UNTWISTED – Chapter One (pg 7-9)

I was the product of rape.

Solely by my mother’s account, she was Cree and Micmac on her mother’s side and German and French on her father’s.
Her immediate family lived around coastal New Brunswick, but the larger family stretches out from the Micmac reserves on the east coast of New Brunswick all the way to the Crees in Northern Quebec.

My mother was born into a family with a lot of alcohol abuse. Because she was the only girl in a family of alcohol abusers and residential school survivors, for her own safety, her maternal grandmother took her away from her parental home and brought her up in the traditional Cree way.

I once saw a picture of this woman, my great-grandmother. She was probably in her nineties, raw-boned and leathery, a small little gal and as Indian as she could be, sitting in a rowboat smoking a corn cob pipe.

When my mother was thirteen, her grandmother died and she was forced to return to her parents’ home. Shortly afterward, she ran away. Being young and Aboriginal, she was sadly vulnerable to all sorts of difficulty and danger. She was raped and became pregnant with me.
It is interesting that my mother decided against going back to her family home to have her baby. Despite her tender age, she knew intuitively that if she went back home, the likelihood was strong her child would become enslaved in the lifestyle of alcoholism and abuse that prevailed there. So she stayed on her own as a runaway.

I was born in an abandoned building. As far as I can figure out, it

was a motel-type of building, perhaps a collection of seasonal cabins that people would have rented during the summer. Apparently the place had gone bankrupt and was now abandoned.

My mother lived in one of the cabins and scrounged for food. There must have been a lake nearby and ice fishing going on because my mother would go around and collect the fish that were discarded or left behind. At one point during the pregnancy, she got severe food poisoning from eating some of the discarded fish, and almost died. She suffered endless vomiting for days and feared she would lose her baby.

It appears there was another young First Nations woman, also pregnant, living in the room or cabin next door. When my mother went into labor, she began banging on the wall in a prearranged signal that she needed help. It was this girl who brought me into the world and cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. They were like two babies having babes of their own.

I don’t know exactly where the abandoned building was, and I’m not certain of my exact date of birth because it was never registered with the government. In later life, I was able to track down my baptismal certificate from a Catholic church in New Brunswick. Going by the baptismal certificate, my best guess is I was born October 24 of either 1948 or 1949. I chose 1949.

I know very little about my mother’s early life other than the fact that she was very strong, very resourceful, and obviously had a will to survive. For a time after I was born, she worked as a housekeeper for a Lebanese family. She remembers them as being very nice people with a big family. My mother and I had living quarters in their house, and she saved all the money she made.

I couldn’t have been much more than a year old when my young teenage mother decided to take the money she had saved and migrate to Toronto. I don’t know what she was thinking, because Toronto was an English city and she spoke only Cree and French, and could neither read nor write. Perhaps she just wanted to be as far away as possible from her former life. Or was it the rumor of gold-paved streets that lured my mother to Toronto? It was generally believed that no matter where you came from, you were guaranteed to ‘make it’ in Toronto.

My earliest recollections centre around living in a rooming house on the corner of Sherbourne and Gerard, right next to George’s Spaghetti House. The rooming house was run by an Oriental family, and according to my mother, before I was five years old, I could speak French, Cree, and Chinese—but no English. We had a bed-sitting room that was basically one large room equipped with a two-burner hotplate.

Two memories of that time stand out. One is taping a tablespoon to a stick and leaning out a second floor window to scoop pigeon eggs from a nest below. Had I fallen out, I would probably have splattered like an egg myself. Don’t ask me what I did with the eggs.
The second memory is taking the doorknobs off all the apartment doors in the rooming house. Understandably, it caused a fair kafuffle in the building.

On one occasion, I apparently went out on my own for the whole day and came back naked with a little girl in tow. When my mother asked where my clothes were, I told her I had thrown them down the sewer. I clearly remember my punishment: being made to kneel in the corner on dried peas.

From the rooming house, we moved to a little house with a dirt yard. It was directly across the street from Sherbourne Park. I would go to the park and hang out at the library which also served as a community center and the armory. I remember climbing on a pair of big metal lions that guarded the entrance steps to the building, and seeing a lot of drunks and homeless people sleeping under the bushes in the park.

Our next move was to the fringes of Regent Park. This was ‘The Projects’—Canada’s experiment with the American-styled ‘Let’s-put- ’em-all-in-one-place’ agenda. Regent Park could only be described as a concrete jungle of four-storey, flat-roofed apartments with probably twenty suites to a building. Two dozen or so of these apartment blocks were squeezed together on five or six acres of land with only concrete between them—no trees, no flowers, no grass.

Because the land on which the development stood had formerly been a cabbage farm near the Don River at the east end of Toronto, the Regent Park area became known as Cabbagetown. The City purchased the farm when it needed a place to put its poor people.

Cabbagetown was where migrants and new immigrants came. It was where the docks and the waste processing facility were located. It was a smelly place with an almost Bowery-type of environment. Cabbagetown was a melting pot for Germans, Ukrainians, Scots, and Irish—predominantly white, with the odd black. There were few Orientals, no East Indians, and no Aboriginals.