Through the tinted glass of the VW, he saw concrete, and scraps of newspaper, and paper wrappings blowing along the sidewalks. There were trees but no flowers. He longed for the softness of light and the colours of New Haven. He wondered if he was not irresponsible, longing so much for the North. The South he had always been told was the place where he belonged. “Why don’t you goddamn go down where you all come from?” But he wanted the softness of red brick, dirty red brick, the tidiness of streets shaded by small trees, he wanted the gently aged appearance of old houses, their dereliction untouched by rioting. Here, the sidewalks, the streets, were too exposingly bright. He wondered if any serious thought or honest intellectual pursuit could ever be achieved under the scrutiny of such brightness. Such instant delineation. Perhaps, people here, in this place, had to wait for the night before they could be comfortable, before they could see into their minds with meaningful clarity. He knew that the deepest, reddest blood was shed in such concealing nights, but still, maybe the nighttime was the right time to be black. He felt entirely confused, his vision clouded by smoke from the mentholated Salems and the vibration of a passing freight train.
Calvin had been deep in his own thoughts, but he must have come to a conclusion, or some agreeable compromise with himself, for he straightened his spine; his eyes were bright, and the whiteness in them shone. His dashiki took on a nobility, despite his cut-off blue jeans.
“I’ll say this last heavy shit, brother. I’ll lay this heavy shit on you, and then, I promise, we’ll enjoy ourselves for the rest of the day.”
He was a man who, to make a serious statement, had to light another Salem. “There’s obvious dangers in generalizations like this. I’m talking bout the sickness in my country, the sickness that is the obscenity going round this country, even among young radicals like me. I’m talking bout the feelings of ambivalence that eat my guts sometimes. Still, America is my country. And America is one vast, no matter what shit going down, one motherfuckin’ mass of landspace, time, and ideas. And in that vastness, in that bigness, for we Americans like bigness better than quality, in that bigness and vastness there’s gotta be a proper diversity of ideas. For, believe it or not, brother, certain judgments gotta be made. If only for the motherfucking purpose of convenience.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“That be the word, brother-man,” Calvin said. “Judgments gotta be made, some serious shit of convenience and inconvenience has got to go down. Now, let’s get down, afterwhile-chile.”
V
It was a long white road. Calvin slapped a tape into the tape-player. “My Favorite Things,” that tantalizing hymn to a new harmonics on the tenor saxophone, a solo that gave him the same feeling as going to church in Barbados. The sun had just gone down behind the tall casuarina trees. There was a slice of a moon, at dusk, thick green sugar cane fields on both sides; and he was walking in the middle, far from each edge of the field, his black shoes shined with the puritan’s love of labour, for Sunday, were covered with the white dust he kicked up, with his hurried, frightened step. The church bells, chiming with hope for the repentance of sins, were as repetitious as the trees, lined and planted stiff on a parade square. Each time John Coltrane repeated his main statement, he heard the monotony of the tolling bells, charming him out of his waywardness. A charmed pull, this same bending of the neck toward the small speaker in the VW, brought back to him the chording of the bells, and beside him was his grandmother, content, for she had travelled many times before this path of anticipated Pentecostal salvation. In the same way, beside him, Calvin drove silent: for he had heard all the places and things and colours which the music had showed him before. The tape had been played many times: “My Favorite Things.”
In the distance, was a barn? A factory? Something like a semi-portable camp for soldiers? It sat stubbornly, squarely, without any architectural grace. It was black from this distance. It was a club.
The tenor saxophone reminded him, by harping on variations of the same theme with precision, of the singing of old women, his grandmother, leading the service-of-song in the Mothers’ Union meeting, repeating “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee…”
A neon sign told him he was approaching the Eagle Club, a black building, the siding being made of black, tarred shingles.
And the neon sign did not tell the truth. The first letter, “B,” had burned out.
It was the Beagle Club.
Calvin parked the VW at the end of a line of cars. He sat very still listening as Coltrane played “A Love Supreme.”
A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme… Nineteen times.
He got out of the VW. Because he was wearing a loose-fitting, pocketless dashiki he had not brought his pipe; he had not brought his tobacco pouch; he had not brought his English leather – genuine leather – gentleman’s wallet; he’d had no room for his fountain pen with black Quink ink, and he was not travelling with his address book. And, he realized he had made a mistake about his comparisons: it was not the old ladies and “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” It was himself, chorister in the chancel of St. Michael’s Anglican Cathedral, singing a song of praise. Easter? Christmas? Rogation Days? Quinquagesima Sunday? Lent?
O, all ye beasts of the sea
Praise ye the Lord.
O, all ye fish of the sea,
Praise ye the Lord…
That was it! That was the comparison. That was the repeat, replete with the beauty of the saxophone.
“Some heavy shit’s going down in here, brotherman.”
“Cool.”
Calvin looked at him. “Every time I git down with Trane playing ‘A Love Supreme,’ I gotta smoke me some weed, and…”
The main door opened, there were tears in Calvin’s eyes. He was not crying. He was happy.
“Can you handle this shit, brother?”
He said no.
“This shit’ll kill you. It’s a motherfucker.”
“Cool,” he said.
“‘Love Supreme’ is a motherfucker. Freaks me out. Least five times a day. I have a joint, shee-it!” He took a deep, silent pull on the joint that was no longer than his fingernail. “‘Love Supreme’ remind me of a thing my grandmother used to hum round the house, something white folks call a canticle. Shee-it, more like cuticle to me! But anyhow, this canticle has got itself a Latin name: Benedicite omnia opera. Shit, been hearing my grandmother singing it, often is often does:
O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye
the Lord: praise him, and magnify him forever.
O ye Nights and Days, bless ye the Lord:
Praise him, and magnify him forever.
bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify
him forever…
“Check it out, man.”
“You Anglican?”
“Baptist bred in the bone! All rib-sandwiches and fried chicken.”
The room was dark. Bodies moving. Laughter loud and sweet and black and jocular. Smoke rising and swirling; and it hovered above the lighter darkness of bodies. Like broad-brimmed halos. Music climbing the walls. Live music as he had never heard before. Loud and full, the enunciation of each voice, of each instrument, of each riff, pleading with thick sensual contrition:
Didn’t I do it, baby? Didn’t I? Didn’t I do it, baby?
Towards the front of the large crowded shuffle-footed room he saw Aretha. There in the warm Southern night! He was overcome. He could feel his body relax. He could smell fried chicken. Fried ribs. Tingling burnt hair. Processed hair. Cosmetics and lotions. He could smell and feel his own sweat.
Didn’t I do it, baby? Didn’t I?…
The large room was like a country of men and women all of the same colour. This was the first time that he had ever entered a space inhabited only by black people. It was a beautiful sensation. He thought of powerfulness. He could feel his blood.
Two women, heavy in the thighs, heavy in arms, heavy of flat broad feet, were together, heavy breasts pressed against
heavy breasts, defying a man to force himself between the veins of these two women, grinding out their joy, grinding black coffee hip to hip, a black world they had created through dance, a black world that dance itself had formed and drawn a circle around.
Three rows from the stage, he stopped. He had to. Bodies were not moving. They were allowing no space for his wooden shuffle. He was the only one not in an embrace. Not hip-snapping slowly.
Didn’t I do it, baby?
He could see her black face bathed in perspiration, like the water of baptism. He came face to face with the woman.
“Shit, there’s more than Aretha…”
He turned his head; it was impossible to turn his body. At his ear, Calvin was smiling round a rib-sandwich.
“There’s more singers in the South who whip Aretha’s ass…”
“But I thought no other woman could sing like Aretha!”
“For every Aretha that whitey make a star, we could up an’ provide ten.”
“They say she’s the best…?”
“The best-known, but she ain’t the best! Not down here!”
“This is somethin’ else?”
“What you say?” Calvin shouted.
“Somethin’ else!”
“Cool as the breeze… on Lake Louise…”
“This chick be a motherfucker!”
Calvin laughed so loudly that dancers glared at him.
The two women who had been dancing together were now at arm’s length, two fat hands holding two fat arms, giving the sloe-eye to him over each other’s shoulders; smiling and content. He was relaxed in a world of sound; safe and almost serene.
A midnight train to Georgia…
There were dark lonely roads; there were tall trees; there was the smell of magnolia, a smell he had been told about, but never could identify, so that even now that he was in the South, where the smell was born, he did not know which trees gave it off. There was also the smell of burning flesh, of rotting flesh, of flesh manhandled; but also, always the smell of love. He was prepared to travel all those dark miles of never-ending rails of steel, going from place to unknown place, to remove himself even farther from his present…
A midnight train to Georgia…
He was now in the arms of one of the fat ladies, deep and comfortable against the billows of her stomach, her arms round his smaller body in an embrace so much like his mother’s that he felt he could fall off into a sweet slumber, except that the song was raging through the magnolia woods of this land that held such frightening mysteries to him. She held him close, tight. She held her left arm round his waist, and her right on the softness of his bottom. And he, in against her flesh, was moved slowly, very slowly by her, by her body, by her blood, the iron of which he thought he could taste, and so gave himself up completely to the music.
He was not passive in his enjoyment, though his pleasure was so complete in its rapture that he felt as a child. He was as aggressive in the almost motionless dance as she was. Her left hand was grabbing the right half of his bottom; and his hands were pressed deeply into her soft flesh, not entirely out of sensuality, but also because she was so much bigger than he that he had to latch on to her, to apply the imperceptible pressure to move her to the music in his own slow, sweet time.
And he thought of poetry … green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman…
“You sticking me?” she said. A breath of Jack Daniels as she spoke.
His right leg was hugging her left leg, the inner thigh. He could feel her weight. He wondered what it would be like if, by accident, or even not so much by accident, she were to fall, full on top of him.
“Is that how you feel?” she whispered into his ear.
And nightly under the southern stars as I rode to sleep, the owls were bearing the farm away.
He searched in his mind for a poem written by a black American, a Southerner, to clothe his joy in, and render his blessings more appropriate. What would she say? What would Calvin say, if he were to know that he was crystallizing this “black aesthetic in white rhetoric?” That he had used a white Welsh poet of wide renowan to capture a black Southern experience? Calvin would say that since the experience was love, or lust, or sex, or the desire for a foop, “It’s a universal motherfucker, brother.”
“You sticking me.”
Her mouth was at his ear. He smelled perfume and cosmetics and treatment, a hot iron, process in her hair. She tightened her grip on him, and forced his smaller body into hers and gave a sigh; apparently not satisfied with the press of his body against hers, she tightened more. His breathing became more difficult, and then she groaned, in a sweet, short, spasm. My wishes raced through the house high hay and nothing I cared… that time allows.
“You like me, don’t you? I know.” The train was entering Georgia. “West Indian men adores American women.”
Wherever Georgia was, or is, whatever the ruggedness of the landscape, whether of rocks or stones, green fields of sugar cane or of cotton, the concluding journey was clear before him. The singer, now bathed in her sweat, sequins moving as she breathed, rippling upwards from her ankles to her arms, her hips swaying, shunting on the beat, shutning like the pistons on the train pulling into town, long after midnight. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea.
“You do want me, don’t you?”
He could feel it. He could feel the deeper softness of her thighs. He could feel grits in his mouth, tasteless sugar, coarse flour-dust. He was hard. The singer was coming home: the two sequined pistons could now be seen in their slowing-down, and as they dropped at her sides, like a victory that concludes bodily exhaustion, he felt the sudden semen thunder down. And at that moment, in the slowed-down, soft sighing voice of the woman, it lighted upon him.
Immediately, the most powerful fluorescent lights, long and shaded by pieces of aluminum foil, came on, and the room became an arena. The woman held him close, although the dance was over. The strength in his trousers was limber. Across the bright floor, Calvin was holding the hand of the other woman, coming towards him, with schemes written on his perspiring black face. The woman continued to hold him close. He did not want to be released from her embrace. The room was too bright. Too accusing, too sentencing, too condemning.
He looked down to see his trousers, but trying not to appear as if he was inspecting any wet damage to his white Levi’s. On the floor, in the harsh fluorescent light, he saw a lady’s earring and a dead fly.
“Blasted fly!” he said.
He knew she would look down. And when she did so, he crushed the fly flat into the dust and cigarette butts. And he took the opportunity, rising from the superfluous murder of the fly, to glance at himself. He was safe. He was still hard.
Small boys in Barbados, he remembered, had put their hands in their pockets, to pacify the evidence. But he could not get his hands into his pockets. His Levi’s were too tight.
“You like sticking me, don’t you, small-island man?” the woman said, and pulled him towards her, embracing him affectionately, overbearing in her fondness for him, as her girlfriend approached with Calvin.
“Fuck it!”
She unclipped a long purse, red as her lipstick, with patterns of silver on it, and from its silver lips, she pulled out a cigarette.
Her hands were broad, thick, her fingers pudgy, short. She wore no rings. She covered his hands with hers.
When she moved her arms, her colour took on the sheen of brown alabaster. He wondered if she was mixed. When he turned to catch her words better and looked into her face, he saw that she was a most beautiful woman. Her nose was large. Her lips were full and soft. She wore her hair swept back off her large forehead. “So you’s this black brain from up at Yale!” Eyes, big and round, suggested a personality that, while being soft, demure, feminine, also took no shit, not from anybody. “Fuck it! We got black brains down here, boy!” She squeezed his hands. “One’s standing across from you!�
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He looked into the deep, cavernous, black sweetness between her enormous breasts; an aggressiveness, a violence surged in his body. He wanted to conquer this woman.
“Don’t mess with this sister!” Calvin warned him.
“Pour this young man some drink,” she said. A waiter had just come by. “Give the man a drink.”
“Can you handle it, brother?” Calvin said.
“With such big brains?” she said. “I heard he got all them white professors on the campus frighten for him. Thass good. We show them.”
“Leave my man be. He got to integrate.”
“Fuck it! Give the man some Jackdanills.”
He was given a plastic cup, a black, red and green striped plastic cup. The waiter poured him four fingers of bourbon.
“Can you handle it, brother?”
“Hope you told those colleagues o’ yours the truth,” she said. “Hope you told them about Malcolm. Most o’ we down here, in the South, favour Martin Luther King. But not me. The church has its place. A place for sitting-in and laying-in, and getting your head whupped. That shit don’t appeal to me. I’m as Baptist as King. But my first love is Malcolm. The NAACP’s more suitable to the North. Don’t ask me what I mean, and how I know. There’s enough white liberals up north, and black ones, too, to finance the NAACP. But we down here in the South? We’s the field-niggers of the movement. You don’t think so, Professor?”
She laid the weight of her hand on his thigh.
“Right on,” he said.
“Fuck! This island nigger’s jiving like us!” she said.
She cuddled closer; and he smelled scent, he smelled hair treatment, he smelled her breath, fresh and clean and with a wisp of tobacco on it. She placed a firm wettish kiss on his lips.
“This nigger’s mine!” she said with a fierceness that frightened him, even though she laughed as she said so.
Her size; her blackness, her sex and sensuality; her hands; her breasts; and her magnitude. The magnitude of her: that’s the word he had been searching for all night to describe her. Her magnitude frightened him, made him feel he was a small man. It was the smell of womanness about her; the funky, sexy smell which put a withering on his hardness. She had claimed him as flesh, as property.
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