I must admit that I have Maritime roots. Up to grade six I lived in NS, at which point my parents moved to B.C. the Beautiful. My childhood was a guilt free existence. It took years to remember the injustices that Amherst's black folk endured.Raymond comes to mind. Here was a 20 year old man sitting in my grade six class. The teacher gave him a special desk at the back, one sent down from the high school. She was unfaillingly polite to him. "Raymond, do you want to take the math test today?" she would ask. Depending on whether his meat-lugging night at the abbatoir was heavy or light, he would give his answer.
Raymond, wearing his sweat-soaked leather jacket, was seated well at the back because he smelled -- also, to keep him separated from the female students, over whom he cast a roving male's eye. His favourite girl was also mine – Mary, a stunningly cute mulatto. Raymond would make 'subtle' comments on her physical charms. Her replies were invariably, "Shut up! You dumb nigger!" I never confided to Raymond my own suicidal affection for her, but I suspect Raymond spotted me trying to look up her dress--the dropped pencil ploy--and respected my leaving the field to him.
One day I left school to discover Reggie, another black student, age 16, sitting on my bike. My entreaties to get off amounted to nothing. Despairing, I prepared to leave for home on foot. We actually thought nothing of walking two miles home in those days. As I walked away, Raymond came around the corner. He assessed the situation immediately. Without saying a word, he went over and cold-cocked Reggie, leaving him in a puddle of fallen bikes. Raymond turned and said, "There you have your bike back." I never had trouble from the older black students again. I later asked him why he came to school at all. He told me, "Because it is warmer than home."
Thinking of Raymond made me think of all the other injustices that he and others faced daily. Negroes were confined to "N****r Heaven", meaning the balconies of threatres. Nor do I remember them eating in local restaurants. It was only when I travelled to the U.S. South that I saw Amherst's black condition writ large. The slums of Birmingham, Alabama and other southern cities in the 60's could have rivalled Soweto's. Later in life, I noticed the similarities between the favelas and our own "N*****r Hill". I can only hope that Mary, Reggie, and especially, Raymond, have had a better life than that meted out to them in Amherst in the my childhood.
