Red Jacket (10 page)

Grace Settles In

Edris's grandaunt would die if she ever know that Grace's roommate, Stephanie Scott, is a Roman Catholic that wear medals and hang a rosary on her bed. Enough to contaminate the air that good Christians breathe! The day after term begin, the said Heathen Idolater hand Grace a letter, saying, “Went for mail. Mail guy must have dropped this. I rescued it. Turns out it's yours.”

Grace so glad she nearly grab the letter out of Stephanie's hand. It is from Gramps, first to write Grace, which is not surprising, for Grace know Ma is bustling to fix up school uniforms, shoes, and books for Conrad, Sam, and Princess, and Pa is hustling to find money for those things as well as put aside some for Stewie, in case he get through to Pursea's, a Methodist college in St. Charles parish that still operate the pupil-teacher system. If Stewie do well on the entrance test and give three references, don't mind he never been to secondary school, they will take him to train in industrial arts. Gramps is tutoring Edgar who finish at the All-Age school, but is trying to do four subjects in the Cambridge exams. He still sending his poems and stories to the newspapers.

Grace only glance at Gramps letter. She going to read it carefully when she get back to the dorm. At present she looking for the admissions office so she can speak to somebody about whether she fulfill all the entry requirements. Just now one of the other overseas students say something that make her think she better check. She rummage in her pocket for the letter, so she can touch it again for reassurance, but then she decide she can't wait whole day, so she cross at Bloor and Spadina, go in the bank, find a armchair, and open the letter.

Hut No 15

Wentley Park

St. Christopher, W.I.

5 September 1976

My dear Gracie,

I have been looking forward to writing this letter since the day Ma Carpenter found you reading the newspaper! I am glad to be putting my pen to paper in the first of what I hope will be many letters to pass between us. Before I go on to the “reasoning,” as Mortimer would call it, some practical things. I hope you are settling in without too much trouble, for I know things are very different there. The cold especially can come swiftly and without warning, so it is best to be prepared. A good bit of advice that my Irish sixth cousin gave me in the war is, “Keep your head and your feet warm!” That is half the battle won against a formidable enemy. Money spent on wool socks and warm headgear is well spent. Also, if you haven't bought them yet, invest in a good pair of boots. When winter comes, you will be glad you did. In fact, on the whole, buy one good thing rather than two cheap ones. It works out less expensive in the long run.

Nor is it only the weather that you will find a challenge. It is also the draining away of colour, the death of everything around you, the absence of the sun. You will need to fight that in many ways. Here are my suggestions. Put a plant in your room or your dormitory — wherever you are living. Remember my story about stealing the piece of
syngonium
from Kew Gardens? Those few leaves kept me going through the gloomy winter months. I paid no mind to all those limey fellows laughing at me. When the bombs rained and the racist insults flew, I'd remember it and resolve that I too would thrive.

Next, put cheerful things on the walls of your room. Cut them from old calendars or magazines or those glossy advertisements that proliferate in the North. And buy clothes in cheery colours too, so that you brighten up the landscape. A red sweater or coat can do wonders for your spirits. And give yourself a treat, no matter how small, from time to time.

Now for our usual discourse.

We have a habit here to speak of what education has done and can do for poor people in a small ex-colonial country. I want to say at the start that you must struggle, now that you are out in the wider world, not to think of yourself in that way. God gave us all brains, black and white, brown and yellow. What you are part of, and what you are yourself contributing to, is something much bigger than a bootstrap operation to benefit yourself. Everybody at the university to which you are going is after the same thing. We all need to know, and knowing improves us all, or at least it should. It is our common pursuit, and we all benefit. You are learning with lots of other people and you have your part to do. I know that you will do it well.

Here now is the challenge. Promise me please that you will not take on every skirmish that comes your way. There will be battles aplenty. Pick the ones you join. You are a black person in white people's country and you are there on sufferance. They will not be afraid of telling you so. LEARN TO SWALLOW YOUR SPIT. You know you can believe me for we have talked about this before, all those times when I told you stories about being in the RAF. That was a World War. People's lives and freedom were at stake. But the colour of a person's skin was what people saw and reacted to. Don't let them shove that view of the world down your throat any more than you allow them to turn you into somebody bawling the whole time about how you have been slighted because of your colour. That is no way to live. It is also letting others box you into perceiving the world in the way they define it — and a narrow, poisonous view at that. Your colour is not your culture nor what makes you who you are. If it were, any tar-brushed white foreigner could be a Christophian. It is certainly part, and an important part, history being what it has been, of a sometimes splendid, sometimes vile set of events that have contrived to make you into yourself. But it isn't by any means the whole of you. You are a brilliant country girl from Wentley Park Plantation in Westland Parish in the island of St. Christopher. Do your do and say your say and know that nobody deserves to be sipping at the fount of knowledge any more, nor any less, than you.

As for news here, things are pretty much as usual. The Queenstown goings-on do not presently affect us in Wentley Park, but I wonder how much longer that will be the case. The problem with these overseas-educated politician fellows is that they eat up the overseas culture and way of seeing things. Don't let that happen to you. Remember the contribution I just spoke about? One part of it involves putting forward the way of thinking and the points of view that you bring with you, those you have because you come from this place and are who you are.

Mr. Wong asked me to enclose the ten-dollar bill. He knows your mother wouldn't take it, but he and I are worldly men so he entrusted it to me.

I close by reminding you again to pick your battles with care: it's sometimes prudent to lose a battle so you might win a war. I am so proud of you, Gracie. All of us are proud. We are praying that you will have great success.

God bless.

Gramps

Gramps missive hurt her heart, but it comfort her too, so she resume her mission feeling better. Inside the administrative building she find her way quick, join a line, and soon reach the front. She land up facing a woman who is maybe fifty and whiter than anybody she ever see. The woman's hair is dark and soft, with plenty gray in it, especially near her small ears. Also, it is crinkly. According to Gramps, in Lisbon during the War, he see plenty women with hair like that, women so sure they were white that they always cross the street to get out of his way. Gramps always laugh and say, “Ah, the Moors! Those Blackamoors!”

Grace say, “Good morning,” and smile a little. Ask if there are still admission requirements she need to fulfill. The grey eyes in the face before her light on hers and fly off like they touch a hot surface. Must be really hot, for in the rest of the conversation, the eyes don't make four with hers again. Now, they travel to a pile of papers on the counter, but don't look up, while a hoity-toity voice ask, “What did you say your surname was?”

Grace is on the verge of saying, “Carpenter, ma'am” but instead she just say, “Carpenter.”

“You know of course that you must take a language proficiency test?” The woman is face to face with Grace again, her raised brows lifting the rest of a mean face, her eyes staring down at her narrow, quivering nose. Grace know the meaning of all these signs. It's not merely to let her know that she's not welcome; it's to let her know she's hardly there. In a second she is standing again at the counter of Mr. Wong's shop, clenching her teeth, struggling to force out Ma's short shopping list in the loudest voice she can manage. She do the same thing now like she do those times: take a deep breath, swallow, open her mouth, and force herself to speak. But she swear yet again that one day God going tell her why he breathe life into her, give her a good brain, then leave her with such a small conviction that she deserve a space on earth.

“What language is the test in?” Grace ask her. “I speak two — three, if you count my Creole.” She sort of stretching things with the three-language bit, but she do have a little Spanish, never mind it's not fluent.

“Your what?” The question explode softly from the woman's mouth in the way you shoot out a coolie plum seed that you finish eating.

“St. Chris Creole, my native tongue,” Grace answer. Grace not sure if the woman hear her, for the eyes now staring past her to the rest of the line, then moving across the room to check a old-fashioned clock on the wall opposite, then rolling up to the high ceiling, then sliding down the marble columns. They are looking everywhere but at her.

“I'd like to know the time for the test, and if there are forms, I'd like them too, please.” There is a eloquent absence of response, as the woman turn back to some shelves behind her, select some papers, turn around, and hand them to Grace, same time saying, “Next.” She is still withholding her gaze. Grace take the papers, consider, decide she will say, “Thank you very much.” As she turn to leave, the woman is amiably asking the next person, “May I help you?”

Outside the four o'clock sun is wading through thick clouds, icy gusts whipping bits of old paper along Bloor Street, everybody passing every other body as if they are alone on the planet. She feel a drum starting to beat in her head, no doubt sake of the rude woman. But Gramps say to pick her battles, and he wouldn't rate the woman as a minor skirmish. Plus Ma would say, the rudeness is probably a sign of worries. Which don't make the experience any more pleasant when you just arrive in a strange place.

She decide to think of the nice people she know, like her roommate, Steph, she with the jade plant on her desk. “My mother says even a murderer cannot kill this plant. I tell her not to kid herself. We have a ten-dollar bet that it will die by Christmas.”

So her roomie is a gambler too. That don't surprise her. Everybody know Catholics with their bingo and raffles. Lord have mercy! The Worshipper of Graven Images and Wearer of Evil Amulets is now also a what — Punter? Wagerer? Nor is that the end of it. Steph's iniquity extend in other directions as well, for she promise to take Grace to Allan Gardens to snitch a piece of public plant for Grace to grow in a private pot in their room — on Gramps's instruction and by his example.

Grace think of the boys thiefing Gramps sugar and fibbing to Ma, bad things that they did because they love her.

A Blinding Headache

Through the glass windows at Coffee Coin, Grace is gazing idly outside, waiting for Maisie's tall, slender figure to stride into view. Though it is only fall, Grace is already a roundness of tights, jeans, and sweaters, an outfit completed by a balloon of a wool hat and smaller balloons of warm mittens, for the cold reach so far into her body, it feel like her pee is frozen into ice. In its approach, winter is no betrayer: it fixing to keep every promise it make to Grace the day she buck up the rude woman in Admissions, a day that seem five years, instead of five weeks, ago.

Grace know Maisie from St. Chad's, her snobby high-school-of-choice in Queenstown, where the girls used to call her — Maisie, that is — “choucune,” which they take to mean “yellow girl.” Grace was dubbed “redibo,” the day she arrive. The light-skin girls at St. Chad's had a rhyme to chant, adjusting it to suit whoever they were torturing. Maisie's version go: “She's a high yellow gal/with hair that straighten well/hair that straighten well/so it's very hard to tell.”

As for Grace
,
if in Wentley Park her red skin, “fine” features, and soft, red hair are the envy of some, at St. Chad's she is at the bottom of the colour/class curve for, first, skin that is light in Wentley Park is dark at St. Chad's, and soft hair there is tough and kinky in this uppity neck of Queenstown.

And she is clearly poor as a scrawny puss.

Maisie not the bookish type and since her family is well off, no way she and Grace were going to be friend and company at St. Chad's, even if they were the same age. In fact, Maisie is a big girl in sixth form when Grace arrive so there is all of seven years between them. Maisie know Grace, though, for everybody in the school know her. Grace arrive with the highest marks in the General Entrance Exam of any student who ever attend the school.

Right now, apart from Maisie and her roommate, Grace know not one other soul in all the length and breadth of Toronto. She meet plenty people, mark you, but it's just plenty hello and goodbye. She don't take it amiss and she hold on to Gramps advice: “Don't shun people, Gracie, when you reach to foreign. There is none of us that cannot profit from a friend. Give a helping hand whenever you can, and if somebody put one out to you, don't box it away.”

So here she is awaiting Maisie.

Their first meeting was a buck-up in a expensive supermarket on Bloor that Grace usually avoid, but which she patronize that day because of a urgent need for sanitary napkins as well as on account of the fact that it have a clean bathroom. Grace see Maisie first and say a timid, “Hi!” Maisie see Grace, pull her to one side, and move through her recent history like bran through bowels. Cramming to keep up with her informant, Grace learn that shortly after Maisie graduate from St. Chad's, her family pack up and come to Canada, she find a job in a bank, marry a Canadian widower with a eight-year-old daughter, and settle down to be wife and mother.

When Grace ask what make her family leave, Maisie look solemn. “My father was a civil servant. Remember how they kill Mr. Ogle on his way to work?”

Grace nod. Mr. Ogle was a honest man, so they put him in charge of government contracts in the Ministry of Construction. He institute a fair system of awarding them and get paid with a bullet.

“Next day Father go to the Canadian High Commission and apply for papers.” Maisie's sculpted eyebrows take off like soaring birds. “He say he learn to read from he is three, so he can see the writing on the wall, and it not worth being Permanent Secretary when a bullet from a ten-dollar gun can land you up as permanently secreted in God's earth as any dead dog.” The crudeness of the dead dog bit take Grace by surprise. “We reach here one year later, which is four years gone.”

So Grace now waiting, taking in the scene, and taking her time over a cup of Coffee Coin mint tea. She never expect Maisie to acknowledge her in the supermarket, so when her schoolmate phone her, she is properly astonished. True, they exchange numbers at the store, but if she was to hear from all the people she give her number to, she would be a speedy car on the social highway.

Maisie finally arrive, full of apologies. She not alone. “Meet a friend,” she say. “Lindsay Bell, this is my schoolmate, also from St. Chris, Grace Carpenter.”

Lindsay say, “Hi, Grace.”

“Gracie, I hate to do this for it's the worst manners!” Maisie say, all smiles. “I have to run and leave you. School call to say Sylvia look like she getting chicken pox, so I must pick her up. I bounce into Lindsay outside, and he say he know your brother, Edgar. I say, ‘Come, meet her!' So see him here!”

Lindsay is tall, black, and sturdy like Gramps. His somewhat slant eyes put Grace in mind of Miss Carmen, but the whole shape of him recall Gramps. He nod his head in greeting and look unsure of what to do next.

“I don't come here often, but I hear their coffee is good,” Grace find herself saying, “and this mint tea is not like the one at home, but it will do.”

“I've time for a coffee,” Lindsay say. “Can I get you another tea?”

“No, thanks. I'm fine.”

Maisie look relieved. “Great! You two get to know each other. I hurrying. Call you later, Gracie.” She jangle off, model-on-the-runway, keys twirling.

“So how come you know Edgar?” Grace ask Lindsay, who now facing her across the table, warming his hands in the steam rising from his cup of coffee.

“Haven't known him long,” he say. “I know his poetry. It's good. I'm a journalism major at Carleton, and I did my co-op at
The Clarion
. I spoke to Edgar on the phone once when he called about a poem of his being published without his name, and I met him once when he came to get a cheque. Nice guy.”

“All my brothers and sisters are.” Even Pansy! She's glad she thinks it freely. “So what you doing in Toronto?”

“On an investigative assignment.”

“Sound mysterious. I guess you can't say what it is?”

“Not yet. What if I send you the story when it comes out — if it does?”

“Okay.”

“I'll need your address.”

Grace amaze herself again by tearing a piece of paper from her notebook and scribbling the address on it.

“What about you, Grace? Maisie says you are at U of T?”

“Doing education, supposedly. Still don't know what I really want to do.”

“You just come, then?”

“Green as grass, Lindsay.” Two of them laugh.

They chat, or mostly he chat, answering her. How come he's at Carleton? Best place for journalism. How come he did his co-op at a paper in St. Chris? His father's idea and connections, him being the St. Chris parent, his mother being from Trinidad. His dad thought Lindsay could do more challenging things at a small paper, plus have the St. Chris home experience. Had it turned out that way? Yes.

Looking outside, Grace can see it's darker. The sky is getting lower; she can taste it. Something swimming in the mint tea in her belly take a dive, creating a raw, acid, disgusting splash in her throat and a peculiar taste in her mouth that mean headache-soon-come. But while this is not her first headache, it's the first time she's doing what millions do every day. She will bear it.

When Lindsay finish his coffee, he say he can't linger, but he hope to see her again, and he renew his promise to send the story. At the corner of St. George and Bloor, they say goodbye. Lindsay head into the subway, and Grace stand up in the same spot where he leave her. Maybe Lindsay really want to see her again. Maybe he will send the story. And he know Edgar! That make her feel warm and near home. She rub her nauseous stomach, but it don't help. As she is calling up the energy to head for her job in the library, a cold breeze clap her in her face like a fast ball crash a wicket. The icy blow relieve the oncoming headache a bit, all the same, so she will see the good side.

She putting foot in front of slow foot, thinking. Who she fooling? Lindsay will not write her. Lindsay have a life. Moreover, what is she doing in this strange place where everything freeze up, even the people, and she don't know neither puss nor dog?

Saturday morning, the headache is mounting a determined attack, keeping Grace in bed all day, lights flickering round the edge of her vision. By evening, it call up reinforcements, and they establish a beachhead in her neck-back. Come Sunday, yielding none of the captured terrain, it start to bombard her stomach. She take two Anacin, close the curtains, get under the covers. The Anacin don't work its usual magic, though; the attack now extend to her eyesight, which is punctuated by black blotches. She decide she imagining them to start with, but by noon she's seeing only half what's in front of her.

“Come,” Steph tell her. “We're going to check emerge at General.” General is Toronto General Hospital, attached to the university, where medical students cut their teeth. Emerge is the emergency ward, full when they arrive, never mind Sunday is normally a slack day. Steph shepherd her, icepack on her head, through the system, and after half an hour, she is talking to a nurse.

“Name?”

“Grace Carpenter.”

“Problem?”

“I can't see.”

“You're blind?”

“She's lost vision in half her …” Steph start to put in her two pence.

“I didn't ask you.”

“I was just trying to help ...”

“You must be deaf. I repeat. I am not addressing you, so kindly shut your mouth.” The nurse turn to Grace. “Are you going to answer my question?”

Grace, terrified at what is happening to her eyesight, irritated at the whirl of people kowtowing to other people, the lowliest being tawny orderlies, cleaners, movers of trash, the highest being pink Canadians decorated with stethoscope necklaces and clipboard hand-gear, is past fury when she hear the woman address Stephanie like that.

“You ask me,” she tell the nurse, “and you better take your face out of my face, like how I have a very queasy stomach.” She give a long kiss-teeth, continue in her most correct English, but with a broad Christophian inflection. “I have had a rass cloth headache for two days, and now half of my vision is impaired. Do I make myself clear?” Grace, already shocked by the language emerging from her mouth, is astounded by the menace in her voice.

A short, dark old man wielding a mop look up when she “rass cloth”, wink, a sly droop of one eyelid, enjoy a barely audible cackle, and resume scrutinizing the black-and-white checkerboard tiles like he planning his next chess move. The nurse glance at him, look back at Grace, do a soft suck-teeth of her own. She proceed to take Grace's blood pressure, pulse, peer into eyes, and ears. Then she latch a plastic cuff on Grace's wrist, point to some chairs, and instruct, “Wait over there.”

“Why, thank you so much for your kind attention,” Grace give out, as she stand up, take Steph's proffered hand, and move to the contingent of chairs.

“You okay?” Steph whisper.

Grace nod, then ask, “Washroom?” as she stop in the middle of sitting down, hand over her mouth.

“Right over there, sweet daughter.” A soft Christophian voice.

“You need to go?” Steph ask Grace, as she nod thanks to the man.

Grace shake her head. “Just need to know where, in case.”

“Don't worry. I going fix you up.” It's the chess master with the mop again, speaking into the floor, and then moving swiftly, crab-like, disappearing around a corner.

Grace sit. Steph offer her the bottle of warm Coke she been sipping all day. Suddenly, another dark man is with them. He is the spitting image of the first, except he is younger, taller, green clad, stethoscope around his neck, clipboard in hand. He say to them, “Please follow me.”

He is Manny, son of Aloysius-the-Mop-Man's cousin, and a nurse practitioner.

“I'm sorry Caroline was rude,” he say. “Her son was murdered last year, by one of ours. Yesterday was the first anniversary of his death.”

Grace shrug. She think of all the black people in the world with murdered children putting on their best face in a million service jobs. If every grief had a rude mouth, is only rude mouth that the world would be hearing.

During half an hour's consultation with Manny, she discover that she has had migraine headaches since she was a child. Relief is at hand, though, for there are pills, and she can also learn to relax her way out of them.

On her way out, pills in her pocket, Grace look for Aloysius to thank him.

“Got to look after a countrywoman,” he say with a twinkle, rocking on the mop.

“I can't thank you enough.”

“Tell you what,” Aloysius say, sweet mischief in his eye, “come visit my church some time. Just down the road on Baldwin.” He push his hand in his pocket and pull out a couple of tracts, which he give her. “Bring your pretty friend too.”

Next day, Grace still can't see straight. She stay in the dorm at Steph's insistence, castigating herself the whole time for not complaining about the nurse. Then she recall Gramps advice. “Gracie, don't be too hard on yourself, and don't expect too much of the folks you meet.” So far, people are not so bad. Some are disdainful, but many are kind. She admire Aloysius and Manny, subverting the deferential dance at the hospital, helping to cure not only sickness of the body, but sickness of the way the world conceive of and construct itself.

Maybe she shouldn't study teaching. Maybe medicine would be better. But she don't think she is doctor material, unless it is Gramps kind of doctoring, a basic set of ministrations that include pulling teeth, snapping palates to cure tinnitus, and brewing home remedies from banned substances.