The Cross of Redemption (29 page)

Liston’s camp was very different, an abandoned racetrack in, or called, Aurora Downs, with wire gates and a uniformed cop, who lets you in, or doesn’t. I had simply given up the press conference bit, since they didn’t teach me much, and I couldn’t ask those questions. Gay Talese couldn’t help me with Liston, and this left me floundering on my own until Sandy Grady called up Liston’s manager, Jack Nilon, and arranged for me to see Liston for a few minutes alone the next day. Liston’s camp was far more outspoken concerning Liston’s attitude toward the press than Patterson’s. Liston didn’t like most of the press, and most of them didn’t like him. But I didn’t, myself, see any reason why he
should
like them, or pretend to—they had certainly never been very nice to him, and I was sure that he saw in them merely some more ignorant, uncaring white people, who, no matter how fine we cut it, had helped to cause him so much grief. And this impression was confirmed by reports from people who
did
get along with him—Wendell Phillips and Bob Teague, who are both Negroes, but rather rare and salty types, and Sandy Grady, who is not a Negro, but is certainly rare, and very probably salty. I got the impression from them that Liston was perfectly willing to take people as they were, if they would do the same for him. Again, I was not particularly appalled by his criminal background, believing, rightly or wrongly, that I probably knew more about the motives and even the necessity of this career than most of the white press could. The only relevance Liston’s—presumably previous—associations should have been allowed to have, it seemed to me, concerned the possible effect of these on the future of boxing. Well, while the air was thick with rumor and gospel on this subject, I really cannot go into it without risking, at the very least, being sued for libel; and so, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Chicago story will have to be left in the dark. But the Sweet Science is not, in any case, really so low on shady types as to be forced to depend on Liston. The question is to what extent Liston is prepared to cooperate with whatever powers of darkness there are in boxing; and the
extent of his cooperation, we must suppose, must depend, at least partly, on the extent of his awareness. So that there is nothing unique about the position in which he now finds himself and nothing unique about the speculation which now surrounds him.

I got to his camp at about two o’clock one afternoon. Time was running out, the fight was not more than three days away, and the atmosphere in the camp was, at once, listless and electric. Nilon looked as though he had not slept and would not sleep for days, and everyone else rather gave the impression that they wished they could—except for three handsome Negro ladies, related, I supposed, to Mrs. Liston, who sat, rather self-consciously, on the porch of the largest building on the grounds. They may have felt as I did, that training camps are like a theater before the curtain goes up, and if you don’t have any function in it, you’re probably in the way.

Liston, as we all know, is an enormous man, but surprisingly trim. I had already seen him work out, skipping rope to a record of “Night Train,” and, while he wasn’t nearly, for me, as moving as Patterson skipping rope in silence, it was still a wonderful sight to see. The press has really maligned Liston very cruelly, I think. He is far from stupid; is not, in fact, stupid at all. And, while there is a great deal of violence in him, I sensed no cruelty at all. On the contrary, he reminded me of big, black men I have known who acquired the reputation of being tough in order to conceal the fact that they weren’t hard. Anyone who cared to could turn them into taffy.

Anyway, I liked him, liked him very much. He sat opposite me at the table, sideways, head down, waiting for the blow: for Liston knows, as only the inarticulately suffering can, just how inarticulate he is. But let me clarify that: I say “suffering” because it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes—a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals. And when I say “inarticulate,” I really do not mean to suggest that he does not know how to talk. He is inarticulate in the way we all are when more has happened to us than we know how to express; and inarticulate in a particularly Negro way—he has a long tale to tell which no one wants to hear. I said, “I can’t ask you any questions because everything’s been asked. Perhaps I’m only here, really, to say that I wish you well.” And this was true, even though I wanted Patterson to win. Anyway, I’m glad I said it, because he looked at me then, really for the first time, and he talked to me for a little while.

And what had hurt him most, somewhat to my surprise, was not the general press reaction to him, but the Negro reaction. “Colored people,” he said, with great sorrow, “say they don’t want their children to look up to me. Well, they ain’t teaching their children to look up to Martin Luther King, either.” There was a pause. “I wouldn’t be no bad example if I was up there. I could tell a lot of those children what they need to know—because—I passed that way. I could make them
listen.”
And he spoke a little of what he would like to do for young Negro boys and girls, trapped in those circumstances which so nearly defeated him and Floyd, and from which neither can yet be said to have recovered. “I tell you one thing, though,” he said, “if I was up there, I wouldn’t bite my tongue.” I could certainly believe that. And we discussed the segregation issue, and the role in it of those prominent Negroes who find him so distasteful. “I would never,” he said, “go against my brother—we got to learn to stop fighting among our own.” He lapsed into silence again. “They said they didn’t want me to have the title. They didn’t say that about Johansson.” “They” were the Negroes.
“They
ought to know why I got some of the bum raps I got.” But he was not suggesting that they were
all
bum raps. His wife came over, a very pretty woman, seemed to gather in a glance how things were going, and sat down. We talked for a little while of matters entirely unrelated to the fight, and then it was time for his workout, and I left. I felt terribly ambivalent, as many Negroes do these days, since we are all trying to decide, in one way or another, which attitude, in our terrible American dilemma, is the most effective: the disciplined sweetness of Floyd or the outspoken intransigence of Liston.
If I was up there, I wouldn’t bite my tongue
. And Liston is a man aching for respect and responsibility. Sometimes we grow into our responsibilities and sometimes, of course, we fail them.

I left for the fight full of a weird and violent depression, which I traced partly to fatigue—it had been a pretty grueling time—partly to the fact that I had bet more money than I should have—on Patterson—and partly to the fact that
I
had had a pretty definitive fight with someone with whom I had hoped to be friends. And I was depressed about Liston’s bulk and force and his twenty-five-pound weight advantage. I was afraid that Patterson might lose, and I really didn’t want to see that. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like Liston. I just felt closer to Floyd.

I was sitting between Norman Mailer and Ben Hecht. Hecht felt about the same way that I did, and we agreed that if Patterson didn’t get
“stopped,” as Hecht put it, “by a baseball bat,” in the very beginning—if he could carry Liston for five or six rounds—he might very well hold the title. We didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to the preliminaries—or I didn’t; Hecht did; I watched the ballpark fill with people and listened to the vendors and the jokes and the speculations; and watched the clock.

From my notes: Liston entered the ring to an almost complete silence. Someone called his name, he looked over, smiled, and winked. Floyd entered, and got a hand. But he looked terribly small next to Liston, and my depression deepened.

My notes again: Archie Moore entered the ring, wearing an opera cape. Cassius Clay, in black tie, and as insolent as ever. Mickey Allen sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When Liston was introduced, some people booed—they cheered for Floyd, and I think I know how this made Liston feel. It promised, really, to be one of the worst fights in history.

Well, I was wrong; it was scarcely a fight at all, and I can’t but wonder who on earth will come to see the rematch, if there is one. Floyd seemed all right to me at first. He had planned for a long fight, and seemed to be feeling out his man. But Liston got him with a few bad body blows, and a few bad blows to the head. And no one agrees with me on this, but at one moment, when Floyd lunged for Liston’s belly—looking, it must be said, like an amateur, wildly flailing—it seemed to me that some unbearable tension in him broke, that he lost his head. And, in fact, I nearly screamed, “Keep your head, baby!” but it was really too late. Liston got him with a left, and Floyd went down. I could not believe it. I couldn’t hear the count, and though Hecht said, “It’s over,” and picked up his coat and left, I remained standing, staring at the ring, and only conceded that the fight was really over when two other boxers entered the ring. Then I wandered out of the ballpark, almost in tears. I met an old colored man at one of the exits, who said to me, cheerfully, “I’ve been robbed,” and we talked about it for a while. We started walking through the crowds, and A. J. Liebling, behind us, tapped me on the shoulder and we went off to a bar, to mourn the very possible death of boxing, and to have a drink, with love, for Floyd.

(1963)

T
HE FIRST TIME
I
MET
S
IDNEY
, I walked up to him at an airport. He didn’t know me, but I admired him very much, and I told him so. I’ve never done that with anyone, before or since, and Sidney looked at me as though he thought I was crazy, but he was very nice about it. Some years later, I really met him. We were both in Philadelphia. He was doing
A Raisin in the Sun
, and I was working with Kazan in
Sweet Bird of Youth
, and we hit it off.

Then, of course, years passed. Things happened to Sidney; things happened to me. All artists who are friends have a strange relationship to each other; each knows what the other is going through, even though you may see each other only briefly, at functions, at benefits, at airports; and this is especially true, I think, for black artists in this country, and especially over the last several years. It’s ironical indeed, but it’s only the black artists in this country—and it’s only beginning to change now—who have been called upon to fulfill their responsibilities as artists and, at the same time, insist on their responsibilities as citizens. As Ruby Dee once said to me, when we were working on the Christmas boycott campaign following the murder of the four little girls in Birmingham, “Soon, there won’t be enough colored people to go around.” She wasn’t joking—I might add that that statement has, today, a rather sinister ring.

As the years passed, and given the system in which all American artists, and especially all American actors, work, I began to tremble for Sidney. I must state candidly that I think most Hollywood movies are a thunderous waste of time, talent, and money, and I rarely see them. For example, I didn’t think
Blackboard Jungle
was much of a movie—I know much more than
that
about the public-school system of New York—but I thought that Sidney was beautiful, vivid, and truthful in it. He somehow escaped the film’s framework, so much so that until today, his is the only performance I remember. Nor was I overwhelmed by
Cry, the Beloved Country
, but Sidney’s portrait, brief as it was, of the young priest was a moving miracle of indignation. That was the young Sidney, and I sensed that I was going to miss him, in exactly the same way I will always miss the young Marlon of
Truck-line Cafe
and
Streetcar Named Desire
. But then, I miss the young Jimmy Baldwin, too.

All careers, if they are real careers—and there are not as many of these occurring as one might like to think—are stormy and dangerous, with turning points as swift and dizzying as hairbreadth curves on mountain roads. And I think that America may be the most dangerous country in the world for artists—whatever creative form they may choose. That would be all right if it were also exhilarating, but most of the time, it isn’t. It’s mostly sweat and terror. This is because the nature of the society isolates its artists so severely for their vision; penalizes them so mercilessly for their vision and endeavor; and the American form of recognition, fame and money, can be the most devastating penalty of all. This is not the artist’s fault, though I think that the artist will have to take the lead in changing this state of affairs.

The isolation that menaces all American artists is multiplied a thousand times, and becomes absolutely crucial and dangerous, for all black artists. “Know whence you came,” Sidney once said to me, and Sidney, his detractors to the contrary,
does
know whence he came. But it can become very difficult to remain in touch with all that nourishes you when you have arrived at Sidney’s eminence and are in the interesting, delicate, and terrifying position of being part of a system that you know you have to change.

Let me put it another way: I wish that both Marlon and Sidney would return to the stage, but I can certainly see why they don’t. Broadway is almost as expensive as Hollywood, is even more hazardous, is at least as incompetent, and the scripts, God knows, aren’t any better. Yet I can’t but feel that this is a great loss, both for the actor and the audience.

I will always remember seeing Sidney in
A Raisin in the Sun
. It says a great deal about Sidney, and it also says, negatively, a great deal about the
regime under which American artists work, that that play would almost certainly never have been done if Sidney had not agreed to appear in it. Sidney has a fantastic presence on the stage, a dangerous electricity that is rare indeed and lights up everything for miles around. It was a tremendous thing to watch and to be made a part of. And one of the things that made it so tremendous was the audience. Not since I was a kid in Harlem, in the days of the Lafayette Theatre, had I seen so many black people in the theater. And they were there because the life on that stage said something to them concerning their own lives. The communion between the actors and the audience was a real thing; they nourished and re-created each other. This hardly ever happens in the American theater. And this is a much more sinister fact than we would like to think. For one thing, the reaction of that audience to Sidney and to that play says a great deal about the continuing and accumulating despair of the black people in this country, who find nowhere any faint reflection of the lives they actually lead. And it is for this reason that every Negro celebrity is regarded with some distrust by black people, who have every reason in the world to feel themselves abandoned.