Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
And sometimes, the railroad track was just there; you couldn’t cross the street because the train was coming. You were trapped again for waiting.”
Oliver summed it up: “All of us knew that it would come all of our life. When you’re a boy, you hit back. But the girls did not. I remember when we moved to Fulford Street, there was a family named Black but they were White. I used to beat them up on a regular basis, and still, some of them called me ‘Black nigger.’ I would hear the same thing in French, ‘maudit nègre,’ when walking around Sainte-Cunégonde Church.”
Shirley said: “The worst time was when I walked with three other girls to Sunday school. Kids, through their open doors, along with their parents, used to call us names. We were seven or eight years old, and they called themselves children of God. We could have gone to the other side of the street, but I refused to do that. We weren’t calling them any names. We reported it to our church director. But there was no protection for us.”
Like Oliver, Shirley was shocked when she realized that most of the churches were complicit in or indifferent to racial prejudice at that time. When Oliver heard about, or was confronted with this kind of treatment, he tended to put the blame on pure ignorance. “It was tolerated. I wonder when all of this stopped, because although we were a fairly large group of Blacks in our district, all of us must have gone through this. As children, you endure those things and you know it is wrong. But what hurts the most is when people are coming out of church, where they teach brotherly love, and the very first thing they try is to harm another child on account of the colour of his skin. That hurts! But after a while, we just forgot it.”
Racism tended to diminish when Black individuals excelled in a domain such as music or sports. Still, White people would think twice before accepting them, perpetuating an attitude of submission rather than one of assertiveness among members of the Black community. As Violet said, “In those days most Black parents would teach their children to turn the other cheek.”
Despite these hurtful experiences, Oliver, like many children of African descent, searched for role models among Black Americans, who had a larger and more impressive profile than Black Canadians. “I can look back to the church and remember all of us looking forward to being able to go to the United States, where everything was happening. We knew of a few coloured actors and actresses, so I think that most of us had some kind of aspiration of going abroad.”
***
As the days went by, Oliver noticed that the girls he liked to watch were walking out with young men who had traded their street clothes for military uniforms. Those who had joined the navy were outfitted in dark blue with white trim; those wearing a uniform of a French blue colour – called “air force blue” – had joined the air force. And there were the ones who would become soldiers in the infantry, lugging guns, driving tanks, and manning the first line of defence. They wore a khaki uniform, green mixed with coppery yellow, an unattractive colour but one that helped to camouflage the wearer in fields and forests, and on beaches.
Impressed by the uniforms, or perhaps by the recruits’ success with girls, Oliver daydreamed of enlisting someday in the army, as his father had done. In the meantime, he practised the piano and played with his friends as usual. Through them, he learned of the distress that affected some families in the neighborhood. Fathers, White and Black, drank in an attempt to forget their incapacity to provide for their families, turning into frightening and sometimes violent men. In some families, this seemed to be a daily occurrence. Nonetheless, Oliver rarely heard of a suicide, perhaps because people’s religion proscribed suicide for anyone who hoped to go to heaven, or perhaps because of a stubborn hope that things would eventually change for the better.
The war brought other somewhat bizarre changes to people’s habits. Hosts of radio programs invited their listeners to participate in a draw organized by companies seeking empty toothpaste tubes for their lead, needed in the war effort. Jestina Louise cut the tube open on the top and the sides, scraped out the inside, then washed and dried it. She filled in a coupon with her name and address and put the flattened tube and the coupon inside an envelope to mail to the radio station. Oliver remembered another contest for which his mother removed the tin foil of chewing gum wrappers. When this operation was completed, Oliver would seal the envelope, stick a stamp on it, and run to the mailbox. If his mother’s envelope had been picked in the daily draw, she would have heard on the radio that she was the lucky winner of a small sum of money. Even the hard-headed Jestina, although she was no believer in get-rich-quick schemes, kept hoping for a prize, but even if Oliver helped her by chewing more gum than usual, no cheque ever landed in the Jones’s mailbox.
Among the effects of the war were exhortations to the public to reduce consumption of products like tea and coffee. However, it was the rationing of the amount of meat, butter, and sugar allowed every month that Oliver remembered most clearly. He would help his mother count their food ration tickets, his eyes fixed on the set of canisters containing flour, sugar, coffee, and tea that sat on the kitchen counter. But it was the fifth tin that Oliver was most concerned about, as was his mother: the one holding baking soda biscuits made from the recipe printed on the side of the container. Oliver had once eaten eight cookies from this tin, leaving only one for the whole family at supper.
Although his sisters had the impression that they were poor, Oliver himself, as long as he ate three meals a day and the house was warm and comfortable, felt that he had everything he needed. Besides, his parents had drummed the maxim into his head that one should learn to live according to one’s means and be content with it. However, there were other families they knew who weren’t content with living poorly but honestly. Some of the men, through their contacts in the underworld, were involved in wartime black market activities, including illegal dealings in alcohol. This would be mentioned either circumspectly or overtly, depending on whom people were talking with.
Oliver’s parents used these examples to explain what was right and wrong, teaching their son to behave according to their lights. “Without a doubt, I think I was a pretty responsible person. I always figured I had a choice. In the neighborhood where we grew up, there were quite a few people who chose to do extremely well, and others who did the opposite and spent a great deal of time in prison. If I didn’t have my music and my sports to keep me occupied, I often wonder if I would have gone in the wrong direction. Those two things in my life – music and sports – were so strong that they filled me with a lot of pleasure, and I did not have to seek thrills by doing mischievous things. I know that a lot of youngsters got into crime by just having too much spare time. Sometime they did not mean to do these things. It just happened, and before you knew, it became a problem. I was very lucky in that respect, and all my very close friends, six or seven that I had, all of them turned out with good jobs even if none of us were rich.”
At the same time, Oliver developed an instinct for spotting who was criminally minded, and he would stay away from these people. “When you grow up with them around you, you can tell who they are, and you learn whether you want to be friends with them or not. If not, you say hello, you pass the time of day, and you move on.”
Oliver knew that there were a lot of boys on his street who got into trouble. “I just stayed out of that. Some, probably because they were drinking at an early age and some, because they got into drugs.” About the drugs, Oliver said: “The only ones really taking drugs were musicians, doctors, and lawyers, and they were into it much more than anyone else. Musicians always seemed to have doctor friends who would get them whatever they needed, and some of them had to use lawyers to get out of trouble.”
Sanctions in Canada were severe. “Back then, an American immigrant would be kicked out of Canada if he was taking marijuana. If you were Canadian, they would put you in jail right away. I don’t think drugs were as dangerous as they are today.” Looking back, Oliver thought that it was mostly marijuana that was consumed, with some cocaine and heroin. “I don’t know where they got that. Somehow we all knew who was taking it, but it was a matter of choice: either you hung around with those guys or you stayed away from them. I preferred to stay away.”
At school, Oliver excelled in artistic subjects and was proud of himself for it. As for the purely academic subjects, he had difficulty concentrating. When thinking about a coming exam, he would panic.