The Man Who Cried I Am (37 page)

Was this what so many places in America were going to be like until the law,
justice
, took off her goddamn blindfold and saw what she had been doing with it
on?
Dawn came. The women rustled in the kitchen and soon the house was filled with the smell of fried ham and eggs, the pale odor of cooking grits. The girl's father had taken one of the early watches. Now he came downstairs, rested, but his eyes were red. He was a man for whom the pace of life, especially this aspect of it, was all too sudden. He didn't really understand it, but with a child in the house caught up in this time, he could not, in some way,
not
understand it; where it failed to come through in all its intellectual complexities, it succeeded emotionally. They had hooted and beat at his daughter, spit at her. But it was important that she go back; there were others who would follow her. They were evil, those white people in the mob, and had to be smitten. An eye for an eye. Jesus Christ, Lord Almighty, where are you this morning?

The girl herself put spark into the morning and thus gained beauty. She had them laughing (politely) at breakfast, after which she preceded her father to the car. The rest would have to wait; that white beast out there sought any excuse to kill: a rifle in a car, a caravan of Negroes protecting their own. The car pulled out of the driveway slowly, as if the girl's father, to incite a gentle day, had merely caressed the accelerator. The exhaust pipe puffed small blue wisps of smoke. Then the car was gone. At the main road, grinning cops in cars would follow it, providing not the protection they had been slovenly enjoined to, but an invitation to the mob to do almost exactly as it wished when they (the cops) sped off on a side road.

As soon as the coed and her father had left, Max got a ride to his rooming house where he was to meet the Atlanta bureau man. They were cordial to each other. Max got in the front seat—a photographer was in the back—and a taut silence filled the car. The mob was bigger now, joined by the rednecks from the countryside. Factory workers from the other side of town, afraid that the college boys wouldn't properly run that nigger bitch off the campus, had swollen the ranks of the mob. Max guessed that today was the first time many of them had ever set foot on a college campus.

The Atlanta man was nervous. Max knew why; he would draw the attention of the mob. The Atlanta man knew, as Max knew, that failing to find the girl who was being spirited from class to class by the campus police, the mob would turn on just any Negro. Max was remembering stories of white men on the hunt for a suspected Negro rapist, murderer or plain bad nigger. The Negroes shut themselves up in their homes and talked in low voices as if waiting for a capricious hurricane from the Caribbean to pass through. They knew, those old Negroes, of the waverings and curvings of white men gathered in mobs; it was something that went down in the blood, the smell of gasoline burning along with flesh, the grisly souvenir hunters. Yes. If they couldn't find who was supposed to be the culprit, just any nigger would do. Once they got up a head of steam, cooking underneath with still likker, the history of their time and place steaming like hog guts thrown upon cold stones with the first frost, nothing could stop them until they got their blood.

Moments later, at the photographer's request, the Atlanta bureau man stopped. The photographer hopped out and took pictures of the flank of the mob, which, suddenly seeing first him and then Max, wheeled and began to pour toward the car. Max remembered chino-covered legs, blurs of white sneakers mixed with heavy country shoes, the uneven drumming of running feet on the grass, the curses. The photographer scrambled back into the car muttering something about a telephoto lens the next time. The Atlanta bureau man sat paralyzed at the wheel. He snapped out of it long enough to scream through a slightly opened window, “Press! Press! Back off there you kids!” A book glanced off his window and he raised it. He looked as if he were going to cry. Max heard the photographer snapping and cranking. The people in the mob had grabbed the car bumpers and were rocking the car. Max wished he had a knife, a gun, a rock.
Something
. Rocks and more books crashed against Max's window. Looking through the window, he picked out the man he wanted to have if they broke into the car. He would break that motherfucker's neck if he had only a second to do it in; no mob would stop him. That thought made him feel better. “Start this damned thing!” Max shouted at the frozen Atlanta bureau man; the photographer reached over and slapped the man sharply. The Atlanta man's glazed eyes now snapped with fear. Max pressed his left foot against the accelerator; the car jumped forward and the people flew away from it. Max jammed it down and outside he saw the expressions on the faces had changed quite suddenly to fear. A sudden warmth flooded through Max. As the car moved and jerked, the Atlanta bureau man sighed and gripped the wheel more firmly. Within seconds they'd left the mob behind. Shaking, Max lit a cigarette. “This is your goddamn Southern hospitality, huh?”

The Atlanta bureau man drove silently, first ashamed that his fear had been so obvious. Then he wondered what in the hell they were thinking about in New York? This wasn't any place for a nigger reporter, he didn't give a damn if it was
Pace
, not when the people in the mobs were throwing things at white men, too, and calling them nigger lovers! Why, the Atlanta bureau man thought in surprise, he had never been as close to a nigger in all his life as he was right now. But those people out there, you couldn't expect them to believe that.

It took only a week before the university found an excuse to expel the Negro coed from the campus.

Sometime later, back in New York, Max learned that Paul Durrell's group had won its demands, two years in the asking. Schools would open the following year on a desegregated basis; the department stores were thrown wide open and no Negro had to take a back seat to any white person on any streetcar in Altea. But within a week of Durrell's victory, his lieutenants complained that the Group's funds had been grossly tampered with. Durrell, finally clearing himself of any implication of grand larceny, went to Chicago.

It seemed to Max that the white press had created the atmosphere for the minister's acquittal; that was the way the white boys worked. Were the stakes in the present so high that the white power structure was prepared to save Durrell from his mistakes already? He'd indebted himself to white America if he really was guilty. One day the leadermakers would call in the chips. Max hoped Durrell was really, really clean. The movement couldn't be affected then, it would keep on rolling. If it worked the other way, disaster. The steam going out of everything; old sisters and brothers, close to the grave, crushed; young sisters and brothers drifting toward Minister Q and, generally, hard-assed times coming.

21

NEW YORK

Pace
had demanded too much time and energy. Max had been able to contribute very little to his man's second attempt to gain the Presidency.

Besides, the politicians preferred Theodore Dallas to Max. Dallas was a Negro but he didn't look like one. That was important. The Negro image was immensely softened by Dallas's white appearance. Besides that, those Southerners who quietly went along with the candidate knew from experience within the blood that every Negro wanted to be white—or as nearly white as possible. Look, they seemed to say, whut lookin' like white did for Powell.

Dallas's blond hair and blue eyes, his white skin taunted by the just-lingering coloring of a remote and very dark ancestor, gave him that perennially suntanned look; the tan burnished his magazine-model good looks. Max could never think of Dallas without thinking of Roger Wilkinson. (Roger had returned to New York, briefly, then gone again to Europe, for good, he had said. He hadn't sold any of the novels he had written, and spent a great deal of time putting together
policiers
for French publishers, which in the end they never accepted. Max wondered how he was going to live.) Like Roger, Dallas did and said everything at just the right time and in the right places. He courted both the politicians and the intellectuals, yet when the two sides had their inevitable conflicts, Dallas managed to remain unscathed and smiling. He always smiled; he had those nice choppers. He mixed very well in the company of Negro men, laughed from his belly, as if to prove that though he was fair enough to pass for white, he was a stone, just-like-you-guys boot. They enjoyed him, expecting some of his glamour, political and otherwise, to rub off on them. A few boasted of having Dallas's phone number. Dallas teased and cooed at the Negro women with just the right amount of hippy-dip to let them know that he was still a spade below his belt. They smiled and grinned back until he had left, then they muttered, “You light, bright, just 'bout right so-and-so.”

But remarks like that were really directed at Dallas's white wife, her with her bright, blond, always neatly coiffed hair; her with her skinny self and trying to talk like colored … Too many of
them
marrying us. No, honey, you got the cart 'fore the horse; too many of
us
marrying them.

The Dallases called down these remarks upon themselves simply by looking as though they were a couple right from the pages of the slickest of the slicks. They were a handsome couple. One saw them—not too often, however—in the better Negro nightclubs or at the Baby Grand catching Nipsey Russell. (That was before the other Negro comedians came, Max remembered.) Or they were seen in the East Side restaurants downtown, sleek, poised over dinner. When they entered a room where a major interracial affair was in progress, they drew stares. They sucked in behind them at the tiny Negro theater openings uptown or off-Broadway, a certain, bright, expectant downtown opening night air.

“He's been around politics so long,” Maida remarked at a Langston Hughes opening on the upper West Side, “that he acts just like a candidate.”

And Max thought, that's true. He was learning, Max was, that the consummate politician was also the consummate actor.

Max's worst days were those when he looked out of his cubicle and saw Dallas bearing down on him, unannounced, smiling acknowledgment of the attention of the researchers and secretaries. “Passing by,” Dallas would explain. “Thought we might have lunch if you don't already have an appointment.” Dallas had been that shrewd. He knew that, if he had called, Max would have had another appointment; Dallas knew that Max did not like him. Nothing personal. A lot of people didn't like him and Dallas knew it. Dallas also knew that Max, as far as he knew, seemed too polite, perhaps even soft, too
conscientious
a man to refuse lunch on the spot. And Dallas knew somewhere in his thrivingly alert set of instincts that no Negro working in mid-Manhattan, regardless of his position, wanted to eat lunch there alone. Eating alone was at best painful to most people.

When they had lunch, Dallas would talk about Harry and how Harry really had beat him to Charlotte. That was in the old days when he had been interested in the Party, but had been smart enough to avoid it. Look what had happened to it.

Max, listening, realized each time that, as a novelist and journalist rolled into one uncertain hunk, he could have a certain value to Dallas, if he could be won over. It had been no small secret to Dallas that the intellectuals always favored Max over himself as a wedge into the Negro community. That undoubtedly was because Max didn't have a white wife. Couldn't trust those intellectuals. They were willing to go only so far. Dallas worked hard at winning Max over. He never wearied of inviting Max to affairs, which Max never attended. Then, discovering that Max hunted, Dallas offered to take him on a jaunt to Canada. Max refused; he'd gotten used to hunting alone. He preferred it. But Dallas for a long time displayed the patience of a whore with a sure John heating up over a fifteen-cent beer in the corner joint. True, Max did not like him, but he knew with boring certainty that Dallas, having the equipment to fit the time, plus the soft-muscled dexterity of a cat that always landed on its feet, would gain his goal to be a big man in Washington. Well, Max reasoned, being close to politics did that to a man. He could understand that.

There were many ways to get to Washington. It figured, therefore, that only shortly before the Gold Coast was scheduled to change its name to Ghana with the coming of independence, the first African state south of the Sahara to do so, Dallas overnight would become involved in African affairs. The announcement of Ghana's independence for March of that year gave new life to the annual spring birthday cocktail party the Ethiopian Mission to the United Nations held in honor of Emperor Selassie in the Delegate's Lounge. Generally the parties had been dull and attended perfunctorily by the other UN people and by a few local Negroes of some community standing and a few others who had none at all; other guests were those who had displayed some interest or concern in Africa. But that spring cocktails were drunk merrily, the party enlivened by the presence of the Ghanaian delegation. Dallas's voice boomed from one corner to another. The delicate, large-headed Ethiopians (all Amharics; Max didn't know then that there were other kinds) glided from group to group. Max was thinking, as he stepped on Ralph Bunche's foot, that perhaps from here on out Selassie no longer would be a joke. What other free African delegations would be here next year? That late spring afternoon, humidity soaking First Avenue, UN Plaza and the city, a new excitement was born: black men were coming to freedom.

Excitement. No, there was a
curiosity
. Whatever, it was centuries and thousands of miles thick. It breathed through the cloying, fetid rain forests of Africa, called up the ghost of Marcus Garvey who never went there, caught the windward tides across the seas, spun the dirt of Harlem streets; it lingered in the bars and restaurants, sat on the tongues of Negro preachers with middle-class congregations:

Africa. Af-rica. Freedom. Free-dom!