The Man Who Cried I Am (39 page)

They sought good writing, but published trash. What would be in next year? Ah, yes! A book on Little Rock and how it
really
was behind the scenes, how the parents took it and how brave the nine kids were, and who inspired them day after day to go out there and face the mobs. But already there were signs that nigger evil would become a real hot commodity (they were running out of everything else), right up there, by god, with the Jewish intellectuals combating the contemporary
apikorsim
. Yes, sir! Who ever thought the day would loom on the horizon when a Negro writer could say

GODDAMNIT
!
I AM ANGRY

and get royalty on $4.95 per burst of anger, less advance and agent commissions, for it?

It chilled Max to think of the murders they were still committing on Harry. What on God's earth did a man do who did not play the game of jacks and jills? Alexis de Tocqueville gave the answer one hundred and twenty years ago; that answer was still valid.

Max wrote Janine's name. He hadn't seen her in Paris, hadn't even asked. She would be pleased to know that, pleased as hell. He wondered what the people on his list were doing and where they were. Did they ever think of him, fondly, as he was thinking of most of them? Did they ever wonder about his being forty-three, without chick or child, sitting around thinking of them while trying to make decisions?

Max stayed late and helped put the book through its final wring-out. That was Friday. On Monday morning he was called to Dempsey's office where, in the presence of a grinning Shea, he was told that the Africa desk was breaking this way:
Pace
was sending a man to head up a desk in Nairobi in a few months. Would Max then survey West Africa and make recommendations where a West African desk—which he would run—should be established?

Part  Three

22

LEIDEN—AFRICA—AMSTERDAM

Max reached once more for Harry's letter. He stopped midway through the act of reaching. The pain in his rectum was uncoiling, slowly, oozingly, powerfully, sliding through his entire body. For the first time Max thought of the .25 he had tucked under the seat of the car, the Llama. When it became too much, the Llama. In the head, not jammed into the mouth. Max swallowed a pill. Sweating and shaking, he shifted on the bed. What in the hell was he doing here in the first place at—he looked at his watch—almost one-thirty and the sun still almost straight up? What was he doing in Leiden, in Holland, a white land eight hours by jet away from that limitless black continent from which his forebears had been dragged centuries ago? Why in this white land east of a white land that could no longer call itself purely white, for in fact it had never been that? And here Harry was, cremated only hours ago, trying to tell him something about color and what it had done and what it was doing. Black Harry who had loved white Charlotte and white Michelle. Why in Leiden? He thought of Margrit, white Margrit and himself, black Max. That was why he was in the Netherlands and, indirectly, why he was in Leiden shut up in an upstairs bedroom that had beams in the ceiling—because Margrit was white and he was black.

Africa stunned Max.

He had come to it via Europe, passing from one ancient ruin to the next in growing, ill-concealed irritation, yet drawn inexplicably to the best of the white man in the past. So there were Roman roads, arches, aqueducts and stadia; so there were Greek arches and shattered yellow pillars, sensual religious art and golden ages and statues. What about
now
, baby, now, while you noble Romans are sitting squat in Fiats and you Greeks have left the Aegean for Brooklyn! Not until he had climbed the hill to another ruin, the pyramids at Gizeh, did he lose Europe and begin to feel both the size and unplumbed history of Africa stretching out over the white sands behind the three tombs, stretching southward to Nubia, Cush, the Sudan.

Max had left Mannie Devoe somewhere between the Nairobi Press Club and the Equator Club in Kenya. Devoe was going to run the East African desk. Devoe liked Africa; he liked the way Africans called him bwana. “This,” he had said as they walked along what was then Delamere Avenue, “is a good brief. Great. I'm glad I took it.” Max had nodded and looked up the street. Nairobi was where you were somehow surprised to see an African strolling along, taking a constitutional, perhaps, and not on an errand for Bwana Blimp. Max had left Devoe there and journeyed three months around Africa on his survey, from Dar es Salaam, hot and muggy from the thick, soft, Indian Ocean winds, to Dakar, fiercely bright in the sun with the indigo blue Atlantic lapping gently against its seawall; and from Kano, with its Great Mosque and dry skin-wrinkling heat, to Leopoldville, surprisingly pleasant, even at midday. Max was staggered by the great distances, the night flights into swollen electrical storms with their thin, jagged golden lances of lightning stabbing down the tremendous, seething skyways.

At the end of his survey, Max had concluded that Lagos was the only logical place to set up the West African desk. All flights south and north went through Ikeja as well as flights to the east and directly to the States. Cable facilities were excellent, thanks to the British. There were some places in Africa where, if you wanted to cable an adjoining country, the message first had to go through Europe. And Nigeria, along with the Congo, was the next big independence attraction. The roads between the major towns were good and the sea was nearly always in view. Also he was sure he could find someone in Lagos to help him polish his French. And he had developed a, fondness for the clubs in Yaba and Ebute Metta. By the time Max left, the smell of wood burning for charcoal, the stink of the open markets embedded so deeply in his nostrils that he could never forget them, he had made arrangements for leasing both a small office on Broad Street and a house for sometime the next year.

Roger, whom Max had left in Rome, had left Paris to live in Amsterdam; Roger met Max at Schiphol. In Rome, he had offered to put Max up, show him Amsterdam. Africa had been expensive and Max was looking for corners to cut on his expenses. Besides, he wanted to talk to somebody about Africa. Somebody Negro. He wished Harry were there instead of Roger. He didn't even know why he had come to Amsterdam, except that he'd never seen it. Now that he was here, maybe he'd start to find out some things about the people whose cousins had either killed off or run out of South Africa the people of Dingiswayo, Usenzangacona, Dingane, Mzilikazi, Umpanda and Lobengula—these people with their cute old houses and canals—these people and their endless battles against the sea. The Hans Brinkers and Silver Skaters.

“How's the homeland?” Roger asked on the long ride into the city.

Max was tired. His flight had started at Lagos and put down at Kano. From there the plane had skimmed the Sahara, ghostly and dead in a full moon. Rome once more, Zurich and then Amsterdam. He was going into his second numbing, sleepless day. He said, “The homeland's there, it's really
there.
”

“The cats are really starting to swing, huh?”

“You better know it. All over. Fantastic place.” Max didn't know yet whether he liked or hated Africa. He thought that curious. The good and bad memories attacked him so violently at the same time, whenever he had to answer questions about the place.

“Where'd you go?” Roger asked enviously. He'd always said that if he got a chance to go to Africa—bam!—he was gone. Man.

In a painful monotone, as the level, snow-covered fields glided by and white roofs glinted in the sunlight, Max began to talk. As he did, the good and bad experiences finally assumed their proper places and he was able to draw them out one at a time. He remembered that the Amharics—the people who gave the UN party every spring for the emperor's birthday—ruled Ethiopia and the Bantu-types such as the Gallas could go bark with the dogs who howled from the Addis Ababa mountaintops each night; he remembered that the Ibos and Yorubas in Nigeria didn't get along that well and that the Hausas in the northern region of the country despised them both; he remembered that the Ashantis really didn't like Nkrumah … Recalling it all on the ride in, while talking to Roger, he suddenly knew why it had taken him so long to make up his mind: he had been setting aside the fact that most of the Africans he had met did not like black Americans; in fact, they held them in contempt. Perhaps he was wrong? When he passed this thought on to Roger, Roger raised his eyebrows. Max smiled. Of course, Roger wasn't going to believe that. Why should he? No Negro looking for another home would believe it.

“Then why are you going back?” Roger asked.

Max shrugged. “It's a job. Best job I'll probably ever have.” Naturally he was going back. Just why, he didn't really know; that puzzled him, too. Say it ain't so, Africa, say it ain't so! In any case, he was going to hole up in one of those air-conditioned houses in Ikoyi after the British left next year, and write, really write. And wait for things to happen. It was too hot in Africa to chase news. When it broke, it chased you and that was time enough. Write? Christ! He had forgotten that he was going to quit.

The conversation ended as they taxied from the bus terminal to Roger's flat on Alexanderkade on the Singelgracht. The brief February sun had gone and Max looked out upon the gray, ice-covered canal thinking of Africa, and its sun. Behind him, Roger was talking of changing and going to meet some people—partying—pahtee, pahtee! Max wished he had gone to a hotel where he could have slept for days, even if he didn't clear a single penny on his expenses. A nice, warm hotel where the cold wouldn't seep into his bones the way it was now. Outside were dead trees, snow, ice and, for all he knew, zombies.

Max wondered at Roger's silence. What was Roger thinking; this? How did that cat get so lucky? Publishing all those books, getting great jobs, getting to travel, no hang-ups with the bread—where it was coming from and how much of it to spend. Just what does the bastard have that I haven't got? Was that what Roger was thinking?

Max looked around the rooms, now filled with the long, heavy shadows of late Amsterdam winter. Everything was a hustle; hard. Max remembered. “I'll get you some chocolate,” Roger said. “And there's some rum around here, too.” “You'll like these people we're going to see, Max. A few of the brothers around, and the broads are not to be believed. They're in your corner. Do anything for you. Lots of cats just mess over them and they just take it. Don't understand that …”

Max opened his bag, took out a clean shirt and found his way into the bathroom. Goddamn, he thought, shivering with the chill. He thought of Africa again and remembered the bathroom of a house he had stayed in in Kano, remembered the way the sun played upon the windows and how the gecko lizards scrambled along the screens and on the outside walls. There was no window in Roger's bathroom. When he came out, Roger had the cocoa ready and almost half a tumbler of dark rum.

Good, Max thought. This should keep me going for a little while.

It was at the third house they visited—they ate at the first house and the host was Dutch and his wife Indonesian; at the second house, with darkness hard upon the city and winds skirling along the canals, was a group of American Negroes, painters, playwrights, singers—yes, it was at the third house that he saw her through eyes glazed more with the need for sleep than from the drinking.

He had been getting very irritated because no one would give him directions back to Roger's apartment. “Drink up, man!” they said. Then he saw her sitting with another woman. He placed their ages at about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was sitting partly in shadow, he remembered. The high-riding cheekbones set in the small, neat face startled him. More tired than I thought, he told himself. Or drunk. Through spaces between people who moved from one part of the room to another, he studied her and once found that he was holding his breath as he watched her face bloom into a smile; he listened to her laughter, muted because of the other noises, flutter its way deep into his memory. He beat his way through the maze of sound which was jazz and many voices. Here too, he thought, jazz was that battleground, a seemingly innocuous place where you proved you were a hippy, if you liked it and played the right cats at the right time. Part of the Negro bag:
Dig jazz, do you, huh, baby?
And if you did and you were a white chick, your drawers were, many, many times out of ten, as good as off because that's why you came and that's why the cats came.

So, he wondered about her when finally he stood before her and peered down into her face. She smiled brightly and said, “Hello,” and extended her hand. Her arm was thrust awkwardly forward, her thumb standing straight up.

“Can I sit down?”

She slid over. Her friend gave her a smile, then seemed to vanish.

Margrit Westoever looked anxiously after her. She hoped she wouldn't leave, because she, Margrit, didn't really know these people, and her friend had brought her. What does it mean that she left like that? Margrit was pleased that the guest of honor at the party Roger was giving—at someone else's house, of course—had noticed her. Was he going to be like the other Negroes she'd heard so much about or had seen sitting in the cafes on the Plein wearing dark glasses and looking so suggestively at women when they passed? Their reputations were terrible.

“My name's Max.”

“I'm Margrit.”

She didn't ask how he liked Holland; he liked that. “Nice group,” he said.

“I guess so. I mean, yes.”

“Don't you know these people? I mean, you sound unsure.”

“Well I see many of them about. That's all.”

“Like jazz, do you?”

“No, not really. Some things, but I prefer other music. You have been to Africa, I hear.”

“Yes,” he said. I'm a Been-to, too, he thought.

“What a large place it seems to be. Is it? Did you find it interesting?”

“Very large, very interesting. Your name is—?”