Emancipation Day (26 page)

Della owned a speakeasy? But Vivian had long ago learned not to show when she was surprised. “Jack and I heard him at the Horse Shoe when we were there two years ago,” Vivian said. “Do you ever go there?”

Dee-Dee looked down at her notepad. “Sometimes,” she said.

“You went to the Horse Shoe?” the bird woman asked Vivian.

“Yes. With Peter and his mother.”

“On East Adams?”

“Yes.”

“In the Black Bottom?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Hmm.” The woman sniffed. “That’s a black-and-tan, and you don’t look too tan to me.”

“Would anyone like some tea?” Jack’s mother said, and Vivian smiled at her gratefully.

Alvina spoke about a beauty contest they were planning for the Emancipation Day picnic, the Miss Sepia Pageant, the first of its kind in Windsor. They were trying to get Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, to come up and be a judge, but they might have to settle for Alf Hunter, a coloured boxer from Detroit.

“That’s what we got to do on Emancipation Day,” Alvina said. “We got to show people that coloureds’ve made a big contribution to this city, that we ain’t just a bunch of housekeepers and barbers. And we got to show that to everyone, coloured or white. There’s coloured businessmen, coloured lawyers, coloured nurses, coloured athletes.”

“Coloured musicians,” put in Jack’s mother, nodding at Dee-Dee. She seemed to have forgotten her offer of tea.

“That’s right,” Alvina said. “We got the Black Pearl singing for us on Emancipation Day.”

“You got a band for me yet?” Dee-Dee asked.

“We’re talking to Jock Anderson and Brad and Wauneta Moxley,” Alvina said. “We’ll get you a band somehow.” She looked at Vivian, who’d been wondering if she were a part of the meeting or just an onlooker.

“I could speak to Jack about it,” she said, although she doubted that she would be able to speak to Jack about anything to do with his family.

“I already done that,” Alvina replied. “Several times. He says, ‘Why would you ask a white man to organize your picnic for you?’ An’ I says, ‘I ain’t, I’m asking you.’ ”

Alvina’s forthrightness about Jack’s colour both shocked and encouraged Vivian. If Alvina could speak to him so directly, perhaps Vivian would be able to as well. One day.

“Josephine tells us you’re going to have his baby,” said the bird woman, staring intently at Vivian as though she were a new species of worm.

“You’ll need to see a doctor soon,” Jack’s mother said, looking at Vivian’s waist.

“You’d be wanting a coloured doctor, then?” asked the bird woman.

“Please, call me Vivian.”

“There’s good coloured doctors in Windsor.”

“We’ll be in Toronto when the baby’s born.”

“Lots of coloured doctors in Toronto.”

“But why would I go to a coloured doctor?” Vivian asked.

Dee-Dee stopped writing. There was a silence in the room. The bird woman stood up. “You stay there, Josephine,” she said to Jack’s mother. “I’ll go get the tea, and I brought us a treat to go with it.”

“You mustn’t mind Ephie,” Jack’s mother said when the bird woman had gone into the kitchen. “She gets carried away sometimes.”

“She had a hard life,” Alvina said, keeping her voice low.

“It made her a bit odd,” Jack’s mother added.

“I don’t mind,” said Vivian. “I know I should be seeing a doctor soon.”

“She sure puttin’ her heart into Emancipation Day,” said Dee-Dee. “I like to see a good concert, but Ephie, all she talks about is how from now on Emancipation Day’s going to make a new era of pride for coloureds, we going to be accepted into all the white communities, jump right over the colour bar. We’ll get jobs that’ve always been reserved for whites. We’ll be able to buy houses in parts of the city we only ever been able to enter as tradesmen or maids before, and sit anywhere we want to in movie theatres and lunch counters. She going to get the mayor to set up something called a task force.
And
she asked Eleanor Roosevelt to speak at the picnic. Imagine that, Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“Why Eleanor Roosevelt?” Vivian asked, just as the bird
woman came back from the kitchen carrying a tea tray.

“Because Eleanor Roosevelt,” the bird woman said, setting the tray down on the coffee table, “quit the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing in Constitution Hall in Washington because she was coloured.”

Vivian was going to ask who Marian Anderson was, but the bird woman’s condescending tone made her change her mind. She kept her eyes on the tea tray: on it were a teapot and four cups and saucers, and a white cardboard pastry box. While Jack’s mother poured the tea, the bird woman opened the box and took out three squares of vanilla cake and what looked like a hard-boiled egg. When Jack’s mother saw the egg she missed Vivian’s cup and poured tea into her saucer.

“Ephie, dear,” she said, “I don’t think—”

But the bird woman set the egg on a plate and handed it to Vivian. Jack’s mother looked uncomfortable.

“What’s this?” Vivian asked.

“A special Windsor treat,” the bird woman said. “We call them Dark Secrets. They don’t have them anywhere but here, far as I know. Go ahead, open it up.”

Vivian picked up the egg. Alvina and Dee-Dee were quiet. Jack’s mother sat down and put her hands in her lap. The bird woman was cackling with anticipation. Vivian touched the egg. It felt solid, like white chocolate. A thin seam ran around it lengthwise, and when Vivian pressed her fingernail into the seam, the egg split in two and lay open in her hand. At the centre
of one of the halves was a small curl of brown chocolate in the shape of a fetus. Vivian was so startled she nearly dropped it.

“Ain’t it wonderful how they make them so lifelike?” said the bird woman.

Vivian felt the blood draining from her face and was sure she was going to faint. “I … I can’t eat this,” she said. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” She stood up and placed the confection on the tea tray, where it rattled and lay still.

“Ephie, dear …” Jack’s mother said, but a roaring sound filled Vivian’s ears.

The bird woman’s high voice cut through the roar like the cry of a gull through a windstorm. “White people been tellin’ us for years that if we got one drop of coloured blood in us, then we coloured. What’s wrong with us sayin’ the same thing back to them? You and I both know, Josephine, that if that baby got one drop of coloured blood, then it a coloured baby. It belong to us.”

“I’ve got to go,” said Vivian, standing. “Jack will be home wanting his …”

Jack’s mother followed her to the door, wringing her hands. She took Vivian’s coat from its hook and helped her on with it. “You’ll see a doctor soon, won’t you, dear?”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “As soon as I can.”

Before leaving, she looked back into the room. Alvina and Dee-Dee were studying their tea, and the bird woman’s head was pivoting around, she was quite pleased with herself. The feathers in her hat fluttered, as though she were preening, and her horrid chocolate egg lay exposed on the tray.

WILLIAM HENRY

N
ow William Henry wishes he could see Jackson’s wife. She has a nice voice and she sounds smart, but you can’t tell much from voices. Radio announcers have nice voices but are probably ordinary people when you meet them face to face. Lying here
is
like listening to a radio program, in a way.
Amos ’n’ Andy
, maybe, or
Boston Blackie
. It sure as hell ain’t
The Happy Gang
.

How did he get here, anyway? He thinks if he wasn’t hit by a bus he might have had a heart attack. He’s never had heart trouble before, but when he gets better he’ll slow down, stop working so much. He’s had enough of slinging plaster. Lifting a hod of wet plaster up a ladder is too damned hard on an old man, and he’s old. Time for Benny to take over.

Jackson could make it easier for them if he wanted to. He could put on a good suit, drive out to River Canard and get them a contract in ten seconds flat. But would he do it? Not in this life. Plasterin’s coloured work, he’d say. He’d rather sell books to white people too lazy to walk to the store to buy it for themselves. Is that how he thinks he’ll earn their respect, by fetching things for them?

He’d like to ask this new wife of his what she sees in him. Is he a good husband to her? This isn’t exactly how he pictured their meeting. He thought that maybe once she got used to the idea of Jackson not being who he says he is, the two of them could commiserate about what a blind fool his son turned out to be. They both suffer for it, they have that in common. But neither one of them suffers for it as much as Jackson himself.

“Will,” he hears Josie say to him, “you remember Vivian, Jack’s wife. She and Jackson are living in their own apartment now. Aren’t you, dear?”

“Yes,” her sweet voice says, “but only for a short while, until we go back to Newfoundland.”

“You hear that, Will? A short while! The faster you get better, the faster these people can get on with life.”

Now she comes over to his bedside and says hello in that nice, young voice of hers, not like his, roughened by cigarettes and alcohol and a lifetime of grunt work. Fifty-seven ain’t that old, but he needs to slow down. His arm hasn’t been the same since the riot, feels like the skin on it shrunk, like it crackles every time he bends it. A lot of things ain’t been the same since the riot.

“We got to put all that behind us,” he says.

“All what?” Harlan answers, startling him. He thought it was just Josie and Vivian in the room. Harlan doesn’t normally come down to the hospital, says he has enough visitors. Besides, he doesn’t want his brother coming here, seeing him like this, flat on his back, his hair uncombed and probably needing a shave. He can only imagine what he looks like. He misses his daily shave.

He sees himself in Harlan’s barbershop mirror, a bib around his neck and half his face covered with shaving cream. He believes he went home late one night and something happened, he forgets what, maybe his heart, and he didn’t get up early the next morning and leave before anyone else was up, and walk down to the British-American for his morning shave, like he usually did, or if he did that was when he was hit by the bus, or whatever it was. He likes that walk, with the sun eating away at the snow and the day still unruined. The lobby always busy with people checking out in time to make the nine o’clock ferry. Harlan leaning against the door of his shop, watching people’s hair as they walk past, imagining how he’d cut it, how he’d change the way they look. There’s another coloured profession on the way out: barbering. After the riot, whites were wary of coming downtown to get their hair cut, maybe they thought twice about letting a coloured man come at them with a straight razor in his hand. There’s white barbers opening shops farther out, up on Wyandotte and Tecumseh, mostly Italians. Harlan was complaining about it just the other day. All them places where they
don’t have sidewalks and nobody walks anywhere. Won’t be long before the coloureds have the whole downtown to themselves; already happening across the river.

“We got to put it behind us,” he says again.

“Get on with it,” Harlan agrees.

“Slavery ended a hundred and fifteen years ago, at least in this country.”

“You goin’ to the picnic this year, Will?”

“I ain’t missed one yet.”

“They say this one’s going to be different.”

“Who says?”

“Alvina, Josie. They say we’re done steppin’ aside to let whitey pass.”

“We come up here to get away from all that.”

“Not an easy thing to get over, though.”

“Jackson was never an easy child to get along with.”

“Can’t say he was.”

As soon as he wakes up, William Henry is going to tell Josie that he long forgave her for having a white baby, although he’s never really forgiven Jackson for being white. Not that he’s a hundred percent white, never mind what he thinks and the way he carries on. If he wants to live white that’s his choice, but he can’t expect William Henry to turn himself inside out to be white, too. He ain’t one of them new electric signs can be one colour one minute and another colour the next. William Henry shakes his head, causing Harlan to step back for a second with the razor so as not to nick him. When Jackson was a baby,
William Henry was ashamed to be seen with him, and now that he’s grown up Jackson’s ashamed to be seen with William Henry. You reap what you sow.

“She’s a bit thick around the waist,” Harlan says.

William Henry heard Alvina saying something like that the other day. Thick with child.

“I ain’t seen her.”

“Me neither.”

“About time, though. How long they been married?”

“Three years.”

“Be your first grandchild.”

“Be another white bugger in the family.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Yeah, that’s right, you never know, do you.”

“No, you sure don’t. Look at Jackson.”

William Henry laughs at Harlan in the mirror. “If that child comes out coloured,” he says, “I just might start believin’ in God again.”

VIVIAN

T
he trouble was, she didn’t know any doctors in Windsor. She supposed she could just look in the telephone directory under Physicians, but that didn’t seem a reliable way of choosing a doctor. She wanted someone she knew, or who came recommended by someone she knew. Then she remembered that Peter’s father was a doctor. She found the directory in the kitchen and looked up Barnes. Yes, there he was, Howard J. Barnes, MD, residence and office 512 Victoria Avenue. She rang that afternoon, when Jack was out and his mother was at the hospital. She thought of calling Della first, but decided it was best to go through the proper channels. She spoke to a receptionist, explained that she was nearly four months pregnant and
needed to see the doctor. She was given an appointment for the next day.

She walked there from Janette. The sky was grey and there was a cold wind, but it was warmer than it would have been in Toronto, she had to admit, there was something spring-like in the air. Gosh, she’d be as big as a house by spring.