I hardly think of the expatriate’s distance anymore, except when there is a story in the States that everyone I phone there has been following on cable court channels day in and day out. Even my parents sounded mad in their saturation with the O. J. Simpson trial. When pressed, I call myself nomadic. I live without proper papers or regular employment and worry how long I can keep roaming across the golden moss. The most valuable part, Brecht called his passport. I had to leave home to discover gospel music. Mahalia Jackson sings, “You know my soul look back and wonder / How did I make it over…”
1994
BANJO
Thirty years ago, West Berlin was a backwater, quiet as a provincial museum. Either an upstairs neighbor was having sex, or those were pigeons cooing on the windowsill. How humbling to be reading Heine. One lonely winter I was living in a friend of a friend’s place in Kreuzberg, a working-class and Turkish part of town. The sky was low, and every day I went to the same Turkish kneipe for takeout, usually wearing the clothes I’d slept in. The Berlin Wall was one block away, which made the streets around me dead ends. There was no telephone in this borrowed room, a painter’s storage space. Canvases lined the walls, and it surprised me that, with his highly flammable life’s work at risk, the artist had a small iron stove with a chimney standing in the middle of the room. All that winter I fed it oval lumps of black coal and small white rectangles of paraffin. I poked at the flames; I wouldn’t leave them alone. Even playing with the ash buildup fascinated me.
I said that my living abroad was a protest. I was getting away from the United States. One creep of a president had been followed by another creepy president and his campaign advertisement supporting the death penalty because of felons such as the black murderer who’d raped a white woman while out of prison on a weekend pass. It is what black writers did, get away from Battlefield America and manage the guilt of not being there, then decide that they could take better aim at the enemy because of the distance. My father thought I was kidding myself. He said I was going to find that racism was everywhere, simply because the European slave trade had gone on for four hundred years, dispersing Africans as far as South America and Southeast Asia. Moreover, what did I know about the racism of the classical world? If racism was so forever, I once asked him, then what was the point of struggle? To struggle was what we were put on earth for, he answered, and quoted Kipling—the poet of imperialism from this black man who had been on the way to his dental office by seven thirty the majority of his mornings for the past four decades so that his son could sleep past noon in a foreign language.
West Berlin feared Germany’s past, and I was sure therefore that my father was mistaken. “Be careful,” my mother said. “Mrs. Pierce said there are a lot of drugs and blacks in Berlin.” A U.S. passport was a shield, but nothing was safer in its unreality than Cold War fortress life. The walled city’s orchestra, opera, chamber music, jazz venues, rock clubs, gay bars, Bhagwan-owned disco, hip cinemas, and the famous film festival; its newspapers, bookstores, universities, anarchists with their skinny dogs, and the Greens in their communes; the smattering of Ghanaians, Lebanese, Indians, Iranians, Central Europeans, some Asians, black Americans, Palestinians, a memorial Jewish population, together with the large Turkish population—all of that made the city seem cosmopolitan as a refuge.
I was lucky. I found work as a writer and dramaturge, a text doctor, for the American director Robert Wilson. Theater in Berlin was exciting, something to get into fights about, and the actors were proud: of course they knew all their lines before rehearsals began. I adored hanging out with them. When drunk, they recited Schiller and Schlegel, Goethe and more Goethe. “Beer leads to Bismarck, and Bismarck leads to Bayreuth,” the East German playwright Heiner Müller said to me one autumn when he solved my homelessness problem. He lived in East Berlin but offered me sanctuary with two actors beloved by their peers in a large and crazy apartment he had at his disposal in a leafy part of West Berlin.
I remember becoming ill from Heiner’s relentless cigar smoke, and how scathing he, always dressed in undertaker black, could be about German literature. I’d never met anyone who hated Thomas Mann. Heiner was fifteen when World War II ended. He said that the happiest years of his life were from 1945, Year Zero, to 1949, when the German Democratic Republic was founded, because there was no government, only jazz. His plays had been banned in East Germany in the early 1960s but became popular on U.S. campuses and in West Germany and France in the 1970s. His prominence in the West restored his status in the East. However, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Heiner was harshly criticized as an artist who had enjoyed privileges under the Communist regime. He would not recant and died in 1995, of a broken heart, it felt like. I don’t know why I said I understood what he meant when he said he was “a nigger in Germany.”
I expected reforms after the fall of the Berlin Wall, not the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The future had never competed with the past in the still-scarred city. Berlin was supposed to be the tomb of what had already happened. But to deny the changes was futile. Poles, Hungarians, Croats, Romanians, Russians, Germans from over there—the Eastern bloc had been coming to town even before the Wall fell. The traffic intensified. If they were tourists, then they were on missions. Berlin went cowboy, briefly. Departing Soviet soldiers were said to be selling their weapons. Suddenly, Berlin real estate had value. Big shots were flying in. Architecture exhibitions were held in fields of mud. East-West subway systems were being integrated. They used to say that, like the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall was visible from space. That was perhaps civic boastfulness of an edgy kind. Though it was easy to trace where the Wall had been, the overwhelming fact was that it was gone, physically if not psychologically. But in 1990 crowds on their way to the reunification-of-Germany ceremonies at the Brandenburg Gate avoided the leaflet tables of the Republikaners, the party of right-wing extremists. A period of hope was being inaugurated in Germany.
For me, it was like being handed my coat and shown the door in a dream. I couldn’t hear what a short man who resembled Jimmy Durante was saying as he held the curtain aside. A whole society was asking about its future, making it nearly impossible not to question my own. Did it matter where I was as long as I wasn’t in the United States? I suspected that I was really in Berlin because it sounded cool. Where do you live? Berlin was not the expected answer. It had a radical ring, a bell of defiance. A city famous for having been destroyed, not for its beauty. The mother of my best friend from junior high school was Polish. She and her mother had been in London on September 1, 1939. They had not gone back to Poland that day because her mother had a cold and couldn’t fly. Mrs. Hodes told me she spent the war sitting in a hotel lobby, making up stories about passersby. When I came to Indianapolis to see my parents at Christmas, Mrs. Hodes never referred to the fact that I lived in Berlin.
* * *
I had to show up at Christmas. It was the unspoken deal between my mother and me. My antique word processor resembled a toy oven. One time it blew a security-testing fuse at Berlin Tegel. To fly with my bizarre word processor on Pan Am after the Lockerbie bomb sometimes made me one of the last passengers to board the plane. But security officials had been pulling me out of airport lines ever since Munich. My father held forth, at the dinner table, in the family room. My mother did not let me and my sisters leave. It was the only thing she asked of us, our time. I listened to what was the latest in the black freedom struggle. There were things I had to understand. After all, I was the one calling myself a black writer. My father spoke to me as though that title had to be earned. He was also reliving my sullen resistance as a teenager to his blackness tutorials. To correct me was his duty and his joy. His tone was adversarial. In order to talk about racism, he had to be arguing about it. My mother and my two sisters debated with him, but I kept quiet through his rebuttals, because I felt that they were addressed primarily to me. I owed him the respect his father never showed him as a committed civil rights volunteer,
respect that my father did not have for his malicious, self-hating snob of a father as a result.
Deflection of emotion in my family: making the subject about politics, racism, or black history, acceptable sources of anger, indignation, and rue, occasions outside the self, or handled as such. To talk about the black condition made conversation seem personal, but then, black history was personal, intimate. The history in the books my father referred to over and over again was real, on the ground, not up in the air with impersonal forces. Most black families have lived every chapter of it. To talk about things black at home—Indianapolis, Indiana—was a way of not talking about myself while seeming to. I used my being black as a way to hide from my black family.
My father said I reminded him of his uncle Lloyd, a jazz pianist I can now see on YouTube playing with Noble Sissle’s orchestra at Ciro’s in London in 1930. He toured Europe until 1938, when Americans alarmed by fascism were hurrying back across the ocean. I thought my father meant we shared a wish to be expatriates. No, he said, his uncle Lloyd couldn’t get himself together either. Uncle Lloyd, who died sometime in the 1970s, wrote an autobiography of four hundred pages, single-spaced, typed entirely in capital letters. He used no proper names, only initials, and it took a while for me to work out that he had played with musicians such as Sidney Bechet and the prodigy Johnny Hodges. In 1980, I found the two large spiral bindings containing the typescript of his life story wedged inside a vacuum cleaner bag under my preacher grandfather’s bed. We never discovered how my grandfather got the only copy of his brother’s book. My father said he must have been hiding it for years. He suppressed it, my father insisted, not only because he considered his brother disreputable, but because he, too, had written an autobiography, published by his church in the mid-1960s, a pamphlet of family lore and reminiscences that my father was disinclined to trust. For starters, our family did not originate in Norfolk, England, just because our so-called masters had.
My grandfather could have destroyed his little brother’s testimony, but he didn’t. I hoped Uncle Lloyd didn’t think of himself as disreputable or care what his family, the black church, thought of him, a trained musician. There was a tradition of black artists either looking for or finding personal and professional freedom by escaping Jim Crow’s jurisdiction. They didn’t all go to Europe, but for most of the twentieth century Europe was the big tent, whether you thought it was an accomplishment to be there or that having Europe too much on the mind was self-betrayal for a black person. I’d make promises to my parents, and while packing to go back to Berlin I’d be conscious that I was fleeing my family, what they represented, as well as white America. Susan Sontag liked to remember Gertrude Stein asking what good were roots if you couldn’t take them with you. I liked to leave mine behind, on the shelves, hanging in the closet. The last thing I wanted were roots.
The rules of what would let down the ancestors watching over Indianapolis, Indiana, were severe. Achievement was self-sacrifice. You must not forget where you came from. You stood on the shoulders of the past. You were one of many. This was serious. You were one of the fortunate, and therefore you had a historic destiny to help other black people. My black life was straight; in my white life I could be queer. I called it individualism. I blamed my high school German teacher, who, after we read Der Tod in Venedig, challenged us to imagine how far we would go to worship beauty. (Can you find your complex in Fanon? Would you want to?) The connection in my mind between expatriatism and sexual freedom was very strong. It had a lot of fantasy and self-justification in it. My generation of expatriates in West Berlin had reveled in an atmosphere of being outlaws. Then the city became preoccupied with the business of being the capital. Germany was asking Berlin to grow up, like a parent expecting maturity from members of the family when times are hard. Nothing was asked of me.
* * *
To be a Friend of Spain was very different from being a Friend of Soviet Russia, Hemingway said. It wasn’t hard for me to understand why black people in the past had been Marxists, Communists, fellow travelers—the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Langston Hughes, like many people, especially Jewish people, had his reasons for supporting the Soviet Union. The Communist Party was at the center of the international protests in support of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white girls in Alabama in 1931. As the Depression worsened, Communists joined with black tenants in fighting evictions in Harlem or the South Side. In 1934, the Party instructed white male Party members in Harlem to take dance lessons so that they could dance with black women at Party functions, because black men were too busy dancing with white women.
“I did not think of myself as a man until I visited Russia,” Paul Robeson said. In his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, published in 1956, Langston Hughes remembered the great rumbling cheers of the Red Army in Moscow, “a mighty masculine rolling baritone.” As a student at Tuskegee College in Alabama in the early 1930s, Ralph Ellison fumed in a sociology class because his black college was using a textbook that described the black race as “feminine” in relation to the white race. Jim Crow was emasculating; messages to the black head served as reminders of physical and psychological mutilation. That the American government was threatened by communism attracted many who wanted to strike back against American society or to feel allied with something powerful in opposition to it.
It used to bother me that Arthur Koestler, who fled Germany when the Nazis drove the Communist Party underground, was praised for his disillusionment with the Soviet Union, while Langston Hughes, whom Koestler met in Central Asia in 1934, was forgiven for being a sympathizer, because he was a black American.1 In Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan, they both witnessed the first public purge trial, but they had very different reactions to what they saw. Hughes could not get Koestler to view the changes in Soviet Asia with “Negro eyes.” In one film school, tribesmen were learning to read and to operate a camera. White men were teaching colored men, as far as Hughes was concerned. Back in the United States, even black theaters had to hire white projectionists, because of discriminatory unions. Koestler was distressed that he and Hughes were privileged travelers in a region where the Party could not hide the fact of famine. Hughes didn’t compare his haphazard hotel diet to the shortages beyond the electric lights. He signed a letter in support of the purge trials in 1938.
Hughes had gone to Moscow in 1932 to work on the English dialogue for a musical film about black America. Few members of the troupe of young black intellectuals that he traveled with could actually sing. The script was a mess, the film got canceled, and Hughes stayed on in the Soviet Union for another year. He enjoyed the reception the Soviet government accorded him, as had Claude McKay a decade before. There was no toilet paper, but there was also no Jim Crow. Hughes’s biographers tell us that he made a more comfortable living as a writer in the Soviet Union than he had in the United States. It isn’t clear how much Hughes appreciated the degree to which alienated black writers and intellectuals figured in Soviet propaganda battles against the United States. The floodlit rallies for the Scottsboro Boys and the official sympathy for blacks in general overwhelmed him. He was somewhere that valued a black man’s point of view. He was in the land of Pushkin. He recalled The Negro Reader, a book on Negro history he’d read as a youth. It said that Edgar Allan Poe in Paris had refused to shake hands with Pushkin when he saw that he looked too much like some of the slaves back in Maryland. The story can’t be true. No modern biography says that either poet ever traveled to Paris, much less met.
Black American actors, agricultural workers, sailors, students, dining car waiters, and interracial couples were drawn to the Soviet experiment in the 1930s. There were famous visitors, but there were also working blacks willing to resettle. In an American-sponsored library in West Berlin, I found a memoir by a black journalist who in the 1930s had held an important position at the Moscow post office. He mentioned Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black science teacher and Party member from Chicago already li
ving in Moscow when Hughes arrived. The journalist said Fort-Whiteman was probably “liquidated” in the purges of the late 1930s. There were reports of American blacks held in the gulag, he continued. I went to Moscow after the Berlin Wall fell. When I came back, I was disconcerted to read an article in The New Republic that informed me that Patrice Lumumba University was the site of a mass grave of Party members killed in 1937. That could have been Fort-Whiteman’s grave I was walking on, I thought at the time. Since then I’ve learned that he was trained by the Comintern, got arrested in 1937, and died in Siberia in 1939.
Mary McCarthy said an expatriate was a hedonist delaying going home for as long as possible. Perhaps I would move on. I was beguiled by St. Petersburg in the long nights of its summers. Because the city was poor, the palaces were painted any color they had enough of: dark green, light green, purple, blue. They said that on the eve of World War I the Winter Palace was black and red. Meanwhile, Oblomov was going to pop up in the Summer Garden, and Raskolnikov had just hurried down those steps into a vodka bar. Because I couldn’t speak Russian and find out what was going on, I drifted through a literature-in-translation landscape. St. Petersburg was as quiet as Berlin used to be. Hardly a café. The Eastern bloc told me who was still paying for the war forty-five years later. One afternoon I noticed a line of people and followed it around a corner into a courtyard where those waiting in front were silent as I looked down and saw the lone, small crate of desiccated peaches. I worried that my being black and maybe in their eyes also American made my sympathy humiliating for those patient Russians.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 29