‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘There he goes!’ someone said in disgust. ‘The fellow’s come from Africa to do our fighting for us.’

Fortunately, there was no fighting that night. Some more money had gone into the music box, and the very first disc to fall into place, a twister, whipped quite a few couples there up on their feet. The gentleman, who had earlier let me in, came up to me, with a cigarette burning close and dangling dangerously between his lips. He was something like the floor-manager of the place and now wanted me to join in the dance and forget my argumentative ways.

‘I don’t know how to dance,’ I said.

‘You – an African? you kidding.’

‘Sincerely, I don’t.’

‘Oh, you just feeling superior or what?’

‘Shy, maybe,’ a woman laughed. ‘Oh, I know these fighting men.’

‘Come, I’ll show you,’ the floor manager offered, and more ash fell off his cigarette on both our fronts. ‘It isn’t hard at all. Well, brother, do you smoke?’ I said no, that I used to be a three-pack-a-day man. At which he said I certainly must have terrific will-power, and when I protested it was nothing to do with will-power, that on the contrary the taste of a cigarette had stopped my smoking it after a bad cold two years back, he said: ‘Never mind, brother. What matters is that you still can put out a fag under your foot, or can’t you?’ So saying he dropped the stump burning closer still between his lips and asked me to stub it out on the floor. I did his command and he was lavish with commendation for me.

‘Now, what did I tell you? You can dance as well as any of us. It’s just boiling in the blood of us black people. You just keep moving like you’re putting that cigarette out all your life-Yes, that’s all the motion, man, and you see, the pretty baby is all yours!’

Back in my rooms, because I still was wide-eyed and restless and unable to read, I tried to clear the backlog of my mail. But it was useless; the only letter I began and addressed to my brother in India, I finished several days after. And when sleep came at last, it turned out to be one nightmare featuring my brother and James Meredith all mixed up in one terrible role and struggle for identity and survival, a nightmare short but self-repeating and more live than anything I remember on screen or stage. So that all I did on waking up shaky from bed was put the seal of my hand on the brand new piece that had forged itself in the automatic boiler of my subconscious even while I slept:

Last night, times out of dream,

I woke

To the sight of a snake

Slithering in the field, livid

Where the grass is

Patched, merged up where it runs

All shades of green – and suddenly!

My brother in India, up, stick

In hand, poised to strike –

But ah, himself is struck

By this serpent, so swift,

So silent, with more reaction

Than a nuclear charge …

And now this morning with eyes still

To the door, in thought of a neck

Straining under the sill,

I wake

To the touch of a hand as

Mortal and fair, asking

To be kissed, and a return

To bed, my brothers

In the wild of America!

My first real encounter with the American Negro was in New York a week or so after my arrival in the country, and it took the form of a reunion with a girl from Columbia who had only then recently returned home from doing research work in Nigeria. I had wired her to come over and fetch me at my lodgings down in Greenwich Village, since her family was not listed on the telephone book and I was still like a sleep-walker in the city. We missed each other the first time she called. I had gone out with my host in search of two young girls who had called for him while he was out and had left word behind with me that they were off to do some early skating at Madison Square Gardens and that they wanted to be picked up when the fun was over.

‘Were they fun?’ Gloria asked.

‘Rather,’ I said. ‘Teenagers you know – one said she was at the City College and the other is a secretary in some firm although she says she’s training at the same time to record proceedings for a judge.’

‘Does that mean you couldn’t sleep with any of them, or isn’t that always your aim with every pretty skirt you run into?’

‘My host danced his partner into the kitchen and claims they made love there and then.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, I tried to with the other who was drinking on the sofa with me – a real kitten of a girl.’

‘Did you have her? Oh, I see, you’ve begun mincing words.’

‘Well, she was rather mixed up,’ I said. ‘Even like the blood in her veins which she said was part African, part Spanish, part Red Indian, and I think, part Mongolian, but she’s Negro all right, she told me.’

‘All of which amounts to a defeat?’

‘Yes, if you like putting it that way. What can you do with a hedge-hog when it bundles itself up into a pad tighter than all adhesives?’ She had got up on her feet, and finishing a sort of pivot, faced me and asked in her direct way: ‘How do you like my hair-do?’

‘I preferred your hair as it was – natural.’

‘But what can I do?’ she broke out. ‘You know in Nigeria I wore it that way. But even there I was thought a schoolgirl. All grown-ups in the cities, I found, wear it straight. And out here of course they think you are crazy or just putting on an act if you don’t.’

‘Yes, so I see. Even the men.’

‘Oh, isn’t that really horrible, men wearing curlers and reeking with oil. But that’s what years of slavery have done to us as a people – we imitate the white in everything – even to the point of wanting to bleach our skin.’

She had begun walking up and down the floor and now I could see she was wearing those long nylon stockings and sharp high-heeled shoes. ‘You don’t like them,’ she caught my eyes.

‘I said nothing of the sort.’