The Tenants

by Bernard Malamud

  Willie drew a restless heavy breath. “Man, I’m asking you to read it.”

  He bent as though afflicted by a spasm but at once straightened up.

  “Like I have a belly ache about my work.” Sweat gleamed on his brow. He touched dry lips with his pink tongue. It seemed to Lesser he had never seen his eyeballs so large before, inflated, white, scared.

  “Belly ache?”

  “On my writing. I am revising some of it again but every time I read it I do something very new, like I never got it right in the first place. The picture keeps shifting on me, you know what I mean? Yesterday I thought I laid down some good pages but when I was reflecting about them in my chick’s apartment the whole scene I wrote blew up in my mind like a brick shithouse. Man, that wipes you out. I didn’t feel like coming to your party. I wanted to go on back to my work and stay on it till I got the wrong stuff out and the right stuff in but Irene told me to renew myself with some relaxation and fun. Today I sat in my office all day reading on my book and I have this fuckn feeling I rode off the main track in some places but I don’t exactly know where that starts or why it does. Anything I read now looks blurred up, as if I am wearing my grandpappy’s eyeglasses, and throws me off my balance. I feel like I am somewhere else than I ought to be. What do you think I have to do now, Lesser?”

  The writer, conscious Willie was seriously asking for advice, answered cautiously.

  “If you get the right distance it’s easier to regain perspective. Sometimes I pick up an earlier chapter and retype it, at the same time making notes about the one that doesn’t satisfy me. That’s one way of quickening insight, there are others.”

  “I tried all that crap,” Willie said impatiently. “Lesser,” he went on, trying to restrain the emotion in his voice, “I could save on lots of worry and trouble if you could put your eye on what went wrong.”

  “You want me to read your manuscript?”

  Willie, averting his stiffened eyes, nodded. “Nobody else I know has got two novels published.”

  Harry reluctantly agreed. “I will if you really want me to.”

  What more could a man say?

  “Would I ask you if I didn’t want you to?” The black threw him a look of hatred as he left the room.

  Harry slowly read the funky manuscript of the touchy man, almost two hundred oversize thick pages. He read at first against the will, two sentences for every one. He read of two minds—curious; resistant. He had promised Willie but after this nothing more. No further involvements with his dissatisfactions, sentiments, labor.

  The wind in the street complained as he read holding a handkerchief to his nose to keep off fumes. He hadn’t heard so pure and sustained a keening outside his window in the almost ten years he had lived in the house, the wind like a live ghost haunting itself. A door slammed in the distance and slammed again, Lesser jumping twice as he read. He heard whispering voices in the hall. Willie, wandering, talking to himself? Levenspiel muttering? Explorers from a ship offshore? Or the lower depths? Going to the door, he put his eye to the keyhole. Nothing he could make out but gloomy hall. Lesser unbolted the door and went in his sneakers to Willie’s office, expecting momentarily to hear his smoking plak plak, though the formidable typewriter visibly sat under the table by the window as he read. Not a serious inside sound of any sort. Maybe a rat scuttled down a toilet hole. Nothing really happening but imagination working overtime, the writer’s bag. You worked with it, you had to live with this hyperactive genie. Yet he listened obsessively as though he might lose some small bite of experience if he didn’t; then tapped with his fingernails on the door, turned the tense knob and entered. Pure black night, no moon or stars. Who could see a black in all this black?

  “Willie?” Harry whispered.

  He snapped on the one-hundred-watt bulb Willie had screwed into the socket one rainy day. The bare kitchen, lit in a glare, stared from afar. Willie’s table and cracked chair—lonely, distant minus the writer writing, two hunks of wood; but if one wrote on them, a dignified desk and chair, serious business going on, the fabrication of fiction.

  Lesser returned to his rooms and went on reading. The manuscript literally gave forth a gassy odor. Stench of toil?—accrued Willie Spearmint sweat plus something mildewed or smelling so? Perhaps odor of decay abetted by the chemistry of very cheap green paper—pulpy sulphurous stuff, typed on, erased often with burning, rubber-stinking eraser, typed over, et cetera? Or maybe the foul blow to the nose derived from the festering lives the words created, or their vengeful human farts?

  Willie’s book had once been entitled A Nigger Ain’t Shit, crossed out for Missing Life, by Bill Spear, ingenious pseudonym, part surname, part tribal hunting weapon, plus overtone of Shakespear, also Willie. A third title had been very lightly penciled in. Examining it closely with his better-visioned eye, Lesser made out Black Writer—followed by a question mark. Anyway, the manuscript, which Lesser read slowly, making notes, in the course of three nights—Willie liked to keep the pages stacked before him on his desk as he continued to work long hours on whatever he was now writing or rewriting, at least he typed—was in two main parts, apparently a Life and Work, six chapters of the first, totaling one hundred forty-eight pages, followed by fifty of short stories concerning Harlem types living their black experience, a not bad approach to an autobiography, though Willie had never called it that. He hadn’t talked much about his book. Lesser had thought of it as a novel possibly because he was writing one himself.

  The book, although for various reasons not a finished piece of work, was absorbing to read, Willie’s human history: from “Downsouth Boy” to “Black Writer”; via progression “Upsouth,” “Harlem Nights,” “Prison Education.” The short last chapter was entitled, “I Write for Black Freedom.” The book was mainly naturalistic confessional, Willie’s adventures simply narrated, the style varying from Standard English to black lingo, both the writing and psychology more sophisticated than Lesser would have guessed. “I” grows up in redneck Mississippi in pure black poverty. He is knocked around by kith and kin more than whites, but it seems to him his first major insight into his life is how much he hates them for maiming the blacks who maim him, in particular his miserable meager mother and white-ass-kissing stepfather. One day, Willie, age thirteen, stepping out of the path of an approaching Charlie wearing a straw boater, shuts his eyes tight so The Man won’t see in them the image of Black Boy crushing under his heel the white’s bloody balls. “My hate of him was so pure it warmed me the rest of my life.”

  To escape the primal cemetery, Eden where nothing black grows green, he hops a freight to Detroit. “Where I spend the most of my days cleaning out white shitstalls for the Ford Company.” And on the side breaks into clothes lockers to steal loose cash; at which, in spite of some tight squeaks, he is never caught. He finally has to face up to the self-hatred living in him like a sick dog in a cellar. This comes like a kick to his head after he beats half to her death his black bitch for no reason he is sure of. He accuses her of sleeping with a white man though she swears, and he in his heart believes, she hadn’t. What he had done to his broken-faced seventeen-year-old girl becomes terrified awareness of something frightening in his nature. The panic of his guilt causes him to split. “I thought if I looked in a mirror it would show I had turned white.” But the depression that afflicts him is because he is black.

  Willie grooves through the Harlem scene in skintight satin pants and fast buckskin shoes, from jazz to jail in easy stages, through numbers, hustling, pimping two white whores. “All you got to know is a white chick loves a black prick.” He pushes hard stuff, and while sick for dope—nose running, cramps, nausea—attempts housebreaking and burglary at which he is caught by two big white pigs he fights in terror with his bare fists. “On my first solo gig I was bagged out of my own stupidity, beaten shitless, and dumped in jail.” He is tried, convicted, and sent to prison for a five calendar stretch. His new discovery is “How low your misery can go. All day I walk on my
self and the shit sticks to my shoes.” He hurts in terrible ways. But the hurt hurts less once you begin to hear the blues deep down in you. He listens and hears. “Willie Spearmint sing this song.”

  Time is slow and sickening but by some crazy mix of pain, luck, and what he still has left of his will, serving time serves him. “Stopping your running you have the time to think. I think clearer about myself, who I am, and if I will ever be more than the lowest.” “If they didn’t put me away then I would’ve murdered somebody for sure.” To take his mind off the soul-destroying prison, to teach himself what he had to know to survive, to put himself together better than he was, Willie begins to read in the prison library. “Once I got started on that I never stopped. I read one book after the other, slow at first, then quicker once I get to know more words.” At first he read fiction more than anything else. He read some Dickens, Dreiser, James Farrell, Hemingway, Richard Wright, Ellison, Baldwin and others. “And I read hundreds of short stories from the word go right up to modern times, both black and white.” “And while I am reading I have this important, exciting and also frightening playback in me that I can write.” “It isn’t hard to do when you have just finished reading one story you have liked to make it go on further. Or change the ending. Or write something like it.” He wonders if he can write stories that have happened to him. “And the next thing I know my head is so crammed full of them I can’t separate one from the other.” Willie laughs, shouts, and dances in his cell. He begs for paper and pencil, gets them, and sits down at his table. He writes about the real funk of life. He writes in tears. “I cry for my goddamn mother, and everybody black I write about, including myself.” He loves the words he puts on paper; out of them black people are born. He loves who they are, their voices and their wit. Willie gets high when he writes, this pleasure is the sweetest. As the sentences fill up the pages and the people and their actions come alive, his heart fills with pride. “From then on I am not afraid of the fucking prison because I am out of it as much as I am in. I am in my imagination. I swear to myself I will be the best writer, the best Soul Writer.” He writes dozens of stories. “The more I write on the terrible and violent things of my life, the more I feel easier on myself. The only thing I am afraid of, I don’t want to get too soft in my nature.”

  Willie also mentioned reading some of the revolutionary writers because he wanted to know more what the whole scene was about. He read in Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao. He read every book he could about black men: books on Africa, slavery, black customs and culture. He kept notes in a looseleaf notebook, but when he tried to write about issues usually it came out little stories about black people. In the main he wrote fiction. As Willie came to a broader understanding of his people’s history and the injustice of their suffering, he felt for them a deep, sweet, overpowering love. For the whites he kept his hatred. Maybe not in his mind every minute of the day but he kept it in principle. When he was sprung out of prison, he left with five folders full of writing he had pledged to the cause of Black Freedom.

  This was the end of the autobiographical section; then came the short stories. None of Willie’s protagonists fared as well as he. No one of them found a way to save himself.

  Bugsy is shot thirty-eight times in Catshit Alley by two white pigs who had cornered him there after a mugging. He had shot back with his razor, flung it once.

  Ellery is cooked to death in Sing Sing. He had tried to convince the judge, “Judge, you got the wrong black man. Black is an easy color to recognize if you lookin for a nigger. I swear to you out of the bottom of my heart I did not kill a white man on that dark night. I am not the one you think I am.”

  Daniel chokes his father to death for spitting in his mother’s face. After, he asks his mama to forgive him and she says she might but the Lord won’t. “I don’t know why I do it, why I kill him all the way,” Daniel says. “I guess I hate him more than I hate you.”

  In a weird story called “No Heart,” this unnamed black man has a hunger to murder a white and taste a piece of his heart. It is simply a strong thirst or hunger. He tricks a drunken white down into a tenement cellar and kills him. He cuts into the dead man but can’t find the heart. He cuts into his stomach, bowel, and scrotum, and is still cutting when the story ends.

  In the last piece Harry ( Harry? ) is painted white by three brothers after they had considered stomping on him, or maybe tar and feathers, for what he did. He had betrayed a numbers runner, his friend Ephraim, to the pigs. Ephraim had taken his true bitch away from him. The runner’s friends trap Harry in his room and force him to strip off his clothes. They pour three cans of white lead paint all over him as he kneels on the floor, the paint so thick on his head only his eyes are black. He escapes into the hall and runs up the roof stairs as they pursue him. The last they see of him is Harry leaping off the roof into the street below, a white nigger lighting up the night.

  Five stories, five deaths—four blacks, one white. The violence shows the depth of Willie’s unspent rage. Maybe his tears had scorched the paper and stunk up the pages? On rereading the book Lesser, though he sniffs now and then, smells no smell at all.

  Lesser is moved by Willie’s writing. For two reasons: the affecting subject of the work, and the final sad feeling that he has not yet mastered his craft. My God, what he’s lived through. What can I say to a man who’s suffered so much personal pain, so much injustice, who clearly finds in his writing his hope and salvation, who defines himself through it? He comes in the end, as in the old slave narratives, to freedom, through his sense of writing as power—it flies up and carries him with it—but mainly in his belief that he can, in writing, help his people overthrow racism and economic inequality. That his freedom will help earn theirs. The Life he writes, whatever he calls it, moves, pains, inspires, even though it’s been written before, and better, by Richard Wright, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and in his way, Eldridge Cleaver. Their self discoveries have helped Willie’s. Many black men live the same appalling American adventure, but it takes a unique writer to tell it uniquely, as literature. To make black more than color or culture, and outrage larger than protest or ideology. Willie has good ideas for stories but doesn’t always build them well; in the end they fall short of effective form. Lesser sees irrelevancy, repetition, underdeveloped material; there are mistakes of arrangement and proportion, ultimately of focus. There’s more to do than he does. On the other hand, he seems to be sensitive to good writing and that may account for his suspicions concerning his own. He writes with feeling, no doubt with pleasure, yet senses he ought to be dissatisfied. He may not even know that his writing shows impatience with the craft of writing. I think he wants me to point this out to him. Should I do it—say what I think, or less?—soft-pedal maybe, encourage, try to even the odds, given what he’s gone through? I wouldn’t want to hurt a sensitive man. Yet if I don’t tell him what I think is true how can I help him improve his work?

  And if Lesser suppresses truth Lesser is a fake. If he’s that, how can he go on writing?

  When he returned the manuscript to Willie the morning after he had finished his second reading of it, Lesser said he was ready to discuss his work whenever it suited Willie’s convenience. He wanted now to get it off his chest but wouldn’t press. Willie, dead-pan, except for an absent smile that grazed his lips, as though he had not heard what Lesser had said but having seen his moving lips was more or less acknowledging somebody had spoken, accepted his briefcase without a word. He didn’t so much as glance at it or look at Harry. On Lesser’s afterthought Willie seemed wounded, hurt before the fact?—by me? unless the writer was misreading. Maybe he had a toothache, or hemorrhoids—some personal problem? Whatever that was, his silence translated into annoyance more than wound; perhaps with himself, as though he might be regretting having asked Lesser to read his book and say what he thought might be wrong with it. But in a minute the black’s lips parted, he gazed into Lesser’s doubtful eyes with his own heavy eyes softened, as though forgiving him for whatever h
e had or hadn’t done, and said sonorously, “I thank you for reading it.” That’s all. And left so cleanly, although hauling the iron load of typewriter and weight of his book in his arms, it seemed to Lesser as though he had willed his disappearance in a prestidigitated poof. Talented man Willie Spearmint.

  That same noon, in a relaxed mood—he had somewhere got a cigar—Willie remarked, “I can’t stay on to talk to you now, Lesser. My bitch is itching. We partying tonight in our place and have to buy some bottles and stuff, but I’ll be around in a day or two to consummate that little mutual matter.”

  “Suit yourself, Willie. Whenever you say. At your convenience.” Mixed in was envy for not having been invited to the party at Irene’s.

  He’s afraid, Lesser thought. Shits green. So do I, to admit the truth. It’s bad enough to criticize a man’s living flesh, as whose book isn’t. But with color added? It’s a black life, understandably touchy stuff. Lesser dreaded a little what he had let himself in for. He had felt forewarned he would have to pay for doing Willie a favor. The nature of certain things, the weight of color.

  Maybe I could make it easier all around by writing him a note? On paper there’s no personal confrontation—who needs it?

  As he took time to write it the next morning—it was only eleven but Willie was on his mind and he was getting little done—the black knocked, not kicked at the door.

  Lesser rose, nervous but relieved, eager to dump the burden that Willie had laid like a paving block on his head.

  Willie, eyes downcast—obviously he’d had trouble working, because he was already putting the typewriter away under the table—as he straightened up seemed to tighten, as though no move but the next was possible and he had no love for it. He stood staring for a while out the window. Lesser looked too. He saw nothing.