Brain-picking was another habit of mind for which I could not stand many Americans. One April day in particular there had been so much picking that I felt emptied and pinched all over. First came a long distance call from the Nigerian Consulate-General in New York. A certain professor at Columbia wanted to start classes in Modern African Literature, and very much wished to have me over in the city for lunch that day. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. As they had put him off a lot of times before, they could not help but accept his invitation without first consulting me. Would I please accept and not let the home side down?
I told them yes, provided they would talk the matter over with the Colonel himself who alone could excuse me from attending the great Parvin seminar due for that afternoon, since the man was already full of frowns for my many outings to address groups as different from one another as college students and faculty members at Cornell and Adelphi, Unitarian church women at Princeton, and diplomats bound for Africa from the State Department in Washington DC, They called me back a few minutes after to say they had successfully carried this off, adding for my benefit that the old Colonel had said I was a very bright talented young man but one obviously needing to see more of the United States to understand and admire its people, and that task they were still trying to perform with me! The eleven-thirty Suburban Transit bus took me into town in under two hours. An old university colleague was on hand to collect me; so we drove straight to the Columbia University area where we eventually located our professor host inside a Chinese restaurant. Tired of waiting, he said he had cancelled his booking and finished a quiet luncheon with a guest from the Ivory Coast who kept time. Anyway, could we start on our discussion of new African authors? This was the signal for his systematic plying of me with questions about the vision, the point of view, the philosophy and so on and so forth of Nigerian writers, especially the novelists, from Tutuola through Ekwensi and Nzekwu to Achebe. And every word I said he gave me the impression of cataloguing away for future use and reference. Later, at his apartment uptown, when he had eventually found the right key out of a huge bunch to let us in, we had some argument about these authors.
‘Well, you have them here in your library, haven’t you?’ I asked rather heatedly.
‘Of course, yes,’ he took my challenge. Promptly he found his way to an extensive rack against the wall but he could not fetch the volumes we wanted even though one or two of them were staring us right in the face. The fellow didn’t even know his texts, and he wanted to teach others African Literature! I got furious in my own short-sightedness. A week afterwards I heard that my professor friend had gone stone-blind. He had first fallen ill aboard an aeroplane somewhere over the Atlantic, and that short day of our meeting had been the tail end of a twilight fast failing into complete darkness. And I had taunted him for trying to be smart with me. I felt rotten for days afterwards.
With others, however, that day and elsewhere, I still have no sympathy. I returned to Princeton that April day to find that some publishers wanted me over immediately to their place for supper. Co-guest with me that night was a very learned man, Dr William Spaudling, sometimes something of a titular head for the publishing industry all over the Union. After a rocking handshake with me, he resumed the folksong he was singing with the young married daughter of the house, whom I thought I had seen before singing folksongs of all lands to her own guitar accompaniment at the Princeton YMCA some time during the Christmas season. This was his last night home before flying to Europe and Africa, Nigeria being one of his stops. In fact, host Dr Datus Smith, the Director of Franklin Publications, and guest had only recently returned from a business tour there and still remembered vividly the rough-surfaced crooked roads of that country. ‘Real death-traps, those! And how you folks drive your automobiles! So crazy-why don’t they clear those wrecks off the highways?’ the travellers reminisced together.
But host and hostess, fearing a head-on collision between their two guests right there at the setting out, steered the conversation to educational publishing in Nigeria, the abiding subject of their mission to Africa and other dark places needing light. And the publisher president was full of questions for which he had himself all the answers. Like, what did I think of my country’s novelists? They were a promising lot, weren’t they? Oh, so I did think the novel was not African because it was a literate form and experienced only by the individual? Which meant I disapproved of all my colleagues! But seriously, didn’t I agree that the elimination of English matter from our school syllabus would affect standards for the worse? It might be good politics, but that’s not what he meant. His fear was that African students history and English ones for example, going overseas, would no longer be at home with the subjects others were studying in the great universities. Yes, a start had to be made somewhere, but how was the balance to be preserved, and where to find the teachers able to put across the new material? And could I tell them where to find the authors for the new African histories and readers? It seemed to him the solution lay in the present syllabus for all its being colonial.
I had hardly touched my supper for arguing with the publisher. Now both husband and wife stepped in again and directed us to the safe course of the table, all superbly laid out by their Negro housekeeper, who threw me an anxious look now and again. Later they all took me back to the Graduate College, and for once I was glad to be back there, alone and unsolicited in my room.
At nearly all the large house parties I had invitations to, either from couples living in a perpetual state of unpack in tenement buildings, say in the deep lower and upper reaches of New York, or from career couples comfortably established in shiny, anonymous apartment blocks, as well as from upper middle class, middle-aged couples retired far away from the madding crowd in wooden-fronted suburban mansions, I always ended up right in the heart of a curious circle of guests asking this or that question about Africa and giving me that knowing quizzical look when I provided a piece of information quite contrary to the prototype image they had in mind. The tenement people showed a preference for the arty subjects and were more open and disinterested in discussing matters American.
On the other hand, the aspiring prospering professionals inclined to topics political or economics and sociology within their group. Conversation was often a criss-cross of comparisons and queries to the ding-dong tune of ‘did-you-read-that?’ and ‘you-should-read-the-other-fellow: his-latest-work-is-a-sure-must.’ With the propertied and the nouveau riche, usually ensconced away in self-contained communities, the pattern becomes even more interesting. First one accommodating man, armed with a glass of gin or some other firewater, ambles up and discloses a mind curious for geography. He takes a chair by me in one corner of the overdone and decorated lounge, and immediately another pulls up his seat to join in so that before we have left the realm of the flora and fauna of Africa, others have made a complete circle about us. How is the state of education down there? Nigeria has up to five colleges? Always thought the place no bigger than a penny-stamp on the map. And you have cities and civilizations long established before Columbus discovered us? Fancy that! Now, which of the presidents was shot recently? Oh, yes, aren’t things a bit unstable there right now? You don’t think so? In other words, you are saying foreign investment would be safe for a long time to come in the New Africa. Hm, the newspapers don’t make it look so!
But the discussion, somewhat dry and impersonal before, inevitably turns to sex, love and marriage habits in other lands, that is, in Africa, as compared to the honourable, democratic practice of co-equal, loving partners observed among American couples. By this time however, the ladies in their silk and fineries, smelling a conspiracy of males against their dominance of the house, fan their way floatingly to form an outer ring to the group. Did they understand me to be offering defence for the obnoxious practice of polygamy, almost as vile as that other uncivilized practice of clitoridectomy? They flounce up to me.
‘Oh, it isn’t more so than circumcision,’ say some men there taking up cudgels for me, and as several there are often Jewish, the blow usually gets home.
‘I don’t understand at all!’ A frothy-fronted lady stamps her plump foot.
‘Oh, don’t you, dear? Some surgeon fellow takes hold of the clitoris and with one fell movement of hand, slices the offending thing off!’ crows a successful merchant showing a medical turn of mind.
‘How dreadful!’ gulps every bejewelled throat craned forth.
‘Oh, how wicked!’
‘But it probably takes care of that itch in the promiscuous!’ The oversatiated merchant guzzles down another drink.
‘Still I don’t see how I can share one man with another woman – Darling, that would be like allowing you other lovers!’
The women remain petulant together.
‘Well, the fellow says his mother is quite happy with his father who has a dozen other wives,’ the darling husbands assure them.
‘O la la!’ issues the universal whistle.
‘And no two persons could be closer than my mother and father are,’ I rub it in.
‘How can that be?’ The women rise in one voice.
‘One man to several women deprives the wife of her rights!’ they intone together.
‘And what are those rights?’ I laugh.
Surprisingly, there is a hush, for none there can think up immediately their famous well guaranteed rights. Until one, spirited and aloud, speaks of her co-equal rights to any property her husband has – like the home and his business. To this I say my mother has her self-contained apartment in the concession or compound and that she has her own farming, fishing, or independent trading to do when not helping with the larger business of the husband. And at her age, which probably is that of many of my fellow guests, she would be too concerned with the well-being of her children to go nervous and neurotic over sex as apparently is the preoccupation of most American wives.
‘Oh, that’s not fair at all,’ come the protests, frantic still but becoming decidedly abashed. However, I do not give any quarter now. Oh, yes, I press on with my victory, in the old African set-up still intact outside the cities, women slept with their men usually only between their monthly periods. In other words, procreation was the first thought, not pleasure, which was incidental. Nine months the housewife was heavy with child, and another nine or more she weaned her child before there was thought of making another.
‘Meanwhile, the man does his rounds with the others!’ someone breaks into a high-pitched laugh and clap. ‘A very sensible rotational system it seems to me. Old Solomon must have done just that! It carries its own birth-control safe and natural.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it all sound gorgeous for you men!’
‘Well, I think most people are polyerotic anyway.’
‘And I still think polygamy an obnoxious practice.’
‘Oh, not so different from what the young man calls our serial system of marrying today only to divorce tomorrow to begin a long string of uncertain couplings.’
‘That at least is a democratic process, and things are even between both parties.’
So ran the conversation at a typical big bourgeois house party I attended, everybody talking at the same time, not to advance the progress of anything but usually only so that each could score a point and not feel left out and without really having to listen to one another. The gentleman who had started it all with me earlier in the evening rose up at last to go home. ‘Young man,’ he held my hand, ‘let me know when you are returning home. I sure want a holiday in Africa.’ A short scattered burst of laughter as of expensive china broke uncomfortably down the room, for just then his wife, a roundish woman, who all evening had shown sparkling fire playing on a large piano at the other end of the spacious sitting-room, came by to collect her shawl and overcoat and handbag from where such costumes are usually deposited as an opening to the night’s ritual.
‘You must be a happy man with such an accomplished pianist for a wife, to delight you every day at home,’ I said awkwardly, the lady bowing graciously to my compliment.
‘On the contrary, my boy,’ her husband bade me good-night, ‘the very fact that she is so good makes it all the more frustrating for everybody that she is not performing at Carnegie Hall.’
Then there was the usual bussing of cheeks and even lips and the brief exchange of hugs among neighbours, all very formal and rather chilling to the stranger, after which each guest and couple found their individual ways into the dark and cold outside with mutual calls of ‘goodnight’ and ‘goodbye’.
Although I stopped with several American families at their kind invitation, I never quite gained a fair estimate of the size of circle of acquaintances my host families called friends. How large and constant is it? I sold the problem to a professor of sociology almost in my last dinner engagement at Princeton. A veritable encyclopaedia on the social life of his country, the surprise was that he did not quite know himself. A friend of his at Harvard had conducted a study like that before, and made the interesting find that any two Americans, that is, picked at random among any number of states, have friends whose friends know one another’s friends. Which was not quite the same thing. Nor sense to anybody, snorted another professor present at our table. ‘If it comes merely to knowing of people,’ he pooh-poohed the whole theory, ‘do you have to go to all that length? I know of Police Commissioner Bull O’Connor of Birmingham, because I have read of him and his dogs let loose on Negroes in the papers.’
There were of course house parties, but these told more what a household could offer by way of conspicuous consumption than who was a friend and who a business associate or rival one wanted to impress to some purpose and profit. A house, even more to the American than to the proverbial Englishman, has become a castle, indeed, a cocoon. You drive out of it in your serpentine automobile because you have to go to work to pile up those dollars, to run the children to school if they are not to miss the opportunity of going to college, which is ‘America’s best friend’, and you spend a night out of the house because you are taking the entire family for the year’s holiday to some beach or outlandish country. So one gets cooped up there most of the time, especially during winter, like some dormouse in its hole. Fortunately, there is plenty of room for everybody to pad about and play inside. Daddy perhaps has the library and the tool or box-room to potter about in, the children have their nursery and toy-lobby which may take the whole undercarriage section of the house to accommodate a railway network, and of course Mummy who rules over all with great affection and firmness has her holy of holies, the kitchen.
A special creation here, the kitchen is one of America’s three super graces. The others in that trinity are, the telephone always at your elbow, making it possible for you in New York to date and clinch a deal with another in California, and those vast, toll-collecting highways streaming away in multiple long stretches to the horizon, and which together with the millions of automobiles sweeping them in all directions of the wind, give rise to the old query: which came before the other, the egg or the chicken? But even more treasured and revered by all is the kitchen. With its refrigerator, cooker, washing-machine, dish-washer, crockery boards, chromium racks, and a hundred odd gadgets and ends, some for crushing and splicing, others for reforming and moulding meals which often are only half cooked to retain all calories and vitamins, the American housewife’s kitchen, even more than nuclear stock-piles, has become the debate-winner for the United States in the ideological clash and Cold War since former Vice-President Richard Nixon had his famous culinary encounter with Nikita Kruschev.
With every member of the family in such good company and so well provided for, the home is world enough certainly to all. You can follow all the sports shows and news on a round-the-clock TV coverage, and there is always the telephone to make any call anyone can think of. So why go visiting? In any case, who actually bothers to come over, especially over the snowed-down impassable highways in winter? These conditions favour a closing together of ranks among members of the family. Consequently, parents and children, each denied the wider companionship of members of their own age group, become co-equal members of one close club, swapping jokes and ice-cream cones, and flinging things at each other on grown-up equal terms, a relationship I found at once most touching and disturbing.
