Many more Indians from the past of place names, battles, ambushes, and raids, jumped into our path; but still no one in the limousine seemed to have noticed the way in which they gave direction to our progress through time and space. We were travelling again on the skulls and bones and penises of Indians, particularly on their penises; for it was this form of the destruction of their manhood, their bravery, their culture, the clean castration of Indian “braves” in the movies of the West that had permitted American white men to see themselves as the alternative to the Indian, and to boast about the larger testicles of their own courage. I felt that my own testicles would tend to grow larger if the test of my manhood was that I had shot a “brave” coming at me in the prescribed circle of the ritual, armed with nothing but an arrow while he rode a horse. There would tend to be no contest; and no notation of the “brave’s” part in the contest, simply because the author of the history of this contest, is the same man who writes with rifles.
But the smoothness of the highway and the condition of its upkeep (anyone will tell you that without looking at the signs that mark state lines, he can tell you when he has passed out of New York State and is entering into Connecticut: merely because of better roads!), a highway which has meaning today because it is the road from here to Yale University in New Haven; this highway is probably nothing more than smothered thousands of buried skulls and bones and penises appropriated into an attitude that went into the construction of the highway.
The passing Indian names on the embankments, on the billboards, are merely ghosts from a past that had got to be forgotten; because it is a state of mind that can brook no inquiry and no examination.
My own expectations were high. For even though I tried not to be overcome by the meaning of Yale, and my accomplishment there as a black man, a West Indian, a black man who had been appointed a “Hoyt Fellow,” I still had to be aware of the possibility of personal failure; for it was the first time that I was to teach in a university. I had never thought of teaching in a university; and there was never any serious hidden, or half-hidden desire in the back of my mind that I might ever want to teach in a university, even though I admired a man, Professor Ashley, who walked with bended neck and bowed head, looking at the sign of autumn fallen on the path of the quadrangle in Trinity College, on the short but intricate intense arrangement of Italian ceramic squares, or the rectangles of stone quarried and shaped by masons who came over from Scotland with presbyterianism in their Bibles, mashing the yellow leaves with the brown, in the distance it takes from his professor’s suite on the third floor, high with the angels and the bats and the daring squirrels in the Crows’ Nest. His grey, English-cut worsted sports jacket, with one ripping-iron vent, white shirt with a tie of alternating white and blue stripes, and grey flannel trousers, brown shoes that had cracks of age and style in them, that made no noise on the obedient stones. I erased his portrait and painted in instead, my own image of what a professor looked like; this only wish, this only speculation of myself in Professor Ashley’s place. No, there was never any hidden or half-hidden desire to teach in a university.
I began to think of my outspokenness against America, which in some ways represents to me, the basest condition of humanity because of America’s racist practices. I also thought of what I had published about America. And then a terrifying thought hit me: I was taking part in a writers’ conference sponsored by the Canada Council, and held in Vancouver, a few years earlier; and I had suggested then that Canadian writers, the serious ones, those who did nothing but write, and therefore starve because they were writing in Canada, should be offered sinecures in Canadian universities as “writers-in-residence”; that they should have no obligation to teach, or do anything at all; and that their presence on the university campus should be sufficient prestige for the university, and that the university should leave the writer alone to do their writing. Someone suggested that it was a great idea. And it was pointed out that the Americans had led the way in this regard, as they tend to do in almost every other. And then the suggestion was made that we Canadian writers ought not to look toward the border, toward America, for such sinecures. This proposal incensed me. I felt it was just another example of Canadian dependency upon America, a dependency which a former prime minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker, had said so much about, and caused him to win the biggest electoral majority when he campaigned against such dependency. Mr. Diefenbaker had, in fact, to remind Canadians, during his term in office, to be Canadian, and not be dependent on America. And I had said then, imitating Mr. Diefenbaker’s Canadian nationalist political philosophy, at the height of my own arrogant clairvoyance, “I will never, under any circumstances, live in America, furthermore accept a job in that damn country as a writer-in-residence.” The year of the Canada Council conference in Vancouver was 1966. Martin Luther King, Jr. was kneeling on the Southern red dust to make good the principles of non-violent protest and the premise of human equality; and Malcolm X was like brimstone and ashes, setting the fire of his oratory to describe his brand of nationalism, condemning the country he accused for its recalcitrance and refusal to acknowledge its principles of racial injustice. And in the hotel room in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the other end of Canada, far, far in the West, the other Canadian writers, all white, applauded. It was a moral and intellectual position which most of them had been forced to take, if not fully understand, through the imperatives and the embarrassment to all white people over the world, the embarrassment that the Selma marches had chiselled on their mind, and the Alabama brutalities; and in the behalf of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had forced America to kneel with him in the blood-soaked dust, in grief, as he had forced Canada and most of the world to see the full implication of American racism, and its effect on Canada.
Now, here, only a few months after that righteous stand that I had made in Western Canada, I am now heading along the Eastern seaboard, toward Yale University, my wife beside me, probably confused with her own thoughts, my two daughters in the seat in front, fascinated by the journey and the newness of things along the way, choosing perhaps which bedroom they were going to have in the university-controlled apartment that was assigned for us.
I was trying to appease and understand for myself the immorality and the obscenity that my presence in this Connecticut limousine signified. My baggage, piled on its roof, told me that there was a clear indication that I had contradicted my principles. I had in fact immigrated to America, harnessed with an impracticable principle of arrogance; and armed with an “H-1 visa” in spite of my being indicted by the very Americans, as a “politically controversial” person.
The limousine stopped at Bridgeport — or, it could have been Darien — to rearrange the passengers so that three limousines would not arrive in New Haven with one passenger in each. This preoccupation with organization, and not with comfort in travelling, was to be startlingly conspicuous during my stay at Yale and in America.
The number of pieces in my luggage was creating a stir. There was some conspiratorial discussion among the three drivers, dressed in ugly green uniforms, similar to what American GIs wear into battle. One large and quite ugly and weather-beaten, pocked-marked, and red-faced driver assaulted me by his manner, which somehow matched his face, in saying to me, without calling me by name, without addressing me, “You have to pay extra for each of these!” This was in addition to having paid the fare for each of my family. I regarded this as my first assault by white America. The driver ceased to be pocked-marked, ceased to be an ordinary man, and became instead, the ugly face of America which I had seen so many nights on the screaming shots in news and documentaries all through the summer of 1968. And I began to regard his assault upon my intelligence as a kind of microscopic exploitation, which perhaps upon face value might not have been racial, but which when taken with the meaning of my journey from LaGuardia toward New Haven, devolved into a plain case of a white limousine-driver trying to bleed an unsuspecting foreign black man. I realized there and th
en, by my outburst, that it is impossible to walk through a trough without carrying some of its lingering perfume in one’s senses. We had both apparently watched the same drama and the same violence and the same news on the same television network, from Selma and from Alabama, and from New York City.
I do not think that he expected a confrontation from me. He had probably miscalculated my middle-class manner and appearance (clothes have a way of betraying a man’s crudeness; or of representing him to be a gentleman, when he does not wish to be regarded as such!), and he might have assumed that I was going to be agreeable. But he was wrong. I knew he was trying to rob me by his claim for a tax on my luggage. And still I had some doubt that he was not deliberately trying to rob me; but we had both been cast in certain, preconceived, precise roles. Television had done that to us, many years before.
He looked like a man who drank beer for two hours immediately after his shift ended, before he captured the peace of mind to face his wife and five children; like a man who threw dice in a crap game and enjoyed doing it, like a man who might have had some recent bad luck, and the prospect of a few unsuspecting dollars from me, seemed to be the gamble in his demand. Or, he might have mistaken me for a polite middle-class American Negro … like a friend of mine, a black professor; he and I went once to a place somewhere outside of New Haven to pick up an antique desk which his wife had picked out and which he assumed his wife had either paid for, or else had settled the price of. He went into the living room of the house of the man selling the desk and other furniture (where the furniture was kept for sale), thinking that it was the place of business, for the sign outside the house, nailed to the side, said TRADING CENTER; but it turned out to be his home. The desk in question was a very beautiful one. It had “$75”pasted onto it. Beside it was another desk, almost identical in design. I asked the man, a white man of about sixty years old, whether this one was also for sale. And when he said yes. I started to bargain with him, although he had placed the same price tag of “$75” on it, written in red ink with a felt pen.
“I’ll give you sixty dollars for it.”
“I couldn’t take that,” he said.
I really wasn’t serious, for I didn’t need a desk. But all of a sudden I needed this desk; and I needed to purchase it, although I really wasn’t serious about bringing him down, for the price asked for, was rather reasonable. But I was testing him.
“Sixty-five,” I said to him (and to myself, “… and not a fucking cent more!”), certain that he would say something like, “Mister” or, perhaps, “Boy …”
“All right!” he said, all of a sudden.
I was laden with a desk I no longer desired. But I arranged to take it. My friend and I took his desk outside first, into the station wagon and he went back inside to pay the man. But the man was looking through the shutters at us, and he wanted to make sure that my friend understood that his wife had not already paid for the desk.
“Your wife didn’t pay me, you know,” he shouted. “Your wife didn’t pay for the desk.”
We knew what the man was thinking. But we merely laughed. When my friend returned from paying him, he was smiling.
“I saved five dollars. He took off five dollars after you got yours for ten dollars less …”
He was excited. But he hadn’t bargained. His wife obviously hadn’t bargained, either. They had both taken the man’s word. They were both American like he was: they are both American Negroes.
“You know, Austin, I never thought of bringing him down!”
And so, this pocked-marked man comes towards me, insisting that there is a tax …
We were in New Haven. A hot, dusty, Southern-looking town, in late August, although it was September; a Friday; with construction going up here and going down there, old buildings being pulled down all around the town, as you enter it in a small road, like a small piece of the entrails leading to a large stomach, tagged by a blue sign that said NEW HAVEN with its reputation that leaked out inside the limousine, that the town was a “model city.” No one explained whether “model city” meant that New Haven had had no recent race riots, or whether New Haven had a mayor who was a “model” of a mayor, so far as mayors go, and if he was being compared with other mayors, like Richard Daley, the Father of Chicago. No one could say whether in fact New Haven was a “model city” simply because it had begun to house its poor black population in model low-income housing projects.
But the most impressive thing about New Haven this afternoon late in August — or was it early in September — was the stifling and strangulating heat. It would be a different temperature of New Haven’s climate that would come to strangle me later on. But, for the time being, I knew that where this kind of heat resides, there resides also the locust; and locusts in American summer towns are the taxi drivers. New Haven’s locusts are the most unmannerly in the world. And this is taking into consideration the taxi drivers in New York City; Boston; Durham, North Carolina; Toronto; Montreal; and Austin, Texas.
A stranger to New Haven can spend up to two hours on the street, holding up his hand to hail a taxi, before some understanding resident tell him that the only way to get a taxi is to call the company’s number for one. So, you just have to make that telephone call. Monopoly and bad manners, one the cause, the other the effect, leaves the stranger at the mercy of the taxi driver. But taxi drivers in New Haven complain that they do not make much money driving taxis. They never tell you, if you are black, the colour of the holdup man; and I never found out what they say to their white customers, for obvious reasons! Tipping is small; and New Haven, which is Yale University, which is mainly a student population, is not a taxi-using community.
The town is small, and its layout with an unnecessary number of one-way streets encircling the town, makes it almost entirely impossible for a successful bank robber to make his getaway from the scene of the robbery. It might also be that the one-way streets make pedestrians think twice about taking a taxi from Park Street to the Park Plaza Hotel, a distance of four blocks, but which would require the taxi to drive a distance of half of the town to reach a destination which could be walked in five minutes. But in this August heat, and with baggage, you won’t want to walk this short distance; and you would therefore submit yourself to the unimportant conversation of the taxi driver with his unlit half-smoked cigar, its juice mixing with his saliva, at the corner of his mouth; and you won’t mind at all if he insists that he isn’t going to lift “all these bags myself,” and then drives off with you in the wrong direction (after having boasted that he won’t ever live in any other place but New Haven, where he has spent every one of his fifty-five years), and to test whether you are really a stranger, or a returning student, he asks you, “Do you know which corner of Edgewood Street, 228 Park, is near?”
It is his senses that you have to watch out for. He senses that you are a stranger, but he must be certain and make this dialogue with you, in order to test you, in order to lessen his conscience about deceiving you. And you say nothing, and you leave him to strangle on his guilt and suffocate in the New Haven heat. And you, if you knew then what you shall learn later on, you could have concluded then that this taxi driver is nothing but a strangler, in the same sense that the university is a strangler of the poor mainly black people in whose midst it stands like so many mounds of locusts; and this you will have learned later on.
In the summer months when nothing really happens in New Haven, because Yale is closed, and everything is dead, this death by strangulation chokes breathing as it chokes the aspirations of poor people all year round. But its dramatic pressure is felt and seen more easily at this hot time of year. And you feel, if the knowledge you are going to have were in your possession today in this taxicab, that the heat and the taxi drivers and the university itself and the dust and the university-controlled apartments, with the college rooms that have no air-conditioning, are all the same agents of some cultural and political and intellectual strangulation.
But you can’t sa
y anything of this yet. Not today, not on this first day, because you are overcome by the physical beauty of Yale University, and also by its metaphorical beauty. It is physical beauty that opens up to you on a moment’s reflection, the academic and intellectual situations you can get involved in. And your mind starts to revolve on this first day, around large theories and on great themes; and you feel that the ivy on Yale’s walls is really a reflection of the aristocratic nature of the university; that only the rich and the influential have a place here, can be happy here, where they come like fish swimming to spawn; that years ago one would never imagine a Jew at Yale, that a Jew could not be chairman of the Department of English, and certainly no American Negro could ever teach here, and no American Indian. You begin to feel that Yale was a place set apart for some elite of American white masculinity and brains, which of course you tell yourself, from a thumbing appreciation of the country’s history, was the original intention of higher education. And you conclude, in spite of this history, that that tradition is all damn nonsense. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are still alive.
But you do not have this reflective disquietude about your arrival yet, because you are still affected by the bad manners of the taxi driver whose attitude is similar to that of the limousine driver; and you wonder whether this is not an occupational characteristic, or whether it is their way of greeting strangers. Something shakes this attempt to be broadminded out of your head, and you are thrown back upon the fact of what you are: that you are black in this strange midst, no longer are you a West Indian. But whatever it is, you feel that they do not behave this way toward a white stranger. And you tell yourself that this is so, because you know you know, and you know consequently, that you are in America. And the fact that your piece of American residency is within the physical boundaries of Yale University, makes no difference whatsoever to the conclusions you might make to this confrontation … “Do you know what they call a Negro with a PhD degree?”
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