There were no other cars in the yard, but a couple of men in shirtsleeves were waiting there in the yard in the wet snow. They had sharp eyes and folded arms and you could see they had purple and blue tattoos on their forearms and no intention of warming up or going inside. A woman with a fur-trimmed collar on her coat nodded to my father and rushed up to Paul and shook his hand eagerly through the window.
Paul got out of the old car slowly, looking around cautiously at the weatherbeaten wooden fences. He was wearing his scarf but was leaving the coat in the car. He shook hands with each of the men, saying a few words and looking over at me with a smile of amusement. He spent extra time with one of the men, also a black man, who said he would be bringing lots of his people to stand up with him at the big concert at Massey Hall.
–– Standing up, that’s the thing, I heard him say. That’s important. Every day.
Then Paul put his hand on my shoulder, and I could feel the weight of it right down to my rubber boots. He didn’t say anything, just cuffed me on the back of the head with the pale open side of his enormous hand, chuckled and went into the building, pausing to duck his head at the door.
My Dad pointed to the coat and the papers in the front seat of the car and asked me to bring them inside. The newspapers were heavy with fresh ink. One of them was open to an inside page with a picture of Paul and a story at the top with a heading that said, “Negro Singer Enters Canada, Will Be Questioned”.
I took off my brown corduroy jacket and wool scarf and hung them up in the cloakroom, along with Paul’s long black coat. Then I went upstairs to the hall where we usually had our dance classes. This time there was a big attendance, maybe thirty or forty of us. The children were sitting on folding chairs in a big circle, with a lot of parents and other adults standing around the walls. Paul walked up to the piano, leaned down to shake hands with the man at the keyboard and stood up in front of us so you could hardly see anything else.
There was no introduction that I can remember. The piano played a few bars, and then Paul started to sing. It was the deepest, richest voice I had ever heard, and it filled every corner of the room. When it was loud and strong, you would still have to call it sweet, and when it was soft and quiet you would still have to call it overpowering.
Bring me a little water, he sang, and you were with him in the hot fields bending down over the cotton. When John Henry picked up his hammer, you were there on the track, and something died when he had to put it down. Then he sang like he was a motherless child, and you could not help feeling like one too, even if you did have the best mother in the world.
There was a lot more. You were side by side with him, marching in the bog with the prisoners, or at the battle of Jericho, where you helped make the walls come tumbling down. You were there looking up at Joe Hill beside your bed in the middle of the night, and although the story said it was a dream you knew that it was really about Paul himself and that he was the one who was smiling with his eyes.
He sang some more, including the one about how the world agreed to put an end to war, and somehow he made you think the world was getting smaller, not bigger, and that everyone was a friend or a cousin. There was not another sound in the room when he sang, and I sat there wondering at the miracle of a man who had a heart as big as the world and a voice to go with it.
There was a lot of clapping at the end, and when he said a few words it was about how happy he was to be here and how his Canadian brothers and sisters brought him across the border even though he did not have a passport and, whatever it said in the newspapers, he did not mind being questioned and nobody could break his spirit even if they put him in jail.
There was something about the defiant way he said that last part, about the newspapers and being put in jail, that made me start thinking. The newspapers? He was going to be questioned? What about the policeman? What about the coat and the package?
The little concert was over, and Paul sat down at a table while the other children lined up to shake his hand and have him sign an autograph. My Dad was waving at me to go and stand in the line. For a long minute I didn’t move. It was as if I was standing in the middle of the snow trying to get my bearings after a bumpy toboggan ride down the hill, chilled to the bone and hot inside the head. My ears were ringing, and I thought I could hear a police siren somewhere in the distance.
I jumped up from my chair with a start and ran out of the hall and down the stairs. The cloakroom was warm with the smell of sticky rubber boots and wet wool on the radiators. I looked along the row of coats hanging from the pegs. The newspapers were on an upper shelf where I had left them, and there it was, right beside my own jacket, Paul’s big black coat.
I reached into the outside pocket and took out the brown paper bag. There was something slippery inside and when I picked it up it made a gurgling sound. I pulled out a soft velvet-coloured bag with braided gold letters on the front. I opened the tasseled gold strings and saw a small dark bottle. The paper seal on the cap was broken, the bottle was half empty, and there was a sour smell that made my head spin.
There was no time to explain anything. I ran down the corridor to the washroom and emptied the bottle into the toilet. Then I pulled open the frosted window and dropped it out and heard it crash on the bricks below. Then I ripped up the paper bag and put it in the garbage. I washed my hands with soap, wiped them on the purple bag and went back upstairs.
The line of children was still inching its way up to Paul, and I joined the end of it. My Dad waved his approval. When my turn came, Paul stood up to shake my hand and looked right at me with total concentration and said two words, “Thank you”. Then he signed a piece of paper and handed it to me, “To my friend, my little bodyguard, from your friend, Paul”.
This all happened many years ago, but I have not forgotten a single thing. For some reason, I can’t explain why, I never told anyone what happened that day, not even my father.
On winter weekends when it is too cold to go outside, we like to put on the old 78s and turn up the volume on the record player and listen to Paul’s deep voice fill the house. My father sits there on the couch, clenching his fists in a militant way. My own son plays on the floor with his marbles, quietly taking it all in. When the music is finished, we put the records back in the cardboard album with the autograph pasted in the front, and my son puts his collection of marbles away in an old purple bag.
