“It took you a long time, it seems,” Harry said.
“Catch as catch can?”
Harry’s laughter, booming, filled the car. “No, hell, that’s everybody’s bag. Don’t worry about that in Paris. I mean getting back to writing.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Well, I had to learn the other world. I mean, sleeping with white women isn’t the whole thing. You can learn the men from them, though, but you’ve got to see them in action, the white boys. These guys run the world and when I stop and think about that I either get scared or mad.”
“Some world, man.”
“Hip.”
“Tough, your man losing the election. They liked him here. Good tongue; good head. The other cat—well, it’s a good time to be away.”
The sun had been bright that day and there were many cars on the road, the sun’s rays glinting from their tops. Before taking Max home, Harry swung up the Champs toward the Arc de Triomphe. “Look at that motherfucker, Max, look at it!” Then they went back to Notre Dame, to Sacré-Coeur, the Sorbonne, pausing for a drink here, a drink there; they became high, not merely from the liquor, but from each other, and being in Paris in summer; and that night in his room in Harry’s house, where he was staying until his own flat a few blocks away was ready, Max looked out the window. Paris. Paris! And Harry burst into the room with another bottle, just as though he knew Max would be at the window looking out …
I’m sorry [the letter went on] to get you into this mess, but in your hands right now is the biggest story you’ll ever have. Big and dangerous. Unbelievable. Wow. But it’s a story with consequences the editors of Pace may be unwilling to pay. And you, Max, baby, come to think of it, may not even get the chance to cable the story. Knowing may kill you, just as knowing killed me and a few other people you’ll meet in this letter. Uh-uh! Can’t quit now! It was too late when you opened the case. This is a rotten way to treat a friend. Yes, friend. We’ve had good and bad times together; we’ve both come far. I remember that first day we met at Zutkin’s. We both saw something we liked in each other. What? I don’t know, but it never mattered to me. Our friendship worked; it had value; it lasted. I’ve run out of acquaintances and other friends who never were the friend you were. So, even if this is dangerous for you—and it is—I turn to you in friendship and in the hope that you can do with this information what I could not. Quite frankly, I don’t know how I got into this thing. It just happened, I guess, and like any contemporary Negro, like a ghetto Jew of the 1930’s in Europe, I couldn’t believe it was happening, even when the pieces fell suddenly into place. Africa …
“Jaja Enzkwu’ll be here next week,” Harry was saying. Max had been in Paris a month. They were the first at the cafe where they took midmorning coffee.
“How is he?” Max asked.
“A prick,” Harry answered. “I’m going to tell you before Wilkinson and the other cats get here. Africa is in for trouble. If the white man knew what’s going to happen to that continent when he leaves it, he’d change his mind, but he knows what he’s doing, and them dumb niggers are falling flat on their faces. I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but that place crushed me. Enzkwu. In Africa and out of Africa, he’s always talking about how much he hates whites. Told me the only reason why he puts up with me and Charlotte is because he likes me; we’re ‘brothers’ says he. But that man goes stone out of his mind, stone, when he’s with white women. Never saw anything like it. If I didn’t keep a close eye on him, he’d have his hand up to his wrist in Charlotte’s crotch. That’s just the reason he gets out of Africa so often.”
Max, bent double laughing, did not see Wilkinson’s approach, but Harry did. “Cool it.”
Max, who found himself laughing more and more at Harry’s secrecy, as much as his comments, was still laughing when Roger arrived, pulled out a chair and sat down. Harry flashed a quick, amused glance at Max—the kind of glance exchanged when you’ve allowed an outsider (who almost too quickly takes advantage of it) to thrust his way into your group. Wilkinson ordered coffee and croissants and joked with the waiter. “Where you learn all that French, boy?” Harry asked, mocking paternal gruffness. Roger smiled shyly. (He always did the right thing, said the right thing at the right time, Max recalled.)
“In school. I was pretty good at languages.” Roger laughed. “You know what they say—psychopaths usually are good at languages.” He laughed again; broke himself up.
Generally, the passing of a beautiful woman sparked part of the daily ritual, the “lying and crying.” Harry: in Spain; a girl who had an apartment in Gaudi’s La Pedrera on Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona. Roger: two girls in a tourist-class cabin aboard the Flandre, hopping from upper to lower berths. Max: a church-going landlady in a Tunica, Mississippi, boarding house. Harry: a girl in Peking who was lean and soft. Roger: A geisha in Tokyo while he was in the Army. And on, until the others—a couple of musicians, an actor and an opera singer—joined them. Then politics, mostly concerned with U.S. racial problems, replaced the girls. But not until Roger, seeing a tall, firm blonde pass by, announced that next he was going to Scandinavia, where the pussy was said to be climbing out of the walls, out of every open bottle of Aquavit.
If they stayed at the cafe long enough, soon, it seemed, every American Negro who was in Paris passed by or joined them, like the nightclub singer, Iris Stapleton, and the drummer she went with, Time Curry. Marion Dawes never stopped. He passed at a distance, usually, waved at no one in particular and continued on, his regular entourage of at least two companions at his side. “The only time he ever really talks to me,” Harry mused one day, “is at those Franco-African meetings.”
And yet, one night when Max had had dinner with Harry, Charlotte and the kid, the phone rang. “Dawes,” Harry ducked back into the room to announce. While he talked, Max and Charlotte edged into a conversation. Charlotte’s alert, disdainful New York look was gone. Her face was beginning to assume a slight, perpetual frown, as someone with constant migraines. She seemed in a hurry to end each topic of conversation she became involved in. On the whole, she looked fine. She too had put on weight, but carried it well for a big woman.
Harry returned. “He wants to borrow some money. We’ll meet him at the cafe, okay, Max?”
“Sure. It’s on the way home and I’d like to meet him.”
“He’s got his goddamn nerve,” Charlotte said. “After all the rotten things he’s written about you—”
Harry pulled on a jacket and said, “Can’t let a brother starve, baby. Says he hasn’t eaten in three days.”
“How much?” Charlotte said. “We’re running through money like water. The family fortune isn’t unlimited, you know.”
In the middle of buttoning his jacket Harry stopped and dropped both hands. Then he said very quietly and wearily, “Baby, it’s all right.” But Max had heard distinctly the warning in his voice. Charlotte cleaned the table silently, but with an abundance of ferocity that she obviously wished to direct at Harry.
Little Max walked Max to the door. He needed his own child. How did that saying go? “Ain’t got chick nor child.”
Max and Harry walked quickly to the cafe, Harry frowning all the way. They never went to the cafe at night; now it was a strange, dingy place with weak lights and faded tablecloths. Marion Dawes sat huddled at a table in a corner. He was very dirty and he looked tired and bloated, like an exhausted beetle trapped. His round dark face was slack, but he managed to stand and give a weak smile when Max and Harry approached.
Harry said first thing, “Hungry?”
Dawes smiled again and nodded. “But I can manage if you let me have the francs.”
“The meal won’t be deducted from the loan,” Harry said, just short of being curt. They sat down.
Max said to Dawes, “I’m Max Reddick. Good to see you.”
“Yes,” Dawes said. His hand went briefly into Max’s and was withdrawn.
Harry signaled the waiter and ordered, without consulting Dawes, soup, a steak with f
ries.
“You don’t have to—” Dawes was trying to say.
“You’d better eat, Dawes,” Harry said gently. “I’ve been hungry. Nothing looks right, feels right or sounds right. Nothing is right. Go ahead and eat. We’ll get a drink.”
“Thank you,” Dawes said, taking the francs Harry passed to him. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”
“Sure.”
Max sat back and studied both of them as Harry looked at Dawes who was bent over his plate. He was hungry, but he ate neatly, pausing to smile and say, “Sure is good.”
When Dawes was drinking his coffee, Harry said to him, “How come you’ve been attacking me, Dawes?”
Dawes’s head fell slightly and his thick, unkempt mop of hair glowed dully in the cafe lights. “Well—” he began.
“You make it sound as though we know each other. You know that’s untrue. We’ve spoken to each other exactly five times and I spoke more than you. You’ve never been to my house, and I’ve not been to yours. What is this? What are you running me down for? And now—I’m not putting you down because anybody can have bad luck—you call me to borrow five hundred francs. I got a family and I’m a long way from home, too. All right. I understand you’re having bad luck. But why call me to help you after you’ve been running me into the ground? That’s what I can’t understand.”
Dawes’s voice broke from him high-pitched and sharp. “It’s the duty of a son to destroy his father.” Max watched Harry recoil. Harry then looked Max full in the face; his face, Max observed, was at once a puzzle, flooded with understanding and rejection of that understanding.
Gruffly Harry said, “What in the hell are you talking about? I’m not your father.”
Dawes loosed an exasperated gasp that sounded like a hiss. “Harry, well, if you don’t know—you’re the father of all contemporary Negro writers. We can’t go beyond you until you’re destroyed.”
Cautiously Harry said, “You’re crazy, man. You’ve been hungry too long.” But Max noticed a sudden gleam rise in his eyes and then slowly fall. Dawes finished his coffee in Harry’s lingering silence. “Really,” Dawes said. “As soon as I can, I’ll pay you back. I’ve got a couple of pieces on desks in the States right now.”
“I hope they’re accepted,” Harry said. “But aren’t you working on a novel?”
“I’ve just finished it.”
“Good,” Harry said simply. Then he stood. “We’ve got to go.” He shook hands with Dawes and then Dawes, turning crisply, took Max’s hand. “Mr. Reddick, I’m sure we’ll meet again.” Whistling, Dawes merged quickly and plausibly with the shadows that lay close to the cafe.
Max and Harry stood watching and listening. “That motherfucker’s got some nerve,” Harry said with a suggestion of admiration in his voice. “Let’s go. I have to think about this one.” After walking some distance, Harry stopped and said: “Do they really think that, these young guys, of me being the father of Negro writers?”
“Yes,” Max answered, remembering how eager he had been to meet and talk to Harry ten years ago at Wading River. “We’ve been thinking it a long time.”
“‘We’?” Harry laughed. “You trying to destroy me, too?”
Max laughed.
“No shuck?”
“No shuck,” Max said. “You’ve been away too long or you’d know you’re the father.”
“Too long?” Harry scoffed. “Do you think they’d let me back in without hounding me to death after that visit from Michael Sheldon last week? I got news for you: no. I’m also getting a little tired of France. Not enough brothers here for me. But where else can I go? I tried to get a permanent visa to live in England—no dice. They won’t let me live in Spain. All I have to do is to show up at the frontier once more and you can forget about old Harry, writing about Franco Spain like that. Africa? I’ve got nothing in common with Africa.” Harry laughed and the sound was rich and full. “Man, I’m dangerous!”
Dangerous or not, Max observed, Harry was the darling of the French intellectuals. Several times it happened that they met at parties to which Harry thought Max had not been invited. Harry never said, “I’m going to Jean’s, did he ask you over?” But when Max was invited, he would ask if Harry were going and Harry would grumble and run the host down. But he would show up at the party and seldom, it seemed, was able to break away and exchange a few words with Max. By the middle of that fall, Max had come to understand. Harry’s friends were very much like his books: they were not for lending; they were his. He had bought or written them, and he wasn’t going to let them get out of his sight—or be shared. But Max enjoyed the gatherings because most of the people who went to them spoke English. There were times when he hungered for the sound of it; sometimes the cafe didn’t count because the talk was often about race or women and sometimes politics. He longed for talk of people and doings and he didn’t mind if the English was badly pronounced. At other times, Max preferred knowing just enough French to ask for directions, prices, buy food and carry on a light conversation with his concierge or a woman.
Michelle Bouilloux, who usually attended the affairs with her husband, a short, plump poet from Avignon, made Max speak in French. She waited while he searched for words or stumbled over them. Sometimes she supplied him with the word he was seeking and then laughed, heartily, showing her white teeth and letting the ceiling lights play on her red hair. Max liked her and envied Harry. Had Max not known of her affair with Harry he would not have conceived it; Michelle seemed unattainable. A souring Charlotte helped.
A souring Charlotte whose brief moments of hilarity now came because of the attention paid to her by Jaja Enzkwu. Knowing Harry as he did, Max was not prepared to dislike Enzkwu. On the other hand, he was not going to like him on sight, either. The Africans Max had met at the Franco-African meetings had made him cautious. But his first meeting with Enzkwu did turn Max violently against him.
The party was held at André’s and when Enzkwu came in, his silken agbada swirling about him, he paused and glanced about the room, then came swiftly toward Max and his date, a tiny, small-boned but tough magazine reporter named Janine; she spoke British English. Enzkwu, a Nigerian, had met her before. He much preferred the French to the British and wished he had been born in Senegal, first; the Ivory Coast, second; or Dahomey, third. Most people, Max thought as Enzkwu swarmed around Janine, for the sake of courtesy at least, tend to guide their meaningful remarks through innocuous ones; or they work with the eyes. There is, after all, some guideline for these sorties and it was usually observed between a man and a woman trying to come together, particularly in the company of others.
There were no guidelines for Enzkwu. He simply ignored Max and gave his full attention to Janine, pausing to adjust his sleeves and to puff rapidly on his Gauloise bleu. His eyes were as uncontrolled as his rather suggestive conversation. Janine was laughing. Max was embarrassed for Enzkwu. He knew the laugh. Pig. That was what Janine was thinking. But one must be nice, musn’t one? And not offend our black brethren. Max knew that when Enzkwu got the message that he was being put down (and he would believe Janine was putting him off simply because Max had got there first), the message would be garbled. For Enzkwu (and Max knew the type), every white woman who was courteous to him was really offering to share her bed with him.
“So, you will not go dancing with me tonight,” Enzkwu said, scowling at Max. But his eyes were already searching the room. “I will call you tomorrow, then …”
“No, Jaja, not tonight. Thank you, you are a dear. Tomorrow I have an interview. Adenauer is in town, you know. Yes. Ta-ta.” Enzkwu rustled away, heading for, Max could see, Michelle. Enzkwu’s stock with Harry was submarining with every rustle of his agbada.
A momentary, floundering silence came between Max and Janine. “Say it, it’s all right,” Max counseled.
“Oh, Max,” she said, tiredly. “What does one do? I find him loathsome. To think that he may even become a First Cabinet member—and I didn’t want to offend yo
u.”
“What’s he got to do with me?”
“You’re right, of course. Nothing. Well—”
“You people have got to stop being so foolish.” Max was both sad and irritated. “Do you like the Germans? They are white.”
“No. You know I don’t.”
“Well, then, isn’t it the same?”
“I’m sorry. I knew we’d have words about it. It’s the reaction, you see, bending over backwards.”
“Stand straight up for me.”
Janine smiled. “Always?”
Max grinned. “No,” he said, and then, watching Enzkwu swirl away from Michelle and veer toward Charlotte, he had promptly dismissed him.
God, Max, what doesn’t start with Africa? What a history still to be told! The scientists are starting to say life began there. I’m no scientist. I don’t know. But I do know that this letter you’re reading had its origins with what happened there. Let me go back to the beginning. I doubt if you’ve heard of Alliance Blanc. In 1958 Guinea voted to leave the French Family of Nations, and at once formed a federation with Kwame Nkrumah, or Ghana, whichever you prefer. The British and French were shaken. How could countries only two minutes ago colonies spring to such political maturity? Would the new federation use pounds or francs? The national banks of both countries were heavily underwriting the banking systems of the two countries. There would be a temporary devaluation of both pounds and francs, whether the new federation minted new money or not. More important—and this is what really rocked Europe—if the federation worked, how many new, independent African states would follow suit? Then, what would happen to European interests in Africa after independence and federation? Was it really conceivable that all of Africa might one day unite, Cape to Cairo, Abidjan to Addis? Alliance Blanc said Yes! If there were a United States of Africa, a cohesiveness among the people—300,000,000 of them—should not Europeans anticipate the possibility of trouble, sometime when the population had tripled, for example? Couldn’t Africa become another giant, like China, with even more hatred for the white West? It was pure guilt over what Europeans had done to Africa and the Africans that made them react in such a violent fashion to African independence.
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 24