‘Oh, come off it,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you already have fallen a victim of the systematic brainwashing. You see I am wearing my hair long and glossy, and on my skin shines the special cream I must rub on it if I am not to appear leprous. Do you know the hot stretching-comb was actually invented in a farm down South for the black women whom their white masters desired and possessed by force? Well, have they got their hands on you too, and so early?’
‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘You ought to see the verse I have written since coming over. Maybe, your expert eye will detect the change there.’
‘Oh, you’ve been writing? That’s very good. Once or twice I have been worried that I pressured you to come, fearing that like Dylan Thomas, it might affect you for the worse.’
‘I hope not!’ I laughed.
‘And are you thinking of publishing? What about your play – any plans for staging it yet?’
I said some Madison Avenue friends had suggested Mr Langston Hughes should get together a Negro cast but that I had shocked them by asking why the production had to be black when my play was simply for human beings everywhere and about human beings who happened to be in one particular place and situation.
‘Oh, you ought to let them!’ she clasped her hands. ‘But then, you’ll forget us now you are moving in the upper brackets.’
‘Don’t be silly, Gloria!’
‘I am not; you actually asked me at home why you should be bothering yourself with the blacks in America when the whites would love you to death?’
‘Good Lord,’ I held her by the shoulders, ‘You are even more of a masochist than me.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said and plumped back on her seat. But she was up again immediately, saying we must be out and hurrying if she was to see some professor at her college at a particular hour, and if we were both going to have lunch together, or didn’t I want to tour Harlem with her? I jumped at that multiple invitation and on our way, asked how she was feeling now she was home again.
‘I can’t tell exactly,’ she said. ‘In Africa I felt at home, much more so I thought than I could remember in all my life. But then there was my mother as well as my brothers, you will see them before you go. Naturally I wanted to be back among them, especially Sister, that’s my mother, as we all call her. And of course, there is my thesis to finish. Anyway, now I am back, I don’t exactly know where I belong. Perhaps I’ll go back to Nigeria or some other place in Africa, I don’t really know.’
Except for the professor part of it, the programme she had arranged came off without a hitch. We even picked up some warm clothing for me to wear in the colder days ahead, an exercise taken as we got out of Columbia into Harlem, and which spread quite a conscientious glow in both my friend and me as that had been my one ostensible reason for being out of Princeton at that time of week.
But best of all, Gloria took me home out on the Bronx, and so it was I got within the orbit and glow of that amazing phenomenon, so retiring and never quite acknowledged and yet providing the major, if not the entire, source of light in the heart-breaking, bleak confines of the Negro in America, I mean, the matriarch. Gloria’s mother had been away all day at work and now she arrived large, beautiful and shedding warmth and care all over the house.
‘Aren’t you freezing, children?’ she asked. ‘I see, that window there is wide open. And how are you feeling, child? Gloria told us you’d come to see us sometime. Has she given you something to eat? No, I guess not!’ she said half smiling, half scolding. And all along, she suited action to her words, pulling into place the open window, coming back across the floor to give her daughter’s friend a closer look, and that done, she allowed Gloria to help her put down the big paperbag bulging under her arm.
‘What have you been buying, sister? You see, JP? I told him I couldn’t tell what sweet things you’ll be bringing home with you.’
‘That’s no good reason for keeping the boy hungry,’ Sister said, taking off her great coat.
‘I haven’t really felt hungry,’ I laughed. ‘We have been drinking and talking, although I’m dying to see Gloria cook.’
‘You mean I don’t know how to – Sister, do you hear that?’
‘Oh, you go off and take them straight to the kitchen. And what would you like to eat?’ she turned to me. ‘Something hot and with pepper?’
‘Oh, cook us some rice, won’t you, Sister?’ Gloria stopped half-way between the sitting-room and kitchen.
‘Oh, so it’s Sister going to cook after all!’ I laughed.
‘Mind her?’ Sister winked at me. ‘Now, my boy, there is some beef and fish in the house, and I think some pork. Which will you have and what kind of stew do you like with it?’
‘Any,’ I jumped in my seat. ‘Do you know, Sister, all the rice I’ve eaten so far has been dry, I mean without stew?’
‘Yes, he says he’s had no cooked meal since coming these two weeks,’ Gloria chipped in.
‘Poor boy,’ her mother looked me over again. ‘You must be starving and here we stand talking and doing nothing.’ And she was out immediately in the passage, almost tripping over Prince, the dog and pet of the family. ‘Oh, Prince, you stop it.’ She fondled the big brown creature that very often was her one companion in the house. ‘Taken him for his walk yet, Gloria? No? You should, you know. That boy who helps me isn’t coming for another week.’
So getting back into our overcoats and mufflers, Gloria and I took out Prince for a walk in the early and chilling night. We did quite some distance among the plots, each rising around us shadowy and high like a range of hills with flanks broken here and there by light as from fires in a thousand cells and caves. Altogether it was quite an experience. Prince was on the leash and Gloria and I were supposed to be leading him so he could relieve himself, but all along, in point of fact, it was the dog that did the leading and we the following. Prince went where his nose took him, down the kerb, across streets, in between and out of the cars parked for the night in endless lines at street-sides, and whatever pace we took, trotting or just dawdling, was as Prince’s legs and fancy said we should. Just one side of the exercise we had control of, the conversation we kept running all through the walk, and in that Prince had little or no interest.
Sister had finished cooking and laid the table, but she was wearing her apron still and watching TV when Prince, Gloria and I returned to the apartment. She didn’t rise to meet us but then there was hardly any need for that as her presence filled the place to overflowing. There she sat, the archetypal image of mother and mourner as well as guardian and co-sufferer of every member of her embattled race. For hundreds of years, in a land of equal opportunity and freedom she has kept watch, wept and waited; as all her sons were forced out into the fields to labour for others to reap the abundant fruit, and for this flogging and worse misfortune has been their wages; as her brothers were hurled out of the house to be hanged from trees or stoned to death without trial for offences as little or non-existent as asking for their birthright or casting an innocent eye on a harlot who happened to be white; as her daughters, desired and defiled by lustful masters, were made to bear a bastard breed and then turned out to walk the streets, and she has watched and waited in vain when her husband that should be the pillar and prop of the house has broken under the burden and taken after to poisoned drinking, to beating and cursing everybody all day long and then finally walked out into the dark, never to return or be heard from. And in all this deprivation and abasement of her seed she has sought out of odd ends and scattered bits to keep together the broken structure of her family, and in several instances succeeded beyond all miracle through a sheer incapacity to fail and be crushed.
‘How long you’ve been!’ Sister greeted us, and so awoke me out of my momentary dream of her.
‘Prince took a long time coming to the point,’ Gloria grumbled.
‘Oh, he missed you all this time you have been away at college – you in Africa, my small one in Carolina and your elder brother now out of the army and driving a bus on Long Island. But come, children, come into the kitchen. Or would you rather eat here and watch TV? Not that there’s anything special going except for a funny fellow making faces at every person and thing.’ We elected for the kitchen and there she led us. She had the food warming in the oven and she went up there straight to serve it.
‘Aren’t you joining us, Sister?’ Gloria asked.
‘No, you go on eating; I had a sandwich at the works.’
‘Where’s that?’ I asked above the huge heap steaming in my front.
‘Oh, mother works in some Jewish laundry plant out in the city,’ Gloria said. ‘You know the joke here in New York? The Jews provide the business and the Negroes the labour.’
‘You go on eating your food,’ Sister admonished good-humouredly. ‘And don’t lead the boy into talking. You’ll both get your food in the wrong pipe.’
The food went down the proper way all right and afterwards we retired to a good night’s rest half way or so through the Late Show. Very early the next morning, from the big couch in the sitting-room which had been sprung into a double-bed for me, I heard Sister telling a still slumbering Gloria about the breakfast she had already in the kitchen for us children, and then wrapped in her winter clothes and holding a big bag, Sister let herself out for another long day at work for the benefit of her brood.
Of the large body of professionals, artists, and intellectuals whose shady colouring assigns them to a sort of limbo in the American hierarchy, I saw very little to win me over from the unsparing views of the late Professor Frazier in his ‘Black Bourgeoisie’, although much to enlist for them sympathy and understanding. Daubed in a white society as Negro lawyers, Negro doctors, Negro professors and Negro writers or entertainers, and therefore not quite belonging to the civilized and prosperous professional guilds and cults, this class of the blacks in America struck me as falling into two main groups. The first, much embarrassed that they stand out at all, would rather, like members of the middle class anywhere, that they were left alone to pursue their slow pension schemes in peace. When nor worrying about the rent or mortgage on the house, or what brand of car to open new instalment payments on now the Jones have changed their own, and whether Jack Jnr. is smart enough to get into college and play football, they spend the little that is left of their time in pottering about, adding gadgets to the house, or better still, behind the closed doors of the club or fraternity lodge, safe away from wives who are for ever reminding them of the next rung to climb on the ladder of success. At house parties, they sit close by the bar, and especially if the hosts are white liberals and that kind, they conscientiously try to talk shop and swap stale jokes and wise-cracks carried over from another party no less wet and dreary, while all the time the women are together head to head like hens, scratching up this gossip about some neighbours out of hearing, or ruffling their own proud feathers and tempers with remembrance of gorgeous holidays past, and with hopes and plans of those still to come in some outlying state or far-off country in Europe and elsewhere:
‘Oh, John and I took the family to California last time.’
‘Yes, wasn’t that real wonderful!’
‘Everybody ought to do the United States from coast to coast.’
‘And did you drive all the way?’
‘Arthur made all of us fly, you know.’
‘But, Sue, I still think a month or so in Europe is the best.’
Such often is the small talk engaging the entire mind of those of this special sub-class of negroes. All of which helps them like drug and drink to forget there is a strange destiny that has consigned their kind to a social limbo that neither touches the hell of the unemployed, uneducated and desperate of their race nor the heaven of the lowest of the whites to whose heights they aspire but cannot get assumption. Yet it is not uncommon to run into some, like the vivacious and formidable lady I met at a New Year party in Princeton, who when pricked briefly out of her cocoon and euphoria, swore something to the effect and in the hearing of her white hosts that whoever feels persecuted and oppressed under the sacred Constitution of the United States, the most democratic country on earth, deserves to remain so!
Members of the other sub-group, far from being faceless and forgetful of the garment of damnation in which America has for long invested the black in their midst, make a profession of their identity, and indeed a booming business out of it. Its members, like birds of the same feather, which in fact they are, very much move and associate in groups, societies and organizations. These sprout all over the land and are as diverse among themselves as one species of mushroom is edible and another fatal. Apparently, the one strain common to all these groups is their frenetic strife in one form or another to improve the lot of the black and make it possible for weed and wheat to survive together in the fabulous garden that is America. And they nearly all enjoy the backing of strong influential private donors, benefactors and foundations, several of them discreetly anonymous and not showing their hands. In fact, the patronage in some cases appears so lavish and guided that one or two uncharitable and ungrateful critics have spotted behind them some very muscular arm of state or corporate power with a great deal up its sleeves of lace and gold.
Typical and at once unique is the American Society for African Culture all very well set up in down-town New York. As is evident from its name, the society does not present a broad front in the fight to attain for the Negro an equal place, taken for granted in his native American society. Rather, the big point those in it make is the home they have found anew in Africa. Thus its sponsors, most of them Lincoln alumni, would shut out even those whites with genuine interest and perhaps better knowledge of Africa, a restriction and reverse bias that should stand the society in good stead if ever it comes out for sit-ins, freedom-rides, street demonstrations, and popular expressions of that kind, as the very respectable and gouty NAACP has had to do recently. But fortunately for AMSAC, it is always in better company and far removed from the bad breath and sweat of the man uptown in Harlem. Like some bored old lady with a lot of money and who is always scared to be alone by herself, the society is for ever thinking up some party or platform. And it has a nose that smells out an honoured guest from abroad even before he has set foot on US soil. Every leader of any delegation from Africa, preferably in sumptuous agbada or kente, is sedulously scouted out, courted and asked over by AMSAC to a party for which he pays with an address, often with only very little to do with culture except in the widest sense of the word. And of course no artist from Africa, on a grant the society knows little of or cares little about emulating, is ever missed on the list of notables the society constantly compiles to its credit, comfort and complacency.
In such circumstances, it matters very little if the religious and social significance of an original Bambara head-piece copied and proudly hung up on the wall of the AMSAC centre is completely lost and forgotten there. Perhaps it had not even been recognized to begin with. Indeed the mix-up and masquerade could be most crushing. The story goes that on one occasion the proud AMSAC host actually slapped on the back the honourable gentleman from Gabon and asked in great cheer how the old capital city of all the Congos was doing after that maverick Lumumba!
Most symptomatic of the social-climbing and status seeking habits that probably provide the strongest driving force behind the AMSAC was that grand ball it gave last Christmas for all African ambassadors to the United Nations. Like the great festival of folly with which the society had earlier sought fame in Lagos, the gala affair featured luminaries and debutantes but gave little or no room to undiscovered stars and ordinary folks teeming in the ghettos of Harlem, perhaps for fear they might darken the gleaming hall and gates of the Hotel Americana. All was white ties and tails and mink stoles, and the fabulous Duke Ellington himself was there with his band to serenade everybody into dreamland. But not much dancing was done that night since everybody who was anybody or as likely as not part of that bleak stratum of society starved of high cocktail occasions, made sure of a place on the floor so as not to lose for another season or life this one chance of rubbing shoulders with the great of the land. With me that night was my friend James Ward, an old boy of Princeton only now beginning to put his weight behind the lever to upturn for once and all the oppressive burden his black people have had to bear all these many years. And between us sat in dazzling dress his old girl friend of schooldays in Philadelphia. They seemed quite overwhelmed with all the pomp and circumstance of the occasion, especially during the pompous roll-call of honoured guests present. First of them all, it turned out amid great cheers, was the distinguished US Ambassador to the UN, Mr Adlai Stevenson. The great man was even prevailed upon to make a speech and was walked to the rostrum by the super-host of the occasion Dr John A. Davis, all beaming and sweating with satisfaction. Later, when Duke struck up another tune well-remembered with tears by many, and when hosts and guests began shuffling on their feet and basking in all the limelight, Dr Davis and the partner in his arms stopped graciously in front of me.
‘Meet my wife,’ he said. We exchanged how-do-you-do, after which he kindly added: ‘Have a dance with her.’ I shook my head, and he asked why not. Without thought, I told him there and then I was disappointed in the whole show. Both husband and wife looked appropriately shocked, and appeared not to understand. So that in quick succession I asked: Why the build-up for the American Stevenson? How was it not one of his excellent friends from Africa had been given a similar opportunity of saying a word or two, or wasn’t the party for them after all, but in fact for Ambassador Stevenson? And if he had to speak at all as the home representative, should that not be after the doyen among the African guests of honour had had the floor? Or was it simply giving the great man a big hand, which he needed somewhat, after being mauled and daubed a dove and an appeaser in the Cuba eyeball-to-eyeball aftermath? Undoubtedly I had goofed, but the Davis couple took it all very politely, and as they resumed dancing and fell back among the convivial crowd on the floor, the man suddenly brightened up and said laughingly over his wife’s fair shoulders that I might probably be correct about the tail-end of my query.
