‘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.
From the upper middle-class club of AMSAC to the ‘family’ night gatherings that branches of the New York Public Library in Harlem sponsor in a sort of healthy rivalry among themselves, it is not really a long walk. These occasions, usually ones of friendly encounter, sometimes between local writers and their readers, and at other times on a triangular level with visiting African authors brought in, provide a ‘culture’ dose for those of the lower income brackets herded in Harlem as junkets downtown cater for the dilettanti whose one distinction, to quote Frazier, is an indisputable capacity for conspicuous consumption. Apart from that, the taste and indeed the fare are the same between both circles. Each asked me over as a speaking guest, and on each ‘at home’ host and guest were happy to part, never to cultivate each other’s company again. Such was the unpleasantness and nausea felt on both sides, a professional hostess, who floats promotion parties for upcoming artists of all kinds, called for her smelling salts, took a sniff or two as my grandmother would her snuff, and turning to an equally embarrassed friend at one of these affairs, said in everybody’s hearing: ‘Of course, the young man may be a genius. But how can I possibly ask friends over to meet him when he shows such a penchant for making enemies?’
There was so much that was wrong with the house of the blacks in America, even among themselves and on the level of artists, that the most well-mannered cousin calling from abroad could not help but be openly critical – unless of course a primitive pride in the family and an equally primitive urge to clean it out and make the place better for all were lacking. It was a unique and rich experience sharing with the black citizens of America their growing excitement and sense of discovery towards Africa, a place only vaguely remembered by them before, and that with absolute shame and horror, from memories of an irrevocable fall, as Christians years ago recalled the doings in the Garden of Eden. Now, not only has this place they had been taught all their lives to look upon as a jungle full of fatal fruits and serpents turned out to be a rich and open plantation farmed all along by foreign squatters for their own benefit, but the black sons of the soil have at last actually risen and driven the exploiters back across the seas from where they came. And it was no mean or distant performances that could be kept out or distorted for the ears of the people. Today, even the bum on Harlem’s 125th Street, although he may not be able to read the New York Times that prints all the news that is fit to print, and although he may not own a TV set to tune to community-minded stations, can see with his own eyes all the black diplomats at the UN.
Going from one independent country in Africa to another still burning to have its turn, I had observed a similar sense of vicarious satisfaction and feeling of elation that the enemy is at least out of the city gates, although other than those one is defending. In the United States, however, the joy appears even more intense among the emergent Negro. Their goal, though is not the African one of expelling the host, but that of kitchenmen, laundry-hands, motor-boys and noncoms, all of them long restricted to the lowest ranks in the armed forces for no just and legitimate cause, demanding at long last a fair share in the victory and spoils with colleagues really having no special abilities and merits to set them up and apart in permanent positions of privilege.
Out of this new emotional response to Africa among the Negro in America has come a great love for everything African. It is all very heart-warming that a Negro can now get up today and declare the roots of his origin even if he cannot be as definite or far-reaching as President Kennedy disclosing his Irish ancestry to Newark voters also of that extraction. But when he goes collecting masks, and imitations at that, without knowing their religious and social symbols and observance; when he goes sporting drums, called over there tom-toms, in blissful belief that anybody can beat on them, however different in kind and intention, and produce the famous talk for all to grin at; if he goes collecting music from Africa and proclaiming each piece ‘simple’ and ‘folksy’; then such an ‘Afro-American’, making a profession of his faith among the uninitiated, more silly than cynical, must be called to order before he misleads himself and others into total perdition.
A greater danger still is the habit of identifying this phoney, gushing business partly or wholly with the genuine historical stand of Negritude as established by Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, or with the African Personality, to use Kwame Nkrumah’s flamboyant slogan, which is better known in the States. There is an interesting feedback here. The idea of the African Personality, especially in its political context, derived of course from the Pan-African Movement of Marcus Garvey and Dr Du Bois, and although both prophets naturally were never ones to listen to each other, it was to lost black people of America they preached their sermons of Africa that must be redeemed, of an exodus back there, and of the glory and splendour that were its past. It is an irony of fate that today the black educated of America should be falling back upon the very doctrine they rejected and pooh-poohed half a century or so back. That they helped to hurl stones at both wisemen and still would deride them today should the two appear in Alabama or New York City may seem overstating the point. But both men are hardly ever remembered except by a few doubtful faithfuls squabbling on the fringe of Harlem’s murky streets and slums. And more still, the spirit of union which has consecrated for better for worse several heroes and leaders in Africa, providing for each of their people a pivotal point, has apparently either bypassed America or presented her with so many candidates that they confound themselves.
On the other hand, what seems to dominate the field on the cultural front is the tendency among writers, editors and critics, college professors within the cult not excluded, to form themselves into associations for mutual promotion and admiration. As a pure reaction against a society that either from sheer indifference or discrimination strains from its main stream of literature works by Negro authors, this, like Negritude, would be a welcome stand and declaration, to create fresh new pools and channels out to sea. Unfortunately the current does not seem to be clear or cutting deep. Rather members of the club, swimmers, trainers and spectators alike apparently prefer playing their own brand of game which is not bad, except that poor performances and low standards are everywhere applauded to the sky for the simple reason that they are by fellow members of the camp. And to thicken the cheers are the voices of patrons and promoters who naturally must be listened to and respected. Since everybody knows the rules, the patrons and promoters, usually honorary members from outside, play back the game by every time repeating the same fatuous and harmless platitudes and stereotypes like: ‘negro writers express deep feelings,’ ‘the characters they create carry great humour and human warmth,’ and ‘the Negro hero is a simple, sweet soul.’ All of this may be true but not the speciality or preserve of the Negro writer and people. And this is typical of the rich larding these people apply on their skin, a possible attempt to heighten or hide its existence.
Club members seeking compensations for a complex that shows them poor flounderers in life’s stream of conflicting identities and links sometimes ask new-found associates from Africa whether there are any excavations for ancient and lost civilizations going on there, and if so, whether bards have sung them in epics. Not satisfied with the totem in hand, they would have broken pillars and parchments to convince denigrators like Senator Ellender that their black folks and cousins back in Africa did own and create something! At a Langston Hughes party in Harlem, I even heard the further claim that the first American cowboy, not just in literature but in real life and history, was a Negro. Like jazz and other great contributions of the Negro people to American culture, the whites had promptly seized upon it and stolen the patent. A most reassuring claim that was, especially as it came from Professor Rosey Poole, a white woman promoter of the association.
Under such pull and push, it is a miracle writers of real worth have emerged at all among the Negroes. The lately over-lionized James Baldwin, the long silent Ralph Ellison, and self-effacing Sam Allen who really is the poet Paul Vessey, and Papa Langston Hughes himself, everywhere styled the poet-laureate of the Negro people and the Shakespeare of Harlem, easily come to mind. But even these are often loved for the wrong works and for reasons merely sociological and extra-literary and artistic. Poetry, they say, should get as near as possible to music, but when music is made to replace poetry, then it is another matter entirely. Thus it is very painful to hear critics, otherwise perfectly sound and intelligent, picking on the ‘blues’ of Langston Hughes as examples of his best work when there is evidently a corpus of good poetry to the man. But such pieces are as much chosen for the ‘authentic manner’ in which they reproduce the ‘idiom and rhythm’ of the blues as for the virtue they make of being black, and black to the palms and bottom.
Undoubtedly, the temptation of the one theme and motif to choose and of what apparatus and form to present it in overwhelms many a writer, but more so should he happen to be black, and therefore of Africa or America. The tendency I found much more among black authors in America than in Africa, where it is menace enough, is to fall for the blackness of it and forget all art. In Africa both publishers and public unabashedly give a strong impression of praying for this to happen, but then it is a gimmick to be expected, as a great majority of them are at present European, and therefore still have to get out of that terrible hangover feeling of being in a special relationship with exotic and simple natives. Little wonder a lot of people today are making capital out of the theme of encounter, that is, of black meeting white, and the conflict and complication therefrom for the African. All this is fine timber. But it still requires a good carpenter and cabinet maker to turn it into beautiful furniture. Unless one is a gifted and genuine craftsman, what comes to pass for a work of art is a wobbly, ugly stool that should better have remained the piece of log it was before the author began hacking it around. And such logs do in fact make extraordinary seating in the square and market place in front of the ancestral hall.
Coming to the States, where indigenous publishing and a literate, local reading public should really be no problem the black-white theme takes on fresh colorations, albeit of a leprous kind! The point, often so belaboured from the defending end here, is not that Negro authors write only about the Negro. Who else can any author write for and about except his own people he knows so well? The real quarrel is that most Negro writers see their subject at one point and position only – that of protest and prayer. As a result and perhaps without any intention of so doing, they have helped to create and establish a fresh set of stereotype figures and faces capable of expressing only certain simple emotions and gestures, none of which has to do with anything complex or cerebral, or with the mystery and permanence of the mask.
