82 Before Agriculture
to incoherence, when sadness rather than defiance or humour was the mood of the
moment, a few of those I knew best would tell me they would soon be heading
home. But I was never sure what home meant or just how many of them would be
able to get there.
One of the first people I met in Edmonton was Harry. A tall, heavily built man
of about 50, with the strong features of a Plains Indian, he was leaning on the wall
outside the George, playing a harmonica. The music was beautiful – a bubbling of
sounds, fast and rich, with a blend of tunes that I learned later was part Scottish
and part Cree. It was the music of the fur trade, of the encounter between those
who manned the trading posts and bought the furs and those who trapped and
sold them. I stopped to listen. Harry watched me as he played, then paused and
asked if I had a quarter to spare. ‘Sure,’ I said. I handed him 50 cents. He looked
at the two coins, as if measuring their possibilities. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you and
me can go buy a few beers.’
Harry became my best friend on skid row. He was a good friend to have. Every-
one knew him, and many took pride in his musical skill. He played the fiddle as well
as the harmonica, and knew where he could go to find both cups of tea and instru-
ments that he could borrow. He made money by busking on street corners, but only
enough to fund more rounds of beer and the occasional bottle of cheap sherry. I sup-
pose he was an alcoholic, but he never got rotten drunk, and he somehow placed
himself at a distance from those who did. He was courteous and helpful, and a bit of
a street-person social worker: he would take care of those who were most destitute,
and he did what he could to prevent fights from drawing real blood.
One Sunday, when the bars were closed and the skid row community broke
into little clusters of people on street corners and vacant lots, Harry told me to
come and hear some real music. He took me to a bootlegger who sold us a bottle
of the cheapest sherry, then led me to an abandoned house a few blocks from the
George. It appeared to be boarded up. But Harry knew a way in through a broken
door to its basement. Down there, in the gloom, a group of men and women sat in
a circle. A few bottles stood around, and one man was unconscious in a corner.
We joined the group. No one said much, and then two or three people began
to sing. Then another few people; a different song. It was Algonquian music, with
drumbeat rhythms tapped out on a broken chair and the floor, the voices high-
pitched, the words a strange and haunting wail. The singers sat with their bodies
hunched a little forward and their eyes shut tight. They strained to get the sounds
right, to keep the rhythm, to take and keep themselves elsewhere. This was no
longer skid row – or was it actually the very heart of skid row, where those who
lived as marginals could be themselves at the centre of the white man’s city?
The songs were separated by quiet pauses, a hand passing the bottle, a shifting
of bodies, but no one spoke.
After one of the songs, a young woman broke the silence and said to me: ‘Now
you hear our minds, in our song. How come the white man says we have no mind?
When they hear a Cree song, I guess they think it’s a coyote howling.’
Everyone laughed.