The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  Max felt as if he could sleep. He was at peace. In four months he had written a novel complete with rewrites and it had been sold. He had already begun another. And Harry had just published another novel. It seemed to be going well with him and Charlotte now. (Yes, it had seemed so, then.) There was nothing quite like success, American Negro writer Harry Ames, nothing quite like it. It means that you stare at the cops just as long as they stare at you and a host of other things, right, Harry?

  For Max, his own novel had begun new seepages in the old well; there was something down there, something after all. His book was about the war, of course, about Negro soldiers in Italy going up the mountains and down the mountains; it was about Cinquale, Grosseto, Viareggio. In the novel the fat woman became a young, almost innocent farm girl with whom the hero of the novel, a corporal, had fallen in love. The novel ended with white MP’s catching the corporal and the girl in a barn and killing them and covering them with hay and horse manure.

  “Great!” Max’s editor had screamed. “Daring. Honest. Dynamic …” All the words and phrases that would be sent to echo in his ears for all the years he would be writing. Some of the words would fall into disuse, then be miraculously resurrected, and each time, for a while, they would have not a new, but at least a different meaning until the literary ferris wheel took them underneath again. Max didn’t care except that he could repeat them to Lillian Patch, the girl he loved.

  It happened in spring, two months after his discharge from Dix, while he was still living at the Y. He would look out the window of his room, straining to see the street below, but he could only see a small line of sidewalk across the street where the Y Annex was. But looking to the west he could see the white and gray buildings of City College. Then one day, when he was pleased with his work, he hurled a silent challenge at the City College buildings: I will walk to where you are and see if I can see my room from there. He never made it because of Lillian Patch. He followed her from Seventh Avenue, up the sheer rock steps to Morningside Heights to a drugstore on the corner of Broadway and 145th Street. He followed her, marveling; she fit so well with the day. She was young and lithe and she smiled. Mostly it was her posture. Loose it was, as a drifting on the wind, and yet there was a confident control that said, I know my body. In front of the drugstore he pulled abreast of her and found himself strangely tongue-tied. She did not pull away or scowl as Manhattan women usually do. Instead a half-smile came to her face, which was small with the cheekbones riding high along the sides. And when she smiled, the brown of her eyes, a kind of puce, was transformed into brown velvet, the shimmer of them deep. He looked down at her; she was small and that surprised him; she had seemed to have great height. Her skin was as the wet sand, brown, yet suggesting gold.

  “I followed you, you see. It was spring—it’s spring and it was too lovely to stay in and I came out and saw—you …” He told himself, Something is happening, something is happening. “Well,” he tried to beat himself back, “a fine thing like you walkin’ all alone on such a mellow day, and I—” He held up his hands then, and said, “I followed you. I didn’t see your face until now. I want to be with you.” He flinched from his own words. Seldom had he felt so vulnerable.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  Hell, he thought, voice too, oh, God, why didn’t you let me stay in the Y?

  “Max,” he said almost too eagerly.

  “Max,” she said laughing, “are you part Jewish or something?”

  “No, all spook, one hundred percent spook. I think.”

  “I’m Lillian. I have never been followed so far. One or two blocks, you know with the usual—‘shake it but don’t break it, baby,’ comments. Sometimes they make me feel good. Would you buy me a Coke?”

  “Sure,” Max said, charging into the drugstore, biting his tongue to keep from saying, I’ll buy you anything, anything. He drank three Cokes, she drank one. “You have a last name? Mine’s Patch.”

  “Reddick.”

  “Are you a veteran?”

  “I’m afraid so. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Like veterans?” Some of these broads still see a uniform on every vet.

  “Not particularly. Don’t dislike them either, Max?”

  Max almost broke his back turning around; something about her tone of voice. But she said, “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “What?”

  “What you do.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m a teacher, you see. Nosey.”

  “It’s all right. Can we walk some more?”

  “I live just down the block, but maybe we can sit in the park for a while.”

  On the way down to the park, Max kept thinking, I ain’t never been in love before, if this is what it feels like. Good God! Max, baby! Lookit you! He wanted to touch her arm as they went down the steep hill, but he merely looked and smiled, as she did. She pointed to her home when they passed it; she lived with her parents. They were getting old now and she was the only child and she didn’t want to leave them. She had the entire second floor to herself. When, after talking in the park for an hour, she said she had to go home, he said, “But when will I see you again?”

  [Now, still waiting for the buck to reappear, he remembered how she had turned ever so slowly to look at the Palisades, then back to him, saying sprightly] “How’s about now, for dinner?” They held hands going back to the house, resigned, overwhelmed, aware of all the Hollywood Boy-Meets-Girl movies, American Love riddled with clichés: eyes, hands, facial expressions, the lot, and after meeting her folks, they went upstairs to her apartment (her mother did the dishes, she was a working girl), talked some more, with long, long pauses in between and many exchanges of the eyes until he simply stood up, gently holding her hand and pulled her to him. There was no resistance, and it rode them down, that thing, swept them up and left them in a silence in which they held each other desperately as if afraid to be blown away. No, Max said to himself. No, no. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I am talking to this real dumb guy, Max Reddick,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “I’m telling him, ‘No, no, it can’t be.’”

  Lillian smiled. “And what is that real dumb guy answering?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s answering, crudely because he is crude, ‘You’re a boom-boom liar, it is too!’”

  Later Max had run up the hill to Broadway singing at the top of his voice, shimmying when he came to a stop, one of his hands held across his stomach as he shuffled across the sidewalk.

  “What in the hell are you laughing about?” Harry asked “You woke me up. Are you coming loose upstairs?”

  Before Max could tell Harry about Lillian, there came a soft, uneven drumming along the forest floor, and even as they turned to watch the buck break out of the brush where it had vanished before, adrenaline pumping suddenly through their bodies, their rifles swinging up, they sighted. Perhaps frightened by someone or something on the lower trails, the deer, his head full of points, bounded clear of the brush.

  But Harry Ames, too long away from a rifle and the woods, hesitated for just the small part of a second as he started to lead the deer in his sights. The deer seemed ludicrously slow, but it was in its second bound now, floating lean, long and brown against the backdrop of tree and sky. The instinct of the city man, at once envious and frightened of the abrupt display of animal grace, immeasurably distraught at the sudden gift of power (gun at the shoulder, animal in the sights), made Harry pause a little too long. His resentment of Max was like a spurt of acid. He took in Max leading the deer at the height of its second bound, heard his rifle crack sharply and echo swiftly over the mountain, saw Max’s shoulder snap back from the kick of the gun, and saw life go out of the buck as it stretched its legs to land and take off again in another bound. In the middle of these observations, Harry fired too, but he knew he had fired late and had missed.r />
  Some of the buck’s antlers had dug into the ground, raking up a line of dead leaves. The shot had been clean. The buck was dead when it came down. They paused a moment and stared at the animal. “Goddamn,” Harry found himself whispering. “Man, ain’t you a bitch?” Enviously he watched Max pull the buck over to see where the shot had hit. Had to be the heart, had to be. It was.

  “Germans must have caught hell,” Harry said. “Big one. Meat’s going to be a little tough.”

  “Parboil it first,” Max said. “Get some of the taste out, soften it up.”

  There are some people, Max was thinking, with whom you can share elation because they feel it with you. Harry Ames was not one of those. Max underplayed. “Sure was lucky, Harry. Right in the heart. I thought we’d have to finish it off when we got up close.” “We”—wouldn’t that help make it all right? The “we” once more. “Now we’ve got enough venison to last for a little while.”

  “Yeah, ain’t we,” Harry said, suddenly mildly disgusted in the presence of death. Max also noticed but said nothing. Death disgusted him too. It was like looking at a snake and being repelled, for it reminded you where you came from and in some electrically quick way, how long it took to come from there and how horrible it had been, evolving.

  In silence they secured a sturdy limb and tied the deer’s feet to it; they would have to struggle with the 175 pounds of dead weight until they reached a trail. Then, maybe, they could get help from a couple of guys on their way back to the lodge.

  As they struggled through the brush, Harry began to emerge from his reflections on the kill. “Max, you sure shot the hell outa this cat! Whoooee!” Harry was in front. He turned back. “I guess I knew you would, too. Hey! Do you remember that time you stayed with us on furlough, and I had just published Though I Be Black?”

  “The party and that color-freak girl?”

  “Yeah, that time.”

  Max stared at the dead deer. “I remember.”

  “Well, that was the last time I went hunting. I told you I was going to the Island, well, I did, but to hunt bird. Hell, I didn’t want you to come because I knew you would show everybody up—mostly me. None of us got anything, Zutkin, me, whoever was with us, so we weren’t doing too much talking when you and Charlotte got there, only drinking.”

  Max gave the pole a little jerk. “Didn’t you even see anything?”

  Harry was panting now. Just ahead some trails met. They’d wait there and beg a little help; it was a good three-quarters of a mile to the lodge. “That’s just it,” Harry said. “We did. Birds all over the place and we couldn’t hit shit. You would have had the limit in an hour.”

  “I was tired anyway,” Max said, sitting at the edge of one of the trails. “Coming all the way in from Fort Sill. Beat. I couldn’t have walked a half-mile without falling on my face.”

  “I’ll bet,” Harry said, looking down the trail. Max slid a quick look at him. Max wanted to find out if Charlotte had known Harry was going hunting. Oh, you bitch, Max thought, you rotten stinking bitch. Saw me coming too. But how?

  “Of course, Charlotte laughed her ass off when you got there. Took me off in a corner and really gave me the old ‘I told you so.’” Harry turned toward Max and grinned. “The best I could do was give her hell for making such rotten sandwiches and filling my flask with water instead of brandy. But she knew what she was doing. She hadn’t wanted me to go.” Max watched Harry stare thoughtfully at the antlers on the deer.

  On an impulse, which he understood as soon as he began speaking, Max said, “Hey, man, I’ve got a girl, the most bee-utiful, the most fascinating, the most—”

  Harry swung round once more, smiling. “So that’s why you’re finally moving out of the Y? Hard sneakin’ them in there with all those faggots on the desk downstairs. They’ve got the eyes of eagles. She white or colored?”

  “Colored.”

  “Go, Max!”

  “Lillian Patch. Teacher. You’ll meet her when we have this venison dinner at your place.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, Max, that this is the thing?”

  Max watched four men coming up the trail, their rifles slung or held in that manner that tells you right away that they were through for the day, and he felt that he was blushing. “You’re right!” Max said.

  “Well, go, Max go,” Harry repeated. Then they both rose to greet the other men. Back at the lodge they would hang the deer by his hind feet and dress it.

  “Ga-ood God!” Harry said, pulling Max away from where Lillian and Charlotte were chatting. “Where did you find that?” Now, speaking rapidly, Harry said, “I tell you, Max, if she wasn’t yours—oh, Lordie Lord—fweepis fwap and ditty-dit-dat!”

  Max knew that what Harry was saying was this: I don’t give a damn if she’s yours or not! Given the chance, baby, given the chance …

  And Max was suddenly angry, angry at Harry, angry at Charlotte, whose eyes, he could see, were measuring Lillian and doing something else as well. It was the way women were, he guessed, but wasn’t she somehow telling Lillian something? Telling her in that way women have—the eyes (the ever-so-studied, so possessive glance that told the other woman that you knew, yes, positively knew what those pants contained, how the arms fit and all), the voice that did things when it should have done nothing or, on the other hand, did nothing when it should have done something. Almost like a double exposure, Max seemed to see Charlotte again holding Harry’s head in her lap at Wading River on the day he met Ames. He had seen something then. How much was there to see?

  There came a peal of laughter from Lillian and suddenly, as though coming out of a fever, Max dismissed most of his recent thoughts. Lillian was not laughing with Charlotte so much as at her. Neither Harry nor Charlotte had seemed to mind Mary from the Democrat office, or those others. After all, a man had to get his nuts off. (And after all, in Harlem there was untold prestige in getting as much pussy as possible, in having cats whisper to one another as you passed: That cat is a Cocksman’s Cocksman!”) But now, there was something different with Harry and Charlotte, a kind of hostility Max felt floating around the table. Then he knew what it was, at least on Charlotte’s part. The girl he should have fallen in love with should have been white. His loving Lillian was a rejection of their marriage. He was a traitor. Where was his courage to face the world with a white wife and say to it: Screw you, Jack!

  (“—don’t you, Max, don’t you?”)

  (“I guess so. Logical.”) That bitch, Charlotte, Max was thinking while Harry went on talking after Max had thrown out an answer calculated to show that he was still with him. Harry was talking about Africa, a continent where freedom was going to break out with a bang. The British, French and Portuguese were going to pack up and go home. The United Nations might be a good thing, if it avoided the trap the League of Nations had fallen into. “Africa and Asia,” Harry said. “The other side of the globe, that’s where things are going to be happening, and I want to be there when they do. Here, it’s the same. Look what they did to Robeson in Peek-skill; that colored vet whose eyes they gouged out down home. Nothing’s changed.”

  “But we should hope for a change for the better,” Lillian said with such confidence that it startled Max.

  Harry pushed back his chair. “Why?”

  Lillian opened her mouth, pursed it, relaxed. This man would not be argued with. She felt something akin to distaste for Harry and Charlotte. She laughed. Max smiled. Harry chuckled but he was puzzled. Charlotte flashed a look at him, bent her head and played with the silver.

  Max and Harry moved into the living room. Max could never help looking at the bookshelves and particularly the one where Harry’s books stood. Max always counted them. Charlotte and Lillian were in the kitchen, cleaning up. Max had liked it that Lillian had not volunteered to help, but Charlotte had not been above asking for it. Then Lillian had jumped up brightly. “Oh yes, of course!”

  “I was talking with a man from Nigeria,” Harry went on, still talking about Afr
ica. “He figures that at the outside, they should be rid of England in ten years. Can you imagine that? A free Africa. Big, rich, three hundred million people, untold wealth. Can’t you see what will have to happen to the white man’s politics? Africa, Max, I tell you, that’s the only frontier left on the globe. Keep it in mind. I know all those stories the white folks have told us for years. But, listen, if white folks took so much time to tell us how bad and silly and heathen it is, then it can’t be so bad. What have they ever told us that was of any use?”

  Africa. The continent had been like something you knew you had to buy or see or go to, but always forgot. The Black Is Best groups were always talking about it. Then there were the J. A. Rogers books and Max had read them many times, with tremendous doubt and with humor. The Africans had kings and princes and great armies and wealth and culture, Rogers said. Maybe so. The books in the Schomburg Collection up on 135th Street near Lenox also said as much. The Collection was some place. Every Negro feeling the toe of the world halfway up his ass could duck in there and read about how great Africa was and how great black people in general were, but few had done it. The white man’s hate-self-serum had created a hard stale rind of disbelief.

  But it tantalized, Africa. Which was real, Mungo Park’s or René Maran’s? Garvey’s vision of it or Stanley’s dollar-propelled race through it? There were bright spots. The Fuzzy-Wuzzys, the Mahdi kicking the stuff out of the British in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Ethiopians cutting the balls off the Italians at Adowa, the Zulus cutting up the British.

  But why think of it in terms of wars? Why? Because that’s just the way the white folks spelled it out. Francis X. Bushman, Glenn Morris, Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, all kicking the natural pure-dee apeshit out of the natives. Go, Tarzan, just don’t let them Zulus (Negro actors who ate every time they made a Tarzan movie) catch you with your codpiece down. Or Jane. Maybe you’d better put Boy in a safe place too. You know how them niggers are. Not really like Gunga Din at all.