My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  For Sam and Jimmy and the others, it was not about wine but about scotch, and lots of it. Johnnie Walker was often the brand of choice, but I remember Sam sitting down on multiple occasions with a beaker of J&B (Justerini and Brooks, I learned, after picking up untold bottles of it at the liquor store on Eighth Avenue on my way to Sam’s house). In that crowd, house parties were not really parties but rather gatherings of like-minded friends at someone’s home. They were invariably lubricated with these tipples, and more often than not, a meal was part of the evening, whether it was planned for and prepared by the host or hostess, ordered in, or cobbled together in the moment from ingredients in the fridge. At times it seemed that the social life was a combination of Hemingway’s moveable feast and a nongambling version of the oldest reliable, permanent floating crap game in New York from Guys and Dolls: the venues changed, the participants varied with season and locale, and the food ranged from stellar to so-so, but there was always enough to drink, be it scotch, bourbon, or wine.

  Perhaps the most important thing that I learned from Sam, or at least the one that has stood me in best stead, was how to love cooking and to entertain lavishly. Sam fine-tuned my entertaining skills. I’d certainly cut my teeth on my mother’s parties of my youth, and I had inherited her flair for the dramatic along with my father’s love of spectacle, so I had a lot going for me. Sam, however, cultivated my cooking skills and saddled me for the rest of my life with the shopping habits of a child of the Depression for whom a bare larder was a terrifying thing. (To this day, I shop as though I’m responsible for a hungry family of eight, not a single individual.) Sam’s mantras were: If you can afford it, buy it. Always offer your friends the best that you can and have it in prodigious abundance. He reinforced things that my parents had demonstrated but would have never thought of saying to their young, and I expect they thought unsullied, daughter. When you go to someone’s home, never call for a particular brand of liquor: ask for scotch or bourbon, not J&B or Maker’s Mark. Accept what you’re given with grace. Earn your place at the table or in the room by being as entertaining as you can, and if you cannot be your best self wherever you go, stay home. They were finesses, but they were enduring.

  Sam was never happier than when puttering around in the kitchen preparing some elaborate feast that he’d devised in his head. A gourmet and gourmand, he’d plan a menu, shop for the best ingredients, and serve it proudly to friends. One holiday, a roast goose was the challenge that he set for himself, and he brought it off done to a perfect turn. It was a time when the country, and especially New York, was emerging from the chicken potpie and meatloaf aesthetic that had been the 1950s and much of the 1960s at many of our tables. Julia Child and James Beard had unleashed the culinary revolution, and even restaurants had begun to explore not only other cuisines but even culinary history. Restaurant Associates gave us both La Fonda del Sol and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars. At home, fondue sets graced tables, and crudités complete with a savory dip made from Lipton Onion Soup were the ne plus ultra in entertaining styles. I cracked open my Mastering the Art of French Cooking and learned how to make coq au vin, although I couldn’t find the required pearl onions at Balducci’s and substituted a can of black-eyed peas that I had on hand. It wasn’t classically French, but it made a tasty meal. I tried my hand at making pâté with a bit more success and kept on cooking.

  So we bonded over cooking and cooked together, and even though we lived in apartments several blocks apart, it seemed as though there was one larder and certainly one set of cooking equipment. Our batteries de cuisine cohabited even if we didn’t. My terrine went to live with him, and his platter resided at my place. We shared recipes and occasionally cookbooks, but in truth we were both intuitive cooks who worked more from instinct and taste than from recipes. Sam’s kitchen was small and old fashioned, with a porcelain sink usually overflowing with dishes, and in New York fashion, often more than the occasional roach was roaming. My kitchen was not much larger, but it at least had one appliance that dated post–World War II. It was considerably cleaner because I am phobic about roaches and about washing dishes after use and swabbing out every drop of water left in the sink.

  I was in my first apartment, complete with the requisite Dansk pottery and Pottery Barn glasses, but was developing a collection of fine china and Waterford crystal, and had even hied myself to Tiffany’s to buy sterling for one—Hampton pattern—in hopes that it might be the start of my “hope chest.” I even had a set of fish knives that I’d picked up in Portobello Road during my junior year, which meant I often served a fish course at a dinner party just to use them. Sam’s cutlery was nondescript, his crockery had come straight from the restaurant of a friend, and his glasses were simple, basic, and large enough to hold a good solid drink. But when he set a table, it was lovely, and no one ever invited forgot the feeling of being treated to something extra special.

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  We were an odd couple—the mature man who was the cynosure of all and the French teacher fifteen years his junior who tagged along almost as an afterthought yet kept up with conversations and was developing a presence of her own. On closer observation, it was not that complicated. I was not someone who had set my hat for Sam; indeed, I was as bewildered as anyone else about why he’d settled on me. That may have been my attraction: I was also young enough and smart enough and malleable enough to be molded in a way that the other women were too mature and self-aware to countenance. Most important, I simply slunk off to my corner and retreated when things got confrontational. My parents never fought in front of me, and as a result, I’d never learned that fighting is part of how a relationship endures and that learning how to fight and how to make up is a big part of being a couple. It was a mystery to me. I simply went into myself, got quiet, got hurt, and mentally licked my wounds, hoping that they would heal before it happened again the next time. I got really good at that.

  We shared other things as well: love of language, love of literature, love of Paris, and a sense of respect for and a love of the gentle, mannered ways that defined some lives in the South. Sam knew them from growing up in Durham through the lens of a transplanted southerner; I, from the preserved-in-amber South in which I had been raised in the North.

  As we grew as a couple, we shared these loves. Our love of language and literature resulted in long conversations about everything from the denizens of the Harlem Renaissance, whom Sam had known, to chats about the latest books that were coming out. As a book reviewer, I visited publishing offices and left with reviewers’ copies and galleys, which we shared and then discussed. His Sunday salons were almost a throwback to the Harlem Renaissance. In 1973, we compared notes on In Love and Trouble by Alice Walker and Sula, the second book by Toni Morrison, who was becoming a literary colossus. The year 1974 saw Angela Davis’s autobiography, Maya Angelou’s Gather Together in My Name, and If Beale Street Could Talk, by Baldwin himself. By 1976, there was a tidal wave of work, including Alice Walker’s Meridian and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, the third installment in the Angelou’s autobiographical saga. (We both knew the title was the bowdlerized version of Maya’s mother’s expression “twitchin’ and bitchin’ and getting merry like Christmas.”) Then there was the publishing juggernaut that was Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Like my cooking utensils, the galleys and books ended up at Sam’s place sooner or later, blending in with our mutual stuff. To my mind, they were the glue that cemented our relationship and the living testimonial of our growing relationship and our growing couplehood.

  We were social, oh so very social. We’d go out of an evening. As a theater reviewer, I had two seats for everything that opened on and off Broadway. We saw them all: the good, the bad, and the truly awful. I sat through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and an astonishingly bad Macbeth, which, in homage to Orson Wells, was set on a Caribbean island. Each actor had a different, often slipping accent, and Esther Rolle was Lady Macbeth. Sam had an unerring radar for the bad plays
and the good sense to demur on these or walk out at intermission. I was still the good kid and felt bad for the actors who would have to return for the second act to an empty house. So we occasionally would meet at Joe Allen’s or Frankie and Johnny’s or another restaurant after the theater where Sam had spent the second act in the bar while I’d faithfully stayed for the performance.

  We certainly shared discussions about our work at Queens College in the SEEK Program, and we shared Paris. While many at SEEK seemed to feel that my love of Paris and ability to speak fluent French made me somehow less than an authentic Black person, Sam seemed to understand and indeed was something of a Francophile himself. He visited frequently, often as a guest of his friend Baldwin. The September 3, 1970, issue of Jet magazine, the chronicler of all things Black at that time, has articles on the ongoing search for Angela Davis, an article about Alice Walker whose The Third Life of Grange Copeland had just been published, and, in the column “Paris Sketchbook” by Art Simmons, this mention:

  Baldwin’s spending the summer here vacationing with friends in a fabulous flat in Neuilly, France. Guests at his recent birthday party included Samuel C. Floyd, director of faculty and curriculum development at Queens College in Flushing New York here writing a film script and working on the biography of his grandfather, the Rev. Junius Taylor.

  As a friend of Baldwin, he’d often summered with him in both Paris and, later, the South of France. Although we were never in Paris together, we could speak knowledgeably about the clubs, like Le Sept and Le Bilboquet, and restaurants like the Brasserie Lipp and others that we both knew. Despite my love of Paris, I knew that there were racial issues and social divides that mirrored those in the United States, albeit with different Black folks. I’d learned about the racism of former colonials during my junior year, and I certainly didn’t envision myself living there full time as an expatriate. But I did love Paris and journeyed there twice a year. Sam too knew that his lot was on the western side of the Atlantic, and although he traveled to France often to visit his friend Jimmy, he never considered making his life there. He did adopt some of the French expressions that I unconsciously used in speech, and I adopted his southernisms and reveled in his eclectic tastes. And so we went on.

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  Roast Goose

  When I think of Sam’s cooking, the one dish that comes immediately to mind is the memorable roast goose that he prepared one Christmas. I can admit that I have never and probably at this stage am never going to prepare a roast goose. However, if I should get the notion to do so, I would turn to one of my favorite French cookbooks that I acquired back in the 1970s during my French cooking phase. While Julia Child had recipes that were complex, incredibly detailed, and required many steps, French Cooking for Everyone by Alfred Guérot took a more Gallic approach to directions and assumed that the cook knew something about the kitchen. The recipe for roast goose is a scant paragraph. There is no ingredients list or methodology parsed out in small, easy-to-follow sentences—rather, basic instructions on how to cook the bird. This is my version.

  Season, truss, and place the goose on a rack in a shallow roasting pan in a 325°F oven. Roast until the leg joints move freely. While the goose is cooking, periodically spoon off the fat as it accumulates, reserving it for later uses. It will take an oven-ready eight-pound goose about four hours to roast.

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  Chapter Four

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  OH, THE PEOPLE YOU’LL MEET!

  Once Sam invited someone into his world, he was generous with his friends. At least he was that way with me. We started slowly. I was heading down to spend a week in Haiti with Anna Horsford, a high school friend. I’d been to Haiti once before with my first beau (the one who’d turned out to be married), but this time it was a girlfriend trip. We’d booked a room at the celebrated Hotel Oloffson, feeling that it would make a good roost, and we were going down to have fun in the sun.

  Haiti has always been one of those litmus paper destinations: people either love it and view the artistry and the cultural richness, or they hate it and cannot get beyond the poverty that exists. I loved the country: its history and culture and place in the African diaspora. On my return to the island for a second visit, Sam casually said, “You must try to see my friend Rosa Guy; she’s down there writing.”

  The Oloffson, famed as the hostelry that is fictionalized as the center of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, looked like Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house designed by Edward Gorey. Had the sun not been shining and the rum not been flowing, the turreted, veranda-bedecked, carpenter-gothic pile might have seemed ominous. This, though, was in the days when Al and Sue Seitz were the innkeepers and the hotel was welcoming, and it was one of the Caribbean’s most storied spots. The rooms were basic: whirling ceiling fans, sputtering air-conditioning, creaky beds that were as spavined as the mules that carried visitors up to the Citadel in Cap Haitien, but they were covered with bright fabrics and the walls were adorned with the art that was the country’s glory. The rooms were comfortable but certainly nothing to write home about. However, they were not why folks stayed at the Oloffson. It was all about the public spaces: the veranda with its rocking chairs and the bar where all happened. There, it was Haiti’s own Rhum Barbancourt all around.

  The hotel was every writer’s dream, with the flotsam and jetsam of the island circulating at cocktail time. Modern pirates rubbed shoulders with pale-skinned newcomers, their sharp eyes evaluating each summer cotton frock and gold-braceleted arm and calculating schemes and scams. Paint-daubed artists sought solace in the bottom of glasses, weary island-exiled writers fled from the blank page, socialites fought ennui, and white-suited Aubelin Jolicoeur, the prototype for Greene’s character Petit Pierre, hovered: a celebrity in search of an audience. The sophistication was palpable.

  Below the veranda that fronted the hotel, a swimming pool beckoned. It was there that I met Rosa Guy (pronounced the French way to rhyme with key). When I asked about her at the front desk, I was told that she came every day to swim. Soon enough, they pointed her out to me. She’d been swimming laps, exhibiting a svelte figure that was being admired slyly by more than one onlooker. She emerged otter sleek and joined Anna and me at the mahogany bar for a drink. We later invited her to join us for dinner at La Lanterne, a restaurant in a private house in the hills of Pétionville above the capital that was run by a Swiss chef and his Haitian wife. There we dined on chicken flavored with coconut and pineapple and were served at candlelit tables sitting around a swimming pool. We foreswore our Barbancourt cocktails and drank chilled French wines, exchanged pleasant banalities about life in general, and enjoyed the balmy breezes of the tropical night. At the end of the evening, our taxi dropped her off at her home. Actually we dropped her off at a depression in the roadside and I remember watching in amazement as she exited the car, hopped over the embankment, and disappeared down what revealed itself to be a steep flight of steps headed toward her home. I still have a mental picture of her disappearing down a hillock into the night.

  We would meet again after she returned to New York, as she was an integral part of Maya and Jimmy’s group. Although always ferociously focused on her writing, Rosa was also a great flirt. At times it seemed she was flirting just to keep in practice. She and Maya often had an unspoken but very real competition with leading guys on and with seeing who could pull more men. Rosa, with her lilting Caribbean inflections and her twinkling eyes, often was the winner. The scuttlebutt ran that the men might squire her home but they would rarely spend the night. Rosa would put them out before the morning, as she was always up with the dawn and back at work. Work always came first. No one joked about that.

  Rosa’s best friend in the group was Louise Meriwether, who was equally ferocious about her writing, but as with many girlfriends, they were in other ways opposites: Louise was not up to Rosa’s flirting competition. That’s not to say she was a nun or a saint, but rathe
r that she didn’t play on the man-go-round that defined the social life of some members of the group. Rosa and Louise were often together, and by the time that I met them, their friendship had muted and melded their personalities somewhat. I was noted for constantly calling one by the other’s name, confusing them until they spoke. They tolerated my lapses. In earlier years, that wasn’t an issue. If I didn’t know them by face, I knew them by temperament. Rosa was quicksilver; Louise was water, at times placid, at others turbulent, with the ability and persistence to wear down rock.

  Perhaps I felt more of an affinity with Louise because as a northern-based African American, she mirrored a world that I knew: a world that spoke to my own roots. Louise was, like me, a child of the Great Migration; she had grown up in Harlem during the Great Depression. She knew a world that connected her to my parents, who were only a decade older than she. Daddy Was a Number Runner, her first novel, published in 1970, was a book about a time and place that were familiar to my parents, a world about which they spoke. The novel, which was originally published with a foreword by Jimmy, connected with Black folks of all ages. I discussed it with my parents; they got it.