Read an excerpt of And the Walls Came Down by Denise Da Costa below, one of our featured summer reads! Don't forget to save 25% off this book when you use code WALLS25 from August 8 - August 14, 2024.
August 2004
Summer heat ushered the foul scent of sewers and exhaust into the streetcar as it shuffled through Toronto traffic. Patrons poured out of the Eaton Centre and onto the sidewalks. Through their scissoring legs, I searched the faces of the drifters installed on the pavement. This was a habit my sister and I picked up after Mother left, convinced she suffered from amnesia and had taken up with a band of homeless persons. This was a town desperate for the taste of a true summer like the one in 1993, when my mother, Aretha Ellis, fled the suburbs to escape the shame of a dream deferred. It occurred to me that she had been running her whole life from one thing or another.
As the vehicle accelerated, I clutched Mother’s old baking tin on my lap, but the force sent me swaying into the next seat, startling the passenger sitting there. I hadn’t noticed him until then — a handsome, stony stranger who recovered in time to grasp my shoulder and steady me. I shrank from his touch.
“Thanks.” I studied him for familiarity, seeing only the sharpness of his protruding brow line and cheekbones — a skull forming in front of me. I thought of my grandmother whose funeral I’d recently attended and looked away.
Farther east, we passed Jilly’s Gentleman’s Club, followed by a series of studio spaces and a commercial loft under construction. Onward, after a kilometre of residential area, we stopped at a brown-bricked, tumbledown complex in Regent Park. The building next to it was recognizable only by its location. The signage no longer read “Community Centre” but, rather, “Community Clinic.” Same difference, my sister would say.
From there, I could trace the path Mother made me walk home one night. I was fourteen and stupid for having let my delinquent older friend, Richa, convince me to attend a dance party at the centre. The elaborate plan was anchored to a lie that placed me at Nicole’s house, working on a school project. If my mother were to call, Nicole was supposed to claim I was in the bathroom. Yet, shortly after my arrival at the event, Nicole made an entrance. I was furious.
“Listen,” Richa said to me. “If you’re gonna get in trouble, it might as well be for something good.”
She tapped a passerby on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. He shot me a smile. I cringed.
Having acquiesced, I found myself dancing at the back of the gym with the boy when my mother came barrelling through the horde, orbs of light pirouetting across her face. My dancing partner made a hasty exit. I was not as swift. She smacked me hard across the cheek. Nearby partiers let out a shocked cry but quickly returned to minding their own business — Caribbean parents like mine were known to take on bystanders.
Mother grabbed me by the collar of the black crop top I had borrowed from Richa and led me out into the parking lot. Her car sat idling with my sister, Melissa, looking on wide-eyed from the passenger seat. I went to open the door.
“Oh no.” Mother shook her head and pointed to the main road. “The same way you got here is the same way you’re getting home.”
At eleven o’clock, I walked home, more afraid of what awaited me there than anything I might encounter on my journey. I knew that street like the back of my hand: there were one hundred and fourteen cracks in the sidewalk, three driveways, two stoplights, and at least three streetworkers who steadily held the block. Melissa called them “stars” because we never saw them during the day.
In the years since I’d moved away, gentrification had uprooted mainstays and entire communities along Dundas Street but not east of the bridge. East of the bridge there were no banks. No grocery stores. No windowed shops for one to stop and stare at pretty things. If not for the Don River, streetcars would simply detour north onto River Street and avoid the area altogether. I stood, rang the buzzer, then made my way to the exit.
The streetcar stop resembled a giant cigarette piercing the cement and tilting toward the pothole in the hot asphalt — a trap for thin-legged prey. I paused to adjust to the earthy stench and the remains of my old neighbourhood, Don Mount Court. Portions of the complex had been knocked away, and the colour from the surrounding buildings receded as if they were already disappearing. The untrained eye might not have realized it was public housing; it wasn’t a high-rise flanked by brown row houses or a grim set-up of identical step-ups placed like crosses in a graveyard. The towering fortress rose high above the demolition equipment as though freshly unearthed, cracks spreading like spores across its stucco coat.
I followed the construction barrier to the rear of the complex where the carnage of past lives remained, yards of abandoned furniture and skeletal strollers tangled into the overgrown shrubbery. Vines weaved along the chain-link fence probing for the sun, which was busy staring at its reflection in the window of Mother’s old bedroom. I imagined the spectre of a well-dressed woman staring out at the widespread demolition and the emerging skyline beyond. She would’ve found it ironic since the city expropriated the land in the 1960s to build the complex.
I strolled across the deserted courtyard and climbed one flight of steps, where I could look out from the balcony. Unused and abandoned, Don Mount held a semblance of beauty I would miss. In the park, an empty pair of swings swayed rebelliously against their fate, chains clanging, struggling to break free. Trees whispered and shuddered their leaves, the whole area a living organism.
It knows.
The management office, carved into the space between the stairwell and a bachelor apartment, was where tenants paid the rent. Or made promises about when the rent would be paid. Where seniors met before setting off to the “Blue House,” the community food bank. Where they complained about the neighbours, the mice. The violence. I knocked on the door before entering, as was the custom. At the far end of the room, Camille Blanchard sat behind a wooden desk, on its surface a coffee cup, a telephone, and a stack of documents. Camille tapped the pile with a pen, then spoke into the phone.
“Tell them you have my authority to enter the premises.” She saw me. “Hang on.”
“One minute,” she mouthed, then swivelled away, bursting into a hearty laugh before saying goodbye.
The office felt cramped compared to my sparsely decorated home, but it felt like I was visiting an old friend. At least that’s what I figured it would feel like if I had been visiting an old friend.
There was a loud creak when Camille eased her stout frame around the desk. She was dressed for tropical travel, as always, in a flowy cotton frock that matched her depressed blue eyes. Threads of silver streaked her fine blond hair, which was pulled back into a tight bun. Never having been petite, the extra weight she had gained suited her; less so, the leathery tan that aged her by ten years.
“Delia, it’s so good to see you.” She went to embrace me, then glanced down at the pan I held between us. “Is that for me?”
I noted her pungent scent. Was she nervous?
“Of course.” I handed it to her, relieved to part with the debt. She set the container on the desk, carefully unwrapped the foil covering, and clasped her hands together.
“Sweet potato pudding. Delia, you didn’t have to — I did this out of kindness.”