The Bigger Light (24 page)

“I have come only once before I met Lew.”

“You have that trouble too?”

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“Bernice, you know, that women like we, like us, women from where we come from, don’t discuss these things, not even to …”

“Nobody.”

“Dark secrets, heh-heh-heh!”

“Women like us, women like you and like me and like Estelle, have so much inside our hearts that we dare not talk!”

“Yuh know, Bernice. I lay down here in this bed, beside o’ Boysie, my legal wedded husband, night after night, and when he touch me, I feel that the devil touching me. And if,
if
I feel like in the mood for that foolishness, that
stupidness
, I have to imagine, as I tell you, that it is somebody else, like the orderly-fellow, even before it was really and truly the orderly fellow. And my God, all this time I thought I was the most sinful woman, the most sinful wife for imagining things like this. Not knowing that other women experience the same thing! And what is more, Bernice, it is written down in a blasted book. As you say,
education
. But as I say, the printed word. You can’t beat the
printed word
. This is, therefore,
a very serious thing
, Bernice. You don’t think so?”

“More serious than that, child. Blasted serious.”

“Lemme finish-off this last piece, and then get you a drink, and we could talk some more.”
She felt warmth and love during sex, but she rarely had orgasm
. “Oh my God!”
She was not often in this mood for sex
“Like me.”
and fatigue or children’s problems affected her ability to relax sexually. Elaine had few daydreams and no erotic fantasies. Women like Elaine were
concil-conciliatory, unassuming, nur-nurture-nurturing, nurturing and affil-affil-affiliative
. Dots said nothing for a long time. The cat jumped on her leg near to her waist; she looked down at the animal, lifted it off, and placed it gently on the bed beside her and Bernice. “Come, gal. We have to drink something before we talk more about this. This thing opened my eyes to a lot.”

“I tell you! Pour me a double, Dots; only a double could take away some of the shame that I still feel after reading this thing.”

“You are a woman, Bernice.”

“I wish so. I wish I could be like the lady I works for. She and her husband discuss these things all the time, like two friends.”

“You think that I should show this thing to …”

“Boysie?” Bernice almost screamed her objection.

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“The orderly-man.”

“The orderly-man? Why the orderly-man?” Bernice burst out laughing. “Dots, you are not telling me everything, man. Look, bring the drinks back in the bedroom and let we sit down and really talk.”

“You’re the only person in the world that I would talk this way to. I hope you know that.”

Mrs. James did get Boysie to visit one of the black organizations in town, the Home Service Association, one afternoon when he had nothing else to do. She had stopped pestering him about his social obligations. He felt somehow embarrassed that she should bring up this point, because before he met her he had regarded himself as being conscious of his social
responsibilities in his community. But that responsibility did not include visiting organizations. It dealt mainly with writing letters to the editor. And his community was where he lived. But with his new car, and with the obtaining of three new contracts for cleaning office buildings on Bloor Street West, he soon became more involved in making money, and bit by bit he dropped his letter writing altogether, as he began to feel more uncomfortable among poor people like the Jameses. But he liked Mrs. James still, and his new financial position told him that he should go with her, see the depravity of the black organization’s facilities and premises, as she said he would see, and come away without being affected by it. He was getting through, and no black organization had ever helped him. It was therefore
their
problem.

She took him along St. George Street, where he had worked years ago as a cleaner in the Baptist Church House, which was no longer there; and in its place was a luxury apartment building. He grew very nostalgic about this street, and he wondered whatever happened to Old Man Jonesy, the Jamaican who had given him the job, part-time, while he went back home with his wife on a twenty-one-day excursion vacation trip after working for twenty years. Boysie laughed as he told Mrs. James the story of Old Man Jonesy. “Now, you sweep this place clean, you hear, Boysie. And don’t touch nothing in this place that don’t belongst to you …” and Boysie told her about the all-night and all-weekend parties he held in the Baptist Church House, and of the morning the toilet overflowed and flooded the boardroom and damaged the mahogany table; and about Dr. Glimmermann, the boss, who had screamed and had lost his temper and his natural colour when Boysie told him he couldn’t find the plunger because he didn’t know what a plunger looked like. And they laughed as
they passed the place where the Church House was, and when they turned into Wells Avenue, Mrs. James drew closer to Boysie, and put her hand on his thigh.

“You are something else.” She kept her hand on his leg. Boysie did not know whether she was commenting about his leg or about his story.

It was a Friday afternoon, early in the spring, and the temperature was about forty, and many persons were on the street. As they got nearer to the Home Service, Boysie saw more people, mainly young people, in the park, playing on the green and white areas because the snow was melting and the grass was showing through. All of a sudden he became very depressed. He could see many children, dressed in heavy oversized red coats with dirty smudged white collars of something that resembled fur; he thought back to the old ladies who went each afternoon to buy their bottles of liquor and who wore mainly black coats with black or grey fur collars. He wondered whether this group of children was the beginning in time and place of those old ladies, whether this Home Service was the breeding home of the low-rental projects in the city, whether it was also the spawning ground for old ladies’ homes and old people’s homes.

“That’s it!”

They were there. They parked on Wells, a street jammed with West Indians who went about their business with the easy pace and the silent dreamlike manner as if they were still walking under the sun. And the sun was shining this afternoon, but it was not giving off much heat; so they wore hats made out of wool, and some of the men appeared to be aeroplane pilots by the black leather hats they wore with straps untied and flapping down in the windless afternoon, seeming to be on some flight of fantasy about their place on this
springtime street in the new country in which they found themselves.

Boysie looked at them, and wished that they had never come here, that they would learn how to dress for the weather and not appear so conspicuous. Only the aeroplane pilot hats seemed to be keeping them warm, for they were walking about, some of them, in tropical suits. He was wearing his winter coat.

Mrs. James walked right into the Home Service Association building without even stopping in the vestibule cluttered with posters and amateur drawings of children and adults, proclaiming the “blackness” of the organization and of the members. All the posters advertised some meeting of “black” importance, and the drawings showed the powerful proud faces of black men and black women associated with something “black.” There were many flags of red, black and green, and one sign over a door proclaimed, in case any intruder or visitor or organization member should not be certain, that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. Boysie looked at all these things very carefully, and when he had studied them all, he felt very uncomfortable in this building. Mrs. James was walking, just ahead of him, through a narrow passageway with a radiator in it, into the kitchen. A large, healthy black woman, her stomach making her look pregnant, stood like a queen over a large black pot which had steam coming from it. Her face was sweating, and she would wipe the water off her forehead. With the back of her hand. The ceiling in the kitchen was falling down, and it looked as if the workmen had left before the job was finished.

“Well, bless my eyesight!” the woman said.

“How’s things, how you feel?”

“You got it! You see me.”

“Just walking through. You don’t mind?”

“Sister, you’re home!”

Boysie felt very ill at ease during this conversation. Neither of them felt it necessary to call either one by her name, and he wanted to know who this woman with the sweating forehead was. But it seemed as if to know, as if to ask, he would have to be a member first, or it would be an imposition, an exposure of his uneasiness in these surroundings. He wondered what Mrs. James was up to, for she had said nothing to him, really, of the reason for bringing him to this place. He wondered whether she wanted him to work here. The place was surprisingly clean, but clean in the way that a very old rundown house is clean: with the plaster falling, but around the broken plaster all cleanliness. The walls were painted by amateurs, and if not by amateurs, certainly with the cheapest kind of paint. Bumps were in the walls.

“How do you do, Sister James?” It was a man in his late thirties, who came out of a room, not really a room, but really out of one of the bumpy painted walls. He was well dressed, and Boysie did not expect this. He always thought that these militant black men who worked in these organizations were harsh and brusque and militant and threatening and violent.

“I am just showing the brother around. You don’t mind?”

“Course not, sister. Show the brother round the place. And I hope the brother would want to help us. We need part-time volunteer workers.”

It was the first time that anybody had ever called Boysie a “brother.” He did not like it. He did not at all like this assumption of closeness based on colour only. He would have preferred to have been introduced by his real name. In this black organization, walking up the narrow flight of stairs where the walls were again bumpily painted, but were clean, and where it was dark and with a strange odour, as if someone was sleeping in
the building, Boysie wondered aloud in his heart why nobody in this place ever called anybody else by his name. It was the first time that Mrs. James had referred to him as “brother.” Could she be doing this because of the circumstance, and not because of her conviction? There were lots of times in the past when she was alone with him in her apartment that she could have called him “brother,” but she never did. Why wait until she was in a black organization headquarters to call him a “brother”? Perhaps she had just become black, or blackened, when she was around these black militants, who were always giving trouble and talking about a race war in the black newspaper,
Contrast
. It was too much for him to think through to its logical conclusion. Again he wished he had mastered the new language. So he stopped thinking about it, or rather had it wrenched from his thoughts, because he was at the top of a flight of stairs, in a narrow passageway, and Mrs. James was opening a door and motioning him to come and peep in.

She opened the door and pointed. At first all was darkness inside the room. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he thought he saw bodies lying down on camp cots. His eyes became adjusted more, and he could make out that the camp cots were green, and the blankets on them were grey, as if they had come from an army that had been defeated by long marches and by longer battles. Everything had this strange odour, as if people were sleeping.

“Close the door. You don’t want to wake up the little darlings.”

“Wait, you mean …”

“The children sleeping. It’s their rest period. Twenty children sleeping in there.”

They tiptoed back down the stairs and paused once more at a door from which came the strange same odour. This time
Boysie’s eyes adjusted to these surroundings, these strange things happening in a city in which he had lived for so many years now … How many years I been here in this city without seeing these things, or even thinking ’bout them? … There were children in the rooms sleeping on army cots, or camping cots, and they all had grey blankets over them, and in the black corners of the room, perhaps it was at the head of the room, or at the foot, depending upon your vision or your perspective, was an oldish woman, waiting while the children slept, waiting perhaps too to see that they slept well, or that they would not like soldiers with dreams of defeat and conquests on their tired minds and bodies jump through the windows, thinking themselves to be birds or cannon or missiles. Boysie adjusted his eyes once more, but could not see the things Mrs. James was showing him. And he could not see why she was showing him these things.

“Take care, sister,” the young well-dressed man said, as they were going through the front door. “Brother,
did you see?
”

Such strange ways of talking, Boysie noticed. And never calling people by their real names. He wondered whether this was some conspiracy or some closer way of living that he had never considered before. And what worried him was that he did not crave it. It was too mysterious, too ritualistic, too tribal for him. That’s it, he said, outside in the fresher cleaner air, with the only smell being the smell of spring and melting snow and grass trying to come alive. It was too tribal. It was like the antics and attitudes of all those West Indians at the airport, or down at the Jamaican patty shop, how they laughed and talked to each other, and slapped palms and laughed some more, even when nobody had made a joke. Or like all this thing about “Right on!” whenever anybody said anything important or relevant, which he could never understand anyhow. It was this
closeness that bothered him, and made him feel left out, and inferior.

“Let’s stop-off at the Blue Orchid for a drink. I need a drink.” Mrs. James did not answer, and he did not object. “Why did you take me to that place?” he asked her, when the waitress, who was scarcely wearing anything below her waist, brought the drinks. “Nice!” Boysie said, not referring to the drinks.