he does, like a blasted master, Austin Clarke, between these worlds and within each one of them.
They are stories partly about racism:
“Nevermindthat!”
“Why never mind that?”
“Nevermindthat!”
The two women speaking here to the racism that riddles their lives (how much to the fore should this plague be in this instant, must it be always?) are two of a five-member group of island women waiting their turn under the iron at Christophe’s Salon, best in the city for “fixing” black women’s hair. They are here because this is where they have always come. So “nevermind” too the hard plastic chairs in this grungy salon, and “nevermind” their foreign cars parked below or their fine clothes or the fancy lunch they just had at the Four Seasons Hotel with two martinis each. They like it here. They are together, knitting up, weaving between, their various personal West Indian and Toronto stories and their responses to the drama that is suddenly happening at Christophe’s Salon right now.
The story is “If the Bough Breaks,” the first one in the book, and the five talking women constitute a kind of Greek Chorus, providing both overture and running commentary, a site of critique for all that Austin Clarke is doing in his book. They had to be women and mothers. In the other stories there is generally the figure of a man who is in some way our author, so this first story is and is not a different kind of story: the matrix from which all the others are born. It is important for the author that these are middle-class women whose lives contain much pleasure and that their experience of racism is nonetheless deeply engrained, a daily sorrow and source of rage. It’s also no accident that the last story in the book, the one about those old-time friends who meet by chance on Yonge Street, is decidedly male and that it’s called “The Cradle Will Fall.” (Thus, the first and last stories work together as gendered “bookends” for the collection.)
All women know it, really all of us people know it: if the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. And the women on whom their sons and daughters depend cannot always protect them from the harsh and bitter wind. Sometime or many times along the way – early on, or in the middle, or at the end of a normal lifespan – that bough will break, and will be patched up one more time or not. In the last story, about the joy of “these two old black men . . . embracing and laughing and pummeling each other on their thick black cashmere winter coats,” about their boyhood and their alcoholic beverages of choice and their sorrows and satisfactions and all the women along the way, it is clear that the cradle, though still rocking, will fall soon for good.
Because they have somehow become old. It’s harder now to move through ice and snow, and there has been an increase in the habit of “dozing off.” The conch shell that was blown when they were boys on the sand and an uncle was drowned will sometime soon be raised to someone’s lips again to sound forth their deaths. But the author-figure who is “walking in the snow” is at the same time a boy “sitting on the sand” with his friend; and his same-but-different friend with an identical posh coat, still sitting in the bar even though it’s closed, says this for both of them as the story nears its end:
“We leave the cradle, man, and our mothers feed us Cream of Wheat to make us men and we have different paths, and we go here and we go there, have women, wives, girlfriends, but we never leave the place we’re born. We never grow up, really.”
This passage echoes the lines from poet Derek Walcott that Austin Clarke quotes before There Are No Elders begins, and makes a claim that is both general and particularly West Indian. That children generally – and maybe sons most particularly – don’t ever grow up, not really, is a thing the
ir mothers know.
But in the first story it’s daughters that the five women – in their posh clothes, after their martinis – are most worried about. Outside the salon, sirens scream, and the cop cars arrive; the women lean out of the salon windows to see a young white girl being led away. They’d been sure it would be a young black man, or maybe a young black woman, but black for sure – even though, they say, they raise their own children better than those blasted white people do. Cops are racist. But that’s not all of it. Will they rape her in the car? She’s just a child, some mother’s child, and how much does it matter to their level of concern that this somebody’s daughter is coloured white? They’re worrying about their daughters too. And if the cops aren’t the ones who’ve abused the young white girl who later comes into the salon, battered and bleeding, who is the niece of the man in the convenience store below, if it’s someone closer like an uncle, shouldn’t they maybe call the cops? They are drawn together “in their fear and their horror at the spectacle” (as Greek tragedy demands), and they ponder what they know:
...they went back over all those times, when their own children had been left with uncles and brothers-in-law, with close friends of their families, with their own husbands, fathers of their children, and they dared not travel back with too much memory and clarity and honesty. There was blood on her leg.... They knew it could be one thing only. One cause. One kind of violence.
Working together, they try to soothe this poor female child, to patch her up, to cleanse her as best they can. One of them then poses a question that this book needs to ask: “Why is it always this way with women? And for women?”
So the stories of There Are No Elders are often concerned with race (roots and racism) and often too with sexuality and gender (sexual pleasure and fear and violence, and the pain and the distance between men and women). One of the strongest stories in the collection is the second one, titled “Ship, Sail! Sail Fast!” – words from childhood that are revisited in the final story. This story opens in a small, slow lakeside town outside Toronto and mostly spins out from the train journey that the author-figure, who “felt like a man escaping custody,” takes to get back to “the big city.” What he’s escaping is a brief affair with a woman who has irritated him mightily by being a “woman who loved kissing the dog, and kissing him afterwards with the same lips,” and by having “a plastic cover on the toilet bowl that he had to sit sideways on” as well as a “shower which beat against the sides of its tin enclosure” – all of it too small for him, another disappointment with womankind. But the paltriness of his irritation is as apparent to the reader as the deadly accuracy of its depiction; the eye of judgment in the story fixes him, and “Ship, Sail! Sail Fast!” is not a story in which the male of our species is triumphant.
From the taxi on his way to the train, the man sees a huge ship motionless – stalled – on the lake. It is an image that takes him back to the sea of his childhood. The story moves through images, between the parallel, moving planes of the train and the landscape it passes through, moves with breathtaking skill between memories of the woman he has just left and his West Indian youth. The sight of cornfields takes him to the young island girl who was “his only rudder, leading him into the valley of information and learning,” and whose rebuke of a modest sexual advance stopped him in his tracks for fifteen years; it was that long “before he had the strength to raise his hand from his side to touch a woman on her waist.” And that vulnerability, that fear of the power of rejection, even if it’s hard to believe as many as fifteen years, changes how we place him in the story of the sexes.
But the most stunning thing – the extended, fast-beating heart of the story – is how the cornfields call into his imagination the time of slavery and the underground railroad. The figure of a woman appears, emerging “from the deep green patch of corn to hail the train,” and the author-figure (he is not identified as a writer) knows instantly that her name is Jane. She is walking beside Jim, “her disappointment, her hindrance from catching the train that would have brought her sooner to glory and the freedom she was seeking.” The author-figure can see clearly as well “the man’s disappointment. And the man’s shame. For the man knew he was a man, even in the circumscribed circumstance of his life and of his woman’s life. But he had no power to behave as a man.” They exist in different time periods and places, Jim and Jane, these figures given flesh and story by a writer’s racing imagination; and we have before our astonished eyes a passionate history of how life has gone and how it goes for many black men and black women. (For example: when Jim cannot bear any longer the master’s whip – there is “no unmarked area the size of a postage stamp” on his body – he “pushed her forward, to take her rightful place of leadership, and she took and endured the sting of justice.”)
“In an Elevator” is a story (like many others here) with a rapidly zig-zagging point of view and overlapping voices. It is again a piece in which we are conscious of the writer’s construction of what might be going on in the minds of unknown people, how observed scraps of the external world can generate character and theme and story. The principal story concerns a white woman who finds herself going down on an elevator with a young black man; she imagines that she is in sexual danger, and he sees her imagining this. The author-figure here appears only very briefly in the course of another elevator ride, this one going up, that the woman had taken a few days earlier. He is a black man on his way to an interview; he is well-dressed, pleasant, but she doesn’t return his smile or speak. She is uncomfortable in his presence, and later that afternoon “she’d accused herself for having those feelings”; and she’d recalled a girl from Barbados she’d known at school and “that other one from the Bahamas who thought she was the cat’s meow better than any of us with her father the prime minister.” (She’d got back at that uppity Bahamian girl by accusing her of being “the culprit who had written the dirty word on the blackboard about Miss Sweeney: lesbian.”) Black is black; no obvious deviation from racist stereotypes can suffice for the comfort or approval of whites like Susan Cole. (“I was here first, and I work here, and no goddam immigrant or cleaning woman or black son-of-a-bitch, nobody’s gonna make me feel threatened and live like a victim in my own fucking country, province . . . in my city.”)
We are given just a few lines that take us into the mind of the black man in a suit and tie, and nothing about his observation of her. He is, as far as we know, preoccupied with the fact that he’s late for his interview. But in the short time they are together two crucial scraps of information about the woman are recorded: on the ring she wears “was the crest of Bishop Strachan,” and “Danger came into her stomach, like the first signs of diarrhea.” And that’s it – hallelujah! From these two signals, the author-in-thin-disguise has constructed the story in our hands, about a graduate of a posh Toronto girls’ school whose co-workers find her highfalutin and who hates an immigrant cleaning woman she suspects of being a lesbian; a story that begins with this woman he’s called Susan Cole perched on a toilet she has been visiting all day because she has diarrhea; a story that centres on another elevator ride with a different black man – this one wearing a colourful windbreaker (“she has already painted a picture of his attire, and could pick him out of any police line-up with her eyes closed”) and listening on his Walkman, she mistakenly assumes, to what else but “Rap!”; a story that ends with this polite college boy holding the door open for Susan Cole and then disappearing down the street like “a basketball star or a ballet dancer” or an object of impossible desire.
In “Beggars,” we meet again our author-in-thin-disguise. He’s in a crowded subway train, pressed up against a woman, and she is holding onto him for balance:
“Sorry,” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
But I am not sorry. She squeezes her eyes shut.
Opens them, in an expression of friendship and forgiveness....
She closes her eyes again.... And I try to
put her b
ack, a half hour, or an hour-and-a-half, back
into her house....
So this time it is clear. What we have is a man creating a character, imagining a story. It begins with close-up, in-her-skin physical detail – how as she wakes her cotton nightgown “is riding up along one leg, above her thigh,” as anyone who has watched closely will know that nightgowns are inclined to do – and moves to what is on her mind and her early morning routine. It’s an episode featuring her financial worries and her shower and the careful application of make-up and her unemployed husband who requires sex before she leaves for work. (“I have put her at forty years of age. Perhaps, thirty-nine. She is tall. About five feet, seven. And well-built.”) At one point before he wakes up, “she looks down with distaste at her husband, so close to death, if she has a mind for it; and she wonders now, suffering her own suffocation, why she never gave her children a dolphin made of plastic. Or a whale. Or a fish.” Why only “plastic ducks and plastic bears” for the children’s bath? The killing of her husband is an idle fantasy, gone before the sentence is out.
Soon “the train jerks, coming to a stop. It is the first stop since I have made this woman’s acquaintance.” They are still pressed up against each other. Her eyes open and close once more:
And then, like a woman in sleep that is not deep, she starts, tosses long strands of reddish brown hair out of her eyes, as she would coming out of the sea, and is immediately, immaculately, a different woman.... She is taken back, back for half an hour, or an hour-and-a-half, in her own mind....
This time she wakes to the necessity of killing a small cockroach that is crawling away from her face on a double mattress that lies on the hardwood floor. Again, “her nightgown was gathered at her waist.” The new story about the woman’s husband stretches out, intensified. The cockroaches multiply. She has left the bastard, four nights ago, following one of many vicious beatings, in which first he slaps her around. “She stood there, feeling the pain and humiliation deep down,” but he was not “satisfied.” Her reaction is not sufficient to appease him:
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