“It won’t be like that here. At least, not in the beginning. Some of us have learned some hard lessons from what happened in Europe, and I mean black and white. We have also learned some hard lessons from our own country. I know civil rights leaders who talk about guns and island hideouts, privately of course. They know about the enemy and if the enemy knows this, knows we are in another time in which we will kill back or kill first, he will move slowly, if he moves at all. The military call this deterrent strength. I mean no harm with these guns, Maggie. I can’t begin to tell you what has happened inside me to make me even think like this. But I have some measure of peace now, because I can answer the white man’s choice for the future: death or peace. I will only harm him if I know he means to harm me. I think he does.”
“Did you know this when we married?”
“Yes, I knew it.”
His words, enormous, ghastly, elusive, animal. But he seemed calm and sure sitting there, watching her anxiously.
“All this talk shocks me. It frightens me, too, Mox. I did not know—”
“What did you know then?” His voiced cracked out at her.
“I—”
“‘I,’ hell, Maggie! I’m telling you the way it is and you’re talking about shock. Don’t you know who you married? Did you forget everything we ever talked about?”
“That was in Holland,” she fought back. “It did not seem real. And we never talked like this—”
“You didn’t really listen, then. You watch the news every night. What do you think? Those poor colored people? Isn’t it terrible? Is that what you think, Margrit? Honey, come on! You know better. I taught you better. This ain’t Holland, baby, this is the YOO ESS AY, where niggers have had it with getting their heads beat, and I’m a nigger! Do you hear me? And you’re married to a nigger unless you don’t want to be any longer. That’s really all there is to it, Maggie, right?”
Her voice came out desperately. “But life has to go on. I am married to you; we do have each other. You are an uncommon man, therefore, there must be other ways for this peace.”
“There is and this is it. What looks like death is life and what for so long looked like life was death. Baby, they don’t want us to have each other. The guns are here because we have got to have each other.”
She flung herself up, crying and screaming. “THAT IS SO PARANOID, WHAT YOU ARE SAYING AND DOING AND THINKING!”
His eyes alone seemed to smile at her, tenderly as at a strange child passing. “Margrit, in the twenties and thirties when Europeans came here to become Americans, they had only to say ‘nigger’ and they got their papers. In the fifties and sixties the language became a little more polite; those people had only to say ‘you’re paranoid.’ Congratulations, now you really are an American.”
She had fled, and crying entered that labyrinth, the ugly, dark middle of it, uncertain, lost, but from where she had to commence her search for him. She ran toward every illusion of light; she tapped for hollowness in the walls behind which there might be a lever to pull and suddenly flood the interiors with blinding light so she could see him and lead him out; she trod the moss-covered floors and touched wet, dank walls, and nasty little animals slithered away from her. Once she stepped on something large and it made a long hisssssing sound, and she ran past it, screaming. Then one day, she assumed it was a day, for there was neither day nor night in that place, only the remembered period of twenty-four hours, a day, she thought she heard tapping on another wall and a voice, hoarse with much use. She tapped and cried out. The tapping on the other side became louder and she heard his voice just as another little beast slid between her fingers toward the floor:
— Margrit, Maggie, baby, it’s me, Max! Keep to your left, Maggie, keep going left, baby, the heart-side. Can you hear me? Move to your left. I am moving to the left, the heart-side—
— Yes my schatje, I hear you. I am moving to the left also, to the heart-side—
“It’s here,” he said with a smile, and hefted the galleys in his hand. He kissed her. “This is when you finally begin to feel as though you’ve written a novel.”
There was bright sun, and spring once more. She sat beside him while he opened the envelope and unfolded the curled pages of the proofs.
“Max, not really, now. You can’t mean there will never be another book. It is your life; it is our life. What would we do? You will not work for Pace forever?”
“Well, I think I mean it.”
“Darling, you tease me too much.”
“Hey, Maggie.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s rip off a little, what say, baby?”
“Ugh, such an ugly picture you make. Right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
“But dinner will be late.”
“So?”
“So.”
Later she asked, “What does the good Dr. Woodson have to say?”
“Oh, I have to go back.”
“But why?”
“I hadn’t flushed myself out very well.”
“Poor Mox. Soon all the troubles will be over with your little behind and you will be quite all right again.”
“Promise?”
“My darling, I promise everything good for us.”
One day he came home in high agitation and she believed it had to do with what was happening in the South, Birmingham and other places; it was 1963. There followed a period of moving, doing things, going places and seeing people. He kissed her in public after that time, she remembered. In the small hours of the morning, she would awake to find him at his typewriter, as if in a frenzy to hold on to every passing moment. So often when she spoke to him, his mind was far away, and she had to lead him back gently, as if afraid to wake a sleepwalker. That period sloped suddenly down into one when he woke up and stared at the ceiling, then announced that he wasn’t going to work, to hell with Pace. Sometimes he left before breakfast and she knew he was not going to work, and she would not see him until late in the evening, martinis reeking on his breath. He spent each Sunday cleaning his guns, although they didn’t need it. Before them on television danced the police dogs, police and Negroes; fire hoses gushed and Margrit felt lost again, deserted.
“Mox, not again, not with those guns and that look about you. I can’t stand any more of it. I won’t stand for it. I hate it all, all of it, those stupid whites and those taunting blacks. I am sick of it!”
His eyes seemed to have made a noise when he looked at her through that shocked silence that had produced her short, bitter tirade. Click, the eyes seemed to have said.
“I’m sorry, Maggie.”
He seemed this time to be giving way to her, leading her on, encouraging her to have it out, all of it, finally, and she shouted, “Sorry be dommed! Look what’s happening to us again. Look, I tell you! Aren’t you man enough to stand above this nonsense?” She knew she should not have said that.
He spoke quietly and simply, without any special tone in his voice. “It’s not nonsense. I’ve told you that.”
She stared at the guns arranged neatly on the floor, newspapers under them, and suddenly she hated the smell of the gun oil. Their eyes locked across the weapons which were so beautiful in a way, lying there mute and for the moment harmless. She bent quickly and grabbed up a shotgun while he watched her, and beat the stock into the floor several times while the apartment reverberated with the blows. The trigger guard, when she stopped, panting, sprung loose. Margrit was all the more at a loss because—she had seen it—there had been for a second a very tender and loving thing in her husband’s eyes. Now it was gone.
“That’s enough,” he said, still quietly.
“It’s not enough, it’s just the beginning.”
“You’re wrong, Maggie. It’s the end.”
“Then, dommit, let it be the end. This stupid place with whites and blacks at each other’s throats, I can’t stand it! You are right, Mox. It is the end. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
She whirl
ed out of the room and when she got to the bedroom, slammed the door. “Enough of this crazy land,” she hissed at herself in the mirror, “where everyone speaks in superlatives but exists in diminutives. Shhhittt! on it. It can go to hell!!”
A big protest march had been planned for Washington the day Margrit left New York. She had stayed on in New York several months after their break-up, waiting for what, she didn’t know. She was not defeated, merely tired and unbearably worn. Max had moved out of the apartment the Sunday they had the fight; he would reclaim it today, when he got back from Washington. Huh! If he got back. The way this country was going, Washington would be going up in smoke by the time she was midway over the Atlantic.
He had called in the morning to say goodbye. Nothing more, just goodbye. After that she cried; he’d always said she cried too easily, but she got to the airport.
She opened the New York Century on the plane. Everything I touch is Max, she thought. On page three a headline read:
AFRICAN DIPLOMAT FOUND DEAD IN SWISS HOTEL
Jaja Enzkwu, 55, First Minister to the Nigerian Federal Cabinet, was reported dead …
Margrit turned to another page. Enzkwu? She did not recall ever hearing of him.
In Amsterdam, Margrit got up and called the American hotel again. Max had not returned. She called Roger once more, but there was no answer. She pulled on a pair of white gloves, looked at herself once again, then went downstairs. The hotel was about ten blocks away. When she arrived she checked at the desk, but Max still had not come. She selected a sidewalk table near the hotel entrance and ordered a Campari. She put on sunglasses. From where she was sitting, she would be sure to see him when he returned.
28
LEIDEN
Yes, Max thought. I knew Jaja Enzkwu, eagle-faced, hot-eyed Jaja with his sweating, pussy-probing fingers and perfumed agbadas; I knew him.
Max glanced at his watch again. Two o’clock. He wondered what Margrit was doing back in Amsterdam on such a beautiful day. He knew what Jaja was doing: feeding the bugs back in Onitsha where he had been sent in a box, after that deadly rendezvous with Baroness Huganot in Basel that day.
So much had happened that day, the day of the March on Washington. Margrit had left shortly after he called her. Then he had taken a plane to Washington. Du Bois had died in Ghana the night before, and so had Jaja, leaving behind an opened magnum of Piper-Heidsieck, a half-eaten partridge and a startled, voluptuous, eager-to-be-ravished Baroness. But Washington had been the place to be that day. There you could forget that the cancer tests were positive—it was malignant—and that you were going into cobalt treatment soon; you could forget with more than a quarter million people surging around you.
Max flipped up the next page of the letter and when he finished, he shook as if with a sudden chill, and yet the shaking hand had nothing to do with his illness; it was the letter itself. With trembling hands he lit a cigarette.
No, he told himself. I have not read what I just read. This cannot be. No, it’s me, the way I’m thinking, the way I’m reading. He closed his eyes hard and held them for a long time. Then he opened them to reread the entire letter once again:
Dear Max:
You are there, Max? It is you reading this, right? I mean, even dead, which I must be for you to have these papers and be alone in the company of Michelle, I’d feel like a damned fool if someone else was reading them. I hope these lines find you in good shape and with a full life behind you, because, chances are, now that you’ve started reading, all that is way, way behind you, baby.
I’m sorry 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 …
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 white man, as we well know, has never been of so single an accord as when maltreating black men. And he has had an amazing historical rapport in Africa, dividing it up arbitrarily across tribal and language boundaries. That rapport in plundering Africa never existed and never will when it requires the same passion for getting along with each other in Europe. But you know all this. All I’m trying to say is that, where the black man is concerned, the white man will bury differences that have existed between them since the beginning of time, and come together. How goddamn different this would have been if there had been no Charles Martel at Tours in 732!
The Alliance first joined together not in the Hague, not in Geneva, not in London, Versailles or Washington, but in Munich, a city top-heavy with monuments and warped history. Present were representatives from France, Great Britain, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Spain, Brazil, South Africa. The United States of America was also present. There were white observers from most of the African countries that appeared to be on their way to independence. The representation at first, with a few exceptions, was quasi-official. But you know very well that a quasi-official body can be just as effective as an official one; in fact, it is often better to use the former.
I don’t have to tell you that the meetings, then and subsequently, were held in absolute secrecy. They were moved from place to place—Spain, Portugal, France, Brazil and in the United States, up around Saranac Lake—Dreiser’s setting for An American Tragedy, that neck of the woods, remember? America, with the largest black population outside Africa, had the most need of mandatory secrecy. Things were getting damned tense following the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in 1954.
The disclosure of America’s membership in Alliance Blanc would have touched off a racial cat
aclysm—but America went far, far beyond the evils the Alliance was perpetuating, but more of this later. For the moment, let me consider the Alliance.
African colonies were still becoming independent. Federations were formed only to collapse a few weeks later, like the Guinea-Ghana combine. Good men and bad were assassinated indiscriminately; coups were a dime a dozen. Nkrumah in West Africa vied with Selassie in East Africa for leadership of the continent. The work of the Alliance agents—setting region against region and tribe against tribe, just as the colonial masters had done—was made easy by the rush to power on the part of a few African strongmen. Thus, the panic mentality that had been the catalyst for the formation of the Alliance seemed to have been tranquilized. There was diplomacy as usual, independence as usual. What, after all, did Europeans have to fear after that first flash of black unity? The Alliance became more leisurely, less belligerent, more sure that it had time, and above all, positive now that Africa was not a threat to anyone but itself. Alliance agents flowed leisurely through Africa now, and Western money poured in behind them.
From a belligerent posture, the Alliance went to one based on economics. Consider that 15 percent of Nigeria’s federal budget comes from offshore oil brought in by Dutch, British, Italian, French and American oil companies; consider that the 72 percent of the world’s cocoa which Africa produces would rot if the West did not import it. Palm oil, groundnuts, minerals, all for the West. Can you imagine, man, what good things could happen to Africans, if they learned to consume what they produce? It did not take the Europeans long to discover that their stake in Africa as “friends” rather than masters was more enormous than they could have imagined. Only naked desperation demanded that Spain and Portugal stay in Africa; the Iberian Peninsula hasn’t been the same since the Moors and Jews left it in the fifteenth century. Time? It was the Alliance’s most formidable ally.
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 39