***

***

Emmett and Me

*

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree

Strange Fruit/Abel Meeropol

***

1955: August brooded over the Southern Ontario landscape. Pressure cooker conditions, a combination of temperatures over 100 degrees farenheit and humidity near 100 percent had residents of Oshawa migrating to the shores of Lake Ontario for momentary relief from the afternoon and evening swelter. I had already spent my first 6 months in a psychological limbo with a provisional status as landed immigrant conditional on my attendance at school.

Oppressive August became even more difficult when I came down with chicken pox mid way through the month. During the time of my contagion, I was confined to my attic bedroom and felt the discomfort of the heat of the day magnified by hot air trapped at the ceiling of the house. The rays of the sun seemed to penetrate unimpeded through the roof into my attic quarters. To that torrid misery was added a low grade fever as my body sought to rid itself of its virus.

Escape from these August evenings in 1955 was delivered by a delightful and original radio personality, the Hound Dog, George Lorenz. At 7:00 pm, ‘the Hound was around, Mr Movin’ was groovin’ on Radio Station WKBW from Buffalo, New York’. The Big Heavy, an instrumental selection by Cozy Eggleston was the wailing signal for one hour of Rhythm and Blues/Rock and Roll with the Hound Dog himself howling, in the background, baying at his imaginary moon. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Cooke and a host of ‘doo-wap’ groups contributed to buffer the extremes of discomfort from the weather and from disease. The Hound, as dynamic as he was quirky, acquired a devoted and enthusiastic army of fans among teens.

Reception from WKBW was not always reliable. Some nights atmospheric conditions interfered with reception and the sound from New York state faded in and out. On those nights an alternate radio station provided distraction from the summer heat. CKEY, Toronto rebroadcasted the games of the Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball Club of the “AAA International League. That August in my misery I felt a kind of kinship with Joe Crysdale, the play by play announcer who did the rebroadcast of the games, describing  the games by reading the teletyped account of the game in a studio in Toronto. Most of the games originated in another city in the International League, typically a city in the USA.  The appropriate ambient sounds of bat on ball and excited crowd reactions to the play by play were supplied in the studio in Toronto.

Although I had no idea what I was hearing, never having played or seen a game of baseball, I had began to connect to some things in  my new environment. In August 1955, I had 2 friends, an American DJ with the curious alter ego of a hound dog and a Canadian Sports Announcer who was relating a second hand account of a game that he did not see, describing esoteric details of a sport that I did not understand. Oppressively hot August 1955 also presented a sobering reminder that life for Blacks was fragile and that youth did little to guarantee continued existence for the young who had the misfortune to be caught operating in the wrong environment.

***

…They retrieved his body from the Talahachie River in Mississippi. His battered body had been weighted down by a cotton gin fan. One eye had been gouged out and there was a hole in his head from the entry of a bullet.

…He was a Black 14 year old who had come to a rural town, Money Mississippi, from his home in Chicago to spend some time with relatives in the area

…Trying to impress his cousins and their friends, he had bragged that he had a White girlfriend and had shown them a photo of a White girl.

“So, Emmett Till, Mr. Bigshot from Chicago, let’s see you do your move on that young White woman behind the counter of that grocery store in Money,” his peers had probably asked.

“Alright, just watch me,” he had probably replied.

… He goes in, buys some candy and according to some onlookers either whistles at the young White woman or on the way our says:”Bye, baby.”

…To mete out ‘justice’ for the heinous crime of ‘uppityness’ the aggrieved husband of the woman with his cronies pluck the 14 year old from the house where he was staying, and torture and murder him…

…Those charged with the crime are found not guilty by a jury of their peers…

…Declared not guilty they later admit they did the crime and describe the details of the murder to a magazine a few years later.

***

Sensational newspaper accounts of lynchings of Blacks in the U.S. and articles exposing the organization of the K.K.K. in States close to the Canadian border as well as in communities in southern Ontario, catalogued the violence, actual and potential, at home in Ontario and just over there across an illusory divide. The border between the U.S. and Canada did not impede the free flow of radio waves from New York State where the Hound dog diffused his nightly R and B into my home in Ontario, why then would the arbitrary imposition of an imaginary line on the map of the continent block the hatred rampant in the U.S.from releasing its brutal contagion to the North in Canada where I was living? Media presentations about racially inspired violence were frequent enough to feed my reluctance to being in the new and unwelcoming land.

In August 1955, after 4 months in school and left with a fragile sensibility, the result of the difficulties I encountered trying to adapt to a school system different in so many ways to the one I had in Jamaica, I began to question my abilities to function in this seemingly complex culture with the relatively simple set of abilities that I had developed. I had been parachuted into the Canadian school system in February midway into the school year and without educational guidance, left to navigate as best I could, the details between Ontario’s secondary curriculum and the curriculum then in force at Kingston College in Jamaica. The remainder of that school year was a near total loss as I struggled to adapt with little or no guidance to the novelties in my school life.

Adults in my family to whom I may have turned for consolation and guidance were themselves living the insecurities that I was feeling. The function of guidance counseling, rudimentary at best in these times was entrusted to a Vice-Principal and teacher of Mathematics who, after administering an IQ test shortly my arrival at the school, declared that I should be placed in a vocational stream since I would be unlikely to survive in an academic stream. In my previous schools my standing had been very close to the top of my class. A plane ride and a change of scenery had removed many of the assumptions that I had about myself! Of course articles in the media by respected authorities in education and psychology in the 1950s, reinforced the notion of my inherent racial inferiority in matters of intelligence.

My state of mind was not totally bleak however, for at 15 years old the lovely dance of sexual attraction had long since aroused itself. Already sensitized to the yearnings of the human heart through my decade long passion for American popular music which expressed idealistically and euphemistically the drive for coupling, I struggled to find a way to connect to the girls at school and in the neighbourhood. There  being no girls of colour my age in the city of Oshawa, my opportunities for contact of any kind, innocent or corrupt, seemed destined for frustration.

I was by nature shy. I had not taken the initiative in inter gender relations since I was 5 years old when I had precociously persuaded a school mate to doff her panty and reveal her differences. The fear of being rebuffed on racial grounds was an abiding concern.  Moreover fresh from the vicarious experience of Emmett Till, torture and murder at the hands of angry White men with white hoods and burning crosses, I resisted the dictates of my hormones.

Despite my reluctance to take the initiative with girls, I did not long suffer neglect from the opposite sex. Apparently I was presenting in my own tentative little way, subliminal vibrations which found some recipients willing to risk the challenges of inter racial dating. Without advertising, I found consumers of a product that I was not totally unaware that I was offering. How else could I explain that one girl took a taxi once and a bus another time to come, unannounced and uninvited to my home.

In these times, the cautionary tale of my contemporary, Emmett Till’s life and death was never far from my mind. In my third year in high school I dredged up enough courage to attend some of the school dances. At one of these dances, a fairly aggressive girl decided that I would be hers for the night and for the near future. Trouble was that her family had immigrated from Memphis, Tennessee and was recently enrolled in our school. Her presence at school in 1957 created quite a stir since she claimed to have been kissed by Elvis Presley before he hit the big time in 1956.

Katie Kingsley ‘s claims of labial contact with ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ was never confirmed, to my knowledge, but her southern accent was unchallenged and undeniable. I had some initial reservations about dating her contemplating that her initials K.K. were already two-third of the dreaded troika of capital Ks that announced the presence of the despised K.K.K. I  wondered if she was hiding another K in her name or somewhere else in or on her person. Undeniable also were her concerns that her family did not see the boy with whom she was sharing her saliva and her social time.

She lived at the southern terminus of the municipal bus lines near Lake Ontario. After school dances she would insist that I take her home on the bus. She would, however, leave the bus one stop short of the terminus and walk the rest of the way while I stayed on the bus to go back to the northern terminus where I lived. Our relationship was short and quite unspectacular. The unease that  I felt was real but not enough to put me into a cloister, for although the Mason-Dixon line suddenly been deflected northward and for a short time visited me in Southern Ontario through Katie Kingsley, I began to realize that my charms were working in a variety of ways in the winter white world of ‘Caucasia’.

A few more victories of the romantic variety and I was beginning to allow myself some liberties. Although I never let my cautionary instincts diminish, I was feeling increasingly at ease at school and in my social encounters outside of school. And then came Leroy!

***

Here’s the fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

***

Billie Holiday sings Abel Meeropol

***