Lawrence Hill - Blood: The Stuff of Life

THE MASSEY LECTURES SERIES

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

This book comprises the 2013 Massey Lectures, Blood: The Stuff of Life, broadcast in November 2013 as part of CBC Radios Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Bernie Lucht.

LAWRENCE HILL

Blood: The Stuff of Life is Lawrence Hills ninth book. His earlier works include the novels Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood , and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada . His novel The Book of Negroes won numerous awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, was published around the world, and became a number one national bestseller in Canada. A former journalist with the Winnipeg Free Press and the Globe and Mail , Hill has travelled widely in Canada, the United States, France, and Spain, and worked as a volunteer with Crossroads International in Niger, Cameroon, and Mali. To encourage the economic and social development of girls and women in Africa, he has supported Crossroads International, currently as an honorary patron, for more than thirty years. He also volunteers with Book Clubs for Inmates and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society of Nova Scotia. Hill lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, and their five children, dividing his time between homes in Hamilton, Ontario, and Woody Point, Newfoundland. He co-wrote the adaptation of The Book of Negroes to a six-part TV miniseries and is currently finishing a new novel. For more information on Lawrence Hill, please visit www.lawrencehill.com.

ALSO BY THR AUTHOR

FICTION

Some Great Thing

Any Known Blood

The Book of Negroes
(published as Someone Knows My Name in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand)

NON-FICTION

Women of Vision:
The Story of the Canadian Negro Womens Association

Trials and Triumphs: The Story of African-Canadians

Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada

The Deserters Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq , with Joshua Key

Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book:
An Anatomy of a Book Burning

BLOOD

The Stuff of Life

LAWRENCE HILL

Copyright 2013 Lawrence Hill

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published in 2013 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.houseofanansi.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hill, Lawrence, 1957, author
Blood : the stuff of life / Lawrence Hill.

(CBC Massey lectures series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-322-1 (pbk.) (CAN) .ISBN 978-1-77089-324-5 (html)

1. BloodSocial aspects. I. Title. II. Series: CBC Massey
lecture series

GT498.B55H54 2013 306.4 C2013-903727-6
C2013-903728-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909835

ISBN 978-1-77089-323-8 (US)

Jacket design: Bill Douglas

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright materials.
The publisher will gladly rectify any inadvertent errors or omissions in credits in future editions.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For my son, Andrew Raymond Savoie Hill,

who works with abandon

travels with gusto

and with his deliberate and diplomatic hand

writes the most big-hearted Fathers Day cards

CONTENTS

Go Careful with That Blood of Mine: Blood Counts

We Want It Safe and We Want It Clean:
Blood, Truth, and Honour

Comes By It Honestly: Blood and Belonging

From Humans to Cockroaches:
Blood in the Veins of Power and Spectacle

Of Presidential Mistresses, Holocaust Survivors,
and Long-Lost Ancestors: Secrets in Our Blood

Sometimes I look at people and wonder if they are related to me. I do this in public places and private spaces... I have indulged in this curious pastime since I was eight years old, when I first understood that all but one of my mothers family had become white.

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip,
The Sweeter the Juice

*

There is no expiation except with blood.

Sipra ,
the ancient Judaiccommentary on Leviticus

ONE

GO CAREFUL WITH THAT BLOOD OF MINE:
BLOOD COUNTS

ONE SUMMER MORNING, WHEN I was a child, I was on all fours, playing hide-and-seek on a Toronto schoolyard, when my left wrist began to tingle. I looked down and noticed a broken beer bottle. Turning my hand, I saw more blood than seemed right. It was pouring out of me. I stood, let out a cry, crossed the street, and began running. We lived ten houses up the street, less than two hundred metres away. I got ready to shout out for my mother just as soon as she could hear me. Would I have to go to the hospital? How many stitches would it take to impress my friends? This was a deep cut. Lots of blood. Perhaps I would need twenty stitches. Maybe thirty. Three or four wouldnt earn bragging rights. As I ran, I held out my left arm to direct my splashing blood onto every single sidewalk panel, each one just over a metre long. I slowed, when necessary, to ensure that the bright red trail remained unbroken. Later, I wanted to be able to walk with my friends up and down the street and say, Look! Thats my blood! Once I reached 20 Beveridge Drive, I turned into the driveway, forgot about the trail of blood, and began screaming. By now, I was hyperventilating. I terrified my mother when I burst into the house with blood still flowing out of me. She drove me to the hospital.

A few hours later, with three or four measly stitches in my wrist, I was back home. Inspecting the sidewalk proved something of a disappointment. The dramatic red trail had already turned rust-brown. No one would even recognize it as blood, unless I pointed it out and insisted. I told a friend or two, but they were so supremely unimpressed that I gave up with the story. I did, however, study the splatter every day as I walked up and down the street. My blood clung to the sidewalk for a respectable period of time a good week or so, until rain washed it away.

Looking back, I wonder about the mad impulse to hold out my arm and splash every sidewalk panel. I wanted to mark the earth with my own sacred fluid. Look here! This is me! This is proof of my very life, here in this long line of bloody splotches on the sidewalk. The blood had appeared so hot, fresh, and significant when it was spilling from me. But hours later, when it had been downgraded to a mud-brown trail, my accident could no longer be heralded as special or sacred, because the trail I had left no longer looked like blood.