Zack (3 page)

There are all kinds of words to describe someone like me, and every one of them pisses me off. I am “of varied racial origin,” a blend, an alloy, a hybrid, and ad-, com- or im-mixture; a cross- or half-breed or -caste; a créole, a double quadroon, a double-double-octaroon.
Hell, I guess I’m a doubloon. How about a mulatto? That’s a Spanish word and it means mule, for God’s sake, half horse, half donkey and unable to reproduce itself. I’m the result of “miscegenation”—sounds like an antibiotic, not the coming together of “two persons of different race.” In my case, a Jew and a black.

But I don’t look like a Jewish Negro or a black Jew. I look like a black. I am of average height, of average build, with wiry hair that I wear very short, and very dark skin. Talk about an identity crisis.

So when Jen’s cousin from Detroit slammed me with her vicious remark I was shocked but not surprised. Growing up in Toronto, I was familiar with racial slurs directed by all the races at all the other races. Nobody was exempt. My old school in the city had been added to over the years until it was composed of three wings, with three major hallways. Awing “belonged” to the blacks, B to the whites and C to the browns—kids of Pakistani, Indian or Sikh descent—and it was not wise to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to use the wrong doorway coming into the school.

The administration had long since given up trying to stop the turf wars and purposely distributed lockers according to race. There was a race committee—cool name, isn’t it?—made up of teachers and students, and it held a lot of meetings that accomplished very little. The whole operation was maximally stupid.
While classes were on, the unwritten law of territory was suspended and we all moved freely as we slouched to and from biology or English or math, shops or the resource centre. But before and after classes, and at lunchtime, each piece of turf was enclosed by invisible boundaries. Even the doorways were guarded like border checkpoints and nobody, including many of the teachers, dared to venture outside the safe zones.

The system, I suppose, worked well. There were fights, but not that many. The way I saw it, the whites, browns and blacks lived in an atmosphere of tense co-existence while the Asians minded their own business and knocked off most of the scholarships.

The only, and I mean only, thing I liked about my new school—and this will sound weird—was that almost every student there was white, with surnames like McClintock and Stewart, Carroll and Stanhope. The collective faces at an assembly looked like a pan of homogenized milk. I had had no trouble in the short time I’d been there. I was able almost to relax. Until Jen’s cousin woke me up.

I drove home, way over the speed limit.

M
y parents met when Mom, just starting out as a performer, was playing a blues festival at the University of Toronto. Dad was a student there and one of the organizers of the event, although he knew little about music. They started going out together regularly, and Mom recognized she had a weird one on her hands when Dad showed up in Ottawa six months after they met and stood in the snow outside her window singing love songs at the top of his lungs, pelted by the sleet, claiming he wouldn’t go away until she said she’d marry him.

“He was singing off-key, those musical-wallpaper songs you hear on the pablum FM stations,” Mom told me one time. “I said I’d marry him just to shut him up.”

In spite of what Dad thought, my mother wasn’t beautiful. Her nose—which I had inherited, lucky me—was a little too prominent and broad, the curved nostrils too wide. But she was pretty, with velvety black unblemished skin, big eyes and a deep honey-smooth voice. She was fairly tall and slender, with long fingers, strong as steel from playing the guitar. And she always, always had on a pair of big gold hoop earrings.

And Dad, well, ordinary is the best word. He had a medium ex-athlete’s build, curly black hair and brown eyes.

“I met a lot of very intelligent guys,” Mom had told me. “And a few men who were kind and good, but your dad was the only one who put them both together.”

Obviously, race wasn’t an issue with Mom and Dad. My father didn’t make much of his origins. He didn’t go to synagogue and never suggested Mom or I should. It seemed like he didn’t care much about the Laws, and the whole idea of kosher food was nonsense to him. Which made for some interesting discussions at my grandparents’ house.

I can’t remember how old I was when I asked him, “Am I a Jew, Dad?”

“I suppose so,” he said. “Do you want to be?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, you’re a Jew.”

For her part, Mom would get very angry when she was billed as “one of Canada’s foremost black performers.”

“What’s black got to do with it?” she would rant. “I’m a musician.”

She didn’t like it when people called jazz and the blues black music. “Tell that to Bill Evans,” she would demand. “Benny Goodman’s gonna be surprised, too.”

They met, married, and had me. Which was, I felt
when I was old enough to be aware of such things, fine for them. They had ignored the problem and passed it on to their baby boy.

Unless you were heavily into the blues there was no reason why you would have heard of my mother, Etta Lane, who had a small but loyal following in Canada and the States, hard-core believers who liked to sit in dark clubs for hours and listen to her coax the blues from an acoustic guitar as she sang deep and smooth as a river. For as long as I could remember she had been teaching me her art, and now I was good enough to back her up sometimes. She was away from home a fair amount, with all the gigs she could handle. A year before we moved, a song she wrote and recorded, “South on 61,” got a lot of radio play and made her a few bucks (and helped her and Dad buy the new house and move away from the city). It was about a woman who lived in a frozen ghetto and one day decided to head south to find her roots in the Mississippi Delta. Back in the late forties and fifties, thousands and thousands of blacks turned their backs on the worn-out farms they had share-cropped for generations and went up Highway 61 to industrial jobs in the cities of the north. It was one of the biggest migrations in human history.

Mom’s song was ironic, though, or maybe a daydream, because she has told me countless times that she’d never “go back” to the small town where her family lived before they too moved to Chicago,
where she was born. My grandmother died when Mom was three and her dad had gone home after he retired from a truck-parts factory. Mom hadn’t seen him since she moved to Canada. I had never been told why. I’d never so much as seen a picture of him or heard his voice. I had always felt I was missing something, not having any contact with the American side of my family.

“Do I have cousins down there?” I asked her once.

“Yes.”

“Aunts and uncles, the whole thing?”

“Well, that’s where cousins come from, Zack,” she replied with irritation.

“Why don’t we go and see them? How come we don’t get any Christmas or Hanukkah cards from them? Or send them any? How come—?”

“Go on out and play, Mr. Nosey. Mom has work to do.” And she picked up her twelve-string, chasing me off with loud complicated jazz chords. Family was something Mom did not want to discuss. Ever.

M
y grandparents lived in a ramshackle two-storey house with a big sunroom across the back, on a quiet tree-flanked street in the west end of the city. They had bought the place when they were young — so long ago, Grandma always claimed, that it had been the only house on the street, surrounded by apple orchards. Over the years the city had grown towards it and eventually enveloped it.

Grandpa Lane had driven a taxi since he and my grandmother had moved to Toronto from Winnipeg, and after they had scrimped and saved for some years they bought some used radio equipment, hired another guy who used his own car, and became the Shoreline Taxi Company, a strange title, since their house was at least half a mile from Lake Ontario. Dad had grown up with the crackle and static of the dispatcher’s radio in his ears, Grandma being the dispatcher. Now they were retired and owned a couple of duplexes that Grandpa seemed happy to supervise and keep in repair.

Because of his years behind the wheel, Grandpa had firm opinions about automobiles and he shared these views every chance he got.

“I’ll never know why you bought a pickup truck in the first place,” he shouted at Dad from the front steps, shaking his head in mock wonder. “And one of those dinky foreign ones there’s hardly room for you and your lunch in the cab, never mind your wife and son. Who, by the way, if he gets any bigger, won’t fit even in the box!”

“Hi, Dad,” my father said, shaking his head and climbing out.

I got out the other side and Mom slid along the seat to follow.

“Hello, Paul,” she called from the driveway. “Hi, Mae.”

“Never mind ‘Hello’!” Grandpa thundered. “Come up here and give us a hug.”

Grandpa was not tall but he was wide and still strong, with heavily muscled arms and wide powerful hands, and when he hugged Mom I thought he’d break her. With a head of thick white hair and a florid complexion, he radiated energy and good health.

Grandma was a contrast. Where he stood like an oak on the porch in baggy pants held up with red suspenders, a short-sleeved shirt with his reading glasses stuck in the pocket, she was a few inches taller, straight, slender and soft-spoken, wearing a sky-blue dress, her hair stylishly short.

“It’s good to see you, dear,” she said as she too embraced my mother. “I heard your highway song on the radio again this morning.”

It was my turn to be mauled. Grandpa almost broke my ribs and Grandma kissed me, murmuring, “If you get any handsomer I’ll leave this old fool and chase after you myself.”

I liked their house. The furniture was old and the rugs threadbare, but it was comfortable and inviting. I liked to visit my grandparents, too. Normally. But when we were at the dinner table and everyone had a share of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, corn and broccoli—I passed on the broccoli even after a propaganda lecture from Grandma about the wonderful things it would do for my health, pointing out that Dad hadn’t taken any either—I found out that food wasn’t the only thing on the menu.

The four of them ambushed me. It started out with a question from Grandma that was so uncasually casual, alarm bells went off.

“How is your new school, Zachariah?”

Grandpa’s stare bore down on me like a runaway train. Mom nonchalantly speared a piece of potato with her fork but didn’t raise it to her mouth. Dad, who hated confrontation, was suddenly fascinated with the wallpaper.

“Okay, I guess,” I answered. Be noncommittal, I told myself, hoping I could somehow get out of the coming interrogation.

“Have you adapted all right?” Grandma asked in a very nonthreatening tone. “It must be hard, going to a new school, making new friends.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Especially when the school is in a town the size of a tenth-rate golf course and the students know more about horses and fertilizer than good music or cool clothes.

“How are your marks?” Never famous for his patience, Grandpa got right to the point.

“Not so good,” I said, aware that I was about to enter a contest with the odds stacked at three to one, a little steamed at my parents for setting me up. They knew I loved my grandparents and would do anything for them.

Grandpa put down his knife and fork. He took a few gulps from his water glass. “Listen, Zack,” he began in a tone that he almost never used with me, “your education is the most important thing you have. Nowadays, without good schooling, a person can’t amount to anything.”

“You did okay,” I countered, earning a scowl from my mother.

“What okay? A taxi driver? Working twelve hours a day? Putting up with drunks and whores in the middle of the—”

“Paul!” Grandma cried.

“All right, all right, sorry, dear. But you get my drift, Zack. That’s no life. You don’t want that. You can learn. You’re a smart kid. Look at your dad, a university teacher. And your mom, a wonderful musician you can hear her on the radio.”

I didn’t bother to point out that Mom had left school after grade twelve. He’d have told me she had studied music for years, worked as hard as a one-armed wallpaper-hanger—his favourite and corniest expression—and he’d have been right. But I hated it when he criticized me. I felt like I was letting him down.

“I know what’s going on here,” I said, looking at Grandma because my grandfather could always stare me down, no contest. “Mom and Dad got you to hassle me about my marks. But if you want to know why I’m flunking, ask them.”

Savagely, I attacked a chicken leg, slashing the meat off the bone while the silence pressed in on me.

“Listen, Zack,” Grandpa began again after a few moments had passed. “You’re going to let this beat you? You didn’t want to move away from the city, your friends, so you’re punishing your parents by flunking out? I don’t say it’s no hardship for you, okay. Okay?” he said again when I didn’t answer.

“Okay.”

“All right. It’s tough on you. Agreed. We all know that. But let me tell you something. About your mom’s side of the family, I don’t know much.” He shot Mom a look weighty with meaning, and she glanced away, pursing her lips.

“We don’t know much about them. It’s a pity, but that’s another story. On this side, you come from people uprooted from their homes by bigots and
murderers. From Romania to Winnipeg, let me tell you something, that’s no holiday trip. But when they came here, may God bless this country, they could start over. And they did. They didn’t give up. Okay, they didn’t get rich or run for office, but they made a place to stand on.”

He was trying to make me feel bad, like I was letting down the whole Lazarovitch clan, whose name became Lane when they came to Canada.

“This is all just Jewish guilt!” I said angrily.

Grandma’s eyes lit up, her hand darted to cover her mouth and she laughed. Grandpa pointed at me as a cloud of anger crossed his features. Then he laughed too, throwing his head back and letting go.

“What a smart alec,” he said.