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

He took Jackie up in her lessons. “You gonna have a high school diploma, Jackie baby. Do better than me. Do better than your mother.”

“Yeah, Daddy.”

“ ‘Yeah, Daddy’? You say ‘Yes, Daddy.’ No yeah this and yeah that.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Jackie’s father didn’t get a high school diploma, not because he couldn’t but because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time for that among the six brothers and one sister that he had. They had to work, and besides, when the older ones were ready, Nova Scotia wasn’t ready, what with de facto segregation and what with Jackie’s grandmother and grandfather needing the help. And when Jackie’s father was ready, it still wasn’t worth it for a black person to have an education. Where would you put it? What would you do with it, what good was it? What kind of job would you get with it? Jackie’s father had the kind of sense that mattered—street sense. That’s the kind of intelligence that was worth something. Here in Toronto he’d come to a feeling that it wasn’t worth passing on. It was good enough for him and Jackie’s mother. He figured they were country, they were from down home, but Jackie was going to be from here.

Jackie liked the attention. She loved the few weeks when there was no Paramount and nothing up to standard for her mother and father to go to. It was like being on holiday. She already had a picture-postcard idea of how her family should be, and it was coming true.

“Jackie, go over to Liz and see if she’ll take you tonight.” Her mother, testing the waters.

“I ain’t going.”

“ ‘Ain’t’?” Jackie’s father.

“I am not going.”

“That’s right now, but you going.”

“No.”

“Do like your mother says, girl.”

“Can’t. Won’t. Cannot, will not. Stay with Aunt Liz.”

“You cut a switch to beat yourself there, my man.” Jackie’s mother to Jackie’s father. “She’s telling you now. But, girl, don’t let me have to get up.”

Much as she tried, though, Jackie couldn’t keep her mother and father away from the Duke.

They had turned the Paramount into a liquor store by the time Jackie grew up. There’s no sign of the life it once had. When Jackie’s mother and father pass by these days, it’s all a different place. All their good times, dancing and fighting and styling, gone. All their nights with Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” and Stevie Wonder’s “In the City,” all their youth has been jackhammered open, dug up, and cemented over in a concrete-and-glass brand new liquor store with small red-and-green tiles on the front. There’s no sign of their sweet life, the dancing—that’s what they mostly miss—the high-platformed shoes, the thrill of meeting the R & B bands after hours, the particular night when Jackie’s mother almost ran off with the bass player from Parliament Funkadelic and Jackie’s father had to stage the drama of his life—walking out the door as if he didn’t care, so she would know that if she was gone, she was gone—to get her back.

How does life disappear like that? It does it all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after weeks of you passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. This liquor store that was the Paramount will probably, unnoticed, do the same thing in three or four years, and the good times Jackie’s mother and father had here—the nights when nights weren’t long enough, when they all ended up at a blind pig on St. Clair Avenue because they couldn’t go to sleep with so much life lighting up their beautiful bodies, or at Fran’s on College, eating greasy eggs at three or four in the morning—all this, their lovely life, they would not be able to convince anyone it had existed.

FIFTEEN

HE WANTED TO PLAY her Ornette Coleman’s “Embraceable You.” He wanted to play her Coltrane’s “Venus,” Monk’s “I Surrender, Dear” and “Don’t Blame Me.” So he did. He called her and left them all on her answering machine. One every other day. He said nothing in case he put his foot in his mouth again. She would know, he told himself. She would know if he played Dexter Gordon blowing “Laura,” Charles Mingus’s “Better Get It in Your Soul,” and Charlie Rouse’s “When Sunny Gets Blue.” And he would’ve played her Billie Holiday singing “You’ve Changed,” except that he couldn’t play Billie Holiday without bawling his eyes out, and he wanted to be limber strong so that he could seduce her. So he sent her Charlie Rouse playing “When Sunny Gets Blue” twice. He thought that Rouse’s hoarse velvet horn best described all the levels of his love for her, the slow and quiet way he wanted to talk to her, the intimacy he wanted to evoke. And he played her “Venus” more times than he could recall because he felt that tender, that undone with her, that out in space, that uncertain of boundaries, and that much in peril if she didn’t love him back.

After Oku did all this he felt shy, stupid. He never thought of himself as stupid, only with Jackie. It occurred to him that she must be annoyed coming home to crazy music on her answering machine. She could mistake him for some kind of freak stalking her, and he didn’t want her to think that, but he couldn’t stop. He became so engaged in this seduction, he hardly worried about his father any more. Fuck it, he thought, it all had to come to a head soon anyway, and he had to move out of the house. If he loved Jackie, he was beyond Fitz; if he loved Jackie, he could do anything. This mission to send Jackie all