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

he could say—apart from the times when he was so young as not to remember—Sundays were the only days that he could say he loved his father. “Claire, Claire,” his father would call, “you remember this one?”—throwing a forty-five of the Platters on the record player. Fitz still had forty-fives and some seventy-eights. He had the long spinner and the inserts for the holes in the small records. When the music hit him, he’d swoop Oku’s mother up in his arms and spin her around, his thick hands becoming elegant and smooth on her back. “This is what you call dancing, boy,” he would laugh if Oku ventured into the room. “You could never dance like this!”

On Sundays, if Fitz was in a particularly good mood, he would drive Claire out of the kitchen and start cooking himself. Claire having done all the seasoning the night before, there would be a hyperbole of pots and pans clanging, and oil splattering everywhere, before Fitz emerged with simmering curried goat and aromatic coconut rice, boasting at his prowess and his versatility. All along delving into his trunk and putting the Mighty Diamonds, Beres Hammond, and Gregory Isaacs on the stereo. Of course, when the bottle of Scotch was coming to an end and the music from the records becoming sadder, when he began to play Wilson Pickett and Swamp Dog and realized that he was on the brink of tears, he would have to get angry and turn on Claire and Oku instead. He would tell them they were useless and did nothing but eat him out of house and home. If they were lucky, he would go outside to the garden and slam the back door behind him. And if not, they had to sit very still until his anger subsided or risk having an ornament flung at them if they moved. Not that Claire took it always, but it was better to take it than to object. She didn’t want a fight lasting days. And Fitzy was a good man, he only felt that he had been held back, and were he a different man in this country, he would be further ahead.

Sundays were like that—which lately Oku had avoided by staying out all weekend—and weekday mornings were like this: everyone had to wake up at the same time as Fitz, and if Oku made the mistake of sleeping in, Fitz would kick the door in. “I have to put bread on the table for you, the least you could do is be at that table when I’m there.”

This used to annoy Oku, but not recently. Recently he would surprise his father by saying to him, “Fair enough, Pops. Level vibes.” When he first said it, Fitz was struck quiet. “Hmm.” The boy looked like he was pulling a new tack. What did he want now? But Oku would jump up and head to the kitchen close behind him.

“You find a job yet, boy?” That one he knew Oku couldn’t answer.

“Soon and very soon,” Oku mumbled.

“ ‘Soon and very soon,’ eh? All right, boy.”

This was Oku’s new plan, to humour Fitz. Not to fly off in a rage at him, not to bait him, not to look down on him. But to feel sorry for him and to see him as oppressed, ground down by the system.

“You happy, Pops?” Oku said, looking back from the window and the carcasses of Fitz’s plants and cars.

“Happy!” Fitz was incredulous. “It don’t have happy in that! Happy, boy. You think they put you here to be happy! You damn fool. Claire, this boy need to do a good day’s work, then he’ll understand. Happy, my ass.”

“You don’t think that you should be happy by now?”

“This university business making you stupid or what?”

“No, really, Dad, you don’t think that you should be happy by now? What’s all this for?”

“To put food on the table so that my betters can tell me I’m not happy.”

“Why you got to be so sensitive? Why can’t you just answer the question I’m asking you? Are you happy? Don’t you feel you should be happy?”

Fitz looked as if he was about to burst. “Claire, you hear this nonsense? You hear what this idiot boy, you make, asking me?”

“Fitz, mind yourself now.”

“You don’t see the boy speaking as if he better than me?”

“Ah, forget it, ‘old school.’ Never mind.”

“Why you don’t go about your business and make me go ’bout mine?”

“You’re right, you’re right, Pops.”

His father thought he was going to the university, but he wasn’t. Oku was doing a master’s degree in literature, but he had dropped out in January. He couldn’t bear it. And he was weary with the fear of what Fitz would say and do if he knew. They’d already had an argument long ago about why he was doing literature. What good would that do, what the hell kind of job could you get with that, was Oku intending to eat the papers or wipe his ass with them when he got it? Because that is all his “master’s” would be useful for. Oku had endured any number of attacks on the efficacy of a master’s degree in English literature. He had used aloofness and rudeness. It would be a dreadful comedown to now admit that, though for altogether different reasons, he had arrived at the same conclusion as his father. Every now and then he had an attack of panic so strong that he felt weak, he had pains in his stomach. Each morning he thought he was working up to telling him, but each morning he failed.

When he examined this fear, he realized that it wasn’t simply a fear of Fitz. It was he himself who was afraid. He didn’t know where to go from here, and he would see that in his father’s rage, and the panic in him would threaten to burst out and he did not know where it would go.

This morning he’d started what he now thought was a stupid