CHAPTER 1
The Early Years
Three unidentifiable people, shrouded in hoods and mystery, would regularly come walking up the street toward our home in Toronto when I was a child. I didn’t know if they were men or women, but they would come up from Queen Street, just below Dundas. They would proceed slowly and eventually come to a stop outside our apartment building on Simcoe Street. After a pause, they would come up the walkway, frightening and unknown to me. They would enter the house in complete silence, without ever exchanging a word between them. My parents never seemed to be around or to notice. And then, slowly, they would start climbing the stairs toward my bedroom as my mind raced, my little heart pounded, and my fears exploded. Then I’d awaken with a start from that persistent dream, and they would be gone.
From time to time when I wake up in the middle of the night, even today at age eighty-four — eight decades later — I still revisit that chilling scene in my sleep, and it leaves me with a sense of fear and uncertainty. In many ways, those three figures have never been gone. I’m sure psychologists would have a field day trying to sort out the symbolism of that dream. I have spent a good amount of time engaged in my own analysis of it. The one constant is that this vision has remained with me throughout my life, and I’ve wondered if it can be interpreted as an unconscious motivating force, something always lurking deep in my psyche, reminding me that I was under a surveillance of sorts and so I was required to behave a certain way. I had to set and strive for high goals, and all the while I couldn’t allow my colour to restrain me or give me excuses for not pursuing excellence. Otherwise, I could expect one of those night visits.
I wonder if that dream is the sort of imagery we all share. Some of us suppress it. Some of us can’t shake it. You’ve got your family, your colleagues, your union, your place of worship, and any number of support systems. But the message, the bottom-line truth, is that deep in our consciousness we all know we are accountable to ourselves, and within us the motivating force — our own versions of the three hooded figures in black, with their gowns swaying as they walk — will be there to remind us of that.
In truth, if that interpretation is accurate, then the messages are really the ones my mother drilled into my head from the earliest age. For it was she, Mae Rose Royale, a maid born in Jamaica, who really imparted to me those core lessons that endure to this day. When I look back at her circumstances, I am filled with wonder at her courage in advocating and encouraging the pursuit of such noble and lofty goals.
It’s rather worn out, but this is my grandmother on my mother’s side. Naturally, the picture is an important family memento.
While my family was living at 29 Draper Street in Toronto when I was born on January 21, 1922, my first recollections of that iconic dream go back to when we lived on Simcoe Street. My folks later moved to McCall Street in downtown Toronto and again later to Chatham Avenue in the east end of Toronto. While I don’t recall being overly traumatized by racial issues at the time, they existed in abundance. Indeed, there was no doubt in me from
Here I am as a rather handsome young fellow in 1922 at age six months.
my earliest years of what it meant to be a visible minority, even though it would be decades later — in the 1960s and 1970s, in particular — before that term would become common. As a matter of fact, to the best of my memory I can recall only three other black families when I was growing up in the east end: the Abbotts, the Scotts, and the Berrys. When you consider the east end of Toronto of today, it is stunning to realize how much the city has changed in that regard.
Back then in Toronto there were certain places that, if you went there as a black, you had to be foolish. These places may not have been numerous, but you knew to avoid them. Nevertheless, as I would later discover, it was nothing like Harlem in New York, where I would spend almost three of my formative years. The scene in Toronto at that time wasn’t violent, though you had to know your place and govern yourself accordingly.
So, not surprisingly, one of my favourite phrases — “black is beautiful” — just wasn’t the case in those days. Getting work was difficult, if not impossible. Lots of black people were reduced to doing jobs such as plucking feathers from chickens, being maids, or taking on squalid and demeaning labour. In this respect, for many people, there was not a lot of promise in life. After all, this was the WASP Toronto of the 1920s, where people with my parents’ and my colour of skin were barely sufficient in number to constitute a minority group. Blacks at that time made up a sliver-thin portion of the city’s population, and racial prejudice abounded. That environment clearly defined for my parents the kind of employment opportunities they could expect. Theirs was not a world filled with workplace options, so they settled on careers that were largely the default jobs for blacks at that time. For my mother, it would mean toiling as a maid or doing similar domestic work. She chose to work as a maid. My father, Lincoln MacCauley Alexander Sr., was a carpenter by trade, but he had little hope of pursuing that career here in Canada. He took work as a railway porter and, from what I gather, thrived at it. In any case, both lines of work were better than not working, and they were not among the squalid options.
As if the odds at the time were not adequately stacked against them, more pressure soon arrived in the shape of the Great Depression, though it turned out that monumental economic catastrophe did not affect them greatly. Fortunately, they were both committed and industrious, and throughout that difficult time both my parents continued to work and provide a home for me and for my brother, Hughie, two years my junior. Despite the economic and racial pressures my parents encountered in those early years, or that I had to face as I grew up, I will say emphatically to the day I die that I am overwhelmingly happy that they chose to leave the West Indies for Canada. My mom was born in Jamaica and my father in St. Vincent and the Grenadines; their paths brought them to Canada, where they met and started to build a life. My mother, whom I remember as strong-willed and determined, came to Canada at the height of the First World War and risked being attacked by German U-boats to get to the North American continent. That experience alone should present a pretty potent illustration of her firm character.
As much as I idolized my mother, as a youngster I also had immense respect for my father, though later events would cause that respect to erode to a significant extent. He had arrived in Canada about the same time as my mother. To a little kid, my six-foot-four father was a source of awe. They called him Big Alex. He cemented that awe in me one time when Hughie and I were playing in the yard in front of our apartment building. Even though we had a balcony on our second-floor apartment, we often came down to the yard to play outside. A disheveled drunk had come wandering up the street, staggering and mumbling and talking to no one in particular. My father told him to move along and leave us alone. To the drunk’s later dismay, I’m sure, he chose not to leave us alone, so my father decked him with one punch, and the guy went down like a ton of bricks, out cold. I remember thinking, Wow, that was my dad. That was my dad coming to the rescue of his two little sons. It made one heck of an impression on me.
After coming to Canada from St. Vincent, my father had tried his hand on the East Coast, where he had a brother, but he eventually moved to Toronto. As I understand it, he left the East Coast because he didn’t approve of some of the things going on there: the folks there were involved in something illicit, such as rum-running or smuggling. So my dad gravitated to one of the few decent industries open to blacks in postwar Canada — the railway. Working the rails took him away from his wife and family for days on end, but it provided us all with the necessities of life and a modicum of dignity. In time, I was ready for school, and in Toronto I went first to Earl Grey Public School. I remember when it was time to go