Acclaim for
AUSTIN CLARKE
“Mr. Clarke is masterful.”
The New York Times
“[Clarke’s] characters are so real you can reach out and touch them.”
Saturday Night
“Clarke makes West Indian speech into a form of music and poetry … tremendously versatile in what it expresses and exhilarating to read.”
The Globe and Mail
“Clarke is a major Western writer.”
Greensboro Daily News
“Uncommonly talented, Clarke sees deeply, and transmits his visions and perceptions so skilfully that reading him is an adventure.”
Publishers Weekly
“Clarke is magnificent in transferring to print the music, the poetry, the complete aptness of West Indian dialogue. It is comic, it is tragic, it is all shades in between. And as prose it is as near poetry as prose can become.”
Charlotte Observer
“Austin Clarke [is] one of the most talented novelists at work in the English language today. … His fiction is unique, surprising, comfortable until the moment when it becomes uncomfortable. Then you realize you have learned something new that you didn’t want to know — and it’s essential knowledge. And so on you go, alternately congratulating and cursing Austin Clarke.”
Norman Mailer
Books by
AUSTIN CLARKE
Fiction
The Origin of Waves
There are No Elders
In This City
Proud Empires
Nine Men Who Laughed
When Women Rule
The Prime Minister
The Bigger Light
Storm of Fortune
When He Was Free and Young
and He Used to Wear Silks
The Meeting Point
Amongst Thistles and Thorns
The Survivors of the Crossing
Nonfiction
Pigtails n’ Breadfruit
A Passage Back Home
Public Enemies
Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack
Selected Writings
The Austin Clarke Reader
Copyright © 1973 by Austin C. Clarke
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 1998. Originally published in Canada by Little, Brown (Canada) & Co. Ltd. in 1973. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Clarke, Austin, 1934–
Storm of fortune
Second book in the Toronto trilogy.
I. Title. II. Title: Toronto trilogy.
PS8505.L38S75 1998 C813′.54 C98-931309-3
PR9199.3.C526S75 1998
eISBN: 978-0-307-36425-8
v3.1
To Marjorie DaCosta Chaplin
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Violence and Fear at the Base
Chapter 2: To the Very Quality of Friends
Chapter 3: Gathered into the Ling
About the Author
1
VIOLENCE AND FEAR AT THE BASE
Dots was sweating when she arrived at Bernice’s apartment. Sleep, and a few yellow grains that looked like sand, were still in her eyes, testifying to the fact that she, like her husband and her employer, Mrs. Hunter, had stayed up most of the night talking about the brutal beating the two policemen had given Henry.
Henry did not say where he was when he was beaten by the policemen (“Man, it is a damn shameful thing,” he had told them, when he dragged himself from the car which he had left parked in the middle of the road in Rosedale, where Dots worked. “It is a damn shameful thing when the police have to beat up people. Not that they was one, two or three — it must have been four or five big blasted police who kicked me like if I was a dog. I don’t mean that the beating is a shameful thing, I don’t mean that at all. I mean that it is shameful that me, a big strong-arse black man not quite turned forty, would let three, four goddamn white cops put such a licking in my arse! That is what I mean. And man, if they didn’t jump me, if they weren’t hiding, if they didn’t gang-up on me, like they did … because they’re blasted cowards when they’s walking about, individually, one at a time. And I tell you, Boysie, I tell you Dots, be-Jesus Christ, if they wasn’t cowards, and if they had just come at me one-by-one, goddamn, it would have been one big nasty race war in Toronto this morning. But this is a lesson to me. Whenever, or wherever, I meet one o’ them policemen, cop, detective, civilian in mufty, godblindme! it is licks I putting in his arse!”).
And this was what Dots had on her mind this morning. She had heard Henry’s side of the story: she didn’t know that the beating had been intended for her own husband; and Henry said nothing about it. She didn’t know either, that he was beaten because of Brigitte, her husband’s lover and the woman whom she had come to regard as her close friend. She knew none of these things. Still, this morning, late in summer, she bounded into Bernice’s apartment in such a rage that Bernice herself became frightened.
“And when that poor man relate to me this morning,” she went on to say, “even before I got outta my bed, before I even got out of my second sleep, how them four or five police dragged him outta the car, the car that Boysie lent him to go up to Hamilton in, to meet a friend of his that had come in from Barbados, and how they treated him, a human being, after all! a human being, gal, tell me if it is any wonder, I asking you now, is it any wonder Bernice, that I could never bring myself to like these blasted people in this place? Is it? And I am going to tell you something else. From today, from this morning I am a different-thinking person. I can’t tell you how different I am thinking at this precise moment, because I haven’ work it out completely yet. But I know I bound to think different towards Canada from today.
“I just gave that whore I works for my notice! I leffing her! Yes. I told her straight to her face, in the presence o’ Boysie and Henry who was still there bleeding, while we was putting cold towels on his face, Jesus God Bernice! his eyeballs like they
