High Cotton (24 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
When my boss forgot to close his door and I saw him rub the bridge of his nose over disappointing sales figures, look out the filmy window that offered a close, troubling view of a vacant office in another building, I thought maybe he was wishing for
those drunken, turbulent readings at City Lights, the candid hills over the bay, and wanted him to know that I was on his side. I went to the coffee station and made him a cup with just the right amount of honey that I had brought myself, knowing that he considered refined sugar the enemy.
those drunken, turbulent readings at City Lights, the candid hills over the bay, and wanted him to know that I was on his side. I went to the coffee station and made him a cup with just the right amount of honey that I had brought myself, knowing that he considered refined sugar the enemy.
Someone had to take care of him, the unreconstructed hippie playing hardball with what he called power bitches. He said no matter how long he’d been in the business he went into conferences with the Big Boss ready to shit his pants and when he got home he sobbed because his kids were healthy and adored school. He said he cried some more after supper because his working wife was scared that he was going nuts on her. He thanked me for knowing when to talk him down after a meeting with the salesmen and when to leave him alone, to hold all calls.
Who wouldn’t prefer to make coffee than to type a letter? I was frightened of his quick confidence in me because the hand that raises you up always tires and flings you down. Because my boss trusted and perhaps also liked me, I decided that there was something wrong with him, that I had hitched my wagon to a lame one. “See you on the bevel,” the nice guy said when he left early to panic on the train about what sort of statement he was making of his career.
I’d never seen five o‘clock, not the five o’clock of vendors with steaming black chestnuts and pretzels, of ennobling panhandlers, stinking back doors of fine midtown restaurants, the lunatic with a can in front of Carnegie Hall singing the weeping clown from
I Pagliacci,
the five o’clock of jamming through turnstiles. Underground, with the smell of wet wool, foreheads crept up to high, unbearable temperatures. Strangers glued to one another’s stomachs were on the verge of disgrace. Briefcases and shopping bags took the place of chastity belts. Who ate garlic, who had
answered too heartily the clarion of Johnnie Walker, why did she use that hair cream, and why could we not stop breathing it in?
I Pagliacci,
the five o’clock of jamming through turnstiles. Underground, with the smell of wet wool, foreheads crept up to high, unbearable temperatures. Strangers glued to one another’s stomachs were on the verge of disgrace. Briefcases and shopping bags took the place of chastity belts. Who ate garlic, who had
answered too heartily the clarion of Johnnie Walker, why did she use that hair cream, and why could we not stop breathing it in?
It was a job my parents could tell their friends about without the usual psychological gloss. That was progress. I censured them for asking how many blacks worked for the company. I didn’t see why their Negro problem and mine always had to come into things, but then I had not grown up in the days when a position in the post office was a prime civil service occupation.
I could fend off Grandfather’s wise sayings, the kind from a remote, never-to-return history, the lessons I used to think of as plentiful and therefore missable in the Afro-American Culture class that met too early for me to roll out from under the covers for. It was chastising to speculate about your parents as people who had had another life—that life—and had been through more than a few texts. I used to meet my parents’ friends in line at ticket counters, people whose embraces said that they had seen and cared for me at my worst. They always asked how was school and left me with advice: “Remember: they have to take us now, but they don’t have to keep us.”
Life-preserving decrees from Negro Section of the Keep Walking Union that had become life-constraining returned, passed through me, as if I were a medium. They took me by surprise. You are shaving and stare at a discoloration you hadn’t noticed before. The ledger of how to be simultaneously yourself and everyone else who might observe you, the captain’s log of travel in the dual consciousness, the white world as the deceptive sea and the black world as the armed galley, gave me the comic feeling that I was living alongside myself, that there was a me and a ventriloquist’s replica of me on my lap, and that both of us awaited the intervention of a third me, the disembodied me, before we could begin the charade of dialogue.
My parents, the wide thumbs, took turns warning me that though they laughed about local black banks, black radio stations, and black country clubs as weedy as disused airplane hangars, I had not known adults who were not self-employed. Even the teachers in my life had seemed above school boards and trustees, and Grandfather, as we knew, answered only to God. That was Mom-and-Pop corner-store stuff compared to the real world. I admitted that I didn’t know how many blacks worked at the company. They told me to behave, to watch my step, and, above all, to remain a child of Brooks Brothers, not to show up in the prejudicial club hopper’s garb that made them slow to claim me.
I also had not really been on the good side of nine o’clock before. It was pleasing to be a part of the herd, not to have the feeling that the rest of the world was headed in the opposite direction, not to be subject to the criticism in the clear morning eyes of dogwalkers suspicious of after-hours Charlies who slipped from unmarked doors, sour-mouthed, oversmoked, and overspent, after a shoving match on the stairs between heroes of the unsteady like Sid Vicious and the girl known as Banana Daiquiri.
The competing ideology, the oldest message of the moon, was that the night was color-blind. In those embryonic New Wave days access to your feelings, expressiveness of any kind, views, opinions, were social liabilities downtown. Conversation required no practice if you dismissed everything and everyone, including yourself. By day the people of whom you approved waited by telephones and planned what to wear; by night the people from whom you wanted approval waited for drummers, dealers, DJs, divas of 5 a.m., free rides. The question of you had to stay home, and home was a place to sit and remember what it was like to cry, how good it felt, while the invisible you cast no shadow in the Molotov Cocktail Lounge, Tier 3, the
Eskimo, Reggae Palace, The Nickel Bag, Save the Robot, A—7, Dave’s Luncheonette.
Eskimo, Reggae Palace, The Nickel Bag, Save the Robot, A—7, Dave’s Luncheonette.
A job couldn’t be just a job, a source of “chump change” that passed for income, at least not for very long. Heritage had a way of catching up with you in the office cafeteria. It tapped you on the shoulder and made you feel bad about the thoughtlessness of your desires and actions. It made you feel as bad as when you didn’t get up to give your seat to an old-timer, or when you ran ahead to the playground and forced the babysitter with the rheumatoid hip to try to keep up. I found myself looking around for a black table in the office cafeteria.
I had always courted the quick signals that said you were tolerated, put up with. The blacks at the cafeteria tables in high school, in college, handed back your solidarity, as if they were returning your bug collection, which was mostly paraffin anyway. One try, and after that you didn’t have to ask how was metal shop class, how were the med boards going, how was the family, and they didn’t have to waste their time saying fine, fine, and fine all afternoon, scratching purple knit caps, the emblems of fraternity, wondering what you were trying to prove, what had come over you.
If for some reason you didn’t feel comfortable among them, that was your problem, but their body language said don’t turn around and put yourself through changes and come on all friendly like a black alderman out for the vote. They knew your heart was in the right place, because your heart didn’t belong to you. They kept it in a vault someplace, like an indiscreet letter or a forged bill of exchange in an old-fashioned blackmail scheme. Where your head was at was another story, but they’d vote for you anyway, because there was no one else to vote for.
All of this was communicated to me by the way six black men
in the office cafeteria blinked and made room for my tray. Guilt is a wonderfully stimulating condition, like certain forms of incarceration. They said they were from maintenance, Xerox, mail services, production; carried themselves with an air that said they had been through battles, shared a common bond, that I couldn’t just walk in and be part of it. I chose to be reminded of the army films at the beautiful drive-in during which as a child I had fallen asleep. In the unit there was always one who was vehemently detached. By the time I woke and the canopy of stars had thickened the loner had put his life on the line for the squad.
in the office cafeteria blinked and made room for my tray. Guilt is a wonderfully stimulating condition, like certain forms of incarceration. They said they were from maintenance, Xerox, mail services, production; carried themselves with an air that said they had been through battles, shared a common bond, that I couldn’t just walk in and be part of it. I chose to be reminded of the army films at the beautiful drive-in during which as a child I had fallen asleep. In the unit there was always one who was vehemently detached. By the time I woke and the canopy of stars had thickened the loner had put his life on the line for the squad.
The assistant managing editor held himself like the isolated soldier in the bunk. He held a “roosty” position in the hierarchy, though he was younger than the other men, and that, I thought, accounted for the aggression in the way they referred to him as St. Maurice. He looked the part. The gravity, the sort quickly read at a distance, made his companions want to tease him. They treated one another to little goodies, traded cookies, like kids with lunch boxes, but did not include him. Maurice sat, coiled about himself, his basketball-player’s limbs so folded, negated, that he mimicked the design of a paper clip.
I asked to see the book Maurice had with him. He removed it from the table and sat on it. I knew something about the ecstasy of suspicion. “I got a crown in that kingdom.” As an icebreaker I related with disbelieving shakes of the head what had happened to me when I had dared to go to the men’s room on the executive floor. A white security guard stopped by my desk and asked if I had been on the eighth floor recently. I had. Puzzle solved. The chairman’s secretary had alerted security that there was a black prowler in the building. Some people can demonstrate intractability through the simple act of eating soup. Maurice was one of them.
We were joined by two women in similar business suits. They
delighted in shopping together, except at the jewelry store. The woman with too many gold chains said she liked to meet the new unmarried faces on the block. She knew already that I worked in the trade department and said that she’d been trying for two years to transfer up to that main cabin from the juvenile books division. I shrugged. It was boring, sharecropper’s work. Maurice laughed, either appreciatively or derisively. I couldn’t tell which.
delighted in shopping together, except at the jewelry store. The woman with too many gold chains said she liked to meet the new unmarried faces on the block. She knew already that I worked in the trade department and said that she’d been trying for two years to transfer up to that main cabin from the juvenile books division. I shrugged. It was boring, sharecropper’s work. Maurice laughed, either appreciatively or derisively. I couldn’t tell which.
The woman with the better watch said that I was another wedge. I said everyone knew that the trade department lost more money than any other in the publishing company and that without the lucrative textbook line the whole place would have gone bankrupt. She said the prestige was with the trade people. Maurice said she talked like a stockholder. She said she was sick of negativity every time he opened his mouth.
“If I’m lying I’m flying. I’m getting depressed by your resistance. If you don’t like something, well then, get up and change it. We’re here and it’s on us to do what has to be done.” Virtea was head of the company’s Black Caucus.
Maurice grimaced, as if to say he could tell us the worth of that obstructing, petitioning lobby, that blockade to escape into employment’s immensity. Virtea eyed him. “I haven’t even did my nails yet.” She continued her catechism of blackness—we’re here, we’re keeping on—and watched for another chance to squash Maurice, who one moment was looking hard between the bread of his sandwich and the next was up and gone.
Virtea said Maurice was bitter because he had run against her for chair of the caucus and lost. One man who hadn’t opened his mouth since I sat down said St. Maurice would make a good union rep because he was so mean. The problem was that he changed his faces so much no one knew who to vote for. Another man said the cat’s real problem was that he was wrapped too
tight. He said cats that uptight deserved to keel over from heart atttacks.
tight. He said cats that uptight deserved to keel over from heart atttacks.
My boss said that the assistant managing editor’s job was the unhappiest in the company because he was obliged to spy on employees in the name of cost efficiency. Maurice sat between the elevators and the stairs. The open design of the floor lobbies gave his office a view of the floors above and below. Everyone had to go by Maurice’s door, which was always open since a cabal of disgruntled editors had been caught trying to smuggle out equipment in big straw baskets. Someone had also made off with the Big Boss’s antique long glass clock. Not only could Maurice see the comings and goings, he was theoretically visible every hour of the working day, the unpopular, baleful extension of management’s monitoring eye. The Big Boss’s argument was that even the Rolodexes of names and telephone numbers were company property.
My boss said that Maurice had changed since he first joined the company five years before. It used to be a joy to go down to production services and have a chat with St. Maurice while pages of manuscript flipped through high-powered copying machines. Maurice relished discussions about grades of paper, styles of type, anything that had to do with the nuts and bolts of print culture. He even knew antiquated techniques of book binding.
Then one day management went on a rampage of panic buying. Shaken by the Black Caucus’s threat of a suit, my boss said, the Big Boss ran through the office, accosted Maurice, the first black he saw who had a college degree, and promoted him. Many promotions were handed out that day and the gentlemen from the watchdog agency that had agreed to help the Black Caucus read the riot act to the company that had thought of itself as a
family departed entirely satisfied. The Revolution fell, like Agrippina, under the blows of her own children, Herzen said.
family departed entirely satisfied. The Revolution fell, like Agrippina, under the blows of her own children, Herzen said.
At first Maurice took his new job very seriously, but the managing editor wasn’t interested in his “return on investment” projections and vetoed his suggestions. Any attempt at problem-solving on Maurice’s part the managing editor, Little Boss, took as a usurpation of his authority. Little Boss was backed up, even ruled, by his secretary, who maintained a regent’s jealous guard. She, the Power Bitch, wouldn’t give up control of a single flow chart.
When Maurice went upstairs with his grievances he was told to work them out on his own. Little Boss had been with the company many years. My boss said he would have taken Maurice’s side, but he couldn’t afford to alienate a man who so completely enjoyed the Big Boss’s friendship. He said the Big Boss didn’t trust anyone after his favorite clock was stolen.
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