<\/p>\n
We were parked on the street, at a sharp angle to the curb. It was the only street I knew where you could park this way. It was as if you had just pulled into place in front of a wide sand beach with rolling waves. Except this was in the middle of the city in the middle of the winter, a parking meter in front and streetcars clattering up and down the tracks behind us.<\/p>\n
I was sitting in the back seat, waiting for my father and looking out the side window at a pile of snow speckled black from the city smog. It was not as cold as you would think in February, and I was starting to feel overheated in my winter jacket. I watched the sunlight dance in the wet shadows on the sidewalk, and I wondered how long it would take for the sun to melt all the snow and how dirty the puddles would be after that.<\/p>\n
I was daydreaming like this when I became aware of a shadow at the window. A hand in black leather was knocking on the window, right at my ear. When I looked up, I saw a black uniform\u2014 buckles, red trim, white helmet. It was a policeman, one of the kind who wear sunglasses like mirrors on the front of their face and drive motorbikes covered in chrome. He was motioning for me roll down the window.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u2013 Where\u2019s your Dad, son?
\n I didn\u2019t really know, so I didn\u2019t say anything.
\n \u2013\u2013 Did he go inside? Is he coming back soon?<\/p>\n
I nodded silently, watching as he climbed on the running board of our old car. He held onto the roof and peered in at the front seat.<\/p>\n
There was a neatly folded coat there, a long black coat. It belonged to the big man who arrived at our house late last night. From my bedroom I could hear hushed talk about stupid hotels and some fuss about pillows and blankets, so I knew we had a visitor settling down to sleep on the davenport in the front room. This was nothing unusual at our place. Sometimes you wouldn\u2019t hear a thing and you would just find someone in the morning, fully awake and neatly dressed, sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal and raisins and milk just like everyone else.<\/p>\n
The policeman was interested in the coat. He opened the front door of the car and fingered the fine wool and looked closely at the label.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u2013 He must have his friend with him, the policeman said. I\u2019ll leave something for them.<\/p>\n
Then he opened one of the zippered pockets on the front of his leather jacket and produced a small paper bag. He lifted it up and placed it carefully in one of the outside pockets of the coat.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u2013 It\u2019s a surprise, the policeman said, pointing a finger at me and touching his glove to his mouth. Don\u2019t say anything.<\/p>\n
A few minutes later my Dad got in the front seat, and Paul was with him, carrying an armload of newspapers. A few people on the sidewalk stopped and stared. A big black man seemed to be out of place in an expensive suit and a shirt and tie and a silk scarf on a Saturday morning when everyone else was going to the market or the rink or the barber or the library or somewhere else you usually went on Saturday mornings.<\/p>\n
Then we drove through the traffic and Paul looked at the papers and laughed a little, folding one of them open and shrugging as he showed it to my Dad. We bumped along the city streets and I saw we were going past the park with the steep slopes where we sometimes went tobogganing after classes at the red stone hall across the street. I was usually dropped off at the front steps, but this time we drove right past and around the corner. We turned up in a narrow alleyway and stopped in front of a small back door under an iron fire escape.
\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u2013 Standing up, that\u2019s the thing, I heard him say. That\u2019s important. Every day.<\/p>\n
Then Paul put his hand on my shoulder, and I could feel the weight of it right down to my rubber boots. He didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cNegro Singer Enters Canada, Will Be Questioned\u201d.<\/p>\n
I took off my brown corduroy jacket and wool scarf and hung them up in the cloakroom, along with Paul\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s big black coat.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cThank you\u201d. Then he signed a piece of paper and handed it to me, \u201cTo my friend, my little bodyguard, from your friend, Paul\u201d.<\/p>\n
This all happened many years ago, but I have not forgotten a single thing. For some reason, I can\u2019t explain why, I never told anyone what happened that day, not even my father.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Robeson Connection<\/strong>
\nWe were parked on the street, at a sharp angle to the curb. It was the only street I knew where you could park this way. It was as if you had just pulled into place in front of a wide sand beach with rolling waves. Except this was in the middle of the city in the middle of the winter, a parking meter in front and streetcars clattering up and down the tracks behind us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3123,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/3123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}