Read High Cotton Online

Authors: Darryl Pinckney

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American

High Cotton (15 page)

BOOK: High Cotton
6.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
I noticed that the publican was hostile to a group of young whites. Ernest explained that they were medical students who worked nearby. They didn’t know how to behave. When one of them came in and asked if he could get a pack of cigarettes, the publican said yes, but he wasn’t a tobacconist. The thing, Ernest said, was to have a pint of bitters and then buy cigarettes. The pub was white, but it was also working-class. Yet he wouldn’t sell a socialist paper in the pub. He wanted to merge with the local builders’ teams.
“England is divided into counties of the saved and counties of the damned. My landlord got me prosecuted for creating a multiple occupancy dwelling when I gave refuge to a couple of Pakistanis. I won the case, but I got charged costs. England is like that. They say, ‘This is the conservatory,’ when it is obviously a piece of ill-fitting, corrugated plastic over the joined sitting room and bathroom.”
I put on my solemn face, the one that said there was a lot of racism in this world, not just in the anti-Paki East End. I mentioned the schoolchildren who pulled my hair without my permission. Ernest said people were more kind to strangers than they used to be. During the Napoleonic Wars a ship put in at a place called West Hartlepool. There was a pet monkey on board. It escaped. The townspeople had never seen the enemy. They mistook the monkey for a Frenchman and lynched it.
I slept through the second half of the meeting. When I woke I got censorious looks from the women. To make up for my Stalinist boorishness, I swore to Ernest that I wanted to sell newspapers at the dock gates at six in the morning, nourished only by reserves of caffeine. I hoped that my blackness would be more prestigious than my politics.
“This is not Oakland,” he said over the next round of pints. He didn’t believe blacks were automatically the spearhead of the Revolution. “What we have to do is organize the working class.”
I said the question was, Could the working class in Africa organize and control its destiny, and found myself smiling idiotically, the way I did when my mother begged me to tell the truth.
I tried to imagine Ernest making the rounds with his socialist newspaper at street markets and tower block estates, his mouth disclosing an accent very different from that of the people he asked to be more working class. While at Magdalen College, Oxford, he had knocked on a door, looked across a great swath of carpet, and told Prince Tomohito that he was collecting for the Black Panthers, only to be asked, “It is an animal?”
Encouraged by yet another pint, I confessed that I was feeling relaxed and at home at last. Ernest said that if I needed ancestors, it was quite reasonable to borrow anyone’s. It was a spiritual need, not a historic one. He offered to lend me his. “My grandmother, as she grew older, became devoted to her ancestors until in the end she wouldn’t see the vicar. I wondered if she would end up worshipping rocks and trees and wells. She had been a snob. She became an ancestor-worshipper, like the Chinese, or a Thai friend of mine who can remember forty-four generations.”
 
The dialectic of Negro Firsterism boiled down to the old Marx Brothers joke, “I don’t want to join any club that would take me.” A place couldn’t be any good if blacks were admitted, which led to a view of life that the best was always eluding you. For Grandfather, Harvard had been really Harvard in the days of Henry Adams, but had gone downhill just before he arrived in New England.
I commended my feelings to the night, sent them on their journey. The streets of London were as empty and oppressive
as downtown Indianapolis. I lost the way back to my room. Far from the rattling lines of night buses, two policemen interrupted the contact of extremes, me debating whether to relieve myself like a free spirit against a Nash terrace, and screamed that I had no business in that part of town, which I took as a hint that I had to catch the earliest train that would take me to the dock at Southampton. I made it to the bathroom on my floor, where I spent a sweaty night pleading with the proletarian liquids I’d sampled. Someone bashed on the door in the early morning, but I slept on in my hiding place.
V
alley of the
S
hines
“
A
h, masqueraded Harlem,” Lorca cried, “your rumor reaches me.” On an autumn day 125th street offered its “poem of display”—carts of bargain clothes, false gold laid out on squares of fake velvet, “freedom wigs” mounted on poles, and plenty of bad corners with phonograph speakers hoisted above record shops from which funky anthems blared. The crowd flowed, a Niagara of traffic that never ceased, not even at the corners where domestic dramas were acted out. Langston Hughes once gazed with longing on those analeptic streets from his Columbia University dormitory, but since his time Morningside Park had become a DMZ and new students rode the subways in terror of emerging at the wrong 116th Street. Take the A train?
The Negro Capital of the World, the old-timers’ Seventh Avenue, which boasted “fifty-two Easters a year,” I knew had moved, long before, to the rare-books desk of the Schomburg library. The Hotel Theresa was dead, the Apollo was in a coma, and the lush exchanges between neighbors in the pretty town houses of Stanford White had to wait in a nourishing obscurity, like a piece of music whose neglect makes its revival all the more
rapturous. The voyeuristic possibilities of the remains, the bad corners, were more animating to me than that dissertation-giving ardor for the ruins of melanophilia.
The legends of the high life didn’t tempt me as much as the worn-out ones of danger. I went to Harlem, “Valley of the Shines,” Grandfather called it, for the sake of having been there, as if the adventures I planned to enter into and then embellish at a comfortable remove had entertainment value. If I couldn’t have an encounter of the Harlem kind, perhaps a quick immersion in the scene itself would yield a horror recognizable from the newspapers, an accusatory contrast to the euphoric idleness of life as it was lived in the dormitories, in Central Park West apartments when parents were out of town. Having been on the Harlem scene would enable me to extort from my unsuspecting classmates—the expression “get over yourself” hadn’t caught on yet—something of the awe that attends a chief mourner. My people.
 
The Muslim bakery did not stop for me. I submitted the way you pause near a concession stand to listen to the hawker and catch the gaiety of the carnival. I was teased by two young men laden with bales of
Muhammad Speaks
, drawn into being a part of their performance. They wore white shirts and their hair was conspicuously neat. Their formality said that the Nation of Islam was not so terrifying. They reminded me of the eager scouts who once gratefully and gracefully collected for UNICEF, of the manners that were taken for granted before the thaw, when a stranger was someone not from the neighborhood, but even so not the enemy.
They were talking about the “Original Man.” The earth, they said, was about to move and Babylon would soon be taken. The planet was in battle array. They wondered if I knew Chapter
30:41 of the Holy Koran. They asked if I knew that I had been kidnapped by the white race. I said I knew that. This tactic sometimes worked with Jehovah’s Witnesses. If one of them asked if I read the Bible, I’d say that I opened it every night. The Witness would stand there with an armload of
Watchtowers,
confused and temporarily at a loss, long enough for me to make my escape.
These were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. They said that I did not know the Holy Koran. They said I didn’t sound like I knew what they were talking about. I began to think of bear-baiting but did not move on. They said that if I was one of the Negroes, I was opposed to the truth. Their politeness, I realized, was a kind of parody. They said that if I became a black man I would be the truth. Two girls with rollers in their hair stopped to watch us. A woman asked us not to hog the whole sidewalk, please. The followers of the Messenger of Allah said that I smelled like cigarettes. The two girls moved on. Perhaps they’d seen that show before.
I remembered the young inmates I once saw on a fifth-grade field trip to a reform school. We were invited to inspect several classrooms, stood at the doors as if stopping before various explanatory signs at a zoo. The cagelings pointed and laughed at us, the outsiders. The halls rang with the shrieks and whistles and curses of hundreds of embittered boys as we shuffled from doorway to doorway. The trusties and counselors kept up a patter about training programs, indifferent to the noise and our fear.
I was not sure which man, black or white, they said had invented which race in a test tube. They said that white people were devils. I argued with the confidence of being two steps ahead of their next attack. Their primitive weapons and defenses, their slings, stones, and breastplates, were no match, I thought, for the shining mail and Excalibur of my Popular Front mentality.
They said that I smelled lonely. I hadn’t counted on that. They smiled at each other like gentlemen vaudevillians at the crest of their routine. The audience had been set up for the punch line.
“We know him,” one said of me.
“We do.” His partner nodded. “Black on the outside, white on the inside.”
 
Con men, ready and agile in broad daylight, added themselves to the path of pretended friends, like the swift nothing of brown paper and tawny leaves hanging and dropping into the sidewalk’s grate. The arithmetic of chance and need put me in the sphere of operations.
“Please help me.” I first saw a piece of paper with a smeared address and then a long sleeve of stove gray. Attached to that was a face as sable and glossy as the desk organizers marked down 30 percent in the window behind us. “Please help me.” He got out that he had been looking for this address all day, but no one would help him and those who said they would were not very honest. “My daddy said don’t never be scared of nothing. But I don’t know where I am. My mama’s counting on me.” He called me sir.
I asked him not to call me sir. He said they called him Tunk back home in South Carolina. He’d come up by Greyhound all night long, directly after his father’s funeral, to collect the insurance money. I believed him. Tunk said he had been hunting for his father’s people. I watched him remove a large flowing red handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his smooth, childish face. “My mama gave me it.” He lovingly wrapped it back into his trousers and looked around, lost, alone.
“Please help me, sir.” Tunk accosted a wiry man in a hat as wide as a tire. I didn’t move on. Beneath the brim the dandy stroked his goatee and bore down on Tunk’s mauled piece of
paper, as if the address had been written in a hieroglyphic the secret of which would be revealed if we only had patience. Tunk raced through his story, loud and desperate. The Samaritan in the plum leather coat said that Tunk was on the right street, but a study of the buildings, their windows like the sockets of skulls, showed that the address did not exist.
The frightened farm boy said he couldn’t get a bus back to South Carolina until the following day. He had to find his cousins, his father’s people. He had heard bad things about hotels. Besides, his mama needed every cent of the insurance money. I’d seen the film of
A Raisin in the Sun.
I’d read the play and worried when Tunk pulled out a clump of cash as thick as a biscuit. The Good Samaritan and I agreed that a stranger to the city as naïve and trusting as Tunk had to be careful about whom he showed so much money to.
“We got to find you a bank,” the Good Samaritan said. He turned about wildly, as if he meant to hail the first emergency vehicle.
Tunk said he didn’t believe in the white man’s money house. Man is more complicated than his thoughts, they say. The Good Samaritan was appalled. I believed in Tunk’s backwardness as thoroughly as I did his distress, precisely because both were played so broadly, laid on so thick. I believed in the existence of young men like Tunk, up from the tobacco fields, careful not to let their Sunday best make contact with the dirt, slow-witted and abandoned in the coursing streets. We must help him, I thought.
In the urgency to make Tunk believe in the white man’s money house right then and there, that very afternoon, in the struggle to pierce the country boy’s obstinacy that so aggrieved and astonished the complicitous Good Samaritan, I didn’t reason very far, not to the illogic of why someone leaving town the next
morning had to be persuaded that banks did not steal your dollars, at least not in that way. Tunk cried out that we were just like everybody else, that we wished him evil. The Good Samaritan was on the verge of throwing up his hands.
Tunk said that if I proved to him that the white man’s money house was safe he would regain a little of his faith and courage, enough to go on. I remembered a check from home still in my back pocket. Some mystical force had preserved it there for that purpose. I volunteered to step into the Freedom National Bank, open an account, and make a withdrawal. Tunk said that such a thing could not be done. I hastily produced the check and waved it at Tunk. I didn’t think about the sudden silence in our uproar until later. Tunk had stopped complaining and the Samaritan had left off beseeching. They had looked at each other. It was a brief moment that betrayed a resemblance around the eyes. We are one family, I thought, as I hurried into the bank. Later the rapid look that had passed between them I interpreted as amazement that they had hooked such a stupid fish.
I wanted Tunk to see that some money houses were black men’s money houses, but he wouldn’t come inside with me. He had a change of heart and pleaded with me not to go in there, as if a bank were a burning house. I saw through the window the Good Samaritan comforting Tunk, who looked up now and then at me from his wet hands to make sure that I was still alive, wriggling on the line.
The manager was kind. She asked me what I studied. “Smimoff’s,” I said, the good deed I was about to do had enlivened me so. I told her about Tunk. I pointed at the window. I told her that I needed to bring money to Tunk, to show him that I had told the truth, to make him believe.
“Tell me you’re kidding, honey.” She called to a colleague. “Those flimflams are at the Drop again.” The aim of the scam
was to switch their fake bankroll for your real money, or steal your money outright, if they thought you couldn’t run fast enough. Tunk and the Samaritan were gone when I looked back at the window, when I ran out to the street to beg them to come inside and clear up the misunderstanding for the manager.
 
By dusk garage doors were pulled down over the shops, revealing murals painted in a sort of local Zhdanovism. The fast-food joints were open and so were the bars where what went on went on softly behind the clarity of pink, blue, green neon. “Positively no guns. Positively no loitering in the restroom. Positively everyone will be searched.” The armada of churches was quiet, the storefront dwellings of the Holy Spirit as well as the flagships guarding the Haussman-like boulevards. Eighth Avenue and the tenements leaning toward St. Nicholas Avenue were nervous bazaars for heroin, with brand names like Circle B, Sure Shot, Three Hearts Ready to Kill, and Blue Magic. Glassine packets were passed through peepholes by children too young to be prosecuted.
Every stray encounter was decisive. Every evening held magical promises of renewal. I was going to walk out the door and reinvent myself. I was going to turn a corner and there in the configurations would stand the agents of my conversion. I was going to step out of a taxi and the life in which I existed without inward definitions or external categories would finally come.
 
Everything was possible because this life continued to be something that stood outside myself, a little way off, in a diner maybe. This life hadn’t recognized me yet, like love or history, both of which always seemed to be walking on the other side of the street from where I was. I never noticed as the days took on a similarity to a neurotic pattern: doing the same thing again and again, and
each time thinking the result different, significant. Sometimes I misplaced that dream, which is what dreams are for, found it again, and once more departed from the world of facts.
Nevertheless, what a miracle it was to climb the twisting monumental stairs of Morningside Park, frightened by the shadow of a falling leaf, to return unscathed, to take the day out of my pocket, to lay it on the desk along with keys, coins, and folded lunatic leaflets from a group more paranoid about the reasons the comet Kohoutek had disappeared than they had been about its collision course with the earth.
After one of my feeble excursions to test the hypothesis that the sum of Harlem was greater than its parts, I tried to fit my imagined hurt to the balm of being with acquaintances who, having enchanted their brain pans with LSD, talked so much I couldn’t see where I was going. They blocked traffic with their heads and assured me that there were some black people whom they thought of as “just normal people. I forget that you’re black.” It was, as the song goes, nobody’s fault but mine, and I didn’t want to hear myself say that I forgot some white people were white.
 
“God has put into my hands a whip to flog your back,” Grandfather said straight off whenever he called. He quizzed me about my reading—“Yes, but can you bend over and tie your shoes without your glasses falling off”—my Columbia classmates—“Their parents don’t mind their children growing up with poor people”—and predicted that I would come to no good among the no-accounts, burrheads, shines, smokes, charcoals, dinges, coons, monkeys, jungle bunnies, jigaboos, spagingy-spagades, moleskins, California rollers, Murphy dogs, and diamond switchers. He liked to be shocking. Perverse opinions were among the few pleasures of his old age.
BOOK: High Cotton
6.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Radiant Dragon by Elaine Cunningham
All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow
Father of the Man by Stephen Benatar
Phoenix by C. Dulaney
Wild Encounter by Nikki Logan
Consumption by Heather Herrman