Storm of Fortune

Room-for-Rent signs, and reading the faces of ethnic landladies and landlords and men whose faces were pale and square, and whose English was strange if spoken at all. She was searching these faces and houses for a sign that the “room” printed on the sign in the window was really a room in the house which they were willing to rent to her. She had heard somebody say (perhaps it was Henry, who knew this district well) that if a black man couldn’t get a room on Huron Streeet, then his chances of getting a room anywhere else in Toronto were nil. Huron used to be the international street in 1955, when the first flood of West Indians arrived to attend the university a block away. Estelle saw a sign in a window, just one block north of Bloor Street. But as she was walking up the path to the front door, she happened to notice a woman wearing glasses, peeping through another window, beside the door. The woman hastily pulled the transparent white curtains and covered herself from Estelle’s presence, and from Estelle’s request. Estelle turned back. Her courage fell. It was her first trial. Her first defeat: but she was not certain that it was not herself defeating herself.

Estelle felt the dejection of this first, probable, self-inflicted defeat: and she knew also that there would be other defeats not brought on by her self-consciousness. She walked, and she looked and she walked: left and right; but she looked in such a way so as not to let on to the people passing, or the people loitering on small cement porches, that she was really looking for a room to rent. She wanted very much that her other defeats not be witnessed by them. It was too personal an adventure she was on, too personal to expose her quest to any-and-everybody. She was out to get a room. This was her own problem: she must find a room before the night became too old. Her valise she had left in a locker in the Gray Coach bus terminal on Bay Street. The advice given her by the man in Union Station when she was setting out for Timmins came in very handy. She knew something now about life in a big city: you didn’t have to load yourself down and lug your load all over the place: you could rest it behind you. There should have been some of these lockers in Barbados, she mused; and straightway went on that journey and fantasy of memory through distance: those country women in Barbados, who came to Bridgetown early in the heavy dew-dropping, damp mornings with the weight of their laborious backbending existence on their heads. Only a few lockers, and those women wouldn’t have to walk with such loads on their heads! Boysie once had something to say about this, too. “It is all-right for certain eddicated people to talk a lot o’ shite ’bout Wessindian women having good shapes and good-looking backsides because of the heavy loads they have to carry on their head. But I would say it is plain simple, arse-hole hard work! Wessindian women know more ’bout hard work than a snake know ’bout grass!”

“I need a blasted room,” she reminded herself, when she got to St. George Street. “Today.” She had just turned across Bedford Road, looking for signs and a sign. The first house with a sign said Furnished Room. The house itself was an imposing structure, and Estelle felt it was too good for her. There was ivy on its walls. Estelle thought she saw five levels of windows. The front door was open. She walked up the walk, and just as she was about to press the button marked Press (“What else could you do with a button? Eh?”), a man came forward out of the broadloomed twilight of the house.

“Yes.” Was he telling her something was all right?

“I was just passing, and I noticed your sign …”

“For how many? I have three vacant rooms going. Furnished or unfurnished?” Estelle didn’t have the experience to understand then that not all rooms had to be furnished before they could be rented. It was another absurdity about life in this country. She felt that all rooms had to have furniture; she didn’t bring any with her, from Barbados!

“Come, come with me,” the man said. On the second floor, somebody was playing a kind of music she had heard often in Sam Burrmann’s house, when Mrs. Burrmann was absent. It was Sam’s music; and it was played as loudly as Sam played it. She thought of Sam. The landlord informed her what the music was, and what his attitude to it was, as he said, with great history-assured confidence, “That damn jazz! They call it music?” On the third floor there was a different music, the music of guitars, and she liked this kind better. The landlord didn’t tell her what his attitude to this kind of music was, but led her up the broadloomed steps of the short staircase to the fourth floor. “Here it is, miss.” She was in a coffin of a room. There was a bed, a narrow couch like the one she had slept on in North Bay. There was a cupboard made of metal, painted white to look like wood. There was a stuffed chair which took up most of the head-part of the coffin. And there was a bentwood upright, uprighteous-looking chair, and a table whose top showed how many and how often glasses and hot plates and cigarettes and staining things had been put on it. The landlord was moving out of the coffin. “Now, out here, in the hallway, is a hotplate …”

“A what?”

“Hotplate! You know, a small stove-thing for boiling yourself a cup of tea in the mornings, or cooking little meals like weiners and eggs. Snacks and so forth …”

“Oh yes.”

“You will be sharing it with the other lady who lives on this floor with you. There