The Man Who Cried I Am (51 page)

His eyes seemed to have made a noise when he looked at her through that shocked silence that had produced her short, bitter tirade.
Click
, the eyes seemed to have said.

“I'm sorry, Maggie.”

He seemed this time to be giving way to her, leading her on, encouraging her to have it out, all of it, finally, and she shouted, “Sorry be dommed! Look what's happening to us again.
Look
, I tell you! Aren't you man enough to stand above this nonsense?” She knew she should not have said that.

He spoke quietly and simply, without any special tone in his voice. “It's not nonsense. I've told you that.”

She stared at the guns arranged neatly on the floor, newspapers under them, and suddenly she hated the smell of the gun oil. Their eyes locked across the weapons which were so beautiful in a way, lying there mute and for the moment harmless. She bent quickly and grabbed up a shotgun while he watched her, and beat the stock into the floor several times while the apartment reverberated with the blows. The trigger guard, when she stopped, panting, sprung loose. Margrit was all the more at a loss because—
she had seen it
—there had been for a second a very tender and loving thing in her husband's eyes. Now it was gone.

“That's enough,” he said, still quietly.

“It's
not
enough, it's just the beginning.”

“You're wrong, Maggie. It's the end.”

“Then, dommit,
let
it be the end. This stupid place with whites and blacks at each other's throats, I can't
stand
it! You are right, Mox. It is the end. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

She whirled out of the room and when she got to the bedroom, slammed the door. “Enough of this crazy land,” she hissed at herself in the mirror, “where everyone speaks in superlatives but exists in diminutives. Shhhittt! on it. It can go to hell!!”

A big protest march had been planned for Washington the day Margrit left New York. She had stayed on in New York several months after their break-up, waiting for what, she didn't know. She was not defeated, merely tired and unbearably worn. Max had moved out of the apartment the Sunday they had the fight; he would reclaim it today, when he got back from Washington. Huh!
If
he got back. The way this country was going, Washington would be going up in smoke by the time she was midway over the Atlantic.

He had called in the morning to say goodbye. Nothing more, just goodbye. After that she cried; he'd always said she cried too easily, but she got to the airport.

She opened the New York
Century
on the plane. Everything I touch is Max, she thought. On page three a headline read:

A
FRICAN
D
IPLOMAT
F
OUND
D
EAD IN
S
WISS
H
OTEL

Jaja Enzkwu, 55, First Minister to the Nigerian Federal Cabinet, was reported dead …

Margrit turned to another page. Enzkwu? She did not recall ever hearing of him.

In Amsterdam, Margrit got up and called the American hotel again. Max had not returned. She called Roger once more, but there was no answer. She pulled on a pair of white gloves, looked at herself once again, then went downstairs. The hotel was about ten blocks away. When she arrived she checked at the desk, but Max still had not come. She selected a sidewalk table near the hotel entrance and ordered a Campari. She put on sunglasses. From where she was sitting, she would be sure to see him when he returned.

28

LEIDEN

Yes, Max thought. I knew Jaja Enzkwu, eagle-faced, hot-eyed Jaja with his sweating, pussy-probing fingers and perfumed agbadas; I knew him.

Max glanced at his watch again. Two o'clock. He wondered what Margrit was doing back in Amsterdam on such a beautiful day. He knew what Jaja was doing: feeding the bugs back in Onitsha where he had been sent in a box, after that deadly rendezvous with Baroness Huganot in Basel that day.

So much had happened that day, the day of the March on Washington. Margrit had left shortly after he called her. Then he had taken a plane to Washington. Du Bois had died in Ghana the night before, and so had Jaja, leaving behind an opened magnum of Piper-Heidsieck, a half-eaten partridge and a startled, voluptuous, eager-to-be-ravished Baroness. But Washington had been the place to be that day. There you could forget that the cancer tests were positive—it was malignant—and that you were going into cobalt treatment soon; you could forget with more than a quarter million people surging around you.

Max flipped up the next page of the letter and when he finished, he shook as if with a sudden chill, and yet the shaking hand had nothing to do with his illness; it was the letter itself. With trembling hands he lit a cigarette.

No, he told himself. I have not read what I just read. This cannot be. No, it's me, the way I'm thinking, the way I'm reading. He closed his eyes hard and held them for a long time. Then he opened them to reread the entire letter once again:

Dear Max:

You are there, Max? It is you reading this, right? I mean, even dead, which I must be for you to have these papers
and
be alone in the company of Michelle, I'd feel like a damned fool if someone else was reading them. I hope these lines find you in good shape and with a full life behind you, because, chances are, now that you've started reading, all that is way, way behind you, baby.

I'm sorry to get you into this mess, but in your hands right now is the biggest story you'll ever have. Big and dangerous. Unbelievable. Wow. But, it's a story with consequences the editors of
Pace
may be unwilling to pay. And you, Max, baby, come to think of it, may not even get the chance to cable the story. Knowing may kill you, just as knowing killed me and a few other people you'll meet in this letter. Uh-uh! Can't quit now! It was too late when you opened the case. This is a rotten way to treat a friend. Yes, friend. We've had good and bad times together; we've both come far. I remember that first day we met at Zutkin's. We both saw something we liked in each other. What? I don't know, but it never mattered to me. Our friendship worked; it had value; it lasted. I've run out of acquaintances and other friends who never were the friend you were. So, even if this is dangerous for you—and it is—I turn to you in friendship and in the hope that you can do with this information what I could not. Quite frankly, I don't know how I got into this thing. It just happened, I guess, and like any contemporary Negro, like a ghetto Jew of the 1930's in Europe, I couldn't believe it was happening, even when the pieces fell suddenly into place. Africa …

God, Max, what doesn't start with Africa? What a history still to be told! The scientists are starting to say life began there. I'm no scientist I don't know. But I do know that this letter you're reading had its origins with what happened there. Let me go back to the beginning. I doubt if you've heard of Alliance Blanc. In 1958 Guinea voted to leave the French Family of Nations, and at once formed a federation with Kwame Nkrumah, or Ghana, whichever you prefer. The British and French were shaken. How could countries only two minutes ago colonies spring to such political maturity? Would the new federation use pounds or francs? The national banks of both countries were heavily underwriting the banking systems of the two countries. There would be a temporary devaluation of both pounds and francs, whether the new federation minted new money or not. More important—and this is what really rocked Europe—if the federation worked, how many new, independent African states would follow suit?
Then
, what would happen to European interests in Africa after independence and federation? Was it
really
conceivable that all of Africa might one day unite, Cape to Cairo, Abidjan to Addis? Alliance Blanc said
Yes!
If there were a United States of Africa, a cohesiveness among the people—300,000,000 of them—should not Europeans anticipate the possibility of trouble, sometime when the population had tripled, for example? Couldn't Africa become another giant, like China, with even more hatred for the white West? It was pure guilt over what Europeans had done to Africa and the Africans that made them react in such a violent fashion to African independence.

The white man, as we well know, has never been of so single an accord as when maltreating black men. And he has had an amazing historical rapport in Africa, dividing it up arbitrarily across tribal and language boundaries. That rapport in plundering Africa never existed and never will when it requires the same passion for getting along with each other in Europe. But you know all this. All I'm trying to say is that, where the black man is concerned, the white man will bury differences that have existed between them since the beginning of time, and come together. How goddamn different this would have been if there had been no Charles Martel at Tours in 732!

The Alliance first joined together not in the Hague, not in Geneva, not in London, Versailles or Washington, but in Munich, a city top-heavy with monuments and warped history. Present were representatives from France, Great Britain, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Spain, Brazil, South Africa. The United States of America was also present. There were white observers from most of the African countries that appeared to be on their way to independence. The representation at first, with a few exceptions, was quasi-official. But you know very well that a quasi-official body can be just as effective as an official one; in fact, it is often better to use the former.

I don't have to tell you that the meetings, then and subsequently, were held in absolute secrecy. They were moved from place to place—Spain, Portugal, France, Brazil and in the United States, up around Saranac Lake—Dreiser's setting for
An American Tragedy
, that neck of the woods, remember? America, with the largest black population outside Africa, had the most need of mandatory secrecy. Things were getting damned tense following the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in 1954.

The disclosure of America's membership in Alliance Blanc would have touched off a racial cataclysm—but America went far, far beyond the evils the Alliance was perpetuating, but more of this later. For the moment, let me consider the Alliance.

African colonies were still becoming independent. Federations were formed only to collapse a few weeks later, like the Guinea-Ghana combine. Good men and bad were assassinated indiscriminately; coups were a dime a dozen. Nkrumah in West Africa vied with Selassie in East Africa for leadership of the continent. The work of the Alliance agents—setting region against region and tribe against tribe, just as the colonial masters had done—was made easy by the rush to power on the part of a few African strongmen. Thus, the panic mentality that had been the catalyst for the formation of the Alliance seemed to have been tranquilized. There was diplomacy as usual, independence as usual. What, after all, did Europeans have to fear after that first flash of black unity? The Alliance became more leisurely, less belligerent, more sure that it had time, and above all, positive now that Africa was not a threat to anyone but itself. Alliance agents flowed leisurely through Africa now, and Western money poured in behind them.

From a belligerent posture, the Alliance went to one based on economics. Consider that 15 percent of Nigeria's federal budget comes from offshore oil brought in by Dutch, British, Italian, French and American oil companies; consider that the 72 percent of the world's cocoa which Africa produces would rot if the West did not import it. Palm oil, groundnuts, minerals, all for the West. Can you imagine, man, what good things could happen to Africans, if they learned to consume what they produce? It did not take the Europeans long to discover that their stake in Africa as “friends” rather than masters was more enormous than they could have imagined. Only naked desperation demanded that Spain and Portugal stay in Africa; the Iberian Peninsula hasn't been the same since the Moors and Jews left it in the fifteenth century. Time? It was the Alliance's most formidable ally.

In South Africa, the spark of revolt flickered, sputtered and now is dead. The Treason Trials killed it; oppression keeps murdering it, and those who say the spark is still alive, those successive schools of nattily tailored South African nationalists, who plunge through Paris, London and New York raising money for impossible rebellions, lie. The paradox, Max, is that, denied freedom, the black man lives better in South Africa than anywhere else on the continent; the average African. The bigshots—with their big houses and long cars, their emulation of the colonial masters—do all right. My friend Genet said it all in
Les Noirs
.

The Alliance worked. God, how it worked! And Africans themselves, dazzled by this new contraption the white man was giving them, independence, helped. Lumumba, disgracefully educated by the Belgians, was a victim of the Alliance; Olympio, dreaming dreams of federation, was another. Nkrumah and Touré have lasted for so long because their trust in the white man never was, and their trust in their own fellows only a bit deeper seated.

The Congo mess served as a valuable aid to the Alliance: it could test the world's reaction to black people in crisis. The Alliance was pleased to observe that the feeling in the West was, “Oh, well, they're only niggers, anyhow.”

I could have foreseen that reaction; you could have foreseen it; any black man could have anticipated it. But, then, “niggers” are embattled everywhere, ain't they, baby? Asian “niggers,” South American “niggers” … But let a revolt occur in East Germany and watch the newsprint fly! Let another Hungarian revolution take place and see the white nations of the world open their doors to take in refugees—Hungarian Freedom Fighters, yeah! Who takes in blacks, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, who?

But the picture began to change. It was quite clear that the Europeans had Africa well under control—and that was all they cared about. America, sitting on a bubbling black cauldron, felt that it had to map its own contingency plans for handling 22 million black Americans in case they became unruly; in case they wanted everything Freedom Fighters got just by stepping off the boat. So, America prepared King Alfred and submitted it to the Alliance, just as the Alliance European members had submitted their plans for operations in Africa to the Americans. King Alfred in its original form, called for sending American Negroes to Africa, and this had to be cleared by the Europeans. The Europeans vetoed that plan; they remembered what excitement Garvey had caused in Africa. The details of King Alfred are in the case, and it is truly hot stuff. All this Alliance business is pretty pallid shit compared to what the Americans have come up with.