“That’s quite enough. You’ve got your deal. Let’s shake on it. What did you say your name was, again?”
“Cane. Langston Cane, the First.”
“The First? Meaning?”
“Meaning that there will be a second. After I get to know Mattie better.”
He let out a loud cackle. “Aren’t you something. I’ve never met a Negro quite like you. Do you always talk this much?” “Only when it’s necessary.” “I’m off. Good day.”
When he was halfway out the door, I said: “Captain Wilson?”
“What now?”
“I’m afraid I’ll need money for arsenic. And where can I find a store that sells it?”
“Lumsden’s Hardware. Go up Navy to Colborne, turn right, and you’ll see it. But I’m not leaving you any money. I don’t have time to explain all about shillings and pence and pounds and so forth. Get my wife to explain about British currency. Tell the man at Lumsden’s to put it on my account. You’re making me late. Good day.”
Lumsden’s seemed to sell everything. Eggs. Bread. Milk. Meat. Nails. Planks of wood. Paint. The men behind the counter — there were two of them — made me wait until all white people had been served. Then one of them said, “What’ll it be, son?”
“Son?” I said, with enough force to turn heads. “Do you actually think I’m your son?”
“Shhh,” he said. “Calm down. You’ll disturb the customers.”
Heads, indeed, were still turning our way. “I’m a customer. As for what it will be, I’d like a small container of arsenic, please.”
I heard two people talking near the door. I haven’t seen him before, have you? No, he must be one of Robert Wilson’s Negroes.
“Arsenic? What is a Negro going to do with arsenic?”
“Just put it on Captain Wilson’s account, please.”
“Robert Wilson? Why didn’t you say in the first place that you were in here on his behalf?”
“I’m not. I’m here on my behalf. But it’s going on his account.”
The man shook his head and handed me a small container of arsenic.
“Do I sign for this, somewhere, so that it goes on his account?” I asked.
“You can write, can you?” He burst into forced laughter. “Well, that takes the cake. A nigger who needs arsenic and knows how to write. Here, then, sign beside this entry.” I signed the sheet, said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and left the store.
It took just four days to find a place to stay, and to rid Captain Wilson’s home of rats. The captain was wrong about his wife. She was absolutely fascinated by the rat-catching process. True, she said, she would have screamed bloody murder if she’d seen one running wild through her kitchen. But she liked seeing them dead. She said that I was to handle them and dispose of the bodies, thank you very much, but she was most fascinated by my technique. I said I wanted the choicest bits of potato, beef, and fruit.
“We have apples and strawberries,” she said.
I told her strawberries would be fine, with the other things. “Rats like good food,” I said. “They like fresh food, and they like variety, just like people.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” she said.
But she appeared to enjoy my explanations. She followed me about the house as I set down food here and there. “What about the poison?” she asked.
“Not till later,” I answered. “First, you win their confidence. You feed them for two or three days, and get them used to the idea. Then you lace their feast with arsenic.” The morning after I set out the laced feast, I found seventeen rats, belly up on the floor. I set them outside the side door, where the captain and his wife could admire them without feeling threatened. And then I plugged the holes in the house foundation. Captain Wilson offered to pay me. I told him that I hoped to render him many services over the years, but that he would never owe me anything.
Mattie helped me find a place to stay. The day after arriving, when I knew the captain was attending to business in town, I found the Smith home, knocked on the front door, and asked the portly white woman with the apron, who opened it, if I could have a word with Mattie.
“Mattie? You wish to see Mattie? Well, yes, certainly, come in, do come in, don’t stand out there in the wind, come in and I’ll get her.” I could hear her calling out loud. “Mattie. You have a visitor. Mattie, you have a visitor, I say. No, I don’t know who it is. A Negro. A man. A grown man. A grown Negro man. What did you say? What? Pardon?” The woman returned to the door. “What did you say your name was?”
“Langston Cane.”
“Thank you. Just a minute, again.” She disappeared and then returned. “She says she’ll be out in a moment. She’s taking bread from the oven. Would you care for something? A glass of lemonade?”
“I’m parched,” I said, having just learned the word the previous night, reading a volume by Charles Dickens in the Wilson home. “Positively parched. So yes, thank you, I would love a glass of lemonade.”
The little woman ran off again. “Oh my God,” I heard her shouting at Mattie. “He says he wants lemonade. Where am I to put him? What is this all about? Why are you making him wait like this? If you weren’t making him wait, I wouldn’t have to be fetching him lemonade. I’ve a mind to tell Mrs. Smith about this.”
The good woman with the apron returned with the glass of lemonade and led me to a padded chair with armrests by a window. I had never before sat in such a chair. I sipped my lemonade. It was delicious. I saw bits of real lemon floating in the glass.
“I’m afraid it might not be terribly cold,” the woman said. “Shall I get you some ice for it?”
“Sure. I would love some ice.” I handed her back the glass. She took it, turned, marched off, and shouted out “Oh-h-h-h-h” when she was behind closed doors. “Now he wants ice. Get some ice for him, would you? You what? You won’t? I am to get that man’s ice, too? Are you about finished with that roast? You’ve been taking your time over it.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, when she brought back the glass, with ice.
“Wattle. Jane Wattle. I’m the maid here, and the assistant cook.”
“The lemonade is delicious.”
“Thank you. You’re — you’re not from around here, are you?” “How did you know that?”
She leaned toward me. “You’re the first Negro person ever knocked on this door.”
Mattie joined us in the parlor. Jane Wattle disappeared without a further word. Mattie’s eyes were clouded, and dark. “You look a fine sight more comfortable here than at the top of a schooner’s mast,” she said.
“So do you,” I said. “I won’t take up your time. I need your advice. About a place to stay.”
“You could do what all the other newcomers do and get yourself a job building plank roads or picking fruit and see what your employers offer in the way of rooming.”
“I could. Or I could get your recommendation. Somebody who has a room to spare, and wouldn’t charge too much.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I’m at Captain Wilson’s place for the rest of the week.”
“I heard. He says you’re quite something with your mouth.”
“I’m good with my hands, too.”
She grunted. She smiled. She didn’t want to. She even covered her mouth with the back of her hand. But Mattie smiled. And, three days later, she left word that a bed was waiting for me in the home of Samuel Adams, a sexton at the Knox Presbyterian Church. It was a straw mattress, in the same room as Samuel himself. I took it. And I got a job nailing down planks on the nineteen-mile road they were building from Oakville to Stewart’s Town.
The town of Oakville was a strange and active place. There were people coming in from Ireland. There were fugitives like me from the country of man-stealers. There were people moving in from other parts of Canada West. And they were all working. They were growing and picking pears and apples. They were growing grain and shipping out of the harbor. They were splitting timber and
milling grain. They were building schooners to ship more grain. They were tearing down the trees they hadn’t already torn down. And there was mud and dust and horseshit everywhere. On Colborne Road, the main east-west road running through town, you could step along a plank sidewalk by the storefronts. But just about everywhere else, if you were on foot, you had to look out for mud and horseshit. There were taverns and inns for the men building the plank road. There was talk of a railway maybe coming through town. There were more rats than I could possibly kill. There was all sorts of money passing through hands. Pence, shillings, and pounds, but American dollars, as well. There was beer and wine and whiskey, much to the disgust of some in the town. There were farmers, and there were blacksmith shops, and there was a livery business, and when the spring came, there was the subtle but pungent smell of strawberries in the fields. Children picked strawberries for the fun of it. Colored folks picked them for extra money, and for making jams. Farmers packed them morning, afternoon, and evening, and put them up on boxes to be drawn by horse to Toronto and to Hamilton. I didn’t mind eating the strawberries, but I never picked them. Colored people had been bending over and picking things off farmers’ fields for hundreds of years in the United States, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it in Canada.
Oakville was a bustling town, and an easy place to make a living.
Matilda and I met again several months after my arrival in Oakville. She was on her way to the harbor, and I was going to see a man about his rat problem.
“Hello, fugitive, been up any mast poles lately?” she asked.
“I’m not a fugitive any longer,” I said. “The name’s Cane. Langston Cane.”
“I know that. People are talking about you.”
“How so?”
“That you’re strange. That you been here months and have already walked away from all sorts of jobs.” “What people?” I asked.
“Colored people. They say you know a darn sight about rats. That you catch them better than any man in Oakville. What you got against some big black rat running free?”
“Where I come from, colored people don’t mind killing rats. Colored people I know worry about their own black butts, and if they are going to swing free. Mine is swinging free right now. And I like having different jobs. Lots of jobs. I don’t plan on working for anybody for any long period of time. That’s why I like catching rats. I clean out a man’s house or his barn, he pays me, and I’m free to go.”
“People also say you ain’t been seen in a church or in company of a woman.”
“You could help me prove them wrong about never being with a woman.”
“I’ll think about it out on Lake Ontario. I’m heading out on Captain Wilson’s schooner for a few days.”
I caught malaria in the spring of 1851, not quite a year after arriving in Oakville. People also called it the fever, or ague. It hit the center of my bones, which I thought would explode. I had waves of nausea and a fever much worse than the common sort. I thought I was truly dying.
Mattie came in and looked after me when I got the malaria. She mopped my forehead when it poured with sweat, and put a cold cloth on my face when it was burning up. She forced me to drink broth, and sat by my side and rubbed my neck and told me how she had come to Oakville.
She had been living in Baltimore, as a slave. She’d fled five years before me. She told me I did it all the wrong way, butting my head this way and that, doing it without any planning. She said women weren’t as strong as men, so they had to be smarter. She fled in a smarter way. She found out about some Underground Railroad conductors, who gave her safe passage most of the way to Rochester, where she’d been helped by Captain Wilson.
Oakville, Mattie agreed, was a strange and lovely town. Nobody beat up on you, or brought out a whip, or threatened to drag you back to slavery. But colored people were still made to feel like outsiders.
“The only talking that white people here want to do with me is about how wicked American slavery is, and how I must think I’ve died and gone to paradise, now that I’m in Oakville.”
When my strength returned, I borrowed a horse and took Mattie north of town. We made our way into a forest and tore off our clothes. We went at it for quite some time. Later, I found bits of leaves in my hair, between my legs, and between my toes.
“Let’s get married,” Mattie told me, while we rode back to Oakville.
“Why?”
“It’s what people do. We can go at each other in the peace of our own bed, in our own home, without having to do it in hiding from other people.”
“I like doing it in hiding. Don’t tell me you didn’t like it, too.”
“You know I did. But that doesn’t mean I’d like it that way every day. Brother, I ain’t lying down on the snow for you.”
“Why marry? I just want to love you up and down, inside and out. Why don’t we just enjoy this while we have it? We could be dead tomorrow.”
“You’re still thinking like a slave,” she said. “You ain’t gonna be dead tomorrow, and neither am I. We made it out of slavery, Langston. We’ve come this far, and nobody will crack our heads in Oakville.”
We got married a month later in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oakville.
In the fall of 1851, I paid for horse and wagon fare to Toronto — a two-day trip — to attend the North American Convention of Negroes. There were about fifty of us Negroes at that convention, from Canada West and from the United States. We did so much talking that my head began to ring. We condemned slavery. We endorsed support for fugitive slaves to Canada. We talked about those tomfool plans that some colored people were making to go back to Africa. We talked about the trouble colored people had eating in taverns, staying in inns, and buying homes in Canada West. Some people talked about temperance and the worship of God and other measures to lift up the race. They nearly ran me out of the conference for arguing that we didn’t need any lifting up and that if a man — colored or not — wanted whiskey, it was his own business. Nevertheless, the conference was worth attending. I heard about The Voice of the Fugitive, a newspaper from Windsor. After the conference, I started buying it whenever I could find it. I traveled to visit a colored community in Chatham. I didn’t care for it. There were too many colored folks, too close together, each one making sure the other was praying enough. And they were all farming. I didn’t care for farming. I didn’t like the idea of bending down over growing plants and breaking my back to pick them. The whole thing made me think of the Virginia plantation where I was born.
I kept traveling. On weekends, I would go to Toronto, or Hamilton. I won’t deny that I was roaming for other women, and that I found one, from time to time, who needed a man to warm her bed.
I had three jobs during Mattie’s pregnancy. I helped build a plank road from Oakville to Fergus, hammering nails, sawing wood, carrying loads, and so forth. I got hired by a man hooking stone from the bottom of the lake. Shale was on the lake bed. People used it for house foundations, and for walkways and steps leading up to their homes. So I became a stone hooker, on weekends. At night, I helped homeowners by the lake get rid of rats. My rat-catching shoulder bag consisted of a bag of nails, a hammer, thin mesh wiring, various bits of fresh fruit and cheese, and so forth. And in my pocket, I carried a five-dollar ferret. People tried to pet his white-brown fur. They asked me what I called him. I told them he didn’t have a name because he wasn’t a pet. “This here,” I said, “is a work ferret. He ferrets out rats for a living. That is our only business together. But I keep him well fed.”
I became more demanding about the goods I would take as payment for rat-catching. I accepted flour, bread, meat, apples, pears, peaches, salt, sugar, potatoes, rice, greens, lettuce, and even baked pastries. I also took blankets, pots, a table, a winter coat, and boots — but these things I took only if we needed them, and if they fit. Stores in Oakville were starting to refuse to accept bartered goods as payment, however, and I started telling my customers that I couldn’t accept t
hem either.
The Voice of the Fugitive said colored people depended too much on others for their livelihood. That gave me the idea to write a little sheet of information and start selling it for a dollar to my rat-troubled customers. Mattie knew how to write, so she made copies for me. In the first part, I set out my reasons for eliminating rats. They spread disease, they were unsightly, they upset women, they contaminated food with their droppings, they chewed holes in your house, and, if cornered, they might bite. In the second part, I set out my own experiences catching rats in Virginia, Maryland, and Ontario. Said I had been catching black and brown rats for years. And, in the last part, I set out the techniques available for nabbing the rats. I talked about effective traps. I talked about setting out poison. I talked about the proper use of ferrets. I talked about smoking them out and pouring water down their holes. One spring, when the rats were particularly bad, I sold fifty information sheets.
In the winter, when it was too cold to hook stone and to lay down plank roads, I drove teams of horses. I drove for families and business people, such as the Chisholm family, and for Robert Wilson. I drove for farmers who wanted to move equipment to and fro and get things done that they couldn’t do during growing and harvesting seasons. I worked when I could for a livery stable. In the morning, I would take five red-hot bricks from a fire and put them in a blanket under my feet. And when they started building the railway north of Oakville, I cut up and dropped off loads of wood for the steam engines.
I named our first son Langston Cane Jr. Before I left Oakville eight years later, we had two more boys. They, too, we named Langston. Mattie said, “As long as I get to call the first Senior, the second Junior, and the third Langston, and as long as you stick around to keep this roof over our head, we can call the boys anything you want.”