Some Great Thing

  Helen gave her first name only.

  “Helen,” thundered the managing editor, “is a fine British cognomen.”

  “No it’s not, sir,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Helen is not a cognomen. A cognomen is a surname, sir. And Helen is my Christian name.”

  “Very good, Miss. Very good. Have a doughnut!” The managing editor disappeared.

  A young man about eighteen years old came up with a fresh tray of doughnuts. “Take one,” he said. “Take two.” He winked at Helen. “So you’re pretty smart, eh? That’s good. Don’t drop out of school like I did.”

  Helen was scandalized. “You dropped out of school?”

  “Had to. I needed a job.”

  “My dad had to do that too, but I didn’t know it was still going on.”

  “It sure is. But you stay in school, okay?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Helen said.

  The doughnut man’s brow furrowed. He obviously didn’t know the word ‘patronize.’

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I’m the copy boy.”

  “Coffee boy?”

  “Copy boy! I handle news copy from all over the world. I sort it out, take it to editors. I get to read it too.”

  “So you know the news before the rest of us?” Helen asked.

  “You bet.”

  “So what happened in Europe today?”

  The copy boy’s mouth fell open.

  Helen decided the young man wasn’t too bright. But out of politeness, she asked his name.

  “Chuck Maxwell. Look for my byline. I’m gonna be a reporter soon.”

  “A reporter?” Helen said. “Don’t you have to be real old for that?”

  “Nope. Reporting takes energy. Lots of it. It’s a young man’s game.”

  That, as far as Helen was concerned, was the only credible thing Chuck Maxwell had said.

  Helen Savoie became a news addict. She read The Herald daily. She read The Toronto Times. She read American papers and, studying languages at university, began reading Spanish and French newspapers. She read magazines in all three languages. She developed an extraordinary knowledge of world affairs. She wanted to become a journalist. She felt that writing for a newspaper would allow her to speak her thoughts, to participate in public life and to exercise influence. She would have liked to have started at a top newspaper such as The Washington Post, or at least at a prestigious Canadian paper such as The Toronto Times, but they never responded to her letters and resumés. So, in 1975, at age twenty-four, after finishing an undergraduate degree in modern languages and travelling for two years in Europe, Helen Savoie lowered her professional sights to take a job at a starting salary of $170 a week at The Winnipeg Herald.

  “Oh yeah, hi kid,” Chuck Maxwell said when Helen identified herself. But she could see that Chuck didn’t remember meeting her years earlier. Helen quickly learned that Chuck couldn’t spell or write. He also knew very little about the news.

  The Pantages bar was underground on the north side of Portage Avenue. Arriving before Helen Savoie, Mahatma Grafton ordered a tonic water and crushed the lime slice between his fingers, stirring the pulpy citrus bits into the drink. He hadn’t spoken to Helen today. He’d been busy and Helen had been out of the office. But he was curious about Helen’s secretive phone call. This morning, Mahatma had looked at the murder story he’d written the day before. It carried everything he wrote and one other small detail. He wondered where the extra detail had come from. No byline. That meant something was wrong. Somebody was unhappy with him.

  “Hi!” Helen Savoie slid into a seat opposite Mahatma. “Did you see the extra detail in your murder story? The age of the victim’s mother?” When Mahatma nodded, she added, “I put that in. I got the whole story, more or less what you got, with the age being about the only detail you didn’t have.”

  Mahatma put down his drink. “They sent you out to do the story?”

  “That’s right.”

  “After I did it?”

  “That’s right. It’s called double coverage. If I had come back with stuff you missed, then they could have said you weren’t doing your job.”

  “So you saved my job,” Mahatma said.

  “You would have done the same thing, in my place.”

  Mahatma paused to take that in. “Why’re they after me?”

  “You embarrassed them on that Polonia Park stuff.”

  “I thought I straightened it all out with them.”

  “Fat chance. Betts really holds a grudge.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Mahatma said.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “We work together, right?”

  Sandra Paquette had a head full of knowledge. Mahatma went to see her in the mayor’s office to ask about the Franco-Manitoban situation. He wanted to break a scoop about language negotiations and he thought Sandra might know a few things. As it turned out, she wasn’t able to tell Mahatma much. Sitting in her office, they talked about Mahatma’s suspension and about the troubles he had had when trying to write about the mayor’s U.S. border troubles. They talked about Jake Corbett and joked about the time Melvyn Hill had him arrested. Sandra laughed, remembering the event; Mahatma found her mood uplifting. On a whim, he invited her home for dinner.

  “My old man’s a good cook,” Mahatma said.

  “Great,” Sandra said. “I’d love to meet him.”

  When they were seated at dinner, Ben asked Sandra, “So you work for the mayor, do you?”

  “I’m his executive assistant.”

  “The mayor’s an old friend of mine,” Ben said. “I dropped by his office a few years ago; we were going to go say hello to a friend.”

  “I remember,” Sandra said. “You were going to look up a retired railway porter. A man named Carson, I believe, on Annabella Street. I remember you and the mayor joking about him being somewhat corpulent.”

  “Fat,” Ben said. “We called him Fat Harry and we were going to a porters’ reunion with him. But the reunion was a disaster.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Judge Melvyn Hill.”

  “Judge Hill? He used to be a porter?”

  “That was the only job he could get,” Ben said.

  “So what happened at that reunion?” Sandra said.

  “Melvyn handed out his business card and told everybody to call him Judge Hill. Harry got drunk and started picking on him. ‘Hey, boy, shine mah shoes,’ Harry told him. Then they got into pushing at each other. Melvyn was furious. He left early. Harry got so drunk I had to help him home. He started going on about his parents and head taxes and so on.”

  Sandra said, “You mean they were part of that migration before World War One?”

  Ben looked surprised. “Yes. From Oklahoma. They settled on the prairie with a lot of other blacks. But the whites were so afraid they demanded a head tax on Negroes.”

  “Right,” Sandra said. “So blacks stopped coming here.”

  Mahatma was astonished that Sandra knew what he had forgotten years ago. He thought of the many times Ben had tried to cram details into his head.

  Yoyo, who had been to visit Mahatma’s home, had commented one night, walking south on Lipton Street, that the homes seemed vulnerable under the cold, unending sky. Winnipeg’s winters were so cold and miserable that Yoyo felt vulnerable himself. What if the furnace broke down? In subhuman cold that turned water into ice, nature couldn’t be trusted. Yoyo missed Cameroon. In the warm villages to the north, no citizen could freeze. You could lie on a mat outside the door and stay there all night; blankets and coal and gas and oil were superfluous.

  “I will return to my country soon; you must come and see me there,” Yoyo spoke in the night air, under a lamplight, struck to see his own breath wafting out of his mouth. Even when he kept his lips sealed, he could see columns of vapour leaving his nostrils.

  “But not in the hot season,” Mahatma said.

  “No,”
Yoyo said, “not in the hot season. Don’t come in March. Come with the rains. Come in July. Or August. Venez quand vous voulez. Mais venez à tout prix nous voir.”

  Looking out his bedroom window at midnight, Mahatma reflected on Yoyo’s invitation and on the evening he’d just spent talking with Ben and Sandra. He couldn’t sleep. With his lights out and curtains open, he saw the stars. He saw far more than he could usually see in the city. “Star,” his dictionary read, “a self-luminous gaseous celestial body of great mass whose shape is usually spheroidal and whose size may be as small as the earth or larger than the earth’s orbit.” Larger than the earth’s orbit. Burnt out and gone, possibly, thousands of years ago. Gone before his father was born, gone before slavery died, before the Moors took Spain, before Christ lived, before Homer wrote, before Peking man found fire.

  “Go do some great thing,” Ben had told Mahatma, seeing his son onto the train to Toronto seven years ago. “Do something great for humanity.”

  Mahatma hadn’t done anything for anybody. He hadn’t even tried. He had gotten a Master’s degree and learned two languages and returned to Winnipeg to chase the families of murder victims.

  He couldn’t sleep, so he switched on the light. In the closet were boxes, heavy with papers. Junk. Ben’s souvenirs. Mahatma pulled one from a shelf and began thumbing through brochures, handwritten notes and newspaper clippings. A headline caught his eye: Group Demands Explanation over Porter’s Death.

  The Canadian Jewish Congress has demanded an explanation from the Canadian Transcontinental Railway about the death of one of its porters in a Toronto rooming house. Alvin James, 55, a Negro Jew who had worked eight years for the company, died in the Huron Street fire last month.

  A clipping from the same paper, a day or two later:

  Canadian Transcontinental Railway porters were frequently locked inside the Huron Street rooming house in which an employee was killed by fire last month. “They were always locking us in at night,” said one porter who asked not to be identified. “We didn’t like it. Most of us slept elsewhere when we came to Toronto.”

  Another headline: Company Denies Door Was Locked. Subsequent clipping: Company Says Door Locked to Protect Employees. And finally: Fire Commissioner Says Huron Street Home Had Faulty Wiring.

  Mahatma recalled Ben saying years ago that the Rabbi’s death had become a news scandal. When Ben had pushed Mahatma too far—made one too many sermons about black achievers—Mahatma tuned out altogether. At school, he grew interested in chess, math, computer science. By the age of fifteen he wouldn’t read a newspaper. He didn’t watch TV news, didn’t care about Vietnam or civil rights. At university, he lost interest in science and moved over to the humanities, but ignored courses about human rights or blacks.

  Mahatma saw a clipping from 1952: Porter Runs for City Council.

  Ben Grafton, 43, is the first Negro to seek civic office in Winnipeg.

  Running in Ward Three under the CCF banner, the railway porter pledges to fight for better housing for the poor, better job opportunities for minorities, better schooling in the north end…

  Populist Porter May Become Winnipeg’s First Negro Alderman.

  Negro Candidate Loses to Communist John Novak and…

  Mahatma scanned the story:

  Railway porter Ben Grafton came within fifty votes of winning one of the three spots for Ward Three Alderman on City Council last night. He was beaten by communist John Novak and by incumbent Liberals John Alexander and Peter Hlady in yesterday’s civic elections.

  Mahatma scanned other articles, looking for more details on his father. He found nothing. He remembered nothing more. His father had run as a socialist, lost narrowly and not run again. But how had he campaigned while working the trains? Why did he run at all? If Ben were to die tomorrow who could answer Mahatma’s questions? If he were to die tomorrow, how could Mahatma tell his future children who their grandfather had been? After all Ben’s speeches, tracts and tirades, if the old man were to die tomorrow, Mahatma would go to his own grave ignorant about the life of his father.

  The Huckleberry Finn story took less than an hour to research and write, but it generated fifty letters to the editor. It came to Mahatma while he was talking on the phone. The receptionist tapped him on the shoulder. “A Charlene Thompson wishes to see you.” Mahatma swallowed. Charlene Thompson. He hadn’t heard from her since high school. They had dated a few times, but the more she showed an interest in him, the more wary he became. Charlene Thompson was a black activist and her strident behaviour made Mahatma uncomfortable. He didn’t disagree with her ideas—he just didn’t want to be associated with them. Her soapbox arguments reminded him of his father. Still, Ben had made a good point when he’d heard they’d stopped dating. “She made you feel ashamed, didn’t she?” Ben said. “You didn’t like going out with a black girl, having your white friends see you together? Remember that you’re black too, and as long as you reject black people, deep down, you won’t like yourself, either.”

  Mahatma recalled his horror at his father’s perceptiveness. Until high school graduation, he avoided Charlene Thompson. Now he saw her again, walking across the newsroom toward him. She said, “I’ve got a story for you.”

  “Good,” Mahatma said, “shoot.”

  Initially, Mahatma left his pen lying on his notepad. But soon he began writing. The story ran the next day.

  A Winnipeg high school has banned the study of Huckleberry Finn and education officials may strike the American classic from all Manitoba classrooms because of complaints about racist stereotyping.

  Mark Twain’s 1884 novel was removed from Franklin High School when Principal John Butler learned last week that one of his pupils—a 15-year-old girl of Jamaican origin—had cried in class after being made to read aloud a section about the runaway slave character “Nigger Jim.”

  The girl’s mother complained to Minorities of Manitoba President Charlene Thompson, who in turn contacted the principal and the provincial Department of Education.

  “It was hurtful to the girl,” Butler said. “It shouldn’t have happened and won’t happen again.”

  Officials are preparing a report on the matter for Education Minister Renate Midland, who is to announce the fate of Huckleberry Finn next month.

  “‘Nigger Jim’ is simple-minded and superstitious,” Thompson fumed yesterday. “Imagine making a black kid read to her peers about those stereotypes! That book’s no classic. It’s a classic insult to people of colour!”

  The book paints an absurdly optimistic picture of the slave-owning “Miss Watson” by having her set free “Nigger Jim”—who escaped because she planned to sell him for $800—in her will, Thompson complained.

  “They could chain their field niggers and trade them for cattle, but deep in their hearts slave-owners were good people,” she said sarcastically.

  Education Department spokesman Peter Fowler said the province may strike the novel from school reading lists. “It’s great literature, but it may be too sensitive for high school.”

  Fowler pointed out that the novel—about the Mississippi River raft adventures of a rebellious white adolescent and the runaway slave—paints Jim as one of the only good people in the book. “But how do you get that across in the classroom?”

  “Nigger Jim” uses a hairball from an ox’s stomach to predict the future, and claims to know all about devils and witches. In a typical scene early in the novel, “Nigger Jim” is terrified to see Huck, who is thought to have been murdered and dumped in the Mississippi.

  “Doan’ hurt me, don’t!” “Nigger Jim” cries out. “I haint never done no harm to a ghos’. I awluz liked dead people, en done all I could for ’em. You go en git in the river agin, whah you b’longs, en doan’ do nuffn to Ole Jim, ’at ’uz awluz yo’ fren’.”

  The next day, callers swamped The Herald’s switchboard. Don Betts took ten calls in half an hour. He didn’t understand what the fuss was about. So Nigger Jim was big and dumb and superstitious
and kind-hearted. What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that true half the time? Weren’t a lot of blacks like that? The phone rang incessantly. It was Grafton’s day off, so Betts sent Chuck Maxwell out to do a man-in-thestreet opinion survey about Huckleberry Finn.

  Charlene Thompson wouldn’t tell Edward Slade the name of the girl. Nor would the school principal. But he wasn’t discouraged. Franklin High was in a wealthy suburb south of the University of Manitoba. How many fifteen-year-old black girls could possibly be in grade nine there?

  Slade got to the school at lunch hour. He spotted a girl walking alone and asked her. Firmly. With authority in his voice. “Excuse me. I need to reach the girl mentioned in the paper today about the Huckleberry Finn incident. I forgot her name. What was it again?” She was an easy find in an all-white crowd. “Susan? I’m Edward Slade. Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  She put down her sandwich. “Sure.”

  “How about at another table?”

  “Here’s okay,” she said. Pleasant, mature voice. Cute kid. Soft brown skin. Braces. Long braids.

  He had a tape recorder running inside his vest pocket. “I need to know about the Huck Finn incident. What happened, exactly?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m with The Winnipeg Star.”

  Susan’s friends stared at him. One boy tapped Slade’s shoulder. “Why don’t you give her a break, eh?”

  Slade persisted. “All I need to know—”

  “I won’t talk about it,” Susan said. She turned to one of the boys. “Tell him to leave.”

  “You heard her,” a second boy said, pushing Slade. “Stop it.”

  Slade stood up. Someone tripped him and he was knocked to the floor. A man and a woman rushed up. Both were gym teachers. Both were bigger than Slade.

  “He’s a reporter,” one girl announced. “He was bothering Susan.”