Quickly I said, “Whaddaya mean by that?”
She laughed, leaned her head into my chest and laughed some more. “Nothing,” she said. I could see the wrinkles starting, just starting in her neck, and could pick out quite clearly the curled white strands mixed with the dark blond of her hair. I felt a soft, spreading sadness, together with a long, firm pull of pride.
“Put the pad away,” I said.
She looked at me. “Honey, I am a little tired.”
“So am I.”
“I don’t think Mack’s asleep yet.”
“Tough.”
She was smiling when she put the pad on her table and turned to me as she slipped off her gown.
The letter was postmarked Cabinda.
Dear Dad (and Allis and Mack):
It took me four days to get my sea legs and to stop puking in the oatmeal. I’m okay now.
Strange how the sea rather than the land makes you miss people, places and things.
It was curious, passing over the old slave-ship routes. I thought I’d feel something. I didn’t.
The crew’s interesting. From all over the world. A couple of Africans. From where, I am not sure. They grin all the time and say yes to almost everything. The crew ranges from dregs to dreamers. That’s not right. No good seaman could be dregs, at least not at sea. They all want to make money for different reasons, away from the crowd. I guess we’re all loners.
They tell me this is a small tanker; it holds only a million gallons of oil. There are tankers that hold twice as much, built mainly by the Japanese, I’m told.
The smells are the oil, though there’s none in her now, the sea and my cooking. But the air neutralizes them all.
I saw my very first Africans in Africa fishing off the coast of Senegal and again nothing special happened. I thought it would. They waved. We waved back.
What else? I seem to have a lot of ideas kicking around. But I wasn’t going to write anymore, was I? Well …
There’s really not much more to write about. Nobody’s complained about my cooking, but they didn’t out at Yellow Springs, either.
Gotta get a letter off to Maija. More, as they say, later.
Love, G.
“We have always been sailors in my family,” I said to Allis at dinner the night the letter arrived. Maija had received a letter, too, and had joined us. I felt uncomfortably like a father-in-law instead of a letch. “Name for me,” I said haughtily, “a famous Jewish sailor.”
Allis was serving and didn’t even bother to look at me. She said without a break in her motions, “Christopher Columbus.”
“Really?” Mack said, his eyebrows rising to meet his hairline, while Maija politely said nothing. “I thought he was Italian.”
“What’s the matter with you, kid,” Allis said. “You never heard of an Italian Jew?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Mussolini.”
She threw the French bread at me.
Dear Dad:
This should have a Dar-es-Salaam postmark. We’re on the way to Mombasa.
We stopped at Cape Town, but most of us didn’t go ashore. I felt bad about not going. Would you have? I thought of Gandhi, Luthuli, Suzman, Mandela, Paton, Mphalele, Tambo, and Sharpesville and God only knows what and where else. But, hell, I didn’t go on any big marches back home either. I didn’t do the voter registration drives. What would it have proved?
I mentioned the two Africans who were always grinning. But every grin ain’t for glee. I think they smuggled aboard a guy in Cape Town harbor. There was a lot of bustling and eye-cutting among the crew. One of the Africans claimed to be so hungry. Would I please fix him extra rations? This was said, you should know, in such a way that I couldn’t refuse, with all the charm of a super-Godfather. I think this guy was close to Tambo, heading for Dar, where, I’ve been told, for every African Freedom Fighter there’s at least one CIA agent. These brothers have networks all over the place.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget these smells—the oil, the sea, the galley. There’s another, Africa. It’s a great giant reclining on the horizon, all green and brown and gray. We come from here? I’m trying to stick my plug in; it won’t connect emotionally. I want skyrockets to go off, explosions to boom, the heavens to crackle. But there’s only silence, nearly. The engines, you know. And the smells. The ship is like my history—our history—perpetually moving around the body, rarely piercing its core.
I love you all and I miss you.
G.
Allis whipped the letter out from under her pillow and read it to me. “He’ll write again, don’t you think?”
“Yep. Let me see it.”
She passed it over.
“Was there anything else important in the mail?”
“You saw the rest of it, Cate. I thought this would be a good bedtime thing for you, hearing from your other son. How’d the work go today?”
I was reading, hearing Glenn’s voice and seeing the east coast of Africa as the Chinese must have seen it, Duarte Barbosa, the nameless Arab and Indian sailors, and thinking of Africa’s implacable silence behind the monthly discoveries that attested to its place in the world. I was finished.
“Yes, he’ll write again. Graves? Went okay. I’ll show it to you tomorrow. A section I want to finish.” I turned to her. “I really liked ‘Toast and Terror,’ but now I’m going to feel self-conscious when I turn on the radio in the morning and unbuckle the Times.”
“I’m the one who turns it on, remember? Want the latest report on the candidate?”
Allis was working on the campaign for this asshole who wanted to be mayor of New York.
“Not really. But how far did he put his foot into his mouth today?”
“Up to his kneecap.”
“What?”
“The city could save money by eliminating twenty subway stops in Harlem.”
“You ought to do something with that poem,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
“Look,” I said. “These jerks come and go every two or four or six years. They don’t interest me. Your poetry does. I think,” I said less forcefully, “that a work that deals with the terror that men must feel every morning when they go out to work touches everyone more than any politician’s statements could in a century. It’s a good poem. Maybe even a great one—shut up! How do I know? I don’t know but I do. Maybe I know through feel—”
“No! And don’t tell me to shut up!”
“Well, goddamn it, you were the one who said you have to do something to make the landsmen come out of the woodwork! You said it, and you’ve done it and all you want to do is to take refuge in something that happened to you twenty years ago. They hurt me. Yet you could sit down and record my hurts. Shit, you don’t know the half of my hurts because I haven’t let you see them and I haven’t told you—”
“I have seen them! I’ve felt them. I don’t think being a man is easy. I think being a black man is, a functioning black man, is a stupendous achievement, you ass, marvelous. There! You made me say it! You think you can be with someone for the same twenty years and not know, you ass? I know what they’ve done and are doing. How could I not? Don’t you think I know? What the hell’s this marriage all about if it isn’t about knowing? What’s so important about publishing my poetry? Why are we shouting? You didn’t have a good day, did you?”
I flipped over. “Aw, to hell—”
“Is this about being black?”
I raised myself up and looked down over the foot of the bed toward the door at the same time Allis did. Mack was sitting there cross-legged, as if he’d been there for a few moments.
“It’s about being a man,” Allis said.
“It’s about being a woman,” I said.
“It’s not really about being black—or white?” he asked. A smile of relief waited in the wings of his lips. There were echoes in his voice.
“Well, gee,” he said. “I get nervous when you start arguing.”
“Mom writes poetry,” I said
.
“I know it.”
“It’s good poetry. You know, like you want to get things in the school paper?”
“Yeahhhh.” He was looking at his mother. She was smiling. He was starting to smile.
“I just think that she ought to get her things in magazines and books; that’s all.”
“And she doesn’t want to.”
“Right.”
“They’re her poems.”
I looked from him to her. “When they’re good,” I said, “they belong to everybody.”
“Why?”
“Because they might make the world better, that’s why. Good night. Get your ass in bed.”
“You won’t fight anymore?”
“We hardly ever fight, Mackie. You know that,” Allis said. “Right? Give us a kiss. Good night.”
It seemed a long time before we spoke again.
Then she said, “Can we talk about the sign for the Metropolitan?”
With some relief I said, “Yeah. I think we gotta forget about a lot of those people, like Hawkes and maybe Bibby, and ‘Nubian’ archers as against ‘Egyptian’ spearmen. It’s gotta be about what people see or don’t want to see. Yes. Let the other be.”
“Yes. How about that quote you got from Desroches-Noblecourt, the colors of the people and gods in the wall paintings?”
“Perfect. Did you see the cornrows?”
“Yes! They seem to be the style now.”
“Used to call them braids, plain and simple.”
“Let’s look at what he says about the colors in the wall paintings, okay?” She went quickly through her book rack and pulled the book. She opened it and read, smiling all the while: “… women’s skin is always painted light or pinkish yellow whereas men’s skin is red ochre.”
I said, “That doesn’t try to explain those obviously slanted-eyed yellow-colored girls with dangling pigtails, or the very black, and brown—”
“Red ochre,” Allis interrupted.
“Right. Or the kind of hair apparently best suited for cornrows. Well, let’s just continue.”
She put the book back and slid down under the sheets. I turned off the lights. In the darkness I said, “You’re sure, baby? Nothing nagging? No furtive little desire? No sense that you might be missing all kinds of acclaim?”
“No, honey. Honestly. Nothing.”
“Then I’m sorry I’ve been insisting. Maybe I wanted it for myself.”
“I thought of that. Maybe. But you aren’t a failure, not in the terms we both consider right.”
“Then why sometimes does it feel like it?”
“That’s the whole plan, darling.”
Yeah, I thought. Why did I keep forgetting that?
9
“It’d be great if you could come to the national sales meeting,” Gullian was saying, “to meet and talk with some of the men in the field. They know about you, of course, but they’d like to meet you. It’d be a tremendous help, Cate.”
I agreed to go. Like an old boxer, I was looking for the edge; I sensed that they were cutting off the ring on me. Some boxers used the speed of their opponents to their own advantage; others came up with a new style just for that fight, a kind of rope-a-dope, if you will. So I went down to the Hilton already knowing as much as I wanted to know about book salesmen. If they had plenty of good advance word, they hustled your book; if the word came down from Jock Champion that this was the book to push, they pushed on pain of probable separation if they didn’t. But the work of nearly all black writers was as suspect as it had been in 1940, when, somehow, the system let Native Son slip through.
A publisher might be coming out with a great book by an author who is black. The publisher of course plugs the book at the sales conferences; he has advanced too much money, maybe, not to. The salesmen who have come to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, San Francisco—any where people buy books in great numbers—are wined and dined and possibly even whored at the publisher’s expense. Are they then to question the greatness of this book? Are the salesmen not, as company men, visibly and excitedly in agreement with the publisher’s assessment of the work? Of course they are. At the conference. When they leave, the book goes into a corner of the trunk of their cars. Who’s gonna buy it? they ask themselves. The sixties are over, done with, and my booksellers and their customers have no interest anymore in black people. They’re fed up with them, as a matter of fact. This would be in some cases a judgment unilaterally arrived at. The pages of the book begin to yellow and flake; the sleek jacket, once so brilliant and bright, turns lusterless in the dark. “Oh, there’s no market for that book,” the salesman advises his regional manager. But of course he has not tried to place the book, fobbing off on booksellers in the hinterlands various up-to-date versions of Peyton Place or Gone With the Wind in its stead, for he knows commissions will accrue on these titles. Some people with a sense of balance—teachers, perhaps, of the better sort—scream, phone, write and plead for a multitude of books by authors who are black; these books, however, have gone into and out of print with the speed of a message rushed through the old pneumatique, out of sight with a whooosh!
When I walked in, I felt like the fighter who knows he’s supposed to lose, that he’s in the bag, at the bottom of the latrine looking up. Gullian, with forced lightness, I thought, introduced me with that hackneyed phrase “distinguished novelist,” etc., etc. She was nervous and her camaraderie was like the flit of a fly as she fended off bold lunges at her breasts and butt and parried whiskey-sheened lips with deft twists of her cheeks.
I talked about The Pushkin Papers. The salesmen shifted in their seats, whispered to one another. Then Jock came into the room and they gave me their attention, or pretended to. There were no questions during the question period. There was one statement by a regional manager: “I suppose after all the times you’ve come to bat you could stand to make a little money, right, Cate?” He scanned the room as if seeking support.
“Money?” I said. “Look, let me tell you that those people who’ve been writing jacket copy, and those interviewers and biographers, have got it all wrong, you know. I don’t need money.”
A stillness slipped through the audience like a knife through Blue Bonnet margarine. Jock glanced at Gullian.
Money. It was what they understood. All they understood. All they respected, and they were saying they would maybe give me a bit of it.
“Both my parents were doctors; surgeons, to be precise. So I’ve always had money, you see. They gave me my first Cadillac when I was sixteen and had come home from Eton for a part of the summer instead of joining them on the French Riviera. They thought I should have at least one American car. That was the same year Dad built a poolroom onto the house for me and bought a two-inch slate-bed pool table, upon which I still play from time to time with a good friend of mine whose name I won’t mention because I know you’re familiar with it.”
There was a murmuring. Gullian was bent close to Jock Champion, who was talking furiously into her ear. She looked pale.
“It seemed somehow wiser when I began my writing career to concoct that background of the mother who was a domestic and the father who was a merchant seaman. I mean, it was expected, really, wasn’t it? If I had come on with airs and a British upper-class accent and a splendidly tailored white suit, who would’ve believed I was for real?”
Jock was standing.
I said, pointing to him, “I didn’t even let ole Jock in on the secret, did I, Jock?” I turned away from him. “To answer the question more directly, gentlemen, it’s not money I need. I don’t need you to make money for me. I just want all you cocksuckers, all you motherfuckers, off my goddamn back. You are not clever. You are not cunning. You are just small, greedy, frightened men, fit mostly to flush woodcock or pheasant or partridge from the heather on my moors in Scotland.”
Jock Champion had sat down. Maureen Gullian sat beside him.
“Thank you,” I said with a smile, my voice booming back through
the silence from the speakers. “Thank you very much.”
And I hit the road, humming, feeling good, feeling that I had at last washed myself clear back to absolute sanity. Therefore, it was nothing to walk at a brisk clip up Seventh Avenue, through the Park, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from where I could just see patinaed towers of the building where Paul and Betsy had lived with their children. I wondered how long he’d dreamed of living on Fifth Avenue.
For a moment I hesitated, thinking first to go to the second floor and look again at the Rodins and the Degas. No. Business. I strolled into the Egyptian Wing, down the corridors hung with replicas of wall paintings. A guard who was black sauntered through, his eyes catching mine. For an instant they seemed to dance, and he was gone.
There is a painting said to be from the tomb of Nakht (Eighteenth Dynasty) of three young women, loosely called, by some, entertainers; by others, a double-flute player, a lute player and a harpist. (A harp has forty-six strings; this “harp” has thirteen.) They all wear pectorals and beaded headbands, and they have intricate cornrows. They are a neat, rich brown—“red ochre”? Their heads are long and possess a modified prognathism; the faces are seen in profile, the style at the time.
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