“You worry too much, my friend. They don’t stop every person they meet at the border, do they? We’ll figure out a way. Take me. Take me with you, I say.”
Yoyo was earning eight hundred dollars a week for cleaning houses, plus four hundred dollars for his weekly missives to the Toronto Times. He had been going like that for the better part of two months. He said he needed to save as much as he could before moving to Toronto. I showed him the manuscript. He read it the next day. “You have to get this published, my friend,” he said. “You should have been sending it out in pieces for publication in magazines and newspapers. You have to learn to start making money, my friend. You need a little more of the African entrepreneur in you. Wake up, Langston. You have friends, right? You have contacts. You have all those people who called in response to my stuff in the Times about John Brown. I say, wake up, my friend, and make some money, and write another one. It’s easy, writing, isn’t it? Cleaning houses, that is hard work. Selling kebabs on the roadside and getting arrested and having to jump from police station windows — that is hard work. Writing is a snap. You can do it. I say, publish this one and write another.”
A week later, I received a letter from Annette.
Dear Langston,
Here you are running around all over Baltimore and Harpers Ferry trying to find out who you are and who your family is, and you don’t even see love when it falls into your own bed.
I loved you from the minute I saw you. You seemed unlike any man I’d ever known. Quiet, humble, but doing real things. And you stood up in a wonderful way for that boy on Pennsylvania Avenue. You didn’t seem all full of yourself, like so many men I meet. And I have to say that you had a pair of lips on you that seemed just made for kissing.
I didn’t want an elaborate and silly dating game. I have needs, just like you. Men and woman aren’t that different. You must know how much I enjoyed making love with you. So, I figured, let’s get all the sex out of the way, let’s just do it from the start and enjoy it, and see if we can get beyond it to anything interesting, rather than the other way around, pretending something interesting is going on when you’re just beating a path toward someone’s bed.
But you really hurt me by ignoring me on that trip. I thought of that trip as a test. I thought, this man has things to do there, but if he really likes me, he’ll make room for me. And you didn’t. You hurt me, Langston. Good-bye.
I did the right thing this time. I wrote to Annette immediately. Told her I was sorry about Harpers Ferry, but hadn’t attached the importance to it that she had. Perhaps that wasn’t right, I said, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in her. I told Annette that I had done pretty well everything I needed to do in Baltimore, except work things out with her. I asked to see her again, and mailed the letter special delivery.
I gave my landlady notice that I would be leaving in a month, told Yoyo that I had decided to help him get to Canada, and drove straight to Mill’s house. When I said I had decided to leave Baltimore, Mill stared at me wordlessly. The pouches under her eyes seemed darker than usual. But when I went on to say that I wanted her to come with me to Canada, and that I would see to it that she was well taken care of, a light came on in Mill’s face.
“Are you talking about driving? No airplanes at all, but a long car trip?”
“That’s right. It’ll be crowded in the car.”
“Come over here, son.” I walked to her chair. “Help me up.” I gave her my hand. When she was standing, she let out a holler and shook her knees and arms, shook them as madly as one of her church cronies struck by a love bolt from Jesus, and said: “Langston, oh Langston, this is a homecoming that I have wanted for a long, long time.” And she crushed me in a bear hug.
A few days later, Mill asked me to help her look through her personal boxes.
“Haven’t I been looking through your boxes for the last several months?” I asked.
“No, you were looking through family history boxes. But I’ve got my own boxes. In another room. And I’m trying to find something.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just start going through these boxes,” she said.
She had me bring four boxes down from the attic. She said she was going to have to throw that junk out soon anyway. I picked through the first box — family photos, two pairs of old shoes, old railway tickets, a 1978 season’s pass to the Baltimore Orioles, and so forth. Nothing doing. Same sort of junk in the second and third boxes. The fourth box was full of slips of paper.
“That’s the box,” she said. “Go through the papers slowly.”
“What are you looking for, Mill?”
“My citizenship papers.”
“American citizenship papers?” I asked.
“No. Canadian.”
“You’re a Canadian citizen?”
“I got some papers. I know I got them, somewhere. From when I was living in Oakville, back in the twenties. Dad got us all Canadian citizenship papers back then. He said they might come in useful one day.”
I found them near the bottom of the box.
“Go get a pen and some paper.” When I returned, she said, “Now start writing:”
Dear brother,
I’m coming to Oakville. I want to die there. Not that I plan on dying any time soon. But it’s where you are, and it’s where your boy Langston is soon going back to, and it’s where Aberdeen Williams is. It’s even close to where your other son Sean is, who, from what I hear, is going straightforward ahead in the lawyering business. I figure that if he’s a lawyer, he’s got as much mouth on him as your Langston does. Oakville is where my family is, so I’m coming up. Your son Langston has offered to drive me up to Oakville. I’ll call you when we’re leaving so you can get a room ready for me. You know I ain’t getting on no airplane. I won’t be flying but once in life, and that’s when I’m going to meet my maker.
Mill had me seal the note and take it to the post office right away. She came along. But after I’d posted it, she made me stand at a counter and take down another dictation.
“Dear Aberdeen,” I wrote for her. “Don’t die on me yet, ‘cause I’m coming up. To stay. See you soon. Love, Mill.” That one went out by special delivery.
Mill asked Yoyo to clean her entire house. She wanted it so clean that a stranger coming in the front door and walking around would find it attractive. Yoyo replied that she would have to consent to let him throw out most of the junk in the house, and then paint it, and then clean every single room. They negotiated for two days about the price, but Yoyo wouldn’t budge. He said it would take him ten hours a day for at least a week. Mill finally agreed to his demands: three hundred dollars to clear out the junk, four hundred dollars to paint the inside walls and the outside trim, and another four hundred dollars to clean the house to a state of perfection. It ended up taking Yoyo ten full days of work, but he didn’t complain. Mill paid him in cash and threw in a hundred dollar tip.
Mill threw a party, and invited her church friends, Yoyo, my landlady, and me. When the party day came, I discovered a For Sale sign outside her house. Under that, I saw that it said Sold.
Mill announced that I was taking her to Oakville. Yoyo said I was taking him, too. I admitted that I hadn’t yet figured out how to get him across the border. Annette stepped out from behind a door. “I’ll help you figure that out.”
Mill and Yoyo had to mail a few boxes of their possessions to Canada. There wasn’t room for her luggage, and Yoyo, and Annette, and me, all in the Jetta. The only thing Yoyo insisted on taking in the car was his computer. Annette only packed a small suitcase — she didn’t know how long she’d be staying. This would be a trial visit.
Mill got behind the steering wheel with fifty miles to go to the Canadian border at Niagara Falls. She said our family had been moving back and forth across the border for five generations and that she would know how to handle this crossing. We should all just hush up and leave the talking to her. The official at the Canadian border asked us w
hat our nationalities were.
“Canadian,” Mill said.
“Where do you live?”
“Oakville,” Mill said.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Baltimore.”
“How long you been there?”
“Just a week. We had a church reunion. We were at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, mister, and we had one thousand souls in the arms of Jesus.”
The officer raised his eyebrows. “Are you are all related?”
“In the back there,” she said, indicating Annette and Yoyo, “are my children. And this here is my nephew.”
“This one is your nephew?” The officer studied me. “What is your name?” he asked her.
“Millicent Cane.”
“And what is your name, sir?” he asked me.
“Langston Cane.”
“May I see some identification?”
“You really got to see all that?” Mill said. “Okay, folks, get your ID out.”
“Not everybody,” the officer said. “Just yours, ma’am, and your nephew’s.”
I tendered my passport. Mill showed her seventy-year-old certificate of Canadian citizenship.
“I haven’t seen one of these old certificates in years,” the officer said.
“That’s ‘cause I was born a long, long time ago,” Mill said. “But I’m a long way from dead.”
The man laughed. “Have a safe trip home, folks.”
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Author Biography
About the book
An Interview with Lawrence Hill
Read on
An Excerpt from Some Great Thing
From Lawrence Hill’s Essay “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?”
Further Reading
Web Detective
About the Author
Author Biography
LAWRENCE HILL is the son of American immigrants—a black father and a white mother—who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, DC. On his father’s side, Hill’s grandfather and great-grandfather were university-educated ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in DC. The story of how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill’s bestselling memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario, in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill’s writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.
Lawrence Hill’s third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada and the UK, and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Published in translation around the world, it also won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009, The Book of Negroes: Illustrated Edition was published with a new introduction from the author and with more than one hundred images, including early maps, documents, paintings, artifacts and illustrations to complement the novel.
Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing. His most recently published fiction is the short story “Meet You at the Door,” which appeared in the January–February 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine.
Hill’s most recent non-fiction book, The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (written with Joshua Key), was released in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and several European countries.
Hill has received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo. He has also won the Bob Edwards Award from the Alberta Theatre Projects, and he was named Author of the Year by Go On Girl!, the largest African-American women’s book club in the United States. Hill won the National Magazine Award for the best essay published in Canada in 2005 for “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?” (The Walrus). In 2005, the 90-minute film documentary that Hill wrote, Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada, won the American Wilbur Award for best national television documentary.
Formerly a reporter with The Globe and Mail and a parliamentary correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, Hill also speaks French and Spanish. He has lived and worked across Canada, in Baltimore, and in Spain and France. He is an honorary patron of Canadian Crossroads International, for ? which he travelled as a volunteer to the West African countries of Niger, Cameroon and Mali. Hill is also a member of the Council of Patrons of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society and of the Advisory Council of Book Clubs for Inmates. He has a BA in economics from Laval University in Quebec City and an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Hill lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
About the book
An Interview with Lawrence Hill
You’ve described Any Known Blood as a loving but fictional tribute to your family. When did you first know that you would write it?
“I like the freedom of creating stories andcharacters.”
Just before my first child, Geneviève, was born in 1990, I felt that I should hurry up and interview my father about his life and our family history before I ran out of time. My father’s health was already declining, as he had a painful terminal disease. Thankfully, he held up over the interviews, which I taped over the summer and completed just a few days before my daughter’s birth. I knew as I was interviewing my father that I would mine, reshape and fictionalize at least some of the material for a novel.
What made you decide to develop the stories as fiction rather than non-fiction?
Never for a minute did I think about writing a family history. It was a novel from the first moment of conception, because I am primarily a novelist. I like the freedom of creating stories and characters, and I treasure the latitude novelists have to bend history and reshape the “facts” to tell a good story. I have written books of non-fiction, and I hope to write more. I am proud of them, too, and have worked very hard on them. But fiction is where my heart lies.
What was your family’s reaction to their story being turned into a novel?
“My father believed that the only way for a black male to transcend racism was to become a successful professional.”
Long before I first published a book, my parents used up all of their anxieties about having children who were artists instead of professionals. My father believed that the only way for a black male to transcend racism was to become a successful professional. By the time I started writing, however, Dad had come around to accepting that his children would make up their own minds about following their passions, and so my father and mother always supported my novel writing. They were positive about Any Known Blood but wary of how they and other family members were depicted, even fictionally. Certain stories from the lives of my parents and grandparents did enter into the story, but not without going through the creative meat grinder. Although my father understood that this book was a novel, he was troubled by the depiction of a fictional sister—the character Mill—as a prostitute during the Second World War. “Larry,” he said, “I know it’s a novel, but did you have to make her a prostitute?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said, and that was the end of the conversation.
What aspects of the life of the fictional Langston Cane II mirror those of your greatgrandfather, Daniel Grafton Hill I?
Daniel Grafton Hill I was the son of Richard Hill and Demias Crew, who were slaves in Maryland until Richard bought freedom for himself, his wife and their eight children in the late 1850s. Daniel was
born in 1860—the last of nine children—and raised in Washington County in western Maryland. His mother died when he was just one, and his father did not have the means to raise all the children. I don’t know what became of the other eight siblings, but Daniel was sent to live with Maryland Quakers. He studied at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and then at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He went on to become a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and to serve as minister at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Druid Hill Avenue—the same church that is featured in Any Known Blood. Like Daniel Hill I, my character Langston Cane II is orphaned as a boy and raised by white Quakers before being sent back into his community to study and become a church minister. But those are the only similarities. I don’t know much about the life of Daniel Hill I, and I was happy to invent a life for Langston Cane II.
What are some of the inherent difficulties involved in writing a work of fiction that incorporates real people and events?
The difficulty is respecting the broad lines of history, stamping the fresh face of fiction over the past, and being creative and lively at the same time. Historians will be happy to jump all over you if you get your facts wrong, but readers will drop your book in the trash can if you can’t captivate them. Somehow, one has to mine history and then jack it up with dramatic tension, and make it worth reading. I believe that fiction, well done, is a fabulous way to introduce readers to history. I love speaking to students of all ages and trying to infect them with the history bug. I love telling them stories about the trials and triumphs of blacks in Canada. Part of my job as a novelist is to write the colour—and by that I mean human drama and struggle—back into history.
“I believe that fiction, well done, is a fabulous way to introduce readers to history.”