Emancipation Day (18 page)

“My old high school,” he said, nodding at the back of the turreted, red-brick building. “We used to call it the Castle.”

“Were you a good student?” she asked him.

“Oh, sure, straight As. Captain of the baseball team, all that.” He stared at the deserted diamond behind the school.

“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t finish grade nine.”

“Why not?”

“I had to help my father.”

“Building houses?”

“The war was on, the Depression was over. Anyone who didn’t have a job had joined up, so wages were high. Dad couldn’t afford to hire anyone except coloureds, so I quit school and worked for him as a plasterer for next to nothing, room and board. Didn’t you ever work in your father’s store in Ferryland?”

“No,” she said. No, of course she wouldn’t have.

“That’s why I joined the Navy,” he said. “I got tired of working for nothing.”

He could see this information puzzled her. He had told her his father owned a big company and could have afforded to hire lots of workers, but now she’d seen enough to know that that hadn’t been entirely true, and he had to give some other reason for his leaving Windsor. What he’d told her might have been true. Just as it might have been true that he had gone to Kennedy Collegiate, which was an all-white school, instead of Patterson, which was mixed. He should have gone to Kennedy, so what was the harm in saying he did? He knew his family didn’t believe he was white, but he believed he was, and that was all that mattered. He didn’t know how it had happened and he didn’t care, but he knew it was true. You only had to look at him to see it was true.

He hadn’t thought about Jackson Park in years. When he was a kid he’d believed the park had been named, like him, after his grandfather, Andrew Jackson Lewis, and that, although the park didn’t exactly belong to him, he had a special right to be there. As he grew up, Jackson Park had been one of the few places where he felt he belonged. In the summer, when the other kids on his street gathered there to play baseball, he used to wander to the pavilion, climb up to the grandstand and look out over the gardens, imagining himself conducting an orchestra or singing into a microphone. He preferred singing because a singer stood before both the orchestra and the crowd, and both sides looked up to him. People strolling along the paths would wave at him,
coloured couples in their Sunday clothes, unaware that they were waving goodbye.

The big celebration in Jackson Park was always August the first, Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire. When he was little, he’d thought slavery was illegal only on that day, and that the rest of the year people could treat coloureds any way they liked, since they did. His parents would dress him up and give him a nickel. The park, his park, would smell of horseshit and barbecued pork, and there would be gambling tents and watermelon tables and more coloured people than he’d ever seen in one place before. His father would park their car on the grass just off Tecumseh Boulevard, next to other cars with licence plates from all over the northern States, from Indiana and Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. By nightfall everyone would be drunk just to show how free they were, and Benny and his friends would swig stolen beer and check car doors and watch out for the police, who mostly weren’t around. He remembered his father singing in the grandstand with the Garden City Quartet, and Alvina, who was barely into her teens, wearing high heels and lipstick and smoking cigarettes given to her by men in tan suits and wingtips, men with southern drawls and skin so dark that if they shut their eyes at night Jack was sure they’d disappear.

In the morning there would be blood on the pathways, torn shirts in the garbage cans, men and women sprawled under picnic tables. Before going to First Baptist, he and Benny would collect as many bottles as they could fit into their wagon and take them
down to the sheeny man, who gave them a dime a load. That was during the Depression, when you could still buy something with a dime. He’d always felt as though the dime, earned only once a year, was a gift from his grandfather. At First Baptist the pastor would preach about Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities on the banks of the Jordan River, as near to one another as Windsor was to Detroit, destroyed by Jehovah in a shower of fire and brimstone for the wickedness of their ways. What that wickedness consisted of was never spelled out, but the reference to Emancipation Day was clear and the congregation squirmed in their seats.

When he turned eight and found out that Jackson Park had been named for an old mayor, he felt as though he’d been kicked out of it. The knowledge had lowered his grandfather in his eyes. Of course, he’d thought, why would anyone name a park after a barber?

WILLIAM HENRY

“H
ow’s things at home?” William Henry asked Benny. Benny was sitting across from him in the tavern, reading a newspaper. If you saw a person reading, it meant he was bored, and William Henry didn’t want Benny to get bored and leave just yet. He raised two fingers to Fast Eddy and four draughts appeared on the table. Benny took a drink from one of them and lit a cigarette. William Henry relaxed.

“Okay, I guess,” Benny said. “Jackson brung home his new wife. She’s a bit confused, though, if you ask me. First time she took a look at me I could hear the gears whirrin’ away in her head. I don’t think Jackson told her a thing about anything.”

“White girl?”

“White as a mushroom.”

“They must not get any sun in Newfoundland.”

William Henry took a long pull. Jackson didn’t just want to be white, he thought he
was
white. How he explained that to himself or to his new bride William Henry didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t explain it, maybe he just brassed it out. Weren’t many other ways he could do it. William Henry remembered the time when Jackson was fifteen or sixteen, working summers at that mattress factory on Walker Road, where they didn’t hire coloureds. Jackson just walked in and applied like he was white, like he had the right to work wherever the hell he wanted, and they hired him just like that. One day, William Henry was walking down the street and he seen Jackson and his boss talking on the sidewalk in front of the factory, smoking and laughing like they was old friends, and William Henry had had a good mind to go up to Jackson and say something like, “Yo’ mama wants you to buy her some cracked corn on your way home, we gonna have us some fried mash for supper.” That would’ve been the end of that job. But he didn’t do it. Jackson seen him coming and his face froze, like he was expecting something like that, and his eyes drifted off, and William Henry just kept walking by, didn’t say nothing, didn’t even nod to his own son. Pretended he didn’t know him. Did him a favour, just like William Henry done during that riot in Detroit. Let him go. How many times in his life had he said that about Jackson? Just let the boy go.

“Look at this,” Benny said, pushing the
Free Press
across to
his father. “Says they doin’ some work on the old Fox.”

William Henry loved talking about the Fox Theatre, his moment of glory. It pleased him that Benny had brought it up. He had a big outfit then, six people working for him, took them a week just to put up the scaffolding. That was 1925, the year Jackson was born. He shook his head. Whenever there’s sun there has to be shadow somewhere.

“Let me see that,” he said.

Detroit was safer in them days, he could give Benny a nickel and let him walk down the street without thinking twice about it. He always come back with something different, a twist of licorice, a balsa-wood airplane, a stick of gum. Jackson stayed at home with his mother and Alvina. That was maybe the trouble with Jackson, he’d been raised by women. They let him keep his attitude, let him think too highly of himself.

When the Fox opened things were good for a while. Lots of contracts, new truck from Labadie’s. They even almost moved out of the Settlement, had their eye on a house on Church Street, their first dream home, which they could’ve got someone white to buy for them and when they moved in probably nobody would’ve said anything about them being coloured because Josie and Benny were almost light enough to pass and they had Jackson, who was lighter than all of them. Anybody started asking questions they could just stick Jackson out on the front porch in his carriage. Jackson would’ve felt right at home growing up in that neighbourhood. Things would surely have been different. When the crash came in ’29, all the offers dried
up and Labadie repossessed the truck and the house on Church Street got sold to somebody else for under five hundred dollars. Like he said, no sun without shadow.

“They should get you to do that work,” Benny said, pointing at the article.

“I couldn’t do that kind of work today,” William Henry said. “I’m too old.”

“You ain’t that old,” said Benny.

“What’s that mean? How old ain’t I?”

“You ain’t too old to put up gypsum board.”

“Maybe not. But I’m too old to want to.”

William Henry’s father hadn’t wanted to cut hair anymore, either, that was probably what killed him. When the old man died, William Henry was Jackson’s age, it just struck him. The old man hadn’t been living at home, either, spent most of his time down here at the British-American. Something to think about. That man sure cut a lot of hair in his day, though. First he had a place on McDougall, then a place on Albert, then he got a chair in a big barbershop in the basement of City Hall, mirrors on all four walls, six chairs going all the time. When Harlan turned eighteen and said he wanted to be a barber, too, they took this place in the British-American. That’s when something went south, he didn’t know what it was, his father just got tired of cutting hair. Maybe it was the people who come into the shop wanting their hair cut just so, not the way he done it last time. Even customers Harlan had had for thirty years started bringing in pictures of movie stars from magazines, wanting
their hair to look like this one or that one. And when they got home and looked in a mirror and didn’t see a movie star, the next time they went somewhere else to get their hair cut. It was the same with plastering. You spent your life getting good at something, you thought people appreciated what you did for them, and then some new way come along that looks like hell but is easier and cheaper and suddenly it’s
so long, old man, we don’t need you anymore
. Gypsumboard, he wouldn’t touch it. Don’t talk to me about loyalty, William Henry thought. My own son taught me all I need to know about loyalty.

“Why’d he bring his wife here, d’you think?” William Henry asked, more to himself than to Benny.

“Wanted to show her off, more’n likely,” said Benny, taking the paper back.

VIVIAN

O
n their fourth night in Windsor, Vivian and Jack crossed the river to hear some music.

“You wanted to see Detroit, didn’t you, doll?” Jack said to her.

What she wanted was to meet Jack’s father, but she didn’t dare bring that up again. And she did want to see Detroit. It would be her third country in a week. She was seeing the world, even if the world wasn’t what she thought it would be. Maybe Iris was right, after all.

They ate supper in Benny’s apartment, a nice stew she’d made on top of the stove, then she and Jack walked to his friend’s house on Victoria Avenue, a couple of streets over from Ouellette. “A better part of town,” Jack said as they walked, pointing out the
houses and lawns and shade trees. It was starting to feel like fall, the days were shorter but still warm enough that she didn’t need a sweater. “Peter’s father’s a doctor. We were in the cadet band together.”

“Did he join the Navy, too?” she asked him.

“Who?”

“Peter.”

“No.” But he seemed uncertain about it.

They walked in silence for a while under the elms and chestnuts. Maybe he was afraid that the war had changed his friend as much as it had changed him.

Jack rang the bell and a woman came to the door.

“Hello, Della,” Jack said when she opened it, and it took Vivian a moment to realize that this was Peter’s mother. In a slightly flared skirt and silk blouse, she looked very pretty, and young enough to be an older sister. Still, Vivian wasn’t sure if she should call her Della or Mrs. Barnes.

“Yes,” Della said, “do come in. Peter will be down in a minute.” She seemed flustered. She didn’t appear to know what to do with her hands. They were standing in a large, open foyer, just inside the door, with stairs at one end and large, solid wooden doors taking up almost the whole of one wall. “You must be Vivian,” Della said. “I’m Della. How do you do?” They shook hands rather vigorously. “How are you liking Windsor so far?”

“It’s very different,” she said.

“And what about you, Jack? How was the war?”

“I just caught the tail end of it,” he said.

“Howie’s still at it,” Della said, brightening, then turned to Vivian. “My husband. He’s in Cornwallis.”

“Not back yet?” Vivian said sympathetically. “How awful for you.”

“I’ve had good company,” Della said. “Jack and Peter and I used to go to Detroit all the time, didn’t we, Jack. My son plays trumpet, he’s starting his own group.”

“Ensemble, Mother,” said a young man, obviously Peter, coming down the stairs. His hair was light brown, the same colour as Della’s, and he was wearing heavy black glasses and an argyle vest. “The Peter Barnes Ensemble. What do you think, Jack? Sound classy enough for you?”

“Hello, Peter,” said Jack, and the two men shook hands.

“Well,” said Della, “we should be off.”

They took Della’s car, with the top down and the side windows rolled up to cut the wind. She was in the back with Jack. Della was half turned towards them, and saying something to Jack, who was leaning forward to hear her, but the wind made it impossible for Vivian to eavesdrop. She didn’t mind, she was studying the tunnel. She had been expecting something narrow and gloomy, but this was four lanes wide and lit up like a ballroom. It was as though someone had built a brick sky over an airport. How had this feat been accomplished? A tunnel under a river! Halfway through, she leaned her head back and looked up at the ceiling, imagining the tons and tons of water above the yellow tiles, the fish and mud and sunken logs that would come rushing in if it cracked. Would she be able to swim up through
the hole and be saved? She forced herself to think of something less frightening. Della had stopped talking to Jack and turned to face ahead. Vivian looked at Jack, who had given up conversing and was now leaning back, staring out the window. He’d probably prefer to be in the front with Peter, she thought. Surely they were nearing the end of the tunnel? She wanted to tell Jack she loved him before the roof caved in.