Griff

Griff was a black man from Barbados who sometimes denied he was black. Among black Americans who visited Toronto, he was black: “Right on!” “Peace and love, Brother!” and “Power to the People!” would suddenly become his vocabulary. He had emigrated to Toronto from Britain, and as a result, thought of himself as a black Englishman. But he was blacker than most immigrants. In color, that is. It must have been this double indemnity of being British and black that caused him to despise his blackness. To his friends, and his so-called friends, he flaunted his British experience and the “civilized” bearing that came with it; and he liked being referred to as a West Indian who had lived in London, for he was convinced that he had an edge, in breeding, over those West Indians who had come straight to Canada from the canefields and the islands. He had attended Ascot many times and he had seen the Queen in her box. He hated to be regarded as just black. “Griff, but you’re blasted black, man,” Clynn said once at a party in his own home, “and the sooner you realize that fact, the more rass-hole wiser you would be!” Clynn usually wasn’t so honest; but that night he was drunk. What bothered Griff along with his blackness was that most of his friends were “getting through”: cars and houses and “swinging parties” every Friday night, and a yearly trip back home for Christmas and for Carnival. Griff didn’t have a cent in the bank. “And you don’t even have one blasted child, neither!” Clynn told him that same night. But Griff was the best-dressed man present. They all envied him for that. And nobody but his wife really knew how poor he was in pocket. Griff smiled at them from behind his dark-green dark glasses. His wife smiled too, covering her embarrassment for her husband. She never criticized him in public, by gesture or by attitude, and she said very little to him about his ways, in their incensed apartment. Nevertheless, she carried many burdens of fear and failure 96 for her husband’s apparent ambitionless attitudes. England had wiped some British manners on her, too. Deep down inside, Griff was saying to Clynn and the others, godblindyougodblindyou! “Griffy, dear, pour your wife a Scotch, darling. I’ve decided to enjoy myself.” She was breathing as her yoga teacher had taught her to do. And Griffy said, godblindyougodblindyou! again, to Clynn; poured his wife her drink, poured himself a large Scotch on the rocks, and vowed, I am going to drink all your Scotch tonight, boy! This was his only consolation. Clynn’s words had become wounds. Griff grew so centred around his own problems that he did not, for one moment, consider any emotion coming from his wife. “She’s just a nice kid,” he told Clynn once, behind her back. He had draped his wife in an aura of sanctity; and he would become angry to the point of violence and scare everybody, when he thought his friends’ conversation had touched the cloud and virginity of the sanctity in which he had clothed her: like taking her out on Friday and Saturday nights to the Cancer Calypso Club, in the entrails of the city, where pimps and doctors and lonely immigrants hustled women and brushed reputations in a brotherhood of illegal liquor. And if the Club got too crowded, Griff would feign a headache, and somehow make his wife feel the throbbing pain of his migraine, and would take her home in a taxi, and would recover miraculously on his way back along Sherbourne Street, and with the tact of a good barrister, would make tracks back to the Cancer and dance the rest of the limp-shirt night with a woman picked from among the lonely West Indian stags: his jacket let loose to the sweat and the freedom, his body sweet with the music rejoicing in the happy absence of his wife in the sweet presence of this woman. But after these hiatuses of dance, free as the perspiration pouring down his face, his wife would be put to bed around midnight, high up in the elevator, high off the invisible hog of credit, high up on the Chargex Card; and Griff would be tense, for days. It was a tenseness which almost gripped his body in a paralysis, as it strangled the blood in his body when the payments of loans for furniture and for debts approached, and they always coincided with the approaching of his paycheck, already earmarked against its exact face value. In times of this kind of stress, like his anxiety at the race track, when the performance of a horse contradicted his knowledge of the Racing Form and left him broke, he would grumble, “Money is naught all.” Losing his money would cause him to ride on streetcars, and he hated any kind of public transportation. He seemed to realize his blackness more intensely; white people looking at him hard—questioning his presence, it seemed. It might be nothing more than the way his color changed color, going through a kaleidescope of tints and shades under the varying ceiling lights of the streetcar. Griff never saw it this way. To him, it was staring. And his British breeding told him that to look at a person you didn’t know (except she was a woman) was infra dig. Infra dig was the term he chose when he told Clynn about these incidents of people staring at him on the streetcars. The term formed itself on his broad thin lips, but he could never get the courage to spit it at the white people staring at him. Losing his money: his wife would sometimes be placed in a position, where after not having had dinner, nor the money to buy food; the landlord locked the apartment 97 door with a padlock one night while they were at a party; she would smile in that half-censuring smile, a smile that told you she had been forced against the truth of her circumstances, to believe with him, that money was “naught all.” But left to herself, left to the ramblings of her mind and her aspirations and her fingers over the new broadloom in her girlfriend’s home, where her hand clutched the tight sweating glass of Scotch on the rocks, her Scotch seeming to absorb her arriving unhappiness with the testimony of her friend’s broadloom, or in Glynn’s recrea tion room, which she called a “den”; in her new sponge of happiness, fabricated like the house in her dreams, she would put her smile around her husband’s losses, and in the embrace they would both feel higher than anybody present, because, “Griffy, dear, you were the only one there with a Master of Arts.”

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