Dominoes at the Crossroads Page 2

  IV. Futures

  Kellough’s notion of the future is informed by the city’s Black history. The future is encoded in the past, and in certain events that decide our lives for us. One such event was the 1734 burning of the city, attributed to the enslaved woman Marie-Joseph Angélique. Born into bondage in Portugal, Angélique is an atypical progenitor. Even though she was a mother of three children, including twins, she was an arsonist and a murderess. Her act, one that prominent 20th and 21st century scholars, including Dr. Afua Cooper, believed to be deliberate, was one of massive destruction. The fire that she lit, by placing hot coals in the roof beams of the de Francheville home on the rue St-Paul, then blowing on them, destroyed a large portion of the port of Montréal, which was later known as the Old Port, and is now known as Pirates’ Town, an underwater amusement park. She destroyed the city, but her act forced the citizens to reimagine and rebuild. That history-altering act was carried out by a member of a population that was consistently marginalized. It is telling that today, with much of Old Montréal submerged, her story is prominent, and she is venerated as an ancestor of Milieu.13

  NOTES

  1La question ordinaire et extraordinaire: The question, which was a torture in the Middle-Ages in France, was a way of discovering the truth. It was often combined with a water treatment, or with les brodequins, the boots. The ordinary question involved the application of the torture, and the extraordinary question saw its intensification. In 1734 in the port of Montréal, the enslaved woman Marie-Joseph Angélique was submitted to the question. The boots were applied to her legs by formerly enslaved Martiniquais Mathieu Léveillé (1709-1743), who was brought to New France to serve as Angélique’s executioner. She confessed to setting her mistress’s house on fire, but even when the extraordinary question was applied, she refused to reveal her accomplice, rumored to have been her (White) lover, Claude Thibault, who fled New France following the arson.

  2Rockhead’s Paradise: Famed jazz venue in the Little Burgundy District of Montréal named after its proprietor, Jamaican-born Rufus Rockhead.

  3Mathieu Da Costa (1589-1619) was a translator, and the first free Black person to land in Canada. He traveled with Samuel de Champlain.

  4Radio-Canada was the Francophone side of Canada’s national broadcaster. The broadcaster’s public funding was cut, and it was dismantled in the first half of the 21st century. Its reestablishment was undertaken by Antillean Marxists, and it became the familiar Voix Libre International.

  5White Flight A phenomenon that originated in the United States in the 1950s, when people of various European ancestries migrated en masse from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.

  6Excerpt from an unfinished story begun by Kellough in 2017-18. Concordia University Records Management and Archives (Kell-1074-02-128).

  7Kellough, Kaie. “Montréal: Slavery, Revolt, and the Future.” Interview with Dr. Nalini Mohabir and Dr. Ronald Cummings, in Canadian Journal of Caribbean and Diaspora Studies 48.4.4 (2017): p. 516-539.

  8Kellough, Kaie. Accordéon. ARP Books (2016).

  9The correspondence in question was drawn from Kellough’s email. Concordia University Records Management and Archives (Kell-1074-02-146).

  10Kellough, Kaie. Dominoes at the Crossroads. Véhicule Press (2019), p. 19.

  11Through 2017/18, in response to a tightening of US immigration policy, thousands of undocumented migrants crossed into Québec on foot. 4,000 slept on military cots at the Olympic Stadium. Kellough references these migrants in Magnetic Equator, and predicts that they will one day “inherit the city.” On reaching the border, some migrants were met by armed vigilantes, affiliates of a group of disenfranchised Whites calling themselves La Meute (The Wolfpack), who wore shirts printed with the image of a wolf.

  12Name Change: The first Muslim mayor of Milieu (the city was then known as Lamontagne), Djamila Aboutair (2100- ), was responsible for the name change. Aboutair was a descendent of the French and Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. Aboutair noted, on several occasions, that the name Milieu was chosen in reference to Derrida’s work.

  13In “Montréal: Slavery, Revolt, and the Future,” Kellough, Cummings, and Mohabir note that the fiercest opponents of imperialism and slavery in the Caribbean, those who led rebellions, who marooned, who advocated tirelessly for freedom, are venerated as national heroes in their respective countries. They argue that those same honors should be paid to Marie-Joseph Angélique.

  Porcelain Nubians

  Saturdays my grandfather would take me to the St-Michel Flea Market. Though I haven’t been there in decades, I remember its mingled odor of dust, petroleum jelly, sweat, mold, and even after smoking was banned indoors, how its air was weighted with old tobacco. I imagined that its walls breathed nicotine and tar, and the building that housed the market, built in the 1940s or 50s like so much of St-Michel, just like the house we lived in, had asbestos in the walls and was one immense, ailing lung. The merchants, many old, bent Québécois men and women—some with drooping yellowed moustaches like retired Prussian generals—would take every opportunity to slip outside and smoke a cigarette, and the smoke would blow inside with the winter air when the door opened. The merchants always showed a mixture of suspicion and warmth when my grandfather greeted them. They showed respect because he was old and his manners were impeccable, but they withheld some basic intimacy because of his distance from them. To them, no matter how long he lived here, he was from ailleurs, and his accent always confirmed this.

  St-Michel itself, even though it was on the metro line, the blue line, the narrow blue streak over the mountain and into the east, was like a little bustling elsewhere within the city. It was an elsewhere where Arab men squatted on the sidewalk outside a café, holding saucers on which they perched tiny cups of espresso, while smoking cigarettes and watching the shoppers on Jean-Talon Street. It was an elsewhere where short Central American women balanced groceries on their heads. It was zigzagging power lines and housing jumbled without a thought toward zoning or consistency. It was a concrete high-rise next to a single-level shoebox. It was Haitian teenagers laughing on the sidewalk and Italian seniors staring at them out of lace curtained windows. It was a sloping floor and no soundproofing, it was the lingering question of the rent cheque, and it was the unceasing bustle to and from metro St-Michel, the queues of Black and Brown people on St-Michel Boulevard waiting for another bus heading farther east. It was the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the metro, in their orthopedic shoes and black stockings, holding Awake! and Watchtower, with their coats buttoned against each blast of cold air when the doors swung open, it was sometimes the extremes of being saved, or of being ensnared. It was the bustle and the pressure that rose from the Crémazie expressway in the mornings and rattled the entire borough awake. It seemed like elsewhere, but it was here, the easternmost stop on the blue line, tucked in next to Villeray, whose property values were rising.

  My grandfather was always on the lookout for two things: antique table radios and landscape paintings. He had assembled a collection of old radios in the basement, with names like Grundig, Brando, and Silvertone, radios he’d restored. I used to turn out the lights and tune them all to the static between channels, then pretend I was either adrift on a raft on the ocean or shuttling through the cosmos. He also loved generic landscapes, with tall pines set back from winding streams, mountains in the distance, or lakes bordered by rocky shores atop which evergreens narrowed to the sky. He dusted and repainted the frames and hung the landscapes throughout the house. I would stare into them, into the peacefulness and space that they offered, and I always thought of how different they were from the busy neighborhood framed by our windows. In those paintings I saw distances that I wanted to enter to leave the neighborhood behind. At night I might dream myself standing in a clearing that I had observed in a painting, but I would be a different version of myself, always exhausted from having just run, always out of breath, always glancing over my shoulder w
orried that the mastiffs might be after me, and men a short distance behind them, yet staring ahead toward the river and the skirts of the evergreens that swayed in the night wind, and I knew that only a little farther and I might enter the future, where I could stop running. I would wake up in my room in St-Michel, listening to the voices and cars out the window, and the smell of the flea market hovering in the room.

  My grandfather smelled much sweeter than the marché. There was something elemental about its smell, just like there was about him. He had always been present, as far as I, and even my parents, could remember. He remembered Ayiti in ways that they couldn’t. He remembered a more hopeful and peaceful time, before Montréal loomed on the earth’s clouded curve. He also remembered his parents, who had told him about their parents, whose own parents might have stood with Dessalines atop a citadel, biting down on a lead musket ball to stave off hunger and thirst, as they prepared to repel a French ambush, and their parents before them who might have been bound in iron and shipped across from Ghana, or Benin.

  After my grandfather died, I stayed away from the Marché aux Puces. It reminded me of an older St-Michel, one that I didn’t miss, one that didn’t have 400,000-dollar condominiums being built, one in which the modest single family houses along 21st, 22nd, 23rd avenue weren’t being bought by young couples, their interiors painted white, their linoleum replaced with cool tile or floating laminate, and high wooden fences erected around their backyards. In my remembered St-Michel, bidding wars weren’t erupting over triplexes, tenants weren’t being renovicted, and duplexes weren’t being converted into townhouses. They were leaking, growing mold, as their landlords did little for their monthly cheques. As the neighborhood makeover progressed it appeared inevitable, as if there had never been a doubt that someday St-Michel would take off. It was decried as gentrification. Tenant advocacy groups were convened and people spoke out in the local papers. I didn’t care. I was relieved to see the old neighborhood change.

  My grandfather used to say that nothing is inevitable until it happens. I wondered about the inevitable things he saw, like the rise and fall of dictators or the flight and eventual landing of families on other sides of an ocean, or the shift of one language into another, the new one still retaining inflections of the old, such as the curling of a W around the edges of an R, the new shapes a tongue can never quite form. These things are bigger than us, and some are so vast that they sweep nations, or generations into that disordered library called history.

  The only thing my grandfather framed and hung that wasn’t a landscape was a short article he clipped from the Globe and Mail. I don’t know how he came across the article because it was in English, which he hardly spoke, but there it was, and after he died it wound up in a box jumbled among his landscapes. I took it. The article was about an auction held at the Ritz-Carlton in the downtown’s Golden Square Mile. The Montréal Ritz was the original, the first one in the world to bear the Ritz-Carlton name, and apparently that was worth conserving. It was 2008, the Ritz’s elegance had faded enough that 100 million dollars in updates were planned. But before it was to be renovated, it would hold an auction. The article quoted one of the Ritz managers, discussing the items up for auction: genuine silver serving platters, crystal wineglasses, tablecloths, curtains, other Ritz memorabilia that didn’t seem like it would be worth much, but then I thought of the flea market and the old adage about trash and treasure. The interview noted, curiously:

  According to auctioneer Iégor de Saint Hippolyte of the Iégor Auction House, the pieces involved in the auction have more sentimental interest than value as antiques, except for a pair of statues of Black Nubian slaves, made in Venice between 1850 and 1880, that flanked the hotel’s original elevator in 1912. They fetched $15,000 on Wednesday night.

  An ice bucket with the Ritz logo went for $150, a wooden desk for $1,000 and a gilded mirror from the restaurant sold for $800.

  None of the hotel’s lobby furniture or art was on offer.

  Silver-haired Louise Leclerc said she could not imagine summer in Montreal without lunches in the garden with her life-long friends.

  –Heather Sokoloff, Montréal,

  Special to the Globe and Mail, June 27th, 2008

  The word “fetched” stuck with me. The slaves fetched the money, and after all of the years during which they had been attentive to the guests and the décor of the Ritz, they were sold, and they were required to fetch a large sum for others, and their fetching was noted with approval. Perhaps that was a sign of social progress, that the value they fetched was noted in a national newspaper. Whose 15,000 dollars had those slaves fetched? Where were they now, and into whose collection were they going?

  The article was not accompanied by a photo of the Nubian figures, and I wondered whether the writer was using that ethnicity accurately. How would she, or the auctioneer, know that the figures were Nubians? Had they asked the figures where they were from? And if they had been in North America, via Venice, since the 1850s, might they not identify more strongly with the Black cultures of North America? I was shocked that the Ritz-Carlton had continued to practice slavery into the 21st century. It hadn’t attempted to conceal this. It hadn’t attempted to, say, make the figures invisible by relegating them to the bowels of the hotel, or to washing dishes in the rear of the kitchen. During working hours they were visible. They stood by the elevators and perhaps each wore a red fez cocked just so, with black skin gleaming beneath, and black tight curls close cut, and they may have stood on sizeable blocks of—ceramic?—and their hands held up large planters in which the Ritz had planted dwarf palms. Or, perhaps they each leaned back on either side of the elevators and held out bamboo fans to cool the weary tourists. As the figures cooled the tourists, they completed the image of old-world ease, and they turned time backward, toward a past in which a body might belong to another.

  After hours, when the guests stopped coming and going, and the bellboys stood outside smoking on Sherbrooke Street, the Nubian figures put down their fans, or the dwarf palms whose fronds they peered between, and strolled through the lobby with its marble floor and wood paneling. Their feet, accustomed to standing on stone, eased into the carpet in the empty dining room. They sank into lavishly upholstered chairs in the rear, in darkness, with only the lights of Sherbrooke Street reflected in the windows, and they shared a spliff.

  “There are no more adventures left for people like us. Our time is passed, even though it continues.”

  “The past continuous is a verb tense that describes actions that began in the past and that are continuing now. I suppose a person contemplates life in the past continuous.”

  “I think that’s the only tense for the contemplation of a life.”

  “If so, then we carry the past into the present, and it stays relevant.”

  “I don’t know. I feel we’ve reached a stationary point, whereas we used to move from city to city, we used to be coveted, now we’re tucked in a corner of the hotel, and we’ve been here since 1912.”

  “Yes, things used to move faster, and while we were considered servants, decorative pieces, there was always prestige. Now it seems that we’re afterthoughts.”

  “Afterthoughts is a euphemism. I think you mean relics.”

  “Relic: A surviving memorial of something past.”

  “Yes. I can stomach being a relic without being subjected to ridicule. We’re an embarrassment—even to White people. When they see us they cringe, yet they don’t have any idea where we’ve been.”

  “I think they know where we’ve been, but they don’t think anything of it.”

  “They don’t think.”

  “They think, but they don’t think about us.”

  “The looks we get from the Black and Brown people who stay here are no better.”

  “The ones who work here, at least, show us some respect.”

  “Pity or respect?”

  “Do you remember when we first landed in Venice?”

  I moved out of St-Mic
hel in my twenties, into a triplex my grandfather owned. He had the foresight to buy in the 1980s, a building built in the same year the Ritz-Carlton was established, in 1912. It had dark wood paneling, plaster moldings and high ceilings. The floorboards were narrow and long, stained a lustrous amber. The foundation was stone and mortar, solid, not the poured concrete that later became standard. The neighborhood was not prestigious when he bought, but he loved the building, he was proud to own it, and he kept it up. When he died he left it to me. Suddenly I was no longer a tenant, but instead the undeserving owner and landlord of my building. He left my parents a larger one, a five-plex built in the same era.

  A wave of real estate activity washed over the Plateau before any other borough, and once it receded, the value of the triplex, which had a sizeable backyard and boasted 1,400 square-foot apartments, each with a large rear terrace, had inflated to almost a million dollars. When my parents died, I inherited their home in St-Michel. As their only child, I also inherited my grandparents’ home in St-Michel, which they had previously inherited and rented out, and the five-plex. The two houses were entirely paid off, as were both tenant buildings, and I was suddenly, through no effort or interest of my own, a minor real estate investor. I enrolled in a course with Re/Max to become a licensed broker.

  I decided to keep the tenant buildings, update them, and transform the basements, which were being used by the tenants as storage space, into additional rental units. I increased the rent to the maximum market value. As for the houses, I decided to sell. I tore up carpet, re-finished hardwood, painted the interiors powder white, and listed them both. I donated old family possessions to merchants at the St-Michel Flea Market. My grandfather’s table radios and landscapes returned to the dust and clutter from which they had been rescued. They lost their meanings. The spaces that the landscapes had opened up in our home were now closed, compressed with the rest of the neighborhood. Dining cabinets and dressers now belonged to noone, they became idle material. Sets of matching dishes were stacked among other sets of matching dishes. Cheap silverware returned to its box and was shelved with other sets of cheap silverware.