Wellbeing is a bed
Of rubber foam that
Possessed, rocks us
Asleep. And not just
The body, but spirits
Sink with sirens. Pain
Is the pin or thorn,
That a foundling around,
Stabs us to waking. Which is
Hard to endure. Thus
Hands softer than
Down, fairer than
Flower, held both to heart,
And flaked all with ash.
At Cornell University, however, where boys and girls compete on equal terms on the same campus, I once walked into a scene in one of the women’s halls of residence, just at that time of signing in before lights are out, that I found most affectionate and touching. There in the gloaming of the hall, on a windy, snow-clad night, each boy returning to the larger world open outside the gates was an Orpheus, and each girl being commandeered away by the hall-warden was an Eurydice! After that, I did not exactly mind my own date repeating her mother’s lesson to me that New York was not Ithaca, and it would therefore be difficult to continue our mixed dating there.
Grades, dates, and games therefore form the healthy pre-occupation of the American student. Protests and demonstrations are adolescent manifestations to be expected among the growing student bodies in the emergent and unstable societies of Africa, Asia, and South America. It matters very little that the Debating Union at Oxford or Cambridge and lately the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament spawns in Britain products that go direct to Westminster. American society, so fluid, they say, in many things, is however too set for that. In fact, for students to engage together in such pastimes in the United States would be to expose themselves to the charge of engaging in un-American activities. The fault therefore lies in their set-up, not in themselves for being dumb and undemonstrative about events outside. Their one failing perhaps may be ignorance of trends and events happening abroad but which the press, TV and radio guardians do not think fit and proper to project and register on their conscious.
There was that controversy we had at Princeton over what foreign papers the Graduate College should retain in its common-room. Many of us from abroad voted for a continuation of our subscription to The Times of London, our argument being that not even the New York Times in all its amplitude quite carried all the important news items those of us from Latin-America, Europe, Asia, and Africa were pretty certain of reading a day after in the air-freighted edition of The Times of London. I took a bet with the Colonel, by the way, that story by story, and not just by linage, his bible The New York Times was nowhere near the ambling matron of the British Press in the coverage of foreign news. Neither of us won the wager as we never got down to the brass tacks of taking a comparative count. The row at the Graduate College raged on for days, and notice-boards got plastered several times over with disputatious personal letters and committee notes in wild approval or protest against retaining the services of Aunt Fleet Street. Symptomatic of all was one rebuff roundly delivered by an irate American graduate student: ‘What do you want to read that red paper for? You must all be Commies!’ But wrong labels and false accusations like this all really go back to the great ignorance and self-absorption of Americans as a prosperous self-sufficient people long safe behind the Atlantic and the Pacific and the walls of protective beliefs, tariffs and slogans they have raised about their freely acquired property.
Bars of sororities and fraternities, behind which American students safely operate, when not rioting and derailing trains to no purpose except that the sap of spring runs wild in their blue veins, as at Princeton, are not raised for aliens and the uninitiated; nor did I go out of my way to seek an opening and passage. But Professor Tumins of Princeton’s Sociology Department once told us a story at the Parvin Seminar that could well be indicative of the attitude of mind of the typical member of these closed shops and clubs that the American student has made a special preserve. Apparently, there arose a diplomatic and political need among Princeton’s exclusive student eating-clubs to have some black faces in their midst. This started a lot of arguing within the cabals and cliques. For which of the African students, in the absence of American Negro youths, were they to invite? Few as they were, they certainly could not all be invited. So a quota system, very traditional with the place, had to be worked out among the various clubs. And what criteria did they agree to apply to their African guests? First of these was that they must show a decent sense of dress – when the hosts themselves are so scruffily turned out! After that, I did not care to hear out the rest of the list.
In my last week of scuttling from Princeton with a few feckless hands trying hard to effect a salvage of some sort, there were inevitably precious possessions and objects I tried very hard to clutch at and rescue, possessions and objects that proved most disconcertingly scarce to recollect in that period of crisis. Surprisingly, the one thing I missed in the US and which I still regret very much was the break-up of my ties with a couple of Negroes out in their comfortable ghettoes and lone posts. I visited my folks of St John’s Street, as I came to call them, quite frequently for a time.
The man had been a Captain in the Army during the War but now he was quite contented with being an attendant by day in some Women’s Club in Princeton. His wife worked at night as companion and watch for an old invalid widow or spinster with a lot of money. Together they made a jolly, bustling couple with their jobs, home, and children, the first of which had long since begun earning his own keep. The man used to say to me: ‘Look at your friend who went to College, and to Princeton at that, how much dollar do you think he makes in a week with all his education? Of course, I regret not going to college or continuing with my commission, but look here, my wife and I here comb up quite a bit between us. Which is more than you can say for some people with all their libraries and airs.’
It was hard arguing this when examples abounded every-where, depicting the ugly and unbelievable phenomenon in the American firmament of opportunity and plenty which makes many a cleaner and porter, with his odd shifts and spare-time jobs (called moonlighting), as well off as, if not better than graduate teachers and trained technicians. So although college, they say, is America’s best friend, why shouldn’t there be drop-outs, and at a very heavy rate too among the Negroes, when the unskilled and uneducated can perfectly well afford to marry the girls of their dreams, and both spouses can settle happily ever after in the regular home plus the automobile that are their combined dreams? The only snag is that the unskilled man might perhaps be more exposed to the dangers of settling down in a rut or getting rattled about in shallow grooves, whereas his compatriots with developed brains and skills may make a better fight of it, against automation, perhaps, and so move up the social scale with a fair degree of acceleration. Yes, this probably was so, agreed my St John’s folks, and it certainly has been one of the cruel factors that have kept the black man down and out in America for so long. ‘But things will sure change,’ they cheered themselves. ‘Why, look at you here drinking with us when President Goheen wants you over at the college to dine with him.’
My other couple, much older and more by themselves, have a thirteen-acre home on a hill some miles outside of Princeton. From there on a clear-skied day the visitor can see New Brunswick some twenty-five miles away. Not having children of their own, and constantly harassed now by land speculators and city planners making designs on their estate, my friends have turned their property into a trust. It was their hope when their large swimming pool was complete, to license the place as a community and holiday centre for the Negroes, just as the Jews and others do for their people. To this end, they actually invited me and other Parvins, that is, the coloured ones only, to dinner one night, so that each of us in turn, being so highly spoken of in Princeton, could bring over to the opening of the centre envoys and other influential people from our countries. Only their presence and sponsorship, they said, could convince the blacks of Princeton that it was time they all got together. Corporate action, the secret of big business corporations like RCA, all very vulnerable if only the black people of the earth will boycott them for exploiting them, was what a centre like theirs would strive to foster in the heart of members. And could all of us there help?
It was a pity they seemed not to know of the wary habits of diplomats, Africans not excepted. And it was so painful that I never saw them again before being chucked out of the country of their birth and beleaguerment. It seemed a simple and straight natural relation could not exist for long between my American Negro friends and myself without their wanting me to do something or another to help them. And not really being in a position to help myself, I found it a better policy keeping away, although this too was an unnatural and impossible position. In such circumstances, I often found it more congenial and convenient, while in New York, to walk on Harlem’s 125th Street, to skirt Times Square, and to meander among the alleys of Greenwich Village, where for all their pimps, prostitutes, dope-peddlers, and promiscuous clients in homosexual pubs, you knew what exactly you were being solicited for, what the risks and price were, and what was more, your own capability, leaving no tender feelings of loyalty and other susceptibilities trampled behind.
But moving to neutral, commercial ground and refusing to get engaged and involved in the affairs of my embattled friends only served to isolate me more, making me most lonely when in the thick of that human mart where Broadway becomes Times Square. After one such fruitless night of seeking for lasting warm contact, I gave while waiting for my bus connection at the Ports Authority Bus Terminal, the following wail and yawn like a lost dog baying the moon –
Day fell here:
Like a drift of dead leaves,
Day fell facewise among the blocks,
And suddenly! down the overgrown plots,
The great tall figures, all sterile
And faceless before, are in woods
Of a festal night conifer-like trees
Ablossom with fruit. All
Who earlier in the fall
Milled here to pluck or pick at a price
The apple or peach, have forced
Thro’ the harvest, bitten by
Bugs, have followed nuts
Home to rabbit-holes,
To nest up among boles.
How stripped of sensations now the stalls
