Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  Now everything goes back into the box, except the journal, which I continue to read. I wish to reacquaint myself with Jane. The period of Jane’s life between Chenka and Olo was an album of self-delusion, with good examples of all the major types?professional, social, romantic … no, I am being too hard on her. She was a tough girl. It’s not easy losing your first big romantic thing and your sense of the underlying reality of the cosmos at one and the same time.

  This gets me thinking again about Dad (for I have gone to see that boat, Guitar, several times, down at Dinner Key). I wonder, is that kind of person still around, will we ever have people like that again? He always said it was his generation, that peculiar lost one that was born during the Second World War. He used to tote up the things that his generation was last at. Last to experience segregation of the races, last to come to sexual maturity before women’s lib and the Pill, last to believe that the United States was invariably the good guy, last to defer without much question to teachers and elders in general, last to get the full load of dead white male culture force-fed into their brains and souls, last to grow up before TV became the ruling power. If Catholic, last to get raised in the pre—Vatican II shut-up-and-do-what-we-say, superstitious, devotional American church. The last to start screwing before Roe v. Wade, and hence and finally, the last to think it mandatory to marry the girl you got pregnant. Thus me.

  I was like him, or tried to be, perhaps to be less like my mother, who was thoroughly modern, although only five years younger than he. As she often told me, she went to him to get money for an abortion and he said, before she could ask, let’s get married, and she did. She imagined a life rather like that of the Kennedys, and tried to have one to the extent that she could. Dad stayed home with us kids while she did so. I will give her this, that she made it home for the major holidays, and here they all are, dutifully recorded in short entries about home visits. A dull story, even to the author, who seems to be the sort who will end up wearing a plain brown dress and a bun, with a ring of keys at her waist, standing in the doorway of the big house saying, “I am afraid my father cannot be disturbed.”

  Until Witt. That was a surprise, and registered as one in the journal. I am addicted to genius, so Jane wrote back then. If true, I believe I am in recovery now. We did not end up in bed on the night we met, I am happy to say; Witt had that much care for his old pal Lou, but he called me the next day and invited me to that rehearsal and I was a goner. It seems that I actually believed at the time that someone who could ring the changes on race hysteria and hypocrisy the way he could would be fairly immune to racial insanity. Such immunity is not impossible, I must believe. Needless to say, in both Chicago and New York we were acquainted with any number of interracial couples. They were not even unusual in the arty circles we hung out in. Maybe they were writhing secretly, but I saw no evidence of this. Some people, I believe, are just happy to be alive and successful. I thought we would be like them. As I read this, I see I had not a clue. And maybe he didn’t, either. This is what I like to think, even now, that it was Africa that changed him, the witch stuff. He would not be the first decent man to succumb to the temptations of power. And there is a part of me, of course, that says it was all my fault. What did I do?

  Money was fine. We had, both of us, more than enough, and, as everyone knows, rich people are happy. He was never interested in mine, or where it came from, and only seemed to notice it when I was being stingy, when he would poke fun. He was generous with his own, although his refinement of taste kept him from being too hideously nouveau. The excesses I noticed I blamed on his status as an artist. Everyone knew artists were nuts. We had a coterie of hangers-on, but not an embarrassingly large one. He was decent to the people who started out with him in Chicago, too, which I thought was a good sign.

  Sex was fine. We were hot for each other from the start and stayed hot. I think he was a little surprised at me, since I look like a gawky, boyish, convent-school product, and I guess he was looking forward to stripping off my Catholic pudence. This had, of course, been quite stripped off already by a lover of encyclopedic technical scope and virtuosity. Was he as “good” as Marcel? What’s good? The Jane Clare Doe Gold Medal for Most Spine-Cracking Orgasms in a Standard Time Period remains in Marcel’s possession, but while I was kid-crazy about Marcel, I was in love with Witt, and that made a difference. I thought it was for life, if you want to know, and so I laid everything I’d been taught by Marcel at Witt’s feet, or penis, the love secrets of exotic civilizations and tribal peoples. So, all in all, one could ask for nothing better. I mean, what is there besides sex and money? Could I have predicted what happened? Are there signs in the journals that even now I can’t see? He always tried to make me happy. He had a gift for it, for delight. Once on my birthday he hadn’t said anything about it and I thought he’d forgotten and when we got back to the loft the whole place was full of flowers, I mean thousands and thousands of flowers. He once hired a whole choir to sing to me out in the street under the window of our loft. Once he picked me up at the museum and put me in a cab and I thought we were just going home but we drove to Kennedy, where we boarded the Concorde and flew to London. He liked making me happy.

  Okay, that’s only money, but he gave me his attention, too. When he wasn’t working, which was a lot of the time, he had no other interests. Not like Marcel, who kind of squeezed me into his famous man’s life. He listened, hours and hours of listening, like I was some kind of oracle. Not something I had much experience of, to say the least. A perfect husband, right?

  Yes, there was that little detail of his parentage. There are entries here covering the great unveiling, our fight, the happy reunion. I come across as understanding itself. My wounded hero! What a sucker I am for the wounded hero, especially the genius wounded hero. Marcel hiding from the Nazis, Witt hiding from White America, my father hiding from my mother.

  I visited his parents once, without telling him. Stan and Cynthia Moore, of Morristown, New Jersey. I called them and asked if I could come by, and they said I could, so one Sunday in late spring I drove out. There I found more or less what I expected: a suburban split-level on a mapled street, the newish VW van in the driveway, bearing an Amnesty decal on the rear window and a sticker on the bumper opposing some state referendum (vote no on 171!), a hoop attached to the garage. (Witt playing b-ball? A strange notion. He could barely ride a bike.) And the Moores themselves, decent, middle-aged, liberal people, givers to Greenpeace and the ACLU, Democratic voters, Unitarian churchgoers (she a lapsed Jew), sadly infertile, former peaceniks, marchers for civil rights, wracked, confused, failed by the gods of niceness and decency.

  Their house was casually furnished with an ex-hippie-gone-straight miscellany, blocky Ikea and Door Store stuff, steel-framed posters and original art on the walls, Rya rugs, hand-thrown pottery, not very tidy. The living room, where they sat me on a brown corduroy sofa, was filled with books that looked read; on one wall a huge stereo loomed, flanked by a wall of LPs and CDs. I used my best anthro techniques on them, I fear, me who was trained in childhood not to ask impertinent questions. They were, fortunately, the sort of American couple who had been through so many group sessions of one kind or another that they had dumped any pretensions to privacy. They were desperate for intimate news of their son.

  So I learned that back when the Moores found that one of Cindy’s several abortions had screwed up her pipes, they decided to adopt, and decided also that they would not be one of the selfish racist bourgeois who demanded a white kid, but would specifically look for a child of one of the oppressed minorities. Then the great carnival wheel of fate revolved, Ifa cast his hook and line, and out popped the ten-week-old abandoned child of a woman who had staggered into Bellevue Hospital in New York, dropped a boy baby, and slipped out a day later, having left a phony address. They named him Malcolm (after you-know-who) DeWitt (after Mr. Moore’s recently deceased dad). He was a doll. This I have transcribed verbatim from Mrs. Moore’s lips. A doll, and from the
first week, sharp as a tack, as Stan Moore noted. The Moores raised him according to the latest liberal nostrums?lots of mobiles, lots of attention, pickup on demand, no sugars, Mozart in the nursery, Montessori preschool. And they had tried to give him an interracial upbringing. The Moores had plenty of African-American friends, and friends who had adopted kids of other races. Their church was full of them?little Koreans, little Chinese, little Cherokees, little mulattoes of all shades?the Moores made it sound like the anteroom to Utopia. And it might have been. God bless all their liberal souls?they were all of them nice people.

  I saw the album, smiling baby Witt (or Malcolm, as he was then called), grinning toddler Witt, gap-toothed Witt on a carnival ride, the family at Disneyland, a Halloween picture, the smile for elementary school graduation, and then the photos petered out, and became darker, no more smiling poses; instead, candid snaps of the morose or snarling adolescent.

  They thought it was a phase. Kids are like that. They themselves were handfuls back in the sixties. They had met, in fact, in jail, after a demonstration in Madison, where they were both at school. The Movement; they both still pronounced it as if capitalized. So they didn’t worry too much, although they were hurt. He didn’t love them? Impossible. They loved him!

  I probed the wound. He had gone to Chicago on a full scholarship. His grades and SATs were excellent. She still knew them all by heart. They thought he was going to be prelaw. They had no idea he was writing poetry. He didn’t come home for Christmas the first year, nor for spring break, nor for the summer; he had a job. They said they’d fly out; they wanted to see him, meet his friends, see where he lived. No, he was very busy. Too busy for Mom and Dad?

  They found out what he was busy at that summer, when the Chicago cops called. He’d been arrested in a crack house, charged with possession. They were there the next day.

  I knew about this part. Witt had woven it into his life tale of coming up rough in the ghetto. He’d never been a user or a dealer, just hangin’ with the homies, and the Man had jumped them. This was true. He had just been hangin’ with the homies, to whom he’d lied just like he’d lied to everyone else. Naturally, the Moores were on his side, they knew all about the racist pigs, but it turned out he didn’t want them on his side. There was a horrible scene in the lawyer’s office, where they went after bailing him out of Cook County jail. He blamed them for his not having a real identity, for depriving him of his black soul, for using him as a convenient tool to assuage their stinking honky guilt. He wished he’d been raised by his junkie whore mother in the community, at least he’d be something. He might be a black junkie killer, but that was better than being a white nigger. And so forth. The charges were dismissed and they left. It was like leaving a morgue after they’d made you identify your kid on a slab, Cindy said. Why? Why? We did the best we could. I didn’t know why either. I did the best I could, too.

  He never came home again, never contacted them, refused calls, returned letters. He got a job in the library to support himself. For five years, nothing. And then Race Music opened and eventually came to New York. And, with not a little trepidation, they’d gone to see it on Broadway. And they’d seen the much-remarked-on scene in the second act, the scarifying, vicious lampoon of the white liberal couple who adopts a black baby. They’d left at the intermission. She’d cried for a week afterward.

  I thought I could fix it up. I always think I can fix things up. I said good-bye to Stan and Cindy on an up note, therefore, saying I’d keep in touch, intending to lay it out for Witt when the time was right: Look this is crazy, you’re not a kid anymore, they’re your parents, they raised you, they’re decent people, this is wrong.

  But the right time did not immediately appear. He was working; he actually never stopped working, not even in the summers, when we went out to Sionnet. There was a little apartment over the boathouse there that our dockman used to have when we had a dockman, and we converted it into a studio for him. Oddly enough, my family got on pretty well with him. My father, of course, likes everyone and dwells in that zone in which social status is so absolutely secure that one can treat all beings with perfect, thoughtless equality. To Dad, there is the Doe family and there is everyone else?the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the guy who comes by in a pickup to collect the trash. And Witt can be charming, too, which helps.

  My mother likes lovely people and the famous, and she was both surprised and delighted that clunky old Jane got a lovely, famous one, and his race simply added a little panache to the mix, something else besides her affairs with which to shock the girls at the club. Mary, my sister, or Mariah, as she called herself then, immediately put a heavy make on him, which he deflected amusingly, thus winning my heart even more than it was already won?the only human male on the planet besides my stepbrother who preferred me to her. Mariah, although lovely as the dawn, is a couple of steps slow in the flashing wit department. Witt would say absolutely outrageous things to her in my presence that would go right past her, that wouldn’t even dent the famous smile. You have to give her game, though. She never stopped trying, even after she outdid her big sister by announcing she was pregnant. Something I was not, and not likely to be, given my husband’s attitude. She got married in Saint Pat’s.

  My brother was there that time, too. And now I’m reminded, reading along, that Josey never much cared for Witt, nothing he ever said, but there was a stiffness there. I thought it was because my dad liked him, and so Josey had to not like him. Witt never said anything about it. Few entries for that summer, actually. I guess I was happy. Fortunate are those whose annals are brief. I remember him waving from his window when we took the boat out. He never came with us. He got seasick on a floating dock. I thought he was happy, too, a member of our family at least. He had a knack of fitting in, although if you believed his writing you would have thought here’s a guy who would never fit in anywhere. Maybe that was his invisible part, adapting the local coloration. He pronounced Sionnet SIGH-nit, instead of sigh-ON-et, like the tourists, and Montauk with the accent on the second syllable, like an old Long Islander, and exhibited the proper contempt for the south shore.

  Was the real Witt lurking beneath the surface then? Was the camouflage that of a leopard lying in wait? There’s nothing here to suggest it in these pages, not the slightest suspicion. As it turned out, that was the last summer we were all together. After it ended, Witt and I went on our trip.

  Suddenly I don’t want to read anymore. I’d rather not read the Africa stuff just now. I put the thing into a cupboard and go out on the landing. The sky is low and wet and there is lightning to the west over the Glades. I am thinking about our first night in Africa, when we got to Lagos, and how fast it all collapsed. A week and the whole thing was gone, or so it now seems, all the flowers and singing and the making me happy, all eaten up. No, not a leopard inside. A certain weakness, a hollow place in Witt, that his nice parents couldn’t reach and, as it turned out, I couldn’t either. But something did, in Africa.

  TWENTY

  10/24 Lagos

  Can’t believe this happened, even as I write it down words seem unreal, as if writing down in a dream journal something that didn’t really happen. Seem compelled to, tho, habit of keeping a record of everything that happens, discipline of fieldwork. This actually happened, I was there.

  Evening of the fifth, the day I got back from the field, W. came in late, pounded on my door, yelling, should have told him to get lost, but polite me, ashamed, not wanting to wake the whole house. W. a mess, stank of beer, smoke & something stinky sweet, like cheap deodorizer. Talking grandiose, not like him at all: he was imbibing the true spirit of Guineé, African night, the music, alive as never before, etc. I told him he was full of it, said it was parroted horseshit, Soronmu’s negritude line, besides it was late, I was tired, & he stank. He said that I was the one parroting the hegemonic line, bloodless, overintellectualized yawp of the dying white civilization, & that I knew he was right, which was why I had attached myself to him, sucking his
black energy to keep myself inflated the way American culture sucked energy out of blacks & turned it into money. So he jumped on me and I got raped.

  Thinking now, why didn’t I break his fucking neck? Can’t recall, only how exhausted I was, so startled that I just lay there and let him. ?? Exhausted by love, ground down, sorrow, never understood this before, you hear about it, obviously common in male-dominant cultures, like here, recall thinking o fuck it all, he wants to rape me, fine, I’ve tried everything else. And I had thought he was coming around. After which he left, without 1 word, like I was a whore. Funny, I was totally silent during, but after wailed like a crazy woman, didn’t care who heard me.

  Everyone had, clearly, because the next morning the group treated me extra nice, like I was terminally ill with loathsome disease. W. gone too. Unbearable, so scrammed out, got Tunji to take me to the U.

  Worked on Gelede until I saw Mr. O. and his staff were hanging around waiting to close the place down, but were embarrassed to interrupt the great scholar at her work, or maybe they’d heard about the night before like everyone else in this fucking city of dreadful night. Snuck back to my room, locked myself in and worked some more, loading reading notes into laptop, crying in spurts, drinking rum on top of Xanax, and passed out.

  Crashing sounds, singing, loud music woke me up. Total darkness, generator off. Got dressed, followed the sound of music to the hotel bar.

  There were ten or so people there, all drunk, two of them women, tight bright dresses & lacquered hairstyles: ashawos, low-end Lagos whores. The boys were gboyegas, street boys, kind that hung around Lagos Island and Victoria, ripping off tourists and people just in from the bush. Tricked out like American gangstas, baggies, faked designer labels, big sneakers, the backward ball caps. The girls were late teens, the men ranged from that to midthirties. When I came in they were milling around uneasily; Lary’s was not their sort of place, bar was approximation of a British pub?dark paneling, cozy nooks, a dartboard, etc., not a plank on a couple of crates under a kerosene lamp. One had a boom box, some hip-hop shit at top volume. The stranger living in W.’s body approached me and grabbed me and exhibited me to his pals like a trophy. My white bitch. She loves black cock, don’t you? A lot more, too, about me and Dave Berne, how I was screwing the white man, and how we knew how to take care of a bitch like that. The men were nervous, excited, a fear there, too, but dulled by booze. They came closer, I was touched, mauled. They were speaking, joking, in dialect too fast for me to follow. Tap current tap current, slang for feeling up a girl, yes, he was staging the lynch mob’s fantasy, the niggers and the white woman.