“Chicago—and Cleveland.”
“Ah, now I see. Lots of Mississippi folks in Chicago.”
“Yes, over on Indiana, Calumet …”
“But you said your drinking is tolerable, that means you got a hollow leg. We’ll find out. Got all weekend, hey Bernard?”
“You won’t need the whole weekend, Harry.”
Right then, Max noticed the edge in Zutkin’s voice, although the critic’s smile told him that he hadn’t meant to let it slip through. A sidelong glance at Ames told Max that he had made a mental note of it.
“Ease up, Bernard, I brought my own hooch.”
With an excess of gesture and voice, Zutkin said, “Harry, you know you didn’t have to do that.”
Max stared out over the water at what he supposed was Connecticut.
Ames laughed. “Sure, I know it, Bernard. Take it easy, greasy, you got a long way to slide.”
Zutkin laughed then and gripped Ames’s arm. Ames slapped him on the back and snapped a wink at Max.
Oh, oh, Max thought and grinned at both of them.
The afternoon sun began its run toward Manhattan. Record followed record: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Jimmy Lunceford, a new group called the Cats ’n the Fiddle. There was talk about the Germans, the Japanese plowing through China, the impending selective service peacetime act. Couples danced on the porch, in the house, in the yard. Some people had slid down to the shelf and were running toward the water, thermos jugs in hand. By now Max had met Charlotte, a rangy woman with long blond hair and full body. But everything she did was precise, and she had had many drinks. They seemed not to affect her at all. It finally dawned on Max that Charlotte was interested only in Ames. Ah, well, what the hell. And later he was still sitting on the ledge, looking at the changing colors of the sea. A redhead was talking to him. She wore a bathing suit. Her legs were very hairy. He could see her breasts bubbling at the top of the suit “I just love you for that book,” she said. “Jesus, it was great.”
“Well, thanks,” Max said. He turned up his glass, eyes rolling down once more to her legs. The glass was empty. He started to rise to get another drink.
“Let me get it for you,” the redhead said, very close to him. “You’re a celebrity.”
With a show of embarrassed nonchalance, Max gave her the glass. What the hell was her name? Had she told him? He caught Ames’s eye. Ames was lying with his head in Charlotte’s lap. Ames winked and Max thought: This party is going to be groo-vy! His voice thick with insinuation, Ames drawled, “How are you doing, brother?”
“You tell me,” Max said.
“Fine, fine, fine like wine, jack.”
“But you the best,” Max said.
“Man, I know it, just don’t show it,” Ames said, laughing.
“Streevus mone on the reevus cone,” Max said, enjoying the poolhall, jitterbug, nonsensical word game, a game whose meaning was conveyed not by the words, because they had no meaning, but by the tone of voice, the inflection.
“Until sleptis joon cut out from the moon,” Ames countered.
The redhead returned. Ames closed his eyes and said, “Weeby on the streeby and a dit-dit-datty-dit.”
“If it’s not strong enough, I’ll put more in,” she said, sitting down on the sand again. “You’re not high, are you?”
“High? I’m flying,” Max said. What would this night bring, he thought, and really, with so little effort. He was going to like being a novelist; he was going to love the hell out of it.
“You don’t look high,” she said.
“No? Anyway, I got rhythm …”
“That’s a damned silly thing to say,” the redhead cried, getting up.
“Hey,” Max called, seeing his night suddenly vanishing, “that was a joke, don’t you …”
“There are some things,” she said, “that you don’t joke about.”
Max stared at his glass, puzzled. He had the feeling that, although he was lying perfectly still, Ames had heard everything—and was laughing to himself.
The next day, after mumbling his apologies to Zutkin, Max prepared to leave. He was backing out when he heard a voice. He stopped. Harry Ames.
“Heard you were leaving. I think you’re smart. Be independent in your own way. They’d love you to stay and pick up another chick, maybe one that hasn’t heard that you have a sense of humor. I heard that crack about you got rhythm. I haven’t read your book yet, Max. I’m sure it’s good. Zutkin’s no fool.”
The music had started up again. There were voices already raised in tribute to the first round of drinks that day. Ames was leaning in the car window now. “I know there’s no future in that paper of yours but you’re young. There are in this business,” he said, with a heavy air, “people who would like you to be serious, even angry, twenty-four hours a day. If you can’t, then you’re a renegade Negro, and they won’t have too much to do with you. This world is very, very greasy, and it’s going to slide a long way. They’ve been so used to putting it on a certain set of skids that they are quite sure that any way they set it—and at least they’re thinking now about where the world should be set—it’s the right way. Man, they want you to whip them, whip the shit out of them. But then, will you have energy for anything else? Look, I don’t know you very well at all, but we’re colored, we write, we talk that streevus mone shit and—thing is—thing is, somewhere in this business we got something together besides being colored and being writers. You’re doing all right. Just don’t never worry about a little pussy. I tell you this, knowing you can say it fifty billion times. But when you get a chick who can put it on you right with the right combination of other things, that’s it, you’re locked in and all the talkin’ ain’t going to help one bit.” Ames laughed. “Listen to me. And I ain’t even had my first one today. I’ll call you at the paper, okay?”
“Yes, Harry, and thanks.”
Ames started away. He returned as Max started the car. “And I’ll bet you that redhead wishes you two had been alone so no one could have heard, then it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Aw,” Max said, “now I’ll probably never have a redhead.”
“But, man, there are blondes, brunettes and blackheads. Or are you color oriented?” Ames walked away laughing. Max decided that he liked him. He pointed the car toward New York.
6
NEW YORK
Perhaps the failure of Harry Ames’s marriage lay in the fact that so few people knew he had a wife. The women he met especially. Ames did not go out of his way to tell them until it became necessary—when he wanted to be finished with them or if they could not be talked into a quiet arrangement designed not to upset the apple cart.
From where Max sat at the Ames’s dinner table many times, he could not see just what in the hell was wrong with Wanda. Graceful, feminine, intelligent, she had been one of the Cotton Club beauties. Perhaps they were just tired of each other and who could argue with that?
Sometimes Max and Harry would appear on panels together; there were not too many Negro writers, and sometimes Bolton Warren would appear with them. It was more fun when they appeared alone; Warren always put a certain kind of chill on things. His mind, his eyes were always somewhere else. Coming up to the war, the scent of death was already in the air, and the saturnalias signaled to begin. Quite suddenly Max found himself escalated from the world of social club formals and jiving nights in barrooms, into mixed functions, teas, cocktails, full-blown parties. Most of the Negroes who attended the affairs were in Negro advancement organizations, the church, or show business. There was a burgeoning of interracial couples, married or simply mating. It was suspected that not a single one of the interested white men, some of them book editors, who regularly attended the functions was without a Negro girl. But no one knew for sure whose wife the girl was. The same was true of Negro men.
At one party, Harry, his face glowing, pulled Max into a corner and said, waving toward the mixed crowd, “Man, more pussy has been
got and given in the name of the Negro Cause than can possibly be imagined. You gettin’ your share?” And before Max could answer, Harry melted back into the crowd.
One press day afternoon, in the fall, Max lay on his couch reading. Beside him rested a clipboard; sometimes while reading, a passage triggered ideas. The desk light was on and there was paper in the typewriter. His hemorrhoids had been bothering him; it was best to take it easy. But, whenever he glanced at the empty clipboard, the desk, and the typewriter with its surly white paper waiting to be filled, he felt uneasy and guilty about lying down.
He forced himself to read. A little later he felt chills and then was suddenly nervous. He shifted his position. Then he got up and turned off the desk light and returned to the couch. Once more he rose and went to the desk and ripped the paper out of the typewriter. But now his hands were shaking. He was overwhelmed by the idea that he was not a writer, but a pretender, like so many others he had met in Harlem or down on 8th Street. No real writer would be lying on his can when there was work to be done. He had stumbled into a dead-end street, that was all. A writer had to stand the silences that came with being alone, and he hated being lonely and yet it comforted him. You could think when you were alone, and writers needed to think.
He picked up the clipboard and tossed it across the room where it clattered against a wall and fell to the floor. Dilemma. How in the hell did it happen? What had started it? He could get out; he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life like Harry—never knowing what the next phone call or mail delivery would or wouldn’t bring; never knowing what life would hold for you at forty-nine or fifty-nine. No. He was going to apply himself; he was going to scheme and jive, dance in the sandbox, Tom, kiss behinds, and wind up managing editor of the Democrat. He had a little prestige now. No one else at the office had written a novel and they weren’t planning to, either!
His chills and shakes persisted. He thought he would feel better outside. He pulled on a sweater and walked rapidly to the corner and then across the street into the park. There he sat in the sun, but even as he did, his mind floated up words to describe what he was seeing and feeling. A young sharpie in draped coat and pegged pants strolled by, arms held stiffly behind his back. A barge, belly-deep in water, steamed slowly up the Hudson, froth leaping from its bows. Max looked at the Palisades and descriptions came for that sheer mass of stone rising from the west bank of the river. And words came for the color of the sun, for the sounds of the children playing near him, for the arching spiral of a battered football and the taut freckled face that watched its flight. The words kept coming, even when he closed his eyes, words and ways of using them that he knew no newspaper could ever use.
He was twenty-four and he knew he hadn’t lived much. He hadn’t been anywhere, really, not even to Niagara Falls, the Canadian side. Going to college had only taught him that he would never be able to read all the things he wanted to or should. And if he hadn’t read so much or traveled so much, how in hell could he feel so much?
Why me? He asked himself bitterly. He looked at the bouncing back of the sharpie. Why couldn’t I have been like him? Anybody who walked like that and dressed like that, well, he seemed to be able to live life as he found it. Why can’t I wear zoot suits, dance the Lindy better, until my nuts fall, laugh like hell instead of just smiling? Why can’t I be loud and loose and drunker than I ever let myself get? Why am I the way I am? Mutant, freak, caprice, fluke. Maxwell Reddick.
He thought about his childhood, his parents, and dismissed them. No, it went beyond that, beyond them. He remembered a childhood photo. He still had it, somewhere. It was a photo which, when his parents had passed it around, drew the comment: “Three? He looks so old and wise.” Was there something in that silly photo that could give him answers? So old, so wise, God, about what? He would study it once more when he returned to his apartment. What in the world had made him look so old and wise at only three? His family had never starved. His parents had been good to him and perhaps even loved him, coming late in their lives as he had. He didn’t know, had never assumed that they had not loved or at least liked him. That had to count for something, although the old man was hell on wheels right up until they laid him out, four years to the exact day and hour after his mother had died. What did that mean? That look he had at three … Which spermatozoid, which ovum, preserved for generations in the secret places of bodies, had sensed the presence of each other, finally, and, fiercely subcopulating, created him? Had they come out of the past at all, the future? But why, why?
The next time he saw Harry, Max asked, “Do you ever question the way you are, why you’re a writer?”
“Every day.”
Max waited for him to go on. It was a Saturday afternoon and the uptown bar had not yet filled with dapper Negroes starting the second leg of the weekend; Friday night was the first; Saturday into Sunday was the second, which was brought to an end only by habit of going to church Sunday morning or sleeping into Sunday afternoon.
Harry laughed. “Well, you’re colored and you wonder how come you’re a writer because there is no tradition of colored writers. Are we related to some ancient Yoruba folklorist, to Phillis Wheatley? I think about that. Then, somehow, it doesn’t matter about the tradition; what matters is now. You wrote a book, Max, and published it. As I see it, that makes you, like me, a very special person among all the people who’ve ever lived. That’s cause for some pride, I think; that’s cause to produce more books. That also makes you dangerous because they don’t burn people anymore, they burn books, and they don’t always have bonfires. I love it like this; let there be a little danger to life, otherwise life is a lie.
“I’m the way I am, the kind of writer I am, and you may be too, because I’m a black man; therefore, we’re in rebellion; we’ve got to be. We have no other function as valid as that one.” Harry grinned. “I’ve been in rebellion, and a writer, I guess, ever since I discovered that even colored folks wanted to keep me away from books so I could never learn just how bad it all was. Maybe, too, to keep me from laughing at them. For taking it. My folks had a deathly fear of books.”
Harry took a deep drink of his beer and gazed moodily around the bar, then he said, “There’s something wrong with this ritual these people have here. Oh, hell, I like kicking it around all weekend, too, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see what’s going on. A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn’t, that’s why so many people tell themselves it is. But they don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say if it isn’t the same thing they can see or believe, and that’s going to make you a target. Talk about sitting ducks! You against them, and all you’ve got is a beat-up typewriter and some cheap rag bond. And your head.
“If your first book is any indication, you’re a rebel, too, just as you should be. Don’t be guilty if you make it and Negroes themselves start shooting you down; your subject will always be America or Americans. You didn’t make the bed; you just have to lie in it. Even so, when my name is mentioned, I want people to jerk up and look for trouble; I want trouble to be my middle name when I write about America. I wouldn’t like it if a single person slept well. We—you, me, Warren and the others—have that function. I’ll tell you why.
“In our society which is white—we are intruders they say—there has got to be something inherently horrible about having the sicknesses and weaknesses of that society described by a person who is a victim of them; for if he, the victim, is capable of describing what they have believed nonexistent, then they, the members of the majority, must choose between living the truth, which can be pretty grim, and the lie, which isn’t much better. But at least they will then have the choice.
“It must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny
work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white. How it must anger them to know finally that we know they deny women who are white to black men, while they have taken black women at will for generations.
“And don’t they know or want to know that the absence of black voices in the state legislatures and in Congress, unheard since the Reconstruction, wounds them to the death? How painful would it be for them to admit that millions of acres of black men’s lands were ripped from them by night riders and county clerks, and are still being held by the descendants of the thieves? Very painful. They’d have to give back those lands, those dollars, that work.
“Ah yeah, there’s quite enough to be in rebellion about,” Harry said, morosely. “I quit the Party because I became damned sick and tired of white men telling me when I should suffer, where and how and what for. And, Max, I was suffering all the time! And I got tired of writing what I knew was wrong for me, our people, our time, our country. I got tired of seeing young Negroes, young, man! beat when they drifted into the Party looking for hope and found nothing but another version of white man’s hell. Karl Marx was not thinking about niggers when he engineered The Communist Manifesto; if he was, why didn’t he say so? None of the ‘great documents’ of the West ever acknowledged a racial problem tied to an economic problem, tied to a social problem, tied to a religious problem, tied to a whole nation’s survival. And that’s why, man, none of them, unamended, are worth the paper they were written on.” Harry jabbed himself in the chest. “Somewhere you know this and you’re thinking twice about starting to work. Your job is to tell those people to stop lying, not only to us, but to themselves. You’ve written and in the process, somewhere in that African body of yours, something said, ‘I am—a writer, a man, something, but here for today. Here for right now.’”
Harry waved to the waiter for more beer.
“That could make a man start thinking he’s pretty important stuff, couldn’t it, Harry?”
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 6