My Heart Laid Bare (58 page)

“Assuming, darling, that we have souls,” Rosamund says. “For perhaps not all of us are so burdened.”

But Abraham Licht, brooding upon his own thoughts, pays her no heed; nor notices how his long-lost Darian is gazing at him, and at her, with an expression of infinite yearning.

SHORTLY AFTERWARD, ROSAMUND
excuses herself to retire for the night; and Darian's father persuades him to stay another hour, in fact to stay the night—“We can finish this bottle of burgundy. There are so many things we need to speak of, son!”

And naturally Darian consents. Though he'd planned—vaguely—to return to Schenectady on the earliest train out of Penn Station. (Already he's delayed returning by two days; has missed classes at the Westheath School, with no explanation or apology to Myrick Sheffield; the past forty-eight hours have sped by in a dream.) What pleasure in Abraham's—and Rosamund's—company! What riches! It's as if the humiliating “premiere” at Carnegie Hall had never occurred, nor had ever been envisioned by an arrogant young composer. When Father focuses his attention so exclusively on Darian, Darian can feel his heart swell; his “ailing” heart; and knows himself far stronger than he'd imagined.
For so Zeus might breathe the spirit of life into a mere clay vessel. The first music of all is breath.

So Darian remains for another hour in the handsome brownstone on East Seventieth Street, tempted to stay, as Abraham has invited him, the night; yet wanting to maintain some measure of independence . . . some distance from Abraham Licht and his young pregnant bride, despite the dreariness of the Empire State Hotel. Eagerly he listens to his father's conversation, which is as usual one-sided; Darian would like to ask Abraham how he and Rosamund met, how long they've been married, what are the circumstances of Rosamund's life . . . but he's too shy to interrupt. All too briefly Abraham remarks that Rosamund is a remarkable woman whom he loves deeply, far more than he's loved any other woman; as he believes she loves him—“For it's her conviction, Darian, that I saved her life. Which perhaps I did.”

“I hope to play some of my music for her soon. If only you had a piano here . . . .”

“We'll buy a piano. Tomorrow morning. Well—tomorrow afternoon! There's a Steinway showroom on Park Avenue, close by. And Rosamund, I know, loves piano music.” Abraham Licht smilingly snaps his fingers. Almost, Darian can see the magnificent gleaming piano materialize in the adjoining drawing room.

Following this, Abraham begins to make inquiries, tactful enough but edged with paternal concern, about Darian's present circumstances. Abraham has to confess he's never heard of the Wheatsheath—the Westheath?—School of Music; nor does he know anything of Schenectady, New York. “To speak bluntly, son: have you much of a future in such a place? Will you perhaps be moving on to a more prestigious school—like Juilliard, here in Manhattan?”

Darian, giddy from wine, says carelessly, “To hell with Westheath—and Juilliard, too. I want to compose, Father. I want to alter the sound of American music.” Yet in his own ears how childlike these words echo; a mere proposal, and not a statement of fact.

“Do you, son? I wish you well.” Abraham raises his wineglass in an oddly restrained gesture, and drinks.

Darian feels himself subtly rebuffed.

He doesn't believe me. He has no faith in me.

Long ago pronouncing me unfit for The Game.

The evening is fast waning. Darian will not stay with his father and his father's bride but must return to the Empire State Hotel; and fall into bed, and sink into another oblivion. He's both relieved and disappointed that Abraham hasn't asked him more about his life, especially when Rosamund was still at the table. What tales Darian had to tell, long prepared to be told in such a way, to Abraham Licht, of riding the rails in the Midwest, shabby, unshaven and reckless as any hobo; of scraping together a living however he could, as he had reason to think Abraham had done as a young man; of Colonel Harris's Needham Silver Cornet Band . . . and many more. “Well, there will be other evenings,” Darian thinks. “Many more.” It is only relief he feels that Abraham hasn't inquired after Millie or Thurston; assuming no doubt that Darian hasn't heard of them or from them in years.

Abraham offers Darian a cigar, which he unwisely accepts; the men smoke together in thoughtful silence for a few minutes; Darian, who has only smoked cigarettes in the past, and few of these, knows he must not inhale the powerful smoke but isn't quite sure how to smoke without inhaling. He begins to cough, and his head begins to swim. Abraham, fortunately, doesn't notice; he's speaking dreamily of his plans to move to the Chautauqua Valley, and to raise the finest Arabian horses to set “records of the future”; there's a possibility, Abraham confides in Darian, in a lowered voice as if he fears being overheard, of his purchasing the renowned stallion Black Mars who'd won last year's Kentucky Derby, sired out of the 1925 Triple Crown winner Crescent, in turn sired out of the great Midnight Sun of years past. “If only I can realize this dream,” Abraham says, exhaling
smoke in a bluish vaporous cloud. “What prizes, what glory for my wife and my family!”

Darian listens, fascinated. Or would be so except his head is swimming.

“For I am ‘family' too, am I not?” he thinks.

Darian rises to leave, and stumbles; but rights himself, with a thrill of pride, before his father can assist him; for he won't have it said (in jest, even if in affection) by Abraham to Rosamund that poor Darian was incapacitated in the slightest. Another time Abraham invites Darian to stay the night, and another time Darian politely declines; Abraham promises to telephone him in the morning, before his train leaves; and promises to keep in touch with him, in Schenectady; even to visit, soon—“For we won't miss another of your concerts, Darian, I vow.” (Darian is confused: hadn't Abraham planned to buy a piano the next day, so that Darian could play it for Rosamund? Or had Darian misunderstood? He blames the cigar for his muddled head and discreetly lays it aside.) Then they're out on the street, and strolling arm in arm in the direction of Fifth Avenue, where Abraham will hail a cab for Darian, to take him to his hotel. When they part, Abraham embraces Darian impulsively. “Bless you, son!”

“And you, Father. Bless
you
.”

Next day, Darian can't move from his bed until early afternoon.

He has never been so sick . . . so deathly sick. As if his insides, from his lungs to his bowels, were crammed with a corrosive substance like lye. And his head filled to bursting with broken glass.

No telephone call comes from Abraham Licht.

When Darian tries to telephone Abraham Licht, he's informed by an operator that “no such party” is listed in the directory.

When Darian is well enough to venture forth, in the early evening, he takes a cab to the brownstone on East Seventieth Street, or is it East Seventy-first Street . . . he can't quite remember. The brownstones resemble one another, very like brownstones on East Seventy-second and East Seventy-third. When he rings the doorbells at two of these residences, no one answers; at the third, a soft-spoken woman in a uniform, possibly Filipino, opens the door to inform him that “Mister and Missus” are away. Darian asks if Abraham Licht resides at this address, and the woman shakes her head wordlessly, and quickly shuts and bolts the door.

“Wait!” cries Darian. He stumbles down the steps, and out into the street, in order to see the upper stories of the handsome house more clearly. He cups his hands to his mouth—“Father?
Father!
It's me, Darian.” But the upstairs windows are darkened. No face appears.

Next morning, he takes the train north to Schenectady. Praying that his “visiting instructorship” still remains at the Westheath School.

Sitting alone in the day coach staring dry-eyed out the window hearing no music in his head, scarcely even the thump! thump! thump! of the train wheels and the intermittent melancholy whistle; seeing nothing of the majestic landscape along the Hudson River.
Could I console my idiot self thinking I am headed home except Schenectady is not my home. I have none.

. . .
A VAST FEATURELESS
Silence against which elliptical patterns of Sound define themselves: overlapping, drawing apart, rippling, shuddering, running together as wayward currents of water join in a larger stream, rushing together at varying speeds; the rising of voices (of the lost souls of Esopus, of all of the dead) displaced in Time; a gradual fantasia of broken melodies, incantations, children's voices, chants; and always the beat, the blood-heavy beat, the relentless primitive blood-heavy beat, hardly discernible until the final fading unresolved notes.

W
hen Prince Elihu speaks all of the world, white no less than Negro, is obliged to listen: for it is Elihu's teaching that Africa is the birthplace of all civilization, and black and dark-skinned peoples, descended from Ham, are the origin of mankind; of whom the white man is but a fallen, diseased, and doomed specimen, who, by an ironic reversal of history, has come to assume a temporary sovereignty. And Africa, and the black and dark-skinned peoples of the world, shall rise again, to reclaim in righteousness the lost grandeur of that civilization—whether with the cooperation of the white race, or no.

(For the Caucasians are but a tribe of vicious cannibal-devils, as the recent World War made clear; and within a decade or two, according to Elihu's calculation, there will follow yet a second world war waged by Caucasians, against Caucasians, which will destroy their degenerate civilization entirely.)

Thus, speaking as the Prophet, Regent & Exchequer of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, Prince Elihu commands that the United States Government prepare to deliver to the Negro people within its territorial boundaries either a portion of land (of the size of Oklahoma), including a waterfront; or restitution of no less than $5 billion as indemnity for the outrage of slavery, that the entire Negro population of the North American continent might one day migrate en masse back to Africa, to colonize a pure black republic . . . and to prepare for the eventual overthrow of the white-controlled regions of the entire continent.

Liberty or Death!
was the watchword of the martyred Gabriel Prosser, a twenty-two-year-old slave tortured to death in 1800 by his white captors—
Die silent as you shall see me do.

So with Prince Elihu, it is
Liberty or Death
; and
Death Before Humility.

AND:
BROTHERS BY
blood are brothers by the soul.

And:
All white men are our enemies, then and now.

IT IS WHISPERED
through Harlem that Prince Elihu is possessed of immortal powers: that he was born with the gift of voodoo-telepathy; of mesmerism; of slipping out of his skin and entering another's, by way of the secrecy of Night. Though born in Jamaica, or Haiti, or, perhaps, the Windward Islands, some forty years ago, he is nonetheless believed to be the avatar of the ancient African king Elihu (himself related to Egyptian and Turkish nobility)—he who, according to legend, arose out of the fiery flood of a volcano's eruption, and led his people to military glory as conquerors of the region now known as the Ivory Coast. Thus, though numerous attempts have been made on his life, by both Negroes and whites,
he cannot be killed.

Yet he carries a bone-handled stiletto strapped to his left leg, with which, it is said, he has killed a white man (a white policeman, in some versions of the account); and, when attacked by a crazed fellow prisoner in the Atlanta penitentiary (a Georgian Negro whose brains had fried from chain-gang work in 110-degree heat), he managed to overcome his assailant, and hold him powerless on the ground,
without so much as laying a hand to him.

(Of such feats Elihu says carelessly, that, as the eyes of the cannibal-devils are fixed upon him, he is obliged to be a god, that they not mistake him for a beast.)

IN PATERSON, NEW
Jersey, in March of 1917, while leading a rally to protest the deaths of three young Negroes savagely beaten by police, and to promote the cause of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, Prince Elihu was fired upon suddenly by white-hooded men: yet so fierce were his powers that night, so impenetrable the aura he had cast about himself, the clumsy fusillade of bullets spared him utterly.

And not long afterward, following his arrest on charges of sedition (“Having incited both by language and conduct actions directly in defiance of the authority of the United States Government . . . ”), Elihu, though making no attempt to resist his captors or to escape, was nonetheless handcuffed by federal agents, and subjected to a beating of many hours in the Manhattan interrogation chamber of the Bureau of Investigation: which beating had not the power of weakening his proud defense, and his disclaiming of all authority of the United States Government over
him
, at the time of his public indictment.

And, in the hellish Atlanta penitentiary, amid diseased, mentally deranged, and vicious persons, of his own race no less than the Caucasian, the noble Prince withstood any number of physical assaults upon his body; and soon developed a power of second sight that allowed him to know beforehand if he was in danger . . . nor did this remarkable faculty ebb when Elihu was pardoned by the publicity-seeking Warren G. Harding, but, rather, intensified, as the Negro leader continued fearlessly to travel about the country,
even into the deepest South
, seeking members for his revolutionary organization, and making investigations into lynchings, rigged trials, rapes and various assaults, etc., directed toward Negroes by their fellow Americans.

Many a time the Prophet, Regent & Exchequer of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union was fired upon by cowardly white men, in ambush; many a time was a bomb attached to his car, or thrown into a meeting hall or church in which he was speaking. Yet his powers were such, not only he but those standing close to him were spared; in most instances,
at least. (For it must be admitted that numerous tragedies have occurred during Prince Elihu's campaign to awaken his fellow blacks from their delusion of believing themselves
American
, when in fact they are
Negroes
: a truth, Elihu tells them, the white man knows, and acts upon covertly or otherwise at all times.)

ALSO, IT'S WHISPERED
that Prince Elihu did indeed succumb to Death, in the palace of the President of Liberia (whose privileged guest he was at the time): being stricken suddenly with a violent malaise that threw him into convulsions, and then into a coma, or a trance, for twenty hours: from which finally, he emerged—by way of his own princely will. And it is said that he alone survived the “accidental” crash of the six-passenger biplane, the
Black Eagle
(newly purchased for the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union); and the “accidental” sinking, one hundred miles south of Long Island, en route to Miami, of the ocean liner
Black Jupiter
(newly purchased for the purpose of trade with Negro businesses in the West Indies and Africa) . . . though very little is known of the actual circumstances of these misfortunes. (For they were reported but tersely on an inside page of the
Negro Union Times.
)

Yet more sensationally, it is whispered that Prince Elihu overcame a crude attempt on his life in the fall of 1928, at a secret meeting with white leaders (among them Mayor Jimmy Walker, Anglican bishop Henry Rudwick, a scattering of wealthy businessmen, and, not least, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), when he unknowingly swallowed poison in a glass of wine . . . or a piece of fruit . . . yet managed, by a supreme effort of his noble will, to shake off the effect of the powerful draft.

And so on, and so forth: for as many persons who have glimpsed Elihu, let alone have had occasion to speak with him, come away with tales about him; which, while being never wholly true, are yet perhaps never wholly false.

Elihu is not a man but a Destiny
, the Prince himself has said—
and Destiny must run its course.

LESS TO HIS
liking, however, it is said that, despite his pose of celibacy, he has in fact numberless wives: a virtual harem of dark-skinned women!—many of them sequestered on the topmost floor of his private brick residence on Strivers Row (the most exclusive block in all of Harlem); others scattered through the city. Indeed, in every part of the United States, in every foreign country in which Elihu has had occasion to travel since the formation of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union in 1916—among these, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Central America, the West Indies, Brazil and Argentina—Elihu has aroused such desire in women, or by voodoo-telepathy has summoned them to him, that not King Solomon in all his manly glory (possessed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines) is more to be marveled at. How shameless these women, and how desperate!—aflame, as they confess themselves, with love of the mahogany-skinned Prince (most dazzling in his immaculate white caftan and white, white trousers, flaring just perceptibly at the ankles, with, upon certain ceremonial occasions, a bit of gold braid, a bit of crimson velvet, a ruby-studded golden sword carried almost sportily at his side): whom they attempt to approach after his speeches and rallies, crowding about, weeping, nearly hysterical, kept at a discreet distance by Elihu's guards, though, surely?—the more attractive among them are summoned afterward to meet with Elihu, that their frenzied passion be absolved. For even lust may be counted holy, when in the service of the race. (Indeed, it has been the claim of hundreds of Negro women, during the years of Prince Elihu's ascendancy, that the “call” comes to them in their dreams: a vision of their Prince appearing to them by night, summoning them to him, that he might get them with child . . . to maintain the purity of the Negro race, much despoiled in the past several centuries by the white devil's seed.)

And it surely follows, then, that Prince Elihu
has
fathered numberless sons and daughters, in these many parts of the world; each marked by his strong bold features, the near-black eyes flecked with micalike glints of hazel, the long broad nose, the haughty upper lip; marked too (as their mothers boast) by
his
wild spirit.

For Prince Elihu is no ordinary man; but fired with the zealous virility of an African king, of ancient times.

The Prince and his most trusted ministers, however, respond with impatience at such tales; for after all Elihu has pledged himself to chastity, celibacy and manly virtue, as have the most devoted of his followers; all passion to be directed toward the triumph of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, and the eventual reclamation of the great lost civilization of Africa. (This to be done within the next decade; for, by Elihu's calculation, the second of the cannibal-devils' wars will begin by that time, in Europe.) So when distraught women crowd about the platform following one of Elihu's rallies, or appear drunken and weeping at his doorstep on 138th Street, pleading to be admitted, his guards are instructed to turn them away courteously yet forcefully; and to discourage them from further such shameless and degrading behavior. It is their sacred duty to wed and to bring forth black progeny with men of their own sphere, that the race maintain its vigor.
For,
as Elihu has said,
the eyes of the cannibal-devils being fixed upon him, he is obliged to be a god, that they not mistake him for a beast.

Yet to many observers, his fellow Negroes no less than his adversary whites, Prince Elihu is neither a god nor a beast but a common charlatan: indeed, a common criminal—too wily, at the present time, to trip himself up.

But Elihu is as swollen with pride as the legendary peacock, isn't he?—and Pride goeth before a fall.

For, murmur his enemies, only consider: since the formation of his World Union in 1916, he has drawn into his net an estimated eighty thou
sand to one hundred thousand Negroes in the United States and abroad, each paying dues of 35¢ per month; and contributing a good deal more. (In the official publication of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union,
Negro Union Times
—a brisk new rival to such publications as
The Crisis
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and
The Guardian
of the National Rights League—reports of the Union's progress and financial state vary from week to week. Sometimes it's proclaimed that the membership is climbing toward its goal of 1 million members by 1930; sometimes it is lamented that the membership is stalled—the consequence of “old-time Negro cowardice.” Occasionally a news item will proclaim that Prince Elihu's followers are generous in their contributions; at other times, that they are falling behind in their dues. In general, however, the tone of the
Negro Union Times
is one of formality and dignity, at least in those editorials written by Elihu himself; for it's a principle of Elihu that one cannot boast of worldly success without lapsing into vulgarity. When the Negro revolution is complete, and Africa reclaimed by her exiled sons and daughters, then will begin the new age, the Black Age, when human worth will no longer be equated with mere
money . . . .
)

But as Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois of
The Crisis
has charged, Is not one of Prince Elihu's goals the accumulation of money?—and power, and fame, and the installation of the fraudulent “Prince” as the reigning monarch of the colored world?

To which crude accusation the Prince himself has declined to reply except obliquely, at his Harlem rallies: “It is not given to one of low propensities and despoiled vision to comprehend the high.”

AS THE FIERY
Elihu, springing, it seemed, virtually out of nowhere—the eruption of a holy volcano, perhaps, in the very midst of Harlem's streets—drew from the first the active hostility of white adversaries ranging from the New York City police to the Attorney General of the United States,
so too, and perhaps not altogether innocently, did he arouse the hostility and deep resentment of other Negroes. For, after all, each Negro who chose to join the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, and to pay 35 cents per month for the privilege, was very likely choosing not to join such Harlem-based organizations as the NAACP, which had been founded in 1909; or the National Rights League; or the National Urban League; or the Liberty League of Afro-Americans; or even the aggressive Socialists of Harlem. These organizations, closely bound up with Negro churches and businesses, and headed by intellectuals, drew Elihu's lofty scorn from the very first. Their leaders, he charged, lacked the “tragic eye of History”: they suffered from the blindness of false optimism; the inability to comprehend, as one of noble blood did, that the purity of the Negro race can only be contaminated by association of any kind with the white cannibal-devils . . . who must be delivered from the Christian delusions of certain of their spokesmen, pressing upon them the injunction
Love thy neighbor as thyself
when such an action, for the white cannibal-devil, is an impossibility.