Finding edward, p.17
Finding Edward, page 17
“Yeah?”
“So he’s got caught in a gang.” Paul spoke quietly, almost whispered. “YBK.”
Cyril knew the name. That and several others. You couldn’t avoid it.
“Shit.”
“It happened so fast. We knew something was going on about four months ago, when he started to act kind of stupid, you know? Like he knew better than us. And I really noticed because he used to come to me for advice, and he stopped. He never said a thing about gangs.”
“What are his parents doing?”
“Oh, man. His dad is saying, ‘Something must have happened to him on the plane over to Canada ’cause he was a good kid in Jamaica.’ His dad lives there.”
“In Jamaica?”
“Yeah, and his mom is freaked. Because it’s serious. Do you understand how so?”
Paul glared at Cyril, who stopped himself from replying, struggled to put himself where Paul was. Pictured his brother, grown to thirteen years old and fallen into the same trap. A nightmare.
“They kill them if they walk away.” Paul’s voice was raw. “He’s just a little boy.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? You think I can walk up to them and say give him back?”
They sat in silence for a while.
“They really do that?” said Cyril. “To a kid?”
“That’s how it works, man. The kids get pulled in. They think they’re tough enough because they don’t know the beginning of what they’re doing. And then who’s there? On the other side? Kids like themselves but grown older inside of it. Mean as hell, totally lost their souls to the bullshit.”
“Shit.”
“It was high school, man. He made it through grade school, and that was hard. It was a big change. He never spoke much standard English before, right? It was patois. But you know how they assume the kids are fluent in both?”
“Yeah.”
“So he worked hard, and he did do good. Had decent grades. Then he gets into high school, and it’s all about the right attitude and potential and shit that Black kids are not supposed to have. They want him to be good at sports, and you know what? He’s not.”
“I get that.”
“It’s a fucking mess.”
“Listen,” said Cyril. “I’ve got a friend, his name’s Evan. He’s cool, really. He knows a lot of stuff, a lot of people.”
“Does he know YBK?”
“I don’t think so, but …”
“Then he don’t know no one. ’Cause that’s the only way to reach them. There’s no intermediary. They don’t give a fuck about anybody else. Their life is cheap.”
* * *
Evan was away and didn’t answer his phone. He sent Cyril an email describing his work obligations, writing assignments, and romantic complications — Penelope was in a demanding phase — all the very many reasons why he couldn’t meet up. Cyril didn’t know how to put his concern for Paul’s cousin in an email, didn’t know the kid. He had his own preoccupations. His own life at school and at work. He’d follow up with Evan later, when he was less distracted. But he didn’t have any other inspirations; Evan was the only person he knew who might be able to help.
* * *
Cyril had homework, but the store had been busy. He’d had to unpack and inventory twelve cases of food cans and stack them on the shelves. One of the regular customers wouldn’t leave and had Cyril trapped while he talked about his dog, who was outside yapping, and the mess of recycling bins in front of his apartment building. Cyril had heard it all before but had never learned how to get the guy out faster so that he could count the night’s take and lock up. He wondered for the thousandth time how Mr. Lee had done it, mostly alone, for all those years.
Now that he was home, he still needed to study for at least another hour. He sat down in front of a pile of books, let his head rest on top of the desk, and, for just a minute, allowed his eyes to close. He was tired. He heard his mother’s whisper, Bone-tired, baby. At the back of his neck, a tight, sore muscle protested his bent back, the angle of his head. He felt the cold air against his legs and urged himself to get up and close the window, but he didn’t stir. His mind played with the smell that grew stronger as he lay there. The smell of tar.
* * *
It is cold. His shoulder hurts. Edward opens his eyes to the chill damp of the dirty stone steps he’s lying on. Light seeps through the seams of the heavy fabric that covers him head to toe. He is under a tarpaulin. He remembers dragging it down from a truck parked around the corner. His head hurts like hell, rings to the sound of the waking city. A clang of trolley. A newspaper caller. He pulls the tarp up and looks out at the shoes of two men passing by who don’t see him. They are talking earnestly about money. He smells the tobacco smoke that drifts behind them. Then the seductive scent of bacon frying somewhere close. That wakes him up all right. Hungry as hell now, as well as hurting. He touches his head, rubs at a sore place. His hair is messed up, stiff, matted, and something is sharp; he pulls at it, flinches with pain. Glass. He remembers now. The guy was a greaseball, walked into the bar and started up right away. “I don’t like to drink with coloured boys,” he said as he shouldered into the bar, pushing with his arm at Edward’s side. Edward held on to his glass, too precious to lose. The guy didn’t stop. “I don’t like to drink beside a nigger.” Edward pulled away from him and walked over to a table where some guys he knew from a communist meeting were sitting. They found a chair and moved him in with them, between the two big guys at the end of the table who slapped his back with huge hands, palms like paddles. All of them were union guys, out on a Saturday night, and none of them had wives to go home to.
It was a doozy, he remembers that. They were laughing, the union men, when the greaseball suddenly stood over the table, several friends at his side, and then all hell broke loose and somebody threw him at a wall and then somebody hit him on the head. He didn’t know it was a bottle. Not till now. He grimaces, which also hurts, pulls at the bruises around his mouth, stretching his swollen lip. But they were good men, that union lot. They were going to call a meeting where they’d ask why coloured men couldn’t work at the factory. They were going to make demands. Edward imagines a job where you go every day at the same time with Sunday off. Plus a holiday. And it would last forever so that you could buy a house if you wanted to.
When Celia smiles, he feels like that: lasting forever in a room that will always be there with food and heat and light. It has been fifteen days since he’s seen her. She is trapped at work. The family is moving, and they have everyone on extra time, sorting and packing and cleaning. Celia has big decisions to make because they say she’s going with them. She wants to stay with Edward.
Edward pulls himself out from under the tarpaulin. His legs are damp, and the cloth of his pants clings tight. His torso is sore, bruised but dry. He will go back to the flophouse and get cleaned up before he sets up the newspapers. Some people say that the best thing for the country would be a war, jobs for everybody. In the last war, Blacks couldn’t fight in the same units with whites — “I don’t want to fight with coloured boys. I don’t like to fight beside a nigger.” But the Black guys formed their own battalions and went to war anyway. Edward can’t see why you’d fight at all if they didn’t let you have what they had. Isn’t this country as much his as theirs? He carries that question back to the flophouse along with his bruised body, matted hair, torn jacket, and damp pants. The union guys thought he should have what they have. But they are the organizers, the idealists, the communists. The regular guys don’t feel so strongly. They protect their jobs.
Edward is seventeen years old, and he’s had worse beatings than last night’s. He is a target because he is poor, a street hustler, a cheap opportunist by virtue of circumstance. He is a target because his dark skin and tightly curled hair set him apart.
At the house, he finds a change of clothes. Not clean, but not torn. It takes a while to peel the old ones off. He wishes he could get a bath over in the steam house. But he needs money to do that and so has to get out on the street and sell newspapers. He has nothing but those.
Then he remembers with a visceral thrill that he has Celia. But how would they live? She could never stay with him in this rooming house. Will she curl under a tarpaulin with him? Once again, he is filled with the dread of losing her. Celia is the first person in his entire life who has loved him, and she has made him whole. Gathered up the pieces of him that were once a baby without a mother, an unloved child, a boy alone, and made him into Edward, who is ageless and who will always survive.
EIGHTEEN
The man across from Cyril in the subway car held that morning’s newspaper. The page facing Cyril was headlined, “Arrest following scuffle at citizens’ town hall on gang crime.” He had read the same piece forty-five minutes earlier in a newspaper he’d found stuffed to the side of his seat on the bus. In the news again, he’d thought as he scanned the page. They were a public concern. Brown and Black people, Indigenous included, were too often in trouble. They were arrested and went to jail, got out, then reoffended. They abused drugs and alcohol and were inclined to be violent. Out of control — control of themselves — they lacked stable family structure and squandered their opportunities. Toronto’s mainstream cultural convictions poured in at a steady rate and were Cyril’s growing burden. He hadn’t known about this on arrival. He had known it wouldn’t be easy. That jobs were hard to get and that he’d have to work even harder to make a career. That it took time. He’d known all of that. But he hadn’t known how Canada would count him out.
From his fourth-floor history classroom, Cyril watched a slip of blue appear through an opened seam in a grey blanket of sky. Alongside it, a billow of steam rose up from a chimney somewhere, a chimney he’d never seen. People did make it. Lots of them. He just had to figure out how to be one of those.
In the library after class, instead of studying for accounting, Cyril walked through the stacks, following a compelling urge to know more about something the teacher had mentioned. About Canada’s immigrant gateway, Pier 21, back when Europeans came by ship to Halifax on the east coast of the country. As he walked, the library’s carpeted floor rocked ever so slightly, not so anyone else would notice. Edward was there somewhere. The sound in the library, the dense presence of people working, thinned to a distant murmur, surf on sand. The finest of mists moved over his eyes, shifted the light. And he knew which book to take from the shelf. He turned the pages and saw warships, naval destroyers, found the section on corvettes, the little ships that sailed in convoys to protect the freighters on their perilous journey across the Atlantic.
Edward had been there. Cyril was as sure as he could ever be when these through-sights came. Edward, in that frightening place where the men — most of them really just boys — slept in hammocks or on tabletops, wherever there was space. More than eighty of them in those little ships as the water bounced and churned them seasick, and what food they could keep down was over and again corned beef and potato made from powder. The foul stench of stale bodies and cooking grease; oily, suffocating clouds of cigarette smoke; no water to wash; and toilets that sent a flush of dirtied ocean all the way back up again when the seas rolled. Mostly nothing happened for days, and the grinding monotony made them tired and anxious. Then the U-boats sounded on radar, and the boys either killed or were killed.
Cyril went to the archives. Stood outside on the opposite sidewalk mustering confidence, calling it up like a flank of soldiers. But they were perfectly nice inside. Listened to what he needed, said they could help, though he’d set himself a big task. Some of the records were digitized and would be easy to search, but most were not. It would probably take weeks. A needle in a haystack endeavour, they said. Good luck.
Edward was war-age in the 1940s and twenty when conscription was introduced. He might have been sent overseas then. Or joined of his own accord before that, like so many young guys had. Cyril asked to look at fleet lists, and to his astonishment, the archive arranged a reference loan from Ottawa’s naval archives. For the personal convenience of Cyril Rowntree. His work was important, and Edward mattered. It would take time, the process was slow, but they would arrive before too long.
* * *
Cyril was ready to show Professor John how well his research had paid off. There were fifteen minutes left in office hours, and no one was waiting. He stood in the doorway, and John looked up.
“Come in, Cyril.”
“I’ve got a picture of Edward — the kid I told you about — and a name for his father. The guy in the photograph? And the Toronto Archives has asked for naval records to be sent from Ottawa. For me.” He couldn’t stop the smile that took over his face.
“Well done,” said John, looking at the pictures. “And I have something for you. It’s long before your man’s time, but I was just reading about this. Interesting in so many ways.” John pulled a notebook from his bag. “Toronto was the political centre for anti-slavery, as you know.” He glanced up at Cyril for confirmation. “The period of time that the Underground Railroad ran was, what? Fifty years? But that’s pretty much all the Black history that Canadians know.”
Cyril nodded. “Yes.”
“So freedom runners and freed people came up from the States. Especially after the Fugitive Slave Act gave slave catchers leeway to kidnap freed people in the north and sell them in the south.”
“In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, right?”
“Yes. Eighteen-fifty and earlier.” John opened his notebook. “This man, James Mink, who owned one of Toronto’s fancy hotels — and by the way, there were lots of successful Black businessman in Toronto back then. Like Wilson Abbott, who owned property all the way up to Georgian Bay.”
“He was a city councillor too?”
“Yes. Good.” John was impressed. “So Mink — and this story was made into a movie — Mink is supposed to have offered a big marriage dowry for his beautiful daughter, Mary. A white man responded to that offer then kidnapped her, took her south, and sold her into slavery.”
“That’s evil,” said Cyril.
“But here’s the thing. I just met a researcher who is writing an academic paper that proves this story is not true. Despite all of their successes, because the political work Black people did back then was really effective. Despite all that, this is the story that lasts. It makes me think that if you’re Black, you’re bound to lose. Mary actually married a Black guy right here in Toronto, and they lived a quiet, uneventful life. But the movie story makes her father the villain and Mary a loser.”
“Wow. That was also eighteen-fifties?”
“Yes. The best known story. And it’s a fairy tale.” John pushed back in his chair and swivelled toward his bookshelf.
“Hey, Cyril.”
“Yes?”
“Mary Ann Shadd?”
“A Black newspaper publisher in Toronto. An abolitionist. Also from the eighteen-fifties. Another success story?”
“You really do know your stuff!” said John. “And she was also the very first woman publisher in Canada. It was a force, the Black community back then. Still is, of course, though I guess the enemy now is systemic racism. Back then it was slavery, which would have been easier to fight somehow. Not so slippery.”
Cyril left John’s office with two more books and a head full of ideas. Edward’s father must have gained something positive from his time in Toronto. But it was probably harder then. By the 1900s, the Black community’s force seemed to have faded. Tucked into Cyril’s bag was the story of Dr. Alexander Augusta and his wife. She had owned a big downtown store that sold high fashion, and he was a surgeon who’d graduated from the University of Toronto. Another important Black couple. Would it have been easier for Edward if he’d been born in Toronto in the 1850s?
* * *
The days warmed, though the basement stayed cold. Cyril, wrapped in a big cardigan, sat at his desk with a pen and a lined pad. He listed the bills he needed to pay alongside his monthly income. He’d just hung up from an expensive telephone call with his Aunty Vi, who wanted more money for the babies. Times were harder than the usual hard, she’d said. She’s selling vegetables in the market: yam and callaloo and Irish potatoes. But it’s not enough. All the prices are high, and people buy less, so she sells low. She doesn’t make enough to shop for anything other than staples at the supermarket. No extras. She’s scrubbing floors with a cleaning crew at the bank when they need another body even though her knees are sore, her arthritis screaming, but it’s not enough. They are eating breadfruit, but there is no money for chicken. What about paying for school lunches? Because she can’t keep that up. She has spent the money on shoes and uniforms for the children. Her best friend used to work at a Free Zone factory, but those jobs are nearly all gone, moved to Foreign where workers are cheaper. Her cousins couldn’t get work anywhere. “Every likkle ting, Cyr. It add up to small, small, small. Mi mus have more or mi kean keep those chil’n.”
Cyril pictured her talking into her cellphone, standing in front of the three-bedroom house in Philadelphia that was home to two families. Her urgent insistence put him on edge. He had a tiny bit of money saved toward his trip home in the summer. But how could he use that on a flight for himself if he couldn’t give his aunty what she needed? He felt the trip collapse under him.
Now he got it: all those mothers who left to go to Canada or the U.S. or the U.K. to make enough money to raise their families back home, like Paul’s aunt. Why they left their children for years. Didn’t come home to visit. Now he understood. He was trapped. Stuck in the same cycle. Poorly paid work. A school program that was costing him a fortune. It was a fantasy, leaving the country for a better life. He needed the right education to make it work. Or to be full of ideas with connections to money so that he could start a business. He had none of those things.
