Any Known Blood Read online

  Any Known Blood

  Lawrence Hill

  Dedication

  To my grandparents,

  May Edwards Hill and Rev. Daniel G. Hill Jr., who lived and loved with dignity and passion

  Everybody having a known trace of Negro blood in his veins — no matter how far back it was acquired — is classified as a Negro. No amount of white ancestry, except one hundred per cent, will permit entrance to the white race.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Vol. 1, An American Dilemma, 1944

  My old man died in a fine big house

  My ma died in a shack

  I wonder where I’m gonna die,

  Being neither white nor black?

  Langston Hughes

  “Cross,” in Selected Poems, 1959

  PLAN OF OAKVILLE, TOWNSHIP OF TRAFALGAR, UPPER CANADA, 1835

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  About the book

  An Interview with Lawrence Hill

  Read on

  An Excerpt from Some Great Thing

  From Lawrence Hill’s Essay “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?”

  Further Reading

  Web Detective

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Any Known Blood:

  A Word About History

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  SHE CAME TO HIS ROOM after darkness fell, confident that nobody had followed her. He lived alone, in a room above a dry goods store. The yellow moon hung fat and full, so low that it shone through his window. It threw their shadows against the wall as they came together, touched lips, touched tongues. She unfastened the buttons of his pants. He drew up her dress, peeled back her undergarments, and discovered her already wet. Her knees buckled. She almost fell back onto the bed. But he caught her, and righted her, and they pulled apart just enough to undress each other.

  He had turned out the gas lamp before she came to him, and there were no candles burning. There was only the moonlight, and the undulation of moon shadows above his bed. Clothes pooled around their ankles. They remained standing, running fingers over bone, muscle, soft places, hard places. They turned to observe their own shadows cast against the wall. Neither spoke. He ran his middle finger down from the crown of her head, between her eyes, along the thin bridge of her nose, onto her lips. She drew her palm across his shoulder, around his pectoral muscles, down to his navel. They watched their shadows, and, to see them better, stood slightly apart. They saw his erection and one of her breasts profiled on the wall, they watched their own hands joining, and they noticed that the shadows revealed nothing of her whiteness, or his blackness.

  They eased onto the bed and continued with their slow and patient lovemaking. When she finally guided him into her, he held still to relax and extend their pleasure. She lay back, closed her eyes, and tightened and relaxed and tightened herself around him, feeling him grow harder inside her, the very thought of it quickening her breath.

  He raised his upper body. They locked together in a rhythmic and rocking motion, while their lips joined and parted and joined and parted. She thought, My God, I love this man, and he thought, I can die now and I won’t care. She cried out his name three times, and he felt a wave of gratitude as she shuddered and pulsated and ground her pelvic bone against his. She eased back down on the bed, still until he began to move again, faster and faster. As he felt the muscles in his groin tighten, and as his quickening arousal ignited within her an unexpected new fluttering of pleasure, voices from the street — the voices of two or three young men — assaulted them. You will die, nigger. You will die soon. A grapefruit-sized rock smashed his window and struck the side of the bed.

  Chapter 1

  I HAVE THE RARE DISTINCTION — a distinction that weighs like a wet life jacket, but that I sometimes float to great advantage — of not appearing to belong to any particular race, but of seeming like a contender for many.

  In Spain, people have wondered if I was French. In France, hotel managers asked if I was Moroccan. In Canada, I’ve been asked — always tentatively — if I was perhaps Peruvian, American, or Jamaican. But I have rarely given a truthful rendering of my origins.

  Once, someone asked, “Are you from Madagascar? I know a man from Madagascar who looks like you.”

  I said: “As a matter of fact, I am. I was born in the capital, Antananarivo. We moved to Canada when I was a teenager.”

  Another time, when a man sitting next to me in a donut shop complained about Sikh refugees arriving by boat in Gander, Newfoundland, I said: “I was born in Canada and I don’t wear a turban, but I’m a Sikh. My mother is white, but my father is a Sikh, and that makes me one, too.” The man’s mouth fell open. I paid the waitress to bring him twelve chocolate donuts. “I’ve gotta go,” I told him. “But next time you want to run down Sikhs, just remember that one of them bought you a box of donuts!”

  I tried it again at the next opportunity. A woman at a party said Moroccans were sexist pigs, so I became a Moroccan. Then I started claiming I was part Jewish, part Cree, part Zulu, part anything people were running down. My game of multiple racial identities continued until eighteen months ago, when my wife left me. It was the lowest point of my life, so low that I didn’t much see the point in living, even lower than when my son died in the womb. Shortly before Ellen moved out, I saw an advertisement for a speech writer for the Ontario Ministry of Wellness. A line ran across the bottom of the advertisement: “As part of an active effort to promote employment equity in the public service, this position has been designated a Category Three job. Only racial minorities need apply.”

  I filled out an application. I could have told them the truth — that I was black, or at least partly so, having a white mother and black father. I wanted the job, but I also wanted to test my theory that nobody would challenge my claim to any racial identity. So, in the letter that accompanied a résumé and some writing samples, I explained that I was of Algerian origin. I got an interview. They asked if I was actively involved in the Algerian community. I said the Algerian community was small in Toronto, but that I did spend time with my brothers and sisters and with family friends.

  They gave me the job. I still have it. They still think I’m Algerian. I have had to explain that my father changed his name when he came to Canada, and that his original name was Allassane Mamoudy. I have even had to deny any relation to my father, who is well known in the city and most definitely not Algerian.

  It has been said that I have come down in the world. Down from an unbroken quartet of forebears, all, like me, named Langston Cane. A most precipitous descent, my father mumbled, when he heard about my latest job. I write speeches for a politician I tried to knock off the ballot. Usually, I handle ribbon-cutting affairs. I’m delighted to join you on the occasion of your … I admire the years of time and effort you have invested in … something in which I share profound personal convict
ion … I almost quit after the first week. But I stuck it out. I had little choice. Years have passed since I’ve had the courage to write — or, more properly, to re-create — my family history. And the list of occupations for which I’m ill-suited appears to be expanding. So, I stuck with the government job, and initially did well at it. That’s not bragging. Speech writing does not require one to scale peaks of creativity. It does demand a certain control of the nuts and bolts of grammar and the rhythm of speech. One must attempt at all times to adopt natural human language, even if one is writing for politicians. As well, a speech writer must not feel wedded to his own convictions. The best thing is to have no convictions at all.

  Convictions ruled the lives of my ancestors. They all became doctors, or church ministers. By my age — thirty-eight — they already had their accomplishments noted in the Afro-American, the Oakville Standard, the Toronto Times, or the Baltimore Sun. I will admit that it takes a certain discipline and boldness to throw oneself into high-minded professions. But it also takes something to fall from the treadmill of great accomplishments, to fail, even at the tasks of being a husband and a potential father and a writer, to march to the gates of middle age and look ahead and accept that you will not change the world.

  This can’t go on. I’m going to have to leave this job. I have some money saved up and nothing to spend it on — no wife any more, no children, and no outlay exceeding the four hundred dollars a month for my one-room flat above a fur store in downtown Toronto. I can leave, with no fear of having to return to my father, palm upturned.

  I grew up with four family legends — one about each of my direct paternal ancestors. Every year, my father would add another tantalizing detail, but refuse to go any further. I would plead in vain for more, and for information about my father’s sister, Mill. Sean, my brother, would say, “He’s not telling us any more, because he doesn’t know any more, and most of what he’s told us probably isn’t true anyway.” But I ignored Sean. When my father got going, it was like being at a seance. Every drop of his hand, every rise and fall of his tone, every whisper and shout, I felt in my bones.

  My father was born in Oakville, Ontario, in 1923. He returned to the States as a young boy, with his parents and sister, served as an American soldier in World War II, and moved back to Canada in 1950 to study medicine at the University of Toronto. While there, he met and fell in love with Dorothy Perkins. Other than myself, my father is the only one in the long line of Canes to marry a white woman. The only difference is, he stayed married.

  Boycotting weddings seems to be a genetic trait of the Cane family. As far as I know, none of the Langston Canes managed to pull off a wedding without some key family member refusing to attend.

  In the case of my parents, of course, boycotts were expected. And they were duly delivered. My mother has never confirmed this, but I happen to know from my father that my mother’s mother reacted to the wedding news by proposing a brief but enforced stay for my mother in a psychiatric institution. So the mother of the bride was a no-show. And my father has never confirmed this, but I happen to know from my mother that my father’s sister, Mill, let it be known that by marrying out of the race, my father was betraying black women. Her brother’s wife was not to take it personally, but Mill had no intention of attending the wedding or meeting her sister-in-law.

  My mother was from Winnipeg, and my father had been living in Baltimore before moving to Canada. The choice of a wedding site reflected the kind of compromise that has always characterized my parents’ relationship: when my mother moves six miles, my father accommodates her by moving six inches. Accordingly, they married in Washington, D.C. The year was 1954. The season: spring. April 5, to be exact. D.C. looked like a greenhouse. There were eucalyptus trees, cherry blossoms, magnolias, and tulips from top to bottom of Chain Bridge Road, where my father’s parents lived. I can imagine what the road looked like that day because I saw it many times as a boy.

  D.C. in the spring was like a wall of heat, which is the way seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit always felt after shoveling snow in Ontario. I remember my grandmother Rose’s vegetable garden, which took us nearly a minute to run around. I remember visiting the Howard University chapel, where my grandfather served as the minister at my parents’ wedding.

  I have heard so many stories about the wedding that I feel as if I attended it. When someone retells an old story, I can point out errors. It is inaccurate, for example, to say that my mother’s father, George, told a joke about black people. Actually, he told a joke about a Mexican who was mistaken for black in a restaurant that served whites only.

  I wish I’d been there to hear George laughing at his own joke. I wish I’d been there to see everybody freeze until my father laughed and slapped George’s back and gave him a glass of vermouth and walked him onto the subject of golf. As a rule, I dislike weddings — because of the pomp, because somebody’s always in a snit over something, and because I have never looked good in a jacket and tie — but that one would have been worth attending.

  It had rained early in the morning, and then turned sunny and stayed that way. Outside the chapel, the lawns were wet and sparkling. It was the finest Wednesday that spring.

  Wednesday?

  That idea came from my mother, Dorothy Perkins. They couldn’t afford a large reception. But they wanted all their friends to see their act of courage — or social deviance, as my mother, then a sociologist-in-training, joked.

  To which my father replied, “We are a deviant couple, my dear, but on our wedding night, I would suggest that we converge.”

  “Why don’t we converge our ideas on the matter at hand?” my mother said. “Let’s marry on a Wednesday, at two in the afternoon. Only a quarter of our friends will be able to make it. That way, we can plan a small reception and still invite everybody.”

  My parents went ahead with their plans. But almost everybody came. A hundred guests squeezed into a chapel for fifty people. As my father has said, “It looked like the most popular wedding in D.C. And two conspicuous absences weren’t too bad at all.”

  My father opened up a medical practice in Oakville, and became well known for his civil rights activities in Canada. He had two sons. One of them has a growing reputation as a first-rate criminal lawyer. That’s Sean, my younger brother. They should have named him Langston. But they didn’t. They gave the name to me, the first born of the fifth generation.

  Chapter 2

  ABERDEEN WILLIAMS CAME TO MY OFFICE the other day. I wasn’t expecting him. Over the last year or so, having received my divorce papers and pretty well severed contact with my father, I have seen Aberdeen more than usual. Since he is eighty-eight, I go to him. One Sunday every month or two, I take the commuter train to Oakville, meet him at a local café called The Green Bean, and listen to his stories. He tells me about Oakville in the 1920s, when he lived with my grandparents and helped raise my father and aunt. He doesn’t say much about my Aunt Mill, but the little I do know comes from him. He tells me about a Canadian wing of the Ku Klux Klan, which came after him in Oakville in 1930. He shares his theories about how black Africans in small boats crossed the Atlantic to America a thousand years before Columbus.

  But I missed our last rendezvous. Completely forgot about it. Spent most of the Sunday in a downtown Toronto laundromat, thinking about leaving my speech-writing job. Aberdeen didn’t call to complain that I had forgotten about him. He simply turned up at my office.

  He’s a short, thin man. He’s jet black, has lively, inquisitive eyes, and looks about twenty years younger than he is. He still has hair, and keeps a narrow, finely trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache.

  “You look good, Aberdeen,” I said, and got up from my desk. We shook hands. “I can see why they used to call you ‘Dark Gable.’“

  He laughed. I asked how he had come to my office. He said he had taken the train, and the subway, and the elevator, like any other normal person.

  “But you’re not normal, Ab. You’re a thousand years old
.”

  “Maybe, but I’ve got a better memory than you,” he said.

  I stared for a minute. Then it hit me. “I’m sorry. The Green Bean. Last Sunday. I forgot all about it. But you didn’t have to come in all this way.”

  “Actually, I’m bringing a message. From your father.”

  I hoped that the stiffening of my back and neck wasn’t visible. At that moment, my friend and boss — a failed aristocrat named Alfonso de Altura Jr. — stepped into my office.

  I introduced him to Aberdeen. They chatted for a moment, and then Alfonso turned to tell me that a delegation of business leaders from Algeria would soon be visiting our ministry. Could I meet with them?

  I nodded, and started to say that I was just heading out for a coffee with Aberdeen. I was hoping to talk about the Algerian delegation when I came back, alone. But Alfonso kept going. When the man had something on his mind, he was like a highspeed train.

  “They’ll be delighted to meet you, being an Algerian and all. Imagine their surprise at meeting somebody of Algerian origin here. Do you speak Arabic, by any chance?”

  “No,” I said. “Give me half an hour, and I’ll come talk to you.”

  Alfonso said that would be fine, and stepped out of my office.

  Aberdeen’s head was lowered. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet mine. “Algerian?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “You told your boss you were Algerian?”

  “I can explain it to you, Aberdeen.”

  “You’ve always been good with words, Langston. When you were in school, I thought you would become a lawyer. You can explain anything. But your explanation would just make things worse. I don’t want to hear it.”

  Aberdeen pushed on his armrests and hovered, bent, a few inches out of his chair. I scooted around my desk to help him, but he waved me off.