What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

him innocent. One never feels like an adult with one’s parents, and he did experience a slight embarrassment still living with his at twenty-five.

Fitz, his father, never ceased to make him aware of that, either. Oku had tried to move out a few years ago, but Fitz had made him feel both guilty and stupid at the same time.

“Well, if you want to break your mother’s heart, I am not the one to stop you. And if you want to go give white people your money while you could give it to your own family, fine. Go follow other stupid black people and treat the white people better than your own flesh and blood.”

Nothing about himself, of course. Fitz had put out that it was not on account of any personal regard Oku owed him, but Oku felt ungrateful anyway. There was Fitz saying that Oku was betraying not only his mother but also the race. The combination killed off Oku’s idea of a slamming bachelor apartment with a black leather couch, a CD player with multiple loading, a space where he could smoke ganja any time and possibly seduce Jackie without interruption. If he had had that place two months ago, he could have taken Jackie home after the Lula Lounge. He would not have gone cold when Jackie closed the door, disappearing into Ab und Zu, leaving him sick and strangely frightened, picturing her slipping into bed with Reiner. He would have had friends over day and night, he would have spent hours listening to Monk and Miles and Ornette and Dizzy and, best of all, not had to hear Fitz’s voice each morning. All that if he had not listened to that same voice confidentially saying, “Now you can stay home and save the little money, which, for me, would be the best thing. Me know say you is a man. Me respect you as a man and as a son, whatever is mine is yours. So you know the right thing to do. You no have to leave. Me as a man would never say you shoulda leave.” This was as close as Fitz could come to saying that he was asking Oku to stay; it was as close as he could come to saying he would miss him. And Oku had been seduced by it, thinking his father was finally acknowledging that they were men on equal terms. Fitz was pleasant or at least silent for the better part of six months after Oku’s decision to stay. But he gradually reverted to his old self as time went on. By which time Oku had blown the first and last months’ rent he had saved and Fitz had the upper hand again.

Oku was waiting for Fitz Barker to speak. Let him talk all he wants, he thought, don’t answer, appear interested, even schooled, in all the old-time lessons that are his pleasure. Then leave the room. Every morning Fitz delivered the same history lesson in between chewing his hunk of hard dough bread, thick with butter, and downing his cocoa. Oku’s mother, Claire, listened diligently, eyeing Oku as if to say, Please, please don’t answer back and please, please take a lesson.

“Boy, when I come to this country, I didn’t have nobody, you know!” Fitz paused for accent, searching Oku’s eyes to make sure the significance of the point was understood. “You think is one time I wanted to weep here in this place? But I couldn’t do that. Who would bother with me? I was a man. Boy, you hear what I’m saying? I was a man.”

“Understood, Pops.” Oku couldn’t help a little sarcasm, a little humour.

“Don’t ‘Pops’ me, boy. You think because you go to school you smarter than me? Is me who send you to school, boy. Don’t think you have it on me, you know!”

“No, Pops, I don’t have it on you at all.”

Fitz fixed him with another searching look, trying to figure out if Oku was joking again, trying to make a fool of him. Oku looked as sincere as he could, sensing his mother.

“You damn right there, boy.”

“Damn right, Pops.” He was thinking of Jackie.

“Damn right, I tell you.” Fitz was lingering over these words with his knife in his hand, making sure that each centimetre of bread was covered with butter.

“You’ll get a heart attack doing that, man.” Oku tried this as much to halt Fitz as to warn him.

“Heart attack? I work every day, boy. You ever see a man like me with a heart attack?”

Fitz was on his favourite subject now, the physical and moral benefits of manly work. Let him go on, Oku thought, finding something else to do with his mind as his body absorbed his father’s harangue. What an unhappy man. Jesus. He looked out the kitchen window to the garden, where his father grew tomatoes and sweet peppers and mint in the summer. Back of the garden was a garage with at least three broken-down cars, parts, anyway, from three broken-down cars. His father threw nothing away. An old muffler, a leaking carburetor, a rusty fender. Fitz filled every minute and every space with work. Oku had no desire to do any of the things his father did. They shared little beyond genes and the way that DNA makes you walk the same way and lift your head the same way, the way it makes your hands seem as the hands of one person. With one exception—his father’s love of music.

Fitz had a trunk of old records, which he opened every Sunday with a bottle of Scotch while Claire cooked their favourite meats. Spinning Miles and Dizzy and Coltrane and Charlie Parker, the Shirelles and the Four Tops right along with Toots and the Maytals, John Holt, and Burning Spear. As with all his things, this trunk was off limits to his wife and Oku. For Oku, it was the only thing fascinating about his father—this trunk. Sundays were the only days that