The Man Who Cried I Am (30 page)

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.

Max blinked and reread the lines. What was this? It was like listening to Harry talk once more, perhaps in Paris in the cafe, or in his house, in his study, with Charlotte and Little Max in the other room, and he, Max, tingling from feeling good, just being in Europe, and grateful that Zutkin had taken him to task for not writing novels.

18

NEW YORK—PARIS

Grateful later, but resentful then. Max's plans had been sketched out and the talk with Zutkin had stung enough so that he moved up his timetable.

They had been lunching at the Algonquin—Zutkin liked the Algonquin—and Zutkin was being the old writing master, taking Max to task: “It's spring, Max, 1953, and you haven't published a book except those essays in over three years. They'll forget you. Is the
Century
taking it all out of you? Don't squeeze your talent out on Berg's paper. In another ten, fifteen years the best writing has to come from Negroes simply because whatever transition comes will be because of them. Things are moving fast—” Zutkin raised his hand placatingly. “I know. A cliché, but that doesn't mean it's untrue. There is a task force of sociologists, psychologists, attorneys and educators, and people of good will—” that was the first time Max had ever heard the phrase, “People of good will”—“are working now on papers that will shake this nation from top to bottom. School segregation has an excellent chance of being outlawed by the Supreme Court. The speed of the change will tell us what kind of country we're living in and about the people. No issue so reveals what people are or will do as this one of race. This is going to be an exciting and terrible place until that problem gets settled or, at least, people decide that it must be settled. Take your break now, Max, so you can be back when it all starts. For a couple of years now you've been talking about going to Europe to write. You've made your peace with Harry. You made it in a very sly way; you simply stopped writing books; you stayed out of competition with him. We know what the critics do to Negro writers—hurl them into the pit and let them kill each other off—that's going to change, too.”

“Don't hold your breath,” Max had said. He had glanced around the room. There was a female novelist he had met. She had a long, racehorse neck and was eating very daintily. At another table sat a male novelist with heavy brows who, it was said, drank a fifth and a half of bourbon every day and liked his women under nineteen years of age. Zutkin was right, of course, it was time to get out; get out before you got used to the weekly paycheck, the travel, meeting the famous people; get out before death and corruption, the seedy side of life, became a fatal attraction. Max had been planning to ask Berg for a leave starting in the fall.

“All this is none of my business, Max,” Zutkin said.

Max smiled. But, Zutkin had noticed, it was a smile without mirth. “No, it isn't,” Max said. “But you've got all the answers anyway, haven't you?”

Zutkin lowered his head as if expecting a charge. He had always done that, even as a child. People had thought that because he was involved with books and writing he was a punk who couldn't take care of himself. But Max had said nothing else and Zutkin had raised his head, noticing with some distress that Max now seemed bored by his presence. Strange, Zutkin thought, how for a time you think you know someone and then—you just don't, not at all. A word, a look and there's the end of something. “Except that you're a good writer. I care. In a way I suppose that makes it my business.” Zutkin shrugged. He had had his say and he had meant it; Max could do with it as he liked. Max had changed. Maybe it had started with his girl's death. One could not any longer call Max petit bourgeois. The change was good to see, but what did it portend?

Against the background of writer's talk and the clattering of china and silver, Max felt momentary regret. It was hard, damned hard to dislike people who liked you. Here Zutkin was talking about great changes coming over the land, this great, vital American land and he didn't know shit about what great changes, at least, not American ones. Wise, yes, he was wise, but the wisest men looked stupid when it came to exercising that wisdom about America. What about now, right
now
, never mind the big picture. Max swung his head around the room. How foreign it seemed after small dark kitchens in the South where the meals had consisted of grits, grits, always grits and greens cooked too soft, fried chicken or pork, and the people in those kitchens with their dark, impassive faces coming out of clothes that always smelled of cooking. The Algonquin dining room smelled good and the faces in it were so goddamned innocent, even those etched with some genteel kind of evil. God, these people don't
know
, Max thought.

Sure, he had avoided going to Korea, using his operation as an excuse. He hadn't gone to witness and report on the military industry and how it was brought to bear upon and obliterate humanity. Instead, he seemed to have become the
Century
's ace reporter on lynchings in the South and the subsequent trials for murder, if the murderers insisted on being apprehended. He had made many trips to the South, to the small, still belligerent towns in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina—towns with their Civil War monuments surrounded by neat lawns of St. Augustine grass upon which sat old Negro men, as watchful as tomcats, wearing sweat-stained felt hats, wrinkled khaki shirts and faded overalls; and he had been into too many courtrooms down there, in the colored gallery sections, of course, and smelled the sheepshitty, acrid odors and seen the Confederate flag stretched open behind the judges' benches; he had seen too many dead, mutilated Negroes and tough, alive, giggling crackers.

There was your war; there really was no other.

Max had looked at the white defendants, at their relatives in both the jury box and audience, and had come to know,
really
know that to be oppressed was not enough to win ultimately; that to be in the right was not enough. You had to win the way they had won—with blood. Words, petitions, laws, ideas, were not going to be enough. The common denominator was blood, white blood as much as black blood. The politicians he had met, the personalities, black and white, their publicized indignation, were as nothing. They made no waves. How could they, when Negroes themselves were a part of the very system that ground them under? The teachers, the schools, the minute grants of status within the segregated communities, the security derived therefrom. You talk about change, man? You'd better talk about an explosion.

There had been one man who might have started the change, averted the explosion. Max had taken a short leave, with Berg's blessing, to work for that man, because the
Century
, after all, was coming out for him. The man had not won. Damn, he had sounded right; he had seemed like the kind of guy willing to start things. People with sense, unafraid for the first time in a long while, had popped up from behind every bush, as though at the bidding of a master gardener, to lend support. Max had worked on speeches and organization and at the convention. No good, all of it. There were many little things that had killed the man, but none were as effective as the intellectual label. Intelligence is the enemy of the American people; too much of it and they would come to know that it could happen here and that it would be as nothing that had happened anywhere, anytime before. Maybe the answer was that they were intelligent enough, the American people, to not want to know. The old-line people in the man's own party had helped to cut him down. Deals, they wanted deals and could not understand why the man was not dealing. They had helped him on the way down. The man had been capable; he might have heralded the end to the hundred years stench of Negro deaths. The other man: a nation did not move well in the shadow of a man who had performed other tasks with a Jim Crow command.

It was all eating at Max now. Even before he had the lunch with Zutkin. He found himself wanting to get away and write. He wanted to do with the novel what Charlie Parker was doing to music—tearing it up and remaking it; basing it on nasty, nasty blues and overlaying it with the deep overriding tragedy not of Dostoevsky, but an American who knew of consequences to come: Herman Melville, a super Confidence Man, a Benito Cereno saddened beyond death. He wanted to blow the white boys off the stand—those who couldn't blow like niggers—before they took the whole thing and made an intellectual exercise out of it. Goddamn it, yes! He was going to get out. Pitch camp elsewhere and get sharpened up and rested for the battle that was coming: the battle in black and white.

Max took the ship with the summer equinox. At Le Havre where cranes stud the docks as gigantic, long-limbed insects, Max looked down from the main deck and saw Harry waving; he saw no other black faces. Max waved back. He was glad he had written that first letter; it had led to a resumption of a regular exchange with Harry once again. Max had known when he wrote the letter, that it was a matter of pride with Harry. Who would write the first letter after that long period when Max's letters had gone unanswered? Max did, and it was all right. Pride, one of Harry's weaknesses; pride over terribly small things.

Max said goodbye to the people he had come to know aboard the ship; they rushed through the exit for the boat train to Paris. Standing beside his luggage in customs, Max could see Harry waiting for him at the exit. Through wide grins they studied each other carefully, and when Max was through, Harry embraced him. They placed the baggage in Harry's car and Max was glad Charlotte was not there; he'd wanted the first few moments alone with Harry. Their conversation was swift and jovial, but the studies of each other persisted. Harry had put on some weight; that was an ordinary observation. But Harry's face—it seemed to encapsule some grim wisdom, some sad affirmation.

“How's Zutkin? Shea? Granville? Chris? Kenyon? Kierzek?” Harry asked, and without waiting for Max to reply went on. “Fill me in; what's
really
happening back there?”

It is a four-hour drive from Le Havre to the Left Bank if you stop for a late lunch and get caught in Montmartre traffic, if you detour, but by the time they had reached St. Clair, Max was almost talked out. Harry, pausing from time to time to curse French drivers (“These bastards over here don't seem to realize that cars can kill you. Just like Africans.”), went back to the time of his departure and told Max all the things he hadn't known then about the American Lyceum of Letters, the deal with Don Kenyon (the book hadn't done well), and all the little hurts; the sudden flare-ups between Charlotte and himself. “That incident changed my life,” Harry said, driving crisply through the swollen green Norman countryside. “They made me mad. They made me a writer.” South of St. Clair, the traffic heavier, the gray, ugly factories more frequent, Harry turned to Max and said with sudden and curious warmth, slapping him on the knee, “You're in France now, man. Vive la France. You're going to work here. You're going to sit down and write. Paris is the place for it. It's going to be a special thing because they don't shit on you here if you say you're a writer. You can say it and not feel ashamed. Every writer ought to do it, come to Paris, if only for once in his life. Goddamn, Max, you look good. A little tired. Them crackers been running the shit out of you, huh?”

They both sat in warmth for several miles, not talking. Max leaned his head back on the seat.

“Dawes is over here, you know,” Harry said.

“I gave your address to Granville and he gave it to Dawes.”

“Yeah, I know. Don't see too much of him. Travels in another kind of crowd. And there's another cat here. Three weeks ago, I think he said. Roger Wilkinson.”

“I know him. We were as tight as I'd let him get, which wasn't very much. Young cat. Says he's writing, but I've never seen any of it. Haven't seen him in a few months. Had to set him straight.”

“Woman?”

“Just a friend.”

“How can a man have a woman for just a friend. Baby, you're slipping!”

“Long story. Tell you about it sometime. Funny. Wilkinson never said anything to me about coming over here. I thought he loved the civil service.”

“What, was he a social worker?”

“Yeah.”

Harry laughed. “Boy, I tell you, those white folks back there got the best of everything. Now they got so many Negro social workers listening to Negro problems they don't have to be bothered with them anymore.”

“I guess that's what he did. I never asked.”

“Well, I hope he produces. Paris is full of jive cats. Just hustling the best they can. However hard or evil the hustle, they still think it's better than putting up with that nonsense back home. By the way. That Dawes has been on my ass like white on rice. Essays. He's really been stomping me.”

“Why?”

“How in the hell would I know? I suppose it's easier for spades to run each other down than paddys. You know.”

“I'm really in France.
Really
in France.”

“Damned if you aren't.” After a while, quietly, Harry asked, “How's Mississippi? Just as bad?”

“It'll get worse. All of it. The whole goddamn place.”

“That's too bad. You keep hoping.”

“It'll get better.”

“But you just said—”

“After it gets worse.”

“Yeah. I got you. How's the hunting?”

Max said, “Falling off. The weather. I don't know. You don't see too much out there anymore.” He was remembering the last time he'd gone hunting with Harry and shot the deer. The day he discovered that Charlotte had lied to him. Well, then, they had known each other fourteen years. Where had the years gone? “Got one bird last fall. I was out all morning. Ricketts' place.”