They had all pressed after me past the Customs barriers, waving now and subdued somewhat, so that as the last doors shut between us, a certain screen seemed to spring into a place it had no right to be, and many times more oppressive than any wall in Berlin or ancient Benin. In that general nervousness I found, when I began belting myself in my seat, that I had left behind my overcoat. But, as the stewards said, there was little that could be done, except have it sent after me which they did, for already the huge vessel had begun moving, and before I knew there was any real racing going on, we were already off our feet, clear into the vast arms of blind space and night, forming yet another luminous body in the heavens. Below, the indeterminate sprawl of New York, a city with a dark heart, lay blinking and writhing with a thousand and one eyes like some mammoth centipede bruised upon the ground.
‘What did I say,’ giggled a middle-aged man at my elbow, ‘no crashing with any plane I hop!’
‘Shut up, honey!’ his wife fixed him with a stare faster than all belts. There was scattered laughter down and up the corridor from among their friends and fellow passengers, all of them sporting placards labelled ‘playboy’ across their breasts, and no doubt going to do Europe, boys and bunnies all together. Turning away from the lot, I tried to engage myself with the new copy of Ubu Roi that Cat and Israel had given me as a parting gift only an hour or so back. But breathless as is that character’s career, it could not win away my mind from the friends I had just left in the world’s other half, faces which I felt I might well never see again.
Not quite a year before, I had alighted at the same airport on a broad milling afternoon. There was nobody at the ramp and waiting room to wave me in except the Immigration people. At first, they were surly and thorough, as expected, showing more than a fast hand and tongue as they ripped and riffled through my spare luggage.
‘Any drugs?’
‘No.’
‘Any diamonds?’
‘No.’
‘What about gifts for friends?’
‘None.’
‘And money – how much have you got on you?’
Then one of them, with cap drawn over one eye, looked my passport over a second time, and without warning, hit me across the shoulder, quite viciously. Now, what terrible discovery has he made? I wondered. But I shouldn’t have worried, for the fellow hit me another one and asked aloud with a big laugh: ‘So you got a Fellowship to Princeton!’
‘Boy, oh boy!’ chimed in his colleague, ‘You know that’s one of our top colleges!’
And instantly they all made me plenty welcome.
‘Call any cab out there and it will take you safe into the city,’ one offered.
‘But be sure you fix the fare first before going,’ his mate took over. ‘And go straight to Penn Station if you are going direct to Princeton. It’s right on the other side – in New Jersey State.’ All of which advice they offered completely free of charge, and when I said ‘Thank you’ they all answered in one voice: ‘Oh, you’re welcome!’
Incidentally, I had no need of a taxi cab, jumping a lift off some Nigerian diplomat at the United Nations. There were three of us in the car besides him, all of us Nigerians. First was the friend he had come to collect, a young lawyer, fresh from London and going to Yale for another year’s study. The other, it turned out, was a civil servant from Lagos enrolled on the same programme that was taking me to Princeton. Three of us newcomers felt rather lost in the capacious holds of the car. ‘You dare not, as a public servant, take this home with you unless of course you want to set up yourself against the politicians in power and their retainers,’ I teased the diplomat. ‘Just look out there,’ was all he said as we swept into the multiple cross current of cars. His, I came to concede, was anything but spacious and serpentine compared with the average vehicle on the road, but then at home it would be ostentatious living all the same, as only politicians and their conmen can afford. ‘You see, you are in the United States,’ he said. It was a reminder I was to hear rubbed into me again and again like salt over a sore for several months to come.
New York City was too much with me driving into it that open and warm afternoon. Of course, I had expected to see steel and glass structures, all shining bright, rise slender and beautiful before my eyes. But what struck me immediately was the dust and smut covering the face of New York, and one not exactly that of the ages as has settled for good upon a place like London or Paris. At first, it was hard for me to place or breathe, perhaps because strange, primitive pictures were at that time stirring in my mind. For example, I had for quite some time the uncanny vague feeling of being borne in a boat into the heart of some heavily wooded group of islands, each singing out its special charms – and yet one looked so much like the other – and in my mind’s ears all the time was some united and commingled sound of the long and dull splash of fish barely surfacing and of the brush and crack of twigs and bush giving way before some shadowy animals criss-crossing before my eyes. And superimposed over all this, more pressing and overpowering, was the picture of Columbus and his unknown band of desperate sailors, several hundreds of years before, bearing down in their big billowing boats upon surprised bands of Red Indians who took those strange vessels for huge birds sent by their great lord from heaven. How had the man done it? I kept asking myself. Today, in a monster more like those huge birds of heaven the foredoomed Red Indians wondered at, it takes the better part of the day to make the Atlantic crossing to America, which for better or for worse, all the world now knows is irrevocably there. ‘How had the man done it? I kept asking myself more in sincere rhetoric than actual hope of a practical answer.
However, a friend at Northwestern University up in the State of Illinois soon brought me back to earth. Coming into the great harbour of New York with the famous Statue of Liberty holding out to all the weary and oppressed of the earth her hand flaming gold, he wrote to me, how could anybody but the daft Columbus miss the way to the heart of America? As I had already had the terrible misfortune of missing the way, so to speak, I thought it best not to argue the point, especially that portion of it implying all and everyone coming to the States today must be either hungry, weary or oppressed.
Undoubtedly, my first impressions of America as seen through the city of New York were overlush and typical of the jungles from which I understood I had just emerged. Soon after, they were to dissolve into terms and images more easily recognizable to the civilized. They even resolved into verse. The first of these pieces sees New York as a warehouse cum machine factory –
Steel, stone, glass boxes! Not one
A carton
To handle with care!
Castellated, crowd
Miles on end, fall one
Over the other, and Empire State, the proud
Peak flying a pennon
Above this nightmare
Of ladders, beams, bolts, fumes, refuse …
And below!
America, Broadway, Madison,
Park, Lexington
And all the other streets
And avenues, east and west,
In a blue splash of steel
Cascade over channels, drop tubes past
Collisions of shafts, are
Sparking conveyor belts, turning,
Churning, carrying like rapids
The boil and market of a continent
