Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
but Oliver was the only one who was truly gifted. Lillian and Violet studied piano for years and Shirley took lessons too, but not for very long. Oliver Wesley sang in the church choir, but even though he played the piano quite well, he willingly gave up his place at the piano bench to his son. Mysteriously, Jestina Louise, with her beautiful voice, did not sing at home, and her family remained unaware of her talent. On the other hand, she was the undisputed household boss whose rules had to be obeyed by everyone. Mrs. Jones managed the family budget with an iron hand: when Oliver Wesley brought home his salary on Fridays, she gave him what he needed for his weekly expenses, then, holding her purse tightly to her body, she walked straight to the bank and watched the teller enter the deposit. She was lucky that no one ever snatched her purse on the way. Perhaps her determined air and the fact that nearly everybody knew each other in the neighbourhood made robbery too risky a proposition.
Oliver certainly knew that Jestina had a temper. “If I did something wrong or told a joke during the day, my mother would slap me right away. If it was really, really bad, I would get beaten or strapped – she would just bang on my ass. Then she’d say ‘Wait until your father gets home. He’s going to…’ But my mother’s anger was short-lived. By the time she’d had all the rest of the day to think about it, when my father came home around five o’clock, if I’d done something or said something I wasn’t supposed to, he would talk to me. He wouldn’t punish me if it was something my mother told him and if she’d already given me the strap. But if he was at home when I did or said something bad, then he would take care of me!” Mrs. Jones was also short-tempered with her three daughters. “My sisters were scolded too, but Lillian, the oldest, was quiet. The only one I remember talking back to my father was Violet, and Shirley was too young.” In spite of this old-fashioned discipline, Oliver considered himself lucky to have good parents.
Thanks to Oliver Wesley’s steady job and the rent money from the third bedroom, there was always food on the Jones’s table. Never in his life did Oliver, even with his tremendous appetite, remember going hungry. “Food was on the table not only for supper, but for all three meals.” Also, Mr. Jones kept up the custom he had begun before the Second World War: every Friday – payday – he gave a dime to each of the older children, Lillian and Violet, while Oliver and Shirley, the younger ones, got five cents each. The amount gradually increased to twenty-five cents and stopped when the children started earning their own money. Oliver didn’t even want to imagine what would have happened to him if he’d spent all his allowance before being able to make up the money for the stolen toffee apples.
Even though Oliver Wesley was assured of a steady income, every once in a while, he would try a game of chance. Oliver saw his father come home from work later than usual one evening, his arms loaded with parcels, an enigmatic smile on his lips. Mr. Jones had just won the astounding amount of $380 by gambling in a Chinese restaurant and had gone shopping. Oliver watched his father opening bags and boxes containing a tan overcoat, a brown hat, and two suits with matching ties. Oliver Wesley loved to dress well – his son would inherit this trait; he was proud of the purchases he’d made and of still having some leftover money for his wife.
During the week, Oliver’s sisters set the table for supper, washed and dried the dishes and put them away. Apart from bringing in the firewood and taking out the ashes and the garbage, Oliver, as the only son, was the pampered child in the family. However, he didn’t feel that way on Saturday mornings when he had to accompany his mother to the Atwater Market. People would come from far and wide to buy from among the variety of fresh farm produce and the more exotic products brought by ship to the Port of Montreal – like the famous Barbados molasses. Whenever a shipment of oranges from Florida would come in, the news would spread rapidly, and a crowd of homemakers would swarm to the market. Making the market even more attractive was its new Art Deco building, with a monumental tower that Oliver and his mother couldn’t miss on their way there, she walking very fast and he pulling his little red wagon.
A little boy like Oliver should have been happy to go to this popular rendezvous. But not only did his mother calculate the household expenses with great care, she was also an inveterate bargainer. Jestina was skilled in the art of judging the shape, size, weight, taste, smell, and colour of nearly every item at the market, after which she would apply her formidable powers of persuasion to bring down the price. She was notorious among the farmers. When one of them saw her coming his way, he would groan to the other vendors: “Oh, no! Not Mrs. Jones!” Oliver felt humiliated and didn’t know where to look.
At home, Oliver also had to contend with his sisters’ varied characters. Although he never fought with Lillian, he teased Violet mercilessly, and she, in return, would argue with him all the time, making them into bitter enemies for as long as their quarrel lasted. He also fought constantly with Shirley, whom he considered a pest.
As for his parents, Oliver summed them up as responsible people – perhaps overly strict, but loving. They taught him a certain standard of polite behaviour. “If you passed an elderly person, you said ‘Good afternoon,’ and if you did not, once you got home your parents would already know about it. If I was with a bunch of kids, or passed by any Black adult, I would always acknowledge them. That was the type of society we had. But the first time I went to the United States, where I’d never seen so many Blacks before, I realized that Black Americans just didn’t do these things.”
Oliver Wesley, always respectful of his wife, never raised his voice, and never played the role of the domineering husband. He let Jestina run the house and the family while he took care of more manly tasks. Mr. Jones had his convivial side: “My father drank, like anyone else in those days, but I never called him an alcoholic. He loved his beer after work and never missed a day of work. Alcohol was never a major problem. He loved to drink on the weekend with his friends and never hit anybody, never started a fight, or got into arguments. On holidays, he might have gotten drunk, but did not misbehave. It made him feel jovial, then he’d fall asleep.”
Oliver was aware that for many of the Black families around him, life was more difficult than it was for the Joneses. He knew that some fathers would have to leave home for a whole week, sometimes longer, to work as Pullman porters on the trains. Some of them travelled between Montreal and western Canada or the United States while their wives ran the household and raised the children alone. These women also suffered the inevitable problems associated with having dark skin in a country where the majority was white, experiencing a pain that Mrs. Jones too feared for her children and for herself.
When Shirley was only three, she had been playing with a little White girl and came home in tears, saying: “Rita’s mother doesn’t want her to play with me because Blacks eat White children!” Oliver too encountered racial prejudice as a child and acknowledged the fact when he grew up. “I never cried, but at an early age, I realized that I was not part of the majority and that this attitude of people was ignorance. My father explained to me: ‘You can expect it but you don’t have to respect that type of treatment.’ My father always tried to keep cool and calm and never showed anger. But at times he said: ‘You have to stand up for your rights.’”
Yet it wasn’t easy for a Black child to fight for his rights. Violet remarked: “Our family and another Black family, we were living in an area of thousands of White children. Even going to our church, Girl Guides, Brownies, sewing class, there was always a gang of Whites calling us ‘Niggerblacks!’ They got those stones, not big, but you couldn’t go this way or that way because there was always a gang. Those days, they didn’t see many Blacks. Every time you went to school, snowballs as well, no matter what direction you walked in, whether I was walking along with a girlfriend or by myself, you could be sure, no matter what direction, White kids were waiting for us. We felt trapped. You hated to pass but you had to make your way to get home.”
Violet pointed out that the White children did not dare to touch them and when one shouted “the teacher’s coming!”, they would all run away. “I could be five, six, until the age of ten, I couldn’t wait to get away from that district. But, on the other hand, the nuns never bothered us.”
Even when the family moved from Workman to Fulford Street, Violet recalled: “We were in front of the school, and the priest – or was it a brother? – taking the boys to confession let them call us ‘Niggerblacks.’