!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  It is a photograph, wrapped in tissue, of Monica, a dark-skinned pretty little girl with a whimsical smile, a larger, more manly version of Federico García Lorca Jones, looking very much like his grandfather—I see that instantly—me between boyhood and puberty. Monica’s face has a softness now; I recall it being sharp with the edges of hunger and desperation when we first met, the eyes sad and heavy …

  I rush to the desk and ask the manager who had left the photograph. He tells me that a chauffeur, in uniform, driving a Mercedes-Benz, brought it. He glances at the photo, takes it, studies it and hands it back. He tells me that she is the wife of the representative from Fernando Po. He does not recall her name. She does charity work and is considered to be a person of the highest character.

  I return to my seat and stare at the photo. I have a mischievous look that is not quite concealed by the smile about to be formed. Words come, lightly, rushing through my consciousness the way a chipmunk, looking like a leaf blown against the wind, runs across a road: You, as you pass, your self must sow …

  Monica has a slightly haughty look to her. The camera has caught the glint of jewelry in her ears and about her neck. Her hands, placed casually upon the shoulders of the boys beside her—the girl is in front of her, centered—display diamonds and a wedding band.

  In the white shirt, tie and jacket, I am reflecting the tradition of the middle-class European schoolboy. My eyes beam with light; in them I see that all things are possible, that there is nothing wan or defeated in them. My head booms with the refrain: They made it! Yes! It is all there, the symbols, and in the faces, the attitudes of their bodies. I feel like crying. I must do something not to cry. I flutter the photo, and as it waves up and down I see writing on the back. I turn it over and read: “Federico is a good student at school. Alejo Cato is already a little poet! The other is Teresa. Good luck, Cato! Monica Donoso.”

  I go to a phone to call my editor at Amaya. I ask him to get their address and send it to me, and in the privacy of the booth I cry.

  14

  “Let go! Let go!” Mack screamed. He twisted around. “I can do it, Daddy; let go!”

  He had grown into an active, lusty, demanding boy. I had removed the training wheels from his bike at his insistence. Why not let him finish what he thought he could do? The bike was, after all, a birthday present.

  “Okay!” I yelled. Allis trotted anxiously at my side.

  “Oh!” she said.

  I scampered a few worried paces after Mack and stopped; Allis bumped into me. She grabbed my arm and we watched him weaving, shifting his balance, until at last he straightened, pumped hard and was off, a great dazzling smile on his face. Not much more in life would be so clear-cut a triumph, I thought. Enjoy, kid, enjoy. That’s where the past few years had gone, really. Never mind the work, the college, tracking Glenn’s progress, the trips. The time was measured from Mack’s last diaper full of shit to his riding away from us on a two-wheeler his first time on it. He was five.

  Allis was saying, “Look at him! He’s done it!”

  We smiled. Mackland Douglass had just gained his second out-of-home victory. The first was that he took to nursery school without any problem.

  We walked to a bench where we could sit and watch. It was mild for November, and Central Park had filled with people. They sat on the edges of the benches, looked warily around and seemed to be relieved when the cops came by. They complained (one could overhear them as they sat on other benches) about the high prices at Foodtown or the A & P, or how they always got their gas tanks filled in New Jersey before returning to the city after being away.

  “They’re right,” Allis said. “Things are changing.”

  She had a way of sitting with a book or a magazine while at the same time drinking in all the conversations that flowed about her. “It’s changed an awful lot since we moved up here.”

  “It’s been five years,” I said.

  Glenn had graduated and was going to Iowa. His friend Jed had quit school in his junior year to take advantage of the hardship draft and was now in his second year with the Lakers—living, Glenn said, like a Hollywood star. Glenn had visited him over part of the summer, and that had set him to work on a novel about Jed, which he was calling Jumper.

  Paul’s novel Isaiah’s Odyssey was published with tremendous fanfare. There were ads for it all over the place. Publishers Weekly had called it “a sure bet for the National Book Award.” Paul’s photo was on the cover of Passages and Newsweek, and there was a big story in Time. Selena Merritt did a page one review for Jeremy Poode’s paper, while Poode himself did an inside interview. Shelly Popper also ran a page one review by Colin McInnes, who’d done The City of Spades, and Mark Medowitz returned to writing long enough to do a centerfold portrait of Paul in the Village Voice, and we got up early one morning to catch Paul on the “Today” show with Barbara Walters. She interviewed him for thirteen minutes. I counted, because, with two other black writers, I’d been on her show for nine minutes.

  (You are picked up very early by a considerate chauffeur, who is dressed in a black suit, tie and cap and a white shirt, and are driven in a sleek limo to the RCA Building on Forty-ninth Street, where everyone appears to be waiting anxiously for you, and you are settled in an anteroom with a TV monitor and given coffee and Danish or juice and slipped the release forms to sign, and then they rush you into a studio, where Walters—with someone else—surrounded by cameras, sound men and directors, floor managers and assorted assistants, rush together from one corner of the studio to another, doing a commercial here, updating the news there, and finally, like a small, panting, sweating herd, wired and emitting light, they settle before you, and Walters’ first question is about still another black writer who isn’t even there.)

  I had, of course, received a copy of the novel and a long letter from Paul, explaining why he’d written it and what he’d tried to do with it. There was a blurb on the jacket by John Greenleaf Whittington. For Isaiah was a black man. After all, Stowe had done it, and Melville and Van Vechten and Stein and Bellow and Mailer and Malamud and Updike and Holmes and Styron.

  It seemed to be de rigueur for many American writers. It was rather like the old Egyptians telling the rest of Africa’s story or the Greeks telling the Egyptians’ story or the Romans telling the Greeks’ story, etc. No one seemed to put much credence in the teller who told his own tale. Maybe for Paul and the others there was no other story worth telling. Anyway, he did win the National Book Award with Isaiah.

  Now there was Paul, who after all this time of knowing Leonard and knowing me, had missed our essences, capturing instead, unlike some of the others, the Mau-Mau, the Panther, the militant, the revolutionary, the supercock, without providing him, Isaiah, with the motivation, the reason, for being the way he was; without seeing himself in the portrait with Isaiah the way we all were, just as we all move through the same atmosphere, loving and hating and making love the same way. I had not known until I finished the novel to how great an extent a part of my life had been given over subconsciously to teaching Paul—this time I was the master and he the pupil—an upper-level course in the Real World of Race. Isaiah was a poet, based partly on Leonard, partly on me. (I could not have been wrong.) He rode the Freedom Buses into beatings; he marched with King and had many discussions with him about racism. As he is reciting Sterling Brown’s Strong Men to a group of civil rights workers on the Tougaloo College campus in Mississippi, he’s shot dead by the White Citizens Council. A roaming poet called to the movement by the “essential rightness” of it, Isaiah has a number of affairs and whispers to his women while making love to them: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” (Isaiah 11:1)

  As Paul’s private teacher-tutor-friend, I had failed. Or he had been a poor or unwilling student, or there had been some kind of barrier between our communication.

  It was frankly difficult not to be envious. White writers were always running off to Afr
ica, literally and fictionally, to mine for gold. My novels, Circles Round Saturn and The War Has Already Begun, hadn’t even gone into paperback editions, and this was in a time when a good fart could bring fifty biggies without too much trouble.*

  We didn’t have a chance to talk after his book came out. He was doing a lot of traveling and they were thinking of moving and their two kids kept them busy.

  But quite by chance we did meet, at Le Périgord. I was dining with Maxine Culp, who once again was trying to describe for me the “new novel,” since, she intimated, it was becoming harder to sell my work. There was a trend riding down on New York, she said. “Books have to be like television shows. They’ve got to have the same format.”

  “You mean ninety-six minutes of more or less real stuff and twenty-four minutes for commercials for a two-hour show?”

  “Exactly. Hard spots and soft spots. Television has fouled up peoples’ attention spans. And the characters can’t be subtle; they’ve gotta be up front and glamorous and tough and, yes, one-dimensional. That’s just the way it’s getting to be, Cate. No—thinking. Cliché, if you will. The good guy, riding high, has a fall. Hell, we know he’s going to survive, but how? What new agonies can you come up with to make the eventual triumph all the sweeter?”

  “Shit.”

  Maxine shrugged. “What can I tell you, babes?”

  But I was watching a small, jovial bunch pushing into the restaurant, stringing out around a corner, where a large table bore a RESERVED card. Alex Samuels, Bob Kass (beardless, puffy pink, in from Hollywood, I guessed), Mark Medowitz, Jeremy Poode (I’d figured that the two fine ladies were for Bob and Mark; Alex traveled alone), and Selena Merritt and Paul and Betsy.

  “Anyway,” Maxine said, “I don’t like the way they’re handling you over at Twentieth Century Forum—” She turned to see what I was watching. Slowly she turned back to me and picked up her drink and sipped it. I felt somehow the way I had when as a kid I heard about a party to which I hadn’t been invited.

  “Celebration,” I said.

  “Must be that Book-of-the-Month Club deal,” Maxine said.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Paul got a bundle. They’ve spotted you,” she said, lowering her head, “and they’re on the way over.”

  “Cate!” Betsy was bent over the table, kissing me. Behind me, Paul had gripped my shoulders. “How you doin’, man? Guess who’s in town? Kass! Remember Bob Kass?”

  Grinning, Kass extended his hand. “Cate, it’s good to see you again. You’ve been writing up a storm, man.”

  Selena, Poode, Alex Samuels, the girls, gathered around, too, and we chatted quickly, effusively, embraced, shook hands, introduced around. Paul said, “Why don’t you two join us?”

  “Love to,” I said, “but Glenn’s coming in and I’ve got to get back.”

  “It’d be nice,” Paul said, “if you could.” The others drifted back to their table. He looked uncomfortable standing. He said almost in apology, “Shit, Cate. I’m lucky.”

  “Aw, no,” I said.

  “Yeah. You know it. We’ll talk soon, okay? Maxine, take care.”

  When he’d gone, Maxine said, “Is Glenn coming in?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Neither did Paul.”

  We never saw each other again.

  * Circles was about the reaction on Earth to a visit from beyond the deep space of Saturn by black people who lived out there. The War was about the unofficial declaration by the unofficial National Police Force that the random violence in large U.S. cities, in which substantial numbers of young black people were involved, was really a prelude to The Race War predicted by Ronald Segal in 1967.

  15

  “We’d better get going,” Allis said. She’d just glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a lot to do before tonight and you have to leave early.”

  We were attending the annual awards dinner of the Center for Black Arts and Letters. Tonight we were going to award posthumously the CBAL literary prize to George Jackson, whose killing on the Coast had sparked the Attica rebellion.

  The literary committee, of which I was chairman, two weeks ago had unanimously voted to make the award for Jackson’s Soledad Brothers. Last week I’d put two days back to back and had taken off for Amos’ place in the country to rinse out my head. I was climbing a steep trail, breathing hard but exulting in the vast woodland silence, when suddenly a man stepped out of a clump of white firs just ahead of me. He had moved so quickly and lightly that for a moment I thought I had imagined him. He wore a uniform and there was a badge on his jacket. I didn’t know the area well and wondered how he’d got there without coming up the trail I was on.

  “Are you Mr. Cato Douglass?”

  “Yeah,” I said, abruptly aware of the isolation in which we stood studying each other. What had I done? Why were they here in the emptiness of Amos’ woods? My family! I thought. But I’d called Allis only an hour ago, before starting up. Not that, then. I watched his hands. Shit, if he went for his piece, I’d go for mine. A Western shoot-out on an Eastern mountain. Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin King, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, among dozens more, and now me. Why? What had I written in my books or said in my classes (he was there because of that, wasn’t he?) that made them dispatch a hit man to get me?

  “I’m Deputy Sheriff Castle. I’ve got an urgent message for you from Dr. Jasper Mansfield.”

  Mansfield was the director of the Coalition for the Development of Western Institutions.

  “Yeah?” I said. He was, like me, wondering about the mechanism of events that had sent him into the woods to find me. He took a folded paper out of his pocket and gave it to me and started back into the woods.

  “That’s all?” I moved a couple of steps after him. I could see the trail he’d used.

  “Yessir,” he said, without turning back.

  I sat down on an outcropping of rock and listened to my heart banging away. My hands were shaking. I opened the paper.

  Vigorously oppose granting Jackson CBAL lit award. Will cease funding soonest if done. Board directors adamant. Call soonest. Mansfield.

  Word of the committee’s action had got to Mansfield, who had then called our president, who then had called my home minutes after I’d called Allis. The president called Mansfield back and Mansfield had utilized his own communications system—the county sheriff’s office.

  Now it was early evening. Mack lay before the television set, basking in his achievement. Allis was getting party-pretty and I was leaving for a meeting with the literary committee, the president and the officers of CBAL. It was showdown time.

  We gathered, gowned and tuxedoed, in a private room down the hall from the grand ballroom of the hotel we’d hired. Almost never before in history had so many black artists come together for so singular a purpose—to honor our own, who had been chosen by us, not others, and to speak our words of praise and encouragement. From the start some had felt it to be a mistake to accept any help from whites, fearful that just what was happening would have to happen. Others recited the dreary history of previous failures, mainly for financial reasons, of attempts to form similar organizations. We had all cited the lists of other ethnic groups that had managed to cohere about the issues that concerned them—or had seemed to.

  The president and the officers appeared. The president was a preacher. It was rumored that he wished to use his position with CBAL to secure for himself a position as U.S. ambassador to an African country. Any African country.

  “Jackson gets it,” I said.

  “Jackson,” Mae Smithers said. She wrote children’s books. “We don’t have any problems with that at all.”

  The other committee members said, “Jackson.”

  The president rolled his eyes upward and sat down heavily. He closed his eyes and then opened them. “I understand where you all are coming from,” he said. “But, if CDWI pulls out, we’re dead. As Jackson is now. What’s the goddamn point you’re maki
ng?”

  One of the officers said, “He was just a small-time punk who got caught and became a folk hero. The kind of man none of you would want in your house.”

  “Jackson,” we said.

  “We’ve got a responsibility to all those other black folk who need encouragement and help, to those nobody ever cared about but us. Think of them. Jackson’s dead.”

  “As long as we think we need their money, they’ll pull the strings,” Mae Smithers said. “That’s what money’s all about. Didn’t we know that? If we void Jackson this year the way they want, who will they void next year or the next? When do we start saying no?”

  The president snorted. “When you’re ready to sacrifice and spend your own money—no! no!—I don’t want to hear that old refrain: black people don’t have any money.” He leaned forward. “You do what you have to with what you got.” He emphasized every word as if reciting poetry set with iambic pentameter.

  “Jackson.” The name seemed now to embody considerations of the most imaginable range.

  Whittington slipped in and took a seat.

  “You know what Jackson would say if he could,” one of the officers said. “Outslick the pigs. Use them, use their money—”

  “That’s what you say,” one of the committee members said. There was laughing. “Jackson knew that everything carried taint.”

  Stung and exasperated, the president got up, his spare, tall body tightened with anger. “You revolutionary niggers have sure fucked up this gig!”

  There was one frightening second of silence in which we must have pondered whether what we had done was right or wrong. I started to say something, but Whittington had leaped to his feet. “Yeah? Well, maybe it needs some fucking up. And maybe we will not be together for the next five hundred years; it may take us that long to learn, but goddamn it, Lem, we’re going to give that award to Jackson’s mother, to hell with you and CDWI. Attica’s happened out there. Maybe he was a crook, but he wrote something that touches us all, black and white. And if white people don’t recognize that, we certainly must. They killed him like a dog, just the way they can kill any one of us any time they want. Our vote says no; no, they aren’t going to do that anymore. Jackson.”