He had dreams of triumph, while, more and more, that faceless soldier tried to fight his way into the hole where I crouched fearfully in darkness, totally, sickeningly aware of my vulnerability. One night in the dream, as the Southern Cross exploded soundlessly into light, I saw the face and it was Paul’s. The next night, just as somehow I knew it would, the constellation exploded again, and the face belonged to Amos.
In the days following, I neatly stacked the pages of my novel. I set my suitcase into full view, where I could see it every minute I was in the apartment, and one day I brought home the list of sailings for the Italian Line.
The only language I knew very well was English. My Spanish could get me by; my French was just this side of disaster and my German was still incontrovertibly graded F. Who is to say why the Spanish came better than the others—Fate? Later, when I had learned more, which is to say when I no longer trusted all I had been taught, I thought it possible that in some other life, an earlier incarnation, I had been a Moor and had crossed from North Africa to Gebal-Tarik—Gibraltar. I’ve met people who looked Italian and wound up living in Rome, and people who looked Mexican and went to live in Mexico.
I had few doubts about going. Glenn would need me more later, for the man talk, for the money, if I had it. (Emptiness struck me, though, when I thought of the distance that would be between us. Had my father ever felt it?) Did I need more money? I would make do. Rupert’s offer was for an emergency. The clincher was the fact that I wasn’t getting any younger. The time was now. I had got assignments to interview Sidney Bechet in Paris for Down Beat and Llewellyn Dodge Johnson for Ebony. I booked passage on the Vulcania, and then took a train out to see Glenn and leave Catherine some money.
He was quiet and courteous and I knew he didn’t understand how far away I was going, how I felt. His mother didn’t even look at the check. Once she murmured, “It’s what you want to do, so …” The trip was frustrating; nothing had come across the way I hoped it would.
On that early fall day when they all came down to the ship to see me off, I felt as I had with Glenn, that slow, long pain you feel when doing something by instinct while your head tells you calmly, with the persistence of a phonograph needle stuck in the groove of a record, that you didn’t have to do it.
Mark Medowitz brought a bottle of champagne; Paul and Claire, Glenlivet; Kass, who was going to Hollywood to look for work, a list of pensions and a bottle of sauterne. Poode brought me cigarettes; Amos, books and more booze. Rupert sent a telegram and a box of cigars. Paul said, “Maybe we’ll come over. What do you think?” I said, “Sure, why not?” They all wished, for I could see it in their eyes, that they were going, too. Their eyes swept over the small, D Deck cabin, swallowed whole the entire ship as they tried to imagine it cresting and knifing the restless high waves of the Atlantic; eyes that looked at me, wondering, How did that nigger do it? I’d made the sacrifices they were unwilling to make. They didn’t have to make any. And I needed space, surcease from the intimidating American rhythms, the ceaseless self-glorification, sometimes subliminal, sometimes not. So I went like my father to the sea and left behind my son—all I had besides a sold typescript to show that I’d been here.
3
From Algeciras I made my way northward along the coast through bone-dry lands, past little memorials set in front of homes commemorating the dead of the Civil War, until, finally, I came to Sitges, about thirty miles south of Barcelona. Oddly, though I had never been there, I was in a strange way familiar with its daily vibrations, the look of it, when I located at the opposite end of town away from the landscaped gardens of the British residents. I was at last alone in a large, cheaply rented house in a sweet quiet stroked by the sound of the waves and sometimes the wind careening against the mountains. I had never known such threatless quiet in my life.
I sat down almost at once and wrote long letters to nearly everyone I knew in New York, and this was simply because I wished to receive answers. Getting mail is a necessity for most writers; it reaches in from faraway places bringing the smells, colors, sounds—memories—lends vistas beyond the cold, mute typewriter. The Mail tells you that you are not yet dead, even though you may have lived a life that has encompassed both the three- and fifteen-cent stamps.
I initiated a correspondence with Paul based on the image of the Negro in American literature. We had never talked of these things before, feeling under some constraint because of our friendship, I supposed. Much of the imagery, I said, was light, formless and basically filled with a racial prejudice through just about every white writer’s traditional, romantic view of Negroes. There were a few exceptions, but usually Negroes were just plain niggers, or they were niggers with music. Faulkner sometimes brought depth to black people. Most American writers who were white, I wrote, still were not freed from prejudice.
Perhaps, Paul wrote, the beat writers would represent a change; he had been hearing much about some of their works that soon would be published. There was also talk about a piece Mailer was working on that drew an existential connection between the beats / hipsters and Negro life.
It was true, I replied, that there might be an existential connection between jazz music and Negroes, maybe just as there was a connection between the German people and Wagner’s music. I was sure, however, that the connection did not extend to the beats, simply because they did not have to be what they chose to be. The range of choices for Negroes was in most cases nonexistent.
In addition, I noted, since I was becoming acutely aware of it in my Spanish solitude, that Negroes rarely were allowed to be experts about themselves; others always knew more, wrote or said more, or at least what they said or wrote got around more and certainly was given more credence.
In this vein, purified by distance, I like to think that our dimensions expanded. I did not dream the old dream. Time was measured only by the grumbling of my stomach or the call of the mailman. I worked long but easily, like a distance runner who has found his stride, whose breathing and soft thumps of his feet against the ground are his only rhythms. When I felt need of a pause, a change, being as full as a gourmand, and as satisfied, I went to Paris.
Sidney Bechet reminded me of Blind Willie Lemon at the Stuyvesant Casino, but even so his life was better in France than it had been at home. John Coltrane had not yet come along, but one day if someone does a study on the soprano sax and the changes its use made in popular music, they will have to study Sidney Bechet, too.
“Professor” Bechet, student of Bunk Johnson, Big Eye Nelson and Storyville, former resident of New Orleans, Chicago and New York; ex-member of the Noble Sissle and Zutty Singleton bands, among half a hundred more; leader of the New Orleans Feetwarmers and the Barefoot Dixieland Philharmonic—there he was in Montmartre, somewhat less fat, his widow’s peak more severe, his high cheekbones less padded with the flesh of younger good times. I heard him play in his club, Le Chat Noir, and with him walked the winter-slicked streets—the Rue le Pic, the Rue Durand, the Place St. Pierre, their shop windows clouded with steam—Sacré-Coeur visible between buildings, and smelled cooking foods whose scents leaked out into the streets. I absorbed his reminiscences there as though I were a well designed to hold an infinite amount of water. As we strolled, secure in our blackness (for brown people, sometimes Algerians, sometimes African-Americans, often South Americans, were abused daily by swooping squads of gendarmes who fought the Algerian uprisings in Paris and who ignored the plastiques, which were going off with tiresome regularity over in the Latin Quarter), I drank it all in, digested it.
And I wondered, as all writers must do, if, when I reached his age, there would be younger writers seeking to talk with me, to somehow find their measurements against those I held for myself, or to perceive for themselves the pitfalls I never discovered. This sense was more intense when I found Llewellyn Dodge Johnson.
He, when very young, had come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Through Jean Toomer he’d been turned on to Gurdjieff, who was then at Fontainebleau.
Unlike Toomer, Johnson had remained in Europe, even during the war.
He lived in the Rue de Turenne, a short street overlooked by the Eglise St. Denis. It was filled with shops and traffic growling out to the Boulevard Voltaire and the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The street had little character, was almost in transition, as, in truth, all of Paris was. The war had been over for a dozen years.
In his flat, Johnson sat in a soft, deep chair and was dressed in an old suit of good, dark material. The white shirt and precisely tucked gray tie made me think that he had dressed for me. Johnson was a small man and carried about his person an aura of limitless life. He leaned on a dark, carved walking stick, un jonc, and remained almost motionless, hunched over, talking about the Renaissance and what had happened to it and its people.
“It was strange,” he said. “So many of us were filled with self-hatred. Except Langston. So many of us saw ourselves not through our own eyes, but through Van Vechten’s, as he was seeing then, or Johnny Farrar’s. The downtown crowd loved us. We had shows on Broadway. Wally Thurman even worked quietly in Hollywood. Then, as always, we were cruel, even murderous to each other, like cocks set into a pit.”
In the light I could see a ring of vibrant blue around the pupils of Mr. Johnson’s eyes. He fixed them on me. “You young writers should be very careful of that. We don’t remember. Each ‘renaissance’ is the original.
“Toomer,” he said. “Jean digested essences, things that escape description by word. Somehow, though, he managed; he had that eerie ability. He was one of us who needed to work beyond the usual definition of the senses. Dreiser tried, but Dreiser failed; Gurdjieff couldn’t help him with his writing. Nor could he help me.”
He turned his round, smooth face to me and smiled. “People like to think of Josephine Baker around those times too, you know. But there must have been a hundred, for all I know, a thousand poor, cunning, good-looking black girls who walked away with the hearts, not to mention some of the wealth, of the downtown set. Department store owners, city and state officials, editors, publishers. Those girls made Josephine look like an amateur.”
He mused. “A long time ago. The edges have become smoothed and softened. Paul Laurence Dunbar wasn’t the first nor the last Negro writer to be forced into the bottle; there were lots of us. I was in it myself for a long time, practically until I came to Europe. The tragedies: Bud Fisher going so young; Wally Thurman; the desertions, with Nancy Cunard laying golden bread crumbs for two or three to pick up and follow.”
He was silent for a time and, still bent over, he seemed to be looking into an invisible glass ball, watching the past. He sighed. “America is a strange place for a black man to write in. We always found it so, but I suppose only Countee put it so succinctly—” He swung toward me, almost glaring. “You know the poem I mean?”
I quoted the last two lines:
“Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black and bid him sing!”
Mr. Johnson’s smile was warm and approving. “Ah, yes, Mr. Douglass, precisely. In America, even if you are writing about a thing as simple as feeling good on a bright, clear morning filled with fresh air—feeling as perhaps millions of others are, they will find it difficult, yes, white Americans will find that difficult to understand because the writer is black and they are white. A few whites will.
“On the other hand, should you write about their direct relationship to you, the only one they know, the correct, objective historical relationship, the one that needs improving on, they will understand. That is all they’ve been taught to understand, the inherent, basically unchanged state of hostility. That’s why in so many words and deeds they deny that history in which we have both suffered and are suffering still. What they did is our mutual holocaust, together our passing through the Red Sea, the epicenter from which or to which the universality of the experience expands or contracts. It seems that we will always move at a fixed distance in relation to each other, but only from one place in space to another place in space.
“I have been in tabacs here where I have asked in my French, which is very good French, for a package of cigarettes. The clerks do not understand me. I repeat and repeat, while the expressions on their faces move from shallow politeness to exasperation and finally to disgust—Flaubert was correct to despise clerks—and I am finally put to the humiliation of pointing: ‘Those! Celles-la! Do you see? Do you see?’ My blackness blocks their ability to understand their own language!”
He gazed into the invisible ball again. As if reading a litany he said, “Yet we must continue to do what our natures bid us to do and eventually it is to be hoped that they will be moved upward.”
“Is time the answer, Mr. Johnson?”
“Mr. Douglass, time is not the answer; time is only a pawn. The will, will, is the only answer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any more questions, Mr. Douglass?”
“Uh, one more if—”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Well, why did you stop writing?”
He tilted his head, and through another tolerant, although distant, impishly cold smile, aimed his eyes, thin of light, right at me. “I did not stop writing, Mr. Douglass. I still write. A writer writes. That is self-evident to those of us who are—writers.” He seemed to slide a long, smooth time on the end of that word. “I am published in East Germany, Yugoslavia, Japan and India. Next year I will be published in China, and I have reason to believe that all my works will be published in Russia within the next three months. No, I never stopped writing. In America and, predictably, Western Europe, they simply stopped publishing me, publishing us; our exoticism wore off. I suppose it would be natural therefore for an American to believe that I stopped writing.”
I said, “I see.”
And he said, “Mr. Douglass, I hope you will.”
Back in Sitges, fortified by café con leches and endless cognacs, while the village thinned out before the approaching cold, which had already fitted collars of frost and snow on the mountains between here and Barcelona, I sat and finished up the interviews. Every day now a car in first gear whined away from the beach toward the hard road and Barcelona, the back loaded, the top loaded and tied down; Spain was becoming Spanish again.
Glenn stared at me from a corner of my writing table. He stared at me from my night stand. Sometimes in the middle of a passage, I’d take the paper out of the machine and write him a letter, describing things—the ocean, the mountains, Spanish kids, the weather, the house—anything I’d not told him about before. And of course I told him that I missed him, more perhaps to define the missing concretely, on paper, and thus release a little guilt, than to move him in any way.
In all his pictures there was a curious little curve around the eyes (“you bastard”) that unnerved me whenever I looked at them too closely.
I flooded the mails with gifts: a pic and a matador’s sword in miniature; a small matador’s hat, post cards of Parque Guell, designed by Gaudi, a Spanish scarf (indistinguishable from an American scarf), a soccer ball (soccer had not yet become popular in the U.S.), and yet the emptiness persisted, along with the sense that my sacrifice in going away from him was not as great as his.
I would make it up to him, goddamn, I’d really make it up to him and nothing would ever come between us. I took strength in the reiteration of the promise, but it always seemed to fade, retreat somewhere to the rear of things. Then, seeing it there, I called it back again.
I had to, I told myself, exert total control over the events in my life, and Glenn was, after all, a rather special one. Got you, kid, I whispered to the pictures when I came in high. Got you.
Paul wrote that he and Claire had married; I had thought they were on the verge of breaking up. There was less mail; everyone was used to my absence by now. Yet I found myself pacing as I waited for the mailman, who would ride by without stopping. I took to frequenting the cafés the workers went to, hoping that I was less of a curiosity to them than I
had proved to be to most of the Spanish people I’d met. In the evenings after my dinner, I went out to drink and meet still more people; I even got into discussions with the beach patrols of the Guardia Civil, which no one else did, or dared to. That was a measure of how lonely I found myself becoming.
Now I went into Barcelona two or three times a week, by bus or hiking. Truck drivers were good about stopping for me. Taking the last bus back from Plaza Universidad, my arms filled with books or groceries or catalogues from museums, I entered my cold and quiet house, flicked a light on over my typewriter, read the words on the paper held in its rubber-metallic grip, and wondered—and these were the first times—if they were worth what I was beginning to feel.
4
One morning I awoke and felt filled to choking with wanting to be with, wanting to be deeply inside of and warmed by, a woman. The village was a proper place, as far as I knew; las putas were always in the next village. I saw no signs that the Spanish women of Sitges, or any of the few other European women who’d remained behind, were as eager as I for an eternity of balling.
I simply and painfully missed the hell out of New York; there I knew the rules of the game.
Close to noon the next day, I rode into Barcelona; siesta was coming on fast—the Big Sleep, or whatever they do during that time. I walked up and down the Ramblas and from one Gaudi structure to another; I ate and drank, tried to conceal the heat in my eyes; traffic returned to the streets and the pace of the city picked up as darkness came; and still I drifted from place to place, trying to find a woman.
On my third pass near Paseo de Gracia and Plaza de Cataluña—it was nearly ten and I was growing weary, dejected and more than a little sorry for myself—I heard Afro-Cuban music: cha chink cha cha !click ba ba ah, yah ba ba ah, yah ba !click chink cha !click …
!Click Song Page 5