The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  “Baby, right on the button,” Max said. “Right there, Bernard.” He had never heard Zutkin curse before. “I’ll probably do it, Bernard. I probably will.”

  “Can I congratulate you now?”

  “If I can thank you now.”

  “You came to this on your own, Max. I only wish there had been something like it, a long time ago. But then, you weren’t ready for it.”

  “But I would give everything I have now, Bernard, just to have had a little then. Just something then.”

  “Times change,” Zutkin said.

  Zutkin taxied home after lunch, went to his study and called Julian Berg.

  “Some tea, Mr. Zutkin?” Lottie the maid asked. She had been with him for twenty years. Almost like man and wife they had been near each other for so long that they knew each other’s moods and needs. Over the years Lottie had given him a lot of perspective. You could study all the great social and religious philosophers you wanted to, but you had to watch someone very close to the bottom reach simple, pragmatic conclusions to the problem of life and living.

  “No, Lottie, thanks. I’m going to fix myself a drink.”

  “How many you had already, Mr. Zutkin? It ain’t three yet and you look like you had more than your share.” Zutkin and Max had polished off the lunch with two stingers each.

  “Today’s a special day, Lottie.”

  “Ain’t no need to get so special that you wind up in a special place, Mr. Zutkin. Know what I mean?”

  “When the wagon comes, Lottie—”

  “What on earth do you know about some old wagon coming?”

  Zutkin placed a fat, liver-spotted, wrinkled hand on her shoulder.

  “You ain’t gettin’ fresh at this late date, are you, Mr. Zutkin?”

  Zutkin laughed into her dark, stern face; he had never met a more moral woman. What a mess this country would really be in, he thought, if black Puritans had settled New England instead of white ones. “No, not at this late date. I just wanted to tell you that I know about the wagon and how, when it comes, everybody goes.”

  Lottie walked away, her big shoulders evenly squared. “I’ll get you some tea. One more drink and the wagon’ll be right downstairs waiting for you, and I’m too old to start lookin’ for another job.”

  Practical, too, Zutkin thought. She was right; she didn’t need to start looking for another job. The President had promised to do something about the old people. Zutkin believed he would. You had to do something about capitalism’s castoffs. By long and painful osmosis the lesson had been learned after the Civil War. You didn’t just turn people out who had contributed to the system for so long without any share in that system. They came back to hurt and haunt you. If every ex-slave had been given that mule and forty acres of land, a share of their labor, so to speak, would the country be in such a state today? Would Washington be running around like a chicken without its head complaining about the absent voice of the Negro? Damned fools. But this day history was made: a black man to help the President speak. The liberals would studiously ignore it, believing that this was inevitable; it was what they had fought for. The bigots would close their ears even tighter. But the message would get through. Centuries of agony wrapped up in one phrase, perhaps, but Max’s words would at least now have voice. The thought of the lunch brought a smile to Zutkin’s face. Max had seemed vastly different from the brooding, bitter man he had known for so many years. It was good that there was a Max Reddick.

  Harry would not have been any good for this and if he had and been under consideration, and Zutkin had anything to say about it, he would have vetoed Harry instantly. Zutkin had never forgiven Harry for putting out the rumor that Zutkin “had a card.” Zutkin had never been a Communist. He’d gone to meetings and associated with Communists; then, they were the only people who thought. The people he had known in Europe had been out of step with the crying needs of the world. Lost? They’d been dead. Harry had been young then, and as bitter as a black man with Mississippi dust on his coattails could be. He drank and talked a lot and generally had been unstable. His attitude seemed to have been, If I can’t have my share of the world, no one else is going to have a share. The Party had not been enough for him, or put it the other way around: the good white people in the Party were not prepared for the onslaught of Harry Ames. Of course, Harry had changed. His work showed it. World problems he tied to color, and it worked, if you substituted color for class. Aside from personal considerations, Harry had removed himself from the picture in two ways. The first was physical. His grasp of American problems was based still in the 1940’s. It was 1960 now. In twenty years problems had changed several times; views had been altered or beaten out of shape into new ones; indignation and anger had come to maturity. Harry had missed all the subtle changes which usually tended to be, in later analysis, the important ones. The second way Harry had removed himself was by marrying a white woman. The country hadn’t changed that much. The black man who had a white wife was not the person to put words dealing with color into the President’s mouth. No, the President and his people ran from interracial marriages—any savvy politician did, publicly. Ran like rabbits. The reaction of the people was a known quantity. The people: that dictatorial majority which believed itself by virtue of its mass base to be infallible. The man who was confident of the people (the American people, they said, the politicians) was a fool. You didn’t trust the people, you couldn’t. For Harry, as much as they’d hurt him, he could still twist Marx out of shape and get people. Not Max. The people, yes, but in the abstract. He has a memory like a Jew, Zutkin thought, approvingly; he remembered the times and the places, the where and when of being wounded, just as Jews remember back to Babylonia and Egypt and beyond, up to the present. You survived if you remembered.

  “Your tea, Mr. Zutkin,” Lottie said, carefully placing it on the side of his desk.

  “Thanks, Lottie. You’re right. This is probably just what I need. Tell me, what do you think of the President?”

  “I’d say he’s a mighty handsome young man, myself.”

  “Thanks again,” Zutkin said. As she left the room he thought, They do it all the time, these women, think with their crotches. Built-in voting machines.

  Alone now, walking slowly back to work, away from Zutkin’s massive, powerful although insidious optimism, Max’s mind grew quickly dark with suspicion. Why me? he thought. Why not Dawes? He knew why not Dawes. Dawes would embarrass everybody with his capes and camp-outs. There was Dallas. And he knew why not Dallas; he had a white wife. Max thought of the twenty-odd other Negroes he knew personally who might have been called for the job, but he also knew why they weren’t.

  What does Zutkin get out of it? Berg? There’s got to be something in it for them. What? Here I am sitting on the best gig I ever had in my life and here they come with something a man just can’t refuse. Playing a little bit of God, pulling strings on the President’s mouth—although I hear that bastard likes to edit a lot. Don’t blame him. I would, too. But what do they want, Berg and Zutkin and whoever else is in on this? Nobody does anything for nothing. They want something you’ve got. Or it’s something you can do for them. Admire them, love them, adore them. It all goes back to the guy who is being generous: he wants to think he’s a great guy and you do. If you’re getting, you better act like that. No, no, no. They want me to believe this country is going to turn around and reverse itself. But that’s what they want me to believe, me, who knows better. A greater America. Now, we can do it. The good guys are in and the bad guys are out. Really? Didn’t I just look at a file about a bunch of crackers cutting off a Negro’s dick in broad daylight on a Birmingham street and throwing turpentine where the cat’s dick had been? Don’t I see a whole bunch of crap going down right here in precious little old New York every minute of the day? Goddamn them. They honestly do believe I’m a patriot, with my ass aching all the time now. I need to be somebody’s damned patriot. The President and two million people like him can’t change the way this s
onofabitch is going—downhill without brakes. So, what’s it going to be, Max, baby, Africa for good, huh? Europe, where they’re starting to catch the disease? South America? C’mon off it, man. You don’t know nothin’ but hocks and beans and sirloin and greens; you don’t know nothin’ but hard pavement under your feet, traffic noises and the neighbors’ hi-fis; you don’t know nothin’ but Catskill and Adirondack forests and Long Island undergrowth and how red the earth of the South looks; you don’t know nothin’ but all them black bones and all that black blood beat into the ground and all them niggers twistin’ in their graves waitin’ for one of themselves to walk into the White House and grab that Number One Mister Charlie by his ear to say, Baby, we are tired of you cats fucking over us.

  Or words to that effect.

  Max stopped at a bar and ordered another stinger. He drank half of it, then called Zutkin at home. “Bernard,” he said. “What’s in this for you?”

  At home, Zutkin smiled. A little slow, but in another few hundred years Max would make a good Jew. “Ah, Max. What’s in it for me? You mean what’s really in it for me?”

  “Yes, man, that’s why I’m calling.”

  “Patriotism. You wouldn’t buy that, would you?”

  “Bernard, it’s like this—”

  “I didn’t think so, Max. Money—”

  “Bernard, I know there’s no money involved. Look, almost twenty years of knowing each other through good and evil times. I have a right to know why me?”

  “Jesus, Max. You really examine a gift horse, don’t you?”

  “Damn it, I gotta know if it is a gift horse or not. Besides,” Max said, doggedly, “I want to know.”

  “It’s very simple—”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Are you listening carefully? Want to come over for some of Lottie’s tea?”

  “No. I’ve got to get back. Are you going to tell me?”

  “As I said, it’s simple. We need each other. Got the picture? We need each other.”

  “I thought it was something like that. I’m glad I called.” Yes, there was always something.

  “I wondered when you would.”

  “Bastard. You white folks are something else, Bernard.”

  “Sure. Listen. The tea is really good. Lottie would put some whiskey in it. She likes you. Can’t imagine why.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “It’s simple, Max, but important.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  And I also know that I am not free and never have been. No, people don’t do things for nothing; there’s always something they want. Always.

  He would have been freer on the Lagos desk, he told himself, as he hung up, walked past his half-finished drink and went back into the street. He would have been away from New York, free to act on his own more rather than less. Perhaps there are degrees of freedom. He would have been guided only by occasional cables and his own conscience. That was half the battle, getting away from the hectic GET A NEGRO demands being brought on by the times, which in some quarters, particularly the press, always ready with a name for anything, was being called the Negro Revolution.

  Hullo, Max.

  Back are you?

  Never been away. How can the Saminone ever be away?

  Get the hell away from me.

  Now, boy, simmer yourself down. Just wanted to ’mind you that it was you whut wanted back in.

  Shut up.

  Beggin’ around them offices, you hat in you hand, feared they was gonna turn you ’way, and they surely did.

  Shut up, I said.

  It was you whut grabbed that slave at the Century and then the one at Pace, gettin’ all that white man’s sal’re. Tee hee.

  Why not? I deserved it. I worked hard. I earned every penny of that money.

  Oops! Don’t get salty now. It was you took all ’em trophies and plaques wit dat shit writ all over ’em, and you knew in you heart that they give ’em to you ’cause you was back in; a black-ass nigger, but back in all th’ same.

  How does a man trap himself so completely?

  Is you askin’?

  Yes, I’m asking.

  Pride, pride, turrible pride.

  You’ve got to do better than that.

  Oh, no I don’t. You so goddamn busy tryin’ t’ prove you am.

  You were talking about pride.

  The same thing, burr-head, the same goddamn thing. Hee, haw … safe an’ secure from all alarm, leaning, leaning …

  Motherbugger, you.

  Aw hell. Here we goes agin.

  24

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  In swift succession Max saw Dempsey, Dempsey received a phone call from the White House, and Max found himself on a plane for Washington to see the President. He had almost walked into a trap, he told himself. He saw the Africa desk slipping out of his grasp, and his future in Washington unsure. Maybe he was all for the cause now, and in full accord with Zutkin’s idea that they needed each other. But who knew about next week? He recalled the Negro who had served in the White House during the last Administration and how even the secretaries had refused to work for him. That man had been used very little; he hadn’t even been a good figurehead, for the Administration seldom trotted him out. This, however, was supposed to be a new era. He’d see. He’d asked for a leave of only five months to feel the new job out, and Dempsey agreed.

  Max had last gone to Washington by train many years ago; he hadn’t liked Washington then. It had been Jim Crow for much too long, and if J.C. was virulent in the nation’s capital, did it not have the excuse to run rampant throughout the country? On that last trip Max had been on his way to the South; he took the Jim Crow train at Washington. You did that as a matter of course then, because the railroad companies went right along with the Southerners’ programs. From Washington the trains plunged southward over the blood-red fields, the crowded Negro cars filled with people carrying bag and box lunches. No one wanted to suffer that final indignity of sitting behind the segregated green curtain in the dining room out of sight of the white diners. In those days you paid your money, but you had no choice. Max had known an endless number of Negroes who had come to the capital from the Deep South and, finding it too much the way it had been back home, struggled the few hundred miles farther north, if they could. Washington not only had a southern exposure, it had been controlled by Southern legislators whose politics both decimated and dominated the land. In those days it had been commonplace for them to stand in the Senate or House and say “nigger” while everyone pretended not to hear. That Washington pressed against the memory now as a point of specific reference. Now the trains ran southward without Negro sections, without the green curtain in the dining room; now, if a Southerner even said “nigra” in either House, he was subject to loud and immediate correction from the gallery, or from the legislators themselves—and quite possibly, Max hoped, a chiding word or two from the President.

  This Washington was new indeed. Perhaps it was because of the President, who rose tall and smiling as Max entered his office that afternoon. Max had seen him in person only once before. That was during the campaign when he held a rally on upper Broadway in New York. He seemed golden then with the summer’s sun, and he smiled down at the housewives and joked with them; he reached over white people to shake hands with black people, all the while nodding his large, almost brutally square head.

  Now, Max took the President’s hand and could not help smiling. “Let’s sit over here,” the President said, gesturing to a couch with one hand and stroking his rib cage just inside his jacket with the other, as Max had seen him do many, many times on television. “How was your flight down, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Max said. “It was all right.”

  “You look bigger on the dust jackets of your books, Mr. Reddick. Is that calculated?”

  “No,” Max said with a smile and wondering which of his books the President had read.

  “You come highly, very highly, recommended, Mr. Reddick. I h
ave the greatest admiration for Julian Berg and Bernard Zutkin. And Oscar Dempsey tells me that Pace owes much of its preeminence in reporting civil rights to you.”

  “Dempsey had to be willing to gain that position, Mr. President.”

  “Yes, well, the coverage is good, quite good. I’ve had some journalistic experience myself, you know. Dempsey says you’re free to join us, but that you have some reluctance. Now, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Reddick.”

  “Indecision is a better word, Mr. President. I want to do what I can to help—especially in this area. At the same time, I have to be concerned with my own future, my own work.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Dempsey has given me five months leave. That ought to tell both of us about the future—whether you’ll want me to stay—”

  “I understand.”

  Max went on: “While I am honored that my friends thought enough of me to recommend me, and that you want me to be here, and while I believe in your program, staking what future I may have on someone else’s four years is not the kind of gambling that I, as a Negro, can afford. That’s the heritage of the lack of equal opportunity you’ve pledged to improve.”

  The President smiled and Max followed his eyes to the wide expanse of the White House lawn. “Say, did you vote Democrat?” the President asked as he toyed with a cigar case. “It’s true that we are given four years at a time, Mr. Reddick, but we owe it to our people, who are gamblers in a sense, to give them the best we can during the time and for the future. I know you’re not unaware of that.”

  “No, sir, I’m not.”

  “I appreciate your loyalty to Dempsey, and I can understand your eagerness to be in Africa; it is a very exciting place—but we think Washington is, too. We can promise you vigorous activity for however long you choose to stay, and if you’re the kind of man I think you are, that other people say you are, then I’m not worried—you’ll be around long after your five-month tryout period.” The President stood; the interview was over. At the door the President said, “Mrs. Agnew, my secretary, will get you set up across the street, and the other fellows, Gus Carrigan and Jim Bonnard, will take you in hand. We’ll get together in a week or so.”