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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 to kindergarten that first day another child came by, a nice black boy named Desmond Davis. (Desmond Davis later fathered Carl Davis, who is now an inspector in the equestrian division of the Toronto Police Service.) He was in Grade 2 and, being older, he came to take me to school and guide me across University Avenue.

Me with my hot tricycle in the late 1920s.

There were not a lot of cars back then, not like today, but there were still enough vehicles rolling along the streets to create some danger. I remember that event as clearly as if it were yesterday — my first day of school.

Here I am in my Grade 1 class photo in 1928. I’m front row left.

At the same time, I enjoyed another first: my first puppy love. I can still picture it. We were all in class sitting in a circle and — remember, I was the only black kid in the class — this little girl sort of took a liking to me, and she grabbed me by the hand and we walked around the circle. I forget what game we were playing, but it was typical of those games you play when you are in kindergarten. It’s funny the memories you can never shake, no matter how young you were when they happened. And that is one I’ve never forgotten, because it really struck me, even though I was a young child, that this was such a warm, friendly gesture that this girl offered. Oh, my, I was in love.

Despite such gestures of friendship, dealing with being the different one among my classmates was a constant for me, and it was never easy. Far from it. Throughout my education in Canada, from public school to my secondary and post-secondary studies, I was usually the only black face in my class. Despite that, I can tell you that I never raced home from school and cried. That was unacceptable. What mattered was gaining respect, and with the right kind of support from family, certain teachers,

This was, I believe, my Grade 2 class at Earl Grey Public School. I’m third in the row on the right.

and other children, I was able to get that respect in a variety of ways. I can’t fight anymore, of course, but as a kid I would often have to fight, and I’m not ashamed to say that I had my fair share of entanglements. I wish it could have been otherwise, but at the time I had to stick up for myself. That taught me to always walk tall, and with a certain bearing, so people knew I meant business.

In the 1920s and ’30s, there were several hundred (although some estimates put it as high as seven thousand) blacks in Toronto, and racism was simply a grim fact of everyday life. You could be confronted with it anywhere from your job, to school, to out on the street. I felt I had to make it clear that I would not accept being called any of those insulting names — nigger, coon, whatever. If those issuing the insults couldn’t accept that, I had to resort to duking it out, and I can recall throwing the first punch, commonly known as a sucker punch.

When I started high school in Toronto, I went to Riverdale Collegiate, and, not surprisingly, yet again I was one of only a handful of black students. I was often singled out for name-calling and other insults, and that meant I again had to fight for respect. The results of these altercations were always the same: I’d win because no one else could fight like me. Of course, what’s wrong with that picture is the fact I had to fight at all. From that time to the present, I’ve been required to take whatever measures were necessary to assert my dignity and my right to respect — from scrapping in the schoolyard to calling out the dean of my law school for a public racial slur. Like it or not, confronting racism is a lifelong enterprise in which I have been engaged both personally and at the organizational level.

When I was young, I started piano lessons, essentially because my dad wanted me to be the next Duke Ellington. I wonder what he would have thought about me meeting Count Basie and the Duke in Harlem and then later on in Toronto. My father loved music and he loved the jazz of those years. I can’t recall whether he was disappointed to learn I just didn’t have any interest in the piano. I imagine he must have been somewhat let down. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t musical. In fact, I can say without boasting that I do have a musical bent, not with an instrument but with my voice. That has been evident from time to time, such as during my 1960 trip to Africa when my fellow travellers and the native Africans couldn’t seem to get enough of my singing. But as a youngster, propped at the piano plunking away at boring scales, I’d look out the window and see the other boys playing softball and all kinds of other sports. Sitting in front of the piano was the last place I wanted to be when there was a ball or puck in sight. Some people have the right combination of talent and drive to play the piano, but I didn’t. I was fortunate enough to realize that and to give it up. I’d like to be able to play the piano now, but I’d have to practise a lot, and I am not interested in taking the time for that. You have to want it more than I did.

Instead, as youngster, I was very involved in extracurricular activities. I loved sports, to the detriment of piano. I used to run the hundred-yard dash in track, and I also played soccer, hockey, and softball — I even boxed. I loved it all, though I recognized I wasn’t all that gifted an athlete. I was tall and skinny with big feet, and as a result my co-ordination may not have been my strongest athletic asset. I was pretty good at sports, but, as a gangly youth, I didn’t excel. Nevertheless, even today I have a real love of sport because I think there’s great value in challenging yourself. Sport does that. It makes demands of you, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I can remember as a child being out on an outdoor rink in Toronto all by myself. I loved to skate, loved to hear the sound of the blades cutting and slashing through the ice. I liked crossing over my feet making turns and hearing the crunch of the ice. I eventually got a very good pair of CCM skates, which greatly enhanced my regular visits to the outdoor ice palaces. I liked to stickhandle the puck, too. Moving in and out with that rubber disc, zigging and zagging at top speed — well, my top speed — was such a thrill, with that brilliant winter air filling my lungs. It’s quite likely that the attraction was that being on the ice, with fresh air, speed, and exhilaration, delivered a fantastic sense of freedom.

I also tried lacrosse, but in recent years my greatest sports interest has become basketball, which is natural given my involvement with the Toronto Raptors Foundation, of which I am the chairman.

As kids, we used to walk from Chatham Avenue over to Riverdale Park to bobsled in the winter. We’d carve tracks out of hills and go careering like crazy, defying mortality. During the hot summer days, we would take that daredevil attitude and apply it to the track, where we raced our homemade go-karts. We’d make them out of old crates with roller skates for wheels, and we’d race them on the streets. I also did a lot of cycling when I was a kid. The point is that I was a pretty active youngster, as I think most children were at the time, and I worry that today children are not encouraged to get out and be active. One thing I can’t do athletically is swim. I went

Me with a bunch of pals in Riverdale Park in 1931. I was nine.

for lessons once, and the instructors got the brilliant idea of moving the taller people toward the deeper end, which ended up being not such good planning from my standpoint. I went farther, then a bit farther, and then, as I went a bit farther and tried to stand up, I dropped like a stone. I’d reached the separation point between shallow and deep, and I was gone, hopeless, a deadweight. I remember the teacher jumping in to pull me out. As soon as I realized that swimming was life-threatening, it was assured that I would have a real short swimming career. I never did learn how to swim.

Generally, my childhood memories are pretty positive with regards to my family, particularly early on. We always had presents at Christmas, and as a youngster I remember lots of love in our home.

In those formative years, my parents delivered different life lessons and sets of beliefs. My mother was utterly convinced that education was the certain path to a good future and insisted that I work hard at my schooling. I was told, “Go to school, you’re a little black boy” so often that I knew when it was coming even before she said it. And I have to say, all her lecturing paid off, because I became a pretty solid student in elementary and secondary school. I was at the top of the class a few times and I was consistently in the top ten with my marks. My strengths during my school years were arithmetic, English, and history, and it was no coincidence they were also my favourite subjects. In time, I also came to be fond of manual training, which was related to machine shop training, woodworking, etc.

Although I wouldn’t shy away from a fight to earn respect, one of the central messages my father left me with was the value of getting along with people. It was his nature to behave that way, and the trait was valuable to him in his work as a railway porter. In fact, there were regular visible, financial illustrations of his ability to get along with people. When my dad returned from one of his lengthy railway journeys, he would deposit a huge pile of cash on the table, the product of tips gained from being charming and effective in his work. My father was a porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the years when the CPR passenger service meant something. It had history and authority and class.

One story he told me was how he and his fellow porters would often serve members of Parliament or other big shots of the day. When such people took the time to say hello or chat with the porters, to treat them with respect, they received the best services available (and there were a lot of them). One payoff was that the porters would introduce them to the women in the sleeping cars. But if they ignored the porters, their shoes would not be shined, or perhaps they would not be served whisky. Those porters knew how things worked. Thanks to my father’s story, I always remember to be friendly when I meet people and to treat them with respect. If I see someone looking my way, I always say, “Hello! How are you?” That breaks the ice; the atmosphere gets warmer and the communication gap shrinks.

In our family, my father was the disciplinarian from a physical standpoint, and there was no doubt about it. He expected us to be on the doorstep at 9:00 p.m., for example; if we were even one second late, he’d dress us down. Hughie and I were afraid of him. He didn’t hit us much, though he did now and again. He’d just beat us on the bum with his belt. Not to hurt us, but to let us know that when he said something, he meant it. As a CPR porter, he had a steady run from Toronto to Vancouver — and occasionally Toronto to Montreal — so he would often be gone five or six days at a time. My mom used to say that if we weren’t good, she would tell him when he got home. Talk about protracted anxiety! He could still be several days away from getting home, and we were left to imagine our punishment the entire time. He would be coming in from either the Montreal or the Vancouver run and, along with covering the table with his tips, he would bring us a lot of things, ranging from eggs, chickens, and turkeys to Sweet Marie chocolate bars. These were things people would give him or that he would buy along the way if he found good deals. So while it was always exciting to see what he had for us, in the back of our minds we would be concerned about being punished for our youthful indiscretions. We’d be shaking in our boots. Fortunately, my mother many times would not tell my father of our misdeeds.

In the end, my father’s strict nature was good because it taught me responsibility and discipline, even though he was a rascal himself. In fact, it was that rascal element in my dad’s character that eventually tore our family apart. My parents were religious. They went regularly to the Baptist church on University Avenue in Toronto, and, as is the case with many religious organizations, it became the centre of their social life as well. As a result, I went to Sunday school every Sunday for years. But religious faith alone could not forestall what lay ahead.

Hughie and me, ready for the annual Port Dalhousie picnic, the annual gathering of the black community in Ontario and parts of the U.S. My hand is in that position because I was covering a spot on my white slacks so my dad wouldn’t see it. I ended up not having socks on and my dad sent me home, which brought on a torrent of tears.

My mother was like a lot of women in those days: she often just turned a blind eye to my dad’s indiscretions, at least up to a point, and I imagine that her faith helped her manage such emotions. So it wasn’t racism or poverty that marred my reasonably happy childhood. It was infidelity — my father’s. I had always thought there was a lot of love in the house, and in many senses there was, but in truth things were far from idyllic, at least as far as my parents were concerned.

My brother Hughie all decked out, ready for the annual picnic.

In some respects, if they were so inclined, railway porters were not unlike salesmen or sailors, with love interests in each of the “ports” they visited. That was my father’s weakness. Over the years, he had a series of trysts in the many places the trains stopped. Eventually he was caught after he passed a sexually transmitted disease to my mother. That was unacceptable to my mother, and she was humiliated, so she resolved to leave him immediately. That shows you the kind of inner strength she had, and maybe that’s where I got my strength. Imagine, in the mid 1930s, with the effects of the Depression still lingering, having the courage as a woman to strike out on her own.

On the morning my mother left, it was as if all hell were breaking loose in the house. There was a fracas, and I can remember going downstairs to the kitchen where I witnessed a physical battle. My mother was trying to get out the back door, and my dad was blocking her way. I recall screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, don’t hit her.” During the fight, I was hanging onto his bathrobe belt and I was very frightened. He slapped her and broke her eardrum, a physical exclamation mark that signified the end of their relationship.

One of my dad’s weaknesses didn’t rub off on me. He was a womanizer. That was a lesson I learned. Never put your wife in the position that my dad put my mom in. He had done a lot of running around and, as I said, she cast a blind eye up to a point — though I have to believe it hurt her deeply. But when he gave her that disease, it was the last straw. She headed to New York, to Harlem, where she had a sister, Iris Knight.

Along with the devastation of her departure, we had to figure out how to carry on. My dad mostly handled the Toronto–Vancouver run, which was a prize among the CPR porters. It produced plenty of extra tip money, so he was reluctant to give it up. But that meant he would be gone from home for several days at a time. As a result, Hughie and I became a problem, me at fifteen and him at thirteen, without a mother. To solve this, first my dad arranged for a niece of his, Isobel Gibson, to come up from Halifax to look after us. Eventually she moved to California, and even today I hear from her from time to time. After she left, fortunately for us a wonderful couple, Sadie and Rupert Downs, cared for us while my dad was away. They were like surrogate parents at a particularly rough time in our lives. They had a son, Ray Downs, who went on to become an internationally renowned jazz pianist. I taught him to play “I Love Coffee, I Love Tea,” his first exposure to the keyboard, so I guess you could say I helped launch his career.

Sadie and Rupert Downs cared for us until I was able to join my mother in New York in 1936. Hughie stayed behind and, from that point on, we never had a relationship to speak of, which is quite sad to me. My mom was in a difficult financial position at the time and could only afford for one of us to join her. That turned out to be me. Hughie was, quite naturally, jealous over the years and resented my mother’s decision, and I made matters worse by ignoring him. In due course, as he grew older, he moved to Boston and we drifted even further apart. He was a hard worker, and when he did get to Boston, where he became a plasterer, the city was in the midst of a building boom. One trait he inherited from my dad was a taste for women, and he ended up going through three wives.

Even though my dad was a porter, the trip to New York was my first train ride. It was fun, but then everybody likes choo-choos. My mom came

My brother Hughie boxing with Ray Downs, the son of Sadie and Rupert Downs, who helped with our care after my mother moved to New York. I had followed her to New York by the time this picture was taken.

up to Toronto and took me back on the train. I remember as we were preparing to depart she bought me a Coke and a National Geographic magazine. That was my first Coke, and the National Geographic was my first magazine, and I find it interesting that she chose it. There had to have been lots of other choices for a fifteen-year-old, but she opted for National Geographic, which I think reflected her determination to make me adhere to my studies and learn.

We lived in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, and I welcomed the move with open arms, since it put me back together with the person who had such a profound influence in my life, my mother.

Once I arrived in the Big Apple, one of the first things I did was pawn off for $12 those beautiful CCM skates my mother had sent me from New York because, as it turned out, not too many kids in New York were into skating, particularly black kids. My mother must have had a hell of a time finding them in the first place, because even at that time I wore a size 14.

Girlie, my mother’s sister. She was a nurse in Jamaica, then later nursed in New York. The note on this photo postcard says, “to dear Mae Rose from Con,” one of my mother’s three sisters.

My Uncle Ernest, my mom’s brother, in Kingston, Jamaica, in, I believe, the 1920s.

One of my mother’s sisters, Dolly, also known as Girlie. My mom’s other siblings were sisters Con and Iris and brother Ernest.

I enrolled at DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, and I have to say the school has turned out a roster of impressive grads: playwrights Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon, actors Don Adams, Judd Hirsch, Burt Lancaster, and Tracy Morgan, composer Richard Rodgers, jazz musician Fats Waller, comic Robert Klein, and designer Ralph Lauren. In my time, I was about the only member of my gang to go to high school and, given the message about education that had been pounded into my head since I was a young child, the fact those kids didn’t go to school was an eye-opener for me. In my mind, going to school was what you did; it was the right thing.

Beyond my studies, being in Harlem at that time turned out to be an incredible learning experience for me, although not all my experiences were positive. I had moved from a city where, as a black, I was the exception rather than the rule to a place where the exact opposite was the case. Black was everywhere, and it was important for me to see that. In all professions, in all walks of life, blacks were fully represented, and that was a stark difference from the limited career opportunities I’d come to expect in Canada. Mind you, much of that advancement was still primarily within the black community, largely insulated or isolated from the wider New York and American mainstream. Regardless, the sight of what all these blacks were accomplishing stiffened my resolve to be more than a porter.

At that time, my mom got me my first part-time job, moving around the clothing carts in the laundry where she worked. Then I got another life lesson. I was doing well and working hard when after two weeks, out of the blue, I was fired. It made no sense. I was devastated because I considered it a significant job and it enabled me to help my mother out financially. It was my first job, and I was a proud son of a gun, and then this guy up and fired me. I asked my mother how that could happen, and she said, “Well, the boss wanted to go to bed with me and I said no.” I’ve never forgotten that. It affected me. It taught me that life wasn’t fair. You can work as hard as you can, and then all of a sudden almost on a whim something can come upon you and you’re gone, through no fault of your own.

I’ll never forget that slimy excuse for a boss. I was getting used to seeing hustlers, con men, pimps, prostitutes, and rounders of all sorts taking advantage of people … but when it affected me personally, and my mother, I was shocked and hurt. My mother took me aside and explained the facts of life to me with respect to the boss’s request. I felt awful for her that she had to put up with things like that. She was a decent, moral woman.

I got my next job setting up pins in a bowling alley in the Bronx. As a relatively new arrival from Canada, I was really discouraged and disillusioned by the blatant racism in the United States. I remember saying to another black pin boy from Georgia how awful it was that in his home state, for instance, blacks couldn’t go into restaurants or get work, and at that time blacks were even still being hung from trees in that part of the South. Incredibly, that young guy protested that I was insulting his home state, one of the worst states for racism in the United States of America. The reaction shocked me. It was hard to understand, and it taught me a couple of lessons. One, it’s important to be proud of your birthplace, and two, get all the facts before you open your mouth.

Nevertheless, I got the New York experience, which is a very broad one when you are young. Those streets require you to mature very quickly and come to terms with what life is all about. You see how people are forced to live, often in the direst of circumstances. Back then in Harlem, you would regularly see a pimp beat one of his women for not turning over all her money. There were drunks lying on the sidewalks, knife fights, and many other illegal activities going on all over the place. When I hear people describe such settings as jungles, I have to agree. I feel safe in saying Harlem boys and girls of ten and twelve have seen and know more about the hard facts of life and suffering than young boys and girls in Canada in their late teens or even early twenties. That was true in the 1930s, and I am convinced it is the case today. There was no city in Canada to compare with Harlem before the Second World War. It was gruelling and grinding, it eroded your humanity, and it consumed your dignity. From that sense of personal emptiness, you begin to develop admiration for people who fight their way through that and have learned to hold their heads high.

Harlem, notwithstanding certain good points, faced a lot of poverty, crime, and despair, and there was little opportunity for the majority of black people to crawl out of that.

On top of it all, nobody — and by that I mean civic, social, and government people, those who could do something about it — gave a damn. It was debilitating. Life for black youth was bleak, and of course they didn’t hang around on the streets out of choice. They were there because there was nothing else to do. And I will tell you that there were a lot of brilliant people on those streets. Given the opportunity, they would have been leaders in business, in politics, in government. That’s proven by the fact that some, somehow, escaped the horrors of Harlem by becoming lawyers, judges, community leaders, politicians, professors, doctors, business leaders, and sports superstars.

They got out because of their own strong character, their determination, and their will, which made them able to sacrifice and not fall prey to the easy ways of life — crime or welfare. Seeing that was a very important lesson for me, and it reinforced much of the direction and encouragement I was getting from my mother.

My mother was a decent woman who always insisted on living a decent life. We lived in the relatively better part of Harlem, and I ended up being a regular, good student at DeWitt Clinton. Mae Rose had a lot of influence on me, and it was always clear her expectations of me were high. In turn, I had a great deal of love and respect for her and I realized how deeply it would hurt her if I let her down. Because of her I have always set my sights high. The fact that I was one of the few people from my gang attending school alone helped minimize my time on the streets. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be something, somebody.

My mother, Mae Rose, photographed around the time she left for New York. As I have pointed out, and as is obvious, she was a beautiful woman. The note says, “With much love to Linny, Mom.”

After I went to New York, I really didn’t go to church much, although I visited the church of Father Devine, the black American religious leader. Born George Baker in 1875 near Savannah, Georgia, he began preaching in the South in around 1900, and in around 1915 he moved to New York. There he founded his Peace Mission Movement and adopted the name Father Devine. This cult figure was a saint to the people of Harlem, and it was there I realized how religious many black people are. In retrospect, at the same time I discovered how vulnerable some people can be to persuasive talkers and how people can be consumed by cults.

The grim experiences I encountered in Harlem, fortunately, are not all that I remember. There are good memories. My first sexual encounter took place in Harlem, in the rumble seat of a car. It was a passing moment of youthful exuberance. These things happen. No matter how you cut it, the Harlem years are a part of my roots and have helped define who I am. I’ve gone back many times, including on my honeymoon. When I went back I would often see some of the gang I knew as a boy, still hanging around the same corners or sitting on their front stoops. When they recognized me, they greeted me with the same foul language and love they expressed back then.

In New York, I started a habit that would eat away at me for half a century and threatened my life at one point. I started smoking cigarettes. Back then, we used to “dinch,” which means you choke off the lit end to save the rest for later. I kept my smoking from my mom, but I used to put the cigarette butt in my pocket, where she would find it when she was doing laundry. In some respects, I guess I wasn’t too bright as a young fellow.

I played around a bit with reefers, or marijuana. The stuff was all over the place down there, and it was hard to avoid, so I tried it a couple times, but it just didn’t work for me. Unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. I also started to drink while in Harlem. I didn’t drink beer down there. Instead, the beverage of choice was Sneaky Pete wine, which is American slang for fortified cheap wine. There’s a song about it, “Sneaky Pete” by Sonny Fisher. It’s a classic:

Well the old hound dog come a-snoopin’ around my door

Took a drink of Sneaky Pete, ain’t seen that hound no more

Like the little white rat he drunk on Sneaky Pete

Told the big tom cat don’t you even bat your eyes at me

Well down in the hen house I thought I heard the chicken sneeze

It was a big red rooster he was drunk on Sneaky Pete

I wants a big fat woman, bottle of Sneaky Pete

Now I’m a tellin’ you boys that stuff just can’t be beat

When I came back to Canada I had to learn how to drink beer because it was far more common. I soon discovered that I liked beer. It was easy to get and cheap. I can remember it being ten cents a glass.

Meanwhile, through the dirty thirties the world had slowly begun to turn its attention to Europe, where tensions were growing astronomically in the wake of the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. Their racist policies and expansionist belligerence perhaps didn’t resonate immediately with this seventeen-year-old, Harlem-living Canadian kid, but in time the dangers hit home. My mother grasped the threat, and as the Second World War was breaking out, she sent me home to Canada. I’m not sure how I would have turned out if I had stayed in Harlem. There were many negative influences and not a lot of hope for young blacks. In that regard, you could argue that the war saved me. We were in New York, but Canadians were being asked to register for the draft, so she told me I’d better get back to Canada and sign up.

Soon after I came back I began living with my father. None of the women my father knew were aware he had a son my age. He had never talked about me, and he told me not to mention I was his son (though we were known as Big Alex and Little Alex). One night I was going home with my girlfriend at the time, my first serious one, Eulie Abbott. Eulie was beautiful but possessive. Girls would surround me, because I was a pretty handsome dude, and she would yell, “Leave him alone, he’s mine.” That didn’t sit too well with me because I don’t like possessive women, so that relationship was doomed. Anyway, as Eulie and I were going along Queen Street and looking up Spadina, I could see and hear a big fracas outside the beer parlour on Spadina where all the porters used to hang out. The ladies of the night used to hang around as well, so they could get to the porters (who had a pot full of money after returning from their runs) before they got home. I was told the next day that my father had been beaten up by a young guy named Wilfred Hayes in that fracas. Now, I remembered Wilfred as one big, tough dude and a boxer of some repute. I was fuming the next morning when I got up, so I grabbed my switchblade, a souvenir from my recent term in Harlem, and went looking for Wilfred.

This picture was taken in Toronto, shortly after I returned from New York. I am nine teen years old.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about carrying a switchblade on the streets of Harlem. Most men and many women carried them there. But that wasn’t the case in Toronto. I made my way over to Wilfred’s apartment, near University Avenue, north of Queen Street. When he came down stairs and opened the door, he was surprised to see me. He hadn’t seen me in the three years I’d been away. The moment he opened the door I flipped open the knife. “Wilfred,” I said as calmly as I could, because I was angry, “I hear you had a fight with my father, and I’m telling you I’m here to cut your goddamn throat from ear to ear.”

The dapper Alexander brothers, Linc and Hughie, shortly after my return to Toronto from New York.

I was a mean son of a bitch and, having just gotten back from Harlem, I was very schooled in the facts of life on the streets, even though I wasn’t a street regular. His eyes were wild with fear at the sight of the knife, and as he backed slowly and cautiously up those old wooden stairs, he was mumbling and stuttering. He started to cop a plea, apologizing and trying to justify how and why he would beat up an old man.

I said, “I’m sorry, Wilfred, I’m still going to cut your goddamn throat.” Eventually, he persuaded me to let him tell his side of the story, but that blade stayed a couple of inches from his neck. He was a boxer and a good one; that’s why I had a knife in my hand. I let him tell his story and try to justify why he beat up my dad.

He said my father had started playing around with the girl he was going with, who was beautiful and shapely, and he was very jealous of my dad and worried about the embarrassment he would face if he lost her to an older man. When Wilfred was done I said I guessed he had some justification to beat my father up. In a way I was relieved, too, because using that knife was nothing I fancied. But I added, “Let me tell you here and now, if I ever see or hear of you molesting my father again, I’m going to cut your throat, I’m going to kill you, you son of a bitch.” Then I backed carefully and slowly down the stairs and made my way along University Avenue. As I was walking away, I kept my knife at the ready and kept looking back over my shoulder to see if he was following. He didn’t, and he never bothered my father again.

Later, I stepped into the bar where the fracas had happened and gave everyone there the same message: “Don’t you ever touch my father, any of you sons of bitches, or I’ll come after you with my switchblade too, you bastards.” It hurt me deeply, a young man beating up an old man.

Another time — a non-confrontational one — my dad was coming off work and I went down to the station to meet him. This was in around 1940, not long after I’d returned from Harlem. Quite proudly, I think, my dad introduced me to his boss, A.B. Smith. Smith, trying to be positive and encouraging, said that I was a big and strong and would make a good porter one day. Now, I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, only truthful, but I replied that I would never carry anyone else’s bags but my own. “You have the wrong man,” I said. “I intend to go to school and see what happens.”

Between returning from Harlem and preparing for war, I met Yvonne Harrison. I remember seeing her for the first time at a social event in 1940 in Toronto and saying, “Who the hell is that?” She was considered one of the “untouchables” — not necessarily aloof, but very shy and elegant. I was just back from New York, bold and sharp looking. I said to myself, “That one is for me.” I was bowled over by her beauty, and I decided right then I would marry her. How brash is that? It would take time and effort, but I was prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to win her over. On returning from New York, I had taken some machine-shop training in Toronto and subsequently received assistance from Frank Barber of F.F. Barber

Here I am, the future Duke Ellington, tapping out a tune.

and Sons Ltd. of Toronto. Barber had connections, and through his colleagues he was able to get me job offers in Hamilton or Ottawa. I chose a job in Hamilton, and I went to work as a machine operator with Otis Fenson, making the 40-mm Bofor anti-aircraft guns. I wanted a job in Hamilton, Yvonne’s hometown, so I could be in a better position to woo her.