The Fight (5 page)

No, he was hardly surprised when his illness flared on return to the States, and he went through a week and then ten days of total detestation of himself, a fever without fantasies, an illness without terror, for he felt as if his soul had expired or, worse, slipped away. It was enough of a warning to lay a message on him. He got up from bed with the determination to learn a little about Africa before his return, a healthy impulse that brought him luck (but then, do we not gamble with the unrecognized thought that a return of our luck signifies a return of our health?). After inquiries, he went to the University Place Book Shop in New York, an operative definition of the word
warren
, up on the eighth or ninth floor of a wheezing old office building below Fourteenth Street — the smell of the catacombs in its stones — to find at exit from the elevator a stack and excelsior of books, cartons and dust where a big blond clerk with scraggly sideburns working alone assured the new customer that he could certainly afford these many books being laid on him, since he had after all been given the million, hadn’t he, a worthless excursion to describe if not for the fact that the clerk picked the books, the titles all unfamiliar.
Would there be one paragraph of radium in all this geographical, political, historical sludge? His luck came in; not a paragraph but a book:
Bantu Philosophy
by Father Tempels, a Dutch priest who had worked as missionary in the Belgian Congo and extracted the philosophy from the language of the tribes he lived among.

Given a few of his own ideas, Norman’s excitement was not small as he read
Bantu Philosophy
. For he discovered that the instinctive philosophy of African tribesmen happened to be close to his own. Bantu philosophy, he soon learned, saw humans as forces, not beings. Without putting it into words, he had always believed that. It gave a powerful shift to his thoughts. By such logic, men or women were more than the parts of themselves, which is to say more than the result of their heredity and experience. A man was not only what he contained, not only his desires, his memory, and his personality, but also the forces that came to inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead. So a man was not only himself, but the karma of all the generations past that still lived in him, not only a human with his own psyche but a part of the resonance, sympathetic or unsympathetic, of every root and thing (and witch) about him. He would take his balance, his quivering place, in a field of all the forces of the living and the dead. So the meaning of one’s life was never hard to find. One did one’s best to live in the pull of these forces in such a way as to increase one’s own force. Ideally, one would do it in harmony with the play of all forces, but the beginning of wisdom was to enrich oneself, enrich the
muntu
which was
the amount of life in oneself, the size of the human being in oneself. Crazy. We are returned to the Calvinism of the chosen where the man with most possessions is chosen, the man of force and wealth. We are certainly in the ghetto where you do not invade another turf. We are allied to every pride of property and self-enrichment. Back to the primitive sinews of capitalism! Bantu philosophy, however, is not so primitive. It may offer a more sinister vision: maybe it is nobler. For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread. It takes bravery to live with beauty or wealth if we think of them as an existence connected to the messages, the curses, and the loyalties of the dead.

In the presence of a woman who is finely dressed, an African might do more than salute the increase of power that accrues to the woman with her elaborate gown. To his eye, she would also have taken on the force that lives in the gown itself, the
kuntu
of the gown. That has its own existence. It, too, is a force in the universe of forces. The gown is like the increment in power an actor feels when he enters his role, when he senses the separate existence of the role as it comes up to him, much as if it had been
out there
waiting for him in the dark. Then, it is as if he takes on some marrow of the forgotten caves. It is why certain actors must act or go mad — they can hardly live without the clarity of that moment when the role returns.

Here is a passage from
The Palm Wine Drunkard
by Amos Tutuola:

When laughter presents such power, what are we to make of the African’s attitude toward lust, the inevitable kuntu of
fuck
— yes, every word will have its relation to the primeval elements of the universe. “The word,” says a Dogon sage named Ogotemmêli, “is water and heat. The force that carries the word comes out of the mouth in a water vapor which is both water and word.” Nommo is at once the name of the word and the spirit of water. So Nommo lives everywhere: in the vapor of the air and the pores of the earth. Since the word is equal to water, all things are effected by Nommo, the word. Even the ear becomes an organ of sex when Nommo enters: “The good word, as soon as it is received by the ear, goes directly to the sex organ where it rolls in the uterus.…”

What exhilaration! This small fine book,
Bantu Philosophy
, and then a larger work bursting with intellectual sweetmeats,
Muntu, the New African Culture
by Janheinz Jahn, is illumining his last hours in New York, his flight on the plane — a night and a day! — his second impressions of Kinshasa. It has brought him back to a recognition of his
old love for Blacks — as if the deepest ideas that ever entered his mind were there because Black existed. It has also brought back all the old fear. The mysterious genius of these rude, disruptive, and — down to it! — altogether indigestible Blacks. What noise they still made to the remains of his literary mind, what hooting, screaming and shrieking, what promise of oblivion on the turn of a card.

How his prejudices were loose. So much resentment had developed for black style, black snobbery, black rhetoric, black pimps, superfly, and all that virtuoso handling of the ho. The pride Blacks took in their skill as pimps! A wrath at the mismanagement of his own sensual existence now sat on him, a sorrow at how the generosity of his mind seemed determined to contract as he grew older. He could not really bring himself to applaud the emergence of a powerful people into the center of American life — he was envious. They had the good fortune to be born Black. And felt a private fury at the professional complacency of Black self-pity, a whole rage at the rhythmic power of those hectoring voices, a resentment at last of their values, of that eternal emphasis on centrality — “I am the real rooster on this block, the most terrible cock, the baddest fist. I’m a
down
dude. You motherfuckers better know it.”

Yet even as he indulged this envy, he felt a curious relief. For he had come to a useful recognition. When the American Black was torn out of Africa, he was ripped out of his philosophy as well. So his violence and his arrogance could be a fair subject for comprehension once more. One had only to think of the torture. Everything in African philosophy was of the root, but the philosophy had been uprooted.
What a clipped and overstimulated transplant was the American Negro. His view of life came not only from his livid experience in America but from the fragments of his lost African beliefs. So he was alienated not from one culture but from two. What idea could an Afro-American retain, then, of his heritage if not that each man seeks the maximum of force for himself? Since he lived in a field of human forces that were forever changing, and changing dramatically, even as the people he knew were killed or arrested or fell out on junk, so he had to assert himself. How else could he find life? The loss of vital force was pure loss, equal to less ego, less status, less purchase on the availability of beauty. By comparison to the American Black, a white Judeo-Christian could live through a loss of vital force and feel moral, unselfish, even saintly and an African could feel himself in balance among traditional forces. An African could support the weight of his obligation to his father because his father was one step nearer in the chain to God — that unbroken chain of lives going back to the source of creation. But the American Black was sociologically famous for the loss of his father.

No wonder their voices called attention to themselves! They spoke of a vital (if tense) force. A poor and uneducated man was nothing without that force. To the degree it lived inside him, he was full of capital, ego capital, and that was what he possessed. That was the capitalism of the poor American Black trying to accumulate more of the only wealth he could find, respect on his turf, the respect of local flunkies for the power of his soul. What a raw, searching, hustling, competitive capitalism. What a lack of profit. The establishment offered massive restraint for such massive
fevers of the ego. No surprise if tribal life in America began to live among stone walls and drugs. The drug gave magnification of the sentiment that a mighty force was still inside oneself, and the penitentiary restored the old idea that man was a force in a field of forces. If the social contract of the African restraint had been tradition, the American Black with a political ideal was obliged instead to live with revolutionary discipline. As he endured in his stone walls it became a discipline as pulverizing to the soul as the search for condition of a boxer.

Bantu Philosophy
proved a gift, but it was one a writer might not need. Not to comprehend the fight. There was now enough new intellectual baggage to miss the train. Norman would bring some of it along, and hope he was not greedy. For Heavyweight boxing was almost all black, black as Bantu. So boxing had become another key to revelations of Black, one more key to black emotion, black psychology, black love. Heavyweight boxing might also lead to the room in the underground of the world where Black kings were installed: what was Black emotion, Black psychology, Black love? Of course, to try to learn from boxers was a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Champions were great liars. They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment. There would be limits to what he could learn of Ali and Foreman by the aid of any philosophy. Still, he was grateful for the clue. Humans were not beings but forces. He would try to look at them by that light.

T
AKEN DIRECTLY
, Foreman was no small representative of vital force. He came out from the elevator dressed in embroidered bib overalls and dungaree jacket and entered the lobby of the Inter-Continental flanked by a Black on either side. He did not look like a man so much as a lion standing just as erectly as a man. He appeared sleepy but in the way of a lion digesting a carcass. His broad handsome face (not unreminiscent of a mask of Clark Gable somewhat flattened) was neither friendly nor unfriendly, rather, it was alert in the way a boxer is in some part of him alert no matter how sleepy he looks, a heightening common, perhaps, to all good athletes, so that they can pick an insect out of the air with their fingers but as easily notice the expression on some friend in the thirtieth row from ringside.

Since Norman was not often as enterprising as he ought to be, he was occasionally too forward. Having barely arrived in Kinshasa again, he did not know you were not supposed to speak to Foreman in the lobby and advanced on him with a hand out. In this moment, Bill Caplan, who
did Public Relations for Foreman, rushed up to the fighter. “He’s just come in, George,” said Bill Caplan, and made an introduction. Foreman now nodded, gave an unexpected smile, and proceeded to make his kind remark about a champ at writing, his voice surprisingly soft, as Southern as it was Texan. His eyes warmed, as if he liked the idea of writing — the news would soon come out that Foreman was himself working on a book. Then he made a curious remark one could think about for the rest of the week. It was characteristic of a great deal about Foreman. “Excuse me for not shaking hands with you,” he said in that voice so carefully muted to retain his powers, “but you see I’m keeping my hands in my pockets.”

Of course! If they were in pockets, how could he remove them? As soon ask a poet in the middle of writing a line whether coffee is taken with milk or cream. Yet Foreman made his remark in such simplicity that the thought seemed likable rather than rude. He was telling the truth. It was important to keep his hands in his pockets. Equally important to keep the world at remove. He lived in a silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep, exactly, to keep handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence. One had not seen men like that for thirty years, or was it more? Not since Norman worked for a summer in a mental hospital had he been near anyone who could stand so long without moving, hands in pockets, vaults of silence for his private chamber. He had taken
care then of catatonics who would not make a gesture from one meal to the next. One of them, hands contracted into fists, stood in the same position for months, only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant. Guards were always informing new guards that catatonics were the most dangerous of the patients. They were certainly the strongest. One did not need other attendants, however, to tell you. If a deer’s posture in the forest can say, “I am vulnerable, irreplaceable, and soon destroyed,” so the posture of a catatonic haunts the brain. “Provided I do not move,” this posture says, “all power will come to me.”