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

then back to his armpit. He was a tall, lean man, his deep dark skin setting contrast to his pink palms. You noticed his palms because his hands were so large, his fingers long and slender.

On their first meeting Oku made the mistake of looking at him too long and nodding to him in greeting. Thinking the musician was an ordinary black guy, he said to him, “Hey, bro, what’s happening?”

“I’m not your brother.” The musician jumped up, spilling a small table over. He flew at Oku, his face livid.

Oku reached out his hand in front of him, “No problem, bro, no problem.”

“I am not your brother, I say.”

The musician’s sudden looming scared Oku. His outstretched hand touched the musician’s coat, offending him even more. He grabbed hold of Oku, spinning him around. Luckily for Oku, the leather folder fell to the floor and the musician dropped him and scrambled for his music. The small clasp on the folder was broken, and the music sheets slipped onto the floor. The musician became frantic, whimpering as he collected the sheets. Oku moved away from him, disappearing out the door. But he appeared to have forgotten Oku, and tears of relief filled the musician’s eyes when he had put his folder back together. And he appeared to have forgotten the whole incident the next time Oku saw him.

He was a pianist, classically trained. He held the folder as if it were his life; the leather was blackened and dogeared. All the sanity he ever had, had been poured into a symphony, Sepia Ceremony, which he had created as homage to Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 and Duke Ellington’s sacred music.

He would walk up to perfect strangers in the street and show them his reams of notations for his symphony. He would launch into explanations about this or that movement to surprised passersby.

They wanted him back home in London, he said, they wanted him to go to Munich, but he had come to Toronto on the promise that his composition would be played by the Toronto Symphony. But when they realized he was a black man, their promises had dried up, he said. Bewildered people skirted him, thinking he was a panhandler. He rushed out to them to reassure them. They fled or threatened to call police.

He inundated the Human Rights Commission with complaints against the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Roy Thomson Hall. Leaders of the black community had taken him seriously at first, but his deteriorating mental state would make him launch into outbursts that made his claims confused, if not dubious. He was an artist, a great genius, and they were all fools—his supporters as well as the commission and his persecutors.

Oku came out of the St. George subway one day, and as he walked toward the university, he saw the musician sitting on a concrete embankment, his leather folder in his lap, his large hands making a gesture of piano playing. Oku slowed his pace, trying to decide whether to take another route and avoid another unpleasant encounter. But he saw that the musician was heedlessly playing his symphony. His face was a beautiful mask of pleasure, his long fingers lustful on some arpeggio.

Oku walked by close enough to observe these things and far enough away to run if the musician recognized him. The musician looked up and met his eyes, but there was no recognition there except as an artist to his audience, a great pianist to his adoring fan. Oku paid the musician the compliment of listening, then after some minutes, when the musician seemed to have come to the close of his solo, Oku applauded. The musician bowed his head to receive the accolade. From then on when they met at the Market Café there was no trouble. Oku never made the mistake of calling him “brother,” and the musician went about his business, composing his music on brown paper bags and securing his leather satchel full of the contents of his sanity.

The musician was never as lucid or as friendly as the Rasta, so Oku came by his name through the Rasta, whose own name Oku never found out.

“See him there?” The Rasta pointed to the musician. “Him a mad, you see! Is talent what have him so. Talent and Babylon take him. Not like the I and I. Babylon don’t down cry me yet.”

He was patting himself warm in the cold spring day, standing near the parking lot in the market. He waited there often to arrest shoppers as they exited the lot. Oku was on his way to the café.

“See him? See what me tell you?” The musician was playing his phantom piano outside the café. “Him mad!”

Oku felt like laughing. Between the Rasta and the musician, who was more mad?

“Nuh take things to make jokes, dready. Him is a genius. Him name Clifford Hall. Him get scholarship from yard to go a London when me was a big man. Look pon him now! You nuh see it? Follow the white man ways and you doomed. See, them make him mad.”

Clifford took money out of his mouth, and the Rasta said, “Is how me supposed to compete with a madman? You nuh see me trial! Cha, man. Anyway, ah nah nutten. Make him live. Jah will take care of the I and I. Seen.”

The Rasta and the musician had become a strange source of friendship for Oku. Though, of course, he had a home, albeit increasingly uncomfortable. A mother, a father. A roof over his head. And the anxieties of a failed career were still in the future for him, if at all. And the elixir of faith, which held the Rasta, was not anything that Oku could say firmly he desired. His was for a sense of sovereignty. How had they started out? he wondered. Like him? He knew he hadn’t experienced the moments, he hadn’t visited the scenes that would lead him where the Rasta and the musician had gone, but he had