by M. J. Bosse
. . . and Kit accompanied him. All day I paced the deck, awaiting Kit’s return, and avoided the Flag Lt., who frequently appeared topside on errands for the Commo. We had barely nodded to each other after his admonition to me. Finally Kit returned and no sooner had he entered his cabin than I was at his door, knocking for entry. At first he was reluctant to tell me anything, doubtlessly on explicit orders from the Flag Lt., but finally, by virtue of our longstanding friendship and close family ties back in Boston, he relented and told me all.
Assembled at the townhall had been the Regent, his treasurer, the interrogator called Sho Fu Fing, and six judges. Each witness knelt upon the ground just outside of the hall, with his head on a level with the flooring. Questions were put only by Sho Fu Fing, and if the witness failed to respond or responded too slowly, his elbows were tied behind his back, and upon any further sign of intractibility, he was punched severely in the ribs by guards who carried large sticks, about two inches in diameter and four feet in length. According to Kit, some witnesses were prodded until the blood freely soaked through their shirts. Such blows ultimately never failed to loosen tongues, but whether to utter truth or falsehood did not seem to be of importance to Sho Fu Fing.
At the end of such brutal questioning and then a series of complicated rituals, it became clear to Kit that the witnesses were no longer witnesses but prisoners. Their extorted reports had become confessions. The Regent intended to punish his own people for crimes against another nation that they had not committed.
Without demur and with the stoicism characteristic of these Asian people, almost a dozen witnesses finally confessed to having stoned the black American to death. They were all to be banished to Pachung Song, a nearby deserted island, for life, all except the supposed ring-leader, Takisi, long known in Naha as a street critic of the regime. Takisi would be placed in a bamboo cage too small for standing or sitting and kept there until he starved to death.
The Regent, Kit noted, had been well pleased by the trial, and Mr. Williams had learned that by implicating Takisi the Government had rid themselves of a popular leader of the people, one who until now had managed to escape imprisonment and even legal accusation. Kit seemed visibly shaken by having witnessed such a travesty of justice.
For our own part in the investigation and trial, we had not accorded with standard legal procedures. For example, the black man’s corpse had not been available for examination, although, according to Kit, the Regent and his judges did not seem at all inconvenienced by this American refusal to cooperate in establishing the most fundamental concept of law, that, in fact, a crime had been committed. Doubtlessly the sword gash would have meant nothing to those who conducted the trial. Such had been the spirit of this court at Naha.
When I mused outloud whether our own officials would reconsider and reopen the affair and demand a proper court in which our own two jack tars would be placed on trial, Kit grew pale and uneasy. I strode angrily out of his cabin and coming upon deck was amazed to see the two jack tars, now at least sober but still sulking, ambling along as free as one could please. Whereupon I asked Edwards, a Master’s Mate, what was the meaning of these prisoners being at liberty. He answered curtly that they had been punished well enough by having pay docked and a reduction in grade.
Edwards had hardly got those words out of his mouth, when I spied the Flag Lt. on the quarter deck. Going to him I was preparing to speak when he declared as follows: The Regent of Naha had tried twelve persons for crimes against a member of the United States Navy; the Commodore had been duly informed of the action taken and of the punishment to be carried out forthwith; the honor of both countries had therefore been preserved; more particularly, an Asian nation had been clearly apprised of our resolve to protect our national interests. With that the Flag Lt. wheeled about and left me.
26 June. Last night was long, sultry, filled with cold stars. Not able to sleep I strolled above decks and meditated upon the tiny dots of light along the shore where the city of Naha lay. I pictured to myself a man half sitting and half standing in a bamboo cage, without food or water. Back in my cabin in a fitful state between waking and sleeping I had dreams or visions or what you will of the black man, face down in the stream, his head laid open and great ribands of blood waving in the rapidly moving water. I saw the drunken faces of the jack tars, disembodied and charging hard upon me. I saw clubs wielded in air above my head. I saw a laughing fat man sitting cross legged on a silken pillow. I saw the black man at Kurihama behaving with the dignity of a king. I had many strange thoughts in that long night between sleeping and waking and in the morning I was bathed to my very feet in sweat.
I have decided today that I shall maintain this journal, which admittedly I began as a lark and perhaps as a kind of symbol of independence. Now, however, regardless of the official censure that would be mine were I discovered–and I suspect that regulations on this point will prove strict and closely enforced before the voyage ends—I shall keep this journal. It has become for me an affair of honor. I am convinced that an accurate record of the death of the black man has herein been made, insofar as second-hand accounts can be faithful to the facts. Though I knew this man only in his capacity as a seaman, my personal observation of his behavior had never convinced me otherwise but that he was a decent and honorable man, if inclined to amorous behavior of a loose sort. In the main, however, he deserved justice at the hands of Christians and shipmates, justice denied him because of his African race. I hereby resolve to maintain this journal in large part as a record of one man’s ill treatment. I herewith record his name: Amos Brown of Lynchburg, Virginia.
That finished the section and meant that the description of the meeting between Perry and the Russians were still missing. But the twelfth pipe had certainly cleared up the mystery of the racial incident at Naha. I typed up my transcription, and when I had finished reading it over, my hands were trembling. This had happened a hundred years ago, and things had happened in my lifetime—and for that matter, things had happened in recent months and in recent weeks—that were wilder and more relevant to me than what had happened at Naha. But what the hell, our Bostonian had laid it on me, the anger and frustration that follows injustice, and for a little while I had gone right back there to Naha and felt with him.
I gathered up everything and left the library. In the sunlight, shading my eyes to get bearings, I remembered my coffee date with Roger Wales across the street in a little eat shop. I backed into the library interior, took a pencil and paper out of my handbag, and scribbled the following note:
Dear Mr. Roger Wales:
Please accept my apology for not having coffee with you, but I am busily engaged in an affair of honor.
Sincerely,
(Miss) Judith Benton
I collared a hippie type coming out of the library. “Friend,” I said, “would you help a lady in distress?”
He was very tall, very thin, very shaggy, and he had these nice very bright green eyes. “Anything,” he said.
“Like, would you take this note to a guy in the coffee shop?” I took him to the curb and pointed to Roger Wales, who was visible through the shop window, drumming his fingers impatiently on a table.
Taking the folded note, my hippie said, “Any time,” and we waved in parting.
*
When Virgil had finished reading the transcription, he flung it down beside his armchair, like, irritably.
“Isn’t it what you were looking for?” I asked.
Virgil reached for a new pipe and filled it carefully, moving his fingers into the tobacco all delicately like a surgeon. Something was terribly wrong, and I knew it—I felt it all along my spine.
“Virgil?” I said.
“Yes, it’s what I was looking for,” he replied in that same odd mood of irritability.
“Was the Russian part lost overboard by that Ralph guy?”
“Forget the Russians. This supplies the motive.”
“I don’t dig.” But he didn’t seem to he
ar me. He lit the pipe, drew upon it, and sent swirls of smoke up into the humid room. The sky was overcast, promising more rain, and in the gray light, squinched down in his chair, Virgil looked small, withdrawn. When he slumped down and inward that way, there was nothing to do but wait.
I watched the turtles paddling in their new bowl. I washed out some of my things and hung them up in the bathroom to dry. When I came out of there, he was still brooding, as remote from me as if he had been at the North Pole. I wanted to question him: Why had reading the transcription irritated him? What was wrong? What was he struggling against? What had he meant by the manuscript supplying the motive? But I don’t bother Virgil. Some women bother their men, and I pride myself on not having that vice. So I padded quietly around the apartment, waiting.
I went over to Virgil’s desk and glanced at the stack of file cards all bearing his small, neat, precise handwriting. I read notations of events and names of people that meant nothing to me: William of Wykeham, Edward at Coblenz, Alliance with Louis the Bavarian. A book was lying on a pile of typing paper: Dépres, Les Préliminaires de la guerre de cent ans, 1328–1342. It struck me once again that I was living with a remarkable man. I mean, here he was writing a full-length study of fourteenth-century England, searching for a nineteenth-century American manuscript, and solving a twentieth-century murder.
“Judy.”
I turned to see him staring at me. He didn’t look small and withdrawn anymore: he was his usual controlled self; but I felt about him, somehow, a new sadness. He told me to sit down. I watched him relight the pipe, which had gone out. From where I sat on the couch his face was obscured, a dark oval in the cloudy light against which he was framed. So I didn’t see his expression; I only heard his voice, that deep, full baritone, steady but somehow troubled, telling me things I had never known about him. He spoke of his sister, dead in a tenement fire at seven, and of his mother, carried away by heart trouble in the year prior to his military service. He hadn’t seen or heard of his father in ten years. His voice went on, rhythmic and low-pitched, telling me of his boyhood street, how in Harlem a street has its own shape and size and smell and personality. He named the names of friends many of whom had disappeared or died.
And then he spoke of “the boyhood miracle”: that’s what he called it. He described this teacher he’d had during his early teen-aged years, this woman who was tired, faded, bitter, but who had encouraged him to read and thus saved him from the drugs and crime that he felt would have been inevitable for him. Through this woman he had learned to walk in worlds created out of the printed word.
A few of his brothers from the street had become musicians and actors and painters, having quite logically stepped from the street into sculpture studios and theaters, using the same cunning and following the same intuitions that had enabled them to survive babyhood and adolescence, whereas he had taken what was a rarely traveled road out of Harlem—the road into law and history. Through his reading he had come to believe that Man’s survival depended upon the power and truth of laws and traditions. That was why he had become fascinated by fourteenth-century England: the search then for a strong code of social contact had been stark and dramatic.
The more he studied the structure of power, the more he convinced himself that the techniques of acquiring power were there to be learned from the intrigues and violence of Western history. He had this private dream of hundreds of boys from Harlem learning through white history how to get black freedom. He felt there were keys, devices, skills, all of which could be separated out from history like chemical elements and studied and put to new use.
And he had convinced Henry of this mission. He had taken hold of this younger brother of a Black Panther and encouraged him to accept white concepts of law, to move out of Harlem into white society, to employ the techniques of white scholarship, and all in the ultimate hope of helping to create a world in which black and white could live together because both were sophisticated in the uses of power.
Virgil stopped talking. He smoked. A light rain began to come down. I heard the wheels of cars sliding through the wetness of the street, and I waited.
“It’s that idealism of mine, that has caused the trouble,” Virgil said after a while.
“What’s happened?” These were the first words I had spoken in a long time.
“It’s so obvious now,” he said, putting his pipe down. “You see, Henry did it. He killed Don Stuart.”
Looking back at it, I wonder why I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t. Henry had killed Don. Henry had killed him. I went to astrology for an explanation of this terrible fact. I mean, after all, Henry was a Scorpio, born under that powerful and mysterious water sign. A Scorpio can do anything. Henry had killed Don. That was it. The idea grooved. I looked at Virgil, where he now sat clenching an unlit pipe. “I’m going,” I said quietly, and I got to my feet. “Don’t take me home,” I added. “I’ll get a cab. Good night.”
*
The next morning I awoke before the alarm went off. Linda had not slept in her bed, and I imagined that she and her boyfriend were balling in his apartment. Why had I ever carped about a thin curtain? I wouldn’t have minded what they were doing behind it, just so long as they were nearby, because I was lonely and scared. Perhaps more lonely than scared. Ray Hack made me scared, but the idea that Henry had murdered Don Stuart, for some reason, made me lonely. Like, isolated. Like, all alone in a terrifying world.
I needed Virgil then; but I was learning from him how to do my thing no matter what, so instead of rushing over to his place, I got dressed and looked neither to right nor left—to hell with Ray Hack and the CIA—and went straight to the New York Public Library. I was going to finish my term paper, no matter who had killed whom or who was following me or what had happened between Perry and the Russians. I worked. But by noon my willpower sort of gave out, and anyway I had earned the right to call Virgil, so I called him.
When I heard his voice on the phone, I visualized him among his file cards and books, all alone, without compromise, silently and thoroughly completing his dissertation. But I also knew that a part of him was in anguish—I mean, appalled by the idea that one of his brothers had murdered another. I knew that this other Virgil sat in Virgil’s heart and grieved.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “I mean, about Henry?”
“I don’t know.”
“You aren’t thinking of—” I paused, unwilling to say it.
“Of telling the police? Yes, and of not telling them. My dilemma, Judy. At any rate, we’ll go to Tai Chi tonight.”
“But we can’t!” I blurted out.
“Yes, we can.”
“But Henry will be there, Virgil.”
“I know he will. That’s why we’re going.”
“I can’t meet him now. Not, you know, under the circumstances.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t be that cool,” I said reproachfully.
“Yes, you can,” Virgil said, and after exchanging a few more, like, very cold words, we hung up.
I sat there in the phone booth, staring at the metal box and imagining I could see Virgil on its shiny black surface. He was ramrod-straight, arranging file cards. Believe me, the English court of King Edward’s day would have been a groovier place had Virgil been there. I mean, had he been there ministering and intriguing, and all the while keeping the good of his country in mind. Sometimes I have, like, this Technicolor image of him being noble and all; but what the hell.
I called back.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “don’t worry about me. I mean, I won’t mess it up tonight.”
“I know you won’t.”
“Do you love me, Virgil?”
“We’re all together,” he said. And the way he said it got me all together, and I returned to work. By late afternoon I had completed my research, and when I left to meet Virgil I was ready to drop. When I saw him on the northwest corner of Washington Square, I just about cried. We embraced, and
I clung to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, disengaging himself to look at me.
“No,” I said, tears in my eyes. “I am really uptight.”
He touched my cheek. And this is Virgil. One gentle touch of his can bring me up or take me down, whichever is necessary. Like, we are standing in line for a movie and everyone around us is restless and so am I. I see him looking at me and shyly smiling; then he looks down and so do I, and we are watching one of his feet slide up to my toe and stop right there, his shoe and my shoe slightly touching. That’s all. But the wait becomes easier. I relax with my arm snuggled in his, and in the marquee glow I look at the tawny sheen of his cheeks, that good deep darkness, and the wonderful curve of his forehead, the strong flared nose, and the black eyes with the whites of them very pure, and I say to myself, Kid, you’re in luck. And to think that a girl once asked me if Virgil and I had difficulty getting cabs.
I was pretty settled down when we got to Tai Chi class; and a good thing, too—because the first person I saw in the room was Henry. He was practicing. He was really beautiful. He was, like, all alone while he concentrated on perfectly executing each of the complex movements of the exercise. His arms moved through the air as if they were pushing invisible pillows, and the way his head was set on his neck made me think of proud black people, kings and warriors of Africa. Henry could have any woman he wanted. He looked as though he would be fantastic in bed.
Martin wasn’t there—a relief to Virgil, who wanted to deal only with Henry. I too was glad that Martin wasn’t there, because knowing now that he kind of dug me, I was nervous and afraid of doing something to hurt him. Someday I would like to find him a groovy chick, one who would give him more to think about than Braless in Gaza.
In Tai Chi you have to concentrate, otherwise you easily forget the sequence of movements, and that is what I did that evening. I was Carrying Tiger to Mountain while everybody else was Stepping Back and Repulsing Monkey. You would have thought Virgil had nothing on his mind but the practice of Tai Chi. Not that he was as good at it as Henry. Nobody was.