Before he knew what was happening, Chairman Snipe was beside him, hugging him, the stale smell of cigarette smoke on his jacket and the smell of whiskey on his breath.
“Excellent!” Chairman Snipe said. “Excellent. I hope, as I said in my letter to you, that you will consider seriously being with us, to organize our black studies program. I’ve talked with Yale and my administrators, and they’re agreeable, if we can reach…”
He searched the crowd, now cluttering the exits, for the lone black man, who’d been so conspicuous in this white crowd, but he was gone. The chairman was talking about the offer.
“We’ve arranged, with some little struggle from the faculty, you’ll understand, to give you a tenure track position. Excellent. Excellent. I myself particularly like your conclusion. ‘The power of definition is also the power to define.’ How many times I’ve tried to make the same point in my sociology class. But tonight, you’ve said it better than any social scientist!”
He did not know what the chairman was talking about. He could not remember having made that point. He could not remember saying any of the words, which, obviously, he had to have in order to fill up the hour, the words that had brought such applause, and now, from the mouth of the chairman himself, approval and an offer.
He thought he heard shots from behind the green trees.
“Let’s go to your reception,” the chairman said, holding his guest’s arm, pointing him away from all the people at the back, exhaling his smell of cigarette smoke stale and heavy, and languid as rainwater on damp wool. “The other faculty members’re waiting for you…”
He went down the side stairs from the speaker’s platform, following beside the chairman. The auditorium was nearly empty. He wondered why, the couple of times that he’d been in this southern town, he was always in the company of only one man. He had never walked beside two men, not at the same time. And he had never had the pleasure of walking beside a woman. Not one woman. Not once, since he had come to this town, “with all these beautiful black broads,” as a black taxi driver had said, to which he had added, “pulchritude.”
He noticed on his way out of the room, with the pressure of expectancy and the nervousness that preceded the lecture now past, that the auditorium was actually a very large classroom, with desks and chairs arranged in rows, and elevated towards the back, so that when the lone black man had appeared, his black fist had flashed against the whiteness all around.
Chairman Snipe raised his hand, with a cigarette in it, and pointed him toward the reception in the privileged quarters of the faculty club. There was no one in sight. He could not understand where they had all gone; where they could have disappeared to, so quickly after his lecture. He felt they should have remained outside, on the pavements, as in Barbados, when an audience, done with the lecture, spilled onto the pavement and tore the lecture apart, and put it together again, with their better wisdom.
The light he had been seeing beyond the trees had sunk, and was now merely the remnant of the sun.
“Such a beautiful sunset,” Chairman Snipe said. “With these long days, and with so much rain, it’s a privilege to stand here as a free man and watch our sun set.”
II
Why was he so lonely, adrift, unanchored and unhappy? If he looked around him, in the broadloomed room of Persian rugs, table lamps and books in so many places, on tables, on the floor, in chairs, that he hardly had space for his large scotch and soda, why did he feel so much the stranger among these men and the few women who smiled at him each time they crossed to the bar, each time he lit his pipe? Why did he feel it was so difficult for him to accept their kindness, their smiles, their snatches of congratulation? “Fine speech,” “Fine lecture,” “You really taught me something about this country” and: “I never looked at things just that way. You provided me with a new way of seeing old things!”
Why was he so intent on regarding himself as unsuited to this well-heeled, well-fed, hard-drinking crowd of professors and their wives; and why was he now certain that he had once before been in the company of that black-fisted man in one of the back streets that bordered the black area of town, sitting in the doorway of a country café, checking out the sounds, what’s going down, as the man had called it, listening to Marvin Gaye and Aretha, Sam and Dave and John Coltrane, a music as strange to him as rock and roll and bluegrass country guitars; forced to snap his fingers and nod his head to the loud beat, “like you ready to lay down some moves, man.” Why could he not relax, crystal glass in hand, with three ice cubes at swim in whiskey, as he nodded to expressions of approval? Why could he not put back his head, plump against the soft pillowing of the wing-backed chair? Why had he not felt free to say in that country café that he preferred Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and his Third to Marvin Gaye’s “Get It On Up,” that he was more at ease with anything by Mozart, than he was with Aretha? Not that he disliked Aretha. After all, it was she who had accompanied him on his first performance of cunnilingus; and there was something, after all, like the eating of fresh fruit, to be said about that activity. Peaches. That’s it, he thought, sitting in a Queen Anne chair as if he owned it, it was the taste of fresh peaches: biting the teeth into it, and having his lips touch the filament of skin.
Slouching, he continued trying to take his mind off his discomfiture in these academic surroundings, polished with wealth and good taste in furnishings, so, instead, he studied Chairman Snipe’s long-jawed face weather-beaten by the crossings of time, an element of travel in the face; arrival and departure; his body bulky, pudgy, as are the fingers of both hands. On the right, and beside it, on the little finger, a wedding ring, a family heirloom, an emblem or crest of some sort. He is amazed that he is able to absorb himself in such small things. Chairman Snipe has the girth of a man who likes to eat, who likes to drink. A happy figure. He wears baggy black trousers, black socks, dark brown sandals of a determined German make and design. When he takes off his jacket, he is in a short-sleeved blue shirt, with a tie.
As a small boy, dispatched four times on a Sunday to church, to matins, communion Sunday school and evensong, he wore a short snap-on tie.
Chairman Snipe’s tie is not a snap-on. It falls over his imposing belly. His belly is, without doubt, the focus of all his emotions. He wears it proudly. He does not try to button his jacket. He does not try to draw in his paunch. He does not try to pull his trousers over it. It cannot be covered. He is not ashamed of it.
Studying Chairman Snipe’s belly, he was sure that he again heard shots being fired in the distance. But in the drawing room, on the edge of the Queen Anne chair, he was far removed from shots and guns being fired. No one was hearing the jazz being played – as if no one wanted to hear the riffs of the alto saxophone and the piano chordings, but wanted only to have a musical distraction behind the determined conversations about black studies and “the place of Dutchman in the spectrum of American belles-lettres.”
“On what basis,” a professor was saying. “On what intellectual basis can we include a work like Dutchman in a credit course of English Literature? On what grounds? The point I am trying to make is, that even if we considered it as part of our course in Modern American Literature, there still would not be the intellectual basis to justify its inclusion.”
Again he thought he heard the ping ping of bullets.
“In South Africa,” the professor continued, apparently tired of his own argument about black literature, “in South Africa and in Northern Rhodesia, to give two well-known examples…”
“But why don’t you bring your argument and transplant it to the United States?” another said.
“Are we any better here than South Africa or Northern Rhodesia?”
“In this double standard, we live the way we do, because it is mainly in the United States that there is…”
“Has always been.”
“The point I was trying to make…”
“I’m sorry.”
“…is that there has always been considerable
social intercourse.”
“We are not graduate students here! Make the point. In other words, confess. Considerable sexual intercourse.”
The chairman was speaking, patting the tail-point of his tie against his stomach.
“There has always been considerable social and sexual intercourse between whites and blacks.”
“You mean blacks and whites.”
“Why the differentiation?”
“Doesn’t he know?”
Again, Chairman Snipe was speaking.
“The most important thing about a book I’ve been reading in manuscript, is its title. White Over Black. White over black. It could not have been different – black over white – without a different book having to be written.”
Nine men, five women, himself, four forty-ounce bottles of Dewars, three bottles of Jack Daniels, one bottle of rum from Cuba, one bottle of Gordon’s Gin, one bottle of vodka. He could not pronounce the Russian name on its label. All half empty.
The voices in the room were rising.
“The schizophrenia of this country, whose antecedents have maintained a double standard…”
“And of which the country itself has become suddenly and painfully aware, according to the latest issue of Esquire…”
“The double standard is now being questioned by the heightened social awareness of black Americans.”
“It is being questioned also by the white American, just as seriously, for it is this white man whose misfortune it is to witness a black successor and heir.”
“We can always bless the black American with this problem.”
“Bless him, or blast him.”
“Newsweek carried an excellent piece. On Martin or Malcolm.”
“If the law had punished improper social intercourse and sexual intercourse, between blacks and other non-whites…”
“Are we in South Africa?”
“Apartheid, you mean?”
“Well, now that you’ve mentioned it! The point is, ontologically speaking of course!”
“That is no point.”
“The fact remains that this apartheid would, filtered through other American myths, crystallize the illegality of such intercourse.”
“We are in South Africa.”
“The time has got to come, as we gathered from our colleague from Yale…”
“Yale, our mother university! Is that what you’re hinting?”
“As our colleague from Yale, soon to be numbered amongst us, said earlier tonight, at the moment that the white American can afford to believe that the primary inhabitants of the Dutchman are…”
“Which is, euphemistically, blacks.”
“Blacks.”
“Well, say blacks.”
“Okay. Blacks are not non-people, then…”
“Then, and only then, to overstate the case, then and finally, will it be possible in this country to be sane, and at the same time presume that the inhabitants of Dutchman…”
“Blacks.”
“Blacks.”
He heard the shots again, outside the drawing room. But no one flinched, no one went to the window.
“By the way…”
It was Chairman Snipe.
The four forty-ounce bottles of Dewars, three bottles of Jack Daniels, the bottle of rum from Cuba – was it Cuba, or Jamaica? – the bottle of Gordon’s Gin and the bottle of vodka, whose name he had already given up trying to pronounce, were all down to a quarter full.
“By the way,” Chairman Snipe said. “Did you notice the fellow at the back? Do you know him?”
“You mean the black!” a professor said. “With the black power salute! Did you see him?”
“If I were you, being a stranger in these parts, particularly…”
“What the good doctor is trying to say is, as a West Indian intellectual, your fight is not their fight. Have I synopsized your sentiments, chairman?”
Chairman Snipe ignored the assistance.
“Do you know the fellow who gave the salute? What I mean to say is, I hope you don’t plan to…”
“Birds of a feather, chairman. Birds of a fucking feather!” another professor said.
Chairman Snipe scowled, knitting tight his thick eyebrows.
“You have a future on this campus. I would hate to think that you might jeopardize it, being a West Indian, by that kind of… a precipitous association. We want you down here. We want you to consider the offer, seriously, tenure track isn’t often offered in the South,” the chairman said.
He read the label on the large Dewars bottle; he tumbled more whiskey into his heavy crystal glass. He over-poured. He spilled a lot of whiskey on his jacket sleeve. He saw the chairman’s overhanging tie, placid upon his belly. He could hardly hear Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond playing “Time Out.” Something was happening to his eyes.
He should go. He decided to go. One o’clock in the morning. Time, someone said. Chairman Snipe placed his hand, which was soft and puffy, on his damp tweed jacket, on his shoulder, with no force, with no weight of emotion in the touch, with no indication that the gesture was hale, as in two fellows well met.
“Yes, it’s a short walk, but maybe it’s best you take a taxi. No? No taxi! Okay. Safe home y’all. Safe home.”
III
In this darkness, in this strange land of more rain than sun, he shortened his steps, unsteady, as if he were, being a little drunk, about to stumble. He was on a street bordered by wide green lawns. Even in the darkness, he could see that the houses were painted white. All the houses he had seen, during the daytime in this place, were painted white. There were no lights in the houses. Some were almost hidden by trees. He walked in the middle of the road. The road was straight. He shuffled forward, sidewinding from curb to curb. He could smell patchouli, old water and mud. He smelled of whiskey. His sleeve was still wet, from elbow to cuff. He felt the weight of his bladder. He knew he would have to stop in front of one of these large, tree-hidden houses to pee on the lawn. He knew he had taken the wrong way, as he edged up onto a lawn, his right shoe toeing against something soft, about to unzip his trousers. He stood still above the rising stench of dog shit. The grass was wet; the sweet smell of fresh-cut grass cleared his nostrils as he wiped his toe, while noticing a moving light around the corner. He moved, and the light moved, too. He returned to the middle of the road, shuffling on.
He stopped under a signpost. The name of the street was Hyacinth Circle. To his left, he saw three tall, shiny white columns holding up a white-painted house. He thought of Rome. He thought of Greece, he thought of all the textbooks he had studied back in Barbados; he knew he was in front of the courthouse.
That afternoon, the local newspaper had carried a front-page story about three black men who had been sentenced to ninety-nine years in that courthouse.
“Ninety-nine?”
“Ninety-motherfucking-years, plus nine, brother!” he’d been told by the college’s dormitory porter.
The courthouse square was wide and sprawling with many benches, but he figured old white men sat on those benches in the afternoon, chewing tobacco and expectorating the dark brown tobacco blood. Beside the old white men would be some black men grown old early, with felt hats that had sweat stains round the hat-bands, bright-coloured braces, checkered shirts and shapeless trousers. They would be smoking cigars, their faces creased in painful, suspicious intensity.
“That the motherfucking courthouse,” he said aloud.
Hyacinth Circle thinned into a lane; the canopy of trees had a smell, but he had not learned its name. The smell that still travelled with him was that of whiskey. He had a sleeveful of whiskey. He did not think he had drunk so much.
There was a light at the foot of a driveway. Not bright. It was mounted on the left pillar. As he got near, he saw that the pillar was wooden. The pillar turned into a post; nothing like the Roman or Grecian pillars he had seen farther back. The number on the post was 432. He knew a house somewhere, a house he had entered often, with the same str
eet number. He wondered where he had seen that house last. He walked up to the post. He loosened his tie.
By the light on the gatepost he saw a clump of grass, thick and strong, and he could see its roots. He remembered back in Barbados, in his father’s “ground,” pulling pond-grass from choking the potato-slips and the young yams. “To pull-up this kind o’ pon’-grass, yuh does have to grab-on pon the clump by the root, at the bottom, then, and ease-she-out.” His father had said that.
He squatted down, grabbed the plant by the bottom, wrapping his fingers round the root; the dull light from the gatepost hitting him in the face, just as, years before, in another place, he had bent down, with the sun hitting him full in the face.
He got the clump of grass: devil-grass, pond-grass, or blue-grass, as they called it in this part of the world. He wiped the root over his sleeve and the lower left side of his jacket; he smelled now more of the dank earth than of slovenly drunk.
He moved off.
Under a canopy of trees over the road, he was walking now in almost total darkness, down a slight incline. He felt the strain and the muscles in his legs register and balance the other muscles in his body. A sign said North Jefferson Street.
He looked back, and there was nothing; nothing, except the sound of the night, which was like the breathing of a woman who has asthma.
The incline became steep. He could feel the muscles in his calves. Two dull lights seemed to follow him, shone over his head and pointed to the trees thinning out.
His jacket felt heavy. His shoes were hurting his corns. He remembered a story he had been told about corns and bunions and black women.
“Why not black men, also, have bunions?”
“Because the black woman walks to work, on her two feet; stands up and works, on her two feet; is fucked over from behind by the master, while on her two feet; and at the end of a sixteen-hour day, she turns around, and walks back, on the same goddamn two feet, in the same goddamn shoes! She deserves to have her corns and bunions.”
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