New Boy (9 page)

"A friend from school asked me to dinner at his house," I said.

"And he lives on Park Avenue?" she said, obviously impressed.

"That's what he said. I don't have his address. I have to call him," I said. I wasn't sure what the fuss was about. I assumed Burns came from money, with a chauffeured limousine and all that, and I'd heard about Park Avenue, but I'd never seen it. Although Cousin Gwen seemed interested in the discussion, she remained silent. The reactions of my parents, however, made me curious.

"Well, we have to hear all about this," said my mother. "What time are you supposed to be there?" I was becoming concerned, wondering if my parents would take me to Burns's house and park the car on the street to wait for me until dinner was over.

"I don't know," I said. "He wants me to give him a call today."
I knew I had to make that call when no one else was around, and I began thinking about how it could be orchestrated. I decided it might be best to go for a walk and call Burns from a pay phone. I could even take a subway down to 125th Street and make the call from there.

"You know your father and I were planning to take everyone out to dinner on Saturday," said my mother, pausing for dramatic effect. She finished her grapefruit and rested her spoon on her plate. "But I suppose we can just as easily go out tonight," she added, with a sigh. "That is, if everyone is available."

"I'm free," I said. "I've got some reading to do for a class and I might want to go out for a walk a little later, but other than that, I'm available."

"Me too," said Cousin Gwen. "I'd love to go out to dinner tonight."

"Well, that settles it," said my father. "Let's plan to meet here at six o'clock, and we'll get ready to go to a restaurant. Gwen, you got any ideas about where we should eat?"

"You can get a pretty good meal at Lucille's down on 125th Street," said Cousin Gwen. "That's about the nicest place around."

"Sounds good enough to me," said Dad. "Clarissa, why don't we go out for a drive this morning? Gwen, you're welcome to come along. We can leave the socialite here to do his schoolwork before his engagement tomorrow night." Dad laughed good-naturedly, and everyone at the table joined in.

"Just give me a moment to get my things together," said
Cousin Gwen, and she rose from the table and went off to her bedroom.

"What do you have to read, son?" asked my father.

"American history," I said. "Right now, we're reading Tocque-ville's
Democracy in America.
It's pretty interesting. Have you read it, Dad?"

"I can't say that I have. What's it about?"

"Well, this Frenchman came to the United States in the eighteen hundreds and spent almost a year traveling around the country and making notes about what he saw. The book is about his observations of the United States."

"I don't suppose he has anything about Negroes in there. For most of these white historians, we don't even rate a footnote."

"You'd be surprised, Dad. There's quite a bit about slavery, and about the treatment of the Indians as well as Negroes. There's even a section on mulattoes and the friction between light-skinned Negroes and dark-skinned Negroes. It's quite interesting."

"Is that so? And have you discussed any of this in class?"

"So far, we haven't," I said, and it occurred to me that we might not discuss it at all.

Wrapped in a stole of muskrat pelts and wearing a black felt hat with a long pheasant feather, Cousin Gwen returned to the front room. "Well, I'm ready when you are," she said. She stood before a hallway mirror adjusting the feather at a dashing angle. The pelts covered her shoulders and arms so conspicuously, she looked like a trader from the Northwest Territories, but I thought better of mentioning it.

"Well, come along then," said my mother. "We should be back in a couple of hours, son." As soon as the door closed, I felt a wave of excitement at being left alone in Cousin Gwen's apartment. Not only would I be able to call Burns and make arrangements to go out on Saturday night; if I was careful about the time, I could even browse through the books in Cousin Gwen's study or go for another walk to see more of Harlem. But I knew if I went out and returned too late, my parents would be worried and it would be much more difficult to sneak away with Burns the next day.

I found the piece of paper on which Burns had written his telephone number, and I went into Cousin Gwen's bedroom to call him. It was a small, cluttered room, with dark drapes and a double bed covered with a pink spread. Next to the bed, the telephone was sitting on a night table surrounded by bottles of pills, a small tin of hard candies, a half-filled water glass, ajar of cold cream, and a small ceramic vase filled with dusty plastic flowers. On the same side of the bed were books stacked in piles on the floor and a large wicker basket filled with newspapers and magazines, some of which I knew, like
Our World, Sepia, The Afro-American,
and the
Amsterdam News,
and others, like the
Liberator,
the
Nation,
and the
New Masses,
that I had never heard of. The television sat on a table in a corner of the bedroom opposite a large, stuffed lounge chair, with a notebook lying on the seat cushion. Cousin Gwen spent most days in her bedroom watching television, hoping to see a colored face. Every so often, but rarely more than once a month, she said, a Negro entertainer like Rochester or Peg Leg
Bates or a singing group like the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots, or sometimes just an unknown, rubber-legged tap dancer with straightened hair, would appear like magic on the television screen and Cousin Gwen would pick up the notebook and make an entry, recording the entertainer's name, the show, and the date, time, and channel. Even though the drapes had been pulled back, the room, which looked out on the back of the building, seemed dark and heavy with the musty smell of old clothes, barely disguised by the fragrance of moth balls emanating from the overstuffed closet.

I picked up the receiver and dialed Burns's number.

"This is the Burns residence," said a voice at the other end. It was the voice of an older woman, chilly and formal, with a vaguely European accent. "With whom do you wish to speak?" Suddenly I was at a loss for words. Even though I had never met her, the mere sound of the woman's voice made me freeze.

"Hello? Hello?" said the woman. "Is anyone there?" I struggled to speak and finally managed to get a few words out.

"Gordie," I said, haltingly. "Gordie there?" I could just imagine what she must have been thinking, but her icy voice never lost its formality.

"One moment, please," she said.

After a moment, Burns got on the telephone. "Garrett?" he said. "I thought it might be you. Are you all ready for tomorrow night?" He sounded as excited as I was.

"Yeah," I said. "But I still have to work out a few details. I
have a feeling my parents are going to want to drive me down to Park Avenue and drop me off at your place. I told them that I was invited to your house for dinner, but I think they are going to insist on bringing me."

"That's okay," said Burns. "I'll tell the doorman to expect you, and the elevator boy will bring you right up as soon as you get here. You can meet my parents. Just don't tell them we're going to a nightclub. Say we're going to a movie."

"Sounds all right with me. Say, Burns, who was that woman who answered the phone?"

"That was Hildegarde, my mother's secretary. She always answers the phone. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, I don't know. She just sounded so formal. I wasn't expecting it."

"Yeah," said Burns, with a snicker. "She thought you sounded a little strange too. She almost hung up on you." We both laughed.

"What club are we going to?" I said.

"Jinxie's. It's uptown, on Seventh Avenue. Coleman Hawkins is playing there this weekend. He's always good. It's a nice place."

"What time should I plan to get to your apartment?"

"How about seven o'clock?" said Burns. "That way we can be uptown by eight, in time for the first show." My heart was starting to pound again. This was going to be great. An adventure cloaked in secrecy. Going to see Ruth Brown at the Majestic would seem like child's play compared to this. I got his address and said goodbye to Burns, put down the receiver, and sat on the side of Cousin Gwen's bed. I wasn't sure when my parents and Cousin Gwen would return.

To distract myself, I went into the study. There were books everywhere, in bookcases surrounding the day bed, in piles on the floor, stacked in the windowsill, and on top of a desk. I chose a bookcase at random and began running my finger along the titles on the spines.
Little Women. Great Expectations. Call of the Wild. Moby Dick.
All familiar, although the only one I had read was
Great Expectations.
I moved to another bookcase.
Cane. Home to Harlem. Black Boy. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The only one I recognized there was
Black Boy,
and that was because I knew the name of its author, Richard Wright. Wright also wrote
Native Son,
which my parents had lying around the house for a while, but for some reason, they always managed to keep it away from me. I decided to move to a third bookcase.
The Negro Labor Vanguard, International Socialist Review, Black Bourgeoisie.
Cousin Gwen certainly had a broad appetite for books, but now I was lost. There was nothing familiar to me here at all; however, my curiosity about the last title led me to take out the book and open it. It was new, written by someone named Frazier, and it had that wonderful, fresh smell that new books have. I turned to the table of contents and noticed a chapter titled, "Behind the Mask." A statement at the beginning of the chapter caught my eye "There is an attempt on the part of parents in middle-class families to shield their children against racial discrimination and the contempt of whites for colored
people." Boy, did that sound familiar, so I skimmed the page until I saw another sentence that gave me a start. "Despite such efforts to insulate their children against a hostile white world, the children of the black bourgeoisie cannot escape the mark of oppression."
The mark of oppression.
I had never heard the term before and I wondered exactly what it meant. It sounded awful. Did I have the mark of oppression, I wondered. And if I did, what was it like? Could it be seen?

It was getting late and my parents would be arriving any minute with Cousin Gwen, so I replaced the book on the shelf, went over to the day bed, and fumbled through my bag until I found my copy of
Democracy in America.
I took it into the living room and sat down on Cousin Gwen's worn and faded sofa, opened it to the bookmark, and read until my eyes fell upon the following words: "In one blow oppression has deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. The United States Negro has lost even the memory of his homeland; he no longer understands the language his fathers spoke; he has abjured their religion and forgotten their mores. Ceasing to belong to Africa, he has acquired no right to the blessings of Europe; he is left in suspense between two societies and isolated between two peoples, sold by one and repudiated by the other; in the whole world there is nothing but his master's hearth to provide him with some semblance of a homeland." Could this be the mark of oppression, I thought, the absence of any sense of one's humanity? If so, I was certain it did not apply to me, although I lingered over the part about being 'left in suspense between two societies and isolated between two peoples.' I already felt suspended between two societies, but, I told myself, this notion came from a book that was written by a Frenchman more than a hundred years ago. Lots of things had changed since then. Or had they? Certainly not, according to Lewis Michaux. He could have written that paragraph himself. And yet, despite our resentment at the oppression we had suffered in this country, every Negro I knew still considered it home. We paid our taxes, served in the military, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and wondered when things would get better.

By Saturday afternoon, I was more excited than I'd ever been. The sky was cobalt blue and cloudless and, under a brilliant afternoon sun, Harlem shimmered like a mirage. During dinner at Lucille's the night before, to my relief, no one had mentioned my upcoming visit to Burns's apartment, and now I was doing my best to appear composed by sitting on the sofa in the living room and reading
Democracy in America.
At one point, Cousin Gwen came in and sat down in the wing chair across from me to read one of those magazines I had never heard of, the
Negro Vanguard,
and I found my thoughts drifting away from my book and toward Cousin Gwen. She seemed so wise, wiser than just about anyone I'd ever met. Maybe her wisdom was the result of owning all of those books, but to me those books on the
masses
and the
vanguards
seemed pretty boring. I didn't bother to look at them. I had the feeling they could get you into trouble, even though Lewis Michaux was selling them out in the open on Seventh Avenue, with a police car right down the street. And then it occurred to me how different Cousin Gwen was from the rest of
my parents' friends. She was unconventional. She spoke her mind regardless of what others might think. And she had a library filled with books. I had visited the homes of most of my parents' friends and there might be a few dust-covered volumes on a shelf next to some bric-a-brac, but no one, not even my parents, had a library. It was as though they had stopped thinking about ideas, about the world and how to change it. Obviously, Cousin Gwen hadn't.

"I'll be interested to hear what you have to tell about your trip to Park Avenue," Cousin Gwen said, looking up from her magazine as she spoke. "It's a different world down there, you know.
Big
money. Not a colored face anywhere in sight, except for the cooks and chauffeurs and the cleaning ladies, and, of course, they all use the back entrance. I don't suppose they'll make
you
use the back entrance, but if they try, you say
'No, thank you. I'm a guest of the'
—what did you say that boy's name was?" she asked.