Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
High Cotton (23 page)
I was going to get Dashiell Hammett for “darkie town,” and Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank, even Carl Van Vechten. This was serious—no Julia Peterkin, Fannie Hurst, or Dubose Heyward. I was going to stick to the Dilseys and Joe Christmases. If Conrad had to go, so be it, Celine too, for his scenes in Little Togo. Lady Chatterley’s lover conceded that a black woman might be able to have an orgasm, but that would be like sleeping with mud. Sweat dripped from my nose onto the index cards. The laughter boiling in the streets added to my sense of lonely mission.
I woke in my clothes determined to beat up Stephen Crane, and poor Hart Crane for “Black Tambourine.” Not even Berryman or William Carlos Williams was going to get off easy. The jig was up for Rimbaud’s sham niggers. Sins were everywhere. Poe, Defoe. Katherine Mansfield in a letter spoke of one woman as “the sort to go with negroes.” I was going to let Shaw and Genet have it, show Sartre a thing or two about the aura of the text of
Black Orpheus.
How dare Daniel Deronda condescend to defend Caliban.
Black Orpheus.
How dare Daniel Deronda condescend to defend Caliban.
But, by noon, thanks to hypoglycemia, I wasn’t sure it mattered
that in 1925 Virginia Woolf had come across a black man, spiffy in swallowtail and bowler, whose hand reminded her of a monkey’s. How to bring down Whittier? Or Katherine Anne Porter’s “Uncle Jimbilly” and Kate Chopin’s “Aunt Peggy”? And to what purpose? How far back would I have to go, to Pushkin’s Ibrahim or to the black ram tupping the white ewe? Roussel’s
Impressions d’Afrique
didn’t even take place on earth, not really. Dinesen’s farm was real, but so what? What was done was done, though most of the “gothic horror” was far from over. “Let them talk. You know your name,” Grandfather had said. I threw out the cards. The motive for my pedantic note-taking was pretty sorry: after leaving Miss Barnes I had fallen into the pit of trying to prove that there was more to me than she thought.
that in 1925 Virginia Woolf had come across a black man, spiffy in swallowtail and bowler, whose hand reminded her of a monkey’s. How to bring down Whittier? Or Katherine Anne Porter’s “Uncle Jimbilly” and Kate Chopin’s “Aunt Peggy”? And to what purpose? How far back would I have to go, to Pushkin’s Ibrahim or to the black ram tupping the white ewe? Roussel’s
Impressions d’Afrique
didn’t even take place on earth, not really. Dinesen’s farm was real, but so what? What was done was done, though most of the “gothic horror” was far from over. “Let them talk. You know your name,” Grandfather had said. I threw out the cards. The motive for my pedantic note-taking was pretty sorry: after leaving Miss Barnes I had fallen into the pit of trying to prove that there was more to me than she thought.
There was more to sinking, to being a handyman, to becoming a part of the streets around me, than I had thought. I had only to approach the surface of things, like a child coming too near the heat of a kitchen range, to discover that. Being in arrears made me afraid to meet anyone from Pomander Walk. I didn’t have the nerve to ask the caretakers to examine a faucet. I sold off some big books to keep the lights on. The curtain over my rear window stayed down. What companionship of the outside I had was provided by the view of Ninety-fifth Street from my front windows.
It was there that I sat on those penniless summer nights, watching the elderly across the street scrutinize me from their bolted prisons. There was a parking lot belonging to a nursing home. Daily the employees dragged themselves to their horrible duties, and in the evenings they exchanged gossip with the night shift before hurrying away. Sometimes, on Sundays, guilty families came to wheel their begetters into sleek sedans for useless outings.
It was a street on which anything could happen, and a lot did happen. Sometimes the angry voices after midnight terrified me, as if a wife or a whore were being beaten at the foot of my bed. I gave up calling the police and got used to it. That accounted for Pomander Walk’s general fear of invasion. Between Riverside Drive and Central Park West, Ninety-fifth Street was a no-man’s-land, a zone of welfare tenements. There were enough stories of ivy being torn from the walls by vandals, of someone who had had her purse ripped from her arm by a fleet-footed phantom who could not have been more than fifteen. The chilling cry of “Motherfuckers! All y’all motherfuckers is gonna die!” was enough to send every light on Pomander Walk blazing, as if a whistle had been blown to alert the local militia.
The building directly across from me had the most unsavory of reputations. It was an SRO, a very dark, benighted affair embedded in a slope. I noticed that pedestrians crossed the street to my side rather than risk the building’s contagions that waited in ambush. A check-cashing joint occupied one of the rooms on the first floor, and from the number of men coming in and out in their undershirts with soiled paper bags from which the tops of wine bottles were visible, I guessed that there was also a bookie joint somewhere inside. These men with missing teeth who paced back and forth on the street, discussing their chances in snapping, high-wire Spanish, made a strange tableau with the drag queens who also congregated outside the SRO.
The drag queens were impossible to miss, impossible not to hear. Hour on hour they milled around the entrance, dancing complicated steps to snatches of music that came from automobile radios. Most of them were in “low drag”—cutoffs, clogs, improvised halter tops, hair slicked straight back. Some appeared in wigs, curlers, black bathrobes, gold house slippers. They held cigarettes, long brown More menthols or Kools, which they rationed
scrupulously. They gossiped, waited, and played whist, “nigger bridge.” They taunted young mothers who pushed baby carriages and balanced Zabar bags and balloons; they hissed at broad-backed boys who sauntered up the street in school T-shirts. “Honey, you need to go home and take off that outfit. That green gon’ make yo’ husband run away from you.” Or: “Come over here, sugar, and let me show you something.”
scrupulously. They gossiped, waited, and played whist, “nigger bridge.” They taunted young mothers who pushed baby carriages and balanced Zabar bags and balloons; they hissed at broad-backed boys who sauntered up the street in school T-shirts. “Honey, you need to go home and take off that outfit. That green gon’ make yo’ husband run away from you.” Or: “Come over here, sugar, and let me show you something.”
Sometimes, for no apparent reason, just standing there, one of them would let out a long, loud, high scream—“Owwwwwww”—and then look around with everyone else on the street. This was particularly unnerving to the people who lined up with ice-cream cones in front of the film revival house to see Fassbinder or Fellini. Equally unsettling to the neighborhood was their booby-trapped friendliness: “How ya doin’, baby? Okay. Be that way. Don’t speak, Miss Thing. You ain’t getting none no way.”
I watched the people of the SRO every day as the buds on the ginkgo that grew at a slant toward my window failed one by one and the pigeons pushed through the litter of frankfurter buns, hamburger wrappers, and pizza crusts. I recognized some of the SRO inmates in the Cuban tobacconist, the Puerto Rican laundromat, the Korean deli, the Yemenite bodega, at the hippie pot store, the Sikh newsstand. I watched them with a kind of envy. I loitered on the corner one night, but everyone stayed clear of me. Perhaps they took me for a narc. But it was perfectly natural to cross the street to get the instant replay after a checker had slammed into a station wagon or a fire had been put out three blocks away.
Of course I did not find friendship, no matter how swiftly some of the drag queens and youths stepped off into the personal. Raps about the doings on Broadway or in the park inevitably shifted
to breathless, coercive pleas for loans, though I told them I had had to break open my Snoopy bank for cigarettes. The soft-spoken owner of Pomander Bookshop took me aside to give me a warning. More than one innocent had fled that SRO without watch, wallet, or trousers. Three “bloods” invited me up to discuss a deal. An alarm went off in my head. I remembered how, as a child, three classmates had invited me to join their club. They escorted me to a garage and kicked the shit out of me. Remembering that, I got as far as the lobby, made some excuse, and split.
to breathless, coercive pleas for loans, though I told them I had had to break open my Snoopy bank for cigarettes. The soft-spoken owner of Pomander Bookshop took me aside to give me a warning. More than one innocent had fled that SRO without watch, wallet, or trousers. Three “bloods” invited me up to discuss a deal. An alarm went off in my head. I remembered how, as a child, three classmates had invited me to join their club. They escorted me to a garage and kicked the shit out of me. Remembering that, I got as far as the lobby, made some excuse, and split.
It is hard to recall the murky, inchoate thinking that led me to make those inept gestures toward infiltrating what I saw as the underside of life, hard to camouflage the fatuity of my cautious hoverings. One illuminated night, late, a young woman was attacked by two kids. I heard her scream, saw her throw herself to the ground and thrash about. The kids couldn’t get to her purse. By the time I got across the street others had come running. That was it, she moaned, she was going home to Nebraska.
One grinding dawn I stumbled into the haze with loose change for a doughnut. The intersection of Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street was clogged with squad cars. Flashing lights whipped over the faces of the somber onlookers. There had been a shooting. A handsome Hispanic man in handcuffs was pulled over to the ambulance, presumably to be identified by the victim. His shirttails flapped like signal flags. A policeman cupped the “perpetrator’s” head as he pushed him into the rear of a squad car at the curb. The man’s head sagged on his smooth chest and shook slowly, rhythmically. Who was it that said the man who committed the crime is not the same man as the one in the witness box?
The violence was arbitrary. I was in the crowd that watched
in horror as the policeman who had been summoned to defuse a fight beat a black teenager until coils of dark blood gushed from his head, his mouth, and drenched his shantung shirt. To my shame it was a black cop who used his stick with the most abandon. We were ordered to disperse, didn’t, were rushed, and the voltage of fear that seized us was nothing like that of the political demonstrations of another time.
in horror as the policeman who had been summoned to defuse a fight beat a black teenager until coils of dark blood gushed from his head, his mouth, and drenched his shantung shirt. To my shame it was a black cop who used his stick with the most abandon. We were ordered to disperse, didn’t, were rushed, and the voltage of fear that seized us was nothing like that of the political demonstrations of another time.
Shortly afterward, I called home. It seemed that I packed more than clothes. I carried to the corner all the baggage of my youth. I thought, as the taxi driver slowed to look me over, that I could leave that weight behind, like a tagless piece chugging round and round on a conveyor belt. Pollution made the sunset arresting, peach and mauve, like the melancholy seascapes of The Hague School. On the way to LaGuardia, stalled somewhere near the tollbooth, I, looking forward to my prepaid ticket, to the balm of the attendants’ professional civility, felt a wind. It came like forgiveness, that sweet, evening breeze, the first promissory caress of the high summer. The storm that followed delayed the departure of my flight.
E
qual
O
pportunities
qual
O
pportunities
T
he little branch library on the Upper East Side, its shelves as depleted as those of the nearby store selling painted Catholic statuary, was Grandfather’s equivalent of the laundromat, that haven where the elderly wander in their noon dreams and, warmed by dryers and the lush scent of detergent, count with either satisfaction or regret the number of stoplights they have obeyed. At a desk with a Rosetta Stone density of carved hearts and obscenities, he relived the promises, the seduction, of instruction. You cannot learn unless you fall in love with the source of learning.
he little branch library on the Upper East Side, its shelves as depleted as those of the nearby store selling painted Catholic statuary, was Grandfather’s equivalent of the laundromat, that haven where the elderly wander in their noon dreams and, warmed by dryers and the lush scent of detergent, count with either satisfaction or regret the number of stoplights they have obeyed. At a desk with a Rosetta Stone density of carved hearts and obscenities, he relived the promises, the seduction, of instruction. You cannot learn unless you fall in love with the source of learning.
History books for young readers that Grandfather checked out and dutifully returned at the end of the day, helping the woman at the desk with her coat, had become substitutes for stories about himself. He said that what fascinated him most about the “back years” was the story of how young Frederick Douglass, driven by the sound of his master reading from the Book of Job, stole a primer and copied the letters on pieces of pine plank.
Grandfather couldn’t get over it. As he retold the historic episode that had for him, as a fact forgotten and relearned, the excitement of an excavation, ignorance had been more intolerable
to Douglass than the overseer’s beatings. Grandfather couldn’t stop smiling. Perhaps he wasn’t used to his new teeth. Douglass made impudent progress in secret, he said, and, lo, one day literacy, like the fleet waters of the earth, swept him to freedom.
to Douglass than the overseer’s beatings. Grandfather couldn’t stop smiling. Perhaps he wasn’t used to his new teeth. Douglass made impudent progress in secret, he said, and, lo, one day literacy, like the fleet waters of the earth, swept him to freedom.
Neither of us mentioned his memoirs. I maintained a guilty silence. Boston was taboo as a subject with Grandfather as well. We sat with it unspoken between us, like two people after a failed assignation. One of them, the one who had the change of mind and traveled alone, hopes the canceled party has enough pride not to beg for an explanation, but to be on the safe side injects into the conversation a preemptive civility.
Grandfather described how Booker T. Washington learned the alphabet in secret from marked pork barrels at a loading dock and deepened little Booker’s cunning until it rivaled the kickback schemes of the president of Standard Oil. By the time I was to understand that to Grandfather the education of such men was his Borodino it was too late. Meanwhile, he, a “friend of goodness,” wanted me to enjoy myself, to find him worth talking to, though his sovereign insights had become a little hard to fathom.
I would have let his eightieth birthday come and go without comment. My parents added my name to family cards. Since Grandfather’s surrender to his portion, the beige stepgrandmother, four or five years earlier, I had seen him a half dozen times. It was too easy to blame the stepgrandmother, triumphant, balky, rude, accusing. I put off visits, crosstown trips to the pigeon coop for senior citizens and low-income families on upper, upper Third Avenue, the way sweethearts postpone the bus ride to the Wyoming Correctional Facility, the minimum security prison near Attica. I fought like hell to be excused from meals with him in salty restaurants when my parents and sisters came to town.
Sometimes I looked up through my windows that I cleaned under pressure from my neighbors and imagined that the pigeons
in rapid transit—it was hard to follow them, the sky itself was often so pigeon-gray in winter—were carrying messages on their legs to Grandfather, but I couldn’t think what the messages would be.
in rapid transit—it was hard to follow them, the sky itself was often so pigeon-gray in winter—were carrying messages on their legs to Grandfather, but I couldn’t think what the messages would be.
Along the Harlem River that helped to wall him in, the Circle Line tour guides fell silent and cameras were given a rest. People went below for refreshments until the boat had gotten by the oil drums and irrelevant crates on the eddies. The tour boats navigated toward the strait with the Dutch name where the microphones would come alive again.
Grandfather didn’t ask what I was up to anymore, and something in his bright manner made it unnecessary to wonder what was going on in his world. Three plain rooms: first hers, with the television the size of a motorcycle; then his, with a prominent shoe rack; and in the main room at the end of the narrow, unadorned hall the old, mute Philco. Seeing it there in that greenhouse, bravely presiding over the stepgrandmother’s maze of savage houseplants, made me think of those “white telephone” films of the thirties in which heedless revelers in top hats are astounded to discover a corpulent Russian nobleman handling the nightclub door.
Below Grandfather’s windows, as hypnotic as the ocean, the song of the FDR Drive. He’d dressed up for me, put on a jacket. The beige stepgrandmother adjusted her hairnet. We heard her double the sighs that were the most important part of her preparations for lunch. She saw every chore from the viewpoint of someone who had no one to count on. She sidewinded to the table with a plate of bread and, to break up the fun, told me to get ice, to fill the pitcher. She was agitated by Grandfather’s devotion to the library and said again that sooner or later someone was going to crack open his head and lay him out because he never looked where he was going.
Only two places had been set.
TV Guide
rested on the stepgrandmother’s
plate on the kitchen counter. She groaned and fished out a pair of tweezers to operate the broken horizontal control knob on the portable television crouched between two toasters. I said we could manage if she wanted to watch television in the comfort of the easy chair in her room. She remained on her bar stool, behind Grandfather’s chair, one eye on the game show and the other on his conversation.
TV Guide
rested on the stepgrandmother’s
plate on the kitchen counter. She groaned and fished out a pair of tweezers to operate the broken horizontal control knob on the portable television crouched between two toasters. I said we could manage if she wanted to watch television in the comfort of the easy chair in her room. She remained on her bar stool, behind Grandfather’s chair, one eye on the game show and the other on his conversation.
“In my day,” Grandfather said, “Negroes understood everything. They didn’t have time to talk. They were in school eight hours a day. None of this ‘Let Aunt Mary Anne take care of it.’” He meant the American Missionary Association. “Now they are totally isolated. They are cut off like the poor.” He didn’t eat. He smiled at his fingers, at the colors playing on the rim of his wet glass, then at me. “And they bear children behind the mill.” He turned over his fork to read what was written there.
I left soon after offering to wash the dishes. Grandfather said that was his favorite part of any meal. I had the feeling that the beige stepgrandmother wanted to search my pockets. The elevator took several minutes to come in their building, one of five bleak concrete towers on what had been the casual intentions of a landscape artist. I knew she was watching me through the little hole in the door. Designed for people with walkers or in wheelchairs, the elevator opened and closed very slowly, enough time for the stepgrandmother to phone her sister and have her cover my exit from the other side, to see if I met any shady characters and tried to fence the silver soap dish she said was missing.
My expedition had not been a success. I’d needed a small loan. That was the reason I called and went by in the first place. Grandfather hadn’t referred to my request and I hadn’t had the nerve to bring it up in person. Lord, plant my feet on higher ground. Almost instantly a check from my father fell through the slot in my door with a note saying not to embarrass Grandfather
anymore. Light can break in upon you only by degrees, Douglass said.
anymore. Light can break in upon you only by degrees, Douglass said.
My father always said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. I was late to my first real job. A cold torrent swept through Central Park like a pack of unruly teens after a rock concert. I invested in a four-dollar umbrella at the subway exit on Seventh Avenue. It had blown inside out and gone its own way by the time I reached Fifth Avenue. The company occupied four floors and sundry pockets in a sleek tower of black syenite on a fashionable midtown corner. I hadn’t seen the bus that created an enormous wake and my shoes squished on the marble-like tiles in front of the security desk under the gold lettering.
The chairman came out to welcome me aboard, a custom from his father’s day. His head fit snugly into his collar like a shell into a canister. A part began far down on one side of his head, from which his gray was combed over to the other ear so that he looked as though he had his full head of hair. He wore the dirty glasses of old money. His pupils were small, but the whites around them were exaggerated, as if he were in a constant state of surprise.
“Wet out there?” He released my hand. “The good stuff is back this way, Maurice.” I mumbled my correct name. He walked inside the memory of Princeton football injuries. Let’s go, Tigers.
My new boss wasn’t in yet. The chairman left me to get acquainted with my desk, to which I had been introduced several times by my distrustful predecessor. He would have presented me to the other secretaries—editorial assistants, the union called them—had he remembered their names. The effect of a long marriage to the
Late Late Show
was that I looked at my new job
as a rerun. I expected a first day like that in the opening scenes of those 1950s Technicolor movies about office life when the old hands gather about the newcomer and quickly give the lowdown. My new co-workers didn’t budge and I didn’t peek over the pattern of plywood partitions at them.
Late Late Show
was that I looked at my new job
as a rerun. I expected a first day like that in the opening scenes of those 1950s Technicolor movies about office life when the old hands gather about the newcomer and quickly give the lowdown. My new co-workers didn’t budge and I didn’t peek over the pattern of plywood partitions at them.
Those partitions were at once territorial and neighborly—the white picket fence effect. They gave to the otherwise claustrophobic space and narcoleptic lighting of the department a kind of
Saturday Evening Post
domesticity. The aisle was the street, on either side of the street the white fences marked off small yards for the secretaries. Each yard was followed by an office with a door. I had the urge to run a stick along the white partitions to see which of the secretaries would run up and bark.
Saturday Evening Post
domesticity. The aisle was the street, on either side of the street the white fences marked off small yards for the secretaries. Each yard was followed by an office with a door. I had the urge to run a stick along the white partitions to see which of the secretaries would run up and bark.
I removed my predecessor’s fussy plants, switched folders around, and scribbled my name on the stenographer’s pad, just to make the area mine. It had been unbalancing to want to move into the neighborhood, to want the desk, the gigantic IBM typewriter, the passport for union dues, the pension plan. During my interview I’d gone down on my knees and reminded my boss-to-be, Stanford, Class of ’62, of the Bakke decision, in case he had also seen through my appreciative reference to his unremembered book of poems that called out after the Beats like the lonely cry of a bittern to its mate. Fortunately, he was amused. “I know where you’re coming from.” He probably hadn’t been able to use phrases like that in a while.
I’d wanted him to think of me as a grownup. That hoax was much like the deception I’d heard people who had more self-knowledge than self-regard condemn themselves for when they were forced to shift gears in their love stories. They faulted themselves for misleading their Others into thinking that they were sensible, solvent, and sober. Without warning they reverted. They couldn’t help it, they said, they didn’t feel like tidying up
or being cheerful anymore. The Others discovered that they dedicated all of Sunday to reading last Sunday’s newspaper. Sometimes you land the job anyway.
or being cheerful anymore. The Others discovered that they dedicated all of Sunday to reading last Sunday’s newspaper. Sometimes you land the job anyway.
“On deck already? Let’s do it.” Which meant picking up my new boss’s raincoat. He would not ask me to make coffee, he said. He brought his own, when he wasn’t on an herbal tea regimen. He felt silly giving dictation and hoped that I wouldn’t mind coping with his handwritten notes in the “out” box. I was not to clean up the avalanche on his desk for any reason. Nor was I to do the twist around the towers of papers, boxes, page proofs, books.
A glance at the walls of chaotic bulletin boards, charts, notes, disorderly shelves, snapshots, and children’s drawings made me think of some noisy migratory species conglomerating on a cliff. I was expected to make myself familiar with his buried projects and yet to keep in mind that what was a mess to the uninitiated spoke to him and his “authors” of the labor for self-transcendence. He was developing a line of self-help books for the New Man.
What he really wanted me to do was shield him—from unwanted telephone calls, hectoring mail, and nuisance manuscripts. No problem, I told him. I might have flunked the typing test, but dissembling was a skill I trusted. He liked that. He closed the door and pulled out a chair. He said it had hurt at first, but he found out very quickly that you couldn’t work in an office without lying. It was impossible to get from 9:30 to 5:45 without telling a lie.
He said several of his colleagues were dangerous. Only the Big Boss, the chairman, could afford to indulge in Christmas speeches about everyone pulling for the team. He said the company was pretty laid back as far as companies went. The basement was on a first-name basis with the executive suite, but the bottom line was that it was a business. Even Bob Dylan was a brand name
when you got down to it. “We’re not changing your life. We’re just paying scale. Now go out there and find me a winner.”
when you got down to it. “We’re not changing your life. We’re just paying scale. Now go out there and find me a winner.”
I was sorry for my boss. He dreaded the life he had made: the commute from the horse country of New Jersey, the school fees, the cookbooks that sold well, the Hollywood agents with expense accounts twice his salary, the mocking, jazzy memos from the art department downstairs, the belittling, intrusive summonses from a vice president upstairs. Slabs of unsolicited manuscripts caused his step to falter in the mornings.
Most of the manuscripts arrived festooned with gimmicks to draw a reader’s attention, pleas for special consideration like contestants in a studio audience: “Pick me.” My boss was conscientious and wanted a written report on every manuscript. I tried to sneak these tomes, so hopefully dispatched, into the slush pile housed in a room called the Morgue, but my boss retrieved those addressed to him personally. I poured what I thought was kindness into the rejection letters that I sent out over his name.
That the letters were not supposed to be from me stayed my fingers when I was tempted to add some ameliorating touch, a question about how many children were still at home or did the “author” also keep a garden. To sound interested involved the risk of being encouraging. Addressing rejection letters to tollbooth attendants who wrote lacy blockbusters between shifts or insurance agents who produced spy thrillers at night made me feel that I was in correspondence with convicts about to be paroled who might turn up at my boss’s door if I made him sound like an easy mark.
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