!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  So, no, nothing beyond temporary / token (beyond the meager exceptions), because we just might hang around long enough to review the works of white authors. God! Something startling might be written (and perhaps even published); some new (or possibly old, unchanged) truth might be perceived under black light, as Diop peeped the hole card of several generations of Egyptologists; some carefully arranged literary status might be imperiled (but, surely, only briefly).

  They went to very great lengths to maintain the cultural mechanisms in good order. They caucasized Pushkin, who fathered the Russian language through poetry, plays and fiction. Oooo! they skim over his antecedents as rapidly as they do Dumas’s or Colette’s. They suggested that Chesnutt not use his photograph on his book jackets, and perhaps the same suggestion was made to Frank Yerby. They fucked up their own rules on a regular basis: black literature one decade was that literature written by people who were black; the next decade it also included nonblack authors writing on black themes; it was zit! and then zat! Now you see it, now you don’t. And even if you did see it and call the hand, you were bitter, self-serving, overcome with the effects of racism, without sensibilities.

  We all knew this and talked about it among ourselves, compared idiocies and idiots, when we could gather without the hostility such knowledge engenders. Yet none of us dared to say it aloud or to write it because we were each hopeful that we might be the one next in line to pass over the Great Divide into Nigger Heaven, joining Whittington and Huysmans.

  And they knew it, too.

  Poode’s interview, when printed, was bland and circumspectly bigoted in that cozy New York manner, filled with fleeting asides and throwaway lines. It ran beside the review, whose lead read: “Watch out, John Greenleaf Whittington, move over, Elliot Huysmans—here comes Cato Caldwell Douglass!”

  It was what they called a “selling” review, and it was enough to give the reviewers on the other side of the Hudson their cue not to be terribly nasty to me. For Poode’s publication established the line to be followed, and, indeed, with one or two marshmallowy challenges from competing publications, the line tended to be obeyed. Poode’s interview mentioned that my wife was white, as though that were some mitigating or castigating factor that explained or excused, I don’t know what.

  (When some white personality’s wife is black, somehow that escapes attention.)

  And afterward, curiously, congratulations began to arrive over the phone and by mail, several of which contained the review / interview. Even the note from Sandra Queensbury, written in aquamarine Super Quink Ink, began: “Congrats, I think, Cato. I hear Ike Plunkett is back in town. Have you heard from him?”

  There it was. A tune piped, however dissonantly, in the insular melodies of New York set the lemmings in motion from one end of the cultural apparatus to the next, pulling along the media in a gigue to which most authors respond with palpable relief.

  Oh, I danced a few numbers, danced my ass off, but I didn’t stay for the whole ball, gripped by the sense that, with two or three exceptions, it was the kind of bullshit I could now do without, though it would have been heady stuff had I been twenty-five.

  Poode’s interview was followed by a rash of invitations also, to parties and places, most of which we did not accept. (Without discussion we had agreed that we would not serve as a token mixed couple. A fat, ugly, little man, said to be brilliant, had shocked the liberal literary community, of which he was once a member, by writing, among other things, that the sight of mixed couples stirred him to disgusting prurience.

  There were requests to read or lecture at colleges; these had a certain appeal. There would be bright students, liberal professors, teachers like Bark; there would be acres of soft-swelling greensward upon which would sit concrete and brick copies of the architecture of the Golden Age of Greece.

  Was I to realize then how the reading circuit would expand until it would become a firm adjunct to the writing itself, or how it would change essentially private people into atrocious actors and some into drunks quite unable to prevent themselves from puking over podiums, or transform them into cocksmen and cockswomen and hapless victims of logorrhea?

  Could I have suspected that some of those writers who would invite me to read at their schools would, in return, expect invitations from my school when I began to teach—the old QPQ? Who would warn me of grand fees, parts of which were expected to be kicked back to the inviter? And who would be so bold as to tell me that I could expect audiences from six hundred to six—more often the latter—until I published another novel and if the reviews did not maim me?

  Paul’s letter was long, part confession, part apology. It was strange, coming as it did after the typescript of his novel. We had not been in touch for about three years until that arrived. As I had gone to Spain to clear my perspectives, so he had left New York to order his. I recognized that, but I was vaguely troubled that my presence and work had made him uncomfortable enough to leave the city. His discomfort, however, made me aware of an unspecific capacity vested in my just being what I was.

  Paul’s was the kind of letter I knew he’d made a carbon of (as I would have done), one destined for posterity, when his biographers got to work piecing together his life. The letter was also designed to head off any lengthy discussion of the subject that had caused it to be written. (That would not work!) All he said in the letter he had said more eloquently in his book. For then I was but one of his audience, not as, with his letter, the audience, who brought to the work more knowledge of the book’s sources and nuances than would a mass of readers.

  I had never supposed that the bigotry in the United States was devastating enough to make a Jew want to pass forever as a Gentile. I had known Jews who changed names to beat the medical and law school quotas, but they’d not changed their religion. One could understand, even envy, that ability to use the great American “asset.” For black people there were no assets, no matter how much one related to Indian relatives or to the occasional white sheep who showed up in the family photogravures.

  This, though, was different. I, and I suppose others, had been inconvenienced, misled, lied to, so that Paul’s story might possess the shape of truth. Now here he was with the real truth, whole and nothing but. Was there a point in continuing a friendship founded on such shifting sand? I could have let it go in Spain, but hadn’t; not even on my return, though I took my time renewing it. And he could have when he left the city, but hadn’t. We were two disparate elements of the whole, sharing the public experiences, jealously guarding the private. There had been a spill-out; balances had been subtly altered. We were like two kids on a teeter board: if one jumped off, the other plummeted down.

  We met, as he had requested over the phone, for dinner in the Village. He seemed relaxed, cool in a guarded way, and slightly bemused as we embraced.

  He stepped back, still gripping my shoulders, and studied me, the way an older brother might regard the younger. “It’s good to see you, Cate. So solid. So sure of yourself—”

  “Rock of ages,” I said. “The tree planted by the water.”

  He laughed.

  We sat down and ordered drinks.

  “How’s Allis?”

  I wondered if he was supposing that she was overjoyed at the news that he was really Jewish. “She’s good,” I said. “Sends love. She’s pregnant. November.”

  “Oh, yeah! Marvelous, just marvelous!”

  I smiled in spite of myself.

  “You got anything going for you in the way of women, man?”

  “A Betsy.”

  “A what?”

  “Woman named Betsy. Looks like this is it.”

  “Great,” I said. “Fantastic. She from here?”

  “No. Chicago. And you know, man, strange. After I’ve gone through all these changes, she’s not even Jewish.”

  I said, “Well …”

  “You liked the book?”

  As I said, “Yes, it’s a fine book, Paul,” I flashed on Walter Pidgeon saying that to
Van Johnson in a film made, I think, from something Fitzgerald wrote. “I mean, it was really good.”

  “I’m glad. That was important to me. I think Alex’ll do well by it.”

  “I think he will, too.”

  “I liked The Hyksos Journals,” he said. “Apparently, so did everyone else.”

  “But they didn’t understand the fucking thing.”

  He said gently, “They never do, but does it matter? You know what you did.”

  “I know, yes, but it would be nice to know that out there, tapping through the darkness, some others knew too.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. By the way, man. You know that whole Hyksos business, I mean the historical occurrence, is extremely anti-Semitic.”

  I remained motionless over my food for a moment, then said, “I’ve read the pros and cons—Philo, Josephus.” I decided to change the subject. Who needed this right away? “Too bad about Leonard.”

  “Yeah, but I knew it would go something like that.”

  “He seems to be doing better dead than when he was alive,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s classic. But I want mine now, don’t you?”

  “I’m with you, man.” We laughed brittle little laughs, and I said, “Listen, Paul. Mark suspected all along. About you, I mean. That business with the co-ops.”

  Fright tracked quickly across his face and vanished. He ate silently, watching me. “He said he would have remembered you. That shit you put us through with your father—that was pretty fucking unnecessary—”

  “You met my father,” he said in an unnaturally quiet voice.

  “When!” I challenged him. “When the hell did I ever meet your father?”

  “The day you moved to New York. The day Janice left. You must have run into my father on the stairs. He stamped out angry because, even though I was rid of the shiksa, I wouldn’t claim my heritage. He left one second and you came in the next. He’s a rabbi.”

  I recalled that hot day, painting his apartment, and I sighed. “So, now. What does it all mean, Paul? I mean, what’s changed?”

  “I guess what’s changed is that I’m no longer ashamed of or afraid of being a Jew.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know, loud, pushy, money-grubbing—all the stereotypes.” He studied me. “And the fear. I belong to a people whose ass has been kicked forever. We let the Germans destroy us, but you know, they were only mopping up for the rest of Europe—”

  A reversal, I was thinking. Saul / Paul, at first a persecutor of Christians, then his trip to Damascus, a vision on the road, and then the ministry (with Simeon called Niger and the rest at Antioch) and dropping the name Saul and becoming Paul, who later would vanish somewhere in Spain. I was wondering, too, why it was that Jews suffered so much in temperate zones and not nearly so much in the subtropics.

  “—we ate shit for breakfast, lunch and dinner and, listen, Cate, I wanted no part of it. Other kids played ball on Saturdays; not us. I tried to hide my yarmulka; our parents spoke Yiddish and English with an accent. Our lives were twice encircled: Is it good for the Jews and is it bad for the Jews—”

  Priests and cardinals and popes wore yarmulkas, I thought, and other people also wondered if events were good or bad for them.

  “—in the army I could press the trigger of my M-1 and the people in my sights died—”

  “I know the feeling,” I said, remembering it, the mixture of elation, of awe, of power, all overriding, dominating, just subjugating a quick sense of grief brought on by the broken commandment.

  “I know you do,” he said sharply.

  As he talked on, now loudly, now intently, voice just above a whisper, I reflected on that ancient and mystical and perhaps even physical bond between the black people and the Jewish people, who were white. Much of that was changing these days, was being obscured, but there persisted among black people in the South an admiration for the Jews that was not based only on spirituals and Bible lessons about the Hebrew children; in other parts of the country, we lashed and lunged at each other like lovers, one of whom is about to depart.

  We knew that had we been in Germany or anywhere in Europe, we would have gone to the ovens as we in our millions had already gone to the sea; they seemed to have always overcome; we were, all over the world, still overcoming in the future imperative.

  He was still talking.

  Maybe, in some very distant time, the people who then lived in Europe perceived the Jews as an ethnocentric group, while they saw themselves as theocentric. (“Africa begins in Spain; Africa begins in Portugal, in Italy, in Greece, in France,” and for the British all the niggers were lined up at Calais.)

  Paul called for cognacs while I thought of Moses, the man called Moses, with his slowness of tongue, strangeness of speech (was it a !click-ing?), which experts claimed was a stutter, and of God changing the color of his hand (aha!) to that as leprous as snow and back again; and the business of Miriam and Zipporah—fables, all fables or, rather, allegories, concealing truths in pieces like puzzles. It all lay shrouded, concealed, and belted like a wondrous woman in simple but fine linen; you know what is beneath: the private mounds and clefts. Micrometers of cloth may separate you, yet you may never know, truly know, what it would be like to be, finally and blissfully, inside that cloth.

  “Negroes don’t have the problem,” Paul was saying. “They know precisely where they stand.”

  He seemed to be waiting for some kind of response. I was thinking that, wherever I had been, meeting a Jew had always been more comfortable than meeting any other kind of person. How old a thing was that, I wondered. To Paul I said, finally, “I’m not so sure what it all means, Paul, to be a Jew. I mean, I’ve read things and heard things, the history, the laws, the customs, all right. Good. But you make it sound as if the color of the sky has changed for you, that somehow pussy is different, that things for the rest of us are somehow—not quite as good. Hey, look, you ain’t been a Jew but for five minutes, as far as I’m concerned. You wanna be Jewish, okay; but you don’t put friends through changes because you have problems with it; you wanna be a goy? That’s okay, too, but no changes. So what’s it mean?”

  His face was draining. He seemed to gather himself. “For one thing, maybe the most important as far as you’re concerned, Jews were never involved in slavery or the slave trade—”

  He stopped short when he saw my expression. Gently, I told myself, gently. I laughed. “Well, we weren’t involved with the ovens. Almost even.” I felt the urge to cradle the side of his face in my hand, and I did. “Paul,” I said. “This is Cato. I remember your anti-Semitism, remember? And here you are, already assigning virtue to yourself. What shit’s this? We had some fun before this religion thing—what’s it to be, race or religion, huh? But before you lay all that Jewish righteousness on me, you check out the Jacob Cohen family, the Salinases and the Mordecais of Charleston; you see who owned the family Langston Hughes came from, the family that Chester Himes came from. No gold medals, man. Sorry.”

  He chuckled softly. “None?”

  “Did you want one?”

  “Guess I just wanted to be what I really am, Cate.”

  “Well, welcome to reality. Drink to that?”

  “You’re on.”

  Perhaps it had been, after all, his “Jewishness” that had formed the basis of our friendship.

  “Listen,” he said, “how’s about the four of us meeting for dinner next week? I’d like you to meet Betsy.”

  “Sure. You did say you were going to get married?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And not Jewish? I figured that was important now.”

  “She’ll convert.”

  “That’ll make it okay?”

  “Sure.”

  I sighed. “I don’t really understand, but what the hell. I’m glad you’re back in town. You’ll do well with the book.”

  We were outside now. “Catch up with you, maybe,” he said. He punched my arm softly. “Joking, man.” But St. Paul
had outpreached the others at Antioch, even Barnabas.

  As I left him I said, “Listen, Paul. Even Negroes bought and sold slaves.” I walked down the quiet streets to Mr. Storto’s. He was leaning against a lamppost. “Ah!” he said. “Mist’ Douglass! How are you? How’s Miss Douglass? Let’s get an ice.”

  We stood talking, licking the ices. I told him the pregnancy was coming along fine. “You know, Mist’ Douglass, that’s the way it should be, not some over here, an’ some over there, an’ this guy, he wants to fight that guy. All bullshit. I’m glad. I bet you glad, too, uh? Say, how’s my Glenn, eh? College? Boy! That time, she flies!”

  He promised to visit, but somehow I knew that he didn’t intend to leave the Village, his turf, yes; something in the way he said it and, more to the point, he hadn’t yet come. He was like a lesser Roman emperor who waited by his streetlight in front of his small palace for people to come and pay him court. We shook hands and then I went home.