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

to the horoscopes: “Aries—April is your time of the year romantically but you are in danger of being attracted to those who do little to brighten up your life, so don’t give up your heart too quickly …” “Not fucking likely,” she said loud enough for the few on the streetcar to look at her. “… Cash wise, gains come through investments, people, and travel. During May you seem to be saving like crazy because you are quite capable of saving more cash than a demented millionaire on occasions …” She laughed, unaware of the attention she attracted around her. She looked up to see her stop about to be passed, and she pulled the cord furiously for the driver to stop. When he didn’t, she collected her magazines and walked to the front of the car. The driver slowed to the next stop. Jackie climbed off, saying loudly, “Some people are just assholes.”

Alexandra Park is that urban warren of buildings and paths where Jackie and her mother and father lived after taking the train to Toronto. That was 1980. Here they call Nova Scotia “down east” and “down home.” In Alexandra Park everyone is hip to the news about who else is making their way across the country, best as they can, hoping to find a job in Toronto or, better still, a way back home with some money.

After Jackie grew up, she didn’t want to go back, but her mother and father still always talked about it as if it was a real possibility. Impossible. And they both knew it. They’d sold what little they had in the first place, which was a diamond earring belonging to Jackie’s mother from a great-grandmother who went to New York in the thirties and a car with a broken fan belt belonging to Jackie’s father. And little by little, in the years following, most of their families, except for some unknown, unfriendly cousins in Truro, most had moved to Toronto too. So there was no one to go back to, but the thought remained a fantasy, and as fantasies do, it pictured Nova Scotia, Halifax, as a paradise on earth and Toronto as a wretched hellhole. Jackie didn’t remember Halifax, Nova Scotia, anyhow. Same as any kid, a life is a room, a playground, a mother, a father, not a city by the ocean, small and undulating, not a harbour, not snow cakes out to sea, not a warm Scotch at the Brown Derby on Gottingen Street.

Jackie wouldn’t remember Halifax except for the North End Library next to the apartment building where she lived the days of her fifth year. Half a day with her grandmother, half a day at the afternoon daycare. At the library she would linger on pictures in books from the children’s section and Miss Towney would get her and other children to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” once a year.

Not needing a memory to take with her on a train all the way across the country, all her memorable memories were in the two people she sat between on the train ride—the one who took her to the bathroom and held her up so she didn’t touch the seat and the other one who blew on her hot chocolate before she drank it; the one who gave her his change and his rabbit’s foot to play with and the one who undid and redid her braids so she’d look nice when the train stopped almost a whole day later at Union Station in Toronto. Jackie was going to be a supermodel ever since her already long five-year-old legs twisted and scrunched themselves trying to sleep on the train coming west. She was decked out in psychedelic pants and a frilly Indian top just like her mother’s. They were five years late for that style, but they were still looking good in 1980. The father wore velvet pants and a hat with a feather.

They came to Toronto just when the Paramount—the best dance club in the country—was about to close. They only got the tail end of the dancing and the beautiful aroma of fried smelts. That was after Marvin Gaye came out with “After the Dance,” and the Paramount had a huge painting of the jacket cover on the wall. And people were as if they had stepped right out of the painting, the slinky retro-thirties dresses, the men in hats, the saxophone player, the whole smoky intoxicating gyration of the figures in the painting melded with the figures on the dance floor and at the fish-fry tables. The smell of Avon White Linen perfume and the elegance of Chivas and all the crazy moves and all the broken hearts and the girls who were being turned out and the men who tried to look criminal and hard and the drunks who were charming and the drunks who were mean and just the hot, urgent, dangerous feel of the place where scores were made and scores were settled. Jackie’s mother and father only tasted it all for a year or so. Maybe two.

Jackie’s father found out that there was a crap game downstairs and you could get reefer and blow and whatever, and when the cops entered the Paramount a red light went on and off, the signal from upstairs to ditch everything, the money, the drugs, the works. He thought craps was his game, but every man down there thought that. This is how you could wake up the next day with your furniture going to somebody else’s house, all because of a bet past broke. And your engagement ring—somebody could tell you it once belonged to them. And your leather coat with the slit up the back looked just as good if not better when you watched some guy who came to the Paramount in polyester walk away from you with it on his back.

Jackie’s mum got in with some girls who had a rivalry with some West Indian girls. Saturday nights they would settle