[ book excerpt: novel ]

Tara Gereaux: “Spring 1911 Regina, Saskatchewan“

“He hid his Métis identity and never talked about it.” Tara Gereaux spoke about her grandfather in a recent interview. “I was always interested in why he made those decisions.” 

She’s discussing one of the points of origin for Wild People Quiet (the author’s third work of fiction, following Saltus and Size of a Fist, a YA novel).

A Prairie-raised UBC MFA graduate who resided in Vancouver for most of her adult years before returning to southern Saskatchewan, Gereaux appears equally drawn to Prairie locales and fascinated by the past.

One of the novel’s epigraphs (from the lips of Sir John A. Macdonald) gives the novel its title—”I anticipate that [he] will have a good deal of trouble, and it will require considerable management to keep those wild people quiet”—and clarifies that Gereaux’s vision of Canada’s past is far from naive and romantic.

Wild People Quiet is largely set in small town Saskatchewan and focussed on Florence, a seemingly unflappable senior secretary at an insurance business in (fictional) Torduvalle.

The year is 1946, and to all appearances Florence is happily self-made: she’s accomplished, independent, and respected; she drives her own car and is comfortably nestled in a house she bought with money that she earned; she’s the captain of her own fate.

Decades before, however, in Quincey Lake, Florence saw racism and its consequences up close. Métis herself, she learned then—with “It can’t be that easy”—that with a few adjustments to her clothing and hair, she could pass as White. Before long, she uttered fateful words: “One ticket to Regina, please.”

The British Columbia Review would like to thank Tara Gereaux and publisher Simon & Schuster for permission to reprint the following excerpt. —BJG

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“Spring 1911 Regina, Saskatchewan“

Florence promised Mrs. Vinduska that she wouldn’t cause any trouble, and she didn’t want any herself, but the problem was, trouble was all she felt.

It wasn’t just how some of the men at the boarding house leered at her as they ate their meals, or whispered things to her as she passed—things she chose not to hear. She felt it almost everywhere she went. When she inquired about work at a grocery store, a man followed her out and said he would gladly hire her if she went with him into the alley. She soon learned there were areas of the city and certain streets she needed to avoid and understood the Vinduska’s hesitancy to rent her a room. But it wasn’t just that kind of trouble. It was also the trouble of her past.

Being someone else for a few hours every couple of months was completely different than living as someone else all the time. She felt like her past was always waiting for her. In every room she stepped into, on every new street she walked, and hovering on the edges of every conversation she had with every new person she met. It was always there, waiting to rear up and catch her out. It was the fear of being caught that made her flee at every potential threat.

A month into her first job as a maid at Regina College’s residence for female students, she learned a second-year student there was from a town near Quincy Lake, so she abruptly quit. When she’d been nearly two months at the Vinduskas’, Mr. Vinduska joked with a fellow lodger one evening during supper that the only good half-breed was a dead one. Florence couldn’t sleep the whole night and checked out the next morning. At her second job, as a domestic servant for a politician and his family, she learned the head of the household was working on a project with the Indian Department, so she told the housekeeper that a family emergency required her to return home immediately. Being constantly on the move and telling spur-of-the-moment lies was exhausting. But mostly, it was risky.

It’s while sitting in the room of her fourth boarding house on the night before she’s about to search for her fifth job that Florence decides she has to make a change. If she wants to truly live as someone else, she can’t carry her old life around with her anymore. Her old thoughts and memories. Old experiences. In order to live confidently in her new life, she needs to excise the old one. She begins with her hair.

Florence slips out to the pharmacy on Rose Street to buy a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a staple in the laundry room at the college and in the politician’s house. Half a cup in the washing tub made the sheets and shirts white-white-white. And it’s rumoured to be used in the salons in France, according to the politician’s head housekeeper. She locks herself in the shared bathroom on the second floor and starts with a tablespoon in a cup of water, dunking in just an inch of her hair that she can easily cut off if it doesn’t work. But it does work. Too orange at first, and unnatural, but she adds another tablespoon of peroxide and dunks another inch, experimenting until every strand is a golden apricot.

When she enters the dining room the next morning, many of the boarders are already there eating breakfast, and as usual, they don’t take notice of her, too busy shoveling hot sausages and eggs in before the workday begins. But as Florence pours herself some tea and carries it to an empty table, the owner, Mrs. Peckham, and her hired help watch Florence from the corner, disapproving looks on their faces. And just before Florence finishes her own toast and eggs, Mrs. Peckham’s underling approaches her table.

“Mrs. Peckham would like to see you in the front room when you’re done,” she says.

“Is there a problem?” Florence asks, but she already knows there is because, before the young woman responds, she takes a long moment to stare at Florence’s hair. Runs her eyes over it with a curl in her lip.

“You’ll have to speak with her,” she says and stalks off.

“I think you’re in for it,” a man at the next table says over his shoulder.

Florence glances at him, and he turns to her, a smile on his face.

“I think you’re right,” she says, and smiles back.

Sure enough, when Florence meets Mrs. Peckham in the front room, she tells Florence she’ll have to leave at the end of the week. Once again, Florence is told they don’t want any trouble, and Florence doesn’t argue because, from their perspective, it would seem suspicious. But she can’t explain to them that her change in hair colour is not to hide something; it’s to allow something new to come forth. Florence doesn’t stay until the end of the week. When she heads out the front doors and down the stairs with her packed bags, the man who spoke to her in the dining room is there smoking a cigarette. He sees her, her bags in hand.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her. “They didn’t need to do that.”

“It’s okay,” Florence says, and oddly, it is. For the first time since she arrived, she’s not leaving a place out of fear or panic; she’s leaving because she’s moving on. “I’ll find somewhere else.”

“I hope this doesn’t make you late for work.”

“It won’t,” she says and pauses. “Because I’m also out of a job.” Florence laughs. She shouldn’t—she came here for a better life, but after months she’s still scraping by.

“King’s Hotel on Scarth. Tell them Gerald sent you. Gerald Banks.”

“Is that where you work?”

“Used to. Finished up the expansion there, but we’re heading to Saskatoon on Friday for a job.”

“Thank you,” Florence says, and turns to head down the street.

“Hey!” Gerald calls after her. “If it’s any consolation, it looks pretty on you.” He tugs at a lock of his own hair and Florence blushes as she rounds the corner.

She finds a room at another boarding house east of Broad Street and close to the hospital, but it’s worse than the others she’s stayed in. The stairs are broken in places, and the front door doesn’t lock, but at least the door on her room locks and she can slide the dresser in front of it for extra security if she needs to. The room is stale and damp, and there’s a large dark stain on the hardwood floor. The window over the bed is cracked and so splintered in places, she pulls the bed away in case it decides to give way and shatter. She sinks onto the mattress, worried she’s only traded one kind of poverty for another.

But the King’s Hotel hires her on the spot to work as a chambermaid, and in many ways, it’s perfect for her. Five floors of rooms on top of a busy restaurant and a café on the main floor means there is more staff than they can keep track of. She disappears into her work, and the supervisors barely remember her, recognizing her only by the signature black dress and white pinafore. She spends her days flinging bright bleached sheets onto the beds and dusting the tables and dressers, removing the evidence and history of others’ lives from each room. While doing so, she feels her own history dissolving.

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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