Free Some Great Thing by Lawrence Hill Page B

challenged by an angry student. Mahatma and his friends would turn to stare at the student, not to reflect about the complaint, but to wonder about how anyone could care so much. For years, Mahatma moved among peers who would look up, narrow their eyebrows and stare in curiosity if they heard someone wishing he had “done more for society.” It never occurred to people in his generation to “do” anything for anybody. That seemed naïve.
    Nevertheless, Mahatma had felt a flood of anger earlier that evening, watching Don Betts sabotage a story he had carefully researched and—yes!—begun to care about. The story meant something! It was fascinating that the United States and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should be brimming with paranoia. The mayor’s case intrigued him. Mahatma had dug out the story by talking to the mayor and to Sandra Paquette and to U.S. government officials. He didn’t dig it out to see it distorted by Betts.
    Mahatma spoke calmly to his father. “I had something to say and my editor tried to warp it. Would you want him to get away with that?”
    “Was it a good story?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you believe in it?”
    “Yes.”
    Ben clasped his son’s hand. “Good for you, son! Stick to your guns!”
    There had been no television in the Grafton home until Louise bought one, without consulting Ben, a year or two before her death. But Ben advised his son not to watch it. “It will rot your brain,” the old man said. “Help me fill out this big book. It’s going to be a history of our people.”
    But Mahatma, eleven by then, had better things to do. Hide and seek. Baseball. Working alone, Ben slowly mounted his “Negro History Appreciation” binder. It contained the odd news clipping of pertinence to blacks. It also contained his thoughts and recollections and interesting tidbits he’d heard in conversation or on the radio.
    “Nobody shall think that We have no Reasons for documenting this History,” Ben had written years ago in the introduction to his binder, capitalizing nouns that seemed important. “Many times have we been subject to Questions about our History, the Tendency being for citizens of Winnipeg to express Wonder about the presence of Negroes in their city, and to display Incomprehension of certain Facts, namely, our presence.”
    In this spirit, Ben noted down his own background. “I, Ben Grafton, Jr., was born in Winnipeg in 1908. My father, Ben Grafton, Sr., was born in Nebraska in 1879. He met my mother in Oklahoma and together they moved to Alberta in 1905, where my father worked as a labourer. Two years later, they moved to Winnipeg.”
    Ben did more than document his roots in his precious “Negro History Appreciation,” which attained its peak of thickness during Mahatma’s boyhood. Knowing that Winnipeggers werereluctant to acknowledge his place of birth and that they didn’t believe that Negroes had accomplished anything of importance, Ben undertook to document Great Negro Achievements, and to insert such information piece by piece in his binder. One such entry read: “Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, 1799–1837, a Russian Novelist, had Royal African Blood on his mother’s side. His great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, was an Abyssinian Prince and a Negro, making Alexander Pushkin Also A Person of Colour, no matter how Vaguely! P.S. Abram Hannibal was captured by Moslems, sold in Constantinople, and later adopted by the Russian Czar Peter I.”
    The bulk of Ben’s entries pertained to Canadian blacks such as Osborne Anderson, who in 1859 had participated in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and escaped back to Canada, and Anderson Ruffin Abbott, the first Canadian-born black doctor. Over the protests of his wife, Ben told these things to his son. “You have been born to do something great for humanity,” he told Mahatma in his eleventh year. Mahatma, who was holding a baseball glove at the time, said he had just hit a home run. “Greater