A Jamaican immigrant must overcome mistrust and self doubt to find love and acceptance in Canada.
After his father’s death, Eric Taylor is left to fend for himself on a small farm in the mountains of Jamaica. He decides to seek his fortune abroad and chooses Toronto as his new home. It is a decision he immediately regrets. Alone and half-frozen, he longs for the sunshine and sensuality of his homeland.
The civil rights movement is at its height and the Vietnam War is raging. Catastrophic events in the United States have a profound effect on his perceptions – and on his life.
Early encounters with bigoted Canadians make him acutely self-conscious of his swarthy skin and Caribbean accent. And when he falls in love with a white Canadian girl, his mind is filled with self-doubt and mistrust.
But his talent for music and help from newfound friends open doors he never knew existed, and shape a destiny beyond his wildest imaginings.
Excerpt
I look back on it all, and I wonder. How did it come to pass? How did I get so lucky? Where would I be today if I had not come to Canada?
I shake my head when I think how silly I was, worrying about my color. My swarthy skin caused me so much concern, and as it turned out nobody – at least nobody who mattered – seemed to care in this wonderfully diverse country.
I know now that Rita has always loved me for myself, not as Othello or the oppressed Negro. And her theory about the Venus flytrap turned out to be so much hot air – for us, anyway. Ask the Old Boy and he will tell you how he feels about it. As some guy commented recently at a party, when he caught Rita and me having a quiet snuggle, there may be snow on the roof but that doesn’t mean there’s no fire in the hearth.
Every time that little white girl from Peterboro holds my hand I feel the old electricity coursing through my body. And I have every reason to believe she feels the same way about me.
And I know now that if Rita had given birth to coal-black babies, nobody I cared about would have been shocked. They would not have thought less of the babies or of me. Greta and Barb and Jim and Ken – and the rest of our friends and family – are better than that. They would have loved the babies just as much as they love Kate and Jamie.
O Canada! What a country! It may be cold and forbidding at times. The snow may block our driveways and the sleet may freeze our wipers to our windshields. The trees may lose their leaves and raise naked arms to the gray sky in surrender. We may scurry along, cursing the wind that chaps our lips and stings our eyes. And I may have to bundle up like a snowman, peeking out from layers of scarves and shuffling along in overshoes. But so what?
It’s the loveliest place on earth in the fall. The mountains are majestic. The oceans are grand. The prairies are breathtaking. The land is bountiful. Even the winters are lovely – viewed from indoors. When the snow drifts against the picket fence and blankets the maple tree in the back yard, we sit in front of our wood burning fireplace and enjoy the postcard scene framed by our window. There’s nothing like a white Christmas to bring back heart-warming memories.
And there’s so much more to Canada than its physical aspects. There’s the social climate. We Canadians are learning to get along with each other at last. Germans and Jews, Greeks and Turks, the descendants of ancient enemies, live side by side – mostly in harmony. Asian children sit in class with Scandinavians and share their peanut butter sandwiches. Black kids play tag with white kids. Eskimos and Indians – they don’t call them that any more, though; it’s Inuit and Native Canadians now – are treated with dignity and respect.
Even the Quebecois seem to have calmed down.
To be sure, in a nation of nearly thirty-five million people, bigots persist. That kind of stupidity dies hard. You will find your fair share of white jerks and black jerks, Oriental jerks and European jerks, Arab jerks and Jewish jerks… That’s life, after all.
But in Canada, the vast majority resolutely opposes bigotry and espouses tolerance. In general, sanity prevails.
And the state has no business in our bedrooms. As time passed, men would be able to marry men and women would be able to marry women. If that’s what makes them happy, why should the rest of us come between them?
Peace is valued as much as prosperity. Canada’s armed forces are peacekeepers, not warmongers. Progress is welcomed not feared. Scientific research is encouraged, not forbidden.
Sadly, it seems that the forces of Fascism will be with us always, appearing sporadically like a nasty rash on the face of a beautiful woman. But in time the pimples will fade. Canada has come too far to go back now.
I wonder how different my life would have been if I had chosen the United States or Britain. In America, would I have been the target of racial scorn and even hatred? In Britain, would I have been fettered by an oppressive social system that would keep me in my proper place, as perceived by the upper classes?
I don’t know about the United States. I don’t know about Britain. But I know about Canada. And I know this land is my land.
Professional Reviews
Building His mOnument, One Book at a Time
By Jan Hollingsworth
The Tampa Tribune
Our own George Graham hung up his "little magic reporter's coat" and hibernated in his Lakeland home for a year after retiring from The Tampa Tribune in spring 2006. He may have been burned out from the daily grind of newspaper reporting.
You would never know it, though, from the astonishing volume of prose that has been streaming from his keyboard since last summer, when Graham, 74, started churning out novels and blogs like a man possessed.
His first novel, "Hill-an'-Gully Rider," was published in summer 2007.
"I had this urge, this need, to put words on paper all my life," he said at the time. "I'm full of these words, and they spill out."
Newspaper stories are like writing in the sand, he said. The waves wash it away.
Graham wanted a monument.
On May 17, the prolific writer's third novel, "The Color of Ice: A Canadian Serenade," will be available in bookstores across the nation, including Internet retailer Barnesand Noble.com.
For those who don't want to wait, the book can be purchased from PublishAmerica at www.publishamerica.com.
Unlike "Hill-an'-Gully Rider" and Graham's second novel, "Girlie: A Love Story," the third novel is not self-published.
"Everybody who read the manuscript said, 'You've got to get a real publisher,'" he said.
Nonetheless, the three novels share familiar themes plucked from Graham's unusual life and fertile imagination.
Born in Jamaica, he immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. He worked in Canadian newspapers, magazines and television for 24 years before moving to Florida.
Like "Rider" and "Girlie," "The Color of Ice" features a young protagonist trying to navigate life and love against exotic backdrops and historical events.
Young Eric Taylor, however, is more innocent and less jaded than his predecessors.
After his father's death, Eric is left to fend for himself on a small farm in the mountains of Jamaica. He finds a new and forbidding world in Toronto at a time when the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are in full swing in neighboring America.
"This is a sweet kid who means well. He really looks at life in a very gentle and forgiving way. He has modest expectations," Graham said. "He's the kid I wish my mother had had. But she got me, poor soul."
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