I've always loved motorcycles. I think I became obsessed with them after seeing the movie Terminator 2 : Judgment Day for the first time in 1991. I was only four at the time, I think, but it became my favorite movie. And my fascination with all things related to bikers began. The problem is that I didn't know any bikers from my ethnicity. The only black bikers I can think of are those I've seen on television, in movies starring L.L. Cool J and Ice Cube. Fiction can be fun, but doesn't hold up to grim reality.
The name is Samuel Blanc, and I was born in the City of Montreal, Quebec, to a Haitian immigrant mother, Giselle Blanc, and a white father, James Steinbeck. I never knew my pops, he died when I was a few weeks old. Ironically from a motorcycle accident. My worried mother did everything to discourage my interest in motorcycles, for she feared losing me as she lost my father. I love my ma, but I felt smothered by her constant worrying. Every day she would warn me about racism on the streets of Montreal, fights between rival gangs of Haitians and Italians, and so on.
Montreal is one of the most racially diverse cities in the western world. In the 1960s, thousands of Haitian immigrants arrived, forever changing the demographics of Quebec's crown jewel. Today, there are close to two hundred thousand Haitian-descended people living in Montreal and I am proud to say that I am one of them. Many people of Chinese, East Indian and Arabian descent make this place their home as well. For the most part the various minority groups get along, but sometimes there's bloody friction.
As if I didn't know about these things. I experienced them firsthand as a young man of color walking through the streets of Montreal. I enrolled at McGill University and earned a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my degree. And I had a lot of bills to pay. Education is cheaper in Quebec compared to the rest of Canada but still...you need dough to earn a degree. And if you don't start paying your student loans six months after graduation, the government of Quebec will garnish your wages. For a couple of years I worked for the Quebec Ministry of Corrections as a prison guard, and although it was interesting, it's also kind of a dead-end job.
If you want to work as a prison guard, the worst thing you can have going on for you is being overeducated and overqualified. The job attracts a lot of guys, most of them white, with barely a high school diploma, though some of them have some trade school or community college. Men like these tend to be distrustful of anyone different from them. And I was quite different from them. I'm six feet two inches tall, with caramel skin, lime-green eyes and curly black hair. Even though I'm light-skinned, I identify as black rather than biracial. A lot of black folks and biracial people take issue with that but the way I see it, being half black means catching all the prejudice that 'pure' black people get, so why not embrace my blackness in its totality?
The fact that I have a McGill University degree got me chided and ridiculed at work, by men who were clearly envious. The Ministry of Corrections in Quebec isn't a place where highly educated individuals work. At least not at certain echelons of the organization. Being overeducated and a person of color made me a target. When it got to be too much, I told the losers to buzz off because there's only so much bullshit I can tolerate before losing it. My immediate supervisor, a forty-year-old Frenchman named Joseph Tremblay sided with a guard named Evan Stiles when he filed a charge against me for restraining him as he beat up an inmate, an old Chinese guy named Chen.
Evan was one of the meanest guys at work. The kind of guy who's always looking for a fight, didn't matter whether said fight was with his fellow corrections officers or inmates. Chen is old, and hard of hearing, and had been at the prison for a long time. He's a harmless soul, but that day, something he did must have provoked Evan's ire, for the dude went after him with everything he had. I had to step in and stop Evan from killing Chen. The old Chinese guy was on the floor, and Evan had his boot against his chest. A seventy-year-old unarmed Chinese-Canadian man versus a six-foot-tall ex-military redneck. The very definition of an unfair fight if you ask me. Sadly, Chief Tremblay didn't see it that way.
I was suspended with pay pending an evaluation. I had a lot of time to think in the fourteen days before I faced a hearing with the Board of Corrections. I walked all over Montreal, ate at nice restaurants and watched movies. I was sitting inside a café one evening when I ran into an old friend. It took me a moment to realize that the five-foot-nine, raven-haired and bronze-skinned vision of feminine beauty in the low-cut red dress was my old study buddy. Sarah Beyhum, this Lebanese Christian chick I met while at McGill. Hello stranger, she said, in that voice that sent pleasant chills down my spine. Smiling, I cordially invited Sarah to join me. Nodding gracefully she accepted, and I ordered her a latte.
