Reluctant Neighbors

by Braithwaite, E. R. ;

  “Recently while I was in England there was a report of the accidental sinking of a submarine at a south coast base. Three servicemen trapped inside it. All the pathos and anxiety of rescue preparations. Finally the moment of escape. The wild bubbling of the water as air forced its way up ahead of the first man. His head breaking the surface in a shower of spray. Me thinking of the way blacks were striving to escape their encagement. Hoping to break through to social and economic freedom. But waiting for them, not the rescue parties, not cheering voices, but zoning laws. N.C. signs. There. Here. Everywhere.”

  “Tell me about your book, the one on welfare,” he said, switching away.

  “I’ve told you about it.”

  “I mean. Was it written in the same way as the first? With yourself as the central character?”

  “Very much the same.”

  “Any film offers on that one?”

  Hell, I knew he was trying to keep us off the touchy discussions. The sensitive areas. Doing it in a patient, gentlemanly way, keeping it nice and peaceful between us. Still under the To Sir influence? Through the window haze no more flashes of green. Buildings in the distance. The train picked up speed for a few moments, slowed again, then once more ran free.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” The tone of his voice hinting he was sure I wouldn’t mind. Not now. Not with him in my corner among the To Sir fans.

  “I’ll know the answer to that after you’ve asked the question. Go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s something I’ve heard about, but from sources which are not necessarily reliable. It’s about the social life in France. Although I visited Paris a few times, I had no opportunity to discover much of what was going on. Tell me. Is it really as free and easy as some people would have us believe? I mean, for a person like yourself. A black person?”

  Trying to make his question as acceptable as possible. Circling around. I immediately knew what he wanted to ask but couldn’t. It stuck in his guts. The irritation began to rumble in mine. Okay. Let’s play with it.

  “What do you mean by social life? Cocktail parties? Theatres? Luncheons? Dinners?”

  “Yes, but more than that. Social contact. Associations. Even friendships.”

  “Oh, there were all of those. Among the colleagues with whom I worked. Neighbors. Eventually one made acquaintances, and some of these developed into friendships. The usual.” He’d have to spell it out, the thing he had in his mind. He’d get no help from me.

  “I was thinking. Bearing in mind your experiences in Britain. You were a black man in a white society. If I may say so, you’re an attractive man. You’d need more than mere acquaintanceships. Or even, just friendships.”

  “In what way?” Keeping him on the line.

  “I’m thinking of personal relationships. With women.” Giving me his buddy-buddy smile.

  “What about them?”

  “You spoke of white contempt for blacks. Were the white women equally contemptuous? If one accepted that it was a general thing, would you say it was also a personal thing?” Circling. Clearly circling around it.

  “Are you asking me if I slept with white women?” I wanted to pin the bastard down. When he said I was an attractive man he meant that I was attractive to women. Perhaps, in his mind. French women, being alien, foreign and distant, might respond to my attractiveness. An attractive, healthy man would need the intimate association of women wherever he was. Wherever he lived. Would he dare bring the question nearer home? Or did he think of American white women as unattainable to such as myself? Christ, he must be blind!

  “I’m asking if the contempt and exclusion you’ve been talking about prevented any deep personal relationships.” Reddening a bit. Just a touch of asperity.

  “No. Anyway, that’s one of the absurdities of prejudice. It can always find excuses for its own default.”

  The red quickly spread upwards around his neck to involve his ears. Matching the edge in his voice. Hell, I’d got under the cool shell.

  “Aren’t you being very selective about absurdities? If you could occasionally be wrong about a personal relationship, couldn’t you be equally wrong about more general attitudes?” Bravo! He’d neatly side-stepped further talk about women. I’d provided him with an exit line and he’d gobbled it up. Bright.

  “Look here,” I replied, “I think you’re missing something. White contempt is not a matter for speculation by me. It’s there all around. Observable. Demonstrable. Here. Rhodesia. England. South Africa. Germany. Russia. Gooks. Chinks. Niggers. It’s there all around. Wherever I look. Wherever I go. I don’t need to search or examine. Remember that proverb, ‘Beware of Greeks who come bearing gifts’? To every black a friendly white is a Greek bearing gifts. Out of character. So caution dictates that we check lest it be another example of the Trojan horse.”

  “That’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it? As if you expect the overtures of friendship to come from one direction only. Always. And you scornfully set yourself up, to accept or reject.”

  “Perhaps.” Not wanting to continue with it. Let him think whatever he wished.

  “Did you meet other blacks in Paris?” he asked, again slipping away with that disarming boyish grin. Maybe this was all part of the technique of public relations. Keep smiling to keep the customers happy. The boyish, skin-deep smile.

  “Yes. I met many blacks in Paris. Residents. Students. Diplomats. Painters. Poets. Models. Entertainers. Street cleaners, dustmen. Prostitutes. They’re all there.”

  “That’s fine, but what I want to know is, did you seek their company exclusively from the company of whites? Or were you able to forget your experiences in England on arrival in France? There’s a reason for my asking this. Over here one hears of blacks claiming that they’ve given up being reasonable with whites or even talking with them. They want to be separate. Separate institutions. Some have set up separate communities. They want to throw out the idea of integrated schools and go back to all black schools, this time with complete black control. In France you had the opportunity to start afresh, as it were. With blacks only. Did you?”

  “No. I found that in Paris people of different color were interrelating with apparent ease. My office colleagues were white and nonwhite. The same thing was true of other people I met. Skin color seemed to have no special merit. Intelligence. Charm. Imagination. Humor. Money. These were concerns which influenced social intercourse. Admittedly I entered France expecting problems because of my color, but I experienced few or none of those problems. There was no longer any need to seek the company of other blacks exclusively. No pressure.”

  “Would you say that is the experience of all blacks in France?”

  “Why should I? And how could I? Perhaps there are blacks in France who would totally disagree with me. I don’t know. I’ve not met them. Here’s a refreshing thing. On meeting blacks in Paris, it was not inevitable that we talk ‘race.’ We might discuss art, or money or the politics of the time. Or women. Mostly women. Occasionally race, but not inevitably race. Does that tell you anything?”

  The train came to a shuddering stop, interrupting our conversation. From the comments of those commuters nearest the doorways, it seemed that we were a few hundred yards short of the 125th Street station. Passengers gathered their possessions and braced themselves for an equally shuddering start. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes of grumblings and speculation, then a sudden exodus of the more impatient ones onto the tracks. We remained seated in the now more than half-empty compartment. My neighbor commenting on the irrational impatience of people, on the foolhardiness of walking beside electrified rails, on the futility of so dangerously seeking to save a few minutes which would be casually wasted later over coffee or a cigarette, etc., etc. Then back to us.

  “And after those four years?”

  “I went on to another job.”

  “In Paris?”


  “Yes.”

  Remembering those occasions while with the Veterans, meeting with senior UNESCO personnel at the international conferences in Paris and other European cities. Talking with them about education and welfare. More often about education. Drawn slowly but, it would seem, inevitably back into the wider concerns of educational theory, method and application. Those were good times. Feeling completely at ease with men with whom I shared a particular interest. Flattered by their occasional references to my authorship of certain remembered essays and my book. Eventually accepting the job with UNESCO in Paris. Everything moving comfortably for me. The native Guyanese with the British-passport resident in France.

  Thinking about that passport and the irony of it. Treated as British when traveling in continental Europe or in Asia or in Africa. The passport was enough. Amused at the security it not only offered but guaranteed me. Outside of England. Like a protective talisman.

  “ … Valid for all parts of the Commonwealth and for all foreign countries … ”

  Taking it all in my stride. To Spain and to Italy and to Portugal. And later on making a trip to Australia and New Zealand for a UNESCO-sponsored series of lectures on education. Disembarking at Melbourne Airport after a busy schedule in New Zealand, my thoughts on a hot shower, a cool bed and long hours of relaxing sleep after that tiring flight. Handing over my passport for the immigration officer’s inspection. A mere formality. I thought. Watching his careful scrutiny of each page then hearing his soft-voiced, patient query.

  “Your visa, Mr. Braithwaite.”

  “Visa?” Caught off balance.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I can’t find your visa for entry into Australia.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand. This is a British passport.”

  “I can see that, Mr. Braithwaite.” Unperturbedly patient.

  “Well, this is a Commonwealth country, isn’t it? And on page four of this passport it clearly states … ”

  “I know what is stated on page four, Mr. Braithwaite.” His courtesy as keen as a razor’s edge.

  “Well, then, what’s the problem?” Me embarrassed as hell, acutely conscious of the interested attention around me from my fellow travelers. All white. Many of them new immigrants. English. Italian. German. Dutch. Hungarian. I’d heard them on the flight. Excited, enthusiastic about coming to Australia.

  “Let me put it this way. You’re not European, Mr. Braithwaite.”

  The gentle smile, while I got the message, the ugly contemptible message. Feeling the sudden eruption of rage, but holding tight to myself under all those eyes. The years at Cambridge contributing.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that you were European either,” I responded. Let him chew on that for a while, then let him spell it out for me, loud and clear before these new, would-be Australians.

  He was beautiful, his aplomb unruffled, confronting the only black in that small crowd. A real professional, adroitly shifting position with, “May I ask the purpose of your visit to Australia, Sir?” Holding the passport open as if any eventual decision depended entirely on whether or not my reply satisfied him. Me wishing I could somehow disturb that glacial self-assurance.

  “I’m here on UNESCO business. I am sure the Residential Representative is waiting for me somewhere inside.” Observing the barely perceptible change in him. He left abruptly and entered a near-by office, returning almost immediately to wave me through into Australia with my unvisaed passport.

  Within the country itself, the people I met were extremely courteous and kind and helpful but my own responses were inevitably tinctured by the recurrent memory of that incident at the airport. Two weeks later I visited that other piece of Australia. The offshore island of Tasmania. Green and pleasantly rural. Over a long beer with one of the local elders we talked about Tasmania’s growth and development from the “good old days” to the present. In the “good old days,” he told me, the settlers would organize Sunday picnics. Blackbirding picnics. Groups of men would take their dogs and guns into the bush to flush out and shoot “blackbirds,” a term they used to describe the hapless and helpless bands of aborigines, men, women and children, who once inhabited Tasmania. Shooting them had been the popular Sunday sport for the settler men, women and children. It was always refreshing to get back to France.

  “What about your writing?”

  “About this time I wrote my first novel.”

  “The others were all autobiographies?”

  “Right.”

  “How was it received?”

  “The reviews were very flattering.”

  “Was it set in France?”

  “No. In London.”

  “I’ll look forward to reading it. Tell me. Would you say that the years in France changed you? Your viewpoint, your attitude? Bearing in mind your experiences in England, most of them obviously painful, how would you compare the time spent in France with your time in England?”

  He was as agile as a grasshopper. Switching from one thing to another. Telling me he’d look forward to reading my novel, yet not asking its title. Now he wanted me to make this kind of comparison. To hell with that. Why should I make such a comparison for him? Anyway, they were very different experiences. In England it was a sequence of sharp contrasts. The happy years of University and the R.A.F. The bitter years of job hunting and the early flight into teaching. Then the eight or nine years of recovery, adjustment, growth, if you like. The years in France were quite different. I went there into a well-paid job, unharried by social or economic pressures. Soon after arrival there my first book was published in French to good reviews. I was accepted into the community of artists. No strain.

  “Sorry, I can’t make that kind of comparison for you,” I replied.

  “Okay. I accept that. Another thing. You visited Africa and found yourself responsive to the fact of being there. Did you feel any strong inclination to settle in Africa, to be free of the strains and stresses which you intimate are nearly inevitable for a black person in a predominantly white society? Look, I’m not asking these questions idly or attempting to pry into your personal life. This is honestly the first opportunity I’ve ever had for this kind of frank discussion with a black man.”

  “I thought you said you knew some. Business associates and others. Haven’t you talked with them? Asked them your questions?”

  “Not really. After you’ve lived here several years you’ll begin to understand. I’ve known many black friends over the years, but never well enough for a chat like this. Always it seems as if we meet each other with our guard up. Careful to say the right thing to each other. The acceptable thing. Like playing a game according to prescribed rules, I suppose. Going through the motions without letting ourselves become too exposed. I suppose, if you broke it down, you might say that we’ve never risked knowing each other.” That ever-ready smile, turned on and shining.

  “But you refer to them as friends,” I said.

  “Yes. Of course. I’m sure that we’d all pass the superficial tests of friendship. Entertain each other at home. Lend or borrow money, if necessary. Put business in each other’s way. All the familiar, acceptably general things. It’s possible to do them for years without knowing each other. Without testing each other’s real thoughts. Without establishing the contact of truth, you might say.”

  In spite of the smile the words sounded flat and sterile as if he were reciting an algebraic equation. Words for words’ sake.

  “Then why do you believe you’d get answers from me?”

  “Because we’ve been talking this way. Frankly. Without trying to butter each other up. Anyway, as I said, I don’t want to intrude, but I just thought I could ask you.”

  “I don’t consider it an intrusion. I went to Africa as a visitor, with a job of work to do. Not as a tourist seeking comparisons, or a displaced person seeking anchorage or a dissatisfied person feeling around for a chang
e of environment. I was content with my work, socially comfortable and artistically motivated. I had no wish to change even though being there in Africa was a wonderful experience … ”

  Remembering it. Remembering the letter I wrote to Rudi in Paris about it:

  … Our African heritage extends far beyond that which most white people know anything about. It is inclusive of nobility and pride in self and generosity one to another. As I travel through Africa, one thing I’ve discovered is that one needn’t be hungry in Africa. If anyone has, he lets you have some of it. There is always a welcome, and any claim to kinship is a claim to participation. When we as black people talk about our blackness and our African heritage, we must include all these things. Here I’ve discovered the respect for the elder and respect for the leader, and respect for the person who is in a position to advise and teach, and also respect for the very young, the little ones who are growing up. The older ones care for the little ones and the little ones care about the older ones. The little ones help the older ones and the older ones look after the little ones.

  In my blackness, I must recognise and accept all this. I must see the complete identity, not a partial identity. That identity has nothing to do with the way I dress and the way I comb my hair. It has to do with the kind of spirit I have, a spirit that will accept nothing which dehumanises it or debases it. When you’re in Africa, you see the man close to the African soil. A proud man. I saw Guinea soon after it had insisted on its independence. I saw Guinea as it was raped by the French, the buildings stripped of everything that could possibly be of use so that a house vacated by a French occupant was just a shell with anything representing utility taken out.

  I saw the harbor that had been destroyed; all that remained was the skeletal residue of piers sticking up out of the water. I listened to the President of Guinea speaking to his people regularly, not saying to them, “We must hate the French for what they have done.” Never one instance in which I heard this. He was saying to them, “Guinea is now ours. We must build it together. Everything that has to be done, we must do it and we must take pride in doing it.” He said, “Perhaps, it is a good thing the French did what they did that we might be reminded freedom never comes cheaply.”