The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  “Damn it, let’s go there some time,” Harry said.

  “Sure, why not?” They were always planning to do things together, but at the last moment, something happened. Might not be a bad idea, Africa.

  But now he was walking through upper Manhattan with Lillian. They came out of the subway at 116th Street, so different from Washington Square Park, the Village. They couldn’t even see downtown Manhattan; it was hidden by the trees in Central Park. Up on 145th Street, Max knew, you could stand on a corner and see all the way downtown or, at least, that rigid, square spire, the Empire State Building. One and the same. Uptown where they were, life still flooded the streets. Horse-drawn junk wagons, their drivers asleep, clip-clopped past them. The new sounds drifted out of Minton’s, new sounds that no one could dance to anymore. They called the music rebop or bebop and it was played by musicians with crazy names like Monk, Bird, Diz, Fats, Sweets, Little Jazz. These were the streets that belonged to Sugar Ray, the Cutie, The Unscarred, and to a fat, balding Joe Louis and a bullet-headed Jersey Joe Walcott. The streets belonged also to Wynonie Blues Harris whose voice was blasting into the streets from a loudspeaker fastened to the front of a record shop. The double-deck buses, still vibrating the dust of Fifth Avenue, groaned up Seventh Avenue. Hipsters, their legs going loose, their shoulders held stiffly, passed from the shadows to the lights of chili joints, barbecue joints and bars. At the bars they would drink with their left hands, and the other customers would mark them for bad. Max and Lillian sauntered past storefront churches and spired churches, past cops glad that fall had come to cool the blood of the inhabitants. On the corners men stood loudly exchanging jokes and gossip. And the hustlers went by, little ones, big ones, ugly ones, attractive ones, with big tits and little tits, with big butts and no butts at all, and each of them seemed to say with their stride, I got the best that’s going. The muscatel smell lingered on corners like a live thing. Ghetto. The people who lived south of Central Park even concealed their lights behind the curtain of trees to avoid exciting the natives. (Watch that codpiece, Tar-zan.) Off in an alley somewhere, Max bet, someone, frustrated and drunk with whiskey and rage at Mister Charlie (although he wouldn’t be aware of it; he would lie to himself) was making a pincushion of a man in his own color-image, another Sambo. A man had to strike out. Not many men struck at the right places. Black men at any rate. They moved down the street, past Big Ola Mae’s chili house. Max saw Sergeant Jenkins gulping his free bowl of chili. Jenkins liked to work nights; they concealed his sadism. “Nuthin’ I like better’n beatin’ a bad nigger’s head,” he often said. They turned off the street at the Nearly All Inn for one for the road they still had to make.

  He sat across the table from Lillian and let his eyes tell her that he loved her. Insane when you thought of many animals, their love and hate, the swift couplings and even swifter departures. This thing men have, he thought, this love and loving, how unnatural! What causes it, fear? Possession, like the animals, but bound by men’s laws which have also been worse than animal laws. No. Not as good. The laws of man condemned you to repeat over and over the rituals of love and loving to the death. Love. Marriage. A thing for the poor (natives also) to keep them happy, while kings screwed themselves to death or got screwed to death, but while all this was going on, there always being more poor than rich people, the attitudes and habits, the arts and language overtook the rich in their clappy beds and shitty castles and made marriage, and love, the human condition. But is the Bible first concerned with man-woman love? No. Stop fighting. Did Rameses ever order a statue of his love? No. Me, me, me. Ever go into a cave and see a prehistoric drawing of a man and woman, boy and girl in the postures of love? No. Animals, yet, eating stuff. Did the White Lady of Brandberg on that cave wall in Southwest Africa allow herself to be discovered in a compromising position? No. She was out hunting, surrounded by hunters and Springbok, looking for that eating stuff again. So what? Lillian, I love you.

  They finished the drink and walked once more. Max was still thinking of love when she spoke. The heart, they used it for everything: courage, guts, love. (“Have you ever slept with Charlotte?”)

  Floomp, the heart again. Nothing in the head, just a new set of dials turned on. She knows something, Max thought. No, she’s guessed something, and he thought once more of how Charlotte had been at dinner. (“No, why do you ask that?”)

  “Oh, I just wondered. I’m not jealous.”

  He heard her clearly now, all thoughts of love whisked away in favor of defending himself. Stoutly. “That’s a hell of a thing to be thinking about.”

  “I’m sorry then.”

  “What if I’d said yes?”

  “I didn’t expect you would, Max.”

  They both sighed with relief when they entered his apartment. It had gotten chilly and too much walking when you are in love can be exhausting. Lillian opened the nightcase she had brought before they had gone to Harry’s and pulled out a gown. She was going, she had told her parents, to visit a friend in New Rochelle for the weekend. She looked at the bag and said aloud, “They know. Most people know things. All they want is a lie plausible enough to believe.”

  “Stop it,” Max said. She was, of course, referring to her earlier question about Charlotte. He put his head in her lap. She said, “It was before I met you. I don’t care if you did. She is nice and not nice. Harry—”

  Max sat up. “What about Harry?”

  Lillian put the gown down and got up to make drinks. “Does he really make a living writing?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s written more books than you.”

  “Yes, he’s also a little older. Lillian, what is it?”

  “Nothing, here.” She gave him his drink.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Start something and not finish it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Go on.”

  “With what? Really, there’s nothing.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Max gulped his drink. “Okay. One more, then to bed.”

  Lillian watched him from the chair. She was so quiet that Max turned. “Okay, now what?”

  She laughed and went to him, holding him tightly. “Ah, well. Honey?”

  “Tell me what.”

  “I think I love you very much.” She didn’t look at him.

  It was sometime during the far side of the night. Both had heard and seen separately something in black (was it?), prancing at the top of a hill, ready to gallop down. Max turned first. Lillian was there in her sleep, refusing to wake completely, enveloped in that millennia-old dream of women to be taken, to be had; and she was warm when Max slipped the gown from her and the nipples of her breasts grew taut and hard; her skin rippled and her light bones slipped under it. Max came at her and his dream was old too, the dream of men to take (and therefore be free, animal-like, of the consequences), and to match the mock submission he created a mock rage and they stroked and kissed on the knife edge of capture and theft. And they knew each of them, the reality and fantasy of what they were doing and their movements were gentle, as if with great sorrow. Even the bed gave back no sound. After, they held each other; their orgasms had been long and sweet and thorough, as if to signify that that narrow place between what was real and what was not was the best place after all.

  Max woke as the first gray sifted through the room. “Lillian,” he said, pushing her gently. “Lillian. Let’s get married, okay? Okay, Lillian?”

  She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Could we live on your writing?” Max recoiled. He had some money in the bank from the folks’ house. He hadn’t made a dime on his first novel, but had got good money as an advance for his current one, $750. He had socked away his mustering-out pay and was a member in good standing of the 52–20 club, and had disability coming. But. “I don’t know. Some of it would be a little rough, but not all of it.”

  Lillian hated this; she didn’t look at him. She remembered t
he conversation she had had with her parents. “He’s a writer,” she had told them.

  “Yes,” her father had said, “but where does he work?”

  “Couldn’t you write nights and work?” Her voice was a little plaintive and she hated it. The stories of writers were romantic and all, but you couldn’t eat romance, that kind, sitting around in garrets and drinking Chianti. Besides, who ever heard of a Negro writer making money? The Ames home wasn’t so great. The dishes were chipped, the chairs didn’t match, the kid was a mess. What happened when people stopped being nice to Harry Ames, where did they go from there? They didn’t even teach English very well where Lillian had gone to school, just so some nut wouldn’t get the idea that he wanted to be a writer. Now she glanced at Max. “I’ve gone and spoiled it, haven’t I?” She took his hand.

  “No,” he said. “I’m so damned full now. I’d hate to lose everything working. I feel free for the first time in my life. What would there be besides the Democrat? There aren’t that many jobs downtown; things haven’t changed that much, Lillian.”

  “You could—” she knew she shouldn’t be doing this—“teach, or do casework …”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then we’ll have to work something out.”

  Max slumped down into the bed. There were always choices. What choice was there to make? He wanted her. Already it hurt to think of not having her. But Jesus, where in the hell was there a job in New York City for him? Madison Avenue? Park Row? Teaching? Social work, who wanted to do that? That got you right next to them again, the ones who hurt so damned much that they spilled over on you, like thick sap from a tree in spring. Get a job? Man, wasn’t that like the American dream? Boy meets girl, gets good job and everything’s all reet. “Wow, honey,” he said aloud.

  Lillian lay on her side of the bed staring at the wall. The black thing she had seen on the hill just before they made love, moved a little, downhill. Now Lillian knew what Charlotte and Harry had seen: a middle-class Negro girl whose father was a bank janitor and whose mother worked for rich theater people on Central Park West. All right. So what? Did that mean that she could ignore security, the crushing desire to have it? Along with love, and she loved Max. But he was black. Of course he was black, but Negro men, they had a way of starting out with a bang, with the long, long dream, but ending with less than a whisper, so beaten were they simply because they had dared to dream in the first place. Max, her Max, was a man with dreams, but he had to see the hard reality of the present. You couldn’t eat dreams; they wouldn’t even put cheap, gaudy furniture from the 125th Street stores into your home. If you dreamed too much you got hurt. In her classes she could look out on the children and knew that killers were already stalking their dreams. How had Max managed to elude the killers? Suppose Max said no. He wouldn’t say no; he couldn’t say no, and she knew it as well as he did. Charlotte had seen all this, the whore, white whore.

  Max twisted in the sheets. In the final analysis there is always something someone wants. Lillian was special because she never took from him the way others did when they saw him coming; she had asked for nothing, until now. Now what she was asking for might be the most important thing of all and he had no choice but to give it to her.

  12

  NEW YORK

  Winter. Harry Ames stared out the front window at the bleak street. How did he really feel about winter? He tried to bring his thoughts back to work, but he was waiting with foolish anticipation for Max to stop by. He usually did when he was finished with his rounds. Harry looked down at his shoes and they gave him an idea. He’d take all his shoes out of the closet and polish them. Charlotte’s too. All the time he’d be thinking about the unfinished paragraph still in the typewriter. Yes, he would polish shoes. Charlotte would be proud of him.

  When he had finished the shoes he returned to the typewriter, snappily pulled up his chair, reread the paragraph which paused at a comma. Listlessly his eyes drifted to the pencils on his table. Jesus! They needed sharpening. How come he hadn’t seen that before? He took out the five-and-dime sharpener and then, one by one, with the utmost care, he sharpened the pencils. Where the hell was Max?

  The New York Times Book Review lay under some paper, and Harry picked that up and scanned it again, frowning at the picture of a young Negro novelist whom he had never heard of. It gave him a jolt that the review was what they call “a rave.” He looked at the picture of the plump novelist. Fat face, eyes like slits. Hmmm. Have to get the book, see what this young boy is putting down. Could be a challenger to the Ames prestige. Them white folks: divide and conquer or, divide and pay less money for talent because everyone’s scufflin’ to get there and takin’ pennies for the project.

  Too bad, he continued thinking, that the artists were so terribly distrusted by the Party. The Party people never understood what was what about color in America and never understood painters and writers and musicians, only the workers, and as soon as the workers got theirs, to hell with everything. Labor (workers) was going to be one of the Fattest Cats, Harry guessed, when the smoke of the war finally blew over. It had had the foot way inside the door even when the war broke out. The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been a victim.

  People Harry had known in the Party were complaining these days about the “Iron Curtain.” That Churchill sure had a way of making names stick. Harry’s friends complained, but rationalized that the Soviets would soon return to their own borders. They had to stay in those places to help those countries back on their feet, just the way the U.S. was doing. But Harry insisted that the Soviets were there to stay, in Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and all the other places. He didn’t have to rationalize; he wasn’t in the Party anymore. To hell with those fools who thought there would be a resurgence of power in America. Nowadays it looked like the Communists were coming back big, riding the coattails of the liberal organizations that were being born with the speed of rabbits fornicating against a stop watch. But there were already blazoning signs that communism was going to catch hell just as after War I when the heady atmosphere of liberalism was becoming just a bit too much to stomach. Americans were afraid to suck every drop of meaning from the words that had given their country birth in the first place.

  New liberalism? Look at Max.

  Max Reddick was trudging across the street head down.

  Max Reddick, a good, competent writer, Harry thought. Ideas to be worked out, a style to be cleaned up and set free. Best reporter the Democrat ever had. New liberalism? Look at him. Poor black bastard. All those white boys he knew covering those big stories, that is, the ones who came back in one piece and got their jobs back, were they not liberals? Couldn’t they get Max set in a job the way they helped set one another? Uh-uh. No. And Max is still hurting for that girl and a good job. Marriage. By now he may know what kind of marriage it would be. Nothing wrong with the girl, except that she can’t do Max no good. All she sees is a house with a white picket fence, a refrigerator and a washing machine. Such a fine-looking broad, too. Jesus! That chick could be so great for Max.

  Harry saw Max move out of sight, approaching the house. In a moment he would be ringing the doorbell. Harry was glad Charlotte had a little money. Not a hell of a lot, just enough so they could get by comfortably. And it was getting so that he was commanding larger and larger advances. There had been some talk too about adapting one of his books for the stage. Yeah, it was going all right, so far. But Charlotte. Getting to be a drag, demanding more and more time for other people, places and things. It was as though she wanted to rip him away from the typewriter for good. That was her rival, the machine. But what a rival! It wouldn’t scream or fight back. Charlotte hated it all the more. On the spur of the moment, Harry decided to go down and meet Max and pick up the mail. Hastily, he rolled the paper in the typewriter so that only the very top of the page showed. Then he took some blank paper and placed it underneath his unfinished manuscript. With a little skip and a floundering left jab at an unseen enemy, Harry
Ames moved to the stairway as the buzzer sounded.

  Max Reddick was evil. He wanted to punch out every white face he saw. Evil was beyond anger; it was a constant state, the state of destruction, someone else’s. Impatiently he rattled the doorknob. C’mon, Harry, you sonofabitch; let me in from these white folks’ streets. He glanced behind him. February. Cold, New York cold where the saline air punched holes in the snow and made it melt faster. Today had been payday for Max. For weeks he had been kept dangling, waiting for the final word to come in on several job applications with newspapers and magazines. He wouldn’t have been kept dangling at all had it not been for Kermit Shea.

  They had been at Western Reserve at the same time, had met at political meetings often enough to nod to each other, nothing more. Then they had met again while covering the Boatwright case and Max learned that Shea worked for the Telegram. They had had coffee and drinks together a few times, again, until Max walked into the Telegram office to apply for a job and found Shea in charge of Cityside news. Max knew as he filled out his application that Shea was embarrassed. To hell with him. Shea told him the Telegram was full up, but expecting departures momentarily, then steered Max to a number of other editors. The interviews were always the same: colorful newsmen’s jabber, changing constantly in order to avoid falling into general use by the public. These were followed by the application-form ritual and, finally (sometimes days later, sometimes at once), the leaning back in the chair, man to man (“You and I are above all this, but the publisher ain’t and he’s the man who lays out the shekels, right? [The implication being that the Jews were driving the WASPs out of newspaper publishing] but call me next month, right, Max?”) And then the handshakes that said that the time wasn’t right, but when it is, Max, boy will we call you!