'Membering Read online

  For tee,

  Haddie

  and for Howard Matthews

  the First Floor Club

  Betty Clarke

  The Honourable Roy McMurtry

  “You ’member?”

  “I ’member.”

  “I ’member, too!”

  “What you ’member?”

  “I ’member everything you want me to remember!”

  “You really ’member everything, in-true?”

  — From a conversation seventy years ago, on a humid afternoon, in a school, in Barbados, the St. Matthias Elementary School for Boys

  A time has come and gone.

  Some memories are

  captured in a song.

  Some stories told,

  an artist’s hand,

  something to find

  among the sand,

  something to hold,

  remembering,

  another world.

  Another world.

  — Abbey Lincoln, “Another World”

  (from the album Wholly Earth, New York City, 1998)

  Table of Contents

  First Epigraph

  Second Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Credits

  Chapter One

  I am sitting in my study on a Friday afternoon in 2004, forty-nine years after I came limping through a hurricane whose name I cannot remember, although it is the name of a woman, and I always remember the names of women, but this is 1955, on the twenty-ninth day in September, fifty years later, almost to the day, in this same weather that used to be called, and could be called “Indian Summer,” a term which to me, a novelist, is filled with romantic notions and presumptions, but which the pervading decency of political correctness, like the fury of the hurricane … I ’member the name we called it by now! Janet! Janet, Janet, Janet! Hurricane Janet. I have known many Janets. And all of them were harmless, beautiful women … but here I am, in this study that looks across a road well travelled in the rushing mornings to work, and hardly travelled with such anxiety and intent during the hours that come before the rush to work, walked on, and peed on, by the homeless, and the prostitutes and the pimps, and the men and women going home to apartments in the sky, surrounding and overlooking Moss Park park, as I like to call it. Moss Park park is where life stretches out itself on its back, prostrate in filthy, hopeless, bouts of heroism and stardom, for these men who lie on the benches and the dying grass, are heroes to themselves and to one another, in a pecking order that is full of right-eous daring, and righteous chances of stupidity like crossing the road in front of speeding cars that put the brakes — at the last minute — on with a squeak. The image of a smashed head on the shining bonnet of a Mercedes-Benz is not on the menu for tonight’s dinner in Cabbagetown; or the delay caused by the dying words of the homeless man about his residence in a filthy halfway house behind the bastions of Victorian and Georgian townhouses that hide this degradation from the fleeing man in the German-made automobile.

  Such homelessness — as politicians like to call this layer of detestation — greets me every day on the green grass cleaned by the morning and the dew, like a set of teeth passed over by a smear of toothpaste; or by warm water seasoned in salt; or by bare fingers that had dug during the night in the five minutes ticking off on a Rolex watch, or counted off in seconds by the friction of a French-leathered hectic moment behind the fences of the townhouses, deep into the panties of the woman who stands like a sentry at the corner of two streets, punctual and reliable as a security guard, and whose colour or cleanliness he wisely cannot see in the dark, leaf-shaking night hidden by the trees that have no tongue in the chastising speechless mouth of satisfaction.

  And I wonder why these men with their picked-out women, all standing in the darkness of street corners shaded by trees and the darkness of their own intentions should choose such a little, such a small, short hiatus from their lives of homelessness — or lovelessness?

  I have been homeless once. In a most dramatic manner, with a knock on the door, in the rough, brutal manner of the bailiff; but this is nothing to boast about. I saw my homelessness in the colour of black and white: racism, at its most brutal and unfeeling and uncompromising display. But I saw it also in the insistence that I would overcome this temporary reversal of fortune. I saw it, too, as a revisiting of the importance or the fatalism associated with Fridays. Fridays in my early life in Barbados, were days of terror, when I had to face homework at Harrison College that was almost the equal of one term’s work at Combermere School for Boys, the previous “second grade” I attended. Harrison College was a “first grade” government school. At Harrison’s, which is what we called our school, a normal Friday afternoon’s homework for me as a boy in the Lower Sixth Form of Modern Studies (I was specializing in Latin and English grammar and English literature, with subsidiary subjects of Roman history and religious knowledge), meant “learning” two chapters of the Acts of the Apostles; two chapters in Roman history; one hundred lines of Virgil’s Aeneid Book II, two chapters in Caesar’s Gallic Wars; two chapters of Livy Book XXI; and as our Latin master (Joe Clarke, no relation of mine!), who had no idea of the lives we lived away from Harrison College, always suggested, “Well, you can open your book and look at a few chapters of Tacitus’s Histories, after you have pushed your Sunday dinner plates aside.”

  “One act of Macbeth by Shakespeare; a few stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’; and one act in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral; one hundred lines of ‘Hyperion’ by John Keats; and a few pages of A.C. Bradley’s prefaces to Shakespearean Tragedies, with particular attention to Macbeth,” said the English Literature master, an American from Harvard University (a university which none of us had heard of before his arrival at Harrison’s in loose-fitting linen and cotton suits, brown moccasins with a penny fitted into the instep of each shoe, outfits which we held bets on that he would not repeat in the same week, or month, or term … and he did not!). And anything we wanted to “learn” would improve our chances of winning the prestigious Barbados Scholarship. I was entered for the scholarship; but it was known by the “bright boys” and by my own honesty that I did not have a chance against three other boys in my form, unless two of them suddenly dropped down dead. Fridays at Harrison College were mind-numbing days; days of terror; days that ensured that the entire weekend would be unhappy.

  At Combermere, which we called “Cawmere,” Fridays were days of relaxation, of play, of exercising the power and privilege of being a prefect, or a house captain, or even as Head Boy. Of preparing the body and not the mind for the rigours of the weekend: cricket, “social hops,” the cinema, dropping-round by boys and visiting girlfriends, and eating black pudding and souse, sugar cakes, coconut bread, “cou-cou and harslick”; and “cakes” and puddings made, sometimes, by the girls who had listened to their mothers’ memorization of old recip
es, delivered like dictation; and going to the beach to loll in the warm, salty, enervating waves, and wash your face with sea water that burned your eyes, that made the hair round your forehead red and tough, and that you drank as a kind of purgative to “clean-out the bowels”; while men took it home in bottles, or else drank it from their palms as they would drink “a drop o’ hot sauce,” and afterwards cry out “Hem! Uh-hem!,” exclaiming at its marvellous recuperative qualities. Going to church, as a little Anglican to the English Church of England; or to the Methodist church; or to the Church of the Nazarene, or to the Pilgrim Holiness, either to worship — a term never used in Barbados — or to sing in the choir, and as a gesture more to illustrate social class and status, than to demonstrate any contention of being religious, attending church “in your Sunday best” was the only interruption of the two-and-a-half-day holiday, beginning on Friday afternoon, and ending on Sunday after Evensong and Service. But during the weekend when I was at Cawmere, the spine of a textbook was never broken as we tromped through the weekend in our noisy glee; and if the Bible was in fact looked into, it was in order to follow the reading of the two lessons by the vicar. It was certainly not considered the same as reading Scripture, our first class on Monday mornings at Cawmere: “The Axe of the Postles.” Bright and early at nine-fifteen — after prayers — in the class of Mr. L.L. Webster, who never looked into a book himself while he heard the lesson of Scripture. At the beginning of his class, he asked, “What is the lesson today, boys?”

  “Axe of the Postles,” the monitor, Armstrong, A.E., reminded him.

  “Uh-huh!” he told the monitor and the class of thirty other boys.

  And when the monitor, A.E. Armstrong, told him a second time, “Axe of the Postles, sir!” all Mr. Webster would do was close his eyes, pass his hand over the few remaining strands of hair on his balding grey head, and, with his eyes still closed, as if calling up memory and strength to paint the picture of the verses about Ananias and Sapphira more clearly in his retentive mind, he would hear us in the lesson, orally, having us complete the words in a verse he had picked, at random, out from his expansive mind.

  “Uh-huh!” he would keep saying. “Uh-huh!”

  Mr. Webster was the brother of the owner of Wildey Plantation, of vast fields of sugar cane, and which produced raw sugar and crack liquor, another name for molasses, and which is the model, only in its physical dimension, though not in racial and moral disposition, of the plantation in my novel The Polished Hoe.

  Fridays became for me, at Cawmere, signposts of the long journey I did not know I was about to begin, but which I found myself on, a journey going backwards, always on a Friday while I lived in the Island; and now in this country of greater size and lesser self-assurance, similar in some ways to the indecisiveness of colonial power, and the people who lived under that power, going backwards to a Friday; a Friday in September that marked the change in my life which cannot be altered now; and in some cases, be redeemed. But in this journey backwards, I am discovering more about myself and the heritage that brought me, through ancestry, to this part of the bigger world, the First World. I have never been concerned with the history of my hijacking from some place in Africa, to the West Indies; and I have never really contemplated that I was a slave, even through that ancestry, and association with slaves, in history books, and in fact; even though former slaves and slavery are painted in the picture of my origin. We were brought up to imagine that the page had not been stained by this “passage.” But it did not mean that I could not see, as I did, traces of this terrible experience in the body and physical and mental disposition of my grandmother, Miriam. I do not know whether she regarded, and could remember when her mother was a slave. Or if she herself was a slave. But there was something about her complete satisfaction with her life, her acceptance of it, whatever it was — mostly a terrible, spare, and bare existence — that alarmed me into thinking that I had been hoodwinked in those Sunday School classes by parables and Christian tracts; seduced into feeling that I would inherit the earth because of my injection with Christian principles.

  Friday, September the twenty-ninth, in 1955, was a dramatic day in my life. I arrived at the airport in Toronto, bound, as a student, for the University of Toronto. Since then, my search in life and in literature has been to find the meaning of myself, my personality, my reason for entering the relationships I have formed, with friends and enemies and lovers; my abandonment of women who could have been amongst women chosen as wives, recognizing the old-fashioned, and chauvinistic implication of putting this sentiment in this archaic language; my reasons for remaining in this country when it was possible to go to England and enter the London School of Economics to which I had been admitted in 1952, to enter the Middle Temple, and satisfy the craving for big, autocratic and even dictatorial power in a small island; and become prime minister, or an autocrat, like other West Indian prime ministers; to ruminate upon disastrous decisions I have made in private life, in literary life, in love; quite simply I wanted to know what would become of me, with the decisions I have made. And this search, though not of the kind that I see in historical inquiry, I am reminded of it, in the retelling of that very history, narrated from the mouths of the women who have lived through it.

  And when these Barbadian Fridays had got the better of me, and had fashioned my outlook on things more than homework, I was now forced to face Friday afternoons at Trinity College in the University of Toronto.

  Friday afternoons, much later on: in marriage; and later still in separation; and in broken love affairs …

  And then, there is Good Friday! Eleven o’clock Matins at the Anglican Cathedral church on the northeast corner of King and Church Streets, where Good Friday comes back to me in full, sweeping emotions that began in another Anglican church, a smaller church built by the English and by slaves, in St. Matthias Church; and then, with the change in status, and the change in my voice, I am in the choir stalls of the St. Michael Cathedral Church in Bridgetown, where I “cooed” like a dove during solos, or carrying the descants; and like a bird singing psalms measured and announced in Roman numerals, which I had just begun to learn at Cawmere, in Second Form, in L2D; and sometimes could not find the psalm in time before the singing ended. And when this happened, I would watch the mouths of the more certain boys, who had mastered Roman numerals like little mathematicians; and in time I developed a mastery of lip-reading, following not only the words of psalms, hymns ancient and motets, and all that liturgical music in the high-ceilinged chancels in two churches, but I also learned to read lips in other situations, of passion, of defending myself in crises, of reading minds through the movements of women’s lips, when it was important for me to know what she was thinking before she spoke the truth that set me free.

  Practising to delude the choirmaster that I knew the words, that I could read the intractable Roman numerals fast enough to open the red-leather psalter in time to sing the first notes, and fooled myself that I was deluding him, until his eyes grew larger in the mirrors placed above the rows of organ keys which he had taken from the right and the left side of a motor car.

  I do not know, and cannot remember if the hurricane that was the harbinger of my departure from Barbados, that delayed me through its fury, was the voice of fate that cast me up on these shores of Lake Ontario on the twenty-ninth of September 1955, and whether Janet had something in mind for me. But I do remember trees stripped of their leaves and boughs, just like the sugar cane is stripped of its green blade-like leaves by the glistening fierceness of the cane cutter’s cutlass; and how the land seemed bare, uninhabited, barely discovered by men who claimed to be English; and suddenly to be in serene and peaceful Toronto, even at the ungodly hour of two in the morning, when my plane, a Trans-Canada Air Line that roared in its uncomfortable flight from the British Bahamas, on that raining September morning in 1955, a land I did not know, and a land I never went back to, a land that was segregated. I had never come up against this method of distinguishing black
skin from white skin in Barbados. Not that Barbados was Elysium. Barbados was always Little England. But the rawness of segregation in the Bahamas, and the acceptance of it by those who were made to suffer under its apartheid, was crippling. All of a sudden I was frightened, scared to continue my journey, fearing more segregation at the destination.

  Many years after this first confrontation with racism, I would write narrative about a train ride from Miami at a time much earlier than 1955; and that journey is told by Mary-Mathilda, the main character in my novel The Polished Hoe, who is travelling with the plantation manager, her lover, Mr. Bellfeels, with whom she has a son, Wilberforce. They are going to Buffalo to buy second-hand machinery for the sugar factory. Mary-Mathilda describes her discovery of segregation with the same alarm as I would experience many years later in 1955, at the seating arrangement on the train going from the South to the North, from Miami to Buffalo. To her, it was “not normal.” She called this seating arrangement, “serrigated.” I chose the term “serrigated” instead of the traditional spelling, because I wanted to invent a word that expressed the rawness of racism, like a wound made on the most delicate part of the body, a woman’s belly, with a knife with a serrated blade.

  And in all this time, travelling by now hundreds and hundreds o’ miles, Mr. Bellfeels is seated in a different section of the train, invisible to me, and separated from me. Mr. Bellfeels is sitting in one section, a reserved compartment of the train, a sleeper. And in a next section they called third class, sitting up, my back hurting me, all through this journey north.

  And when I finally notice that something wasn’t sitting too good with me, that something wasn’t normal, I could only shake my head.

  I was serrigated from Mr. Bellfeels.

  I was travelling through serrigated country!

  And, as usual, in these matters of racism, involving the white man and the black woman, the white man never goes, publicly, to the defence of the woman he foops in the privacy of his physical and material power.