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

all scores in the women’s washroom. The Scotian girls, and she was one, had a reputation for fighting. They would beat you like a man. Because their fathers beat them like men and their brothers beat them like men and their men beat them like men, so they beat each other and those West Indian girls like men. You never just fought one of them, they were all related somehow. If some West Indian girl thought she could bring it on in there and took some Scotian girl on, a crowd of cousins and aunts would be on her. “That’s my cousin you messing with, girl.” The women’s washroom was a place to show off your badness. Your bad threads or your bad fucking skills or your bad fist skills. There were some fights there. Over men, over money, over just looking too good for your own good. Everybody at the Paramount was on edge. You had to mind that you didn’t disrespect somebody’s woman or somebody’s man or just somebody.

They knew about the Paramount from Cape Breton to Vancouver, they being a select group. Black people and a few, very few, hip whites—whites who were connected. Just as they knew about Rockheads in Montreal. And every blind pig in Winnipeg, Hamilton, and any city with more than two hundred black people. They were the first places people headed on the nights that the men didn’t hit the strip clubs. On the weekends, that is. They were the places people went to feel in their own skin, in their own life. Because when a city gets finished with you in the daytime, you don’t know if you’re coming or going. After you didn’t get the job, or got the job and it was shit, or you were tired of the job, the Paramount was a place of grace—like church. Where else could you enjoy the only thing you were sure God gave you, your body, without getting into any kind of trouble for it? Well, trouble you could handle anyway—trouble you didn’t give a shit about, trouble you went looking for. You could dance that thing around the Paramount like there was no tomorrow. You could shake it, shimmy it, let it fall out of your dress, let it step off of your high-heeled shoes, you could dress it up any way you wanted, you could fill it with booze, you could float it on ganja, chill it on coke, you could get it fucked right there on the dance floor, then you could let it fall down near the light post on Spadina or walk it up the street like it was on a loose string. What could be more perfect?

Jackie’s mother got caught up in the Paramount on account of Jackie’s father and a West Indian girl from Jamaica. West Indian girls loved Scotian men on account of their accents, which were just like American black men’s, which meant that Scotian men were close to dream men. So Scotian men got a lot of pussy from West Indian girls on account of that. They got a lot of pussy from everybody. In the pussy line, they were at the front. Jackie’s daddy had to come into the ladies’ washroom and tear Jackie’s mother off the girl from Kingston named Marcia. Well, Marcia wasn’t from Kingston, really, but her mother was. Marcia was born in Grace Hospital on Church Street, as Marcia told Jackie’s mother when Jackie’s mother called her “island bunny” and “Jammie.” Kingston Marcia lost some hair and got a cheek almost bit off that night and Jackie’s mother found a reputation.

Jackie got parked at Liz Dorry’s like all the other children whose mothers and fathers were out partying and hustling and drinking and dancing at the Paramount. These were early days, their first, second year in Toronto. Jackie’s mother wanted to take a course in hairdressing, a course in icing wedding cakes, and a course in nursing. She was twenty-two. Fine as refined sugar. Jackie’s father had his own set of fights at the Paramount over Jackie’s mother. Some dude with a fur coat would start eyeing Jackie’s mother or grinding her on the dance floor and Jackie’s father would have to break bad.

The fried smelts were delicious at the Paramount, and cheap. There was the obligatory thick greasy guy of a cook with a cigarette hanging from his lips. He would pile those smelts high on the plate, then ring in the money at the cash register with the same oily hands. But man, did they ever taste good. There was the whole incongruity of the elegance on one side of the Paramount and the fish fry on the other and the mishmash of it in the centre. It was a throwback to juke joints and speakeasies, but all legal, well, some legal, right there on Spadina Avenue.

Then there was also the Elephant Walk, where you had to be known to get in, where you had to be certifiably dangerous to get in, or know someone who was. You had to be badass or beautiful. Threateningly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that teetered on the brink of some disaster, like a tooth knocked out or a knife gash that would make the beauty even more beautiful for its gone promise and its evidence of having put itself on the line. Jackie’s mother and father were in time to see this at the Elephant Walk. It was up three flights of stairs in a building on Spadina that held a few small sewing factories. It was just south of the Paramount, and the door was barred from the inside. A bouncer would look at you through a peephole and let you in if you hit the standard. Then he would look you up and down if you were a woman as if you could be his or as if you were his when he opened the door. If you were a man, he took your measure,