Ownie found himself in a university runoff of slim Victorian houses with cramped gardens and gauzy curtains. Some had stained-glass windows and ornate trim; others bore the temporary indignity of flats. He could overhear two students chatting at a bus stop.
“I’m thinking of switching my major to psych,” revealed the boy.
“Did you know that doctors once thought that you could tell a crazy person by his smell?” asked the girl, who was wearing a nose ring. “They also believed in physiology, that certain body types were predisposed to certain ailments. They made plaster casts of faces and measured people’s skulls.”
The boy wobbled under the weight of so much information. “I’m still drunk,” he confessed, and the girl shrugged.
Ownie stood on the front step of a tan two-storey and admired the paint job. The trim on the windows and panels was darker tan and the accents plum. You had to do these old places right or they looked like hell, he thought. Scrape them down, soak them with linseed oil. Ownie concluded that the whole block had shopped at the same Colonial paint store, picking complementary shades of Comfrey Green and Empire Grey, accents of Tansy Button and Elderberry. Skewering the effect was a turquoise infidel, inhabited by a fraternity of beer-guzzling party animals and shunned by the neighbours.
When the door opened, Ownie felt like he had entered a tropical fruit factory, lush and ripe. In contrast to the muted facade, which resembled the dried flowers of the dead, the interior walls of the house were cantaloupe, the floor pimento red. Everything throbbed with colour.
He noticed two paintings hung over a white piano. So alive, the paintings tugged at Ownie’s senses like the smell from a bakery. Come closer, they invited, and he took a step toward them. They seemed to be depicting someplace hot, a place with orange tigers slinking through grass under a sky of feathers. A market bustling with vendors and dogs, a busload of shoppers, faces pressed to the windows. Ownie looked harder, sensing something different, like the time Hildred dyed her hair red and it took him a week to figure it out. That’s it: everyone was black, from the bus driver to the vendors.
“They’re by a Haitian artist.” The voice came from a woman with airbrushed skin and pulled-back hair.
“Nice,” Ownie observed. “They’re full of life.”
The woman’s chin tilted up slightly so that the light caught the broad planes of her cheeks. Her brows arched in a look that seemed to say: So? Her look drew you in, and then shut you out, a curious mix of warmth and inaccessibility. She was about thirty, Ownie figured, and stood around five-six. Her eyes were topaz.
“It’s amazing that a country so poor and troubled produces such wonderful art,” she said. “It’s an escape from the insanity, I guess, an insistence on doing something life affirming.”
“They are nice.”
The woman offered him coffee.
“Ah, sure,” Ownie said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Not at all. Sugar?”
“Just one.” Ownie could feel the energy of the room; he could hear people laughing on the walls, eating fresh fruit, soaking up sun, and swimming in waters as blue and clean as mouthwash. He thought about his elusive dream with the gro-lamp and the yellow roses. He thought about being happy and warm.
“You shunn eat that junk.” Turmoil was lolling on a plump lemon couch, TV remote in one hand, an apple in the other. “Sugah is the devil food. It will kill you like it kill all mah peeple.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When they bring mah peeple ovah from Africa, they put them to work on the sugah plahntayshins.” Turmoil raised a hand. “They dohn let them live with their famlies, they dohn feed them right, they work them to death. By the time they finish, more than half is dead!” He lowered the hand in a curse: “Sugah!”
“I hear ya.” Ownie nodded thanks for the coffee he was handed. “I’ve got the same bad feeling about potatoes.”
Ownie cleared a space for his cup, nudging a stack of texts and papers. Toward an Africadian Renaissance. He tried to read a cover upside down: How to Encourage the Rejuvenation of Nova Scotia’s Black Neighbourhoods, written by Lorraine Waters. Could that, he wondered, be her?
Where is he meeting all of these people? People I’ve never met in fifty years. Ownie stared at Turmoil for an answer. The week before, Ownie recalled, Turmoil had come into Tootsy’s with a tall Mi’kmaq in wire-rimmed glasses. The stranger’s skin was smooth and even as if he’d been under a sun lamp. Next to the blanched locals, sun-deprived and spotty, covered with zits and angry patches, he looked like he was wearing body makeup. He looked like natives would have looked, before the white man poisoned their blood with booze and reservations. The man — Ownie had forgotten his name — was wearing a singlet. On one shoulder was a tattoo the size of a kiwi, a pawprint of something: a badger or a bobcat? It looked meaningful, left by an animal spirit or a native god, not by a cheap tattoo artist who branded bikers. Turmoil said the man was a professor.
The fighter finished his apple and threw the core on the pimento floor.
“What did you do that for?” Ownie snapped. “Don’t you have no manners?” Ownie checked to see whether the handsome woman had seen. “Keep that up and you’ll be back living in that dump, that boarding house.”
Stretching his legs, Turmoil yawned dismissively. “When ah was fourteen year old a spir’t come to mah house in Trinidad.”
Ownie tapped the arm of a flowered chair and asked, despite himself, “What kind of spirit?”
“Ohhh it was a bad spir’t. It could put curse on your famly or on your howse.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The spir’t try to get me. Ah be in my room. It try pull me out a window. It say ‘Come wid me, boy.’ But ah too strong. Ah held on to both sides till my fingers sore. Ah wudden let it tek me ’way.”
“What was this spirit going to do?”
“It could keep you in the jungle for a long-long time. It might let you go, it might nevva let you go. It ver-ver searyus bisnis.”
As they were leaving, the woman, all fine skin and searching eyes, pecked Turmoil’s cheek goodbye.
“She’s a smart woman, Ownie,” Turmoil said as the bevelled glass door closed behind her. “She a politishun.”
“That right?”
“You shud know who she is: the first black wummin in the Nova Scotia guv’men. You shud know her name if you payin attenshun at all.”