What Happened

WHAT HAPPENED?

Austin C. Clarke

What happened? Boysie wondered as he kept looking round Henry’s room, trying not to make
Henry uneasy about it. What is it? What happened to this loam. that makes it look so strange,
since the last time I came round here? The last time was soon after Boysie had bought his
secondhand station anon; or was it? No, he had come back after that day; the afternoon of
Illtriry’s wedding to drive him to the church. But there was so much acternent on that afternoon
that he hadn’t noticed anything strange about de room. Now, as he glanced round the walls, his
eyes saw strange things imindi his senses did not register. Suddenly, he knew what it was. The
walls! the walls themselves: no longer walls, but walls painted with books in • - . Every available
space was taken up by bookcases with -Ives made out of onion crates. Boysie was not only
amazed at the • . of books (books had recently crept into his own life, as an g lens through
which he was beginning for the first time to see things around him), but was also impressed by
the way these books have changed the very nature, the very feeling of a room he was • ed to
visiting, and in which he had drunk rum and whiskey so tomes, and had become drunk in so
many times, happy together, just and Henry were now, drinking wine on this chilly, Saturday
afternoon. iltir ’nit! Who owns all these books, man?’
1hr T.*. She owns all these books.’ stn build the bookcases? And who put them in them, all over
the

etre. She build the bookcases. She went down in the Kensington I. mean the Jewish market,
’cause only Jews does call it the . Market. But anyhow, she went down there, early every
Saturday it five o’clock, and get them onion crates, at a bargain. I think she them wholesale,
too, heh- heh -hah!’ a bell of a woman, your wife. You have a hell of a wife, boy!’ /sieve now
become my enemy now in my old age, boy! Books, everywhere. Books in the bathroom Up
there on the second wider the bed. Books all over the place. Jesus Christ, Boysie, teas so mad
that I start counting these blasted books, and when wwa thousand I had to stop counting, cause
be-Christ, Boysie, as
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WHAT HAPPENED?

a’ o man, I am too old to start worrying /Id ’bout books and education. t ese blasted books you
see here, well, they’re written in a language
7 can’t even understand, or talk in, anyhow. Zoology-anthropology-social language! I don’t
understand one iota of that language! And I do understand why one person, and a woman at
that! have to read so books just to be a human being and live in this twentieth-century world!’
’Education, boy! That’s what I mean when I say just now that you’re lucky as hell. Agatha is a
highly educated woman. She is your wife. I wished my wife, Dots, was more learned.’
1 ’My wife! My wife? You referring to my wife who talked so much c about if our wedding
reception was held in another place, in a belt r.• community, the police won’t have interfered,
the police only interfe mainly because in this district, a periphery slum district (that’s what s
said), a periphery district, the police always looking for criminals an drug addicts and the police
was only making a routine check . . . y call this kind o’ woman my wife? Jesus Christ, everybody
at my wedd 1 reception know that the blasted cops only raided the place because it a black
man’s party! Everybody knows that, Boysie. My wife? Is that w you call she? Her father didn’t’
even show up at the wedding. Her moth didn’t’ even remember she had a daughter named
Agatha, getting marri and her two brothers! You ever heard my wife say she has two brother
One is a corporation lawyer, and the other bastard is a professor in university. And this room.
This room! Man, look at this room! This book is stifling me, Boysie. I can’t breathe. Look at my
time, even before I h this brilliant idea to get married to a woman who breathes books. You ha
known me, be-Christ, when I had a television set in here. Now, my wi come, and she get rid o’
that. You know me at a time when I could co in here, and watch the Montreal Canadiens beat
the crap outta the Tolon Maple Leaves. We could watch American football. Every Sunday. Wi
Jimmy Brown playing like a coloured god. We used to like to do all the things, Boysie. We
enjoyed them things. Nobody didn’ have to tell me, tell you, that that wasn’t the same thing as
going to the Toronto Sympho concerts, or going to some place which my wife calls the
Twentiety-Centu Concerts! Goddamit, man, we was having fun! And my whole life was so
messed up in the past that I had to have some fun in the little bit o’ life I had left before I put a
wedding on a book! Now, look at this room! You srr the books in this room? Boysie, this is a
one-room-apartment-room I been living in for fifteen years! It isn’t no luxuriant apartment like
you have In Rosedale or on Avenue Road. But I been living here as comfortable as arise before
my wife, my wife moved into my parlor, said the spider to the fly’ ’Still, the books look good,
though,’ Boysie said. And he meant it. II,
148 Austin C. Clarke solo bed he owned a quarter of them. He wished they were in his
apartment. own bookshelves were taken up mainly by record albums and old tines he had
gathered from his cleaning jobs; and by the collection of ledge-of-the-World, which he had found
in a wastepaper basket in of the many offices he cleaned at night. ’They have this place looking
• real educated place, like a library’ ’My wife did it, man. She is a very educated lady. But it is
going to my rd head. And to make matters worse, she come telling me she just , first in her class
at the university, and she is this big blooming genius. Why gives her something called a
fellowship. I don’t know what a IA whip is, or means, but it have six thousand dollars attached to
it! A dation just handed my wife six thousand dollars, Boysie, and me and I walked our arise
bare and sore looking for a job worth three thousand ye .10 Well, you ever see anything like
that? And for what? For what they hear this fortune? To write about dead animals, because that
is what she me all this zoology is all about. Six thousand dollars to write about ons! Boysie, in
Barbados, we buries dead animals, man!’ I wish my wife could get a fello 2 ’Shut your mouth,
boy! You don’t know when you’re lucky, eh!’ Ikiysie looked round the room, marveling at the
number of books on the , at the many colors of the books: on all these books on the four walls.
were arranged in a certain logic, he saw; all the books dealing with one li of a certain animal and
its particular instincts and behavior, were ped together. Boysie passed his hands over the
covers as if he was ug his hands over his wife’s backside. And there were many books ig with
black people, too. He wondered whether, in the strange ’ge of zoology-sociology-anthropology
that Henry talked about, black r was another way of saying animal, for some of these books on
’s walls called black people by the strangest names he had ever heard: like the silent minority,
the forsaken minority; there was a book I called them crisis-in-black-and-white; there was one
which called ,nsgger (’Be Jesus-Christ, Dots! don’t you tell me I was drunk! We was Only
drinking eight-five-cent wine, and that brand o’ wine don’t ask me to
41•64 So I wasn’t drunk-no-blasted-drunk, woman! I am telling you I saw illorvil I saw that book
with my own two eyes. It said, nigger, right there on over, jacket, or whatever you call it!); there
was one that talked about is people as the sexual life of savages; there was one that called
black ipopIr black jacobins. There was many books. Boysie touched the covers of
4Imw of these books. He opened some of them, except the one named,
4vir All of them bore Agatha’s name, her maiden name: Agatha Barbara atman Zoology
University of Toronto ’59. In a recent mood, and in a hand
149
WHAT HAPPENED? Austin C. Clarke

of contemporary ballpoint writing, she had written on the title page of ea laqs 11111; picture
make you like like a Nafrican. That’s it! You look like book in the house (Boysie made a sample
test when he first saw her n.
4 in the book he held In his hand, a book which called him the myth of ,,ir thu had
said the same thing — exactly; word for word: ’That’s it! You negro past), she had written, ’nee’,
before the Agatha - Barbara- Sellman line; .1 Watusif And Henry had slapped her so hard in the
face, that for and underneath that line, had written, Agatha Barbara Sellman-White After,
he could see the terror and the rage reprimanding him in the he Boysie liked that. He laughed
to himself. Only Englishmen from Englan. r of her white, innocent-looking face. And
Henry had screamed who owned Rolls-Royces in Barbados and large sugar plantations and h .
the said, ’No white man is innocent, man or woman!’), ’Never again black Humber Hawks and
those big old-time Jaguars, only these types ever call me a Nafrican, you hear me, woman! I do
not call you a people had names like Agatha’s, names joined together in holy matrimon
vr, or a Jew!’ But now, coming from Boysie, it had perhaps told him by a hyphen. Boysie was so
impressed by this that he had himself once toyed tiltIg of the past and of the truth; and if Boysie
could see, and Agatha with the idea of joining his mother’s maiden name (he was illegitimate) t.
VI not supposed to see it could nevertheless see it, then it must be his father’s surname. But his
mother didn’t know his father’s name; and sh +111 Henry began to like the idea
that he looked like an African. The didn’t like the idea, either. ’Why, in the name o’ hell, you don’t
let than`
414 the guarded replies he had been giving to Boysie’s questions (after bastard rot in hell,
where he probly is right now; eh boy? I should tar your had known Boysie longer than he had
known Agatha), and the arse just for mentioning his name in my presence!’ ,I In his voice when
he mentioned his wife’s accomplishments, all Boysie sprung up off the stool. His drink spilled, a
little of it. ’Hey! tw disappeared. It was as if something of the pressure of his recent This is you!
Christ, this is you, man!’ He was pointing at a piece v. had been unlocked from his soul. paper,
torn from a large notebook (the broken holes from the rings we • got up from the
footstool and inspected the pictures on the walls. visible), on which was a drawing of a black
man’s head and shoulders done made that stool, too!’ Henry had informed him, this
time with in charcoal. The lips of this black man were very thick. They were painted
mil tIle pride of association in his manner and voice. ’Bought it down at in the charcoal of
reddish-purplish rouge. The hair was very bushy. But in
4Ippled Civilians bargain store. Came back here, eager as a beaver. a way, the face looked like
the face of a white man, except that it was a coat o’ paint on the thing. Rushed
back down in Eaton’s basementpainted black. Boysie looked at it for a long time, and when he
was sure ’tore and brought back that African-looking cloth you now see on it, that
he could really see something of Henry in it, he turned round, faced And now,
when her friends come here they all want to buy it from her Henry, and said, somewhat
unnecessarily ’This is you, Henry!’ y iwmore dollars. One o’ these days, when she ain’t here, I
going sell My wife, again! She is an artist too.’ Axtool and play poker with the money, ha-ha-ha!
But she paid a dollar Boysie looked at the drawing and then at Henry. He did this three times,
o( ol Fifty cents for the cloth on it. The paint was down in the What happened? What is it, he
wondered. And then, finally (you could hear HI here, left back from some that I
used on this room five years ago.’) him breathing heavily with relief), he saw it. The hair. Henry
had allow s attracted by the framed pictures which took up all the space left
his hair to grow long. The drawing had given him up. And then Boysie sa from the
bookcases and shelves. They were all, each and every one of it in the flesh. This is what was
worrying him since he arrived. ’The ul black people. Agatha had clipped them from various
magazines (all hair, man! The hair!’ Boysie was chuckling. ’Man, you look like on •
0’,41 it she always read from cover to cover; and some, more than once), o’ them hippies,
beatniks up in Yorkville Village. Or like, like that fello mow”” had framed them herself with
cheap unpainted frames, bought from from the States Ginsberg or Rap Brown the black-power
fellow. You loo tlert 64 the corner of Charles and Yonge (`Henry will you please git off your like
the brother o’ Rap Brown, man!’ And Boysie again laughed ridiculing! laughing and holding his
head to the floor, and then pointing at Henry, an ’ -1 ond help me paint these frames? After all,
they’re for our home, you ’I dinner, then laughing some more. ’Man, you need a serious haircut,
bad, bad, bad!’ `My lb hell with our home!’ he had told her. have to cook and e here all day
long, with the dirty dishes in the sink since last night, the wife. She likes it long so. My wife says
it makes me look like a real osul cleaned, oh God ...’). She had brought them
home, and when they Afro-Canadian. Me! A Nafro-Canadian. I don’t even like the word,
”African”! qnhhed hung them, to suit her own tastes since Henry did not help in And I sure as
hell don’t want nobody to know that I come from At (’Jesus Christ, woman! You
could throw them in the garbage for all there! Hell, no! I is a Wessindian!’ ’Mutt do I want so
many black people’ faces in my house, for? Ain’t I

150 151
WHAT HAPPENED?

black enough? Black people looking at me wherever I turn. If I lie down I see a goddamn
negroid face! 111 sit on the floor, a goddamn nigger sta at me! Even in the bathroom upstairs. It
ain’t my private bathroom, private bathroom even. Before I met you I never had so many black
peo pinned up on. my walls, woman! Are you out of your cotton-picking-god mind, Agatha?’)
She had left them there to decorate his room, of which was so proud; and of which she wanted
him to be proud. But the picture Henry ever had on his walls, was that One of himself, in the unif
’ of a porter on the Canadian National Railways, in the pride of reminisc when he was adjudged
Porter of the Year! In this picture, he was s hands with the Prime Minister of the country. And
there were also — not the walls, but on his dressing table — three or four photographs of
Agatha, al various stages of her academic development, in penguined white and black,
intellectually unfashionable, in Henry’s books. Boysie Was standing up again. He was studying
the framed pictures. `I see the great Elijah Muhammad, man! He is a great man for black
people, and ...’ ’Elijah ain’t shit!’ ’... and for white people, too. And this must be Malcolm X. He’s
a giant, according to a’ article I read in Life. And a programme on television ...’ He ain’t shit,
neither!’ And who is these three black children, girls?’ Ask my wife.’ `What I mean is, do she
know them?’ Knows them? Where the hell would she meet three black girls? Up Forest Hill
where she come from? Do you see black girls living up in Fo Hill with the Jews? Boysie, look,
don’t talk blasted foolishness, do! Y talking like a white man, now. Man, she teared them outta
some god magazine she reads . . . man, look down there on the floor and see magazines she
reads. Boysie, don’t you understand yet, the brand overeducated woman that I am living with, in
holy matrimony? My god wife tore them three negro girls outta a goddamh magazine because,
as s say, and I using her goddamn words now, they’re beautiful. They’ beautiful, Boysie! That’s
what she tells me, they’re beautiful. Black beautiful. Now, man, look be-Jesus Christ, at these
three blasted half-stn little bitches, and tell me if you see anything beautiful in the goddam ,
hunger and undernourishment express in their faces? Look, man, look, goddammit, don’t be
scared to look the truth in the face! ’Cause I want to find out something. I want to find out if I am
going stark-crazy-mad. All three o’ them girls are teethiess, toothless. One is wearing rags. The
other two not dressed much better. Do ’You see beautiful things in that? Do your And every
goddamn morning, when I open my eyes, my eyes rest first, on
152 Austin C. Clarke

’lure hungry negro children from the South ... and, and my wife tell pyre beautiful! Boysie,
serious now, do you think that my wife is trying me something?’ mean, you mean that since you
is a black man, and them three girls black, that your wife is ...’ ir? You want to hear something?
You is a genius! Yoti are more , in my books, than Agatha with all the PhD’s, all the MAS, all the
’whin(’ her name. She is trying to give me an inferiority complex, And she is calling it beauty. I
do not see one beautiful thing in being io being black, in being hungry. I happen to have been
born this way: ,1 ll Kw, and hungry, and Godblindme! I don’t want nobody to mention $M n r,
’cause I can’t change it, and be-Christ, neither can you, nor her. t6r • Wessindian !’ Henry had
by now worked himself into a shaking rage.
1,a,.., slung, my God, Boysie, I am here trying to catch a little shut-eye after awl night out
gambling, and all night long, from one o’clock till three, live, sometimes six in the morning, all I
can hear is tap-tap-tap-tap! on the typewriter, writing another essay Another essay? Man, she
fifty assays already in this ...’ And he rushed to the steel filing cabinet mak( open its four
drawers and showed Boysie the drawers crammed ”says. Boysie took one out, and it said, in
red ink, Excellent. He i 1; I another one out, from a different drawer, and it said, also in red ink,
oud Indeed! Henry put back the two essays, and slammed the four U shut. Miss Diamond, the
landlady, upstairs somewhere among the of her house-cleaning and her house-cleaning
heather-artificial , asked, ’Is somebody knocking, Henry?’ Henry merely said, so she phalict
hear him, ’Goddamn you! You, too!’ He went back to talking to
10. I doses my eye, I hear tap-tap-tap! I open my eye, and I see those low Nat k . .. You don’t
know, Godblindme!...’ and he made a feigned I* M N the framed picture of black infant beauty,
making as if he was going iv, 11 IrOM the wall. But he had tried to do that before, when he was
once; and even then he could not do it. There was a greater power Nab Agatha had over him, a
power greater than that which he had over INOPU a power greater than the urge he had to
destroy the picture of u-14- sluice little black girls. I when it isn’ the typewriter and the black
pictures, Godblindme!
1,, black music. Black music! I never knew a white woman could .6” much about me, about
black people, before I met this girl. And AI I was, thinking I’s the swingiest hippest together-cat,
as the Americans oi say, together, tight and all that bullshit, in all this hemisphere of sl And no,
look, a little white woman, Jesus Christ, a little pretty Barbara Sellman-hyphen-White,
goddarnmit, is going to come now
153
WHAT HAPPENED?

and tell me, quote, that ja77 in the early years, what is now known 4 traditional jazz, was
betrayed because the people who used to play it i night clubs and popularise it, were only
creoles, half-white-halfblao coloured people, mixed-up people, and they were therefore not
racially nor culturally... You hear them two terms she uses on me, Boysie?. racially nor culturally
free, liberated to do the same thing that the Bird .. Jesus Jesus Jesus! you hear that word, that
is her exact word! Not Charles Parker as we lesser mortals know him by, as most people know
him by, bit The Bird ... not liberated to do the same thing that the Bird did for jazz the forties and
the fifties! Man, I feel I am under a microscope twenty -Ill hours a day! That woman knows too
much about my pedigrees! I don’t fed safe, Boysie.’ ’She is a great woman! You married a wife,
boy4 A wife?’ Again Miss Diamond, upstairs, mumbled something about a collet calling. Henry
lowered his voice and sat down. He took a piece of paper from his pocket. It was a page from
an expensive writing pad. Agatha’s new name: Agatha Barbara Sellman-White, was embossed
at the top. There was address on it. (’Henry, do you really think I’m going to spend the rest of life
in this goddamn slum, eh? Well, I’m not. So, I’ll wait until I have address before I put it on my
personal stationery.’) He gave the paper Boysie to read. Boysie read it. Boysie laughed out
loudly. He then gave it

to Henry ’I asked you to read it, Boysie. I mean read it out, loud.’ ’You really-want to hear this,
man? Okay... ”I love you because you black. I love your black skin. Hove your black hands. I
love your bl black face. If were lighter in complexion, like Harry Belafonte, I wou not like you so
much, because that would not then be a perfect matt Hove your woolly thick hair. I love your
thick purple lips ... (Boysie shaking with spasms of lauigh ter. ’Jesus Christ!” Henry was
laughing too.) . Hove you, I love you, I love you, I love you, you big black beautiful b beast.”
Ohjesuschrist!’ Boysie screamed, still laughing. ’Does your wife, Dots, ever write you letters like
that?’ ’But Henry, you know as well as I do, that my wife is a black woman me.’ Boysie was still
laughing. He couldn’t read any more’ of the letter, was laughing so much. But he glimpsed this
line: ... ’and I love you,’ a love the way you make love to me, and ...’ ,Man, it must be a hell of an
experience to be married to a white woman, eh?’ ’You better believe it!’ ’llah-hah! you black
beast!’ ’You’s a goddamn black beast, too, Boysie!’ Henry went to him and embraced him. He
almost kissed him. And then he patted him on the back. ’Let we go to the Paramount, for some
chicken wings and draught beer, Austin C. Clarke

man. We have to celebrate. We are the same two black beasts, anyhow!’ He took up a twenty-
dollar bill, which Agatha kept in a jar on which was marked, on a piece of adhesive tape the
colour of white skin (so said the Advertisement), in her firm, clear printing: ENTERTAINMENT,
LUXURIES, THE PiutAmouNT TAVERN AND HENRY. Boysie noticed it and laughed to himself;
but he also made a mental note to have his wife, Dots, prepare one similar to this, with the exact
wording, on the top shelf of his built-in bookcase. The idea appealed to him as a good one. ’I am
going to spend twenty dollars on you, tonight, Boysie.’ ’Look, I have twenty to spend on you,
too.’ Boysie left his station wagon parked in front of Henry’s rooming’ house, And they walked,
arms round each other, close as friends, close as rotten peas in rotten pod, dear and honestly,
friends. Henry tipped his hat to the man, who came round begging for empty bottles. Boysie
handed him A quarter, and called him, ’Brother’.

Drinking together, they had not only become drunk often - which was a natural consequence of
the amount of bad, cheap liquor they had consumed - but more important, they had opened the
most personal secrets and actions of their lives to each other, as they had opened bottles of
ninety-five-cent wine. This was the kind of friendship there was between henry and Boysie.
Now, away from the influence of Agatha, as represented by her decorations and books and
pictures which possessed his room; and away from the ghost of her presence everywhere,
every minute in the room, even though she was, in fact, absent (and Boysie had always visited
when Agatha was absent, as if by some instinctual prearrangement); with Agatha now really out
of sight, they could sit down, with a few glasses of draught beer before them, and talk with
candour, as men sometimes found It necessary to do. Freely. ’I was meaning to tell you a lot o’
things for a long time, man,’ Henry was saying, as they drank their first order of fifteen-cent
beer. ’But I was .itching my arse, royally, as the Trinidadian say; and I couldn’t breathe, man. I
was suffocating in holy matrimony. First thing went wrong, was the Ix Aire breaking up the
wedding reception at your place. Well, Agatha ain’t ,;et over that one yet, and I don’t think she
ever would. But I can’t blame rr. ’Cause, look at it this way, man. If it was in another rich and
wealthy Iistrict in Toronto, like Forest Hill or Rosedale or the Bridle Path or even in middle -class
Willowdale, anywhere up there by Upper Canada College, no cop would be so stupid as to go
into a house up there at a wedding party and break it up. That goddamn cop would think twice,
three times, before he even knocked on one o’ them rich people’ doors. But a black man ain’t

154 155
WHAT HAPPENED?

got that kind o’ luck. Well, that was one thing. The next trumpe for a napartment. Boysie, as you
know, hunting for a napar place, a black man and a white woman looking for a napartm place,
Jesus Christ, well, I don’t have to tell you nothing ’bout t you ain’t married to a white woman. But
sometimes, I just Lug} always thinking of my wife. This goddamn rich stupid woman, 1
unemploy’ man like me, and she can’t find a decent place to because she happened to be
walking beside a man with the wr colour. Man, just before you dropped in, I had just come back
along Lowther Avenue, and I see some real nice places up thet apartments.’ Henry held his
head down, into the tea leaves o and the beer froth. He seemed far away: he seemed to be
talkie ’Man I would enter a door, or knock on a door, and the firs is this big change in the
woman’s face, or in the man’s face, a: big set o’ explanation and excuses, and I can’t get inside
I drawing room, at all, at all; and I can’t sit down with a cup o’ and discuss the terms o’ renting,
and rent that the apartme I can’t behave like a human-civilised-being; I gotta see the ajpp before
that son-of-a-bitch could change his mind, before h eyelids blink, I gotta shout, ”I take it! I take
it!” and hope, be-Ch man get frightened for me and rent me the stinking room; anc because I
haven’ had time to look the place over good, I hod that I have not rented a pig sty for rats to live
in with me! Anc people sitting down discussing apartment terms and rent. I people doing it. I
walk all over this city, and I see other people in living rooms, man and wife, man and common-
law-woman, problem like human beings, and I see these goddamn immigra blasted boat from
some jungle in Europe, or in Australia, or in be-Jesus Christ, I see all that, and I see too that in
two days, tzt Godblindthem! they walking ’bout Bloor Street and all over t they own the whole
Canada! That is a kind o’ arrogantness understand ’bout white people, at all. And a friend
o’mine whc England, he come back here in Canada, and say the same happen in England. The
papers telling you every day that it doe the States, morning noon and night, all over this white
man’s I can live through this, because I is a Wessindian. If I was a negn live through it, at all.
Not if I was a born American. I mean, Boysie, man. Jesus Christ, certain times, a certain time
does come in your life when you want to relax, when you want a nice place that you could
afford, you want to ease-up offa hustling, You want to put down roots. Put down the placards
and ease-up offa picketing and demonstrating. Agatha is a nice
156 Austin C Clarke

woman, after all is said and done. She wants a nice place to live in, some old house that we
could rejuvenate and rehabilitate, like some they have on Collier and Elgin Streets. Everybody
don’t like to live in those factories ’Ailed apartment blocks, ’cause ...’ ’That is what 1 was just
going to mention. Henry. They can’t refuse you napartment, because of colour, race, creed,
breed, or anything. The government passed a law saying that this is nullify and void, man. Only
if it is a private house, like the places you mentioned, well, they could do that, because a man’s
house is his castle, but not in a place with more than six units for rent, not in a place with more
than six ...’ ’What the hell are you talking, white man? You talking like a white man! ktm, don’t
you know that the government talks a lot o’ crap ’bout six units and apartment blocks? And they
write morcrap than that in the law hooks, too. If the government wants to find out, let the
government ask mel Let the government ask me, Henry White. Let the government walk ’bout
with me one o’ these nights, even tonight, right here in Toronto, on any street, and I will show
the government some apartment in this city where no law don’t apply, and no black man can’t
get through the door. Man, it is as hard for a black man to get through the door, than for you,
Boysie, to get inside a virgin ... if you want to know the truth o’ the matter!’ That’s a hard thing to
say ’bout your government, Henry’ ’MY government?’ Henry looked at him as if he was
excrement. Are you gixIdamn turning into a white man,’ he asked Boysie, ’just because you
hustling a cleaning job? You becoming one o’ these conservative black men that I hear ’bout?’
’Me? Hell, no, man.’ ’Well, don’t talk crap, then! I am telling you a kind o’ history and Inciology
that not even the great Dr Agatha Barbara Sellrnan White, hyphen, be-Christ, could contradict.
One night, man, listen, one night I spit In a white woman’s face, just because she was about to
close her blasted door before I had time to tell her what I wanted. I was tired o’ having doors
slammed in my face, man. That night, I wouldda do anything to keep that door from slamming.
Another night, Godhlindme! Boysie, as I sitting down here, I was so mad that I grabbed this
bastard by the scruff o’ his Europeannek, and be-Jesus Christ, if my wife wasn’t there beside
me, as a witness ntobably, I would have killed that bastard, dead, dead, dead, be Jesus irist!
This thing does do some funny things to a man’s mind, Boysie. I am Iking about the effects,
man. The effects. One night, again, I was so viing mad, that I went back to that house on Huron
Street where the woman played the fool with me, and I painted a red swastika sign on her bow
door. The front door was, fortunately, white!’
157
WHAT HAPPENED?

`You do what?’ Boysie lost his breath and part of his voice. `On the door!’ ’But was the woman a
Jew?’ ’No!’ `She didn’t even have a Jewish name?’ `I didn’t remember to ask her.’ And you still
painted a nazzi sign on the woman’s door?’ `It was the only sign or symbol I could think of that
would scare living crap outta her pants.’ A nazzi sign?’ ’Red as blood, like the communists! It
was a pretty swastika too. I too me ten minutes to paint.’ And he laughed out. Some neighbours,
drin ’ nearby, held up their heads to the noise, but they soon held them ba down; or had them
pulled back down by the weight in the drinks before them. `The next day I even saw it in the
papers . . .’ `Yes!’ Boysie said. ’The papers said Toronto was getting a Nazzi Party, just like
the States, and that Jews ...’ `I laughed my goddamn head off!’ Henry laughed to show Boysie h
he had laughed then; and then he took a long draught on his beer gl And when I sit down,
sober-like, and face these things, I don’t like to kno what’s happening to me, Boysie. I don’t
want to know. Living with that woman, Godblessher! is like standing up in front of a life-sized loo
’ glass that is not a looking glass but is really a life-sized X-ray machine. Y sees things that does
make your goddamn heart bleed. I started to think much these days, Boysie, the moment I sit
down I start one big thinking life in funny ways, and I start talking to myself in funny ways that I
ne found myself talking to myself in, before. If I stand up, I start thinking. I into the bathroom, still
I am thinking. I am sleeping and I am thinking. An you know what I am thinking all the time?
Murder! Something inside Boysie, something big and terrible, some-damn-thing inside here, in t
heart, is trying to get out. It didn’ come out that night when I laughed that European whore who
slammed the door in my face. And you kno what I did that night, Boysie? I walked three miles to
find a library that open, ’cause I had to prove a certain point. I looked into one o’ them election
rolls with the names and streets and the people living in a certain’ electorial district ... and by-
Christ. all the names on that street with the slamming doors, all the doors that won’t open, all
the names were mostly European immigrant names. Chucks! Chicks! Gowskis! Shevs,
Godblindthemall! Man, they’re lucky I didn’ burn the whole street down! So, as I was telling you,
Boysie,,I have to express these feelings ...’ He paused to sip his beer. Boysie sipped his too.
They lighted cigaretten Austin C Clarke

1 don’t want to make like I am suddenly this big kind o’ writer, or anything. II illigi want to make
you feel that I am a important writer like that fellow low Barbados, or the other fellow from
Guyana. I don’t even know if I have
011 Inc to put two ideas side by side and make them make sense. But there Worthing in here
that I have to let out in the way only a writer or a poet I let out things.’ He fumbled with his drink;
he thought for a while, and I hr said, temme show you something I have here on a piece o’
paper, ir I been jotting down things like in secret, a long time now, since I I getting these funny
feelings I just tell you about. I want to read it. And jib i mind it is written in a poetical kind o’ form
and rhyme . . .’ , Km, don’t tell me you think you’s a writer, now! You playing you’s pore the
Second?’ And Boysie laughed at him, a ridiculous laugh. It I leery very much, but he had already
handed him the paper with the roil Boysie took it, still laughing and unfolding it at the same time.
It was p wilt that Henry had dedicated to Agatha. When Boysie saw this, having towanbered all
that Henry had said about Agatha, he said, ’But you lei ate the thing to Agatha?’ j Mic is my wife,
man.’
4 Hi!’

’lliat’s exactly what I mean ...’

11 mu dedicated this thing to Agatha, after cursing the woman so bad, ilid But Boysie said no
more, and read the poem instead. The poem said:

Ow was it really time that killed rose of our loves? Was it time? VW was it time to die? Is it time?
gbh race?

tt avis not, could not, be time. lime No no power over roses, or over love fk over me, or over
you. lbw, has no gun over love and beauty.

’,cur handed it back to Henry and kept silent for a long while. He raised kW from his glass, and
said, finally, `Man, I didn’t think you liked roses *Mich!’

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