Some Great Thing (6 page)

Yoyo airmailed this report to his newspaper in Yaoundé:

Dear Reader:

Your correspondent’s first month in Canada has proven full of surprises. In this communiqué, he wishes to examine the issue of poverty among white people. Cameroonians believe that it does not exist, but nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty
does exist among white people, some of whom live as miserably, in their own way (necessarily in their own way, Dear Reader, since human misery is a relative affliction, and as yet unquantifiable by Any Scientist), as any other inhabitants of this troubled planet. Let This Author proceed by way of microcosm, offering a description of the life of the Quixotic Jake Corbett.

Mr. Corbett resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His predicament may puzzle Cameroonians who have observed white adults in Yaoundé, but have never seen one lacking employment.

Here are the astonishing facts of Mr. Jake Corbett’s life: 45 years old, unmarried, red-haired and possessing a deathly white skin that burns when exposed to the sun, Mr. Corbett suffers from deep vein thrombophlebitis, which is a vein inflammation malady. He is unable to work because of a painful blood clot in his lower right leg. A victim of the disintegration of the North American kinship structure, Mr. Corbett has no family. He depends on the state for support.

Mr. Corbett was recently arrested for broadcasting his predicament in a public place. Canadians apparently believe in free speech, but not by means of volume-enhancing machinery. However, Mr. Corbett was exonerated in court. This Author visited him subsequently.

Let it not be said that only peoples of nut-coloured complexion live in hovels. Or that only we are undernourished. This Author contends that many Africans enjoy better housing than Mr. Corbett, and eat better food too.

As for the staple of Mr. Corbett’s diet, This Author shall withhold details for Another Report. At present, suffice it to say that Mr. Corbett suffers from a lack of funds and proper food, and lives in cramped quarters atop Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill, a
business establishment serving meals of dubious nutritive value. Despite the humiliation of his recent arrest, Mr. Corbett vowed, in his interview with This Author, to continue his struggle for an acceptable level of monetary assistance from his government. “I worked 15 years, until my legs gave out,” he said. “Now I plan to bug the welfare people until their legs give out.”

To Mr. Corbett’s consternation, local newspapers have neglected to describe the details of his case. Yet these details are arresting. The Manitoba government publishes a yearly booklet entitled “The Social Allowances Program.” This booklet sets out the cost of “basic necessities” of life. In Mr. Corbett’s case, this amount has been calculated at 178.10 Canadian dollars a month. However, authorities have been deducting five percent of this amount every month from Mr. Corbett’s cheque because of an ongoing dispute with him. But a penetrating question has been raised by Mr. Corbett: If $178.10 is required to meet his necessities of life, how can he do without five percent? Mr. Corbett, who appears well versed in his nation’s Constitution, said he is initiating legal action to resolve the issue.

This Author respectfully predicts that Mr. Corbett, although of little education and failing health, will achieve greatness in his life. He will become a figure of world stature. He will become a symbol of the defeated working man abandoned by the wealthy. He will galvanize the downtrodden in countries developed and developing, of skins black and white, although, it must be conceded, Mr. Corbett is not generally recognized in Canada as bearing such potential. Watch for his name in future reports by This Author in Winnipeg!

Respectfully Yours,

Hassane Moustafa Yoyo Ali

La Voix de Yaoundé
, the Cameroonian paper to which Yoyo filed weekly reports, ran the story on the front page. It sparked thirty-five letters to the editor. Most expressed disbelief. A white man? In dire poverty?

“Braver to slay a charging lion than a sleeping cow.” Mahatma Grafton reread his horoscope. What the hell did that mean? The horoscope got him thinking again about his stories on the judge. Chuck Maxwell assured him he was bound for stardom. “Sniff out more ethnic stories,” Chuck told him. “They’ll land you on page one for sure.” Don Betts also showed his delight. “Got any more dirt on the judge?” he asked. The stories had been picked up by all the Winnipeg media. Mahatma heard his second story on the judge read almost verbatim on CFRL Radio. And Edward Slade at
The Winnipeg Star
came up with a scoop of his own by obtaining transcripts of Melvyn Hill’s recent court hearings and quoting the judge’s most outlandish comments.

The judge took no calls and granted no interviews. The media coverage made him look idiotic. But the more foolish the judge looked, the more uneasy Mahatma felt. And his discomfort was heightened by the behaviour of his father, who had barely spoken to him in days.

Mahatma finally asked, “Something wrong, Dad?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’ve been quiet lately.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“How about Melvyn Hill? He says he knows you.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Since I wrote about him, you’ve barely spoken to me.”

“Do you know that Melvyn used to be a railway porter?”

“So that’s how the fool started out.”

“Mahatma Grafton! Is that how you speak of your own people?”

“Who can deny that he’s a fool?”

“He is
not
a fool!” Ben barked. “It’s because of men like him that doors are open for you today. At one time, portering was the only job he could get. It was the only job most blacks could get. But he went on. He kicked and scratched and got himself a legal training.”

Mahatma grumbled, “Legal training or not, the man’s a fool.”

Ben clenched Mahatma’s wrist. “Tell me what’s more foolish, leaving the railway to become a Provincial Court judge, or wasting a university education by taking pot shots at easy targets?” Mahatma gaped at his father, but Ben continued. “Don’t you have anything more important to do than expose the silly habits of an old black judge?”

“Silly habits? He jailed a man for three weeks because he was black!”

“Dig enough and you’ll turn up dirty laundry on anybody. I dare you to do the same number on the chief judge of the province. I dare you to go out and try to make him look like an idiot. But no, you can’t do that. So you pick on someone who can’t fight back.”

“He seems to like the attention.”

“You’re still ridiculing him.” When Mahatma said nothing, Ben added, “You think you’ve got Melvyn Hill figured out. But you don’t know a thing about him.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready to listen!”

It is one of Mahatma’s earliest memories. He is playing in front of his Lipton Street house. Girls are skipping. He tows a friend in his wagon. Elms form an endless tunnel over the street when he looks south, past Westminister and Wolseley avenues. He is towing his friend Albert down the street, into the tree tunnel, toward the banks of the Assiniboine River. They’re halfway down the street when his father calls from the house. Ma-
hat
-ma! Ma-
hat
-ma! He deserts the playmate and climbs into Daddy’s car. “We’re going to see how the men are making out,” Ben says.

“What men?”

“You’ll see.” They swing up to Portage Avenue, seem to drive miles east, then north on Main Street. They enter a world of trains, train yards, train tracks, the train station. Ben gives his horn two friendly taps. “Every time I come up here I see more coloured people on the street,” he says, waving out the window. They arrive at a house on Annabella Street. The house has peeling pink paint, two storeys and steps leading up to a wide porch. Several big, dark men get up from chairs to clap Mahatma’s father on the back.

“I want to go back to the car, Daddy,” Mahatma says.

“Don’t be afraid, son. These men ride the trains with Daddy.”

Mahatma clings to his father’s pant leg. The men tousle Mahatma’s hair. Someone lifts him high onto a pair of shoulders. “Look Daddy!” Ben smiles, shakes several hands, disappears into the house. Mahatma pleads to be let down and runs after his father. In the kitchen, food-covered dishes cover the counter. A garbage bag overflows. Down the hall, a television blares and somebody is showering with the door open. Mahatma enters the bathroom, pulls the curtain back and asks the tall, fat, dark man what his name is.

The man says, “Harry Carson.”

“Hey son, you bothering Fat Harry in the shower?” Ben scoops up the boy and removes him from the bathroom. Mahatma protests; it was warm and misty and pleasant in there. He also protests when it is time to go; he likes the noisy home, with its smells, its misty shower, its men. One has given Mahatma juice, another has offered him beer.

Later, back home, Mahatma says, “Can we go back to the house with the misty shower?”

“The misty shower?”

“The misty shower on Annabella Street.” For years, Mahatma will refer in this way to the home his father rents out to railroad porters.

“Soon, son.”

“Today?”

“Soon.”

Mahatma whines. Ben tells a story. At first, Mahatma absorbs every word. In later years, he tires of these stories. And he grows conscious of his mother objecting, “Ben, stop lecturing. You sound like a church minister!” Ben, who refuses to give up, turns Mahatma completely off the subject.

By the time he is a teenager, Mahatma tunes Ben out. Despite the lectures about discrimination on the railway, the struggle to unionize porters, black pride, Martin Luther King and Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mahatma learns little more of these things than how to shut them out.

Mahatma came home at 9:00 p.m., after a twelve-hour day. Ben, who had been looking out the window, waiting for his son, had already eaten. But he had also prepared a meal for his son. Now he reheated it. “You go rest on the sofa, I’m plenty used to working this kitchen solo,” Ben told him. Mahatma smiled, looking into his father’s brown eyes and his deeply wrinkled face, which was the colour of roasted almonds. This was the old man’s way of saying that he bore his son no hard feelings, despite their argument about Melvyn Hill. Mahatma felt a sudden tenderness toward Ben. It didn’t matter about the argument. Mahatma had thought it over and decided that his father had been right, in large part. Melvyn Hill had been an easy target. And Mahatma had taken advantage of that. The old man sang a spiritual as he banged around in the kitchen. This made Mahatma smile, lying on an old sofa and following his father’s gravelly melody. Ben was the only atheist in the world who hummed spirituals. And he only sang when he was happy. When he wanted somebody to hear. Mahatma was there, listening. And thinking.

“Say, son,” Ben said, “how long do you plan to stay here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“No hurry about finding an apartment,” the old man said. “No hurry at all. You comfortable here?”

“Sure.”

“Good.” Ben brought out the food. “Son,” he said, “do you keep clippings of the articles you’ve written?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’d like to have them when you don’t need them any more.”

“Sure. You even want the clippings about the judge?”

“Even those.” Ben grinned. “It doesn’t matter whether a broken down old ex-railway porter agrees with them. What matters is that those clippings are family history. I’m putting them in my files. You’re the first Grafton to write for a newspaper.”

After the meal, Mahatma pulled one of Ben’s boxes out from under the sofa, dusted it off and lifted the lid. He found an old binder with his father’s writing on the cover: “Negro History Appreciation.” Inside the binder, he found Ben’s clippings and notes about “Personnages of Import to the Negro People.” Mahatma flipped the binder open to the section G. G for Garvey. Marcus Garvey. Born Jamaica 1887, died London 1940.

Mahatma scanned the details: Advocated back-to-Africa movement. Believed God was black. Promoted racial pride among Negroes. Founded Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1914, sought economic power for blacks. Paved the way for black power and black pride movements to emerge decades later. Convicted of mail fraud and jailed two years in U.S.A. Deported 1927. Presided over the International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World, in Toronto in 1936. Died in obscurity. Mahatma turned back one page. Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. Born 1869, Porbandar,
assassinated 1948, Delhi. Known as the Mahatma, or Great Soul…

Mahatma paused. As a boy, he had been told countless times about the life of Gandhi. And about famous blacks. Booker T. Washington. Marcus Garvey. Harriet Tubman. Langston Hughes. Ben had talked about them daily. But Louise, Mahatma’s mother, always cut the sermons short.

“Stop filling that boy’s head with nonsense,” she often said.

“It’s not nonsense,” Ben would reply. “It is the story of his people.”

“He can learn about people in school! Don’t go filling his head with mumbo-jumbo.”

Ben would grumble and back down. Increasingly, he would try to educate Mahatma during his wife’s absence.

Mahatma remembered a certain day, when he was eleven or so. He was watching TV. His mother was ironing. Ben came into the room and tried to turn off the TV, but Louise wouldn’t let him. He said there were better things to do than look at the boob tube. Why didn’t they read, study about their people? Did she know that the founder of modern Russian literature was a Negro?

“I bet,” Louise said.

“He was!” Ben brought a thick volume to his wife.

“Alexander who?” his wife said, reading the cover.

“Pushkin. Alexander Pushkin.”

“Doesn’t sound like a Negro to me,” Louise said.

“He wrote poetry. He wrote prose. He wrote
The Queen of Spades
! He wrote an unfinished novel about his great-grandfather, called
The Negro of Peter the Great
.”

“Didn’t finish it, hunh?” Louise said. “Now
that
sounds like a Negro. So tell me, if he’s Russian, how come he’s black?”

“His great-grandfather was from Abyssinia,” Ben said.

“From where?”

“Ancient Ethiopia.”

“You’re saying he had one ancestor from Africa?”

“That’s right,” Ben said.

“And the rest were Russians? Regular white folk?”

“Yes. But…”

Louise turned back to her ironing. “Then he didn’t have much coloured blood left in him, you ask me.”

Ben lost his temper. Who was she to deny black heritage? One drop of coloured blood made you black, and that was that.

“Don’t pay him any mind,” Louise told Mahatma. “Twisting and yanking the truth out of shape, he’ll fill up your head with confusion. I say, better to have your head empty and see clear.”

“Don’t pay
her
any mind, son,” Ben countered. “If you keep your head empty, you’ll see clear all right. You’ll look clear at mediocrity all your life!”

Louise had wanted to name her son Paul. Paul James Grafton. Ben would have nothing to do with it. Who ever heard of a world leader named Paul? This was no ordinary baby. He was a Grafton! The baby, the story goes, started to cry. Louise rocked him protectively. That husband of hers was insane. He read too many books. Lately, he’d been reading Greek mythology. Walking all around the house spouting crazy names: Prometheus, Zacharia, Euripides, Homer. She wished he would shut up about all those books of his. He carried on as if he were a scholar, and not just a plain old railway porter.

“And how do you want to name him?” Louise asked.

“Euripides Homer Grafton.”

Louise put the baby in its room, closed the door and went to the kitchen cupboard. She launched a teacup at his head. It missed and exploded against a wall. “You’re not naming my baby after any Greeks,” she said between clenched teeth. “And none of your Negro pride names, either.” With her next missile—a teapot—she nicked one of Ben’s massive ears. Years later, Ben would show the scar to Mahatma.
See that? Your mother gave it to me.
Cupping his bleeding ear, Ben consented. It was agreed that he would find the name, but that Louise retained veto rights over anything sounding Greek or Negro. There was to be no Euripides Homer Grafton. No Marcus Garvey Grafton, no Booker T. Grafton. Ben accepted his wife’s conditions, because he knew that otherwise she would oppose him at every turn. She would call the boy Paul no matter what Ben called him. Ben needed her cooperation. He didn’t want the boy confused about his name.

Ben found the name for his son by a devious route. Mahatma Gandhi was a great man. A man of great thoughts and great action. A credit to his race. True, he was an Indian, from India. But he had brown skin. Call him an Indian, call him what you wanted, as far as Ben Grafton was concerned, the man was coloured. Brown-skinned just like Ben’s son. Mahatma it would be. It was a great name. Fitting for a great person. Mahatma had a good sound to it. It was respectable. It had three syllables. Anybody who meant to pronounce that name was going to have to stop and think about it. Mahatma Grafton!

“Mahatma,” Louise sniffed. “Is that a Negro name?”

“No,” Ben was able to answer, “it is not.”

Late one September afternoon, Chuck Maxwell asked Mahatma, “By the way, where are you from, anyway?”

Mahatma Grafton hadn’t found anything to write about that day. He had been in a dry spell for three weeks and was getting edgy about it. Even the old man had been bugging him about it. “I haven’t seen your name in the paper lately. Aren’t they giving you enough work to do?” And now Chuck was asking a question Mahatma fielded ten times a week. Mahatma mumbled something silly and went home.

“He says he’s from Equatorial Mali,” Chuck told Helen. “That’s in Africa, right?”

“There’s no such place,” Helen said. “There’s Mali. And there’s Ecuatorial Guinea. But there’s no Ecuatorial Mali. He’s spoofing you.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Why’d you ask him where he was from?”

Chuck threw up his arms. “What’s wrong with that? We’re professionals, right? What’s wrong with asking a question?”

“Forget it, Chuck. I’m sure he still likes you.”