Street of Riches Read online

  Whereupon, my oldest brother, Robert, arrived home one day bubbling with excitement. Like Horace, the Guilberts' firstborn, he worked in Her Majesty's service, aboard the mail car on the Winnipeg-Edmonton run. He was full of life and exuberance. Madame Guilbert was constantly drawing the contrast between our Robert and her Horace, a lad with so keen an eye to the future, who saved his money and never touched a drop of Scotch.

  "I've found the very roomer you need" Robert told Maman. "Just perfect!"

  "Really?"

  'Tes, indeed."

  "He doesn't drink?"

  "Not a drop."

  "Doesn't smoke?"

  "Just one cigar at Christmas."

  "Dear me!" exclaimed Maman, who paled to find fate thus taking her at her own words.

  "Better still," added Robert, "this chap will occupy his room here only a day or two each week, but he'll pay for it in full...."

  "And the rest of the time . . . where will he be?" Maman asked.

  "Now here, now there," Robert replied, laughing at Maman's expression. "Sometimes in Vancouver ... or Edmonton ... But don't worry; he is a most honorable employee of the Canadian Pacific."

  "Therefore ... quite presentable?"

  "The looks of a president . . . and devout as well," said Robert.

  "A president and devout! What's his name ?"

  "Jackson."

  "English?"

  "He is English-speaking, all right," Robert replied. . . . "But, truth to tell—and here's the one small shadow on the picture, if I may put it that way—Jackson is a Negro."

  "A Negro! No, indeed! Never in the world!"

  My mother had cast a glance toward the house next door. And it was so much as though she had said aloud "Whatever would Madame Guilbert think of it!" that we all deliberately and gravely looked in the same direction.

  Nonetheless, my mother reconciled herself to the idea; basically, I think, her curiosity was the strongest of her feelings. Heavens, she was as curious, almost, as Madame Guilbert! Not long after, I recall, there came a brilliant June day, and all of us were stationed at the windows—way up in the attic—to see our Negro arrive.

  A little earlier, Maman had murmured, "All the same, I'd almost rather he had first arrived at night!"

  In broad daylight, along our tiny and little-frequented street, and with the sun shining bright, the fact is that this large, handsome black man, clad wholly in black and equipped with his little porter's satchel, was highly conspicuous.

  He looked happy as he drew up in front of our house; at a glance he took in the three small apple trees in bloom, the wide porch with its row of rocking chairs, the fresh look of the paint, and even my diminutive countenance staring down at him. For my benefit he rolled round the incredible whites of his eyes. I rushed headlong downstairs to see how Maman would welcome the Negro. And Maman, in her embarrassment, perhaps, at extending a Negro a proper greeting, stretched out her hand, then half withdrew it, while making a sort of reverential bow and saying to him, "Welcome, Mr. Jackson, from C.P.R., n'est-ce pas?"

  Then she showed him to his room. A little later she came back downstairs: at last it was over with—our Negro was under our roof. We could consider and attend to other matters, as my mother put it. Yet during the whole livelong day, the Negro up there seemingly did not budge. This silence on his part constantly forced him back upon our attention. "Perhaps he's asleep..." one of us would suggest. Or, again, "He's reading his Bible. . . ." With a sigh, Agnfcs said, "He's lonely . . . maybe. . . ." My mother frowned. "Still and all, we can't urge him this soon to come down into the kitchen " Occasionally my mother would take a look through a window facing their house to see what was going on at the Guilberts'. There, also, only silence.

  "I do wish she'd come over!" Maman exclaimed. "I'm certain that she saw our Negro arrive, and that she's at her window wondering who he can be."

  And, indeed, at about four o'clock, Madame Guilbert sedately—she would don her hat whether she were merely dropping across the field between us or were on her way to church -came to get the news. Once installed in a chair, she took her usual circuitous path toward satisfying her curiosity, carefully avoiding as ill-bred any direct question.

  "So?" she remarked.

  Maman knew how to keep her dangling. "My my," said she, "how hot it is already! And only the eighteenth of June! . .."

  "It surely is hot," agreed Madame Guilbert. "And speaking of that, haven't your summer guests begun to arrive? I thought I saw someone go into your house with a small suitcase. ... I was just hanging some curtains...."

  "Yes, a guest of a sort," said Maman. "I made up my mind to take a lodger."

  "Oh! So that's it! You know," Madame Guilbert explained, "I must have had the sun in my eyes . .. when that person . . . your lodger, I mean . . . turned in at the end of the street. . . . For a moment I thought I saw a Negro."

  "Perhaps the sun was in your eyes," said my mother politely, "but you saw correctly all the same: it was, indeed, a Negro." And then Maman took the initiative; comfortably she settled into a wholly new role. "I could have rented my room a hundred . . . two hundred times to some white person," said my mother. "There's no lack of whites in these parts But that's just it; I realized that it was more humane, more Christian—if you will—to take this poor Negro whom certain persons—you know what I mean—would refuse to treat like one of their own kind. For indeed—yes or no—" Maman asked, "has a Negro a soul?"

  At first overwhelmed, Madame Guilbert finally regained her capacity to give tit for tat.

  "Tsk, tsk ..." she indicated her incredulity. "Are you going to try to make me believe that you have installed a black person in our midst out of philanthropy?"

  "No . . . maybe not . . ." said my mother with a gracious smile. "But I must admit it, Madame Guilbert: now that I have a Negro, I wish I had accepted him from the outset out of pure philanthropy, as you put it, so deeply am I aware that I acted as I ought "

  For the moment, Madame Guilbert gave every indication of looking upon my mother with benevolence. Then, putting her hat back on her head, she remarked offhandedly, as though without the least ulterior motive, "True enough ... it must be a paying proposition to have a roomer one or two days a week ... but who will pay you for all seven, I presume!"

  Maman, who, in point of fact, had taken the Negro only to ease our circumstances a little, continued smiling, thoroughly pleased with herself. And she remarked for our benefit, "That a good deed should bear fruit—what is so astounding about that? It's no more than natural."

  Dear Negro! He had the most generous soul in the world, and it was indeed thanks to him that, without their causing us too much suffering, we survived serious money troubles that summer, which turned out hot, sluggish, and sleepy, as summer always should be.

  On the evening of his second stay with us, the Negro came down from his room. He reached the bottom of the stairs, and, with his face close against the screen door, he inquired in his deep voice—we were all sitting on the porch, getting a breath of air—whether he might join us. He said that on his Vancouver train the heat had been appalling, and all he wanted was to sit on the stoop. Mother assigned him to a chair. Then from his pocket the Negro extracted the first of the many gifts he was to offer us. It was a pair of white gloves; he presented them to Agn&s, the shyest and the gentlest of my sisters. We were all a trifle embarrassed; but, then, not to accept this first gift from our Negro would have hurt him too much. And besides, Agnbs had every intention of keeping the gloves.

  Thus it went. Each time he stayed with us, our Negro never failed to come take his place on the porch. My mother had planted stock all round, and its flowers exhaled their fullest scent at night. Through the Eau de Cologne and cheap powder of which he reeked, the Negro must have gathered a few breaths of this more delicate perfume from the living blossoms. On such evenings, rolling his big eyes, his thumbs stuck in his vest pockets, he would say happily, "Smell so goo-ood!"

  He would add, "It's fine not to be
rollin' across Canada."

  And he would pull out of his pocket a white silk scarf for my father, then white silk stockings, for Agnfes again . . . almost always something white. As for me, I had become his French teacher. He would point out some object for me—a tree, a house, a chair. I would say arbre, maison, chaise. . . . Then the Negro would thrust his hand in his pocket and bring out a ten-cent piece which he would slip into the slot of my penny bank. I was paid for each three words. I had glimpses of the fortune I would make teaching French.

  Meanwhile, the Guilberts were having serious money trouble. Monsieur Guilbert had retired because of age; the large house, so similar to our own, was mortgaged. The children who were still at school required heavy expenditures. When she realized how distracted her neighbor was, my mother tried to help without wounding Madame Guilbert's pride. One day she sent her a quantity of hare, of which she claimed to have far too great a supply, and on another occasion, when we had received a dozen chickens from one of my country uncles, Ma man insisted upon Madame Guilbert's accepting half of them, assuring her that our family could not eat them quickly enough, that they would spoil. And my father no longer reviled Monsieur Guilbert as a sellout to the Borden government or called him an old jackass, but only an impoverished fool.

  One day my mother suggested to her neighbor, "Why wouldn't you take in a lodger yourself, Madame Guilbert? There's nothing dishonorable about it "

  "Yes, I've thought of it," sighed Madame Guilbert, "but to bring a stranger into our homes, to mingle with our growing boys and young girls—a strange person—is a serious business, as you know...."

  "Yes, it's serious," Maman agreed, "but strangers are rarely "as strange as one might think "

  "I put an advertisement in the paper," admitted Madame Guilbert. "There was no response. . . . Times are hard, you know . . . roomers are scarce. . . . Our little street isn't very well known. ."

  Then she asked, "All in all, you're pleased with your Negro?"

  "Pleased? I couldn't be more pleased! Just imagine, Madame Guilbert, he makes his own bed!"

  "That's easily understood," Madame Guilbert remarked with some asperity. "A porter! A man who makes up other people's beds! It would be the last straw—don't you think ?—if he didn't make his own!"

  "Yes, but, search as I will, I can't find a thing to put to rights in his room," said my mother; "not even a necktie to pick up, or a pair of socks ... I assure you. Madame Guilbert, Negroes seem to me the neatest and cleanest men in the world "

  "About their persons as well?" asked Madame Guilbert, with a slight tightening of her nostrils.

  My mother laughed. "I'm afraid that's his one fault. He's forever taking baths. He uses up every bit of our hot water "

  "But does he keep his place?"

  "Keep his place? What do you mean?" Maman exclaimed. "Certainly he keeps his place . . . just as each of us, Madame Guilbert, has his station in life—you'll agree ?—not as rich as some . . . not as poor as others.. . ."

  In those days on Rue Deschambault we lived as though we were in the country. But along Rue Desmeurons, where our street ended, and which itself was none too built up, a yellow trolley car passed by every fifteen minutes. It discharged very few passengers for Deschambault: my father most days at about six, returning from his office; or else Horace and my brother Robert, who returned together on Thursdays from their travels; and our Negro, of course, who always arrived on Fridays. But on a certain Friday it was not a single Negro who stepped down from the tram; there were two of them, clad alike in black, each with his little bag. One of the Negroes, ours, stopped at our gate; the other, after waving his hand at his companion and calling out, "So long, Buddy!" went on to the Guilberts', whistling as he walked.

  It was my mother's turn to be on pins and needles; and since Madame Guilbert did not appear, she found herself obliged to go over for the news.

  "Yes, indeed," Madame Guilbert told her, "my Horace has known this Negro a long while; they travel on the same train.

  He's a steady, quiet Negro, very well-bred "

  "Like mine, exactly," said Maman.

  "After all, a C.P.R. employee, just like our sons," continued Madame Guilbert.

  But my mother was counting on too easy a triumph, and Madame Guilbert reminded her: "The moment there was already one Negro on our street ... it wasn't too serious a matter to bring in another. Once the example had been set! ..."

  Mother came home a trifle put out. "Anyway," she assured us, "our Negro is infinitely superior to Madame Guilbert's; hers is less well-built, less erect in his bearing " And, as though to establish for good her neighbor's bad faith, Maman prophesied: "You'll see that now Madame Guilbert is going to claim she has a better Negro than ours! You'll see!"

  Which is exactly what happened.

  However, without the least shadow of doubt, the Guilbert's Negro was the less dark in color of the two. And it was precisely this—can you believe it?—that gave Madame Guilbert ground for her pride, since she would observe, "I really believe that he's no more than a mulatto!"

  In the meantime our Negro gave us lessons in kindness. For hours on end in the evening he would hold upon his large outstretched hands skeins of wool which Maman wound into balls. Agnis wore her white gloves even while sitting on the porch.

  Maman crunched candies brought from Vancouver. My penny bank had been filled, emptied, and was in process of being filled again. They say I dogged our Negro's every footstep, penny bank in hand—but I think that was an exaggeration. In the first place, if the Negro gave me the large price of ten cents per lesson, it was because my bank was made in the style of the money containers used by trolley conductors, and allowed only dimes to pass through its slot. Besides, it could not be opened as long as it was not full. In any case, Maman was very wrong to reproach me, for when my bank was again full, she again borrowed from me all its contents—five dollars. I was the ant of the fable, save that from time to time I came to the assistance of the grasshopper. Despite these repeated loans, I ever labored to refill my bank with an eye to a purchase of my own. And then it was that my sister Odette started to be my serious competitor ... so serious that she succeeded in distracting the Negro completely from his French lessons.

  She was later to become a nun; she detested men and, before renouncing the world and herself, she had the soul of a revolutionist. The idea of injustice in the world made her tighten her lips; merely having read in a newspaper that a poor tramp had been found shivering with cold in a park aroused in Odette a smoldering anger against the whole city. Her thin-drawn nostrils were constantly pulsing with indignation. Assuredly she was not made for the world; she was lovely to look at and, having at last given up her tatting, she was constantly playing a certain one of Rachmaninoff's preludes. There was a portion of this piece, in vibrant chords, that she said gave expression to the rebellion of the wretches in Siberia. I was crazy about this rebellion in music. Wherever I might be, under the apple trees or farther off at play with my little Gauthier friends, the moment I heard the rumble of the march toward Siberia, I left everything, rushed into the parlor, and squatted on the rug near the piano. I watched Odette's swelling nostrils, her tight-drawn lips. I would ask, "The rebellion's coming?" Without stopping or even looking at me, Odette would give me a nod of affirmation; then with a movement of her hips she would push the piano bench back a little so as to have a longer reach for the terrible moments to come.

  Our Negro must also have felt the spell of this music. He came down the stairs gently, very gently. He stopped at about the eighth step, on the turn; he sat down; between the slats of the banister he could catch a glimpse of Odette, who in those days had a mass of very fine blonde hair which her movements at the piano and her agitation scattered over her forehead and down her neck in golden strands. One evening Odette lifted her head; she saw the Negro, his face between the bars of the stairway. Concluding, perhaps with truth and certainly with remorse, that she had kept him shut away from her music just as were the exiles
of her prelude from the kingdom of the czars, my sister, pointing to an armchair, with the utmost graciousness invited the Negro into the parlor. And in his honor she played Rachmaninoff's prelude all over again, from the beginning.

  It was so clearly understood among us that Odette had no inclination toward young men, that she was not cut out for them, that no one thought of being astonished at seeing her with the Negro. Moreover, he treated her with a respect that made appear insignificant the gallantries and compliments of bachelors with an eye to marriage. And Odette, resolved as she was upon renunciation, seemed greatly to like being the object of such great concern. In the evening, after the music, she and the Negro would walk together in front of the house. They talked about Africa. Doubtless in the hope of pleasing my sister, our Negro tried to bring back old memories, vaguely handed down in the Jackson family, of slaves on the auction block, of raids by rapacious men, of poor black folk taken by surprise in their straw-hut villages.

  "Yes . . . Miss ... all that must have happened once upon a time . . " the Negro would say, shortening his stride to keep in step with Odette.

  On these same evenings, so soft, so perfumed—for in those days along Rue Deschambault there were untouched stands of clover and wild hay, which a man sent by the city would cut down with a scythe only at summer's end—on these evenings which were summer itself, my mother would often "fetch" Madame Guilbert for a little walk. The two women strolled back and forth along the short length of road in front of Madame Gilbert's house. And everything went well enough between them, except when they chanced to speak of their Negroes; they were relentlessly determined to settle which of them had the better of the two.

  "Mine," Maman would say, "has refinement, I assure you, and tact."

  The Two Negroes n

  "However that may be, mine has enough of those qualities," Madame Guilbert would reply, "to know his place and stay there."

  "Do you mean by that, Madame Guilbert," my mother would ask, "that you have the heart to condemn your poor Negro to remain in his room during this heat? . . . People who suffer so much from the heat! ... and are so sensitive at heart! ..."