No Safeguards (11 page)

P
AUL AND I
arrived in Montreal in the summer of 1997. For the last week of July and the first three weeks of August, we explored the city: to Parc Jean-Drapeau, where Paul wanted to go on every ride — he plagued me to take him back a second time (it was easier to give Paul what he wanted than to endure his hounding); to Parc-Mont-Royal (it was near enough for us to walk to it: a 30-minute walk at a leisurely pace); to the Botanical Gardens, the Insectarium, and the Biodôme; to the Planetarium. He picked up all the pamphlets and absorbed every scrap of information in them. Grama had given me $300. “You looked after Paul without complaining. I shouldn't have put such a huge burden on you. And you did me proud with your CXC results.” By the end of August, I'd spent every cent entertaining Paul and me.

As Labour Day approached, Paul became withdrawn and admitted that he was nervous about going to school. He had to attend French school because of Bill 101, but he'd done French at Excelsior and had a French teacher from Martinique. She'd taken him and his classmates to Martinique four times, one time for six weeks. (The week after he came back he wouldn't shut up about the birds he'd seen there: the Martinique oriole, the blue-headed hummingbird, the ringed kingfisher; in his pedantic way, informing us about their plumage and habits, to the point where I offered to pay him to shut up.) And he'd peruse my French texts and brag that he'd already learned what I was studying, on occasion correcting my pronunciation. Anna had sent us conversational French and Spanish tapes.

The Sunday before school started, he told Grama on the phone that he needed her, that she should come live with us. She replied that in hot St. Vincent her joints creak like rusty hinges. Canada's cold would cripple her.

***

In St. Vincent there was no chance for me to become an amateur actor, and there was none in Montreal. At 17 going on 18, I'd already completed the first year of community college, so I entered CEGEP. Paul was five months short of 12 and had already completed secondary I — always a year ahead of his classmates. Anna didn't want Paul left alone at home. Someone had sketched for her a nightmare scenario of children left unsupervised from three until their parents got home, children who ended up being petty thieves and drug pushers. So, the first two years, I had to leave CEGEP no later than 2 pm to be home for Paul's arrival. There was no time for extra-curricular activities. I fumed quietly. It didn't help that, aside from her regular job at the Jewish General where she often accepted overtime, Anna also worked in another hospital on her days off — until one evening when she came up the stairs out of breath and dropped onto the sofa like a bag of stones. She was on two weeks' vacation then, and had chosen to work at another hospital.

“Ma,” Paul asked, “when last you had a day off?”

She couldn't remember.

“Ma, I like Michael Jordan sneakers, but I don't want you like killing yourself so I can wear them.”

“It's not that. It's because I want us to have our own house.”

“At the rate you're going,” I said, “you won't be around to live in it.”

“Ma, all you do is work, work, work,” Paul said. “Ma, you need a life. Do like Grama. She's cool: she gets together with friends, and they have a good time on a Saturday night. Every bank holiday she'd take us off somewhere and we'd all enjoy ourselves.”

After that Anna stopped doing double shifts and worked only occasionally on her days off, but she did nothing to enrich her life. Of course, shift work didn't help.

She forgot Paul's first birthday here. She'd had a night shift. The day before he'd received a money order for $100 from Grama. The morning after, as Paul was heading off to school, he asked her if she hadn't forgotten something. She gave him a puzzled look. Tears welled up in his eyes. “Ma, yesterday was my birthday.” When she attempted to hug him, he raised his arms defensively. That evening she gave him a card and $20, and ordered in pizza. But Paul, who was accustomed to having a cake baked specially for him and all the foods he liked —curried goat, oxtail, callaloo . . . — on his birthday or the first day he got back to Havre from Kingstown, was not impressed. When he left for school, Anna told me that she had been counting on me to remind her. She hadn't forgotten my birthday a month earlier — a fact Paul unendingly pointed out — but, apart from giving me $30, had been too tired to do anything else.

Now, nine years later, I realize these were crucial mistakes that wounded Paul, mistakes he had no coherent language for. She and Paul didn't know each other, and she didn't know she should have spent those first couple of years forging a bond with him. I see it now: Paul's crying for Grama was his plea for help against the insecurity he'd been thrown into. I recall how Caleb prevented Anna from parenting me as she would have wanted; knocking her down when she tried to rescue me from his brutality — her flight. I should have told her that Paul felt she wasn't meeting his needs and he didn't trust her judgement. That I could have done. But I'd lived for the day when she and I would be reunited. Hurting her feelings wasn't how I wanted our reunion to begin
.
Yep. That's what it was. She'd left a hole in me the day she walked out on Daddy and left me behind, and I hoped to fill it when I got here. Not that I was fully conscious of this when Paul and I came here in July '97.

In Montreal, Paul fought me all the way. Here nobody knew he was Ma Kirton's Genius and wouldn't have cared. In St. Vincent, his schoolmates and the community lionized him for his brilliance
.
After he'd won the Vincentian Spelling Bee in the under-nine category and his photograph was splashed on the front page of
The Vincentian,
Haverites began calling him Ma Kirton's Genius. I remember the agony on Geraldine's face as pterodactyl was called. She was from Windsor Academy, Excelsior's rival. They were already into overtime, and a few minutes earlier the adjudicator had allowed the American spelling for plough, and Paul was livid. They'd already aced words like epistle, gnat, knight, knob, and cyst. When Geraldine said “t,” Paul became electrified. He'd already read the couple of books on dinosaurs in the Kingstown Public Library. At ten and a half, he placed second on the island-wide high school entrance exam, and again his photograph along with the photographs of the girl who'd beaten him by a single mark and the boy he'd beaten by two marks took up the entire front page of
The Vincentian.
He was a year younger than both of them.
Future Leaders
was the banner on the front page of
The Vincentian
. SVGTV and NBC Radio sent journalists to interview the winners. Grama, Aunt Mercy, Paul and I sat in the living room and watched the TV interview. Tears rolled down Grama's cheeks as she hugged Paul fiercely and told him how proud she was of him.
“Our beginnings do not know their ends.
”

In St. Vincent, Paul attended school with the children of the island's wealthiest and most accomplished people. In Montreal, his classmates were the children of tradespeople, petty clerks, janitors, housemaids, factory workers, drug pushers . . . and he was shocked by their sparse knowledge and paltry (his word) vocabulary. “They can't sit still and listen for five minutes. They never read. They aren't curious about anything. They listen to vapid music and gab about the stupid TV shows they watch.” They called him geek, nerd, wimp, fag. Why else would he spend so much time in the library? He was one of seven of 16 Black students in his secondary II class who did homework (the other six were girls). To the Jamaican students, he was a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — because upon teasing him for the way he spoke, he replied that his vocabulary and grammar didn't come from dancehall music. (Elocution was a part of Excelsior's curriculum.) His schoolmates mocked, mimicked, humiliated, and, on occasion, assaulted him. He turned 12 that November. His Black classmates were mostly 13, 14 and one, Alfred — an unflagging persecutor — was 15. Exotic flora and fauna, ornithology, the customs of the world's peoples were Paul's interests. He loved to watch documentaries about almost anything and share the info with anyone who would listen. The films, videocassettes, and books in the Intercultural Library and the school library were the only things that pleased him about being in Montreal. And he was a news junkie. Every day he read the
Montreal Gazette
, and on weekends he added
La Presse.
Anna balked at the expense. Paul was shocked. (Current affairs was an informal part of Excelsior's curriculum. One Saturday when Grama didn't get
The Vincentian,
he'd come close to tears at the thought that he would be bested when his class teacher questioned them the following Monday about what was in the news.)

That first year in Montreal he came home from school anxious, angry, and sullen every day. The joyful, humorous Paul, who never missed an opportunity to best me, was gone. At the end of September he told me he hated being Black. “They eat, dance, talk nonsense, and harass their teachers. Klunks! Imagine, Jay, this fool telling the science teacher: ‘Sah, lemme tell you a liklow secret. If you want we fi l'arn, you ha' fi' beat we.' They talk
loud.
It's hellish when it's raining, because then we stay inside. They plug their ears and yell from one end of the hallway to the other and scream to be heard over one another. Noise! Noise! Jay, it drives me crazy. Then there are these Black and Latino guys that walk around stomping the floor, ropes of gold and silver around their necks, washcloths bulging from their pockets, the crotches of their jeans down to their knees, chains dangling from their hips, like cattle that broke their tether.” (Later when I started tutoring at the Côtes des Neiges Black Community Centre, I learned, usually from desperate mothers, that these were children arriving here at age 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 who were being put in grades 9, 10 and 11 slow-learner classes in which they performed at the grade one and two level. To hide how little they knew they bullied the teachers into ignoring them. Most had long been out of school in the Caribbean and Latin America or had been attending school sporadically while their mothers were undocumented workers in Canada or waiting for their refugee claims to be heard. Most of the youngsters never returned after the initial meeting. Half of those who returned quit the tutorials after two or three weeks.) “Louts. Thorough-going louts” — Paul's voice was almost a hiss. “They eat like hyenas tearing into kill. Only the snarls are missing. Then they lick their dirty fingers and wipe them on their jeans!” He closed his eyes tight and grimaced. “And yelling with their mouths full! You cover your face and hope it doesn't land on your clothes. Half the time you don't know what they're saying because they don't have the language to say it. I can't help it, Jay. They make me feel ashamed I'm Black.”

“Explain.”

“Listen to this, Jay: ‘Smaddy t'ief me t'ing. If I-man ketch ‘im is dead him dead for true, ‘cause I-man bruck him neck.'

“‘Man, how yo' kayliss so! Yo' mek smaddy get in dey n tek it hout an' yo' nuh know!'

“‘Ah nuh dat me a talk ‘bout.'

“Jay, this at ear-splitting volume in the midst of French class!”

Excelsior Paul.
“Watch it, Paul. Daddy breaks stones for a living. Grama owns a store and runs it. True, it made us live well. But there's nothing high-class about it. You'd be speaking like your Caribbean schoolmates if Grama hadn't raised you and you hadn't gone to Excelsior. There's nothing wrong with how your schoolmates speak. It's their language. When I'm with people who speak our dialect I speak it too. Grama does too. You know that. You spent a lot of time in the store with her. Aunt Mercy speaks only dialect, and she and Grama are like sisters.”

“Say what you want, I still can't stand them. For your information, Grama didn't let me speak like that, not even to the people in the store.”

That was true. On the couple of occasions when I had slipped and spoken to her in dialect, she told me to keep that language for my friends and to speak to her in “standard English.”

Paul was no gentler on Black Canadians. Their double negatives amused him. “‘That there don't mean nothing.' Why do they talk like that, Jay?”

“I hope you don't try to correct them?”

He shook his head but turned his face away and pulled at his chin, a sure sign he was lying. Now I wonder whether Grama hadn't given him too much latitude. She encouraged him to argue with her and allowed him to say whatever he wanted and to express his feelings candidly, intervening only when she thought he'd crossed the line of politeness — like when Aunt Mercy once told him to give his mouth a rest; and he replied: “My mouth isn't tired. Besides you only spent two years in school; there's a lot you can learn from me.”

Grama apologized to Aunt Mercy, took Paul into her bedroom and scolded him. He was around ten at the time. She never had any such issues with me. I spoke to her only when I needed to clarify instructions about some chore she'd given me and to answer her questions — always in the fewest of words. Except for when Paul and I were in town, I found a way to let most of Paul's chatter merge with the breeze in the trees and the surf lapping the shore.

In Montreal, Paul and I shared a bedroom the first couple of years. Anna gave us the bigger bedroom. She'd fitted it with twin beds, leaving just enough space for our tiny desks and a chest of drawers each. “This is our room!” Paul said and pulled in his lips. It was less than half the size of our bedroom in St. Vincent and about a third smaller than our bedroom at Cousin Alice's.

Two months after Paul started school, I would hear him whimpering in his sleep. A mid-November morning around 3, we found him fast asleep trying to open the front door of the apartment. One morning at the beginning of December, as Paul was leaving for school, I asked him if I could borrow an eraser. Paul emptied his backpack to search for it. Something glinted among the books.