Then, as the blood began to trickle down his forehead, oozing hot and sticky like spilled wine in the afternoon sun, his wife flung herself into his arms, sobbing wildly. Clinging to each other fiercely in the sudden stillness, they sat listening to the pumping of their hearts and to the waters rushing away beneath them.
BOBBY SHAFTER’S GONE TO SEA
It was on a T-2 tanker, some years ago, that I became a particular friend of the steward. He was a stocky, smooth-spoken young man of about thirty, of mixed Negro and Indian and Irish ancestry. His name was Bobby Shafter, and what happened to the two of us, one steamy night in Panama, I am only now beginning to understand.
We had been knocking around the Caribbean for some months—Aruba, Curaçao, Galveston, La Guaira, Mobile, Paramaribo—but with very little port time in any single place. So we were delighted with the news that we’d be laying up at Balboa to wait for engine-room parts.
Nevertheless, Panama City—and the Zone—soon wore itself out for me. There was an air of malign vacancy about the broad, empty tropical streets that was oppressive and even sinister. There, in all their nakedness, gaped the tourist traps, bulging with Dutch gin, Swiss watches and English woolens that the inhabitants could not afford and had no use for anyway, and the grog shops sprinkled with drunken sailors and pregnant prostitutes. Even sex turned sour after I was accosted at four o’clock in the morning by an adolescent girl at least six months gone.
If there is no revolution afoot, life in these latitudes must imperceptibly degenerate for the visitor into the kind of lethargic vegetating that the existence of the inhabitants seems to him to be. So it was with me.
I did join nighttime crowds, squatting in their white ducks and huaraches and laughing without comprehension at old Marx Brothers movies thrown onto improvised bed sheets in village plazas; I did follow, from a hunger for both music and love, youths strumming guitars and singing romantic Latin ballads through half-deserted back streets—until they saw me and closed their mouths; I did buy a pretty parakeet from a sandaled Indian who knew how to squeeze for an extra balboa; I even tried to enter the lives of some of the whores at the Villa Amor, my closest connection with the republic. But you cannot buy conversation any more than you can buy intimacy or love, and finally, appalled by the utter absence of any strenuous ambition, by the seemingly absolute unawareness of even the possibility of any largeness of social prospect, I found myself lapsing into the torpid colonial mindlessness of those around me—sailors and savages, Yankees and Indians—my days punctuated only by the rains that from one afternoon to the next came pounding at us all with the relentless insistence of death itself.
I was more than ready for anything Bobby had to propose. One afternoon I ran into him in a cantina, impeccable in his gold-braided dress blues and white hat. He shook his head sadly at my loud sport shirt and stained khaki trousers and drew me aside. “I’ve got a date for Friday with one of the sharpest babes on the Isthmus.” He winked. “We’re in love.”
I congratulated him.
“Nita’s a Nicaraguan, and very proper.”
“You like them that way.”
“True, but it raises problems, pal, problems. For this ball she insists on bringing along her two sisters.”
“You’ll be a busy man.”
“So will you. One of them has a husband; the other’ll be your date.”
Bobby was already married, to a square chick from a shanty town outside Nashville; I had seen pictures of her, and I knew that when they had been married, in a formal Catholic ceremony, she had cried for two hours from shame at her own ignorance and fear.
Bobby could joke about his Catholicism to me as he couldn’t to anyone else aboard ship: “Man, there was a time when you scored zero on the turf if you didn’t belong to the Church. And if you did, you made the society column, dig?” Yet the ceremonial of the Mass touched him deeply. He enjoyed the white man’s religion and the white man’s church; still, he retained a lively contempt for his fellow Negroes who wore out their mouths trying to suck their way into the white man’s world.
Bobby had been born and raised in Florida. His grandfather, a Seminole, had bequeathed to him his copper coloring and his name. His father had worked for the express agency, his mother had taken in washing, his sisters had studied bookkeeping and stenography and had nevertheless wound up as maids. Infuriated, he himself had gotten out while the getting was good, expelled after one year from a Negro agricultural and mechanical college. He was more specific about his early sexual adventures: pleased by my incredulity, he insisted that Southern white girls were allured by Negro men.
“During the ten months I worked as an orderly in the state hospital, there wasn’t a week passed that I didn’t make out with one of the nurses.”
“White nurses?”
Bobby laughed at me. “You think there was any other kind? The first few times I couldn’t believe it, but later I got to taking such crazy chances, it makes my hair stand on end now to think back.”
“How old were you?”
“I turned seventeen that year. A wild kid. Once we were parked out in some stump-jumper’s field, and when he snuck up pointing his flash I had to take off with my pants around my ankles, shaking like a treed raccoon. I left for Harlem the next week.”
When he hit 125th Street, he had already been tempered by his audacious nights with the aggressive nurses, by the money he had earned as a kid selling bootleg corn to and for white men beneath the grandstand of the local ball park, and by the bitter knowledge that his parents and his sisters were grinding their lives away because they were both frightened and resigned.
Because Bobby was neither frightened nor resigned, he threw himself into the labor movement, picketing the cafeterias whose tables he bussed and the docks where later he longshored. The Communists took him up, and for a while he took them up. The idea of a career as a leader of the oppressed—planning, telephoning, haranguing—had its appeal for someone who hated being shoved around as much as he hated work, but Bobby was too shrewd to let himself he exploited as a kept boy. He broke with them, but delicately, without destroying those connections that might later prove useful, and moved on to new fields.
He ran numbers, and then jobbed hot cargoes from his longshore friends; afterward there were stimulants, from pep pills to goofballs, and then party pictures. At one time he was living with twin sisters, and three really frantic show girls were working for him part-time. All these activities brought him more and more into the odd zones of the white world, from Cancer to Capricorn, so perhaps it was understandable that it was precisely during these years that he joined the Catholic Church—just as it was at the height of his involvement with the party crowd that he bumped into poor little Ceelie Mae, cutting through the Greyhound Bus Terminal on 34th Street. Bumped into her as she was waiting tensely to roll back to Tennessee, conned her into staying, and married her.
“It was a revelation,” he murmured, fondling their wedding photograph, “that a girl could be so pure. I mean, she didn’t even know what she had it for. And for once I managed to restrain my appetites. In fact I couldn’t imagine touching her until we were married.”
He and Ceelie Mae lived happily on Sugar Hill. She knew nothing of his activities, whether for human rights or for his bank balances, and had never gotten over her original Cinderella bewilderment at their fine apartment, or the splendid clothing that he chose for her.
Then suddenly he shipped out to sea. It had nothing to do with Ceelie Mae, who was no doubt as bewildered by it as she was by Bobby’s other activities and who accepted it (he assured me) as she did everything that he decided to do. I suspect that it was some nastiness connected with either the party pictures or the profits from girls, or both. Within a few years he had worked himself up (probably with the help of well-placed friends) to chief steward on this tanker.
The one great thing that had happened since then was that at last, only some six months before, during Bobby’s most recent shore leave, Ceeli
e Mae had succeeded in becoming pregnant. It was the one fruition that Bobby had always wanted of his marriage but had never been able to admit that he yearned for; and now he was happy.
So we sat in his cabin, more often than we did in mine, because he had a record player, and we talked about all this while we listened to his record collection. Bobby had no use for jazz and didn’t care for classical music. He did love operettas, and he adored the little encore pieces of Fritz Kreisler. There was one record called “Kreisleriana.” How can I ever forget those evenings with the sentimental Viennese waltzes sobbing away, the moonlight floating through the porthole as our ship knifed through the warm black waters of the Caribbean, and Bobby confiding in me about daisy chains in Central Park West duplexes at dawn, and the lovely twins who spoiled him, bought him delicately engraved gold slave bracelets and white leather driving coats, besides turning over to him half of their earnings. He made it all sound not vile or even sordid, but like something out of André Gide.
Bobby’s expenses were heavy, and he turned to unorthodox ways of augmenting his income. He and the Old Man had agreed to split the kickback on the ship’s stores which Bobby was responsible for purchasing. It was not a particularly unusual arrangement; what made it so in this instance was that the captain was from Georgia. But as Bobby said, “If you can show a cracker how to make a buck, he can be mighty big about prejudice. The long green is the one color line he won’t draw.”
Bobby had other ways of making money. He bought cut marijuana in bulk from campesinos who grew the weed undisturbed in the fields of their tiny farms on the fringe of Panama City. Occasionally he took it aboard on his person; sometimes he had it carted aboard with the ship’s stores. Brisbane (which was where we were headed, sooner or later) jumped with cats who had developed a taste for tea during the Yank invasion of World War II and who would pay a dollar for a box of twenty cigarettes. So every evening after dinner he spent a quiet hour locked in his cabin, whistling between his teeth while he stuffed cigarette tubes with marijuana, clipped the ends and packed them neatly in the more elegant boxes—Benson & Hedges, Sheffield, Melachrino.
After we became friends I kept him company while he rolled his cigarettes, although some obscure, indefinable compunction held me back from helping out. As he worked he chatted about some of the strange things he had done in his time and about his hopes for his unborn son, who was going to be called Bobby Shafter, Jr. His manicured fingers worked nimbly, his soft, deceptively innocent countenance glowed with pleasure as he regarded the ornately framed wedding photograph. And behind us, the zigeuner music filling the night air, causing Bobby’s liquid eyes to fill with tears for very pleasure at all the beauty that the world contained. What a sentimental man!
On Friday evening he shamed me into wearing my only suit for our date. He found me swiping halfheartedly at my brown-and-white shoes. In mock anger, he reached out and plucked the cloth from my hand.
“For God’s sake, man,” he drawled, “you so cheap you gotta stoop to shining your own shoes? The liberty boat’s alongside. Come on, I’ll treat you to a first-class shine.”
He did, and after that we clambered into an enormous old Cadillac cab that he had commandeered, slanging a little with the adolescent Negro driver in broken Spanish and island-accented English as we chattered through streets still soaked from the afternoon rains.
Bobby dug me in the ribs with his well-ironed elbow. “Better than riding like a smelly sardine in a chiva, eh?”
He never rode the chivas, those nickel-a-ride buses converted from superannuated Chevy panel trucks into crumbling rust-eaten jalops with two facing benches, each side holding, squeezed tightly, four Indians, Negroes, goats, chickens and their assorted smells; he knew that I did, and he couldn’t resist teasing me about my stinginess.
We cut across a part of the city that I had never bothered to explore and rolled to a stop before a modest white stucco cottage set in a row of similar houses, each with a tiny lawn, a cactus and a flowering geranium or two.
I took Bobby by his uniformed arm as he was telling the driver to wait for us. “Did you let these people know that I’m white?”
He flashed me a confident but wary smile. “They’ll accept you, just the way your friends would me.”
That was equivocal enough—maybe not for the captain, but for me. I followed Bobby up the steps and on inside.
Bobby’s almost-fiancée Juanita, a terribly young girl with huge, dark, frightened eyes, was seated on the very edge of a sagging couch with a young woman a few years older, whom I took to be her sister, and a very handsome if severe-looking young man who was surely the brother-in-law. They were an attractive trio, gotten up for an evening out in semiformal dress, a little nervous, their complexions—more Latin than Negro—a trifle strained. Across from them, stiffly upright in a worn barrel chair, sat a mountainous Negro lady. It was hard to guess her age from her impassive black face, but she was at least ten or twelve years older than the others and seemed to have nothing in common with them; even her shapeless dark dress bore no relation to the frocks of the young ladies. A neighbor woman, perhaps? Or an aunt?
Bobby rubbed his hands together. “Hi, everybody, buenas tardes, here’s my buddy, Nita, her sister Maria, Maria’s husband, Evan Jones, and sister Concepcion.”
I gaped. Was this my date? I turned to Bobby, appalled. The only thing that got me over the next few terrible minutes was the realization that Juanita and her sister and brother-in-law were almost as ill at ease as I. One or two desperate attempts to communicate with Concepcion exposed the final horror: she knew almost no English. It was no go, despite the fact that Mr. Jones, an extremely well-mannered Jamaican whose Spanish was excellent, did his best to help.
“Have you been living here long?” I asked her. I waited, miserable, while the brother-in-law made this important question clear to the lady.
Old Stone-face nodded once. “Si.” That was that.
I tried again: “I suppose all three of you work?”
“Yes.” Nothing more.
I gave up. When we got out on the walk and helped the three sisters into the back of the cab (Bobby and I were to sit on the jump seats and Evan Jones up front, next to the grinning driver), I grabbed Bobby and whispered, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
He smiled blandly. “I didn’t think you’d be color-conscious.”
“It isn’t that. She’s old enough to be my aunt. And I can’t talk Span—”
He waved me into the car with a flourish and said to the driver, “To the Jockey Club, man, and steer like a deer.”
The Jockey Club was maybe not the most exclusive supper club in the area, but it wasn’t the cheapest either. I had certainly never been there for dinner and dancing under the stars, which was obviously what Bobby had in mind; I was more easily satisfied. What was more, it was certainly Gold and not Silver. The social life of the Canal Zone was built around these two fantastically artificial designations. Gold for the whites and the wishful-whites; Silver for the hopelessly dark Negroes from the islands and the Indians from the backwoods and the jungles. There were Gold rest rooms and Silver rest rooms, Gold commissaries and Silver commissaries, Gold swimming pools and Silver swimming pools. I was no agitator. I used the Gold facilities, but it always left a sour taste in my mouth. And the Jockey Club was about as Gold as you could get.
This was not lost on the women or on Evan Jones, all of whom looked at Bobby with such trepidation that he started to laugh. “What’s the matter? This is a big night. Relax.”
The unworthy thought had already crossed my mind that Bobby had invited me to join his family as his front man to gain them angry admittance to forbidden ground. But I didn’t dare tax him with this, certainly not in front of his guests.
It was only when the big cab pulled up in front of the Jockey Club and a uniformed Negro doorman handed us out that I began to get the picture. For not only was the doorman deferential; so was the scuttling Negro headwaiter; and we were shown to
a table that was quite near the Latin American band and well in the clear of the palm trees that fringed the unroofed dance floor. Only then did I really try to see the six of us through the eyes not of one who passed through the Gold doors perhaps wryly yet really unfeelingly, but of one whose every waking moment was colored by the unending dreary decisions to be made every time his hand reached for the Silver door and his eyes lingered on the Gold door.
We could all, save for big, black, stolid Concepcion, have passed for light enough to be acceptable in a world where the line had to be drawn not between white and nonwhite but between approximately light enough and impossibly dark—and by someone not too exigent, someone who would do almost anything to avoid trouble. And that someone would have deftly arranged—as in truth our black waiter did—for Concepcion to be seated at the darkest and most inconspicuous corner of the table, from which she might appear to inquisitive eyes as perhaps a hired chaperone or superior kind of mammy, with our party but not really of it.
The Jockey Club was favored by American naval officers. I counted four junior-officer submariners with their dates, young civil-service stenos or the adolescent daughters of Zone employees (in any case, looking as emptily fresh and untroubled as their cousins in the country clubs back home). There were also a number of tourist couples and businessmen of the type who could afford this kind of evening out. They all took their turn in whispering about our party, in gesturing surreptitiously—and sometimes not so surreptitiously—at the six of us.
But I detected no obvious animosity, nothing more than curiosity or bewilderment, and after a while I began to enjoy the new situation. The puzzlement on these well-bred faces, so used to the easy pegging of their fellow creatures, gave me a kind of secure pleasure. Who were we? Was Bobby an Indian? A South American naval attaché out with his wife? The Joneses, he with his aquiline nose and neat mustache, she with her large-eyed loveliness and good grooming—maybe consular visitors from one of the islands? And I, with my precious skin so patently and painfully fair that I could not expose it to this tropical sun for so much as half an hour without its shriveling and dying? As for Concepcion, it would be no more than a poor pun to say that she was beyond the pale. She was quite simply unthinkable, and all around us our fellow revelers were peeking in uneasy bafflement.
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 32