Rueing the Consequences

George Elliott Clarke. Photo by Thomas King. Courtesy HarperCollins

George & Rue
George Elliott Clarke
223 Pages
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
$32.95
Review by Lawrence Hill

If you like uplifting books, you might pass over the novel George & Rue, by the self-proclaimed “Africadian” writer George Elliott Clarke.

However, if you like a blast of cold air with your fiction – in this case, the air of the disenfranchised and hungry young black men who grow up with beatings and end up committing murder – then George & Rue is a book for you.

In 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton – who were cousins of the author – murdered a white taxi driver named Nacre Pearly Burgundy in rural New Brunswick. In less than a year, they were hanged. Clarke, who acknowledges the family relationship and the historical underpinnings of the novel in an afterword, and who explored the same theme in his Governor General’s Award-winning work of poetry Execution Poems, shows us the murder in its bloodiest details on the first page of George & Rue. Then he works back in time, setting up the lives of the murderers and their kin, filling in the story in all its haunting ugliness.

Clarke is conscious of literary tradition. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez presents us with death in the opening of the novel, and then works back in time. The Barbadian-Canadian writer Austin Clarke (unrelated to George Elliott Clarke) also offers news of murder at the outset of his novel The Polished Hoe, only to spend the rest of the book showing what led up to that fateful hour.

George and Rufus Hamilton are born of dirt-poor parents in 1924 and 1926, respectively, in the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, N.S. There is no hint, in this novel, of hope or progress. Human courage does not trump oppression. The novel’s simple but ambitious aim is to present a slow-motion, poetic examination of how inherited poverty and unrelenting racism squeeze two boys and lead them ultimately to commit murder for a wallet full of money.

Courtesy HarperCollins

George & Rue invites comparisons to the novel Native Son, by the black American writer Richard Wright. Some 65 years ago, Wright took a run at America’s greatest nightmare – that black men would rape and murder white women – and told the story of Bigger Thomas, a poor black city boy growing up in a rat-infested apartment. Bigger takes a job working in the house of a rich white family, panics in the face of dangerous sexual tension when a white girl living in the house shows an interest in him, kills her and stuffs her corpse in a furnace. Once he is caught – and you know that the crime will catch up with him – Bigger faces an unrelenting enemy in the form of the justice system bent on exacting revenge. Wright’s novel shocked America and made him instantly famous. It appeared that his literary intention was to grab readers by the collar and say, “I want you to look at this.” Bigger Thomas, a young black murderer, had a heart and a short life packed with disaster and woe, and Wright seemed bent on underlining his character’s humanity.

George Elliott Clarke is working in the same tradition. He, too, explores the taboo of interracial sex, but it is ultimately poverty – not miscegenation – that brings about the demise of his main characters. It is hard to breathe life and colour into characters who do despicable things. Because one can never love the protagonist, the most to be hoped for is to engage the reader’s empathy. To avoid pulpit pounding, George Elliott Clarke digs deep into his bag of literary tricks. To begin with, he relies on the sound of language to seduce the reader. Describing how George and Rufus’s parents – Asa and Cynthy – met at a springtime barn dance, Clarke writes: “He’d not been fortified with a beer when his eyes caught, snagged, on that dreamy face, too alarmingly splendid. Blossoms were just jettisoning off the apple trees in pastures up, down, the Annapolis Valley – fifty miles of apple blossoms, sir, pink-white-ivory-cream-rose blossoms, delicate to look at, fragile to touch, and the dance was in a barn just off some tan man’s pasture. Blossoms was a-crizzle on the trees.”

Clarke takes serious linguistic risks in this novel, and they pay off. He wants to write poetic fiction, and he also seeks to convey the sound of black idiom in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, around the middle of the 20th century. Like a trombone, Clarke slides back and forth between highly wrought poetry and the parlance of the rural black Maritimer (which has its own soulful rhythms). Sometimes, the two layers of language inhabit the same paragraph. Writing of blacks coping with winter in rural Nova Scotia, Clarke writes: “…the tarpaper shacks with tin roofs was iceboxes, their cold embittering and chilling even embers. In such inclemency, folks could perish while cooking, or freeze into statuesque sleeping positions like Pompeii’s fossilized figures. Or they had to humble and sip muddy water from pigpens.”

Vivid characterization also lifts this novel off the page. From the start, George Hamilton – the older brother – is stronger, calmer, and more reasonable than his brother. George goes AWOL during the Second World War, flirts with crime, lands in jail but comes back out determined to make a clean start of things. He wants to work, put money aside, take care of his young family, but can’t quite make it. Rufus, however, resents the world that has made him poor, black and undesirable, and he mostly refuses to play the role of the Uncle Tom who would do any work for any pay – no matter how little. Rather than bust his backside to survive legally, Rufus tries to beat the system that cheats him. By the age of 15, he has grown weary of watching his father beat his mother senseless, so he attacks his father and leaves him bloodied and fallen. Later, after a failed stab at musicianship and some jail time of his own, Rufus takes the lead in murdering a white taxi driver who was actually a friend of George’s.

George provides the hammer and draws the taxi driver into their lives on that fateful day, but he is sick with guilt before the deadly incident. He is thinking of his wife, who is stuck in a hospital with their newborn child. Neither can get out of the hospital until George comes up with money to pay the doctor’s bill. George wants to spring his wife and child free, but he doesn’t want to kill his friend, and while he is agonizing about it, his brother steps in and does the job. Once the brothers are caught in the steel trap of the law, George grovels at the feet of the police and the court, pleading innocence, blaming his brother, insisting that his own hand did not strike the fatal blow. Rufus, on the other had, spits in the face of the law to the very end, while the legal system jubilantly closes in on him and his brother. He refuses to blame his brother, or to explain himself, or to plead for leniency. In showing these two brothers reacting entirely differently in the aftermath of their crime, Clarke is simply brilliant. There is no confusing George and Rufus Hamilton, and there is no forgetting either one.

An extraordinarily painful story, George & Rue is magnificently delivered. It is not at all pleasant to read. But it is courageous, illuminating, and deserving of a broad audience. Standing on the shoulders of literary forebears such as Richard Wright, George Elliott Clarke insists convincingly that the “Africadians” – black Nova Scotians who are descendents of the United Empire Loyalists – have a rightful place in Canada’s history and literature, and that their humanity is textured, complicated, and worthy of examination.

Lawrence Hill is the author of Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (HarperCollins, 2001).