Читать книгу Oliver Jones - Marthe Sansregret - Страница 11
ОглавлениеCHAPTER III A Community Childhood: A Passion for Sports and Music 1940–1945
After his last year of relative freedom, Oliver, who had just turned six, started school without complaining too much. He even made a habit of arriving in advance in the mornings, as he always detested being late. However, he found the days very long, and as soon as class was over, he would head for home, running like Jesse Owens. After a snack, he played with his friends, most of whom had parents from the West Indies, like his own.
As Little Burgundy was a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, Oliver also played with French-speaking children who called themselves Canadiens, “English” children who included those of Scottish and Irish descent, and children of Mohawk, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and other extractions.
Oliver felt that these children were very much like he was, except for two things. The first and most striking difference he noticed was the respect that children of the Black community were expected to show towards their elders, especially old people. This was an important part of their upbringing. Respect for other children was also stressed. The second difference that struck Oliver was the fact that some of the White children spoke languages other than English in their homes. He asked his father: “Daddy, how come we don’t have a language of our own?” Oliver always remembered his father’s reply: “We had a language, but it was taken away from us a long time ago.”
Oliver learned French on the street. Also, like most children his age, he and his playmates would call each other names. “I remember very well when I was young that the French were ‘French pea soup’ or ‘frogs,’ and the English were the ‘blokes.’ I think everyone had some kind of name – there were the Chinese kids whose fathers worked at the laundry, and so on. At a very early age, I had a close friend that I walked to school with. He was Jewish and his father, Mr. Malcolm Rosen, owned a junkyard.”
As far as religion was concerned, Oliver didn’t see much difference between the Protestant faith as practised by his family and the Roman Catholic faith of his parents’ closest friends, except that Protestant ministers could marry and have families while Catholic priests could not, and Catholic families had large numbers of children. He commented later in life: “You just grow up and wonder why we attach so much importance to differences among various faiths, when the first rule to learn is Love Thy Neighbour!”
An emphasis on honesty characterized the moral education of Oliver’s childhood, to a point he sometimes found exasperating. “Of course all of us have lied! I lied for sure myself when I was young.”
In the Black community, parents didn’t have to worry at whose house their child was playing: they looked out for each other’s children. And if a child behaved badly, he could be sure that his mother would be aware of it before he got home and he expected to be scolded accordingly.
But one day, Oliver, Richard Parris, and Bruce Parent did something that went beyond their usual shenanigans. Richard described their adventure as their first and last attempt at stealing. “This particular day, we said to Oliver: ‘You see the toffee apples on the counter near the door? Well, let’s see if we can get one of them.’ But knowing how strict our parents were, if we ever got caught in anything like that, it’s not like today when you can’t touch your child. Boy, we would have had some warm seats… oh boy, oh boy! I am still to this day wondering if my parents found out. I know we ran away. The restaurant was Gerry’s on St. James, west of Fulford Street. It was Annette – poor her – she was in the back of the store, it was almost like a bar and stools, she had this tray with toffee apples. Oh, boy, they looked good. But they were stuck. I remember putting my hand on a stick and they all came down.”
Oliver remembered the incident very well. “My two friends dared me to go and steal three toffee apples for the three of us. I was the smallest; the counter was way above my head. When the door opened, someone came in and Annette was serving someone else. I remember her yelling at me: ‘I know you, I know you!’. It was nine cents for the three apples and I don’t think I’ve had a worse week in my life! I knew I had to go back and pay that nine cents to that woman and I worried about whether she would tell my parents or not, because they used to buy at the same store. I suffered for a whole week. Since every Friday I would get five cents from my parents, I came up one week later with ten cents. Annette wasn’t mad. She had a kind of smile on her face and she said ‘I knew it was you! Don’t do it anymore!’ I gave her the ten cents.”
It was such a dramatic incident in his life that Oliver believed it cured him for good. “I don’t think I could have been a good thief. I don’t remember if my parents heard about it, but I remember that my godfather who lived close to the store knew about it.” However, this episode was exceptional in Oliver’s secure childhood, with its routine of school, playing with Richard, and practising the piano. Both he and Richard adored baseball, and would fight over who would bat and who would throw the ball. They would argue, tussle, play, and go home. The next day, they would do it all over again.
***
When Canada was about to enter the Second World War, Oliver’s friends told him that their fathers or brothers were considering enlisting. While some of these men may have been stirred by a desire to fight for freedom, others were motivated by the lack of a job to support their families. But when Oliver brought up the subject of the war at home, his father, still haunted by his memories and his nightmares about the previous conflict, would change the subject.
Even if the war was to be fought abroad, the boys heard enough about it to want to play soldiers. One day, Oliver and another child were shooting at a can with a BB gun when suddenly he was shot in his right eye! Whether it was an accident or not, the neighbours on the street began shouting at the other youngster. Mr. Jones, who was nearby, tried unsuccessfully to remove the pellet lodged deep in Oliver’s eye. He rushed to the Reddy Memorial Hospital with Oliver, who was in acute pain, besides being terrified. The doctor, after extracting the piece of metal, declared that only time would tell if Oliver would fully recover his sight in that eye.
Soon after the accident, the Jones family moved again, this time from Workman to Fulford Street, into a two-floor apartment. On the lower floor, there was a bedroom for the only boy in the family, a flowery wallpapered dining room connected to a living room in which the piano had pride of place, and a large kitchen at the back. Upstairs were the master bedroom, a bedroom for Oliver’s three sisters, another room that was rented out, and a bathroom with a tub but no shower, still a luxury in those days. But thanks to Violet, who was a real handyman, the Joneses soon had a shower. Like all their previous dwellings, this house also had a backyard, from which Oliver had an advantageous view of the adjoining yard… behind the girls’ school. When he began spending time watching the girls playing and chatting, his piano practices suffered in consequence.
However, this was more because classical music had begun to bore him. What Oliver really wanted was to play jazz, although it meant disobeying his father. Even his sisters, knowing the difference between serious music and “playing for fun,” would attack him whenever he indulged his fancy on the piano. This happened one day when the living-room window was open and the gang of Palmer children, who were playing across the street, began yelling “Oliver’s playing jazz!” Lillian, the eldest girl in the Jones family, immediately took up the refrain, repeating shrilly: “Oliver’s taking classical music lessons and he’s playing jazz instead!”
Word got around quickly: Madame Jeanne Bonin, a kind woman and an excellent piano teacher, was told of her pupil’s penchant for exchanging compositions by Bach and Beethoven for a type of music she thought was unworthy, and she reprimanded Oliver in consequence. Oliver Wesley began to keep a more attentive eye on his son’s musical training. Every morning when he left for work, he would remind Shirley, with whom Oliver loved to bicker and fight, to make sure that her brother kept to the classical repertoire in his after-school practices.
All the members of the Jones family had musical skills, but Oliver was the only one who was truly gifted. Lillian and Violet studied piano for years and Shirley took lessons too, but not for very long. Oliver Wesley sang in the church choir, but even though he played the piano quite well, he willingly gave up his place at the piano bench to his son. Mysteriously, Jestina Louise, with her beautiful voice, did not sing at home, and her family remained unaware of her talent. On the other hand, she was the undisputed household boss whose rules had to be obeyed by everyone. Mrs. Jones managed the family budget with an iron hand: when Oliver Wesley brought home his salary on Fridays, she gave him what he needed for his weekly expenses, then, holding her purse tightly to her body, she walked straight to the bank and watched the teller enter the deposit. She was lucky that no one ever snatched her purse on the way. Perhaps her determined air and the fact that nearly everybody knew each other in the neighbourhood made robbery too risky a proposition.
Oliver certainly knew that Jestina had a temper. “If I did something wrong or told a joke during the day, my mother would slap me right away. If it was really, really bad, I would get beaten or strapped – she would just bang on my ass. Then she’d say ‘Wait until your father gets home. He’s going to…’ But my mother’s anger was short-lived. By the time she’d had all the rest of the day to think about it, when my father came home around five o’clock, if I’d done something or said something I wasn’t supposed to, he would talk to me. He wouldn’t punish me if it was something my mother told him and if she’d already given me the strap. But if he was at home when I did or said something bad, then he would take care of me!” Mrs. Jones was also short-tempered with her three daughters. “My sisters were scolded too, but Lillian, the oldest, was quiet. The only one I remember talking back to my father was Violet, and Shirley was too young.” In spite of this old-fashioned discipline, Oliver considered himself lucky to have good parents.
Thanks to Oliver Wesley’s steady job and the rent money from the third bedroom, there was always food on the Jones’s table. Never in his life did Oliver, even with his tremendous appetite, remember going hungry. “Food was on the table not only for supper, but for all three meals.” Also, Mr. Jones kept up the custom he had begun before the Second World War: every Friday – payday – he gave a dime to each of the older children, Lillian and Violet, while Oliver and Shirley, the younger ones, got five cents each. The amount gradually increased to twenty-five cents and stopped when the children started earning their own money. Oliver didn’t even want to imagine what would have happened to him if he’d spent all his allowance before being able to make up the money for the stolen toffee apples.
Even though Oliver Wesley was assured of a steady income, every once in a while, he would try a game of chance. Oliver saw his father come home from work later than usual one evening, his arms loaded with parcels, an enigmatic smile on his lips. Mr. Jones had just won the astounding amount of $380 by gambling in a Chinese restaurant and had gone shopping. Oliver watched his father opening bags and boxes containing a tan overcoat, a brown hat, and two suits with matching ties. Oliver Wesley loved to dress well – his son would inherit this trait; he was proud of the purchases he’d made and of still having some leftover money for his wife.
During the week, Oliver’s sisters set the table for supper, washed and dried the dishes and put them away. Apart from bringing in the firewood and taking out the ashes and the garbage, Oliver, as the only son, was the pampered child in the family. However, he didn’t feel that way on Saturday mornings when he had to accompany his mother to the Atwater Market. People would come from far and wide to buy from among the variety of fresh farm produce and the more exotic products brought by ship to the Port of Montreal – like the famous Barbados molasses. Whenever a shipment of oranges from Florida would come in, the news would spread rapidly, and a crowd of homemakers would swarm to the market. Making the market even more attractive was its new Art Deco building, with a monumental tower that Oliver and his mother couldn’t miss on their way there, she walking very fast and he pulling his little red wagon.
A little boy like Oliver should have been happy to go to this popular rendezvous. But not only did his mother calculate the household expenses with great care, she was also an inveterate bargainer. Jestina was skilled in the art of judging the shape, size, weight, taste, smell, and colour of nearly every item at the market, after which she would apply her formidable powers of persuasion to bring down the price. She was notorious among the farmers. When one of them saw her coming his way, he would groan to the other vendors: “Oh, no! Not Mrs. Jones!” Oliver felt humiliated and didn’t know where to look.
At home, Oliver also had to contend with his sisters’ varied characters. Although he never fought with Lillian, he teased Violet mercilessly, and she, in return, would argue with him all the time, making them into bitter enemies for as long as their quarrel lasted. He also fought constantly with Shirley, whom he considered a pest.
As for his parents, Oliver summed them up as responsible people – perhaps overly strict, but loving. They taught him a certain standard of polite behaviour. “If you passed an elderly person, you said ‘Good afternoon,’ and if you did not, once you got home your parents would already know about it. If I was with a bunch of kids, or passed by any Black adult, I would always acknowledge them. That was the type of society we had. But the first time I went to the United States, where I’d never seen so many Blacks before, I realized that Black Americans just didn’t do these things.”
Oliver Wesley, always respectful of his wife, never raised his voice, and never played the role of the domineering husband. He let Jestina run the house and the family while he took care of more manly tasks. Mr. Jones had his convivial side: “My father drank, like anyone else in those days, but I never called him an alcoholic. He loved his beer after work and never missed a day of work. Alcohol was never a major problem. He loved to drink on the weekend with his friends and never hit anybody, never started a fight, or got into arguments. On holidays, he might have gotten drunk, but did not misbehave. It made him feel jovial, then he’d fall asleep.”
Oliver was aware that for many of the Black families around him, life was more difficult than it was for the Joneses. He knew that some fathers would have to leave home for a whole week, sometimes longer, to work as Pullman porters on the trains. Some of them travelled between Montreal and western Canada or the United States while their wives ran the household and raised the children alone. These women also suffered the inevitable problems associated with having dark skin in a country where the majority was white, experiencing a pain that Mrs. Jones too feared for her children and for herself.
When Shirley was only three, she had been playing with a little White girl and came home in tears, saying: “Rita’s mother doesn’t want her to play with me because Blacks eat White children!” Oliver too encountered racial prejudice as a child and acknowledged the fact when he grew up. “I never cried, but at an early age, I realized that I was not part of the majority and that this attitude of people was ignorance. My father explained to me: ‘You can expect it but you don’t have to respect that type of treatment.’ My father always tried to keep cool and calm and never showed anger. But at times he said: ‘You have to stand up for your rights.’”
Yet it wasn’t easy for a Black child to fight for his rights. Violet remarked: “Our family and another Black family, we were living in an area of thousands of White children. Even going to our church, Girl Guides, Brownies, sewing class, there was always a gang of Whites calling us ‘Niggerblacks!’ They got those stones, not big, but you couldn’t go this way or that way because there was always a gang. Those days, they didn’t see many Blacks. Every time you went to school, snowballs as well, no matter what direction you walked in, whether I was walking along with a girlfriend or by myself, you could be sure, no matter what direction, White kids were waiting for us. We felt trapped. You hated to pass but you had to make your way to get home.”
Violet pointed out that the White children did not dare to touch them and when one shouted “the teacher’s coming!”, they would all run away. “I could be five, six, until the age of ten, I couldn’t wait to get away from that district. But, on the other hand, the nuns never bothered us.”
Even when the family moved from Workman to Fulford Street, Violet recalled: “We were in front of the school, and the priest – or was it a brother? – taking the boys to confession let them call us ‘Niggerblacks.’ They were supposed to be men of God and they would still call us names – ‘Chocolate Bars,’ ‘Snow White.’ And sometimes, the railroad track was just there; you couldn’t cross the street because the train was coming. You were trapped again for waiting.”
Oliver summed it up: “All of us knew that it would come all of our life. When you’re a boy, you hit back. But the girls did not. I remember when we moved to Fulford Street, there was a family named Black but they were White. I used to beat them up on a regular basis, and still, some of them called me ‘Black nigger.’ I would hear the same thing in French, ‘maudit nègre,’ when walking around Sainte-Cunégonde Church.”
Shirley said: “The worst time was when I walked with three other girls to Sunday school. Kids, through their open doors, along with their parents, used to call us names. We were seven or eight years old, and they called themselves children of God. We could have gone to the other side of the street, but I refused to do that. We weren’t calling them any names. We reported it to our church director. But there was no protection for us.”
Like Oliver, Shirley was shocked when she realized that most of the churches were complicit in or indifferent to racial prejudice at that time. When Oliver heard about, or was confronted with this kind of treatment, he tended to put the blame on pure ignorance. “It was tolerated. I wonder when all of this stopped, because although we were a fairly large group of Blacks in our district, all of us must have gone through this. As children, you endure those things and you know it is wrong. But what hurts the most is when people are coming out of church, where they teach brotherly love, and the very first thing they try is to harm another child on account of the colour of his skin. That hurts! But after a while, we just forgot it.”
Racism tended to diminish when Black individuals excelled in a domain such as music or sports. Still, White people would think twice before accepting them, perpetuating an attitude of submission rather than one of assertiveness among members of the Black community. As Violet said, “In those days most Black parents would teach their children to turn the other cheek.”
Despite these hurtful experiences, Oliver, like many children of African descent, searched for role models among Black Americans, who had a larger and more impressive profile than Black Canadians. “I can look back to the church and remember all of us looking forward to being able to go to the United States, where everything was happening. We knew of a few coloured actors and actresses, so I think that most of us had some kind of aspiration of going abroad.”
***
As the days went by, Oliver noticed that the girls he liked to watch were walking out with young men who had traded their street clothes for military uniforms. Those who had joined the navy were outfitted in dark blue with white trim; those wearing a uniform of a French blue colour – called “air force blue” – had joined the air force. And there were the ones who would become soldiers in the infantry, lugging guns, driving tanks, and manning the first line of defence. They wore a khaki uniform, green mixed with coppery yellow, an unattractive colour but one that helped to camouflage the wearer in fields and forests, and on beaches.
Impressed by the uniforms, or perhaps by the recruits’ success with girls, Oliver daydreamed of enlisting someday in the army, as his father had done. In the meantime, he practised the piano and played with his friends as usual. Through them, he learned of the distress that affected some families in the neighborhood. Fathers, White and Black, drank in an attempt to forget their incapacity to provide for their families, turning into frightening and sometimes violent men. In some families, this seemed to be a daily occurrence. Nonetheless, Oliver rarely heard of a suicide, perhaps because people’s religion proscribed suicide for anyone who hoped to go to heaven, or perhaps because of a stubborn hope that things would eventually change for the better.
The war brought other somewhat bizarre changes to people’s habits. Hosts of radio programs invited their listeners to participate in a draw organized by companies seeking empty toothpaste tubes for their lead, needed in the war effort. Jestina Louise cut the tube open on the top and the sides, scraped out the inside, then washed and dried it. She filled in a coupon with her name and address and put the flattened tube and the coupon inside an envelope to mail to the radio station. Oliver remembered another contest for which his mother removed the tin foil of chewing gum wrappers. When this operation was completed, Oliver would seal the envelope, stick a stamp on it, and run to the mailbox. If his mother’s envelope had been picked in the daily draw, she would have heard on the radio that she was the lucky winner of a small sum of money. Even the hard-headed Jestina, although she was no believer in get-rich-quick schemes, kept hoping for a prize, but even if Oliver helped her by chewing more gum than usual, no cheque ever landed in the Jones’s mailbox.
Among the effects of the war were exhortations to the public to reduce consumption of products like tea and coffee. However, it was the rationing of the amount of meat, butter, and sugar allowed every month that Oliver remembered most clearly. He would help his mother count their food ration tickets, his eyes fixed on the set of canisters containing flour, sugar, coffee, and tea that sat on the kitchen counter. But it was the fifth tin that Oliver was most concerned about, as was his mother: the one holding baking soda biscuits made from the recipe printed on the side of the container. Oliver had once eaten eight cookies from this tin, leaving only one for the whole family at supper.
Although his sisters had the impression that they were poor, Oliver himself, as long as he ate three meals a day and the house was warm and comfortable, felt that he had everything he needed. Besides, his parents had drummed the maxim into his head that one should learn to live according to one’s means and be content with it. However, there were other families they knew who weren’t content with living poorly but honestly. Some of the men, through their contacts in the underworld, were involved in wartime black market activities, including illegal dealings in alcohol. This would be mentioned either circumspectly or overtly, depending on whom people were talking with.
Oliver’s parents used these examples to explain what was right and wrong, teaching their son to behave according to their lights. “Without a doubt, I think I was a pretty responsible person. I always figured I had a choice. In the neighborhood where we grew up, there were quite a few people who chose to do extremely well, and others who did the opposite and spent a great deal of time in prison. If I didn’t have my music and my sports to keep me occupied, I often wonder if I would have gone in the wrong direction. Those two things in my life – music and sports – were so strong that they filled me with a lot of pleasure, and I did not have to seek thrills by doing mischievous things. I know that a lot of youngsters got into crime by just having too much spare time. Sometime they did not mean to do these things. It just happened, and before you knew, it became a problem. I was very lucky in that respect, and all my very close friends, six or seven that I had, all of them turned out with good jobs even if none of us were rich.”
At the same time, Oliver developed an instinct for spotting who was criminally minded, and he would stay away from these people. “When you grow up with them around you, you can tell who they are, and you learn whether you want to be friends with them or not. If not, you say hello, you pass the time of day, and you move on.”
Oliver knew that there were a lot of boys on his street who got into trouble. “I just stayed out of that. Some, probably because they were drinking at an early age and some, because they got into drugs.” About the drugs, Oliver said: “The only ones really taking drugs were musicians, doctors, and lawyers, and they were into it much more than anyone else. Musicians always seemed to have doctor friends who would get them whatever they needed, and some of them had to use lawyers to get out of trouble.”
Sanctions in Canada were severe. “Back then, an American immigrant would be kicked out of Canada if he was taking marijuana. If you were Canadian, they would put you in jail right away. I don’t think drugs were as dangerous as they are today.” Looking back, Oliver thought that it was mostly marijuana that was consumed, with some cocaine and heroin. “I don’t know where they got that. Somehow we all knew who was taking it, but it was a matter of choice: either you hung around with those guys or you stayed away from them. I preferred to stay away.”
At school, Oliver excelled in artistic subjects and was proud of himself for it. As for the purely academic subjects, he had difficulty concentrating. When thinking about a coming exam, he would panic. Oliver believed that he had a short memory, and felt that he wasn’t bright enough. Not surprisingly, when he came home from school, he wouldn’t talk much about his homework. He preferred to go to the piano, even if he disliked having to practise the same bars of his classical pieces over and over again. If he could only have played jazz, things would have been different. But his father still would not allow it.
On an afternoon when Oliver was playing with friends in front of a neighbour’s house on the corner of St. James and Fulford streets, he heard the young Oscar Peterson playing the piano. The music coming through an open window was so beautiful that he stood frozen to the spot. Because people were accustomed to talking to each other and helping each other in the community, Oliver simply decided to knock on the door of the apartment where the music was being played. As soon as Oscar’s sister Daisy opened the door, Oliver asked her: “Can you teach me how to play like that?”
In spite of his desire for a change, Oliver would always remain grateful to Jeanne Bonin for giving him a good grounding in classical music. He even managed to introduce her to the widowed grandfather of his good friend, Bruce Parent, when he and Bruce noticed that the old man had his eye on the lady. Not long after that, the classical piano teacher became step-grandmother to Bruce, a future jazz musician. It seemed that love made jazz sound sweet to her ears – as long as classical music stayed in first place. Yet she stopped teaching it after her marriage.
While the newlyweds were still basking in their unexpected bliss, Oliver, who wanted more than anything to play like Oscar Peterson, nine years older than he was, began studying piano with Oscar’s sister.
Daisy Peterson was born in Saint-Henri just after the end of the First World War. There were two girls in the family, May and herself, and three boys, Frederick, Charles (Chuck), and Oscar. Daisy had faced racial prejudice at public school. “At times I enjoyed school, but the prejudices were there. They had their favourites; they didn’t swear, but they ridiculed you. We were going to Protestant school, and Blacks were a minority.”
For the Petersons, like the Joneses, getting out of the city for the summer holidays was an impossibility. On hot summer nights, everyone sat outside on the steps, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, chatting with neighbours and watching the world go by as the children played on the sidewalk.
The Petersons, who did not consider themselves poor as long as they could get along, found all sorts of ways to combat the effects of the Depression. They created their own luck through mutual assistance, bartering, and exchanging. As Daisy said, “It was a good community where, if something happened, we would be informed about it. Basically, we remained tied to the church and more or less, we knew from the church what was happening elsewhere because we did not have newspapers.”
Early in life, Daisy showed an obvious aptitude for the piano. Her father Daniel taught his talented daughter until the day he told her: “Now, you show the others.” With great humility, Daisy said of her illustrious pupils: “I did not make them what they were. I just passed on to them what my father had taught me. He gave us so much and we did the same thing later on. He was working on the trains. Some days, he was in, some days he was out, and he always checked on us. My father was a role model as far as music was concerned, a self-taught man.”
Later on, Daisy took private lessons with Paul de Marky, a pianist and composer originally from Hungary, who taught at the McGill Conservatory from 1929 to 1937 and gave concerts throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. Daisy completed her music studies at McGill, where she became an associate professor.
At age eight, Oliver began his piano lessons at the Petersons’ house, with a beginner’s book. Daisy quickly noticed that he was different from her other students. Besides his exceptional talent, he was very obedient, well brought up, and had a natural politeness. At the same time, Oliver wasn’t overly serious – “just normal” – and he listened carefully. Daisy recalled that she never had any problems with him. And when the class was finished, she would take him by the hand to cross the street so he could not be hurt by a passing tram.
Oliver found her classes wonderful. They introduced him to a new world that brought structure and discipline to his music and to his life. Daisy said of Oliver: “I was hired by his parents and I immediately discovered his talent. Anything he would hear played, he would play it back. He used to copy what he heard from me, from Oscar, or from anybody.” Even though some students complained that Daisy was demanding, Oliver never found her too strict towards himself. He appreciated her as a teacher and as a person, even calling her by her first name. A mutual attachment began which would last for life.
Daisy also taught Oliver lessons of life that he never forgot. Of human behaviour, she said: “Since the beginning of humanity, there are people who want to be above others, no matter what the price, no matter what the consequences. Be wary of these men and women who, under any pretext, make sure other people will remain at the bottom.” She also had a definite view about life: “It’s about what you make of it. It’s not what you want, but what you make.”
Oliver inherited some of his teacher’s philosophy. Like Daisy, he knew that out of sorrow came joy, and that life was made up of the good and the bad. “You grow, you remember all the things that you have done or should have done, and you try to live with it and grow. If you look only at what you don’t have, you cloud what you have. So life is to be lived with the two sides of it, happy and unhappy.”
Going regularly to Daisy’s home, Oliver got to know her brother Chuck. The two boys, who both took piano lessons from Daisy, formed a strong friendship that would remain intact throughout their lives. This was just one of the several ways that the Peterson connection influenced Oliver’s life for the better.
Between these precious interludes, he endured school, never complaining. However, the minute the bell rang, he would run to meet his friends. Sometimes they would play on streets inhabited by families with higher incomes than those of Little Burgundy, but they rarely ventured into the wealthy area of Westmount, and then only when they were with Richard Lord, who lived on the street that bordered Westmount and Saint-Henri. But Oliver preferred to play close to the Lachine Canal, in a more typical Montreal neighbourhood.
Every spring, Oliver witnessed the feverish activity of families moving to a bigger apartment after the arrival of a new child. Since his own family had stopped growing – contraception was acceptable in the Jones’s religion – he watched other mothers “shopping” for apartments. Oliver remembered the mother of his friend Robert “Bud” Jones, a French-speaking girl from Gaspé who had married a Black man from the Caribbean, scouring Saint-Henri for an apartment with wooden shutters on each side of the windows. When she found one, she went straight into the kitchen and walked through to the back shed, oblivious of the other rooms in the dwelling. If there was a wooden coal bin in the shed, she would rent the apartment: when the family ran out of money for coal in the winter, she would use this wood for fuel. This was an example of what Oliver Wesley and Jestina Louise meant when they used to tell Oliver that everyone should live according to his means.
Those means, for most Black men, came from working on the railroad, often as porters. As for the White men in the neighbourhood, Oliver would see them walking early every morning to their jobs at Stelco, RCA Victor, General Steelware, or the tanneries. Some ran small businesses like grocery or hardware stores. Others worked in taverns which catered to an exclusively male clientele, and where food was served along with the beer. On Fridays, Oliver couldn’t help noticing the housewives who stood outside the tavern doors, waiting anxiously to find out if their husbands had drunk away their entire week’s pay. At this sorry sight, Oliver felt lucky that his own mother did not have to endure this situation.
There were also the nightclubs where Blacks and Whites worked together and where women were admitted. Oliver pricked up his ears whenever he heard live music as he passed on the sidewalk, especially the music coming from Rockhead Paradise, a club owned by Rufus Rockhead, originally from Jamaica, and of Maroon heritage. Oliver vibrated to the sounds and learned to differentiate between the blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, and bebop. Still very young, he promised himself: “Some day, I’ll be able to play in a band.”
Oliver had no opportunity to see inside the places from where these tantalizing rhythms were coming, but he heard that vaudeville shows, complete with chorus lines, were produced at Rockhead’s. The MCs – masters of ceremonies – who also sang and told jokes, would organize and hire performers for these shows, which usually ran for two weeks.
Oliver also liked listening to jitterbug music – a new form of swing. When he went into an ice cream parlour, his eyes would open wide at the sight of young couples dancing to the jukebox. The girls, about thirteen to nineteen years old, were known as bobby-soxers, with their short, wide skirts, ankle-length socks, and ballerina shoes called “baby dolls.” Their partners wore dark blue jeans with the cuffs turned up, and shoes that slid easily over the floor. Their dancing was fast and creative; occasionally a young man would lift his partner and spin her around his waist.
When he reached home, Oliver’s mind would be full of everything he had seen and heard. However, all that pleasure was not for him, at least not yet: he had to practise classical piano. But no one could stop him from dreaming.
***
During the summer of 1942, Oliver realized that he wouldn’t have to accompany his mother to the Atwater Market for two whole Saturdays in a row. Mr. Jones, as a CPR employee, had a free pass to travel with his family in Canada or in the United States, and he had decided to take a trip to Nova Scotia with his son. Oliver, who only knew his mother’s family, was finally going to meet his father’s relatives in Cape Breton. He was excited at the idea of spending a few days with cousins who were born and raised in Nova Scotia, and who lived right on the seashore. Also, he was going to travel alone with his father. He felt grown up in spite of the fact that he was only eight years old.
On the train, Oliver Wesley explained that around nine o’clock that evening, they would lower the back of their seat to make it into a sleeping berth. From the moment the train left the station, for two days and two nights, Oliver was entranced by the animals resting in the fields and near the barns, the market gardens that made his father’s plot seem small indeed, and the farm houses. He drank in the country scenery with its uninterrupted vistas as only a city child could.
Although the panorama never lost interest for Oliver, he still found the trip very long. He asked his father at least a hundred times when they would arrive, what the Pyle family was like and what they did. Oliver learned that MacDonald Pyle, unlike Oliver Wesley, had married a White woman: Élisa Gressier from Boulogne-Sur-Mer, an important port of northern France. In 1916, she had come to Canada with her mother – also named Élisa – and her sister, Marguerite. Due to wartime conditions, they had taken a ship from France to New York City, and had spent some time on Ellis Island with thousands of other immigrants. They had been impressed by the Statue of Liberty, a project initiated by the chairman of France’s anti-slavery society, Edouard de Laboulaye, in the middle of the nineteenth century. From New York, the Gressiers went to Cape Breton, where the young Elisa met and married the handsome MacDonald Pyle.
But before Oliver had the satisfaction of seeing these legendary relatives, he was captivated by the CPR porters. Oliver, whose destiny – like that of many young men in his community – might have been to earn his living as a porter, thought that they looked very important. They seemed tall and strong in their smart uniforms. He remembered that the Glen Yards in Saint-Henri was also referred to as “the porters’ school,” and he wondered what they learned there.
Mr. Jones, having ample time to expand upon the subject, explained that the porters acquired notions of meteorology, geography, and history at the school. They had to memorize the names of the places on the train routes – towns, villages, mountains, lakes and rivers, and even the names of regional varieties of trees and other plants. The porters walked through the trains all day long, from one car to the other, carrying and serving drinks and food, helping people with their luggage, and answering questions about the schedule and the territory the train was going through. They made and served coffee, dispensed aspirins to relieve headaches, polished shoes, and cleaned compartments. This went on until they had a few minutes to catch their breath, sitting on a stool that was often too low for the length of their legs. But the minute a passenger called for service, they had to jump to their feet again. Oliver could see that it was a lot of work.
MacDonald Pyle (cousin of Oliver’s father) and his wife from France Élisa Gressier, their three sons, Peter, Charlie and Joe, and their two daughters, Marguerite and Lisa.
He was also impressed by their affability and good manners. Mr. Jones said that, in spite of their numerous tasks – including the preparation of baby formula for which they had to know the different varieties and the right mixing proportions – they were not allowed to complain. Even when things quieted down a little, they were required to keep accounting records.
Along with this intimidating job description, Oliver, who loved to eat, learned that porters had to be on guard against stomach ulcers due to nervous indigestion caused by the constant motion of the train. Not only that, a porter could only sleep after the last passenger had retired, which might be at dawn. When Oliver asked his father why some of the passengers acted condescendingly towards their porter, Oliver Wesley replied: “First, because his skin is black; second, because he is at their service.” In spite of this, Mr. Jones explained, whenever an emergency arose, people would call the porter before anyone else; he was like the captain of a ship in danger of sinking.
Following this brief but discouraging life lesson, Oliver was sure of one thing: he would never be a porter.
***
When Oliver Wesley and his son arrived in Cape Breton, Oliver was introduced to the woman he would call Aunt Elisa, although technically she was the widow of his father’s cousin. Macdonald Pyle had died of lung disease before he could see his five children grow up. Oliver met his three sons, Peter, Charlie and Joe, and his two daughters, Marguerite and Lisa. They spoke to Oliver in English, but their mother addressed him in French.
For the first day of their short holiday, Oliver Wesley, who had never seen his cousin again after leaving Nova Scotia for Quebec, suggested laying flowers and reciting a prayer at his grave.
The second day was dedicated to Oliver’s first fishing expedition in which he hoped to catch “many long and large fish.” But before he and his cousins set off, Peter asked Oliver to go down into the coldroom with him. He pointed to some lemon pies that his mother, an expert French cook, had prepared for supper. When Oliver saw them, he realized what was going on. “So Peter brings up this pie, we taste it, love it, and eat it all!” At suppertime, the family sat around the table while the baffled Aunt Élisa wondered why the number of pies for dessert didn’t correspond to the number she had baked. Oliver was frightened, thinking of the stolen toffee apples; he had gotten into a difficult situation again, this time under the influence of his mischievous youngest cousin. He managed to tell his father about it without the others hearing, and Mr. Jones reassured him by saying he would have a little talk with Aunt Élisa after supper.
The following day, Oliver saw a group of children and teenagers approaching the Pyles’ yellow house. Word of his prowess on the piano had spread in the vicinity. The young people sat cross-legged on the floor looking up at Oliver who was perched on a stack of books that Marguerite had piled on the piano bench. He played a boogie-woogie. It was a triumph.
Next morning, it was Oliver’s turn to be impressed. Hearing the other kids in the neighborhood talking, he realized that Charlie and Joe were up-and-coming boxers and were already well known on the circuit. He felt proud of his cousins, who were local heroes.
After a night of little sleep, Mr. Jones took Oliver over to the mines in Mingham. Coal Mine No. 9, where he had worked when he arrived in Canada, had been shut down, so the pilgrimage continued to Mine No. 12, still in operation. When they descended into the mine pit, Oliver felt very small and was increasingly afraid of what would happen next. When they walked in the underground passages, he thought that if he hadn’t been with his father, he would have fainted in those “corridors of Hell, just before the flames did the rest.” Feeling buried in this surreal place, Oliver told himself: “I will never, never work in a mine!” – this just a few days after he had sworn he would never work on a train. Although Oliver didn’t have any idea what he wanted to be, he now definitely knew what he didn’t want to be: a coal miner or a Pullman porter. Two of the limited employment opportunities accessible to Black men in those days were vetoed in his mind.
During their last meal together, Oliver’s cousins spoke about the loss of their beloved father. The two families realized that Mr. Pyle and Mr. Jones had been similar in that they were family-oriented men who treated their wives with respect. The cousins wondered when they would see each other again: Quebec seemed so far away from Cape Breton – two days and two nights of train travel. Since the Joneses would never want to leave the city, the only solution would be for the Pyles to move to Montreal.
***
On the way back home, Oliver thought of the stories he would tell his mother and sisters. He would tell them that Aunt Elisa made the best lemon pies in the world, and that she kept her children very natty and well dressed. He’d say how impressed he was with Charlie, a terrific tap dancer and a real showman. Although Joe was just the opposite, being quiet and conservative, he was making his way in the boxing world. Oliver didn’t mention his escapade with Peter. As for the girls, he brought home the memory of a shy and tender Lisa, and of a beautiful and lively Marguerite whom he wanted to see more often.
During the trip, Mr. Jones expounded more of his views on life to his son, including one that Oliver would always remember: “Make sure you always appreciate our women. I don’t ever want to hear that you haven’t respected them, because they’ve suffered enough like that!”
At home, once he’d told the rest of the family about his experiences in Nova Scotia, Oliver felt a strong urge to play boogie-woogie, blues, and jazz on the piano. He had made everyone in Cape Breton so happy when he did it. But Shirley was back on duty. “Oliver, go practise your classical piano!”
***
The war was still raging in Europe. Oliver realized that young men he knew would soon be leaving Montreal to fight overseas. One of these was Bud Jones. When he completed a six-month farming apprenticeship – sponsored by the Montreal Boys Association – at the top of his class, Bud was refused a job due to his dark skin. Far from being discouraged, he proceeded to lie about his age and enlisted in the army. Not too many questions were asked of Bud, since he played both the bugle and the drums, two essential instruments for military marches. Oliver found out that his “big brother,” Wrenfred Bryant, was about to go off to war too.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones announced that they were going on a trip with their CPR pass. This time, it was to New York City. Carmen Mitchell, who roomed with her mother at the Jones’s, took charge of the household with the understanding that she would supervise Oliver’s piano practices. Oliver took advantage of the situation to play a little jazz, but his babysitter, a jazz lover, never told on him.
When his parents came back from New York, Oliver was all ears as his mother talked about their trip. The lady in whose house the Joneses had stayed kept saying that “Father Levine” was coming over. She got out her best china and silverware, her best lace tablecloth and other special linen for the occasion. Observing this woman’s almost hysterical behaviour with a suspicious eye, Mrs. Jones stood near the front window to watch for the preacher’s arrival. She wasn’t at all surprised when she saw him emerge from a Cadillac and look the house over with a haughty air. Oliver commented: “Of course, people have a lot of faith in that kind of minister – most of them charlatans who are just in it for money.” After Mrs. Jones had related all the details of this episode, she stated loudly and with conviction, “People can be so gullible!” Oliver was proud that his mother was not one of those people. “She was no fool when it came to that.”
Mr. Jones had taken advantage of the trip to go shopping, an activity he enjoyed much more than his wife did. But this time, instead of the usual necktie, Mr. Jones had treated himself to a real Bulova watch, bought near Times Square.
His mother’s tale and his father’s watch made Oliver long to be grown up. Since he had gone to Nova Scotia, he had also developed a desire to see the world.
***
Oliver ran to catch the ball Bruce Parent had just thrown into the air, and the two of them charged into each other. Oliver, who was afraid of the dentist, now had a broken tooth to show him. He remembered this red-letter incident as occurring at about the same time that he and Bruce decided to join the Boy Scouts, as Cubs, mainly to have the opportunity to play the piano and the drums at the Iverley Community Centre where the Scouts’ meetings were held. Since Bruce didn’t have a drum set, he decided to make one out of a wooden butter crate, on which, Violet, a talented artist, painted a Mexican with a guitar sitting on a fence. The two boys already saw themselves in a groove. Bruce proudly carried his drum around in a potato bag, and he and Oliver offered to perform their show in all the homes where there was a piano. Since there were quite a few pianos in the neighbourhood, the duo became quite active and began to feel that they were in business.
Bruce fixed a rod of stiffened rope onto the drum crate and installed a cymbal – an aluminum pie plate – at the top of it. Later on, he used a metal washtub as a bass drum, pots and pans for the other drums, and another pie plate for the “high hat.” Richard Parris was inspired by their success to join them. He found an old banjo without a neck and positioned it on top of another butter crate so he could play it horizontally. The boys continued with their improvised combo while dreaming of more sophisticated instruments like those they had glimpsed at Rockhead Paradise.
Besides making music with his two buddies, Oliver played basketball and competed in track and field with Ralph Whims, who was two years younger than he was. When they ran races together, Ralph couldn’t get over the fact that Oliver ran “as fast as lightning. He was thin and very quick. He would run short distances, like one hundred yards, seventy-five yards, very fast, and he was so skinny, just skin and bones, small, and thin as a rake.”
Ralph’s mother was the well-known singer and chorus line dancer, Bernice Whims. Bernice used to say she had begun her show business career at age eight when the minister at Sunday school complained that she sang too loudly. For that reason, she started singing in theatres and moved on to clubs a few years later. “[Another] reason I ended up in nightclubs is because I was determined that, as a little girl, if I could not do arithmetic – it just bothered me and I could not memorize the times tables – I had to make sure I would use my memory for something I liked, because I could recite and memorize just about anything without looking in the book.”
As Bernice got to know Oliver, she came to appreciate the fact that he came from a good Black family and had the respectful manners to prove it. She introduced him to the young Sammy Davis Jr., who was performing with her; Oliver, of course, had no idea he was meeting a future big star. Watching Oliver develop, Bernice was convinced of his tremendous talent. She got him his first professional gig, when he was eleven years old.
***
At the traditional family Christmas dinner in 1943, Oliver missed Wrenfred, who had sailed on the Île de France. He was to be stationed in Italy, and, for a short period, in Holland.
While his cousin was crossing the Atlantic, Oliver played Christmas and New Year’s songs on the piano for the family and the neighbours. After the holidays, he returned to a typical routine for a boy his age, except for his daily piano practices. If no one in the family was picking on him, he played all kinds of new pieces he heard on the radio. Along with his favourite boogie-woogie repertoire, he picked up romantic melodies like “Blue Moon” and “Star Dust.” He amazed people when he played the blues songs. Although Oliver was far removed from the days of slavery or from the cotton fields of the American South, he threw his whole heart into this moving, sensual music that expressed what Black American sharecroppers and migrants had lived through. Then, with no one to stop him, he would move on to jazz, pop, and swing.
With the arrival of spring, Oliver noticed the presence of the zoot-suiters – young men dressed provocatively in baggy pants with tight cuffs and oversized jackets, who would stroll nonchalantly through the streets. They did not want to serve in the army and did not care to work either, preferring to stay at home and wait for the girls to show up when sailors came to town.
One night, Oliver, while playing in a club, saw another side of the zoot-suiter phenomenon. “I saw a fight break out between a group of them and one of the sailors. I was too young to understand what the fight was about. I remember a zoot-suiter taking a beer bottle and just slashing the face of the sailor, who started screaming. As his face was contracted, I didn’t know why he was screaming until it retracted. Then I saw the blood on the side of his face. We were backstage ready to go, and the man who cleaned the place just said: ‘That’s what you get when you drink too much!’”
Perhaps because this experience stayed in his mind, Oliver was always determined that no substance would control him. “I was too shy and I would be afraid that if I drank, I would lose all my inhibitions. I guess I may have associated stupidity with drinking to excess. We would say that a drunken man speaks a sober man’s mind. Lots of times, people say things when they are drunk that they have in their minds but that they would never have the courage to say when they are sober.” Oliver would often be the only one in a group without a drink in his hand. “For one thing, I never liked the taste nor the smell of beer. I remember having tasted a rum and coke at the Lantern Café with Richard Parris and a drummer, to celebrate someone’s birthday. That was the first drink I ever had. It was pleasant because it was sweet and I love sweets.”
But even one alcoholic drink, sweet or bitter, was too much for Oliver. “I can take this much of it and my arms just go numb. And it has happened all my life. If I make a toast with somebody, just a sip of wine – I don’t know what gin and scotch taste like, although I have tasted cognac once – I get sick. Any time that I take alcohol, the smallest amount, three minutes after, my arms are numb for six or seven minutes. I’ve asked doctors what would cause this reaction and they said that I have an incompatibility.”
Playing in clubs that served alcohol meant that Oliver was also exposed to smoking as a youngster. However, he was turned off it at a summer day camp in the western part of the Island of Montreal, where city children were taken to play in the fields and in the woods. Oliver and his friends crushed some dried maple leaves, rolled the “tobacco” in newspaper and pretended they were smoking cigarettes. “The taste was terrible, so I never got into smoking either.”
***
Oliver began to play in clubs when he was only ten. He met a few other child performers, mostly singers and dancers, on these occasions. Due to their youth, certain rules had to be observed. “We were not allowed to come out into the audience. We had to stay backstage. But I didn’t do a lot of those shows; I did them only on the weekends or during school breaks.”
Oliver played in churches on Friday evenings, and at the Children’s Hospital or in homes for the aged on Saturday or Sunday. He also played at Bordeaux Prison, where he encountered some of the boys he had grown up with. “It was kind of embarrassing, but I never felt any danger. We were young.” He played in amateur music competitions in theatres and auditoriums, mostly in the east end of Montreal. Oliver also participated in Billy Munro’s music talent show on CKVL radio in Verdun. He found that Billy was a nice man who made sure that the young performers got a break – as long as they behaved impeccably at the station. He won first prize on the program twice and came second once. Billy invited him to be part of the show he presented during the intermissions at movie theatres, complete with singers and dancers.
Besides all this, Oliver played the piano in Chuck Hughes’s bandwagon. This fine entertainer produced acts at the Carpenters’ Hall on Bleury Street, bringing in professional dancers and singers, and sometimes bands, from the United States.
Oliver occasionally had a chance to perform with three of his childhood friends, Eddie and Berry Nurse, and Ralph Whims (along with his mother Bernice) in shows at the Delorimier Stadium, where nothing inappropriate for young boys went on.
The situation was different when he performed in clubs. One evening when he was eleven, he witnessed something that was definitely out of the ordinary. Oliver was sitting at the piano ready to accompany a live show when he saw a line of striptease artists emerging from the wings on one side of the stage and a group of policemen coming from the other. Realizing that something that wasn’t on the program was about to happen, he jumped down and ran out the back door of the club.
He didn’t think that his mother heard about the raid. His father, on the other hand, might have. But Oliver didn’t want to risk asking him.
***
When the war finally came to an end, Wrenfred Bryant, back from Italy, paid a visit to his aunt and his “little brother.” He presented Oliver with a guitar he had bought in Rome during one of his leaves. Although the instrument showed the effects of humidity after a two-week ocean voyage without protection, Oliver was very proud of his gift.
After his cousin left, Oliver decided the guitar was due for a reconditioning. But when he sanded off the varnish, he noticed that the wood had become very thin, so he applied a generous coat of white paint to it. The next day, trying to tune the guitar, he found the sound harsh and off key. It was all too obvious that the instrument was out of commission. Oliver went back to his piano.
He started replacing musicians in small clubs. “The most important one for me was Le Montmartre, on Saint-Laurent Boulevard just north of Sainte-Catherine, a tough area. The one thing they would tell us was to stay away from De Bullion Street – the area of the brothels. We never listened much; we just knew that it was nearby and that we had to be careful because it was a rough area. But as kids, we never got into problems. There were so many clubs over there. We always had some friends playing on Saint-Laurent, but I really was not that worried. Maybe we were just too young to realize the danger.”
***
Oliver was thrilled by the arrival of spring. In addition to the relief of having mild weather, he loved to see his mother, sisters, and other girls wearing their pastel-hued spring dresses and straw hats decorated with cloth flowers or celluloid fruits. He and his father would also dress in light colours when the long winter ended. Oliver particularly appreciated the change of seasons because during the winter he was usually dressed in heavy, dark suits that he thought were too old for him.
For Oliver, spring was the time to play songs like Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade,” and when baseball season started, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in honour of Black American baseball star, Jackie Robinson. On the May 24th holiday – Queen Victoria’s Birthday, otherwise known as “Firecracker Day” – he loved watching the fireworks at various Montreal parks and lighting bonfires using materials left behind on moving day, including old mattresses. This would usually bring the firemen over to cool down the party with their hoses.
Oliver’s favourite season was summer. Songs like “Mockin’ Bird Hill” and “In the Good Old Summertime,” made popular by Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Tennessee Waltz,” and “Belmont Boogie” were all part of his hot-weather repertoire. Summer also meant more gigs: in waterside clubs around the island and in resorts in the Laurentians, dances were held on Saturday nights with live band music.
When autumn arrived, he would feel a bit melancholy; it was time to return to school. As for the temperature, although he had never known another climate, he always disliked the cold. Yet his mother, who had grown up in the tropics, would often exclaim in French: “Ah, il fait chaud…!” Oliver, meanwhile, played “Autumn Leaves,” the French chanson that had been adopted by jazzmen the world over. In October, on Halloween night, Oliver wore any kind of costume he could put together, donned a mask, and went trick-or-treating with Bruce, Richard, and another friend of theirs, Luigi Vani. On their rounds, they offered to play music for their “treat.” People were so pleased with them that they gave them money instead of candies.
If Oliver found autumn difficult, it was nothing in comparison to winter with its unpleasant cold-weather chores of shovelling snow, bringing in heating coal or wood and taking the ashes out. The cold also prevented him from practising his favourite outdoor sports. Oliver went to the gym until the day he was conquered by the Canadian sport par excellence, hockey. He plunged into this activity with characteristic passion, to the point that his family thought he had gone overboard. “Having three sisters and being the only boy, you remember things that used to get you mad or embarrassed. Even today, my sisters still tease me about it. I used to go out to play hockey and stay until the last minute. I knew we were eating supper at six o’clock, but I’d come home to be told off by my mother: ‘Boy, why do you wait until the last minute?’ I remember coming in not feeling my feet – no relief – I couldn’t do anything because they were so cold. My sisters were laughing and laughing at me and I was screaming. In my mind, I would say ‘never again!’ But the next day, I would return.”
When it concerned sports, Oliver may not have listened when his parents told him enough was enough, but he did respect their warnings about crossing the railroad tracks, especially near Windsor Street. He had witnessed several tragic accidents. When the train cars were being shunted, children, some of whom he knew, refused to wait and tried to pass between the cars; if they were unlucky, they got caught when the cars banged together and ended up losing a leg, or even both legs.
***
Oliver lived within walking distance of the Montreal Forum on the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Atwater Streets. The Forum, where he had seen the Barnum & Bailey Circus, was the hockey mecca of North America at that time. The home rink of the Montreal Canadians, it hosted games with the five other clubs of the National Hockey League: the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Chicago Black Hawks, the Detroit Red Wings, the New York Rangers, and the Boston Bruins, whose rivalry with the Habs was friendly but very real.
To Oliver, hockey night meant running up Atwater Street and mixing with the crowd milling about in front of the Forum, hoping someone would give him a ticket to the game. He would give up after a while, and race back home to listen to the game on the radio. Between periods, Oliver heard Ken Griffin playing standards on the organ that he himself played on the piano, including “Skater’s Waltz.” When he learned a fan had been taken to the hospital during the game because a stray puck had broken his nose or flattened his cheekbone, he was glad that he was listening in the comfort and security of his home.
Still, Oliver imagined that watching a game and listening to the organ on the spot would have been out of this world. When he finally did get a free ticket one day, he ran into the Forum, his heart beating in double time. On the edge of his seat, he cheered the Canadians and booed their adversaries. However, his enthusiasm was dampened at half time when he recognized the men’s room attendant as the father of one of his friends. Although this Black man seemed to have kept his dignity in spite of his low-status job, the image was irrevocably imprinted in Oliver’s mind.
Oliver only got one more free pass to a hockey game at the Forum. After that he had to wait until he grew up and could afford to buy a ticket.
***
Mr. Jones began to worry about his son’s craze for sports, especially ice hockey. Oliver wanted to become the next Maurice Richard, or at least the next Elmer Lach or Toe Blake – Richard’s partners in the “Punch Line.” Or Butch Bouchard. But to Oliver’s father, it would have been a shame to let this God-given musical talent come second to anything. Oliver himself was conscious that sports distracted him from his piano practices – and from his homework.
Nevertheless, he felt that participating in sports was a wonderful part of growing up. He also had the example of two young people living downstairs from him. Brother and sister Mervin and Rosella Thorne both belonged to the Joey Richardson Track and Field Club that Oliver wanted to join. Rosella had been Canadian champion in hurdles and the long jump and competed for Canada in track and field at the Olympic Games, a rare achievement for a woman. Mervin and Rosella became role models for Oliver, in the same way that Oscar Peterson and Jackie Robinson had. Oliver could hardly imagine what would have happened to him without the positive influence of these achievers in different fields who provided a kind of outlet for him.
In spite of his lack of fervour during his practices, Oliver enjoyed playing the piano in front of audiences more and more. Yet, he still didn’t imagine himself earning his living from music. “The only thing I wanted to do, although it may look strange for a youngster growing up, it was funny, I would have liked to join the army. And the other thing I would have loved to be was a detective. I thought about that for a long time. Of course, I did not have the stature and there were not a lot of opportunities for young Blacks to join.”
Oliver was discouraged in his dream of a sports career when Mervin Thorne, after graduating from an American university with a sports scholarship, took a job as a civil servant. Oliver wondered if he could handle even that kind of job, since he couldn’t imagine working nine-to-five.
He kept playing sports and training at the Iverley Community Centre, a minute away from where he lived, and where Daisy Peterson gave music lessons. The Centre became an important part of his life and kept him busy. “It kept me from getting into trouble.”
***
Oliver was surprised and happy when he heard that Marguerite Pyle, his Cape Breton cousin, was coming to Montreal to live with the Joneses. Right from the beginning, Marguerite was fond of Mrs. Jones, viewing her as “a very outgoing, very beautiful personality, happy, good sense of humour, and a good cook!” She also appreciated her cousins Lillian, Violet, and Shirley. Helping Mrs. Jones in the house during the day, she was impatient for the evenings, when she would attend Oliver’s shows. Since the summer of 1942 when she first heard him play, she had been convinced he would become a star.
Soon after, Marguerite’s brother Joe, who had taken care of the family after his father’s death, moved to Montreal with Aunt Elisa. Joe, already a boxing champion in Nova Scotia, continued his career in Montreal and became Canadian middleweight champion. The media gave him the nickname of “KO” Joe Pyle. Oliver, who felt the pain every time his cousin was hit, rationalized: “I’m lucky because my cousin knocks people out so fast that he doesn’t get hurt much.”
Oliver attended his first boxing matches and enjoyed this manly sport. “We had a good following in Montreal. There was also wrestling, especially Gorgeous George, but we knew that wrestling was phony.” Joe’s brother Charlie also continued his boxing career and would eventually be decorated by Queen Juliana of The Netherlands.
Despite the fact that Oliver still spent a lot of his time watching and playing sports, it seemed that everyone around him had decided on another future for him. Instead of becoming a Pullman porter or an athlete, they easily envisioned him as a full-time professional musician. But Oliver didn’t see it that way, and still hated the hours of practice.
When Richard Parris heard Oliver complaining about his practices, he would argue with him. “Because Oliver played like fire, fire! He would burn everybody. He was just one piece with the piano!”
