“Go ’way f’m here, white man. Dis heah place is closed.”
“Is Bunny Brown in there?” asked Max in desperation.
“Yeh, he’s heah. Does yuh know him? Well, Ah’ll call ’im out heah and see if he knows you.”
Max waited in the cold for about two or three minutes and then the door suddenly opened and Bunny Brown, a little unsteady, came out. He peered at Max in the light from the electric bulb over the door.
“Hello Bunny,” Max greeted him. “Don’t know me, do you? It’s me, Max Disher. You recognize my voice, don’t you?”
Bunny looked again, rubbed his eyes and shook his head. Yes, the voice was Max Disher’s but this man was white. Still, when he smiled his eyes revealed the same sardonic twinkle—so characteristic of his friend.
“Max,” he blurted out, “is that you, sure enough? Well, for cryin’ out loud! Damned if you ain’t been up there to Crookman’s and got fixed up. Well, hush my mouth! Bob, open that door. This is old Max Disher. Done gone up there to Crookman’s and got all white on my hands. He’s just too tight, with his blond hair, ’n everything.”
Bob opened the door, the two friends entered, sat down at one of the small round tables in the narrow, smoke-filled cellar and were soon surrounded with cronies. They gazed raptly at his colorless skin, commented on the veins showing blue through the epidermis, stroked his ash-blond hair, and listened with mouths open to his remarkable story.
“Watcha gonna do now, Max?” asked Boogie, the rangy, black, bullet-headed proprietor.
“I know just what that joker’s gonna do,” said Bunny. “He’s goin’ back to Atlanta. Am I right, Big Boy?”
“You ain’t wrong,” Max agreed. “I’m goin’ right on down there, brother, and make up for lost time.”
“Whadayah mean?” asked Boogie.
“Boy, it would take me until tomorrow night to tell you and then you wouldn’t understand.”
The two friends strolled up the avenue. Both were rather mum. They had been inseparable pals since the stirring days in France. Now they were about to be parted. It wasn’t as if Max was going across the ocean to some foreign country; there would be a wider gulf separating them: the great sea of color. They both thought about it.
“I’ll be pretty lonesome without you, Bunny.”
“It ain’t you, Big Boy.”
“Well, why don’t you go ahead and get white and then we could stay together. I’ll give you the money.”
“Say not so! Where’d you get so much jack all of a sudden?” asked Bunny.
“Sold my story to The Scimitar for a grand.”
“Paid in full?”
“Wasn’t paid in part!”
“All right, then, I’ll take you up, Heavy Sugar.” Bunny held out his plump hand and Max handed him a hundred-dollar bill.
They were near the Crookman Sanitarium. Although it was five o’clock on a Sunday morning, the building was brightly lighted from cellar to roof and the hum of electric motors could be heard, low and powerful. A large electric sign hung from the roof to the second floor. It represented a huge arrow outlined in green with the words BLACK-NO-MORE running its full length vertically. A black face was depicted at the lower end of the arrow while at the top shone a white face to which the arrow was pointed. First would appear the outline of the arrow; then, BLACK-NO-MORE would flash on and off. Following that the black face would appear at the bottom and beginning at the lower end the long arrow with its lettering would appear progressively until its tip was reached, when the white face at the top would blazon forth. After that the sign would flash off and on and the process would be repeated.
In front of the sanitarium milled a half-frozen crowd of close to four thousand Negroes. A riot squad armed with rifles, machine guns, and tear gas bombs maintained some semblance of order. A steel cable stretched from lamp post to lamp post the entire length of the block kept the struggling mass of humanity on the sidewalk and out of the path of the traffic. It seemed as if all Harlem were there. As the two friends reached the outskirts of the mob, an ambulance from the Harlem Hospital drove up and carried away two women who had been trampled upon.
Lined up from the door to the curb was a gang of tough special guards dredged out of the slums. Grim Irish from Hell’s Kitchen, rough Negroes from around 133rd Street and 5th Avenue (New York’s “Beale Street”), and tough Italians from the lower West Side. They managed with difficulty to keep an aisle cleared for incoming and outgoing patients. Near the curb were stationed the reporters and photographers.
The noise rose and fell. First there would be a low hum of voices. Steadily it would rise and rise in increasing volume as the speakers became more animated and reach its climax in a great animal-like roar as the big front door would open and a whitened Negro would emerge. Then the mass would surge forward to peer at and question the ersatz Nordic. Sometimes the ex-Ethiopian would quail before the mob and jump back into the building. Then the hardboiled guards would form a flying squad and hustle him to a waiting taxicab. Other erstwhile Aframericans issuing from the building would grin broadly, shake hands with friends and relatives, and start to graphically describe their experience while the Negroes around them enviously admired their clear white skins.
In between these appearances the hot dog and peanut vendors did a brisk trade, along with the numerous pickpockets of the district. One slender, anemic, ratty-looking mulatto Negro was almost beaten to death by a gigantic black laundress whose purse he had snatched. A Negro selling hot roasted sweet potatoes did a land-office business while the neighboring saloons, that had increased so rapidly in number since the enactment of the Volstead Law that many of their Italian proprietors paid substantial income taxes, sold scores of gallons of incredibly atrocious hootch.
“Well, bye, bye, Max,” said Bunny, extending his hand. “I’m goin’ in an’ my luck.”
“So long, Bunny. See you in Atlanta. Write me general delivery.”
“Why, ain’t you gonna wait for me, Max?”
“Naw! I’m fed up on this town.”
“Oh, you ain’t kiddin’ me, Big Boy. I know you want to look up that broad you saw in the Honky Tonk New Year’s Eve,” Bunny beamed.
Max grinned and blushed slightly. They shook hands and parted. Bunny ran up the aisle from the curb, opened the sanitarium door, and without turning around, disappeared within.
For a minute or so, Max stood irresolutely in the midst of the gibbering crowd of people. Unaccountably he felt at home here among these black folk. Their jests, scraps of conversation, and lusty laughter all seemed like heavenly music. Momentarily he felt a disposition to stay among them, to share again their troubles which they seemed always to bear with a lightness that was yet not indifference. But then, he suddenly realized with just a tiny trace of remorse that the past was forever gone. He must seek other pastures, other pursuits, other playmates, other loves. He was white now. Even if he wished to stay among his folk, they would be either jealous or suspicious of him, as they were of most octoroons and nearly all whites. There was no other alternative than to seek his future among the Caucasians with whom he now rightfully belonged.
And after all, he thought, it was a glorious new adventure. His eyes twinkled and his pulse quickened as he thought of it. Now he could go anywhere, associate with anybody, be anything he wanted to be. He suddenly thought of the comely miss he had seen in the Honky Tonk on New Year’s Eve and the greatly enlarged field from which he could select his loves. Yes, indeed there were advantages in being white. He brightened and viewed the tightly-packed black folk around him with a superior air. Then, thinking again of his clothes at Mrs. Blandish’s, the money in his pocket, and the prospect for the first time of riding into Atlanta in a Pullman car and not as a Pullman porter, he turned and pushed his way through the throng.
He strolled up West 139th Street to his rooming place, stepping lightly and sniffing the early morning air. How good it was to be free, white and to possess a bankroll! He fumbled in his pocket for his little mirro
r and looked at himself again and again from several angles. He stroked his pale blond hair and secretly congratulated himself that he would no longer need to straighten it nor be afraid to wet it. He gazed raptly at his smooth, white hands with the blue veins showing through. What a miracle Dr. Crookman had wrought!
As he entered the hallway, the mountainous form of his landlady loomed up. She jumped back as she saw his face.
“What you doing here?” she almost shouted. “Where’d you get a key to this house?”
“It’s me, Max Disher,” he assured her with a grin at her astonishment. “Don’t know me, do you?”
She gazed incredulously into his face. “Is that you sure enough, Max? How in the devil did you get so white?”
He explained and showed her a copy of The Scimitar containing his story. She switched on the hall light and read it. Contrasting emotions played over her face, for Mrs. Blandish was known in the business world as Mme. Sisseretta Blandish, the beauty specialist, who owned the swellest hair-straightening parlor in Harlem. Business, she thought to herself, was bad enough, what with all of the competition, without this Dr. Crookman coming along and killing it altogether.
“Well,” she sighed, “suppose you’re going downtown to live, now. I always said niggers didn’t really have any race pride.”
Uneasy, Max made no reply. The fat, brown woman turned with a disdainful sniff and disappeared into a room at the end of the hall. He ran lightly upstairs to pack his things.
An hour later, as the taxicab bearing him and his luggage bowled through Central Park, he was in high spirits. He would go down to the Pennsylvania Station and get a Pullman straight into Atlanta. He would stop there at the best hotel. He wouldn’t hunt up any of his folks. No, that would be too dangerous. He would just play around, enjoy life, and laugh at the white folks up his sleeve. God! What an adventure! What a treat it would be to mingle with white people in places where as a youth he had never dared to enter. At last he felt like an American citizen. He flecked the ash of his panatela out of the open window of the cab and sank back in the seat feeling at peace with the world.
SEPARATION ANXIETY
Evie Shockley
(2000)
What holds us to places is people. we make up all kinda stories about how it’s the sunrise over the ocean, the way we can’t sleep without sirens or wake without garbage trucks crashing down the street below our window, the kind of greens/bagels/pad thai we can only get in this neighborhood, but in the end if our lover-boy or sistah-girl is crossing the river, the country, the ocean, to lay down a new life far away, we’re right behind em—if we get invited. no thought for that geographical spot we couldn’t live without last week. and, just the same, if lover or mother or father is stuck to a place like white on rice, we likely to be sitting still, no matter how hard the wanderlust makes us throb between the legs. no matter how much greener the grass on the other side.
i know this from living it. if your life tells you different, you write your own story. this is mine, and here’s how it was:
i never dreamed i would want to leave the ghetto. i was born and raised in the ghetto, and i figured if i ever had children, they were gonna be born and raised in the same place. with our people, you know. where we could see, hear, taste, smell, and feel our culture all around us. it was on the sidewalks in the macs’ rolling stroll and the girls’ whip-fast double-dutch. it was in the broad noses and black granite surfaces of the sculptures in our public buildings. it was in the aromas of collards and catfish cooking that surfed the wind down residential streets. this was the whole point of creating the ghetto—the african american cultural conservation unit, as the official name goes—to preserve our way of life. everyone on both sides of every counter, desk, and door in this place shared my blood, my relationship to this country’s messed-up history. here, i knew exactly who i was. african american. and, best of all, i was a primary cultural worker, the most prestigious rank of employment in the whole unit. a dancer of black dances.
i remember when it all changed.
“peaches!”
i was stretching, on the floor of the main rehearsal studio, in my customary spot—as one of the furaha dance theater’s two female leads, i always practiced in an area where the floor wasn’t warped or splintering at all. point, forehead to knees, hold-two-three-four, release. roosevelt, my baby brother, strode in, obviously hot-n-bothered, but not too off-center to give his muscular legs an admiring glance in the front mirror as he crossed the room. he was waving a bright red flyer at me. flex, stretch, hold-two-three-four, release—inhale deeply, point, exhale, stretch.
“peaches, have you seen this?” as i spread my legs 180 degrees wide, for my next set of stretches, he stepped in front of me and dropped to a seat on the floor, cross-legged, yoga-style, in one effortless motion. skimming the paper quickly, i stopped short, my body wrenching back to center from the beginning of a left-side stretch. it began: effective immediately, residents of african american cultural conservation unit #1 should further organize waste disposal by separating waste associated with sexual activity and sexual health from other categories of waste.
“they can’t be serious!”
“i knew you hadn’t seen this shit.”
i opened my mouth, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. i reread the flyer, more slowly. “they can’t be serious.”
“they gonna be counting your kotex, sistahgirl. straight up. and my condoms.”
there’s always a “they,” i’ve come to see. this “they” was the national department of ethnic and cultural conservation, the “decc.” contrary to my words, the decc took its governmentally mandated mission very seriously. very.
the decc was established round about 2095 or so, when the american national legislature determined that the best way to keep white racist hegemony from wiping out all the rest of us—from slowly starving our bodies or minds, or perpetrating an out-n-out massacre—was to make us some sacred space. set aside some areas of the country where african americans, latinos, asians, jews, american indians, and the rest could be minding our own business, in every sense of the phrase. you know?
talk about happy. african americans and latinos got up and headed for our respective conservation units with a quickness. in mass numbers—ninety, ninety-five percent of us. we were all about conserving our lives. american indians, who already had some land of their own but no economic base besides a few casinos, traded their national autonomy for the guaranteed funding that the new law would grant each unit. jews and asian americans were more divided, as groups, over whether or not they wanted to live separate from white america. but things got so hot for folks who tried to stay, it just wasn’t worth it. people of color were wishin for the days when the klan and groups like that would just burn a damn cross and be done with it. around the turn of the twenty-second century, police were still trying to enforce the anti-hate-crime laws, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once. it wasn’t like all whites were into the violence thing, but there were more than enough who were. by the time things settled down, population outside the conservation units was ninety-four percent white, and folks inside the units were busy hooking things up the way we’d always dreamed of—to suit ourselves.
the government liked that. conservation of cultures was key, everyone agreed. so along with folks getting their own geographical spaces came the duty to contribute to the national archives of american cultures. the president instituted the decc to handle the collection of records and cultural materials. for a long time, the agency worked on organizing historical evidence. that was cool. but the time came, not twenty-five years ago, when the decc began to focus on collecting records and creating archives “as-we-go.” so nothing would be lost, as they put it. started slow and mild: send in copies of all programs and bulletins. videotapes of all live performances. a copy of all books published by ghetto companies to go to the national library of congress, on top of the copy sent to the central unit library. copies of all mxds recorded
went in. likewise, photographic records of gallery installations. birth, marriage, death certificates—double-filed. no big deal. african americans had seen the downside of being nearly recordless, from the days of slavery and reconstruction, so we were proud that recognizing the value of our culture was now the law. but then the law began to grow.
“why can’t it be just like in the good days?” he was saying. “you separate your trash from recyclables, period. you wanna be really super-citizen, you separate your recyclables—glass from paper, aluminum from plastic. there was a purpose beyond just being nosy.”
“so what you saying, roo? you ready to break up outta here?” i smiled at his instant discomfort. i knew what the answer was before i asked. his face so familiar to me, the odd green eyes from some great-grand who didn’t live into our lifetimes, the wide smile just like mine, the eyebrows thick and expressive, bouncing up and down when he got excited, with the random rhythms of a basketball in play.
“i ain’t saying that.”
all the threatened, oppressed groups got three main conservation units each, in different areas of the country. in these spaces, whites can’t enter without permission, in person or by way of any commercial or cultural intrusions. in our unit—the east coast unit, affectionately known to the residents as the ghetto—you don’t have to see no white people if you don’t want to. the ghetto controls its own tv stations, its own radio stations. our movies are black, our commercials are black, our schools teach black history, our theaters produce black plays. nobody’s “universal” aesthetics to define us, nobody’s standards to live up to but our own. the profits stay in the ghetto and benefit us. true, money didn’t seem to go as far these days as it used to, and there were those who worried bout how we were importing more from outside the unit—basics, like toilet paper and tires—than we were exporting—which was mainly cultural products. but we had a lot more ownership and management of businesses in the ghetto than we had ever had before, according to our history books.
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