“How come you never get into any fights, boy?” Dad yelps, tossing aside the fingerpainting I’ve presented to him, courtesy of my kindergarten art class. Although I know Dad’s half kidding—his voice turns higher and more singsongy when he’s having me on—I can tell he’s also genuinely concerned that I haven’t been in a shoving match, let alone an all-out brawl. He’s put on that exaggerated frown face again, a sign that he’s about to light up the kitchen with one of his performances.
“Dan,” Mom chimes in, “what’s the big hurry? Danny’s not even six yet.”
“He’s at an age where he’s gotta know how to defend himself. What if somebody goes after Larry or Karen? Daggum, someone’s gotta show him how to look out for his brother and sister.”
Mom issues one of her big sighs. She knows that when Dad’s winding up to give me one of his lectures, there’s not a thing she can do to stop him. Just the same, she sneaks me a reassuring “don’t take your father too seriously” wink.
“Every day after school, my little sister and I would walk through the tough Italian neighbourhood,” Dad says. “And every day some kid would call me a nigger and I’d have to say to Doris, ‘Sis, hold my glasses for me,’ and then, pow!” To demonstrate, Dad smacks the kitchen wall with the open palm of his hand with such force that dishes everywhere start rattling. The noise makes me jump. “I’d beat the kid halfway to tomorrow and come home with my clothes in tatters. My mother would be so cross with me she’d make me sew the clothes back together myself.”
Dad’s got the transistor radio tuned to an upcoming heavyweight boxing match, and to warm up for the broadcast he’s shadowboxing, weaving and ducking and dancing across the kitchen, his considerable size making the floor vibrate and hum. I can’t take my eyes off him. As he juts out his fat lower lip, pretending to mock an imaginary opponent, Mom and I are overcome with laughter. Anything that puts Dad in a good mood—a “swinging” Basie record, smoked oysters dipped in his special hot mustard mixture, a well-tended garden, a big American sporting event—sweeps me and the rest of the family right up along with him. The opposite is also true. Now Dad abruptly stops his mugging and turns serious.
“Son, promise me you’ll protect Larry and Karen. Don’t you ever let anyone lay a hand on them.”
I nod obediently, ashamed to tell him that the idea of fighting anyone, for any reason, frightens me.
“Give me your hand, son.”
Dad forms my fingers and palm into a fist and shows me how to lean into a punch. The heat of his mitt-sized hand makes me feel bigger and stronger and braver. I don’t want him to ever let go.
“That’s it, boy. See, you’re getting the hang of it now.”
I hear the smack of my scrawny fist against the wall before I feel the throbbing in my knuckles. It takes me another instant to realize my closed hand produced this whacking sound. Mom’s standing between the two of us now, shaking her head with a resigned smile, as if she’s torn between loving the high drama of Dad’s delivery and disapproving of its message.
Dad’s already on to another story.
“When I was eight years old, my father had been asked to give a speech to my public school during ‘Brotherhood Week,’ about the importance of racial harmony.” I’ve heard this one before, but Dad can spin the same yarn a hundred times and still make it riveting. “My father arrived at the principal’s office to find me and a white boy looking all dishevelled and bloody, sitting there awaiting our punishment.”
“Was your father mad?” I ask, trying to imagine the impossible: Dad as a young boy, cut and bleeding all over the principal’s office.
“My father would have given me a whupping on the spot, had I not explained that the white boy beside me had called me a nigger, leaving me no choice but to beat him up.”
I had yet to realize that Dad was simply passing on his father’s trick of instruction, right down to the preacher-like inflections. Any message, which in this case was “Know how to protect yourself against anyone trying to drag you or your family down, even if that means breaking a few rules,” had greater impact when wrapped in a compelling story. Then again, almost everything Dad said came out in story form. For all I know, some of them may have even been true. Several months after Dad’s shadowboxing display, he fired off this nifty piece of fiction to his parents:
Newmarket 1960
Danny starts school in the fall and is currently going through the period of fistfights with the local boys. He holds up fairly well—has been told to defend himself but never to initiate brawls unless someone strikes him, Larry or Karen first.
My parents and I had moved from Toronto to the small town of Newmarket, an hour’s drive north of the city, where they’d purchased their first house in a new subdivision for thirteen thousand dollars in 1955. Larry was born there in 1957, Karen, one year and three days later.
At that time Newmarket was surrounded by lush farmland. Most of its eight thousand occupants were British, many of whom had moved there after the war to work at Avro, and later, De Havilland, building fighter airplanes. Aside from Dad, there was no hint of colour anywhere in this bedroom community, unless you counted the red and orange speckled leaves that lit up the woods and forests once the cooler weather came. While I was oblivious to the endless canvas of white faces, the same could not be said for my mother or for Karen, who was born with the darkest complexion of us three kids. At least once a week, someone would approach my mom when she was out grocery shopping with my sister and say, “How very kind of you to have adopted that little brown-skinned girl,” refusing to accept the possibility that this very brown-skinned girl could have come out of my very white-skinned mother. Eileen, our next-door neighbour and Mom’s best friend, was approached to sign a petition to have us thrown out of the neighbourhood.
I had no inkling about race, or the fact that Dad was the only Black man in this small town, until we acquired our first television in 1959. One Saturday morning, I saw a cartoon in which grotesque creatures with bugged-out eyes and the blackest of skin shimmied around in a jungle with what looked like human bones sticking out of their hugely swollen mouths. They were hurling captive white men into boiling pots of water, smacking their drooling, anaconda-sized lips in anticipation of a delicious meal. My four-year-old mind whirred like a toy top, trying to categorize these odious not-quite-monkey, not-quite-human creatures as they bounded about, semi-naked and chattering unintelligibly.
I dashed down the hall and into my parents’ room, dragging my barely awake father out of bed and into the living room. “What are they, Daddy?”
Dad looked at the TV and slapped my little, pointing finger away from the screen.
“Owww,” I cried. Not from the pain—when Dad hit to hurt, I knew it—but from the sick sensation that I’d done something really bad.
“Skin! Skin! Skin!” Dad screamed at the creepy, dark creatures licking their dreadful lips.
What did he mean, “skin”? Dad’s yelling—that tended to be Mom’s specialty—frightened me. But his incessant repeating of “skin”—no other word escaped his mouth—left me immobilized. My eyes darting back and forth between Dad and the crazed activity on the TV screen, all I could figure was that “skin” related to the cartoonish creatures’ inky-black colour. Did something about their black skin make them crave human flesh? White-skinned flesh? But what did this have to do with me? As Dad continued to yell at the TV and then me, I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong.
Mom tore into the room, her white bathrobe flapping off her sides like half-formed wings. “Shit,” she said. “Damn it, Danny, turn off that TV right now and get back to bed.”
Later that day, when he had calmed down, Dad explained that the cartoon was making fun of Negroes.
But what were Negroes? Dad complicated things further by telling me that he was a Negro. Which made me and Larry and Karen Negroes as well. But, for some reason, not Mom. And that because the TV station did a bad thing, I wasn’t allowed to watch that channel until Dad got them to stop showing those kinds of cartoons. And by the sound of Dad’s stern words over the phone—”Don’t eavesdrop, Danny,” Mom scolded—that might not happen for a long, long time.
This left only one other station: CBC, the boring channel. When Mom caught me watching the banned channel at a friend’s house, I got in a lot of trouble. Dad had a talk with my friend’s parents. I wasn’t allowed over there anymore. Not only that, now I wasn’t allowed to play at anyone’s house that watched the banned channel. Which eliminated every kid whose family owned a TV. I didn’t mention to Dad that being a Negro wasn’t much fun.
That was the first time I’d deliberately disobeyed Dad. It started a pattern that would hound the two of us for the rest of Dad’s life: Dad would issue a rule and, sooner or later, I would find a way to break it.
Luckily, Dad wasn’t piling up the rules back in those early Newmarket years. Between his work, his studies and his commute to Toronto and back every day, he wasn’t around that much during the week. Mom always said that because Eileen lived next door, the week flew by. “We’re like sisters,” I heard Mom tell someone over the phone. Even though having a best friend next door could take the edge off Mom’s temper, especially since she and Eileen could smush their combined six kids together like one big family and do a lot of stuff together, I could still be a major thorn in Mom’s side. Every morning started the same way: “Danny, get out of the house. Get some exercise. Find something to do. You’re not allowed to come home till it gets dark outside.”
This being 7:00 a.m. and all, I knew that meant by midday she’d be in a better mood, passing out graham crackers with peanut butter, listening critically as I sang the jingle, “Kraft peanut butter tastes fresher in the jar than peanuts in the shell,” ready to pounce whenever I muffed the melody so she could sing it back to me with perfect tone and pitch. But first thing in the morning, with Dad already long gone, Mom might have felt overwhelmed with three little kids crowding round her in the kitchen. I didn’t make things any easier, the way I bounced around all over the place, poking (well, actually plowing) Larry in the stomach and laughing in amazement when he couldn’t breathe, or tying together Karen’s pigtails from the back, which, just as I’d hoped, started her blubbering. The next two sounds I’d hear were Mom swinging open the front door with one hand and smacking my rear end with the other.
I was always happy to get out of the house. Newmarket in the fifties was like an extended playground, a dream place for a child like me to wander about and explore. There was little in the way of urban development and acres and acres of unexplored woods that a child with half an imagination could easily lose himself in. When I was growing up, parents didn’t have the fear of strange adults lurking in bushes ready to pounce on their unsuspecting children. And other than the friendly milkman, who always gave me a free bottle of cold chocolate milk, Newmarket wasn’t exactly swarming with people back then. Most days, I could play in the woods down the block from my house and not see another living soul the entire day. I would return home only when my arms were sore from hours of digging up the nearby woods for buried pirate treasure, and my hands reeked from the overpowering odour of the dead rats that I’d scoop out of the smelly pond and swing like prizes over my shoulder to present as gifts to my strangely unappreciative mother.
Mom was always in a better mood on the weekends, when Dad was around. This meant that I could hang around the house pretty much all day, because even with one extra adult in the house Mom didn’t feel crowded by us kids. When it was rainy outside, I’d lose myself for hours in what Dad described as “Danny’s indoor projects.” When I’d finished a difficult puzzle, or constructed a five-year-old’s version of Atlantis out of building blocks, Dad would cry out, “Come over here, Donna. Take a look at what our son’s done. He’s gonna be a great architect some day.”
A year later, I developed the knack for fiddling with our rabbit-eared, black-and-white television until the screen boasted marginally improved reception. “Who taught you how to do that, son?” Dad would ask, as if I’d come up with a cure for cancer. “For heaven’s sakes alive, where on earth did you get your mechanical genius? Not from the Hill side of the family, that’s for sure. Ha, ha, ha.”
Every Saturday morning, I’d bike to the corner store and buy an Old Port cigar for Dad, sucking the packaged cigar through its wrapper in my mouth like a lollipop on my return. Dad would drop this drool-soaked, teeth-indented thing as though it were a lumpy turd, braying, “Sit your behind back on your bike and get me another Old Port. If I find even a speck of saliva—” I was pedalling like crazy before I could catch the end of his threat.
Dad’s attention and approval was the drug I never stopped craving. On the other hand, when I made him angry, I wanted to disappear, anywhere, and never come back. Dad’s moods were like an ever-changing weather pattern; he could be entertaining, jolly, and then, without warning, the smallest thing could set him off. There was only one thing worse than igniting Dad’s temper: disappointing him.
One summer Saturday, Larry and I were splashing around in what my parents thought was a shallow lake. Suddenly the top half of my brother disappeared beneath the water’s surface, like a duck in search of a meal. “Save him, Danny! Hurry!” Dad yelled. All I could see were Larry’s little calves and feet, kicking wildly back and forth upside down, like some zany cartoon. Even from only a few feet away, his flailing legs appeared so unreal that I fell into hysterical laughter, unable to move. Dad, still hollering, bounded fully dressed into the lake, pulling Larry out of the water and up against his chest, hustling him back to safety as my laughter turned to slobbering and bawling. Dad threw me a glance that left me winded.
It had been my third blunder of the day. An hour earlier, as Dad and I visited the public urinal, I’d glanced over at Dad’s serpentine penis and asked if he’d ever wished he were a girl. As Dad glared at me incredulously, a soggy pack of matches tumbled out of my bathing suit and hit the floor. I’d discovered them on the beach and, instantly curious, had tucked them away for a later, secret inspection. Dad may have overlooked the matches and me gaping at his penis, but my failing to rescue my little brother was a crime against family. That could not go unpunished.
Dad waited till we got home before he spanked me. I’d flown into my room and had tried to hide between the mattress and the box spring, seized with a black terror.
“You’re getting ten smacks, boy,” Dad snarled. The sharp, resonating thwackkk of his bare hand on my horribly exposed bum made my head feel like it was about to split wide open.
Long after it was over, I remained wracked with feelings of worthlessness. How could I have failed to protect little Larry? I had stood there and laughed while he almost swallowed an entire lake. I swore to myself that I would never let my family down again.
There was one thing that could rescue me from my moods: the music that leapt out of my parents’ hi-fi stereo. Indeed, the richest part of my vocabulary came from Dad’s extensive collection of Frank Sinatra, Joe Williams and Harry Belafonte records. Sinatra, in particular, struck a nerve. I recognized that sad ache in his voice, the empathetic swirling counterpoint of Nelson Riddle’s orchestra. The music spoke to me, calmed and comforted me, infused me with guarded hope; I wasn’t so alone after all.
I suspect my parents understood this about me. In a household where almost everything remained decidedly “hands-off” for me, the stereo was the one exception. I loved gently placing Sinatra’s Songs for Swingers gleaming 33 on the turntable, holding the cartridge just so and balancing the tiny needle on the edge of the vinyl. I’d sit right between the speakers, waiting for the wonderful crackle of the needle on groove to give way to the rushing whoosh of music. I’d sing along, transported into a romantic fantasy world, my voice catching and then matching Sinatra’s interval for interval, phrase for phrase, breath for breath.
On my sixth birthday, my parents gave me my very own miniature record player. “Honest to God, boy, all that ever comes out of that mouth of yours these days are songs,” Dad chortled. “Have you forgotten how to talk?”
“What your father’s trying to say,” Mom translated, “is having your own record player in your bedroom may influence you to listen more and sing less.”
The opposite happened. My grandparents, more entranced by my singing than my ear-weary parents, gave me two 78 rpm recordings: a cowgirl record with a songstress who dreamily crooned about feeling like a million bucks when she wore a ten-gallon hat, and a singing story about a too-tall fireman who was teased until his height helped him to rescue someone from the tenth floor of a burning apartment building. I enthusiastically sang along with such volume that I’d always be ordered to close my bedroom door.
The narrative driving these songs captivated me as much as the jaunty melodies. What could be more enthralling than the image of an eight-foot-tall fireman discovering heroism as a means of overcoming derision, or outlaw cowgirls taming horses on the American prairies?
That fall I would turn to music more and more for comfort and sustenance. I’d started school.
“Daddy, you and Mommy promised me I would like learning. But I don’t like it one bit. So tell the school I’m not going anymore. Please.”
“I’ll take that under consideration, son,” Dad would say, nodding his head with a father’s understanding as he headed out the door for work.
The moment I started grade one, Newmarket ceased to be a place of endless, woodsy charm. With school came teachers and other children. And as people took the place of ponds and woods, Newmarket turned gloomy and threatening.
“Time to check for niggers under your fingernails, children!” my teacher, a no-nonsense, ruddy-faced woman, would announce first thing each Monday morning, brandishing her pointed nail file at the class.
Tempted as I was to tell Dad about my teacher’s weekly “nigger search” ritual, I was afraid he might get angry at me for not setting my teacher straight. I couldn’t remember: was I suppose to fight adults—even teachers—who said “nigger,” or was I to limit my slaughter to other kids? As my teacher speared her nail file into the soft flesh of my skin, flicking out the last of those “stubborn little nigger critters,” it felt as though I were infected with some awful fungus that all her painful scooping could never get rid of.
Bad enough that school knocked me out of my perfectly constructed imaginary world, but this new world seemed nasty and unrelenting and bewildering, leaving me to wobble through grade one convinced there’d been some terrible mistake, that I’d been dropped off at the wrong place. All this pressure to learn boring stuff on a precise schedule, while fending off brashly aggressive boys and bossy, fusspot girls, left me in a silent state of panic.
Happily, after school, I could always count on the music from my 78 collection to wash over me, building me back up again one song at a time. The sheer physical joy of singing made me feel how I imagined Clark Kent felt when he snuck into a phone booth and changed into his Superman outfit, or the singer of the cowgirl song when she donned her ten-gallon hat and felt like a million dollars: invulnerable. Those kids could crow all they wanted about their adding and subtracting skills, but none of them could sing like me or feel music in the special way I did.
In the summer of 1960, Mom and Eileen returned home extremely late one night, still swooning over the Robert Goulet concert they’d attended in Toronto. Dad, who never liked Mom going to Toronto (or anywhere else that wasn’t spitting distance from our house) without his protection, greeted Mom at the front door, livid. The more Mom oohed and aahed about Goulet, the angrier Dad became. I, in turn, felt a kind of roiling jealousy I’d never experienced before. That did it: I was going to be a famous singer, the greatest singer ever, good enough to make Mom swoon, so she wouldn’t disappear until the early hours of the morning. When Dad declared, shortly after the Goulet incident, that we were moving out of Newmarket, I was convinced that Mom’s night out in Toronto with Eileen was the reason.
Mom, although heartbroken over leaving Newmarket for Don Mills, kept any distaste she may have felt for our new neighbourhood to herself, listening stone-faced as Dad would tell us, in his pep rally voice: “This new Don Mills neighbourhood is chock full of all sorts of opportunities.” “Opportunity” was one of Dad’s favourite words. But not mine. Because with new opportunities came new expectations, which meant more pressure, which meant, I was convinced, more failures. What if I let Dad down, after all the trouble he’d gone through to move us into this shiny new subdivision?
“Every move we make—to a new house, to a better school—represents an exciting step your father is taking up the career ladder,” was Mom’s non-answer answer when I asked her how she felt about leaving Newmarket. But I didn’t much like ladders.
In time, the power of Dad’s determined enthusiasm overrode our fears. We were like a little family assembly line, as one by one, Dad’s insistence that we would soon see the superior splendour of Don Mills passed from him to Mom to me, and on down to Larry and Karen, until we were all converted to his way of thinking. Larry and Karen were too young to know much of anything. You could put them on the moon and they’d still play and fight in the same non-stop, irritating way. Mom, however, may have found it unfair how everything from the important stuff—where we lived—to the everyday—which set of lawn chairs to buy—always came down to what Dad wanted. But when Dad wound himself up into one of his deliriously joyous moods, Mom couldn’t resist him. She would step back and peer up at him the way a child might gawk at a circus performer.
“Sabina, I’m glad I’ve found ya …” Dad would improvise in a pure, tenor voice to the shy little German girl who’d recently moved in across the street and had yet to make any friends. “I’m comin’ on strong, to wrap my arms around you … Sabina … whoaaa … Sabina …” leaving Sabina barely able to stay balanced on her tricycle she was laughing so hard, us three kids studying Dad’s big lips so we could try to sing along to his ever-changing words, and Mom beaming in disbelief as if she were wondering, “Who is this man? This crazy, brilliant, force of nature who blazes life?”
And so, for a while anyway, Mom’s nagging disappointments and annoyances—leaving Eileen behind in Newmarket, Dad’s growing absences due to his ever-increasing career demands, his domineering manner—were well worth it. Almost anything was worth it. Because when he was happy, the world—Mom’s world, our world—felt utterly perfect and unconquerable.
I’m seven years old and tossing a football back and forth with my dad. We’re on the front lawn of Mallow Road Public School in Don Mills. It’s an exquisite Sunday afternoon in early autumn. We can see people through the windows ensconced in some kind of Bible study.
“Look at those poor suckers,” Dad snickers, tossing me a perfect spiral. “There they are, rotting away, studying the Bible while we’re out here playing football. They think we’re heathens. But you know something? They’re jealous as all get-out. They’d do anything to trade places with us.”
Thrilled at the thought of breaking some kind of sacred rule with Dad, I grin defiantly at the people peering out at us from the classroom.
“They’re brainwashed,” Dad says, reaching up to catch my overthrown pass with one hand, the football almost disappearing from view as he traps it between his arm and his chest. Then he makes two quick pumping motions in the direction of the Bible class, his feigned throw so brash that I stop breathing, bracing for the sound and spectacle of shattered glass. Catching me gawking, Dad cocks his arm and fires the football hard and fast into my sternum. “Always be prepared,” he scolds, as I bobble and lurch, half-winded from the force of Dad’s bullet pass, falling clumsily to the ground as the football squirts out of my arms. “Good effort, son.”
Hoping for more heathen football games, I took to coming home from my new public school reciting verbatim passages from the Bible. When it came to violence and gore, the Old Testament had it all over the Sergeant Rock war comics my classmates were hooked on.
“Listen to that boy, Donna,” Dad would carp. “Instead of arithmetic, all he remembers is his nutty Bible studies. That stuff has got to be taken out of the schools.”
I certainly didn’t want it taken out of the schools. Bible study was one of the few courses I was acing. The nerve of my parents, not believing in God. While all my classmates were comforted by the notion of heaven awaiting them, I was left to cope with the cold truth. When you died, that was it. Over. The idea that one day my parents would die, that I would die, left me eager to find some kind of loophole.
“But once you’ve lived a long life, you’ll be happy to die,” Mom blithely explained. “You’ll just close your eyes and say, ‘Well, this has been lots of fun but I’m tired now and my time has come.’”
“No, I won’t!”
“We’ll live on in you. And when you die you’ll live on in your children …”
“What if a lion eats me? Will I live on in the lion?”
“Danny asks too many damned questions,” I overheard Dad tell his dad when Granddad and Grandma were staying with us one Christmas.
Dad, as respectful of his parents’ ardent religious beliefs as he was contemptuous of everyone else’s, portrayed himself as the picture of tolerance when deconstructing the dilemma of Christianity to his children. “Danny’s asking quite a bit about Jesus and God,” he wrote his father in 1959.
I answer him as best I can and hope that later I can assist in giving him the broadest and best life experiences available within my means … The other day he walked in the house— after having a discussion with a Catholic friend down the street—and announced that he saw God flapping around in the clouds… I told him that this was quite interesting, but that he should call me out on such occasions, so that I could see him too.
But soon Dad, finding early-sixties Don Mills far more Christian than late-fifties Newmarket, no longer viewed my struggle with religion as quaint. It wasn’t only religion that challenged my parents in Don Mills. It was an overall conservatism that leaked down through every member of the community. Even babysitters would tell me I was going straight to hell for not praying. When my parents came home from their evening out, it would take all night for them to calm me down. “Heaven and hell, that’s just a bunch of fairytale stuff,” Dad would groan. “Donna, that fool babysitter is not setting foot in this house again.”
It didn’t take long for most of the babysitters to be barred from our house due to one transgression or another: too evangelical, too hawkish on Vietnam, too sports-crazed or anti-Semitic. And I was to blame for most of my babysitters’ firings—they’d have kept their mouths shut if I hadn’t baited them in the first place by trying out my parents’ assorted left-wing beliefs on them. Debating these issues was good practice for me. I used the word “propaganda”—I loved throwing around Dad’s big words—so much during social studies that my teacher banned the word.
It did feel a little isolating sometimes, having atheist parents who thought skiing was a pretentious extravagance, believed America should stay out of Vietnam, regarded Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day as “meretricious, capitalist flim-flam,” and turned sniffy at the idea of going to Florida for Christmas.
“They’re all racists in the south,” Dad seethed, his contemptuous stare making me feel like the family turncoat for even suggesting a southern holiday. “Any Negro stupid enough to venture into Florida deserves what he gets.”
“What about the Negro’s family?” I asked.
“If they have parents that dumb, they’re good as dead anyway.”
Just the same, there were some definite perks to growing up with parents who consistently thumbed their noses at the types of activities most other families in Don Mills considered sacrosanct. My parents never pressured me to join the Boy Scouts, an organization that Dad claimed to be fascist and teeming with white supremacists. While I didn’t know what “fascist” meant and had pointed out to Dad that maybe no Negroes were in Cubs because there weren’t any other Negroes in our neighbourhood, the whole concept of Cubs and Scouts didn’t sit right with me. I sat in on a Cub jamboree one evening out of curiosity, and all those kids standing perfectly still in neatly pressed green uniforms struck me as plain wrong. I thought all that mass saluting was some kind of a joke put on for my benefit, until one boy was caught saluting with the wrong hand and told to go home. When all the kids crouched in a tight circle and started howling like wolves I got out of there as fast as I could.
There were times when I felt like Don Mills was one huge inside joke, and for some reason the punch line always sailed way over my head. Everyone else in my class fell off their chairs laughing at the Three Stooges film shown on special “Movie Thursdays,” but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was so funny. As my classmates streamed into school Monday morning raving about Sunday night’s The Wonderful World of Disney I’d give a fake nod, recalling Dad’s fervently held theory for banning Disney from our TV set: “They don’t hire Negroes at Disney—except to play the occasional low-life criminal in their asinine movies.”
“Face it, you’re just weird,” Elaine, a freckle-faced girl that I secretly liked, told me after I’d forwarded Dad’s wish to have “Ol’ Man River” dropped from our choir repertoire for its references to Blacks as darkies. “You go out of your way to find something wrong with everything!”
One of the reasons Dad continued to wave the race flag in our faces was to compensate for the relative racelessness of Don Mills. Not even a decade old, it was one of Canada’s first perfectly planned suburban communities, sparklingly sterile with endless immaculate parks and cute cul-de-sacs. In fact, the only thing Don Mills seemed to be missing, other than any hint of culture or colour, was a cemetery, as if any neighbourhood this self-consciously tidy would result in a population that never fell ill or aged.
But what Don Mills lacked in character, it made up for by being ordered and civilized. Here in the suburbs, the school kids didn’t seem as raw or tough or downright surly. The mother two doors up from us didn’t look like she was going to cut me into pieces and eat me if I so much as glanced in her direction, like Mrs. Peterson did in Newmarket. Above all, the Don Mills kids were bred to be competitive. By and large, no one dared slack off—bad grades stuck to a student like a funky smell.
This was part and parcel of Dad’s master plan, as if moving from Newmarket to Don Mills were akin to being promoted from a hockey farm team to the NHL. A letter to his parents in 1961, adorned as always with his formal sociology jargon, handily illustrates how I was expected to rise to the occasion: “Danny is having to work much harder in this Don Mills school; the kids are children of the striving, progressive and middle class and Danny can’t lag. I’ve impressed this on him and he’s responding okay.” Mom’s take on Don Mills, based on this letter to her sister, showed a more sardonic vantage point: “There is a tendency in this neighbourhood to build friendships around bridge clubs and curling. Neither of which I have any tolerance for, alas.”
Whether “striving” or “clubbish,” Don Mills was all about winning, even if that meant playing dirty sometimes. “If you see an opposing player sprawled out on the ice, crowding your goalie, skate over his hand,” commanded my grade three teacher, our hockey coach, as we skated around him in dizzyingly tight circles, “My job is to turn you kids into young men. Now stop leaning on your sticks for balance like a bunch of wooden Indians and start hustling. Move it!”
Dad didn’t blink when I informed him of my teacher’s “skate over the other guy’s hand” order, but the “wooden Indian” comment caused him to fire off a letter of protest to the school principal. Two things that Dad would not tolerate in school were racist comments and any teacher who dared lay a hand on his child. I realize now I spent my years in public school protected by an invisible shield, complete with a blinking sign that only teachers could read, warning, “Touch this kid and his big, brown bear of a dad is going to tear you limb from limb.”
I was lucky to be spared, because when it came to discipline, my public school teachers were not only prone to smacking students whom they felt deserved punishment, they doled out just deserts with gusto. “You wretched, wretched child,” my enraged teacher would shriek, digging her long nails clear through a classmate’s shirt till they found traction in his arms, making it impossible for the scratched and bleeding kid to break free.
Some of the more “enlightened” teachers shunned physical discipline, opting for inspired psychological torture techniques that no kid would dare reveal to his parents. What boy would relive the humiliation of being made to dress up in a diaper and tiny pink bonnet, with a baby bottle stuck in his quivering mouth to keep him quiet, and sit in a baby carriage in front of the class until the school day was finished?
Unlike my father, I made it through my early school years as a goody two-shoes, running all-out with Dad’s “Hills are born superior” mantra, scared to let up or even look over my shoulder for a second. Larry was every bit as driven and well behaved, to the point where his grade one teacher called in my nonplussed parents for an emergency meeting to complain that “your overly earnest son is driving himself too hard and overachieving.”
“Daggum, Donna, if Larry had straight blond hair and blue eyes they wouldn’t be giving his straight As a second glance,” Dad harrumphed. “Time for us to get into that school and straighten out that fool teacher.”
As for setting his three kids straight, Dad had an effective brainwashing drill that he dragged us through most Saturday mornings.
“Always do your best! Always do your best!” Dad would chant, with my siblings and me obediently singing along, my nine-year-old voice squeaking uncertainly as it tried to match his proud cadence.
“Hill kids are not ordinary kids,” he’d declare, his voice foghorn-loud. “You were born to be extraordinary.” Then he’d go on to list the endless triumphs that various members of the Hill family had achieved throughout the generations, often with the word “first” affixed to their specified profession. Aunt Lena wasn’t just a gynecologist and psychiatrist—she was the first Black female gynecologist ever to practise out of New Jersey. That I hadn’t the foggiest idea what “gynecologist” meant made her profession sound all the more glamorous and important. Our great-grandfather Edwards was no “ordinary” dentist—he was the first Black dentist from the Washington, D.C., area. Lest we miss the significance and prestige of such a lofty profession, Dad would go on to say, “Dr. Edwards was the first Black man in all of D.C. rich enough to own a refrigerator.”
“Danny and Larry, quick: tell me how much your great-great-grandfather Hill paid to free himself and his family from slavery?”
I balked, feeling crushed under the weight of all the great-great-greats—how could anyone keep track of so many sets of ancestors?—but Larry shouted out, “One thousand dollars!”
“Daggum it, Larry, for winning the smartest Hill child award you get a hard-earned nickel from your broken-down old pappy.”
Dad’s “family pride” speeches scared me silly. What if I became the first Hill child in history to be considered ordinary?
“What’s wrong with you, Danny? Your Flateau cousins are getting straight As!” Dad would rage. One glance at my report card would cause him to look away in agony, my multitude of C-pluses too much of a family betrayal to contemplate. When, midway through second grade, my teacher wrote a note to my parents claiming I needed to stay after class for extra tutoring in “reading comprehension,” Dad waved the note in front of my mom’s nose as if this was somehow her fault: “Donna, explain to me how Danny can top his class in creative writing and not understand a bloody thing that’s going on in the books he’s reading?”
“Dan, you know how Danny’s mind works: he understands what he wants to understand. But if something doesn’t interest him he loses—”
“Donna, we gotta save this boy from that wild imagination of his. You and I are going to see Danny’s teacher first thing tomorrow morning to get to the bottom of this.”
I didn’t like Dad going to the school and making a big commotion. Lately he’d been visiting at least once a month. I wasn’t that close to failing, but the erratic nature of my grades—an A-plus in music and history followed by a C-minus in arithmetic and science—really got under Dad’s skin, as though I was bopping from the top of my class to the bottom just to get him going. Far as I could tell, no other parents made a habit of showing up without warning first thing in the morning to “have words” with their child’s second grade teacher. So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that during “family storytime” I shared with my astonished class how Mom, on Halloween night, had yanked down Dad’s pants and spanked him for gobbling up most of the candies I’d collected. I had a pretty good feeling that this “bare-bottom whacking,” when discussed in the prim and proper setting of Miss Hutchinson’s class, would cause Dad some embarrassment.
“It’s not nice to lie about your parents,” a blushing Miss Hutchinson had stammered, sucking her teeth.
If only I were lying. The sound of Dad’s theatrical boohooing, accompanied by the sight of his bared brown behind, stuck with me like a scene from a horror movie. Even though Mom and Dad were goofing around, I didn’t find it at all funny, at least at the time. But it was downright hilarious when, halfway through dinner, Dad just about choked on his meatloaf when I let it slip that my storytime confession had resulted in my classmates howling and me being sent to the principal’s office.
“Your parents did what?” Mr. Cutcher, the principal, asked, needing to sit down once I’d confessed my misdeed, as though he needed to catch his breath. Then, as though just the thought of such a scandalous act scared him, he ordered me back to class with a whispered: “Make sure you never, ever repeat that story to anyone again.”
Up until that point, it had been uncharacteristic of me to risk punishment. But as time passed, my confidence grew; I was figuring out that, with a little forethought, I could break any number of rules—Dad’s in particular—without getting caught.
If I was the family sneak, complying with Dad’s autocratic rule on the face of things while defying him on the sly, Larry was the great debater, inexhaustibly taking Dad to task over everything from how much TV he could watch to how late he was allowed to stay up at night. “Enough!” Dad would eventually thunder. “Discussion’s over!” But Dad always managed to soften his stance with one of his crooked, half-approving smiles. “Donna, that boy’s a fighter, he’s gonna be another huge Hill success story,” he’d say to Mom, in one of those stage whispers even the mailman walking up our front steps could hear.
Karen, thank goodness, was neither a debater nor a sneak. Her sweet temperament provided the balance our house so dearly needed; otherwise the collective Hill intensity would have blown our roof sky-high. Dad, who’d always wanted a daughter, labelled her his Little Love Bug, overloading her with equal measures of protection and affection. It was as if he needed to remind himself, after contending with two obstinate boys, that his “darling little butterball” was actually real. Despite the attention Dad paid to Karen, it never occurred to me to feel jealous, as she seemed to be hard-wired by a different set of genes. Not only was she as well behaved as I was disobedient, she was as gullible as Larry was suspicious.
“Hey, Karen, look at that black beetle with all those crooked legs, don’t you think it’d be fun to eat? Really, Larry and I eat them all the time when we’re bored.”
Crunch. Smack. Drool. Karen would quickly gulp the wriggling beetle down like it was one of those chocolate turtles and then look up at me with that eager-to-please smile, awaiting my next command. Had I asked Larry to eat a bug he would have picked it up and mashed it into my forehead.
When we had company for dinner, usually Dad’s jazz-loving, pipe-smoking intellectual friends, Karen would be called on for a song and dance.
“Sing ‘A Fine Romance’ for us, my little Lena Horne,” Dad would request, and Karen would hop off the dining-room chair and channel Joe Williams right down to his sassy baritone, twisting and gyrating her coiled, pint-sized body low to the floor as the dinner guests oohed and aahed at the spectacle of a four-year-old gravelling out the witty jazz classic like a seasoned pro.
As our guests clapped and hollered out their approval, Karen, finding herself at the end of the song and beyond the protective spell of her singing, would clamber onto Mom’s lap, as embarrassed as I was secretly impressed by her ninety-second burst of hamming.
Karen shared my singing abilities and outperformed me in school, constantly pulling off marks almost as high as Larry’s. But she lacked my attitude, my growing sense of certainty.
I might have thought that Karen’s timidity came with being female, except that Mom, while sharing none of Dad’s appetite for the spotlight, made it clear that she was no pushover. She was quick to fix her classic “who are you fucking kidding?” face on anyone who dared question her opinion on anything from politics to literature to fashion. But while Karen witnessed her bigger, more rambunctious brothers catching Dad’s competitive spark and running with it, our intensity pulling other kids into our orbit, Karen was finding that most girls her age operated in snotty little social clubs with an impossibly exclusive membership.
“Let’s play hide-and-go-seek,” the leader of the girl clique would suggest to Karen. And Karen, thrilled at finally being included, would be the designated seeker, eagerly covering her eyes and counting to the appropriate number. It would take her half an hour of fruitless searching before she realized that the gang had long since abandoned her, this being their idea of a clever joke.
And so, given Mom’s Mighty Mouse pluck, and Larry and I destined to become “obnoxiously relentless Hill strivers,” Karen’s gentle and uncompetitive nature, her confounding manner of wanting simply to love people and be loved back, struck me as not only wrong, but dangerous. I remained convinced that if I didn’t tease my sister out of her vulnerability, it would somehow infect me as well.
As a child growing up under Dad’s reign, I figured you could go one of two ways: You could marvel at his strength, while bit by bit determining how to stand up to his dominance, either directly like Larry, or indirectly like me. Or, as in Mom’s case a lot of the time, and in Karen’s case all of the time, you could be subsumed by the sheer magnitude of Dad, with the understanding that, as a reward for your obeisance, he would always be sweet, loving and tender. Whatever direction you chose, Dad was watching, ever mindful. Sometimes Dad’s protectiveness was undetectable (a teacher wisely reconsidering cuffing a Hill child for interrupting his lesson), but more often it could be stifling and embarrassing (the way he wrapped his burly arms around Karen, Larry and me while herding us like wayward cubs across a parking lot and into a restaurant, glaring at the driver of any car remotely in our vicinity to get the hell out of our way). And then there were times when Dad’s protectiveness verged on the superhuman.
During the Christmas season of 1963, when our family was driving home from visiting relatives in various parts of the United States, we were involved in a car crash that almost killed us. Mom had wanted to visit her twin sister, Dottie, in Boston, but Dad wanted us to visit his parents and sister Margaret in Washington, D.C., as well as his sister Jean and her family in Brooklyn. So they flipped a coin to see which of them got to choose. When Mom won the coin toss, Dad, being Dad, reinterpreted the rules of the toss and insisted that they visit both sides of the family.
In the car with us on the return trip was my Aunt Margaret. She’d been living with my grandparents, unable to take care of herself since she’d been struck down by mental illness. While the details were pretty murky to my ten-year-old mind, it seemed my grandparents were starting to crack under the constant strain of caring for her. Now Aunt Margaret was coming home to live with us. Margaret sat, barely stirring, beside me in the back of the car—not reacting when I’d sneak glances at her, trying to find signs of this invisible illness we were forbidden to mention. Dad kept telling Mom she was driving too fast, that she should slow down. Dad hadn’t wanted Mom to drive at all, but he’d done all the driving up to that point and Mom had finally convinced him that he needed a break. The weather was bad. A cold, light rain was falling, freezing once it hit the highway. Fifty miles from the Canada–U.S. border we hit black ice. The back of our Valiant station wagon went into a fishtail. Mom, panicking, took her foot off the accelerator and slammed on the brakes. The fishtailing increased; Margaret screamed; the car spun out of control, hitting the guardrail and bouncing off like a toy with a concealed spring. It stopped with its back end sticking out halfway into the right-hand lane of the highway, an easy target for oncoming traffic.
“Drive forward, Donna,” Dad yelled. “Hurry! Get the car off the throughway and onto the shoulder.” But the car wouldn’t start. While the rest of us sat stunned, Dad leapt out of the car and pushed the car with all of us in it onto the shoulder of the highway and out of danger. It happened so quickly that it felt like a dizzying carnival ride gone wickedly askew. We sat on the shoulder, Mom slumped over the wheel, crying, Margaret cradling my sister in her arms, crying, Larry not seeming to react at all and Dad flinging open the doors to the station wagon and, one by one, yanking us out of the car. What a great story to tell my class, I thought, guiltily. On the long, bumpy ride in a tow truck to a roadside motel, Mom’s crying seemed to go on forever, counterpointed by Dad’s uncharacteristically quiet, calming voice of comfort.
“If not for your father, we’d all be dead right now,” Mom used to say, until Dad forbade her and the rest of us to talk about the accident anymore. “I don’t think there’s another man alive who would have had the power, the presence of mind, to have done what he did.”
All Dad cared to say about the throughway incident was “Any father would have done the same thing for his family.”
Dad consistently downplayed his size and physical strength, which in turn gave his powers a mythic aura. Even when he shared his stories of teaching men how to box, or throw grenades, in the U.S. Army during World War II, it was his quickness of mind, his mental reflexes that he’d accentuate.
“One time a soldier pulled the pin, cocked the grenade behind his shoulder and froze,” Dad told us while we were driving to a campsite for a long weekend, sticking the heel of his right hand into the roof of our Valiant to demonstrate a limb momentarily paralyzed while clinging to a live grenade. “I had to make a mad dash to his side, grab that grenade and throw it away in an instant. Had I waited one more second we’d have all been blown to kingdom come. And you know what that means, don’t you, kids?”
“Yes, Daddy,” we’d say in unison, strangely chipper under the circumstances. “None of us would’ve been born.”
“That’s right. Remember, all of you, he who hesitates is lost.”
Of the many sides of my father, this was the one that most inspired me. I couldn’t relate to his university degrees and his high-octane career. But his presence of mind, his ability to react on a dime to a sudden crisis and quickly defuse any and all danger with a combination of power and brains, was what stuck with me. That was the kind of man I wanted to be.