“Apparently, she told Aberdeen that she wants to come up here for a visit sometime. But she doesn’t take airplanes. And she doesn’t care for buses or trains, either. So I doubt we’ll see her here in this lifetime. But that’s enough about my sister. Langston, did you really get fired today?”
“I did.”
“Are those stories on the radio true?” “Probably. I haven’t heard them all.”
“Is this an act of tilting at windmills?” Dad asked. Mom elbowed him.
“Could be,” I said. “I haven’t analyzed it.”
“I’ve got to hand it to you for embarrassing the government. But what you’ve done won’t really change anything. It’ll be in the news for a day or two, but the government will move along as planned.”
“I didn’t really do it to change anything,” I said. “I did it because it felt like the right thing to do.”
“So, what are you going to do now?” Dad asked. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Try thinking about taking a job and not getting fired.”
My mother shoved my father. “Langston. Quit it.”
I could feel my heart shutting down. My soul walked out the back door of the house.
My brother, the lawyer, did his best. “I don’t think this is a productive avenue of discussion, Dad.”
“Good God, son,” Dad said to him. “Didn’t I teach you not to talk gobbledygook? Productive avenue of discussion! If you have something to say, say it! You want me to shut up? Is that it?”
Sean planted his palms on the table. “All three of us want you to shut up. Is that clear enough?”
I felt a cloud lift out of my head and unveil my own desire. It was time to move south and start to write.
“Well, I won’t shut up,” Dad said. I blinked. Batten down the hatches, I said to myself. Dad turned to me again. “What exactly are you doing to do?”
“I’m going away for a while.”
“Not Africa again?”
“No. Not Africa. Africa’s over.”
“Good. Africa doesn’t need you, and you don’t need it. Where, then?”
“The States.” “Jesus Christ.”
My mother slapped her hand on the table. “Husband of mine, would you give our son a chance? Would you let him finish, at least?” She turned to me, waiting.
“I’m going to Baltimore.”
“No, you’re not.”
Sean stood up. “Don’t take this, Langston. Let’s go. You need a lift somewhere?”
“I have a car. Just got it today.” I cupped my chin in my palms and looked at my father. His eyes were unmoving.
“They’ll eat you up in Baltimore. I know what you want down there. Family roots. Forget that nonsense. Your life is here and now. You’ve got no more links to Baltimore, son, than I have to China. Anyway, you don’t go to a place like Baltimore to hang out. I can help you get another job. Stay with us in Oakville until you get back on your feet.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.
“Your cranium is made of metal,” Dad said. “You’ll come back here out of money, out of luck, and out of the job circuit. You’re just hiding from your own life.”
“I’m not going to talk about this any more. Good night, folks.”
Dad just kept on going. “Baltimore! Where are you going to stay?”
“I’ll work that out. Bye.”
“Don’t bother Mill. The last thing my sister needs is to have to bail you out of trouble.” I stood up to go. “I’m warning you, son. Stay away from Mill.”
Mom walked me to the door. She said I had years still in front of me, that I was still young, that things were sure to get better if I listened to my heart and kept my head. Over her words, I heard Sean arguing with Dad. They were talking about me, but I couldn’t make out the words, only the slow monotone of my father, and the argumentative higher pitch of my brother.
“Dad still thinks I’m looking for free rent,” I said.
“He loves you so deeply. But he doesn’t know how to act when he’s upset. So he acts aggressive.”
Sean joined us in the vestibule. He invited me to spend the night at his place. I accepted, let my mother kiss me, parked my jacket on my shoulders, stepped out into the early morning fog, and followed Sean’s Corvette to Toronto. On the way, I thought about how my father had cheated me. He had gone out of his way to visit me in Toronto, and to invite me out to the family house — and when I got there, he had gone on the attack. It was bizarre that Dad never picked on Sean. My brother had no family, and never would have one. I suspected that my father was terrified of the possibility that Sean was gay — which he was — and dealt with the problem by talking only about Sean’s success as a lawyer, and my lack of success at everything.
We drove to my brother’s Harbourfront condo. Sean didn’t ask a lot of questions. He gave me a towel, a facecloth, and bed linen. He said he had to go to sleep — or to try, at least. “You don’t have to run, brother. You can stay here a few days. It’d be good to see you. We wouldn’t get in each other’s hair. I don’t get home until evening and I leave early.”
Sean made me tea and toast in the morning. He sat down at the table and ate with me. I hadn’t eaten breakfast with somebody in a long time. He tightened the knot of his purple and red designer tie and waved from the door. “See you tonight, I hope. Key’s on the table.”
When he left, I showered, read Mahatma Grafton’s article in the Toronto Times, scribbled thank you on a napkin, went out to my Jetta, baptized it Sarah, and turned toward Baltimore.
Chapter 6
I TOOK THE ADVICE OF THE CAR SALESMAN, and took it easy on Sarah. We needed time to get acquainted, and I was in no hurry to get to Baltimore. I stopped in Batavia for lunch, drove another hour or so southeast, and called it a day in Naples, New York.
Naples was in the Finger Lakes district, and had been mentioned by my father as a town into which Langston Cane the First had arrived, exhausted. A Quaker had sheltered Langston the First until the fugitive had been able to continue his trek north.
I drove along Main Street, looking for a place to stay. It was sunny and unusually warm for the month of March. High school girls swung their hips in miniskirts along the sidewalk. Two old men drank coffee on their front porch, which gave onto the street. A barber had one man in his chair and two others waiting. I saw a hand-painted sign for the Hilltop Bed and Breakfast, admired the house, painted white with big windows on the second floor and a widow’s walk on the roof. I parked, got out of the car, and noticed a historical plaque describing the building as a safe house on the Underground Railroad in the 1840s and 1850s. This was the place for me.
The sixty-dollar nightly rate seemed a bit steep, but the room was big and well lit and quiet, and complimentary scones and tea were waiting for me in the kitchen, and the best hamburger joint in the county was said to be just a hundred yards down the street. I snacked and prepared to take an afternoon nap and thought, as I climbed into bed, how long it had been since I’d made love. A year and a half? More, because there had been a long period of coldness between Ellen and me before she had moved out. I had been celibate for nearly two years. I tried not to think about it, and fell asleep under a down comforter.
An hour later, I awoke and wandered downstairs to chat with the owner, Sandy Ingram, who was making dinner for his wife and children.
“According to a family legend,” I told him, “one of my ancestors — a fugitive slave — holed up for some time in this town. What’s your connection to the Underground Railroad?”
“Quakers owned three safe houses in this town. This was one of them. I have no idea if your ancestor stayed here, but I can show you the hiding spot.”
In the backyard, beside a carport that had once been a barn, Sandy lifted a square plank to reveal a hole about three feet wide, four feet deep, and five feet long. I saw a mouse scurry out of sight.
“Damn! I thought we’d caught all those mice,” Sandy said. “Where’d that mous
e go?”
“Into the side hole. It used to be a lot bigger.” A coffin-sized tunnel had been carved out to one side, apparently. Fugitives would slide in there, face up, and the hole leading out to the side would be covered with a thin board, which was in turn hidden behind earth. Next, the ground-level hole was covered by a trap door, which was hidden under straw and dirt. On one occasion, a man hunting for his fugitive slave had come upon the trap door and opened it, but had not noticed the side tunnel. “I think he would have noticed it,” Sandy told me, “but for a dead rat just inside the trap door. He was so taken aback by the sight of the rat that he failed to notice the side tunnel inside.”
“Does any record exist of the fugitives who came here?”
“They didn’t exactly leave their names behind,” Sandy said, chuckling.
“I suppose not,” I said. My great-great-grandfather must have been thick-skinned and mule-headed. To escape as he did, hiding underground with mice and rats, sleeping — if he was lucky — beside cows to stay warm, walking barefoot through the hills of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, getting into Canada only to turn around nine years later and go back. Why? Could he possibly have joined John Brown’s raid? It was hard to imagine a fugitive slave settling comfortably in Oakville and then turning around and heading right back south into slave territory.
At the hamburger joint down the street, I got myself a Naples Special — a quarter pound of ground beef topped with blue cheese — and returned to bed at the Hilltop. I fell asleep before nine p.m. and didn’t wake up before seven. I hadn’t slept so long and so hard for years.
After the war, which he later said was enough to make any black soldier hate America, my father left the United States and came to study at the University of Toronto.
He traveled north from Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus. It was cheaper than the train, and not much slower, and the only inconveniences were that his clothes and hair reeked of cigarette smoke by the time the bus arrived in Toronto, and that he awoke with a stiff neck after sleeping for six hours with his head against the window.
He had fallen asleep in Pennsylvania and snored through New York State and across the Canadian border, where they waved the bus through, and along the Queen Elizabeth Way by St. Catharines and Hamilton and Oakville. He stirred only as the Greyhound headed north on Bay Street in downtown Toronto. He awoke with a cough, stretched his arms, cracked his fingers, and looked at the woman sitting to his left.
She was a white woman, about fifty, with gray hair and with blue eyes.
“You’re a deep sleeper,” she said.
“I was meditating,” he said, grinning.
“Sure,” she said. “Since when do meditators snore?”
“Me? Snore? Never!”
“Mister, you snored until the cows came home and then you snored again.”
Langston smiled. He wondered if a white stranger had ever called him “mister” before.
“You’re an American, aren’t you?” she said. “How’d you know?”
“I could tell. And it’s not ‘cause you’re a Negro, either, so don’t think I’m prejudiced. I could tell you were American because you’re friendly. You talk to people. Canadians don’t talk.”
“You’re talking. And I presume you’re Canadian. And it’s not ‘cause you’re white, either.”
“Very good,” she said. The bus rolled to a stop in the Elizabeth Street terminal. Her name was Betty Sears, and she said she ran a rooming house at 117 Pembroke Street, in case Langston was looking for a place to stay.
“I’ve got a place lined up. But thanks for asking. Where I come from, colored bus passengers don’t often get offered accommodation by white strangers. Matter of fact, they don’t sit together on buses.”
Langston drew two quick conclusions as he entered the bus terminal.
Toronto could do with a few more colored people. It also needed trees. Some eucalyptus. A smattering of sycamores. Cedars and oaks and magnolias. Langston looked out at Bay Street and found hardly a tree in sight. He did find a telephone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and dialed the number for an acquaintance of his father, who had promised to put him up.
No answer. He tried fifteen minutes later. Still no answer. Langston found a newspaper and read the local stories and then tried the line again and still got no answer. It was seven p.m. He hadn’t eaten since lunch. He had forty dollars, and it had to last until his GI money came through. He wondered how long it would take to reach this acquaintance of his father’s. Maybe tonight. Maybe next week.
Langston opened the telephone directory, but couldn’t find a listing for B. Sears on Pembroke Street.
Damn, he muttered to himself, she called it a rooming house. She doesn’t live there.
Langston shouldered his army duffel bag and headed out on Dundas Street. He bought two hot dogs and asked the vendor, a boy of fifteen or so, where Pembroke Street was.
“Tell me slow,” Langston said. “I’m not from these parts.”
“Walk east on Dundas till you hit it.”
“Which way’s east?”
“The way that streetcar is going.”
“Much obliged.”
“You’re American, aren’t you,” the kid said. “How’d you know?”
“Your accent. I can hear it clean through that hot dog. Also, you’re friendly. Canadians aren’t like that.”
“I met a Canadian woman an hour or so ago. She invited me to stay in her rooming house, and she didn’t know me from Adam. And here you are telling me exactly how to get to Pembroke Street, taking your time to make sure I get it right, and you don’t know me, either. So, by my reckoning, Canadians underestimate themselves. They’ll help out a colored stranger, and that’s already going some distance. How much do I owe you for these hot dogs?”
“Thirty cents. Pembroke is fifteen minutes that way. It goes both sides of Dundas. The lower numbers are to the south.”
“Thank you kindly! If you ever need a doctor, look me up.”
“No way! I almost gave you one of those hot dogs for free. You look like you’re out of money.”
“I am out of money. And I’m not a doctor yet. But I will be in a few years.”
“If you’re gonna be a doctor, how come you’re out of money?” “I won’t have any spare cash until the American eagle shits.”
“Till what?”
“Till I get my GI money from the U.S. government for having been a soldier.”
“And when they pay you, you say the eagle is shitting?”
“It’s a long story. You sort of had to be in the war to understand.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Langston Cane the Fourth.”
“Never heard a name like that before.”
“It has been around, this name. At the very least, three people had it before me. Now — one more question before I’m on my way.” Langston lowered his voice. “This Pembroke Street. Is it in a colored neighborhood?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Forget it. Thanks for the hot dogs.”
The Pembroke Street rooming house wasn’t clean, or quiet, or well lit. You could poke a pencil through holes in the wall. My father took a room with a dresser, a bed, a desk and chair, a rug, a washbasin and hot plate, and a view of the street. Langston used a quiet but unrelenting poor-student routine to get Betty Sears to drop her rent to thirty-five dollars a month and to let him delay the first month’s payment until the eagle shat.
Pembroke Street was downright seedy, and the rooming house was no less so. A prostitute lived in one of the rooms. A string bassist lived in the basement. He practiced till one or two every night and never got up before noon and subsisted on crackers, sardines, cigarettes, and beer. Two of the residents were on welfare. Winos slept on benches down the street. Langston concluded that in Baltimore or in D.C., Pembroke Street would have been a black ghetto. But here in Toronto, Pembroke Street was predominantly white. There were a few blacks, but the
y didn’t seem any more beaten up than the others. So where did black people live, anyway?
Langston had no money for streetcar fare, so he walked everywhere. Every day, he headed up Jarvis Street and along Wellesley to the university — and he walked a good deal farther in search of black neighborhoods. The only one he could find ran west of Bathurst, between King and Queen streets. It was by no means a black area, but Langston was likely to bump into one or two black people as he walked there. On Bloor or Yonge, however, he could walk all day without seeing one black face. That was a strange feeling, indeed. It made Langston feel as if he were truly living in a foreign country, but it wasn’t really another country at all — it was just Canada.
Heading out on foot struck Langston as a Canadian pastime. Couples actually went out on walks. Held hands, kissed, walked, kissed some more, kept walking, looked at the trees, which looked starved. In Baltimore, the trees were five times as big, ten times as old, and a hundred times more frequent — but nobody bothered walking under them. Walking was something you did from your car to the house, or from your door to the bus stop, if you didn’t have a car.
At the University of Toronto, Langston was no better than an average medical student. He studied hard just to stay in the middle of the pack. He didn’t have the smarts of a nuclear physicist, but he did have two things going for him. One — he wasn’t obsessed about getting high marks. Learning the material well and getting out with a medical degree would be good enough for him. And two — he had a phenomenal ability to concentrate. He could block out the noise of the bassist playing in the house or the prostitute fighting with her pimp. He could absorb a chapter of anatomy in a crowded café. In the fall of his first term in medical school, he studied right through three parties in the Pembroke Street rooming house. And he could fall asleep in seconds. Any time, any place.
Tenants in the rooming house started losing money, watches, and shoes not long after Langston moved in. People eyed him as he walked up the stairs. He assumed it was because he was black. One day he came home to find that his lock had been jimmied and twenty-five dollars stolen from the shoe box under his bed.