Still, the Village was something of a refuge whose racial mores possessed a kind of liberal continuity. These were bent from time to time and sometimes even briefly snapped, as they had been on Sixteenth Street.
I saw Amos infrequently now, for lunch or a dinner out or in our apartment. From Paul there was nothing. Glenn spent a part of his summers with us and each year his presence seemed to make the apartment smaller because he was bigger. We never felt so crowded as when he was there, even though we tried to spend as little time as possible in the place.
Mr. Storto saw him growing, but nevertheless, for three years running, carried Glenn, who went without the slightest protest, to the circus.
During this time we’d been trying to have a baby, knowing that would force us to find a larger place. We knew we needed one, but kept putting off a search. Our lives were intertwined with Mr. Storto’s. We had ices together, coffee together, snacks together; we solved all the problems in the world and even sometimes helped him clean up after a tenant moved out.
I suppose living down there made us feel in some way that we were younger than we were. However, the fact that we had not yet rung any bells sent us to the doctors to check out the equipment we were working with. Maybe it was older than we wanted it to be. They said we were all right, that we should continue to plug away. And so we did, relentlessly, often to the point of exhaustion, because we had read somewhere that that was when all the little, teeny things inside were most receptive. Sometimes Allis even took a cab home at noon, thinking we’d change the schedule, change the luck.
In the same week that the publication date of my third novel was set for the spring, Allis missed her period. An examination confirmed the pregnancy. We had done it.
Mr. Storto had only one-bedroom apartments, and anyway we now thought of parks and public playing areas, of which there were not too many in the Village, and none near us. We found a larger place on the Upper West Side as spring moved into summer and the ghettos in half a hundred cities exploded into flames and rioting. People started not to look at us. Oh, we’d catch eyes now and again, but more often people quickly looked away, pretending great interest in another kind of scenery.
“Well,” Mr. Storto said. “I don’t know about up there. In the Village, you always safe, always comfortable—you know what I mean, uh?”
“More space for the baby, Mr. Storto,” I said.
“I know, I know. But you gotta come back and see me and bring Glenn, okay? A fine boy. Now maybe another one?”
“You will come and see us, won’t you?” Allis asked Mr. Storto.
He had provided us with excellent references that in part (together with a push from a city agency) secured our new apartment. The landlord had not done handsprings when we signed the lease.
“Sure, I’ll come,” Mr. Storto said. “Sure.”
“We’d like that,” Allis said.
When we were alone, sitting among the packed cartons, thinking of my, our, years in Mr. Storto’s building, I said, “It’s just too much!”
“What?” Allis was smiling. She smiled a lot now. “What’s too much?”
“Look at it. Christ! A baby, a new apartment, and Glenn goes to college this fall.”
Her smile widened. “Isn’t it great? And another book to be published. Fantastic.”
In our new building the nonlook became look again—and sometimes stares. Even the nattily uniformed Negro and Puerto Rican elevator men seemed uneasy with me. (Who is this nigger?) There were no other black tenants in the building. But there had been no others in Mr. Storto’s, either. Perhaps the difference rested in the transitory nature of much of the Village, which was for the young, mainly, and the brazenly artistic.
In the building we saw few young people. Instead, there was a solid sense of middle-agedness. The men wore suits; the women, dresses. Although Allis and I were not kids, we felt ourselves to be outside the world represented by that brown brick structure of fifteen stories and the people who lived in it.
Mornings there meant a concerted rush for the elevators, which Allis joined resignedly. After, housewives shopped and, standing close to each other, gossiped in the carpeted lobby or carried their books or magazines to the laundry room. The place was middle class and comfortably close enough to the Park to give the tenants an identification with those who did live on, not just off, Central Park West. And there was the canopy, with the address on the front and sides, and the taxi-light signal.
Sitting in the freshly painted, newly furnished apartment, with its spacious living and dining room, its eat-in kitchen, walk-in closets and two baths and bedrooms, its partial view of the Park from a certain angle, we decided that we liked it.
“But,” I said, “I feel as though I’ve moved into another part of my life.”
“Is that bad, honey?”
“I just don’t know if it’s good or bad.”
“Now there’s room for Glenn. And we do have to think of our child.” Then she said, “We don’t have that much time, you know.” More cheerily: “Besides, man does not live by typewriter alone—”
“Never wanted to.”
“Typewriter and sex alone?”
“But why not, gorgeous?”
“Because you really want more.”
This she said with finality, and I had to think about it. At question was not only the racial “twoness” that Du Bois wrote of; it was also the twoness of wanting things, relationships, while being fearful that they could be lost; it was the question of being warrior-ready for situations that were historically always threatening (though that posture had done no good on Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue), but desperately wanting a peace that seemed determined never to arrive; the question of being poised to die, yet eager to live.
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.” I wanted off the knife edge. Yet I did not wish to be like those Southern tribes, believing that the world was as civilized as I was; I did not wish to be caught admiring my Pyramids and temples, my herds, flocks and fields, when the Northern tribes swept down again, as they always had, to decimate the civilization I’d built within myself.
Our hands met in the middle of the bed; we intertwined our fingers. We slept that way every night.
“Man, I was really gone. I flew.”
“I wish I could have been there.”
“Me, too,” he said quietly.
Glenn and I were sitting in the other bedroom, which he was using this trip. I was holding a preparty drink—we were having our housewarming party, and the apartment was smelling faintly of the Joy Allis had put on after her bath.
(Joy! Alegría! Joie! Gioia! = Monica = my child;
that child = Glenn = child = child unknown = Monica =
Joy = Allis.)
His look was shaded, but it accused. He was seventeen now and would be off to Yellow Springs in September. Where did it go?
“I’m sorry, truly sorry,” I said. He would not be running track nor playing basketball at Antioch.
“Really, Dad, you don’t mind my not playing, do you?”
“No, of course not. Why should I?”
“Because you played. Mom told me.”
“Not in college, my man. Anyway, so what?”
“I thought—”
“Hell, no. They’re games. Kids play them. Some people just never grow up. You did, I think. But I am sorry I never saw you in a game or running the eight-eighty. You must’ve been pretty good, judging from the clips your mother sent.”
“Well, I wasn’t the worst. Dad?”
“Huh?”
“Did your father ever watch you play?”
“A couple of times. I didn’t especially want him to.” I slapped his back. “I wasn’t as good as you.”
“What did you do together?”
Ah, Glenn, I thought. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Are you the court? Then I ask for mercy. I am repentant—but only because you may have been unhappy. I said to him, “Nothing much—”
I followed his eyes to the door into w
hich Allis was leaning. God, I thought, she is really fine!
“Okay in here?” she asked.
“Sure, why wouldn’t it be?”
“I dunno. Sounded low and serious. Like the room, Glenn?”
He smiled and stretched back on the bed. “It’s great, Allis. I like it fine.” Allis came over and bent and straightened his tie, then stood back and studied it critically.
“Nice tie. You look so much like your father … Are you seeing—anybody?”
Glenn looked at me as if I should decipher what she meant. “You mean, dating?”
“Yeah. They still call it that?”
“That’s what we call it. Uh, I was dating a couple of girls—”
“A couple?” Allis teased. “At the same time?”
“Not quite,” Glenn said, uneasy.
“We’re very proud of you, Glenn,” Allis said. “You’ve done well in school and now you’re off to the big leagues—college.”
“The what?” I said.
She shrugged, and said, “You know, college, the big leagues after high school, right? That’s all I meant. So it isn’t the big leagues. Fire me.”
“I won’t fire you, but I’ll make you a malted. Everything ready?”
“As ready as they’ll ever be, kid.”
“This your first grownie party?” I asked him when she’d left.
“Yeah. We don’t have parties at home.”
“Oh. Catherine tells me she’s thinking of getting married. He a nice guy?”
“He’s okay.”
“Yeah.” We sat listening to Allis move plates and pans around in the kitchen. I really wanted to tell Glenn about his brother or his sister, but I knew I couldn’t, not then.
I had of course written to Señor Jones about Monica, a polite, interested letter that never mentioned my marriage. For I knew that I was important only so long as he thought me eligible to become his son-in-law. Yes, he responded, he was most glad to be advised of my change of address in case he heard from his daughter, though he did not expect to. But one never knows, no es verdad? So. I couldn’t tell Glenn because I could relate only the beginning of things, not the end, and fathers do owe to their sons at least the direction in which the road is going.
Later he would understand.
I said, “Listen, kid. I’m really glad that you and Allis get along so well.”
“She’s okay, Dad. Can I tell you something, though?”
“Sure,” I said, but I was not so sure I wanted to hear it. “What is it?”
“I told Mom how nice she was and she’s really glad everything’s worked out between us.” He wrinkled his nose. “She said she didn’t know why it was, though, that every time a black man became famous, he married a white woman.”
“Catherine said that? Well, come on. I wasn’t famous then, I’m not famous now—”
“She thought so, Dad. Anyway, I told her that was not the way it was.”
“Hasn’t been easy for you, has it?”
He grinned. “It sure has been interesting, though.”
I thought Alex Samuels was handing me a housewarming gift, but before I could say thanks he said, “From Paul. Copy of his manuscript and boy is it first-rate, absolutely first-rate. There’s a letter for you with the copy.”
He relayed all this with a great smile that made me think of an agent who already had in his pocket excellent contracts for a paperback sale and BOMC. Such enthusiasm never greeted my own work; he always accepted it with the resignation of one about to do the stations of the cross on his knees.
“This is the book he got the Goog for?”
“This?” He pounded a stiff finger against the package. He sneered. “Naw. He dropped that. It was a piece of shit, anyway.”
His eyes were skipping around the room, now filled with people from Cumer, Slate and Finch; the others were, in one way or another, associated with books and writing. “Hummm, Amos,” he said. “He’s given up wooing you, I guess.”
“He’s still my friend.”
“I’ll say hello to him.”
Alex went before I could give him a drink. I dropped Paul’s manuscript in the bedroom and returned. Glenn glanced from the records he was playing for us and smiled. I winked at him and wondered why it was that book-people parties almost never included music. They just stood and talked, talked, talked.
Two people from C S & F involved me in their conversation. Their drinks were in good shape, so there was no immediate chance to escape for refills. The topic was inevitable, coming to rest on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, the rebellions of that moment, LBJ’s War on Poverty.
And what did I think of Allis’ promotion to account executive? She was great, just great. Nice place we had here. My son seemed like a helluva bright kid. Was I working on another book? Was one ready to come out? Interesting. Did we miss living in the Village? Interesting friends we had. Mostly literary people? Allis was one bright girl. Bright.
They had promoted her with great speed after we were married. “Douglass,” Allis had said, “is not nearly as Jewish as Greenberg. Darling, we really must confound the hell out of them.”
“Yeah. If they only knew that Douglass even with one s means dark or black in Gaelic. They can’t win, babe, can’t win.”
MIDDLES
1
The Hyksos Journals came out, surrounded by cautious though favorable reviews. By that time I had read the complete manuscript of Paul’s The Burnt Offering and was waiting for his arrival back in New York.
“We have much to talk about, man,” he’d said in his letter, and “if the book didn’t explain enough,” he would explain in person.
Hummm, I thought.
Jeremy Poode, who did an interview with me over a long lunch (his first and last with a black writer), had already heard of Paul’s book and was eagerly looking forward to reading it. Poode and I had never been very friendly, but our conversations when with other people were bright, punchy. We were considered to be close. Now there was more distance between us than ever. He had married and was living in Short Hills. No one knew his wife. At lunch Poode did not talk of Selena, nor did I. I had received a gracious note from her, admiring The Hyksos Journals (except for the section where black men made love to white women). Poode had somehow kept up with my marriage and travels and knew Mark was doing very well (his emphasis) in television.
“How,” he asked, “would you compare yourself to people like Wright, Whittington, Huysmans?”
“We’re all black.”
“I mean—”
“There was something else you’re getting to?”
His vaguely blue—sort of purple, rather—eyes remained steady. His pen, angled above his pad, was motionless. Now he leaned back, glanced around a moment. “Strange title. Does it mean what I think it means?”
“I dunno. What’s it mean to you?”
“The Shepherd Kings. Invasion of Egypt, about two thousand B.C.”
“That’s one theory, Jeremy. But I prefer the one that holds that the Hyksos were a cult composed of dissident Egyptians—though naturalized—and that there was no physical invasion from regions distant from Egypt. The revolt came from within or from the slums just outside.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes, of course.” He wrote carefully.
I studied him. Why, this man, I thought, could destroy me with a sentence, a word, even a mark!—? ( ).
When he looked up I said, “We shouldn’t be doing this to each other, Jeremy.”
“What are we doing to each other, Cate?”
“Let’s put it this way: you’re mostly doing it to me.”
“What?”
But I had seen it in his eyes, his very demeanor.
“Look, Cate, let’s get back to the book, okay? Now, are you saying that when—if is a better word—this society falters, starts to unravel, it will be because of forces from inside rather than outside?”
“Yes.”
“And that the Negro problem will be at the core of
it all?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “Not Huysmans’ line at all.”
“No.”
This was the first of many interviews I would have and they all would be similar.
The interviewers, with their pads, pens and desperately neutral glances, always asked about other black writers, as though they were the only writers you had ever met, read or studied. They ignored the fact that you must have had to study their writers, since works by nonwhite writers rarely, if ever, found their way into textbooks.
(We will for now forget those periods of the pre-Harlem Renaissance, the Renaissance itself, and Renaissance II, which are traceable to trouble on the plantations and later in the streets.)
The interviewers judged all writings without hesitation, suspending, however, literary judgment only in the case of nonwhite writers, because the interviewers (and critics and reviewers—often one and the same) were so innately positive that literary ingredients could not possibly be present.
They patronized, or tried to. They were snide, or tried to be. They were overtly disdainful of nearly every story you related because they were still secretly surprised that you could hang a sentence together at all and compose narrative and dialogue. Like pecking birds, they tapped at the surface of things; beneath that surface, vast gaps were being closed to within percentage points, even according to their rules. So they insisted that the novel be written so that they could understand it, the way they understand rock’s emphasized beat, the way they could not understand the subtleties of a Thelonious Monk; they forgot, if they ever knew, that the novel is novel and therefore often requires decoding, which they do very well when the writers are white. They wrote for each other. The author under discussion was often secondary. The literary community, though powerful, was really small and quite incestuous. If then they wrote badly or viciously about an author who was black, they knew in advance that that author or his agent or publisher probably would not return to haunt them. For what real contacts did the author have? Whom did he or she know? Therefore they turned to nonwhite authors with a distinct sense of relief, for surely we were a people without leverage, familiar with few power brokers in the business who would be willing to go to the wall for us. These interviewers, critics and reviewers, by their acts and attitudes, acknowledged the war. They regarded almost every work by a nonwhite author as a political action. They were almost correct (because a few of those works could not by any unwinding of the imagination be so considered), but failed to understand the politics—or, conversely, understood them perfectly. They did seem to comprehend, along with some like-minded editors, that they were functionaries of the cultural mechanisms of the West, a gemot whose verdicts became, if not the law, the practice. How could they then allow certain other people into their ranks on other than a temporary / token basis? To be sure, they admired Latin writers—but those in Latin, not North, America; they admired black writers, but many of those were from Africa and, in the case of Afro-Americans, dead; from the Caribbean they much adored, obversely, the minority rather than the majority writers, those who deplored, laughed at or debased the island societies of which they were part; they exulted when good works on the Indian experience appeared, though not those written by the Amer-Indian himself, and they preferred Asian female writers to all like John Okada. And because they were a club, they frequently relegated to our ranks a few of their own.
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