The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  Baby, didn’t you understand? You overwhelmed with your blackness, your babies; you choked them with the reek and tremor of the ghettoes they created; you screamed at their injustices which they denied because they must; you stacked up, created a backlog of book-hungry kids before the doors of their quota-oriented colleges, their Wall Streets, communications centers, their theaters; you gave them political hacks, the ones who are worse liars and thieves than they, only to create a wedge through which the uncompromising can later pass; you produced good music for them to copy or steal—and you wrote more; you gave them your sons to help fight their wars (but that must stop—a dead Negro on a German, Japanese, French, American battlefield does very little for a live Negro pinioned to his ghetto). Out of all the garbage they leave for you, you produce, produce, produce, and scare the hell out of them, for if something can be made from garbage, why is it that they have only automobiles, Lillian? See what that desire for old American security got you, baby? Security. You are so goddamn secure now that you don’t have to worry about where the next anything is coming from. And God knows, you don’t have to worry about me having a decent job so we can live the way you thought we ought to—according to their way, which is, my darling, as pitiable as it is, the only way now. Look what you’ve gone and done. They have killed both of us. God, Lillian, I’m mad, I am so mad, baby, and sorry for them, for me, for you. How did we get down here? We should have been out of here by now. Are we going to have to explode out?

  Max moved away from the mirror and all he could do was to shake his head very, very slowly.

  Kermit Shea sat at his desk and stared at the gray, sluggish Hudson River. He felt that it was his fault, Max’s girl’s death. He had failed. Ames had wanted him to feel that way, of course, nothing subtle about it. Shea wondered if he had really tried. Yes. Yes, but in trying to help Max with a job, he had felt himself threatened. Strange, the way you felt it even in the phone calls. Then there were the looks when he had mentioned that Max was Negro. Shea hadn’t known Ames except by reputation. “My name is Harry Ames, and I am Max Reddick’s friend,” he had said over the phone. The only friend? Shea had wondered. “He’s had some trouble. I thought you ought to know about it.” And Ames had told him and he might just as well have added: Feel guilty, you sonofabitch! Shea hadn’t known a thing about the girl, but now he understood Reddick’s curious detachment: he didn’t want rejection, he needed a job desperately, but he expected rejection, which he got. “When’s the funeral?” Shea had asked, and Ames had told him and then added, “But you’d better not come.”

  How many other Max Reddicks and Lillian Patches were out there, Shea wondered, with talents and desires ignored, indeed, unattributed to them? What happened to them and how often? And how thick were those gray ranks who had said to Shea, “How come you know this Negro guy?” All the ramifications of that question, the inherent threat, the contempt and—was it concealed fear? Ames had done his job well. Shea continued to stare at the river. Reddick, what was he doing this day of the funeral? Cursing all white people past hell and into oblivion. Kermit Shea didn’t want to be among them on that journey. He wanted to lead them. He felt that guilty.

  Bernard Zutkin’s office was on the East Side. He sat in it and it was quiet, and that suited him. He had no intention of going to the funeral, although he hadn’t been asked. He understood. A man like Max Reddick knew exactly what had happened to him, to his girl, and why. In trying to help Max get a job, Zutkin had reconfirmed his own position in the literary and communications circles in New York: he was not a well-liked man. He drove hard. His view was uncluttered. He was a critic, not a reviewer. He knew the difference. When he chose to write, he was an author, not a writer. And because he was this precise, his analyses of the communications media had earned him a steady flow of dislike. Zutkin was also a Jew in a shrinking world of Gentiles who did not understand the process of their own abdication of responsibility in both communications and literature (he disliked the term “publishing”). Gentiles had run out of family blood; now they were being beaten out or getting out. When they finally realized what they had done to themselves, they would react just like the Germans. Anti-semitism was always in the American air, Zutkin knew, and to avoid the recurrence of what had happened in Germany, the Jew needed allies. There was the Negro who himself needed allies. But sadly, many of Zutkin’s friends who were Jewish and had matched his own climb up the ladder, had taken over Gentile traits. “Look, Bernie, you know and I know that this is not the time for that!”

  “Well, when is the right time, do you think?”

  “Don’t be a macher, Bernie. The time will come. Why don’t you hire Reddick?”

  “I’m a critic. I have an office. I teach, I’m a professor. How could I use a man like Reddick? And you know all this. The man needs a job now. You’ve read his books and pieces.”

  “So, I’m impressed. Now what?”

  “Now? Nothing. Sorry to have been foolish enough to have asked a favor of you, sweetheart.”

  “Aw, Bernie—”

  “The devil take you, schmuck.”

  Most of Zutkin’s calls had been like that or something like that. Stupid people. Time would run out and turn upon itself. One of these days assassins might have to be sent after people like Reddick and Ames because some jerk didn’t want to give them a job they could do with one hand because they were black. They would have to be silenced somehow. They were learning too much about America—and telling it. Zutkin always thought of how they had reached out after Trotsky. Lenin didn’t get him (didn’t want to, really), and if Stalin hadn’t ordered him done in, God knows Trotsky would have been around arguing and still making mistakes. And Stalin knew it, Lev Davidovich Bronstein; somebody always knows what you are and how you are, exactly.

  Max Reddick fitted no exact pattern yet. The reality of his girl’s death might be good for him, Zutkin thought. A hard consideration, but the world was hard. He had a handicap; he was a bit petit bourgeois. Reddick never knew, except in passing through them and reporting on them, the horror of the ghettoes Ames had known. Nor had Reddick, except for his time in the Army, really known the oozing horror of being a Negro in the South. Yes, in the end, the girl’s death could rip the last ragged curtain of illusion from Reddick. A lot of white people were going to suffer at Max’s hands because of that. That’s why Zutkin wasn’t going to the funeral; he could wait for his turn. He wasn’t jumping in the front of that line.

  First, Charlotte Ames had called the girl who had given her the name of the doctor in Pennsylvania. She screamed, talked and cursed, then hung up. New York, New York, where everyone wanted to be on the in in, and clutched onto the empty in things, like a nonexistent good abortionist in Pennsylvania, even to the extent of making him real enough to have a name, address and telephone number. Now, because of that, Max’s girl was dead. Following the telephone conversation, Charlotte had an argument with her husband. She lost. She was not going to help Max with his meals or invite him to stay with them. “Max and I are friends,” Harry had explained. “I don’t think he wants to be around white people today. We’ve got to give him time.”

  Charlotte looked at him in horror. “Do you mean to say that this afternoon, he has to stand out there alone, without friends who are white, happen to be white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all I am, Harry, someone white, a white thing, to him?” And she came close, too close to telling him in unrelated screams of anger and sorrow how she had been something else to him one night, how she had tricked him and taken him to soothe her own fears and loneliness and how he had fought her for Harry (In friendship, Charlotte!) and how, afterwards, although she knew he hated her, she had become endeared to him in a special kind of way. None of the others gave a damn about Harry. But Charlotte did not become sad enough or angry enough to tell.

  “Time,” Harry said again, “he’s got to have time.”

  “Then I can’t go?”

  “I don’t think you sho
uld.”

  “All right. Harry?”

  “What, dear?”

  “When, when will it ever be better?”

  Charlotte had not been a member of the Party. She had been amused when her friends who were members had discussed the Party line: maximum integration—marry a Negro. And she had observed that nothing wonderful or special had resulted. They were such fools, the Communists, sometimes, but they were the most interesting people she had ever known. At least they were doing something. She was glad Harry was no longer in the Party; it was too restricting for him. There had been times when, waking in Harry’s bed or entering a room where he was, she had drawn up short, wondering what she was doing there. Then one day she had walked into the corner of the room where he was working. There had been a slight film of sweat on his face and he hadn’t combed his hair. He still had on his pajama bottoms. She had paused and watched him and thought, Yes, yes, I do love this man, what he is, where he came from, how he survived. Like Desdemona, thriving, loving, finally, on Othello’s talks of his deeds. But Desdemona too had defied custom. (Brabantio: Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds / By what you see them act.)

  Or your wives. Or your husbands. Charlotte knew that she had not always been fair to Harry, nor he to her. But, more times than not, those affairs, both hers and his, were unimportant, birthed in ennui. They had never brought them home; that had helped.

  She wondered if Lillian had had affairs while going with Max, if Max had had any. In a kind of warm amazement, Charlotte could not conceive of either of them being unfaithful. They had been in love! God, she thought, good God, and now the girl’s dead. No, she hadn’t liked Lillian. Negro women—and it was not their fault—took their men very lightly after the first blush of love. They wanted them to be just like white men in terms of success, which meant, of course, the gracious acceptance of responsibility, the desk job where you bossed instead of being bossed, the lawn you mowed reluctantly when the leaves you raked half-heartedly were not on it. Charlotte had spotted it in a second. One day that would change; the men would stop deceiving themselves and the women would be proud of them. The Lillian Patches would become, with reality, extinct.

  “He’s all by himself, Harry,” Charlotte said.

  “No. I’ll be with him.”

  13

  NEW YORK

  Max Reddick was not sure if he was all wound up or all run down. He drank alone nights, sitting in a chair, thinking of nothing at all, it seemed, then suddenly becoming aware that he was thinking of it all, the whole brief life with Lillian Patch. Mornings, like a madman, he rushed from the house, fleeing before some prickling obligation to get for himself the kind of job Lillian had wished for him. The day came when, after stopping by the office of the NAACP, he was advised to register at the Urban League. When that was done, he drifted home, slipped the new bottle of whiskey from its brown bag and sat down in his chair. Now he had done all he could do, except report back to the Democrat, and what was the sense of that—now? This night Max sat on a pillow, for his rectum had started to throb with, he thought, all the drinking. But he was damned if he’d stop. He sat and waited for Harry’s call, Harry’s nightly call, the single touch of balance, the remembered thing, an origin, a point of departure or return. It came.

  “You working, man?”

  “No. Just sitting around,” Max said, suddenly aware that he had been saying the same thing for a month and a half now.

  “Did you eat?” Why the hell did Harry think eating cured everything? “I had a bite,” Max answered, although he had eaten nothing since lunch when he’d got a Nedick’s frank and coffee.

  “Are you drinking?”

  “Sure, I’m drinking. What did you think I was doing, jerking off?”

  “Bad day, huh? Listen, did you work at all today?”

  “No. I registered with the Urban League.”

  “Whatever in the hell for?”

  Wearily, Max said, “A job, Harry, a job.”

  Harry said, “Oh, shit—listen, uh, goddamn it, Max, how long’s it going to take for me to educate you to the way things are? Wake up. You’re not their kind of Negro. That’s an enclave, man, a niche. If they’ve got a spot, they’re going to slip it to some cousin or brother or some guy like them. You sure got a nerve, dragging your raggedy ass into the Urban League. This is 1947, Max, time for you to be alert! Tell you what: if them niggers come up with a job for you, I’ll buy you a whole case of whiskey myself, but hell, don’t you worry about that; my money’s safe.”

  Max was trembling. He shouted into the phone, “Harry don’t try to fuck up my mind like that, Harry, don’t! What’s the matter with you?”

  A shocked silence of a long moment’s duration hung like lead between them, then Harry said, “Max, I’m not trying to fuck up your mind. I’m trying to straighten it out, man, let you know where it is. I’ve known those fellows for years. I know what goes on, Max. Listen, I’m sorry, really sorry, but Max, you got to let this go. Get out of it. Write, Max, don’t let them get to you. There’s more than what shows and everybody’s looking at the top. Get your crumbs together and meet us in Europe. I go to see the man tomorrow, the interview for the Lykeion. After that, it’ll be getting near cut-out time. C’mon, Max. What do you say?”

  Max stiffened against his trembling. “Europe. Harry you’re trying to straighten out my mind, but I don’t understand yours. Why run to Europe? There are more white people there than here. They haven’t built any ovens here yet; I keep hearing about concentration camps, but I’ve never seen one here. What is this, with all you niggers running off to Europe? Man, don’t you know they started this shit that we’re stuck in? Don’t you know that, Harry?”

  “Okay, Max. The thing is, Europe is closer to Africa. Africa is where I’m aiming, Max. I know what’s happened, and why. You got to cool it, man. Sounds to me like you’re a little shaky. Want to come down?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll grab a train and come up.”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “Can I say something to you without you blowing your top?”

  “You’ve said everything else. Go on.”

  “You’d better knock off drinking alone. Get a broad, get that pussy, lots of it and maybe it’ll pass. You got to try to help it. Max? Max, you listening to me?”

  “I hear you, Harry.”

  “Do it, Max, go ahead.”

  “Goddamn it, Harry, I don’t think I could even get it up. The blues got me and turning me every way but loose. I can’t do anything. I don’t want to do anything.”

  “You sound just like a white man, Max.”

  “Get up off me, Harry. I’m going to be all right. I’m going to be just fine. I’m going to be whole again. One day, you’ll see.”

  “That’s a deal?”

  “Man, that’s for real.”

  “Okay. And eat once in a while too, will you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Harry Ames hung up, stretched and walked into the room where Charlotte was listing items they would have to take with them to Europe. “How is he?” she asked.

  Harry sat on the arm of the chair. He liked Charlotte in horn-rimmed glasses; they gave her a settled look. “I guess he’ll make it.”

  “You were shouting.”

  “So was he.”

  “Bad boys, both of you. I suppose you suggested that he get himself a girl or two?”

  “Nah. Just told him to stop drinking so much and eat a little bit.”

  “Of course.”

  Harry bent forward to look at the list and Charlotte said, “I guess we’ll have to get little Max’s clothes a couple sizes too large. He can grow into them.”

  “Hell no. Buy things that fit.” Harry was thinking of all the too-large clothes he had ever worn: socks pulled back under the foot half a length; pants rolled up two or three times, the tops pinned together to fit at the waist; the shoes p
acked in the toe with cotton or toilet paper … “Charlotte, you don’t know what it does to a kid to have his clothes not fit properly.”

  “Insecure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll have to make more money and we can buy brand new, two complete outfits each year. How about it?”

  Harry rose. “Don’t get smart. Just don’t buy them so big that he gets lost in them.”

  “What’s the interview to be like, dear?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t even know that there was to be one until I got the note. Kierzek said it was just routine.”

  “I like him.”

  “Who, Kierzek? He’s all right, for an editor.”

  “You’ve had much worse.”

  “It’ll be good for us, Charlotte.”

  “What?”

  “Europe.”

  Charlotte lowered her pencil and said softly, “Yes, it will. The big break. But I do wish you’d mute some of this talk about Africa. You’re not African, Harry.” She bent back to her pad.

  “But I’m black.”

  “Really. I always thought you were brown. You’ve deceived me, dear.”

  “You know what I mean.” Harry had retreated to the kitchen. “Want one of these?”

  “No, just water. You’re not going to get me high tonight and take advantage of me.” She smiled to herself.

  “Why would a man have to get his own wife high?”

  She laughed aloud. “Because it’s fun sometimes.” She paused. “Darling?”

  “I’m getting the water.”