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

a presentiment, a moment when he glimpsed all directions of this possible life.

The Rasta and the musician would be an embarrassment to men like Oku’s father. They had gone mad, the worst kind of giving into the system that could be imagined among black people in the city. Violence could be understood, but not madness. Violence at least had a traceable etymology—it protected your life, your remaining will, and all your sense of beauty. But madness, madness was weak. Oku’s boys in the jungle felt the same: “You see that crazy motherfucker playing air piano? What the fuck is wrong with him? Shame.” The Rasta got a little more respect, even though they still thought him mad. At least he answered to higher powers, they said. That a steady stream of them lay open-chested on sidewalks and in the parking lots of after-hours clubs was just how the world was.

Did he want to end up bled out in a parking lot outside a club? Did he want to float out of his body like the Rasta and the musician? Or did he want the hard-headed bitterness of his father, living in the fantasies of if only?

“If only what?”

He was sitting at the café, his thumbs on a page of Baraka’s Blues People. A hand was on his shoulder. It was Jackie’s. He hadn’t seen her come in.

“If only what?” she repeated.

For a moment it seemed right. He felt as if he was in a room, an accustomed room, alone with her, and had merely drifted off. Her hand was utterly familiar, as if they, the two of them, existed in a particular universe, their particular universe. But, of course, it was the Market Café and they weren’t alone. He smiled at her, shaking himself awake.

“Nothing, nothing. Hey, what are you doing here?” He didn’t hear her reply. He was suddenly aware that Reiner had also come into the café.

“Hey, man,” Reiner greeted. “What’s happening?”

His happiness at seeing Jackie became all awkward. “Yeah, cool, man, cool,” he answered Reiner.

“Get me a cappuccino, Reiner,” Jackie said, sitting across from Oku.

“What do you want on it, hon? Cinnamon?”

Oku flinched at the intimacy between them. He felt like making an excuse to leave. Jackie reached over for his book. “So this is where you are these days.”

What did she mean “these days”? “You’re the one who disappeared.”

“I haven’t disappeared. I’m at the store. You know where to find me.”

Was she saying something to him? He could never quite figure her out. A simple conversation was soaked in double entendre. And if he made the mistake of acknowledging the double meanings, she withdrew.

“Do I? Do I know where to find you?” He leaned over the table to take his book back.

“Yeah, you do.” She thumbed the pages, looking at Oku with an appraising sensuousness. Just then Reiner came back with cappuccinos. “Check you later,” Jackie said, rising.

“Yeah, man, see ya.” Reiner followed Jackie to the door.

Well, that was confusing, he thought. He watched them cross to the other side of the street. He hated the easy way Reiner put his right hand in the small of Jackie’s back. He hated him seeming to guide Jackie with this very hand across the street. He took comfort in a fantasy—Jackie had seen him in the café and had come in to tell him that she missed him. That was what the conversation meant. She could have passed by, he thought, trying to dismiss the other interpretation, namely that Jackie’s mother and father lived not too far away, a block, really; in fact, Jackie still lived there sometimes, so it had been sheer coincidence and her words meant just what they said, no more.

But what the fuck did she see in Reiner? That’s what he wanted to know. Well, given the things he’d been thinking about before Jackie came into the café, perhaps it was obvious what she saw in Reiner. Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it, took possession of Jackie’s back, guiding her across the street with one hand, warding off traffic with the other, in which he balanced his coffee. Look at his face, it spoke of someone in control and certainly not threatened. Someone comfortable, easy. Oku hated the familiarity with which Reiner spoke to him too, as if they shared something, a language. He had the sense that for Reiner it was a second language, the “Hey, man, what’s happening?” As if Reiner had switched into the second language to arrive at Oku’s level, so to speak—to talk to him in his own tongue. Those few words were so charged. In any other situation the meanings would be simple. Here, they were the difference between being white and being black, in control or out of control.

FOURTEEN

WHEN THE PARAMOUNT CLOSED, Jackie’s mother and father were lost. Everyone in Alexandra Park was lost. Even some up on Bathurst Street and Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue. As far out as Dawes Road and Pape Avenue. All the glamour left their lives.

Le Coq d’Or—the nightclub on Yonge Street where American acts used to play and where Jackie’s mother and father saw Parliament-Funkadelic and the Ojays, the Barkays, and Rick James, who was put in jail after some freaky behaviour—that had closed down a few years before too. And then the Piccadilly Tube, where they danced till three in the morning, went under. And then Mrs. Knights, where they danced too and sat in the raised section and a man from Ghana had tried to pick Jackie’s mother up right in front of Jackie’s father, and he did it so directly and as if it was such a bargain that even Jackie’s father would have gone off with him to Accra. The guy took Jackie’s mother on the dance floor to “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and Jackie’s