Most blacks left Oakville during the Depression. The A.M.E. congregation died down to twenty members. A bishop summoned Langston to Toronto and told him that the church would have to be shut down.
Langston, Rose, Mill, and Langston junior moved to Baltimore, where Langston was offered a position at the Bethel A.M.E. Church on Druid Hill Avenue. A.M.E. bishops considered it a terrific promotion. It was based in part on Langston’s stance against the KKK, which was reported in papers across Canada and picked up by the press in D.C. and Baltimore. It wasn’t a promotion at all, as far as Langston Cane and his family were concerned. Life was much better in Oakville.
“Down here, the KKK wouldn’t even give you time to open your mouth,” Hazel warned them. “In Oakville, we met their nice northern cousins. But in the States, they’d swing you from a branch and there’d be no talking before or after. As for Aberdeen and that white woman, someone would have put a stop to that nonsense the moment it started.”
Mill left Oakville heartbroken at her separation from Aberdeen. She was convinced that she had lost her best friend because he had been seeing a white woman, and nobody could change her mind. In Baltimore, Mill and Langston junior entered a segregated school. The family squeezed into a home a third of the size of the Oakville residence, which Langston and Rose decided to board up and keep, for the time being. There was no point in selling it for peanuts. Maybe they’d get back there one day. Maybe Aberdeen could use it. Rose left the key and a note with Renata — in case her brother came back.
W. A. Phillips, the KKK ringleader, was jailed for a month and fined three hundred dollars. It turned out he was a dentist from Hamilton. The others were each fined fifty dollars. Most couldn’t pay the fine. They were given the option of spending two weeks in jail.
Aberdeen Williams and his intended made their way to the Six Nations Indian reserve in Brantford, Ontario. Ab had read all about the Six Nations people. He knew, from his reading, that Six Nations chief Joseph Brant had fought alongside Negroes and the British to drive the Americans back across the Niagara River in the War of 1812. He knew that Brant had allowed fugitive slaves to settle on his land and marry his women. He knew that African and Indian peoples had a long history together. He was convinced, in his mind, that African sailors in reed boats had brought traces of their culture to South American Indian communities, and that, if he could find any refuge at all, he would find it among the Indian people.
Aberdeen Williams and Evelyn Morris were married on the Six Nations reserve by an Indian elder. They spent six months there. Ab fixed things. He put things together. He impressed people with his skillful hands. He didn’t impress them too much with his theories about the African discovery of America. “How could you have discovered America?” Wilson Longboat, his first friend there, said. “We were here first. If you discovered America, then what were we supposed to be?”
Evelyn Morris ran off with an Indian. Aberdeen expected as much. He was relieved to be rid of her, although he wouldn’t have been the one to break the marriage up. She couldn’t hold a candle to Rose Cane. Never did, and never would.
Aberdeen Williams returned to Oakville. He was devastated to learn that the Canes had moved. He lived in their house for a month, fixed everything he could think of to fix. But finally he boarded the house back up and left it. He couldn’t stand living there without the Canes. He moved in with his sister. They shared a basement room in the huge residence of the Turner family. Renata cooked, and Ab fixed things. There were all sorts of things to fix. He had free room and board. He had a stash of money that nobody knew about. But he was profoundly miserable. A year passed. Another six months went by. He received letters from the Canes, from time to time, but he was too disconsolate to reply. Finally, in the fall of 1932, he mailed them a cryptic note. Didn’t tell them where he’d disappeared to, and said only that Evelyn and he “were no longer.” He said the economy was terrible, but that he still had a bunch of money saved up from all that work Rose had engineered for him. He scratched a postscript. “P.S. I’m enrolled in history at the University of Toronto.”
Chapter 17
I ASKED MILL HOW OFTEN she had been in touch with Aberdeen after her family left Oakville and moved to Baltimore.
“He came down to visit us a few years later. And he came once again nearly thirty years later, with you and your parents, when you were a baby. I didn’t see you or your parents, but Ab came to visit me. And he writes me every year.”
“But you haven’t seen him in three decades?”
“He came down again when Dad died, and when Mom died a year later. I told a lie when I said I had never seen you before. I saw you and your folks in the church at the funerals. I didn’t speak to you, but I saw you. You look just the way you did then.”
“And Ab?”
“He stayed behind a few days, each time. He stood by me. I don’t think I would have made it through those times, if Ab hadn’t been there.”
I spent another few days digging through the boxes in Mill’s guest room. I found sermons, programs from theology conferences in Europe and all over the States. One box contained correspondence between Rose’s physician in Baltimore and the Toronto doctors who had treated her for cancer. There was a letter from the Israeli government, inviting my grandfather to speak at conferences in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There was even a handwritten note from Harry Truman in 1950, inviting Langston to lunch at the White House. Tucked in among pages and envelopes of all sizes and colors was a letter never intended for my eyes. It was written from Mill to her father in 1947.
Dear Daddy,
I am sorry for all the trouble. Are you ashamed of me? The Bible says Jesus was good to Mary Magdalen. I am glad to know that. I trust you will be kind to me, despite all. The arsenic and bismuth treatments are over. The doctor says it shouldn’t come back. I have left that way of life.
Your loving daughter,
Mill
I put the letter back where I found it, and didn’t say a word about it to Mill.
The phone woke me up. It rang so loudly, it seemed to have a personality. I finally picked it up.
“Is your head still on that pillow? It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
“Mill. How’re ya doing?”
“Good. I have something important to ask you. Come over for lunch. Okay? Bye.”
I wondered if Mill had come across the letter I had seen. If she knew it was in the box. If she sensed that I had seen it.
The phone rang again.
“Mill?”
“Sorry, dear. This is your mother.”
My mother doesn’t make small talk on the telephone. My father, yes. It would be in character for him to call to say that I was wasting my time and ought to hightail it back to Oakville and find a job and settle down. He’d phone to tell me I didn’t know a thing about black folks and ought to watch out because one of them was liable to manipulate me like a washing machine and pick my pocket in the spin cycle. But my mother would never call on a whim.
“What’s up, Mom?” I slipped into my underwear. I could hear her breathing. On went my jeans.
“It’s your father.”
I pulled on my socks. “What about him?”
“He has disappeared,” she said. I scanned the room for my wallet and keys. “I think he’s been kidnapped.” Mom said he’d gone for his usual six-thirty a.m. walk. He had a busy schedule that day. He had an important appointment in Toronto at eight-thirty. Mom had called the police. They’d tried to tell her to call back if he hadn’t returned in another hour. She’d told them who her husband was, and they’d said they’d be right over. “Can you come home?”
My father has placed so many demands on me — get a doctorate, get a job, hold on to your wife, have children — that I have subconsciously arranged to fail at every one of them. My mother has never asked me for anything. I told her I’d take the next flight home. Luck was with me. A Toronto-bound flight was leaving the Baltimore-Washington Airport at nine a.m., and there wa
s still room on it. I made it just in time, and I was in Oakville by eleven-fifteen.
A cop let me in the door. My father was still missing. My mother stepped up to hug me. When I haven’t seen her for a while, I’m always surprised at how short she is. Mom had put on navy slacks, a pink turtleneck, and a blazer. She believed men didn’t respect women in dresses. If she was going to be dealing with cops all day, she didn’t want to appear feminine.
We sat in my father’s study. “You’re looking good,” she said. “Rested. You look much better than when I last saw you.”
“The last time you saw me, I’d just been fired.”
A police officer interrupted us to say that some old man had just opened the front door and walked right in. Did we know this old nut or should he be thrown out? My mother asked if he was black. Yes. She said it was Aberdeen Williams, and to leave him alone.
Aberdeen came into the room. He had a slow, careful shuffle.
“Dorothy,” he said. “Langston! Good to see you. Glad you could come back. I think Dr. Cane is going to be fine. Don’t you worry, Dorothy.”
My mother smiled faintly, kissed Aberdeen, and went upstairs to nap. The phone rang. It was Mill. She blasted me for standing her up for lunch. I told her my father had been abducted. She railed on about how I’d promised to eat with her and she’d ordered in Kentucky Fried Chicken and it got stone cold and she phoned me and got no answer, so drove over figuring I was asleep and pounded on the door until Yoyo came around and said he’d seen me take off like a shot in an airport limousine. So what in hell’s half acre was I doing back up in Canada and why hadn’t I brought her along and hadn’t it entered my brain that maybe she would like to come up with me, like to see Oakville again, maybe even like to be there when someone kidnapped her own flesh and blood?
“Is that Mill?” Aberdeen said, prodding me in the ribs.
“Someone wants to talk to you,” I told Mill, and gave the phone to Ab.
“That you, Mill? This is Ab, here. Aberdeen Williams.”
I could hear Mill’s voice shouting through the receiver. Ab held the receiver six inches from his ear.
“Lord Almighty, Aberdeen Williams! How are you? Fine? Good. How old you-all, now? Eighty-eight! I better get up there before you-all back out the door. Tell that nephew of mine to come on back down here and bring me up to see you in Oakville. He took off without telling me a thing.”
“It’s been a long time, Mill. Why don’t you come up here for a visit?”
“When I come up, it’ll be for more than a visit.”
“Don’t run up your phone bill, Mill.”
“Right, I’ll be seeing ya. Bye.” Mill hung up.
“She hasn’t changed at all,” Ab said. “She’s got the same mouth she had when she was six years old.”
A reporter knocked on the door. I stood up.
“Don’t talk to him,” the cop said. “Media coverage would just mess things up.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. My father had always said not to run from the media. If you run, they chase.
I found Mahatma Grafton at the door. He started to introduce himself, then stopped and said, “Hey, we’ve met before.”
I nodded. I wondered if he would bring up the business of my getting the Ontario minister of wellness fired. But he didn’t.
“I know this is a difficult moment,” he said, “but could you say who you think is behind all this? I mean, first Norville Watson, and now your father. What is going on?”
I said this wasn’t a good time for the family to speak publicly.
“I understand,” he said. “Thanks anyway, and good luck. We all hope you get your father back safely.” We shook hands. I noticed he had the Toronto Times rolled under his arm. I saw the word Cane in a headline. I asked him if I could have the paper.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s the afternoon edition.”
I saw the news of my father’s disappearance in the bold headline. That was the line story, on page 1. Under the fold, I saw a special from Baltimore by Hassane Moustafa “Yoyo” Ali. I pointed to the article.
“I understand that Yoyo is a mutual friend,” I said. “I live in Baltimore. We stay in the same house.”
“I knew him ten years ago in Winnipeg. He’s from Cameroon, right? Speaks French?”
I nodded.
“Take my card,” Mahatma said. “Give me a shout, when things get resolved. I hope everything works out for your family. You going back to Baltimore?”
“I plan to.”
“Then please give my card to Yoyo. Tell him I’m thinking of him. By the way, a lot of people think you showed a lot of guts, the way you brought that minister down.”
I smiled. We shook hands again. I watched Mahatma walk away. He had a car parked on the street. Funny name, Mahatma Grafton. Just about as onerous as Langston Cane the Fifth.
Aberdeen Williams was in the kitchen, rinsing lettuce. “I’m making a light snack,” he said. “For you and your mother and your brother, when he comes. I doubt any of you are eating properly. How about salmon on lettuce, with green peppers and carrots?” I told him it sounded fine. He said he would like to make more, but the fridge was empty. He promised to have some fruit and vegetables delivered from Longo’s Fruit Market. “I didn’t know they delivered,” I said.
“They don’t. But I’ve got a friend who owes me a favor. I fixed his toilet last year. He’ll bring the food over.”
We were introduced to Inspector Robert Hay of the police holdup squad. He would be directing police activities in Oakville. He was a middle-aged man, with a mild paunch and a handlebar mustache. He kept fingering the mustache. Hay asked about the relationship between my father and Norville Watson.
I told him about the rental confrontations. I told him that Watson had successfully opposed an attempt by my father to establish a group home in Oakville for black teenagers who’d broken the law. And I told him that when my father had set up practice in Oakville, he’d had to fight to win the confidence of patients and nurses who had heard, through the grapevine, that he was inexperienced and unreliable. Good at civil rights agitation, one patient of Dad’s had been told by Watson, but not so effective in the doctor’s office.
It took my father years to build up a decent practice in Oakville. He would never have been able to buy the house had it not been for money from my father’s parents, Rose and Langston the Third. They were very excited by the idea that their son and daughter-in-law would purchase the old Cane house, which was sold out of the family in the 1940s. By the early 1960s, my father had built up a unique group of patients. More than one hundred black families in Toronto had chosen my father as their doctor. They didn’t care that he was in Oakville. The commute didn’t deter them. He opened up his house to them. Many dropped by for coffee with my mother. A number stayed on for lunch or dinner. Some even spent the night. The playroom was made available to their kids. Aberdeen Williams frequently walked the kids to a waterfront playground. There was a steady flow of blacks in and out of our house for the better half of the 1960s.
When Dad finally got privileges at the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, he and Watson tried to avoid each other. By 1970, Dad lost most of his Toronto patients. With a wider choice of doctors to their liking in the city, patients were less willing to commute to Oakville. Dad’s white practice picked up. He took care of most of the Portuguese families living near Kerr Street. A few dozen families living near our house came to my father because they liked the idea of having a family doctor who lived minutes away. They liked the idea of being able to run over in the middle of the night if they needed to. And Dad was always open to being roused in the middle of the night. He liked it. It made him feel useful. He liked to tell me in the morning that he had been called out at two a.m. to deliver a baby.
By 1975 — the year I finished high school and left home — my father wasn’t talking any more about Norville Watson. Their feud was on ice. Out of tradition, they still avoided each other. But the host
ility seemed to have diminished. Dad referred some urology cases to Watson. They conferred on the phone occasionally.
“What about more recently?” the police inspector wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I said. “Dad tried to see Watson a couple of months ago, but he wasn’t in his Toronto office at the time.”
“Why did your father want to see him?”
“I think he was tired of thinking of the man as his enemy.”
“Is there anyone or any group you can think of that would want to abduct both Watson and your father?” “No.”
Inspector Hay asked where my father went walking in the morning.
My mother answered. “Sometimes he heads down to the lake, and goes west along the water. Other times he heads up Reynolds, along Macdonald, down Balsam, and back home along the Lakeshore. Other times he winds through just about every street in old Oakville.”
“His favorite walk is along King Street,” Ab said. We all turned to look at him. “I’ve done it with him a hundred times. He likes to go along Dunn and stop at King Street to look at the old Turner house.”
“The old what house?” Hay asked.
“The house the Turners used to live in. My sister used to be their cook. This was back in the twenties and early thirties. Before you were born.”
Hay sighed. “But you have no clue where he went this morning?”
“No.”
“None of your neighbors saw him out walking?” Hay said. “What makes you think he’s in Oakville?” my mother asked. “We don’t. We think he’s been abducted and taken somewhere else.”
“He’s in Oakville,” Ab said.
“On what basis do you say that?” Hay asked.
“Instinct,” Ab said.
I flipped through the Toronto Times. The headline said Second Doctor Missing in Days. The story was mostly old news. It rehashed the business of the Watson abduction.