Barbara and I split up, for the first of many times. We didn’t see each other for a long time, not until I took Sally to see her in her first Broadway show. She played a very small part, but she was noticed, and she got offers from Hollywood which she had the good sense to turn down. I plodded on, and Sally and I split up, and I left The Island and started singing in a short-lived Village supper club. I got hired, as I’ve said, for bit parts here and there, odd parts here and there, but nothing led to anything and I was beginning to be more and more frightened. Steve and I split up, insofar as we had ever really been together, and, at the same time, Caleb got married, and I was the best man at his wedding. He married a woman named Louise, heavy and black and respectable, who would certainly take excellent care of him. I remember the wedding because I hated being there. By now, I was twenty-five, and I was terribly ashamed of the life I lived. Everyone had found the life that suited them; but I hadn’t. Caleb looked safe and handsome that day, he had become a preacher and was now assistant pastor at The New Dispensation House of God. Now, he had a wife and a home and he’d have children, all according to God’s plan. But, my life! It made me, I know, very defensive and difficult. I was a short-order cook, I was a waiter, I was a busboy, I was an elevator boy, I was a messenger, I was a shipping clerk—and that’s when times were good. Otherwise, I was a bum, a funky, homeless bum, a grown man who slept in flop-houses and movies, who often walked the streets without the price of subway fare, and who really knew no one because I didn’t want to know the people in my condition—I didn’t like my condition, I was not going to make peace with it, I was not going to enter the marihuana-drenched, cheap-beer-and-whiskey-soaked camaraderie of the doomed. I was going to change my condition, somehow, somehow—how?—and I was too proud to approach the affluent. My recollection of those years is not that I pounded the pavement, but crawled on my face over every inch of it. Breaks came and went, but terror and trouble stayed. The worst of it was, perhaps, that I most thoroughly avoided the people who loved me most. Barbara, for example, once spent a week in New York looking for me. She couldn’t find me. I knew she was in town because I knew the show she was with was in town. But Barbara had a job, and I didn’t. I knew I couldn’t fool her the way I fooled others—I hoped—with my clean shirt and mattress-pressed pants and shiny shoes and clean fingernails. How I managed to keep clean the half dozen shirts which saw me through those years I’ll never know. I knew—or I felt—that people were beginning to give me up. They felt, I was sure, that I was destined, simply, to become a part of the wreckage which lines every steep road. And, since I felt this way, I began to act this way—the most dangerous moment of all. I began to smell of defeat: that odor which seals your doom. I was drinking far too much, for people will always buy you a drink. And it was in a bar, in fact, that something happened which turned out, as we survivors love to put it, to be my first real break, the solid break, the break which made the others possible. It certainly didn’t look like a break. It only looked like a job. I wasn’t absolutely on my ass at this point. I was working as a short-order cook in Harlem. But, of course, I didn’t want to spend my life as a short-order cook, and I was very low because I knew my mother wasn’t well.
This man came over to me, a white man, very friendly, and said his name was Ray Fisher. He asked me how I was, and what I was doing. I didn’t know the man, and I hated people to ask me questions like that, I was ashamed to tell people what I was doing. But I was also too proud to lie. This man had heard me sing, somewhere, and he had seen me on the stage; which caused me, I must say, enormously to respect his powers of observation. And he told me that a little theater group was going to do an experimental version of The Corn Is Green. This production would utilize Negroes, and they were looking for a Negro boy who could sing, to play the lead. He was a friend of the director’s, which was how he knew about it, and he knew that the director had also seen me, and had a hunch about me. He said that it was only scheduled for seven performances, and the pay wasn’t very much. But, on his own behalf, and on behalf of the director, his friend, he very much hoped that I’d think about it—it might, he said, with that innocent earnestness which characterizes so many Americans, be a kind of breakthrough. Anyway, it might be worth looking into, he thought, and he gave me the address of the theater. Which wasn’t in the Village, but way down on the East Side, precisely the neighborhood where nobody would ever dream of going, especially not to see an experimental production, with a Negro in the male lead, of The Corn Is Green.
I remember looking at him, and saying, “The corn is green?” I was sure he was joking, or mad. You meet all kinds of people in bars. But he didn’t seem to be joking, and he didn’t seem to be mad. I’d never read the play, but I’d seen Ethel Barrymore play it. I didn’t remember the boy’s part at all. It all sounded, really, almost completely mad: I kept staring at Ray, whom I didn’t yet recognize as the hand of God. But we had a few drinks; he was really very nice; I promised I’d go down, because he really seemed to mean it. But what decided me, really, was a telegram under my door, when I got home that night. I was living on 19th Street and Fourth Avenue. It was, you know, well—shit!—they really have been looking for me. So, in the morning, I called the barbecue joint, to say I’d be coming in late, and I went on down.
When things go wrong, the good Lord knows they go wrong; one can find oneself in trouble so deep and so bizarre that one knows one can never get out of it; and it doesn’t help at all, as the years swagger brutally by, to recognize that much of one’s trouble is produced by the really unreadable and unpredictable convolutions of one’s own character. I’ve sat, sometimes, really helpless and terrified before my own, watching it spread danger and wonder all over my landscape—and not only my own. It is a terrible feeling. One learns, at such moments, not merely how little we know, but how little whatever we know is able to help us. But sometimes things go right. And these moments, humiliatingly enough, don’t seem to have anything to do with one’s character at all. I got to this tiny little theater, and I met the director, Konstantine Rafaeleto, a nice man, a heavy-set Greek about forty-odd, and I liked him right away, liked his handshake, liked his eyes. The first thing he said, after “Good morning, Mr. Proudhammer. I’m glad we found you—you’re a hard man to find, do you know that?” was “Do you know the script?” I said, No, but I’d seen the play. He said, “Forget that,” and handed me a script. I thought he wanted me to read, but he poured two cups of coffee and we sat down and he began to tell me what he had in mind.
He had not been in my country long, he said, only about eight years; he was part of the multitude driven here by the latest European debacle; thus, one of the lucky ones—but he said this with a sad and winning irony. Then he said, with a smile, that he did not pretend to understand my country, or the place of black people in this strange place. I was wondering what all this was leading up to, naturally, and I was already half convinced that he was just a nice intellectual nut, who probably couldn’t direct me across the street. But I think he caught this in some expression on my face, for he smiled, and said, “I am not a lecturer. I am a director. I thought that I would try a little experiment.” He paused, and looked at me, now, very narrowly indeed. He said, “I don’t know if you agree with me, but I don’t think that any of these problem books and plays and pictures do anything”—we were in the era of Earth and High Heaven and Gentlemen’s Agreement and Focus and Kingsblood Royal and Pinky—“I don’t think that they’re even intended to do anything. They just keep the myths alive. They keep the vocabulary alive. Of course, we can all feel unhappy about the poor unhappy darkies—we can afford to, we’ve got so many happy ones. Why not feel sorry for the Jews, we’ve killed so many. But a gas oven is a gas oven, and isn’t a darky still a darky?”
I sipped my coffee, and watched him.
“Now,” he said, very attentive to the quality of my attention, “the experiment I have in mind is just an experiment. The principal element of this experiment, that is, the
play, is far from ideal. I mean, I don’t want you to think that I think it’s a great play. But it’s a relatively truthful play, and sometimes very touching, and there are elements in it which I think we can make very exciting.”
I was watching him while he spoke—watching him more than I was listening to him, which is a habit of mine. I always think that you can tell a great deal from the way a man looks at you when he’s talking. Konstantine—Connie—was a kind of nut, as it turned out, and he was to pay very heavily for this later, for the voice of Senator McCarthy was loud in the land. But he was my kind of nut. He had real convictions, and he’d thought some of them through, and he tried to live by his convictions. Not even later, when his reputation and his means of making a livelihood were on the block, and nearly all of those who could have helped him had turned away from him, did I ever hear him complain. He only said, “Well, I guess it’s time to take a deep breath and hold your nose and go under. Thank God, I learned that long ago.”
That morning, while he was talking to me, he looked me directly in the eye, and he was much too involved in what he was trying to say to me to have energy left over to hand me any shit. He wasn’t trying to impress me, and he wasn’t blackmailed by my color. He talked to me as one artisan to another, concerning a project which he hoped we would be able to execute together. This was a profound shock, he couldn’t have known how profound, and it was a great relief. No one in the theater had ever talked to me like that. No, I had become accustomed to the smile which masked a guilty awareness. Americans are always lying to themselves about that kinsman they call the Negro, and they are always lying to him, and I had grown accustomed to the tone which sought your complicity in the unadmitted crime. The directors I had talked to had to suspect, though they couldn’t admit, that the roles I was expected to play were an insult to my manhood, as well as to my craft. I might have a judgment on the clown or porter I was playing. They could not risk hearing it. Of course, I couldn’t risk stating it, though there were also times when I couldn’t resist stating it. But this tension, created by the common knowledge of an unspeakable and unspoken lie, was not present in Konstantine’s office that morning. He was the first director I’d met with whom I really wanted to work. For that matter, he was the first director I’d met who talked to me as though I could.
He poured more coffee, and he said, “One of the things that’s most impressed me in this country is the struggle of black people to get an education. I always think it’s one of the great stories, and nobody knows anything about it. If there were a play on that subject, I’d probably do that. But I don’t know of any, and so I thought I’d try this experiment with this play. I think you’ll see what I mean when you read it. I certainly hope you do. Very few of the elements in the play are really alien to American life. You’ve got mining towns like that, for Christ’s sake, worse than that, and people just like that, right on down to the squire. People don’t really differ very much from one place to another, anyway.”
By now. I had caught his drift, and was dying to get home and read the play. I didn’t know yet whether he was crazy or not, but he was beginning to excite me.
“So I thought,” he said, “I’d take this play, this mining town situation, with no comment, so to say, only making the miners and the servants, people like that, black. It’s true that the play takes place in Wales, but I think we can make the audience forget that after the first few minutes, and hell, anyway, there are black people in Wales. And I figured we’d let the Negro kids improvise around the stretches of Welsh dialogue—dialect, really—and of course we’ve got tremendous musical opportunities with this play.” He looked at me and smiled. “How does it strike you, son? Oh. Of course, Ray Fisher must have told you that I want you to play the boy—to play Morgan Evans. That could be a Negro name, couldn’t it?”
“So could most white names,” I said, and after a moment he laughed and I laughed with him.
“Can you read the script right away?” he asked. “And get back to me right away?”
“I’ll read it today,” I said, “and I’ll call you as soon as I’ve read it.”
“Call me this evening at home,” he said, and scribbled his number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “I hope you’ll like it. That’d be the only reason for doing it. There’s not much money in it, and no glory.”
“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed now, “I’ll call you this evening.”
“Right.” He held out his hand. “People call me Connie. May I call you Leo?”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Well, good-bye, Leo. I hope we can do something.”
“Good-bye, Connie. I hope so, too.”
And we shook hands, and I left.
I read the play, of course, on the subway, and had finished the first act by the time I got uptown. I didn’t want to go to work until I’d finished reading the play and so I went into a bar and ordered a beer and read to the end. It was a mad idea, all right, and I kept telling myself that, but I couldn’t help getting more and more excited. I could see what Connie had in mind; I could see that it might work. Perhaps I didn’t altogether like the faintly missionary aspect of the white schoolteacher, black-promise business, but it really couldn’t be helped and if we played it right, it wouldn’t be stressed. It was only going to play for seven performances, I reminded myself, but anybody in my business has to approach any project as though it has the possibilities of shaking the world. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the boy, Morgan, but I felt that I could understand him and felt that I could do it. And, obviously, Connie felt that I could do it or he wouldn’t have been looking for me. He was so sure that I could do it that he hadn’t even asked me to read. So, it looked all right. It looked very nice. And, no matter what happened now, my morale had once again been saved. And, after all, who knew what might come of it? Who could know? And I sailed out of the bar, with my script under my arm and sailed up the avenue to the barbecue joint in a beautiful gentle wind. I wasn’t helpless anymore. Maybe I was going to live.
I called Connie that night from the barbecue joint. “This is Leo Proudhammer. I just wanted to say, thank you. You’ve made me very happy.”
There was a pause. Then, “You’ve made me very happy, too, Leo. Can you make it at ten in the morning?”
“Right.”
“Till then.”
“Till then.”
Well, this meant that I would be working nights in the barbecue joint, and rehearsing all day. But this was one of the greatest times in my life, and I’ll never forget it. It was the very first time in my life, and after so long, that I was handled as an actor. Perhaps only actors can know what this means, but what it meant for me was that the track was cleared at last for work, I could concentrate on learning and working and finding out what was in me. I wasn’t carrying that goddamn tray, and I wasn’t at war with myself or the play or the cast. I didn’t have the feeling, which I’d had so often, that I was simply hanging around, like part of the scenery, and was going to be used like that. It was the first time I was treated with that demanding respect which is due every artist, simply because of the nature of his effort, and without which he finds it almost impossible to function. I was being challenged and the very best was expected of me. And I was going to deliver my very best.
Connie worked me like a horse. Sometimes he’d say, “Now, you know you’re not telling me the truth. Don’t you? You’re cheating the boy.” So we’d do it again; I knew what he meant; I remembered everything he said. My first encounter with Miss Moffat I’m still not sure I ever really got right. It is a very tricky moment, deceptively cute—“Please, miss, can I have a kiss?” and she spanks me on the bottom, try being cute when you play it—and Morgan turned out to be the hardest role I’d ever been assigned. But it was also the best role, and I didn’t at all mind being worked like a horse. He worked all of us like horses. I had trouble the first week or so with the actress who was playing Miss. Moffat. She had been a fairly big star in
the thirties, a sort of second-string Janet Gaynor or Sylvia Sidney, and she was saddled with one of those awful Wampus Baby star names. She was known professionally as Bunny Nash, and though she was now far on the far side of fifty, she couldn’t change it. She was having a little trouble adjusting to work in a settlement house theater. She was more than a little troubled, though she couldn’t have admitted this, by finding herself surrounded by so many Negroes. Outnumbered, really: for Connie had cast all the serving roles, Bessie, Mrs. Watty, all the mine boys, and Old Tom, as black people. This meant that of fifteen speaking roles, ten were black. This made it hard on Miss Moffat, for, in the play, Miss Moffat’s relationship to her peers is quite perfunctory. Her only real relationship is to Morgan. And, as Connie was directing the play, this is also true of all the “black” people in the play, who look on Morgan as their hope. For the first week, Connie concentrated on these subsidiary and unspoken relationships, leaving the center of the play virtually untouched. And this worried Bunny Nash, who had looked on The Corn Is Green as a starring vehicle for herself. But Connie knew Bunny Nash, and it suited him to have her a little worried. He wanted a kind of tug of war between Miss Moffat and Morgan, in order to make vivid in the production what is only implicit in the script; that, whereas, clearly, Miss Moffat is a mystery for Morgan Evans, he is, equally, a mystery for her. And he wanted Bunny to play it not merely as the imperious, knowing, and rather noble spinster schoolteacher, but also as a woman more than a little frightened by what she has undertaken.
And, in fact, Bunny and I were frightened of each other in different ways, and for different reasons. Connie used this. Cruelly and painstakingly, he walked us, in our own personalities, over the ground we had to cover in the play. He never spoke of the tension between Bunny and Leo, but used this tension—or, rather, forced us to use it—to illuminate the tension between Morgan and Miss Moffat. It worked. He got what he wanted. It made our fight scene in the second act a really painful, tearing fight—Morgan, hateful, bewildered, weeping, striking out, and Miss Moffat, equally bewildered, terribly frightened and hurt, struggling for control. Having hit that peak, as it now seemed with no effort, and resolved that tension, our confidence mounted and we went to work in earnest. We had found our feet, and were able to play the difficult and, at bottom, quite improbable third act as friends whose friendship has cost them more than a little.
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Page 37
