The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  As a yellow Black man who was both despised and rewarded because of his skin color he reminds me of Chester Himes, another yellow Black man. His cynical take on the rising Black militancy reminds one of Himes’s satire of the civil rights movement in Pink Toes. Baldwin, however, embraced the new militancy in the guise of the character Black Christopher in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, the novel that lost him the support of The Family, the name given to the Manhattan liberal literary elite that has been imposing tokens on the Black literary scene for 100 years, because he satirized his former patrons mercilessly. The Family struck back with a Times hatchet job on the book written by Mario Puzo, possibly because Baldwin’s Italians were more complex than his.15 But Baldwin and Himes could vacation from the United States and be wined and dined by the Europeans and, in Baldwin’s case, the Turkish elite. Among the circle that Himes moved in was Pablo Picasso. I asked him if Picasso had offered him a painting. He had. Himes rejected it because he thought it was absurd.

  Charles Wright remained in the United States and took his licks, psychologically, spiritually, and physically. The character Fishback, the necrophiliac, says of the United States that it is filled with “nasty images.” They’re rounded up in Wright’s work. The memorable phrase from both my and Wright’s mentor, Langston Hughes, can apply to Wright’s work. “Laughing to keep from crying.”

  When I read passages from The Wig cited in the Knickerbocker review, I figured that a writer had arrived who would break Black writers out of the aesthetic prison that critics had placed around them. A Faulknerian quagmire of cluttered baroque prose. Copycat Black Modernism. If young novelists have extended his experiments, Whitehead, Beatty and LaValle, it was Wright who began the jailbreak. After reading the review, I called my friend poet Steve Cannon, now a gallery owner and magazine publisher, who was subjected to a lengthy profile in the New York Times magazine,16 and told him that this might be the guy.

  We sought him out. He was living at the Albert Hotel. As we approached his room, we found him engaged in a tussle with another guest. His life was a tussle. From the time of his childhood when he was taunted by his schoolmates for being yellow, he was an outsider who found companionship with other outsiders.

  The final stages of Charles Wright’s career weren’t as dire as the New York Times described in their obituary. Ironically, it was a grant to Mercury House from the National Endowment for the Arts that was responsible for his comeback, the same National Endowment that denied him an individual artist grant when he really needed the money. I have photos of Charles Wright taken at a dinner in his honor at a downtown restaurant. He didn’t seem to me that he had “vanished” in “despair.” Others were taken at a book party held at Steve Cannon’s Tribes Gallery.

  One day, Richard Pryor came to my home in the Berkeley Hills with a package of writings that he wanted me to publish. His standup routine included the kind of rogues and outcasts that Wright had included in his writings. Pryor wanted to get the approval of my friends and me. We’d warned him that he couldn’t bring his corny Las Vegas routine to Berkeley. We viewed ourselves as members of the cutting edge. Our approch was a brutal, ironic, satirical takedown of American society’s hypocrisies delivered in a combative and comic style. For those who patrol Black letters like their antecedents who controlled the movement of slaves, we went too far, then as now. In his autobiography, Pryor says that I turned him down. Not true. I jumped at the chance to publish him. He was the one who withdrew his work. Little did Richard know that Charles Wright had already written the fiction that Richard wanted to write.

  Ishmael Reed

  The Messenger

  In memory of Billie Holiday and Richard Wright

  I AM ON THE STOOP these spring nights. The whoring, thieving gypsies, my next door neighbors, are out also. Their clientele is exclusively male. Mama, with her ochre-lined face, gold earrings, hip-swinging beaded money pouch, flowing silk skirts, is sitting on her throne, the top step. She went to jail the other day, made the Daily News. She had clipped a detective and tried to bribe him with ten bucks. The gypsy kids are out also. The girl is five, the boy six. They sell paper flowers. Some moron walking with his girl gives the boy a dime and tells him to keep the flower. He takes his girl’s arm and they go off laughing, doing the slumming act. The sweet-faced little gypsy boy looks up at me and mutters, “Cheap c———.” The gypsy girl, when her face is clean, looks as if she had been born to wear a confirmation dress. She works men with her sad angel’s face; tears fall like soft rain from her eyes. Most men are not deceived and then she jumps up and slaps them on the buttocks, always the wallet pocket.

  This street is a pretty spring night’s dream, Forty-ninth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, with its frantic mixed bag of colors. Chinese and French restaurants, the Gray Line sightseeing buses, jukebox bars catering to soldiers and sailors and lesbian prostitutes, parking lots and garages filled with people returning from the theatre. And tourist hotels.

  Later in my apartment, five stories up, nothing obscures the brooding night sky laced with orange-red neon. A haze hangs low over the buildings. The Empire State Building looms a giant obelisk; the rest is a misty El Greco painting. In the mist the low buildings are angular, surrealistic.

  Here in this semi-dark room, I become frightened. Am I in America? The objects, chairs, tables, sofa are not specifically American. They, this room, have no recognizable country. I have always liked to believe that I am not too far removed from the heart of America (I have a twenty-five dollar U. S. Savings Bond) and I am proud of almost everything American. Yet I’m drowning in this green cornfield. The acres stretch to infinity. I dare not move. This country has split open my head with a golden eagle’s beak. Regardless of how I try, the parts won’t come together. And this old midtown brownstone is waiting mutely for the demolition crew, these two-and-a-half rooms which have sheltered me for two years. A room with a view: the magical Manhattan skyline, and all for five dollars a week because I have connections.

  But the super just came in. I looked up. From the top of his cranium an unbroken hairless line runs straight down to the hollow of his neck like the bold stripe of a zebra.

  “Charlie, why the hell you sitting in the dark like this? You drunk or something?”

  “Want a beer?” I ask.

  The super was standing motionless with his hand on the doorknob. All I could see was his steel-rimmed glasses. I had a feeling that he was staring hard at me.

  Finally he blurted out, “Charlie, you gotta move. Somebody keeps ratting to the landlord. And it puts me on the spot.”

  “It must be those people next door. They wanted this place.”

  “Yeah,” the super agreed. “But the Housing Authority said this place couldn’t be rented again unless the violations were fixed. So a man from the office is coming round tomorrow and you do what you always do.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure you don’t want a beer?”

  “Nope,” the super said.

  So tomorrow I must pack all of my things and store them with the people in number seven and with Maxine’s mother, who lives on the second floor. I will sprinkle dust on the floor, close the shutters tight, scatter cigarette butts and old newspapers around, and take the mattress off the bed.

  Nothing lasts forever, I remember telling Shirley. She had called to wish me a belated happy birthday. It had simply slipped her mind. Oh, she was fine. When she felt the need to come over, she’d let me know. “Well, you just do that, cupcake,” I had said. “I’ll keep you waiting on the stoop five hours like Easter.” She hung up without a good-bye. We have been fighting and making up for more than two years now. This always happens when people are unwilling to give up even the carcass of an affair.

  I must remember not to flush the cigarette butts down the can in the hall. I’ll need them to make this place look unlived in. I’ll sweep up and move back in when the Housing man has come and gone.

  MAY DAY: Loyalty and Communist Front celebrat
ions. I work for a messenger service in Rockefeller Center and it’s just another day for this worker. A hop, skip, delivery, and I net exactly nine dollars and twenty cents a day. (The minimum wage has increased fifteen cents an hour, but prices rose and not my standard of living.) The other messengers, especially the elderly men, talk labor. A few of them are retired businessmen who work because they can’t stand the yacketyyack of the wife. One has ten thousand dollars in the bank; another owns nine houses. They are fanatical collectors and readers of newspapers, and they take their messenger jobs seriously. During slack periods they sit on a long wooden bench in an odd-shaped room on the concourse floor of Rockefeller Plaza, talking together. They can drive you nuts, but I have learned from them and, on the whole, they’re remarkable. They are still very much alive despite their various ailments.

  One is eighty years old and has a prosperous goose step. His wife is ill and often he has to go home. When he speaks of her, his eyes light up and his voice is tender. Al, the messenger boss, sits in an old-fashioned swivel chair, puffing a cigar. This patriarch, referee of messenger disputes, dispatches deliveries all over the city. Miss Mary, the sixty-year-old telephone girl, is pert as a daisy. She has the gay voice of a schoolgirl. And on this first day of May, everyone is talking labor. I am silent. I have just delivered several boxes of dresses to the garment district. How I hate that place. Laura Vee models in that gilded Buchenwald.

  Later Pepe, Tommy and I—fellow messengers—are in the subway john drinking Gypsy Rose wine, the champagne of winos. We are killing time. It has begun to rain.

  “Shit,” Pepe says. “I’ve gotta move. We just moved into the projects and we still ain’t got enough room. My folks are fighting worse than usual. You can’t shit straight in the projects.”

  “I’m saving my money to buy a pick-up truck,” Tommy says. He is eighteen, a Tenth Avenue Irish lad. “I wanna go into business for myself. I’ve saved up almost two hundred dollars. Everytime the boss tells me to ride I walk and pocket the thirty cents.”

  “Shit,” Pepe says. He’s Puerto Rican and speaks with a Southern Negro accent. He lives in Harlem. “That’s no bread. I’m gonna get me a whore or something. Right, Charlie?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “You’ve gotta have something working for you.”

  “My old man hasn’t worked in over a year,” Tommy tells us. “I’ve gotta help Mama. I really want that truck. Hell, I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”

  “Shit,” Pepe says. “I give my old lady fifteen bucks a week and send my baby sister five a week. She has TB and lives in Puerto Rico with my aunt. The climate is good for her. I’m buying a guitar on time. I don’t have five bucks left when it’s all over. Shit!” “Let’s drink up, boys,” I say.

  “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  That afternoon, as I walked through the concourse of the RCA building, sneezing and reading Lawrence Durrell, dead drunk from the explosion of his words, I suddenly looked up and encountered the long face of Steven Rockefeller. He seemed startled. Doesn’t he think poor people read?

  SATURDAY MORNING I was walking in the East Fifties, going over to the river to find a bench and sit and reread Hemingway’s short stories. A middle-aged man, with homburg, British raincoat, whiskey-ad face, jostled against me. He says, “Excuse me, sonny.” His expression is guarded, his smile buttery. “All young men should read Hemingway.” And: “I remember when I first read Hemingway.”

  Does he really like Hemingway? Or is this a front?

  “I have a large collection of books, mostly rare. Mostly first editions. Would you care . . .”

  I sighed inwardly and said Yes, what the hell.

  His name is Mr. Bennett. We stand in front of his teakwood door. Picasso drawings in the foyer. The Wall Street Journal on the telephone table. A Marc Chagall over the English down sofa. A Vuillard above the fireplace. Pornographic Japanese prints in the bathroom. I drink a double scotch from a Swedish crystal glass. I once delivered a dozen glasses of the same design to a woman who had just moved to Sutton Place South. She looked as if she would have been happier in the Bronx. Nevertheless, she lived in a co-op on Sutton Place South.

  Mr. Bennett was offering me imported Dutch cocktail biscuits and saying I must try this aged twenty-year-old brandy. I smile, teeth and all. I never get drunk and pass out. Alcohol is merely a brace for my spine, the fine oil for my reflex gears.

  If I could only be alone with that wall of books! But Mr. Bennett said, “I think I’ll return to North Africa. So simple. The Arab boys will do anything—for a price, of course.”

  He sat down on the sofa beside me like a careful old maid. His voice was fatherly. Sweat trickled down my armpits. My heart rose or fell a little, as it does at times like this. I bet I can’t get an erection, I told myself. That seemed funny. I laughed secretly, and then I felt his hand on my buttocks. This queer would get nothing but his feelings hurt.

  So I rose, smiling, and made my exit. I didn’t even take a last, hungry look at that wall of books.

  WE BLOW OUR OWN TRUMPETS though we always swear the music is coming from another horn. Some of my friends say I am cocky, arrogant. But I have always been alone and have developed what they see as arrogance for my protection.

  Last evening Shirley came over. Once I dreamed of quitting the messenger service, get a better job, save money, put a down payment on a house, and marry Shirley.

  She sat very demurely in my sagging canvas chair, her dark eyes staring at nothing. There was something fresh and lovely about her, like a single rose in a vase. Her hair was brushed back carefully. She had on a tailored white blouse, dark skirt, and French-heeled, black pumps.

  We sat facing each other like proud enemies, silent, engulfed in the poignancy of a city Saturday night and our own thoughts. There was no light in the room, save for the bright slice of moon cutting through the window. The room glowed in this light, shadows springing lifelike.

  “I thought this was going to be a special night,” Shirley complained. “A celebration. I thought we’d go out and have a little fun. I didn’t come all the way over here just to sit in your apartment.”

  “All right,” I said rising. “Wait until I get dressed. We’ll go down to the Village. But I thought we’d spend a quiet evening together. I’ve a bottle of champagne on ice.”

  “You and your quiet evenings,” Shirley cried. “I don’t like quiet evenings. Not anymore. I’m twenty-two years old. I want a little fun out of life.”

  I started to say, “Get the hell out of here then. Go on the town with your rich doctor.” Instead, I finished my cheap port silently.

  “You’re nothing but a wino,” she said, and she wasn’t joking.

  “So what?”

  “I bet you don’t even write anymore.”

  “Is that any sweat off your Goddamn back?”

  “I told you about cursing at me.”

  “I’m sorry. But what the hell are you trying to do to me?”

  “And what are you trying to do with me?” Shirley shot back, her voice fighting one of her terrible whimpers.

  I poured another glass of port, thinking, I’m through with the Village, the intellectuals. I know the Village and now it is merely a place not to go. I want quiet evenings alone with you. My face is bright, I have a youthful stride, but I am getting old. I ought to stop wearing sneakers. My hair is getting gray at twenty-nine and there is nothing distinguished about that. The lines on my forehead are more or less permanent. My energy has been sucked up; I have given, traded my youth for both good and bad values and what mind I had has been ground fine as chopped meat.

  I said none of these things. The moon has disappeared. The room was dark. I got up and put my arms around Shirley. She pulled away quickly, as though I were a leper.

  Roughly, and with one quick movement, I grabbed her face in my hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  Shirley broke away. “For God’s sake, stop it! You don’t own me.”

  She l
eft angrily; off to her rich doctor. Well, I could sit on the fence and watch love freeze too. Actually I felt like a sea lion landlocked. I sat alone listening to the noises drifting up from the street.

  THURSDAY EVENING Troy Lamb called and said he would be right over with his wife, Susan, and his three-year-old son Skipper. This was quite a shock. I met Troy four years ago at the White Horse Tavern. Those were lean, desperate days, and if Troy had a dollar, I certainly had half of it. Often we shared the same cigarette, divided a hard, buttered roll, split a container of black coffee. Neither of us had a steady job, though Troy received a spasmodic pittance from home. He was studying at N.Y.U., philosophy and anthropology. Ah, those days! Sometimes we rode the subway with the work-bound passengers. Troy would read a French or Chinese newspaper; I’d read the Jewish Daily Forward. It really upset the passengers; perhaps they thought they were still in bed, having nightmares. Once Laura Vee took me to the Dali show at the Carstairs Gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street, where I met a lot of rich kids. They thought I was very swinging, and came down to my place the following Sunday with hero sandwiches, three bottles of Dubonnet, and an inexhaustible supply of cigarettes. Troy dropped in. I introduced him to Susan Mantle, a freckled, doll-like girl. In the green spring of that year, Troy and Susan said they were going to get married.

  Troy received a fellowship to study anthropology. Later they were married and honeymooned in Paris and went to Africa because of Troy’s studies. Skipper was born there. Now they were back in New York and were coming over to see me right away.