Just Above My Head Page 56

  To reproach him for this was utterly useless: one had to learn to take these aspects of Arthur into account when dealing with him.

  Of course, our first problem was money—the walking-up-and-down and shopping money, sometimes known as “front” money: the money which pays for the “front.” We called it cash; we had, of course, no credit. There had been no record offers worth considering. All this was about to change, but we didn’t know that, then.

  There was no money in the South, and managers are in business to make money. A minority of performers in any area become “stars,” but those who are not stars work enough, nevertheless, to keep various functionaries in bread-and-butter money. Arthur couldn’t be booked into the Copacabana or Vegas, but he was valuable on the college circuit; his reputation was growing in rather unexpected places. San Francisco-Oakland, for example, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, of course, sections of New Jersey, Boston—and, for some reason, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and London. These were the places his agency wanted to book him, naturally. Anyway, they couldn’t book him—they couldn’t—into places like Savannah, Tallahassee, New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, and so forth. They wouldn’t have known how to get him out of the hands of the sheriff, or off the chain gang, or out of prison. They didn’t want him to get hurt, and this concern came, very often, out of genuine affection. But they also didn’t want him, certainly not at the very beginning of his “promising” career, to be too closely associated with what was, after all, an exceedingly controversial, and, finally, unpopular causem Furthermore, as J. Edgar’s demise has permitted my-innocent countrymen to discover, exceedingly brutal pressures could be brought to bear on all kinds of persons, and corporations, and in all kinds of ways. Arthur, himself, was not yet that visible, but some of his handlers were.

  Anyway, the money in the South, then, was needed for bail-bond money, fees, and food. One was not, according to Arthur, supposed to carry anything out of the South, except one’s person, if possible: and I agreed with him.

  This meant that Arthur had to pay for the southern road by—going on the road. While his managers were busy booking him into places where he could pick up some change, I was busy booking him into places where he couldn’t: Arthur’s booking in Vancouver, for example, would pay for our journey to Jackson, Mississippi.

  It was marvelous for me. I loved it. It was something I wanted to do: and I discovered that I could do it. Anyway, I had to, I was the synchronizer of the watches.

  Let us say that Arthur, working his way down from Vancouver, has dates in Seattle, and Boston. From, Boston, he is to pick me up in New York, and fly to various points south.

  And Montreal, let us say, having heard that Arthur has been a sensation in Vancouver, wants Arthur on a day when I know he must be in Tuskegee.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not possible,” I say, into the breathing phone. “Mr. Montana is booked for that day—in fact, for that entire week—”

  “Booked? Booked where?”

  “In colleges and churches in the South, sir.”

  “Oh. May I ask—who am I speaking to?”

  “My name is Hall.”

  “Well—Mr. Hall—”

  I learned one thing at once. They always felt that the bottom difficulty was money, and they always raised the price. So, naturally, later, I began at the highest price last quoted, and, then, sometimes, doubled it, feeling my way.

  I found out. But that’s another story. Arthur found out, in a way, but never in the way that I did, and that’s because he had another assignment. I began to understand our connecting conditions. This was partly through Ruth, who worked with me during this first rehearsal, and who should have won several Oscars for her performances on the phone.

  Time out, while I tell you how I met Ruth:

  One of the black organizations—still called Negro, in those years—was throwing a party, either in victory or lamentation, I don’t remember, somewhere in midtown Manhattan. I had to be there, because of my job. Arthur had said that he’d try to be there, but he never showed. When I think about it, I can say only that the pulse of the party was neither victory nor lamentation, neither moaning nor tambourines. The real pulse, at many speeds, was, simply, resolution.

  There was much fire-baptized and shining hair. The Afro was, then, just around the corner—the far corner, that is; having, as of now, very lately, disappeared around the nearest one. There were many hats, some designed, apparently, by architects: neither the bu-bu nor the dashiki had yet appeared, demanding to be addressed in Swahili. Oh, the brothers and the sister were “heavy,” but, mainly, they were wearily resolute. If they flaunted such a vast amount of surface, it was to make certain that anyone misled by the surface would crash through the ice, and drown. Their note of resolution was countered by their knowledge that they, themselves, were tiptoeing, slipping, or striding, inches over an icy grave. But they had been, after all, through the fire.

  The brothers were, by far, less dazzling, mute, one might almost say, covered by the decent, self-effacing, missionary cloth. Whereas the ladies wore hair, they had eyes.

  There I was, anyway, one of the brothers, his life wedged tightly up his ass, utilizing, like a shield, the obligatory glass, and smiling the obligatory smile. The party was in a townhouse, a house on the East Side, a house like the houses in Henry James. The host was a descendant, bore the name, of one of the country’s most terrifying, lethal financiers, one of the century’s most renowned plunderers, hailed from sea to shining sea. Well. He hoped to purchase something out of all our desperate, surface splendor. He was a nice man, a very sincere man. I talked to him as long as I could, insofar as I could, but that wasn’t long. My sphincter muscle was tiring: I had to escape with my life. He couldn’t help but look, poor man, as though he’d been trapped in some resounding slave-auction, on the auctioneer’s day off.

  I walked down a flight of stairs, intending to ease my way out of here—Arthur wasn’t coming. I was at the head of a second flight of stairs when someone stopped me, someone I knew vaguely, someone, let us say, fom a rival firm, another kind of pirate, an adventurer in the antipoverty bullshit hype.

  He was black, though not, I hope, like me—in fact, he was gingerbread-colored—and I grinned at him as he grinned at me. His name, which I always thought was unfortunate, was Roy Furlong. Some of us described him as, for me, but not for long!

  “How you doing?”

  “You see me standing here. How about you?”

  “Beautiful.” He whispered, I can’t imagine why, the FBI knew everything already. “Getting some bucks for my theater, man.”

  “Oh? Crazy. Where’s your theater?”

  “Ain’t no big thing, you understand—just my loft down on the East Side—off the Bowery. Got the kids making sets out of old bedsheets, and mops, and raggedy blankets. We spray them with paint, you know—even got somebody’s mama’s old washing board!” He laughed, his fox-face leaning in toward me.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “I been looking for your brother—somebody said he was going to be here tonight. Is he here?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t seen him.”

  “If you ain’t seen him, he ain’t here. Tell you what I’d like him to do—come on down, and give them kids a kick in the ass—sing them a little gospel, let them know where they come from.”

  I thought, Wow. “Those kids come from all kinds of places,” I said. “Like Catholic parishes and Russian synagogues and Chinese temples—”

  “That’s just the point, man—one song from Arthur, and they’ll shake all that shit together.” He lowered his voice. “And it’d be great publicity for the school—you know, we let a couple of the black brothers in the media in on it, you dig, and they’ll cover it, and it would be great publicity for your brother, too.” He smiled, very pleased with himself. “Everybody gets a little taste.”

  I might now have made the really ridiculous error of pointing out that it didn’t seem to me that the children were
going to be given very much of a “taste”—had opened my mouth to frame the words, when a heavy-set girl, wearing a tan cape, and a hat which looked like a demented Chinese pagoda, appeared out of the confusion around us, and tapped Roy on the shoulder.

  “You told me it had a money-back guarantee,” she said, “and it didn’t.” She pursed her lips. “Now I don’t have to tell you what I could do to your ass.”

  “Ruth, honey!” Roy cried, throwing his arms around her, and kissing her—partly, I felt, to shut her up, in case she was not really joking. “You been here all night? I didn’t see you!”

  “I’ve been skulking corners, listening to you peddle your wares. I am wired for sound, all the way to my teeth—you just wait, Mr. Furlong, until I turn in my report!”

  Roy said, “You wouldn’t do nothing to hurt me, sugar, I know that.” He turned to me, with some relief. “Have you two met? This is Ruth Granger, we used to work together awhile back. Ruth, this is Hall Montana.”

  We shook hands. I liked the feel of her hand in mine. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Montana. Have you known this medicine man long?”

  “We run into each other at parties,” I said.

  “Ah. Fund-raising parties. Of course,” she said, and grinned at Roy.

  Roy laughed, and raised his hands, helplessly. “I don’t know why you so down on me, mama. I declare. What can I do to please you?” and he looked at me in what he thought was mock-despair. “I see you’re not drinking. Can I get you a drink?”

  I said, “I will get the lady a drink. We will leave you here, to plot and scheme some other way of getting back into the lady’s good graces.” I grinned at Ruth. “May I?”

  She was also carrying a rather menacing shoulder bag, which she now shifted to the opposite shoulder, so that she could take my arm: she was accoutered, definitely, for any improbability. “I think you have found the perfect solution,” she said, and smiled sweetly at Roy. “Good night, Mr. Furlong!” and we moved back into the crowd.

  I hadn’t meant to do this, had really meant to go. But, once I had seen Ruth’s face, under that absurd and winning hat, and been exposed to all her preposterous paraphernalia—well, my mood changed, I was no longer that anxious to be alone. I liked her. She was funny. She was direct. I did not dream of attempting to imagine her history. When she laughed, she looked exactly like a calculating, ten-year-old shoeshine boy. She was heavy-set, but she wasn’t fat—a big-boned chick—and, ordering all that solidity, at the center, was a hurt and courageous little girl. I sensed all this, in the way one senses things. I liked her.

  It’s strange, but when a man likes a woman from the git-go, he tends not to think of her as a woman: this comes later, if it comes at all. In the beginning, he is simply relieved that he is not being forced into attempting a conquest. He is relieved to be released from his role. Much later, he may realize that he has been released from a delusion which menaced both the woman and himself. And a woman then becomes a much more various and beautiful creation than she has been before.

  If Ruth’s exterior was elaborate, not to say strong-willed, her tastes were simple. She was not longing for a Brandy Alexander, for example, or a sticky sweet Manhattan, or something preciously French, or Russian, but took what we were, finally, able to get, two Dewars on the rocks. Then, we made our way back to the staircase where we had met. Ruth put her shoulder bag on the floor, and sat down on the top step.

  I don’t know why we hadn’t, already, simply decided to leave the place, but I think we both felt, in our different fashions, that this might have been, disastrously, to risk moving too fast: curious to observe how we act on what we don’t yet know that we know.

  I sat down on the step below her, my back leaning against the iron grille of the balustrade.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” I said, “but I really can’t resist asking you—how, and where—did you get that hat?”

  She laughed, and touched the remarkable thing. “You remember Hattie McDaniel, she played Mammy in Gone With the Wind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you remember, somebody finally gives her something—scarlet petticoats, no less—”

  I started laughing. “Yes—”

  “I think it was actually Clark Gable who gave them to her—I really don’t dare think—but anyway, she shows them to Clark Gable—stop laughing—”

  “I can’t—and—?”

  She touched her hat again. “We all have our different ways of seeking approval. With Gable, I admit, I blew it, but there’ll be others. I just want them to see how well it becomes me—what they gave me.”

  I am sure that I had begun to look somewhat alarmed, for she laughed, and said, “No. It’s just a fun, insane hat. It’s got something to do with what these people call serendipity. I bought it on an especially rainy afternoon, and I wear it when I’m in a certain mood.”

  “What mood is that?”

  “Oh. When I want them to see the hat before they see me.”

  “But that doesn’t work. The moment I saw the hat, I wanted to see you.”

  “That means that you are abnormal, and, possibly, dangerous—you suspect the possibility of cause and effect.”

  We both laughed loud enough for people to turn and look at us.

  “Where are you from, child?”

  “Mississippi delta. Been up South awhile.”

  “How do you know Roy Furlong?”

  “Is there any way not to know him?” She grinned, and sipped her drink. “I used to be private secretary to”—she named a black actress-singer, who had died about a year before—”and she got roped into one of his ‘benefits,’ and I had to curse him out a couple of times.”

  She reached behind her, and rummaged in her shoulder bag, and found a pack of cigarettes. She offered me a cigarette, lit mine, lit hers. She put the cigarettes back in the bag. “We aren’t what you would call intimate friends.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “That wasn’t hard, I hope. In spite of the hat.”

  “No. Because of the hat.”

  She laughed. “Thank God. Now, I won’t have to wear it for at least a month.”

  We had both finished our drinks. I said, “Why don’t we get out of here? If you’re not in a hurry, I’d like to buy you a nightcap someplace. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and rose, stealing a glance at her watch as she did so. I took both our empty glasses, and left them on one of the tables near the head of the stairs. She shouldered her bag, and we went down the stairs, smiling and nodding at various points and people, hoping not to be intercepted either by Furlong, or our host: who were almost certainly, however, by now, busily exchanging fantasies, reveling in each other. We got into the wind. Ruth had her car, and so we drove to Smalls’ Paradise, and sat there, drinking and talking until about two or three in the morning, comparing the Indian-stained Africas in which each of us had first seen the light of day. Ruth had then lived on Riverside Drive in the nineties, which meant that we were practically neighbors, and she drove me home, dropping me at my door. We were going to see each other for lunch, in the next couple of days. I remember watching her drive away before I turned into my building, and wondering why I felt so wearily peaceful, so tremendously at ease.

  We went south, as scheduled, into a punishing climate. I do not mean, now, merely the seasonal climate, or the climate of my heart, or Arthur’s. I mean something harder than that, harder to define. It was the climate created by something riding on the wind. It was as though the landscape awaited the scalding purification of the latter rain—the ruthless and liberating definition. This was in the faces, the voices, the accents, in the horror of what could not be said.

  We flew from city to city, but drove from town to town, walked many a dusty road, crossed endless railroad tracks, walked under many an underpass, saw endless depots, warehouses, scrap heaps, houses abandoned on the edge of town, tough weeds threatening wood and stone, passed many a quiet evening veranda, entered many a church and hovel, s
aw many and many a child. We both realized, at once, wordlessly, that we were still searching for vanished Peanut, for light, reddish-colored Alexander Theophilus Brown. He was absent from every room we entered, threatened to appear at every corner, whispered in the rising and the setting sun. We didn’t speak of him—we couldn’t; we couldn’t say to each other that we had entered a state like madness. We lived in pain and terror, unrelenting, walked in the shadow of death, and the shadow of death was in every eye. It was in the eyes of the men and women willing and anxious to accomplish our destruction, and in the eyes of the black people who were watching us, and watching the eyes which watched us. No one ever spoke of this, any more than my brother and I ever spoke of Peanut. Yet everything referred to—all that could not be said.

  It could not be said that kinsman was facing kinsman, but it was nothing less than that: father slaughtering son, brother castrating brother, mother betraying lover, sister denying sister—kissing cousins chaining kissing cousins, tracking them down with dogs, gutting them like cattle, as they had sold them like cattle. Said: it could not be whispered. Whispered: it could not be dreamed. Dreamed: it could not be confessed. Not all of the sheriffs children are white, this knowledge was in every eye. Not all of my mother’s children are black. This knowledge, which is the same knowledge, was also in every eye, but with a difference.

  This difference is the difference between flight and confrontation. Or, if I may stoop to borrow from a lexicon stupefying in its absolute and desperately sincere dishonesty, it is the difference between being black, or white. The words seem infantile and weightless in such a context, words absurdly trivial to account for so lethal a storm: but I have had to stoop, as I told you, and borrow from a book I did not, thank heaven, write. For, these were the only two words uttered, all that could be said, all that could be heard riding on the southern wind. If I could scarcely believe my ears, if it diminished me to see that we could be so basely craven, yet, I had to hear it, for I was traveling with my brother, and we trembled for our lives. For them, we were black, and that was all there was to it. Oh, I might like to laugh, and perhaps my life was dear to me, perhaps my fingers were capable of field-stripping a rifle, or playing a violin, perhaps I loved my wife, my son, or my daughter, or my brother, perhaps I, too, like all men, knew that I was born to die. None of this mattered, none If this contributed the faintest hair’s-breadth to the balance, for I was black. If I could not conveniently die, or decently smile, gratefully labor, then I should be carried to a place of execution, the dogs to feast on my sex; fire, air, wind, water, and, at last, the earth, my bones: it came to that, for me and mine, and in my own country, which I loved so much, and which I helped to build.