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.’
‘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?’
