Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada
An Excerpt
When I was seventeen, I decided it was high time to do something about the wild mop that was sprouting in all directions from my head. It had become completely uncontrollable. Even when I drenched my hair with conditioner, I still couldn't comb through all the knots. They shot out like a condensed, fused mass from the sides of my head. The curls had wound and twisted themselves around each other to such a degree that the hair looked like one massive dreadlock. The only time my hair looked presentable was when I emerged from the shower, soaking wet.
I hadn't been to a barber in ages and was a little unsure of where to go. I had just come back from travelling in Europe, and I was about to begin my last year in a private high school where there were no other blacks and almost no racial minorities. I felt like asserting my blackness.
I announced that I wanted to get my hair fixed and that I had decided to get an afro, or as close an approximation as my loosely curled hair would permit. Who helped me line this up? My white mother! In retrospect, I find this fascinating. My father, who is prominent in the black community, could easily have set me up with someone. But do you know who was cutting his hair? Corrado Accaputo, the owner of a two-chair Italian barbershop. My mother refused to set foot in the joint because it was wallpapered with Playboy pinups. My father had been going to see Corrado for as long as I could remember. And when my brother and I were children, he took us to the local barber down the street from our house in Don Mills. That barber, too, was Italian. Dan and I hated him. We came out of his barbershop looking like wannabe whites, with our hair plastered down over our heads with water or grease, and combed pancake flat. Of course, the flatness would last approximately thirty minutes - the time it took us to get home, go outside to play and discover that our curls were beginning to reassert themselves, gesturing up like random weeds. So when my father heard that I was planning to get an afro, he suggested Corrado Accaputo one last time and then fell silent.
Reviews
"Black Berry, Sweet Juice is a short book full of pointed, poignant and powerful observation…It jolts you out of any smug apathy you may want to feel about race in Canada..."
The Globe and Mail
"Black Berry, Sweet Juice, an uncomfortable but unputdownable read, is a bitter reminder that when it comes to race, we still have much to rage against."
The Toronto Star