“He is a reporter. My reporter. He’s a Globe reporter,” my photographer told them, with some anger. “The man is a Globe reporter.”
They had never seen a black reporter in their lives, so they mistook me for a black South African. They had “looked-over-me” in the Press Club, and if they had, had not considered that I could be a reporter, drinking Scotch and soda, Scotch and soda, after them. Apparently.
Chapter Ten
When we had crossed the border at Fort Erie, that cold Friday night in 1963, searching in the darkness for a bar to celebrate our “entry into Amurca” with a rye and ginger, or a rum and Coke, in vain, for the streets were marked with signs we could not read for direction, since Genessee, Washington; Niagara Falls, New York, were useless street signposts, and the store boasting of duty-free liquors, emblazoned in fiery red neon lights, was on the other side of the border, the Canadian side.
And down the highway we went, arguing amongst ourselves, whether it would be five more hours, whether the sun would be rising when we saw the sign pointing to New York City, whether we’d see the Statue of Liberty, whether we’d have to go right downtown before heading back up to Harlem, which was where they had agreed to drop me off; and, like three happy tourists, willing to lose our way, in our exploration of this huge, entrancing, violent city we had read so much about, and had seen so much about, its dirty underclothes, and its sparkling white drill suits, on the black-and-white televisions back across the border, in Tranno.
“New-York-New-York!” we screamed, as if we were at a football game. “New York!”
“It’s so goddamn big, and so goddamn important, and rich, and goddamn powerful, they had to name the motherfucker, twice! Two times! New-York-New-York!”
“If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!” I can’t remember, apart from Frank Sinatra, who said that.
In the darkness we drove on, feeling like worms, or such animals, pests that burrowed into the ground to screw out a channel, a road beneath the road on which we were travelling in this exciting darkness. Lights from oncoming cars hit us in the face. High beams. Red spots like fireflies became smaller and smaller like cigarettes being extinguished, as faster cars pass us. The radio has picked up an American station.
“Georr-gia!” said the Trinidadian.
The Trinidadian said, “Georr-gia!” again, slamming his hands keeping rhythm into the steering wheel.
“Oh-God-oh-God! Ray, man!” he says.
And we tried to follow the song, and we tried to imitate Ray Charles’s voice, and we tried to remember the words, to sing along with him.
“Georrr-gi-ah, Georr-giah!”
Ray Charles’s voice carried me back to Georgia, back to Ole Virginny, back to the Island, on a soft pillow of waves, and I was once again, like the worm burrowing a lane through the tenebrous darkness, except for the high beams coming toward us, and becoming like the flickering cigarette stubs of red, in the disappearing distance; and all this I saw in the short interval of following the lyrics of “Georgia on My Mind” just before the night took me in an embrace and buried me in my own dreams. And when I was disturbed by the Trinidadian’s voice, “Man, New-York-New-York, man! Wake up! Is New York-New-York, in your ass!”
The dream that had swallowed me in the monotonous humming of the tires and the swishing-pass of cars newer and better oiled than our 1948 Pontiac, showed me poets walking in long fur coats along the streets of Harlem that I had read about in Ebony and Jet magazines, and in the pages of the local newspaper, the Amsterdam News; and women more beautiful than any back in Barbados, or back in Toronto, with their hairdos shining in the same glitter as the black bodies of women shine in the sun when they come back out from the waves, on mornings and in the evenings, before the sun touches the same waves, to say good night. And I saw bars and clubs and places where they played jazz; and the names came back to me from those pages and in Technicolour snapshots of people moving faster, in greater hurry, conducting better and bigger business … James Baldwin and Duke Ellington; Langston Hughes and Count Basie; Charles W. Chesnutt and Errol Garner; Larry Neal and the Modern Jazz Quartet; Leroi Jones (later to be renamed Amiri Baraka), and John Coltrane; Richard Wright and Thelonious Monk; Harold Cruse and Errol Garner; Ralph Ellison and Fats Waller … and they were climbing a ladder whose steps were laden with books and musical instruments, to get into a three-storey apartment building named the Harlem Renaissance; and when I looked up, to count the number of them, they disappeared, and then were seen leaning on the stage of the Apollo Theater, and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were singing and the place was jumping and I was with all these great men and women, eating Southern-fried chicken. And drinking Southern bourbon and Coke. We walked across the street and faced the Theresa Hotel. And we walked across another intersection, and were at the door of the restaurant-club that sold chicken and waffles. No one was hungry. We were all thirsty. And walking along Seventh Avenue, we saw men reading books about Africa, giving them their names in African languages and various tribes, and we walked up the street … “You wanna go east, or west? Brother? Red Rooster be west, Brother.”
It was in a basement. For the three hours we stood jauntily at the bar. I heard the jazz played by Duke, Basie, Monk, Garner, Charles Taylor, Art Blakey, Trane, and Miles. With me at the bar, leaning, standing cool, looking around, a Salem at almost every pair of lips, of men and women; and Cutty Sark and soda at the same pairs of lips … and Charlie Parker, somebody said his proper name was Bird. Bird! A lover of chicken, a lover of the culture of feathered birds, once you have listened to “Ornithology” … “babba-dabba-boop-de-boop …” And suddenly, as if they had been delivered by parachute from the impenetrable clouds, in one drop, like a large soup spoon delivering dumplings into boiling soup, appeared beside me, all smoking, all with stubbed-and-cheap-glass in the left hand, the smoking was carried on in the right hand, covered by diamonds and glitterings that shone like diamonds, were James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Larry Neal, Leroi Jones, Richard Wright, Harold Cruse, Ralph Ellison, and John Henrik Clarke. And the man from a different Island from me, from Jamaica, Claude “If I should die, let me nobly die” McKay. Winston Churchill, in one of his most disrespectful acts of quoting from sources, without acknowledgement in order to make his language more effective in gathering allies for the Allies, quoted Claude McKay’s poem, and forgot to say from where he got it. But its application, formerly in the specific context of slavery, and racial segregation and the civil rights movement, was now laid at the doorstep of international democratic resistance to the fascist threat of the twentieth century of slavery, of racial segregation, in the context not of civil rights, but of worldwide racial profiling — if you are not white and blond, and Germanic. Churchill, with the worldwide success he gained from this speech, could at least have brought the Jamaican into the picture as having given him grist for his pronouncement. But this is a small digression from the writhing contents of my dream … and there, at the bar of the jukebox-jumping bar of the Red Rooster, with proper Negro middle and upper class moderation, I am dressed; and in the level of conversation, with cigarette dangling and the smoke blinding him, and his fingers of feminine grace in gesture and length, talking about “the immorality of silence,” as James Baldwin began talking, in The Fire Next Time, to his nephew, “Dear James, I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody — with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft.”
That explained, I think, the mood of the two letters written to me with not-so-glad tidings of great joy, by the registrar of Canadian Citizenship and the supervisor of CBC stagehands … that I must have appeared and had behaved “truculent” so that crew chiefs and government officers, policemen, newspaper editors, and others, would not think I was soft.
“Jesus Christ!” The Trinidadian was driving more slowly
now, in the thick Saturday-morning traffic along streets wider than I had ever seen in Toronto, buildings higher, more people, more cars, and not knowing the name of the street, or avenue, as I had not looked soon enough when he said, “Look! Oh-Jesus-Christ, look!” … but it was New-York-New-York.
I was pulled from my dream, and Baldwin’s face disappeared, and was never to be seen, alive and in the flesh, by me, ever again.
Baldwin has more to say about the citizens of his own country, in that letter written in 1962, on the “one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation!”
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.
We had been following Castro. In the mountains of Sierra Maestra. In the newspapers, the New York Times and Granma. In the opinions of the Americans. In the more cautious witnessing of neutrality of the Canadians. But in my mind, I was with him in those Sierra Maestra mountains, fighting alongside a black general, General Maceo, whose statue stands large in the most prominent part of Havana, as you drive along the Malecón — I was nervous and excited during those days of “revolution,” and I remember the tangos and the boleros I would pick up in the late nights on the Dutch “private set,” the short-wave radio, coming in strong, then fading out, and you had to remember the words in Spanish which you could not translate, but the rhythm and the beat was black and was from Africa, years and years before Baldwin’s brother’s understanding of racial violence in his native America was ever pronounced, in poem and play, fiction and non-fiction. I could taste the bloodshed, on both sides. I could taste the moros y cristianos — black beans and rice. Slaves must have eaten this food. The poor, exploited, ill-treated paisanos under Baptista must have eaten this food. Fidel Castro ate this food. All black people should eat this food. And why, for the very first time, did I buy a large bag of black beans in the Kensington Market on the 30th of November this year — 2004? Which ghosts, which fleshless skeleton of my ancestor, slave and slave master, was breathing on my face? “Gimme a pound o’ white rice. And a pound of black beans.” I have never cooked black beans. But I know that they take a lifetime to cook. Most slave food takes a lifetime. Just like the slavery itself. I could taste the movement of women’s breasts and legs and “body-lines” as they swept the floor with men, and swept the same floor with their flowing bolero dresses. Sugar cane. Sugar cane. And rum. They were grown in Cuba, and they are grown in Barbados, and they place me in the philosophical and culture maelstrom of General Maceo. I saw him, standing in glory and bronze, haughty as Othello, haughty as Hannibal, haughty as Toussaint L’Ouverture, in his pride and achievement of place, in 2003, in Havana, as I drove along the Malecón. “Ya know he was black!” the Cuban interpreter, a professor of Afro-American literature at the University of Havana, said. She said it in a way that meant she didn’t feel she had to say it. Everybody knows Maceo’s black. “Todos. Todos el mundo.” Yes, Maceo’s black.
And yes, the world was following Castro. I started to enjoy cigars. Rabbi Feinberg, after a march, after a hearty meal at The Bagel Restaurant in Toronto, would take me to his friend who “rolled the best cigars outside Cuba!” My beard was ready. I learned the revolutionary catchword in Spanish: venceremos, meaning “we will overcome.” And a few of us, from the Islands, added that to the greeting: “Be cool, Brother!” that all black people started to use. It was now, “Venceremos, brother. Venceremos.” The “pig” was not only in stalls and let loose on muddy soiled land in the South and the North, and in Canada: the “pig” was in Cuba; and in Chile, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, all over Latin America. Che Guevara became everybody’s model. His posters were stuck in painters’ studios, in writers’ basements, in the offices of university professors, and sometimes one could be found, undisturbed, and without competing theologies of graffiti, on telephone poles throughout the City of Toronto. We were being “Cubanized”: for we had formerly been cannibalized.
About this time, I began a correspondence with Andrew Salkey the poet, novelist, broadcaster, and pro-Cuban ideologue who was still living in London; and he ended each letter, written in a batch of sometimes three a week, with “Peace and Love. Venceremos, Andrew.”
“Peace and love.” I think he got that from Marcus Garvey. From his Jamaican beginnings. Bob Marley and Garvey and Bussa; and Bogle. The Cuban flag was pinned to the walls of witnesses counting the murdered bodies, as they came down like skiers who had lost their way and had succumbed to the suffocating jungle of the Sierra Maestra mountains — on both sides — waiting, as Dylan Thomas said, “for the explosion.”
And it came. And Castro was our hero. We claimed him as a West Indian, living through geography and climate, though not through culture and ethnicity, as a Caribbean man. And many of us started to learn the palabra of Spanish, “Sí, señor.” “¿Cómo está usted?” “Mi nombre es…” And we gave the Black Power salute in greeting of the new “brothers” from our part of the world. Brotherhood, political and philosophical ideology now closer, symbiotic almost, than was our return, in our minds, in our dashikis, in our “slave bangles.” Watusi and the tribes, linguistic and cultural, were too intractable to learn. Spanish was easier. Cuba, “power to the people, compadre!” was closer than Africa. It was in our own backyard. And then the extraordinary happened. Castro was made respectable. He was invited to the United Nations, to tell the Americans that their colonialism had failed in Cuba. After thousands of lives dripped in blood. And the suite at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan, hundreds of feet up in the air, with the correct number of bathrooms and baths, room service to suit a king, and a television in almost every room, including I am sure the WC (water closet), bathroom, pissery, or banon … Castro became nostalgic for the soldiers’ camp and pillow of a rock covered in a sweat-stained army jacket. He chose the Theresa Hotel, in Harlem. The name has a certain Spanish ring. How many Theresas had Castro himself inducted into his ragtag army of revolutionaries?
The blacks in Harlem shouted for joy, at their victory, much more tangible than it was symbolic or subliminal. Castro had eschewed Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue for Harlem, and for Harlem’s men and women, revolutionaries in the Biblical army of Jesus, “marching as to war.” Castro had most certainly read Baldwin’s advice to his young brother, continuing to remind young James, that “you have been told where you could live, and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, ‘You exaggerate.’ They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one’s word for anything, including mine — but trust your experience.” Castro trusted his own experience. And I followed suit. If Castro could live in the Theresa Hotel up in Harlem, during his visit to the United Nations, who was I not to follow suit?
I booked myself into the Theresa Hotel. Into a single room. With no bathroom. But with permission — “naturally, sir!” — to share a small one, “just down the hall, brother. Just down the hall.” My first visit to the bathroom down the hall was short. I had made a mistake in my enthusiasm to be in allegiance with Castro. He must have been given a different room, on a different floor.
I did not have a bath in four days. My ablutions were conducted with surprising dexterity in the face basin, which looked out on to the street, and the street was always full, and I could hear the voices of Harlem’s men and women; and
see their swagger, and glimpse at their joy and happiness in the midst of the desperation in the country’s urban ghettos, much like Harlem itself, engulfed day after day in flames, soaked in the blood of men and women marching “as to war” to sit beside a white man and a white woman, “integrating a lunch counter.” Years and years after this second civil war, as Baldwin himself called it, as Life magazine called it in raging large print on its front page, years after we trembled at the thought of it happening, and sending the rising waves of blood north, against the natural flow of gravity, I was sitting in the restaurant of a Holiday Inn hotel in Miami, Florida, one afternoon, and I was about to order a dish of fried catfish — catfish is as Southern as lynchings! — when my host, O.R. Dathorne, chairman of African-American Studies at the university, leaned over and said, casually, “Boy, only twenty years ago, we got our ass bust, just to sit in this restaurant, to eat this kiss-me-ass bad food! That is something, eh? Only twenty years ago … we got ourselves killed to eat bad food!” I was trying catfish for the first time. I had read about it in Richard Wright’s short stories, in some of Baldwin’s heart-wrenching fiction, in the stories of Ralph Ellison, and in the blues, and as a boast of national tourism in the South, in the brochures that publicized the more delicate aspects of life in the South. I looked at the waitress, not a particularly young woman, not a particularly beautiful woman, not a particularly seducing woman, not the kind of woman as the wife of the panel truck driver in the South that Emmett Till had ogled at, and had been caught ogling at, and had been put in the husband’s panel truck, and driven bound, kidnapped in rope used to tie a pig, out into the thicker bushes, and cut up as if the rope had turned him into a pig, and butchered him, and then lynched him; it was said he was raped, and not with a prick, either, sure as catfish is a Southern delicacy requiring a Southern sensibility. Raped. The catfish came. I can still smell its alluring fragrance. I tried to imagine the kind of man who would venture in the dead of night into Florida’s swamps and lakes and seas that looked like lakes, to catch this fish, with a hook the shape of an anchor, thrown against a magnolia tree, to hook a rope on, to hang a nigger. I can still taste the delicate taste of the fish, and the quiet noise of the skin fried in a batter of flour mixed with ground corn, in muffled sensual excitement, similar to the noise that comes from a shattered skull, or a blow delivered with accuracy to the middle of a black man’s back. “Only twenty years ago! Ain’t that a motherfucker, as the Negroes say?”
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