Scarborough tale of bros vs. brothers
Read an excerpt from David Chariandy’s award-winning book about two young Black men growing up in the city’s suburbs
Five books have been nominated for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards, awarded each year to books that best represent the city. Leading up to the awards ceremony on Wednesday, Oct. 10 at the Toronto Reference Library, the Star is running an excerpt from each nominee.
Today: Brother, David Chariandy’s award-winning book about Michael and his brother, Francis.
I know now that by the age of fourteen, you feel it. You spot the threat that is not only about young men with weapons, about “gangs” and “predators,” but also the threat that is slow and somehow very old. A mother lecturing you about arrival and opportunity while her breath stinks of the tooth she can’t just for the moment afford the time or money to fix. And as Francis began to approach adulthood, he grew dissatisfied with the world and with his destined place in it.
By the time Francis turned eighteen, he spent almost all his time away from me and with boys I didn’t know well at all. They were older and from different parts of Scarborough, not just the Park. They styled themselves in big pants and unzipped sports jackets, loud hats and the right kinds of shoes. They wore tight fades, with cuts etched into the paintthin hairs around the sides of their heads.
They spoke and gestured in ways that asserted connections beyond Scarborough, to scenes in New York and L.A. and Kingston. They seemed to have their own language, and I’d watch very carefully when they greeted Francis by touching hands and sharing a private joke. But if I tried to worm my way into their circle, saying “sup” or maybe agreeing too eagerly on any matter (“Yeah, homeboy is indubitably dope!”), there’d be a difficult moment of silence when they’d look at me, and then at Francis, and then back at me, as if they couldn’t understand the relationship. As if they couldn’t figure out what, genetically, had gone so wrong.
“Hey,” Francis would say to me. “Can you give us a little space?”
At home, he still helped Mother after work, and she would still touch his face. But increasingly the sympathies that had existed between them strained, and an unspoken irritability and tension seemed to grow with each passing day. And now, when she touched his body, it was often rough, to indicate the lack of “respectability” and “plain civilization” he signalled through hair and clothes and posture. But always the biggest fight was about school. Like me, Francis had years ago been streamed out of an academic program into a basic one. He stayed cool about the whole thing. His new-found disinterest in school perfectly countered its apparent disinterest in him. But in his last year of high school he told a teacher to fuck off, and he was expelled with threats to call the police. “Your one and only chance!” Mother repeated over and over again.
Francis never went back to school. He got a series of temporary jobs and quietly added groceries to the fridge. He worked hard to prove he wasn’t frittering his life away, and he came home looking almost as worn out as our mother, yet this only irritated her more. And then, that summer, just as you could sense the heat coming, the hostility between them erupted. Mother had been taken aside by a neighbour and informed that Francis was spending all his spare time at Desirea’s, a barbershop filled with boys apparently possessing records.
“Deny this!” Mother screamed. “Deny to my face that you spend time there! Deny these boys are known to police!”
Francis had long since learned not to argue directly with Mother. He appeared to listen while never perfectly meeting her eyes, and in this way acted neither foolishly aloof nor confrontational. But this time, as she stood dripping in her coat, Francis’s technique didn’t work. He would not ignore her, Mother warned. He would not get away with pretending nothing was happening. “You are my son!” she yelled. “You will never be a criminal.”
Maybe it was the way Mother pronounced the word, briefly stepping out of the Queen’s English and into the music of her Trinidadian accent. Cri-minal. Or maybe it was something else, some creeping sense of unfairness or inevitability. But Francis laughed. For a moment, Mother just stared. The sharp brass door key forgotten in her hand when she struck him across the face.
Silence as Francis slowly brought up his hand to touch his cheek. His eyes blinking with hurt and surprise, a thin red line welling on his skin. Until his eyes changed and he smiled. As if this, somehow, were a victory.