Some Great Thing (29 page)

Edward Slade moved to New York City. He proved himself on
The New York Sun
, the raciest tabloid in North America. He broke apart some major scams. He liked New York and respected its tabloid reporters. They hated cops and cops hated them. But after two years there, Slade began thinking beyond New York. He branched out. He studied French at night school. Two hours a night, five nights a week, for a year. His teachers, at first, were taken aback by his questions: “How do you say slash? How would you translate bullet hole? What about rape?” Slade listened to French radio, watched French
TV
, went to French movies, met French women and devoured all the French tabloids that he could buy.

After his year of study, Slade became
The New York Sun
’s first foreign correspondent. He moved to Paris, where he demonstrated a remarkable ability to dig out news about French lovers and their fits of jealousy. He became the first reporter in North America to tap the exotic crime beat. New

Yorkers ate it up. They constantly phoned and wrote to
The Sun
to complain about the revolting stories from Paris. Slade’s salary doubled. He became the world’s most famous tabloid scribe.

Helen Savoie lobbied until Lyndon Van Wuyss finally agreed to let her drop the horoscopes and return to reporting full time. She covered municipal politics from a press office at City Hall. Helen strove to build up an impressive portfolio. She worked harder than she had in years and paid careful attention to her writing. Within a few months, she had ten solid articles to her credit. She mailed them and a resumé to
The Toronto Times
. Mahatma Grafton put in a good word on her behalf. Helen was called for an interview and she got the job. And she requested a slight change in her byline. At
The Times
, she would be known as Hélène Savoie.

Mahatma Grafton found a scoop and gave it to Hélène.

“You don’t have to do that,” Hélène said.

“I know. But this will make it easier for you. They’re looking for you to break The Big Story. You know how editors are. So here’s the scoop.” Mahatma had researched every fact. He had prepared a list of all his sources. All that remained was for Hélène to double-check the details and write the story in her own words.

“I owe you one,” Hélène said.

“We’re friends, remember?”

Hélène’s story appeared on page one of
The Toronto Times
. It was picked up by the Canadian Press and printed on front pages all across the country.

United States immigration authorities reactivated John Novak’s name on a computerized list of unwelcome aliens the day he retired as the mayor of Winnipeg.

Novak, a long-standing member of the Communist Party of Canada, learned Monday that…

Mahatma was close to completing a long feature about the life and death of “Rabbi” Alvin James.
The Toronto Times
was going to publish it in its weekend magazine. Two months earlier the same magazine had printed another long piece by Mahatma Grafton, called “Straight and True; the Life and Times of Jake Corbett.”

Someone put his hand on Mahatma’s shoulder. Mahatma swivelled in his chair to face a copy editor. The stocky, middle-aged man had hazel eyes and dark hair.

The Toronto Times
had hundreds of employees and Mahatma hadn’t met this man, although he had often noticed the man looking at him. Mahatma now looked back for the first time, studying the thick lips, the loose, black curls and the skin colour, which was faintly brown.

The man coughed nervously. “I’ve been assigned to edit that story you’re working on. I just took a look at it on my computer screen, to see what it was about.”

Mahatma nodded, patiently.

“My name is Alvin James.”

“Alvin James? Alvin James was the Rabbi!”

“Yes, I heard he was called that. He was also my father.”

Mahatma jumped up. His mouth fell open. He pumped the hand of the Rabbi’s son.

“I know about your father and what he did for my family,” said Alvin James, Jr. “My mother told me all about it.”

Mahatma nodded and smiled. He had learned, through his research, that the Rabbi’s wife had died in Winnipeg fifteen years ago. But, scouring the Winnipeg telephone directory, Mahatma hadn’t been able to find any relation to Alvin James.

“I have pictures and some old railway documents if you’d like to see them,” James said. Mahatma gaped at the man. “And my wife and children would love to meet you. They always ask about my father, and I can never tell them enough. Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

Mahatma clasped the man’s shoulder. “Tomorrow night will be fine.”

Ben Grafton bought a subscription to
The Times
. Each day, he unfolded the paper and scanned it for his son’s byline. Seeing Mahatma’s name made Ben feel closer to his son. He would read the story line by line, imagining his son’s voice, wondering which parts were truly Mahatma’s and which parts had been modified by editors. “Did you write it the way it came out, son?” he would ask later, on the telephone. Mahatma liked it at
The Times
. He told Ben that he wanted to stick with journalism. He wanted to see what he could do.

Mahatma came home for Thanksgiving. Ben baked a turkey and stuffed it with chicken livers, home-made croutons,
onions and herbs. Sandra loved it. She and Mahatma spent most of that weekend together. Ben didn’t mind. Just to see Mahatma’s suitcase in the hall, to hear him in the shower and to chat with him in the kitchen were enough to make Ben happy. He had a son, and his son loved him. He also had a daughter-in-law who loved him. Well, she wasn’t a daughter-in-law yet, but she was heading that way. What else did a broken-down old former railway porter need?

Over the next year, Ben visited Toronto a few times. He considered moving there. But what was the point? Mahatma had a whole career in front of him. And he had started writing a novel at night. He said he was looking forward to showing it to Ben. Wouldn’t talk about it, though, wouldn’t even give the name of the title, except to say that it had something to do with one of Ben’s favourite lines.

Ben stayed in Winnipeg. It was his city, it was his home and it became his final resting place.

N
OT LONG BEFORE
they brought my brother, sister and me into the world, my parents had moved to Canada from Washington, D.C. Dad was black and Mom was white, and 1953 was no time to be marrying or living in the American South as an interracial couple. Toronto was better, but far from perfect. While Dad was still a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he and my mother were unable to rent an apartment together. Nobody wanted an interracial couple as tenants. To secure a place for the two of them, Mom had to take on a surrogate white husband for a day—Don McFadyen, a close friend of theirs who played bass in a jazz band. After the lease was signed, Don moved out and my father moved in, and my parents waited nervously to see how much of a stink the landlord would raise. Luckily, the landlord chose not to make an issue of it, and they were allowed to stay.

I was born in 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario, and grew up in a Toronto suburb. Throughout my childhood, stories of my parents’ marriage and of their subsequent work as pioneers in Canada’s human rights movement punctuated our kitchen table conversations. I was entranced by their ability to navigate injustice with humour and to become engaged Canadians without succumbing to bitterness. Later, I used the stories of my ancestors as emotional fuel to write
Any Known Blood
, a fictional family saga about five generations of men moving back and forth between Canada and the United States.

From my earliest childhood, I recall my mother reading avidly to my siblings and me. I can still hear the inflection of her voice as we listened to “Disobedience” by A.A. Milne.

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three…

I live for the sound of music in language and have come to believe that good fiction enters the reader’s ear first. Initially, I read and wrote to make sense of the world and my place in it. Turning to adult literature at the age of fourteen, I ate up the dozens of novels and essays on my parents’ shelves. Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and their contemporaries became my first literary mentors.

I worked for a spell as a newspaper reporter, initially for
The Globe and Mail
in Toronto and later for the
Winnipeg Free Press
. But I didn’t want to spend my life writing newspaper copy. I longed to write fiction and ached every time I came in contact with great art because it reminded me of what I wasn’t doing. Finally, at the age of twenty-seven, I felt despair at the thought of growing old and not accomplishing something more. I decided to take the plunge. I quit my job, moved to Spain, and, since I had no mortgage, car or kids, managed for a year or so to live cheaply. For the first time in my life, I wrote for hours every day, and after
returning to Canada I continued to work on fiction. Eventually, I finished my first novel,
Some Great Thing
. I could wallpaper my bathroom with all the rejection slips the novel generated, but finally, in 1992, Turnstone Press in Winnipeg published the story (which was acquired by HarperCollins in 2009).

I have many interests in life—learning languages, reading, travelling, running, and loving my wife and five children are chief among them—but writing is the only kind of work for which I have a real thirst, and novels are what I most like to write. The novel is one of the few art forms to which a person can give birth almost entirely unassisted. The individuality of novel writing entrances me, and it never ceases to amaze me that the quirky turns of a solitary mind can create stories that hum for years, outlasting even the rise and fall of nations.

I have written seven books (fiction and non-fiction), with
Some Great Thing
being my first novel and
The Book of Negroes
(U.S. title
Someone Knows My Name
) my third and most recent. I hope that there will be many more and that they will move readers as deeply as literature has moved me since it lifted me off my feet at the age of fourteen.

You were for a time a newspaper reporter yourself. How did your experience play into the writing of
Some Great Thing
?

I could never have written
Some Great Thing
without having worked as a reporter in Winnipeg. The characters and their flight paths are of my invention; it is truly a work of fiction. But working in a newsroom and pursuing stories daily for two years in Winnipeg offered experiences—sad and hilarious, personal and professional—that made it possible for me to imagine the novel. After I had been away from the world of journalism for a year or two, I had enough emotional distance to look back and begin to concoct
Some Great Thing
.

Are you as cynical about the media as the satire in your novel makes you sound?

I had terrific fun cooking up the novel, and it did me a lot of good to poke fun at some of the inanities I discovered, or dreamed up, while working as a newspaper reporter. I enjoyed writing playfully and satirically, but I do not generally feel cynical about the media. I met many fantastic journalists and believe that they do a great service to our country and to the world. I still devour newspapers and magazines, and occasionally write freelance pieces for them.

Arguably journalistic writing and creative writing have different ways of trying to get at “the truth.”Why does writing fiction speak to you?

Imagining a story, and starting from scratch, is such an immeasurably pleasurable process. I get to create an entire world in my own head. Writing fiction helps me process life, making sense of it, tearing it all apart and putting it back together in a way that satisfies my heart and soul.

You’ve said that while working as a reporter, you felt compelled to do something more with your life. This has a familiar ring. How much of you will the reader see in the book’s central character, Mahatma Grafton?

“Imagining a story, and starting from scratch, is such an immeasurably pleasurable process.”

Mahatma was urged by his father to do “some great thing” in life, and my own father certainly did the same. I stepped into the world of newspapers feeling somewhat cynical, as does Mahatma. And we both moved from that initial cynicism into a place of personal engagement with journalism. The novel does reflect my voice and its construction reveals the way my mind operates, so in the deepest sense it is autobiographical.

It is somehow poignant that Mahatma’s aging father, Ben, saves all those boxes of clippings about family and about black history. Are you such a saver yourself, or do you have family members who are?

My paternal grandmother and my father never threw out a letter or a piece of paper in their lives. Old report card? Letter received from a relative twenty years ago? Don’t discard family history, my father would say. Preserve it for future generations. Like my ancestors, I can’t get rid of personal papers. They represent my own life and the lives of my loved ones. If I lose the papers, don’t I risk losing a definition of the life I have sculpted? I can’t bear to be hemmed in by boxes and junk, however. Fortunately I have been able to donate dozens of boxes of my own papers to the University of Toronto Archives, which will organize and keep them and make them available to researchers in the future.