Morning. A newly birthing sun cracks through the trees and lances straight into his blazing red eyes. Baxter is a sleeping car porter. A sleepy car porter. A sleepy porter he is car. Car sleepy. Porter. Sleeping. He giggles.
Winner of Canada’s richest literary award, the Giller Prize, The Sleeping Car Porter took me a while to warm up to. Part historical fiction, part social commentary — all told in a hallucinatory blur of visions and sexual longing and sci-fi fantasy — at first, it didn’t seem real enough to feel true. But as the stakes ramped up for the main character — a young gay Black man working in one of the few (potentially) well-paying fields open to him in 1929 Canada — I finally forged an emotional connection to the material, and by the end, the hallucinatory blur felt like the only way that author Suzette Mayr could have possibly allowed me to truly feel inside this character’s absurd existence. Happy to have read this and delighted it won the big prize.
Hands reach toward him, grab at him for a lift up, grab his coat pocket, wave in his face. A sea swell of passengers, spilling toward his car; a maelstrom of departure-time panic. R. T. Baxter, a dentist-to-be, man who longs to lance gums and extract pathological third molars, standing, here, next to this train, caught in this hurricane. Drowsy already.
From the first passage we’re told that Baxter — a Caribbean transplant to Canada, in search of a better life — has been saving his money for years to go to Dentistry school, and with less than a hundred dollars left to earn, he can’t wait to end his days as a sleeping car porter. We learn that this position entails being on-call twenty-four hours a day to well-off white folks who treat the Black porters like servants or worse (calling them all “boy” or "George", leaving awful messes for them to clean, demanding water or babysitting services in the middle of the night when one might catch a short nap), and a porter like Baxter must smile and obey every piddling order: not only does he earn the majority of his money through tips, but any complaint from a passenger (deserved or not) leads to demerits and too many demerits leads to firing. As Baxter prepares to leave on a run from Montreal to Vancouver — on the “fastest train on the continent” — he’s assigned a bunch of hard-to-please-looking passengers, and as he can only earn ten more demerits before he’s let go (and he’s oh so close with his savings!) it’s a mounting disaster for him when the train is stopped in the Rocky Mountains by a mudslide and the passengers want to hold him personally responsible for the delay.
Layered onto this increasingly tense plot, Baxter’s sleep deprivation (made worse by the delay) leads to hallucinations that usually include teeth (based on some studying he’s already done with a found dental textbook), fairly graphic sexual (in language, not acts) memories/longings, and scenes right out of the science fiction novels he loves to read:
Baxter read and reread his books and magazines about the deep sea and Martians and outer space and time travel and immortal beings and phantoms. He ate alone. He ironed his shirts. He shined his shoes so that they glittered like stars when he walked. He circled the planet Earth in his spaceship, he flew up high on the back of giant scarabs from Jupiter, he travelled the oceans in submarines. He rested in the cellar of his castle in his box of dirt, friends with vermin. He sat on his chair in the speeding train, his back perfectly straight, and he slept with his eyes open, hallucinations draping his face, a tittering insect instead of a heart.
The dehumanising manner in which Baxter is treated by the passengers (and the railroad employing him) is both horrible and believable and I welcome historical fiction that asks us to confront such an ugly chapter from our past. And while at first I wasn’t sure if the sexual content fit in with the bigger picture — memories of cruising in parks and alleys, money slyly offered in a public washroom, pornography that demands to be examined again and again: is this what the grey-haired ladies who pick up every Giller winner are hoping to find between these covers? — I have to admit that being a gay Black immigrant in 1929 Canada is a big, challenging package that deserves to be examined in its entirety; just how was one expected to find love when it was against the law? Each facet of Baxter’s existence seems to be working against the fulfilment of his dreams and desires, and as the hours and days at a standstill drag on — as the passengers become angrier and Baxter becomes ever more delusional from sleep deprivation — I truly did feel empathy for his struggles; perhaps literally placing us in a fantasy world was the only way for Mayr to demonstrate how surreal our actual world can be. I’m glad I stuck with this after feeling lukewarm in the beginning, and again, I am pleased that Mayr has been celebrated for what she created here.
— My aunt Arimenta, says Baxter, carefully — always used to say, Baxter, she’d say, hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
