The Man Who Cried I Am (35 page)

On his own desk Max found material on the Dred Scott decision and Chief Justice R. B. Taney's papers about that decision which he had supported. There was also background material on the Supreme Court's May 17 ruling on education and recreation. Devoe had said, “I bet you know a lot about this stuff, but bring it back to the top. We've got researchers going on Taney's background and Warren's background. We may do four hundred lines on the Chief Justices or on the two Courts. Also the Negro mood at those times. In case nobody told you, we lock it up by Friday night or, at the latest, Saturday afternoon. For the late-breaking stuff, we can even push until Sunday night, but we don't like to. Overseas copy is due in here on Thursday; if it's important, we can bend it until Saturday, but we don't like to do that either. Today's Monday. By Wednesday we should know just what kind of story we're going to wring out of the material you have there. Just holler if you want anything. Tony there'll see that you get it. She knows the ropes. Hear you just got back from Paris. Great town, isn't it? We've got a bureau there. How's your French?”

Devoe hesitated a moment, hoping he hadn't seemed too forceful; just forceful enough. Had to find the right balance. It wasn't easy being boss of a guy with four novels under his belt and a hitch at the
Century
and a year in Paris.

When Devoe left, Max thumbed through the material. So, he thought, this was one of the citadels of white power, and here I am, right in the middle of it, making everyone sweat. How far can I go? How wide can I swing? That his very presence had put a number of people on the defensive was obvious; that left the offense to him, but he was going to use that offensive sparingly. He hoped Shea had schooled the powers at
Pace
in Maxlore; he hoped Shea had told them that he wasn't very likely to take even a little teeny bit of crap. A couple of dollars in the bank always reinforced that feeling, that and the sense of changing times and knowing that Berg would take him back any time he got fed up with The Magazine.

As the weeks passed, Max found himself being invited down the street to the Warriston for drinks or lunch with other people in the office. The calls from Shea (intended, Max guessed, to help ease him into
Pace
's groove) grew less frequent On the whole Max spent his time quietly, fixing up his apartment, making notes for another novel, playing records and sleeping. It was as though he was bored with New York. True, he made his duty visits to Zutkin and Granville Bryant, and passed along news of Harry and his work. Several times, without success, Max tried to reach Regina. When he finally did, she seemed rattled and asked if she could call him back, but she didn't. Max guessed that she had a lover with her. It was late in August before she called and, surprisingly, asked if she might come to his apartment.

It was a different Regina who walked in and embraced him, rested momentarily in his arms. Then Max gave her a drink. “Well, did you?” she asked.

“Did I what?” He couldn't stop looking at her; he had never seen her look so good.

“Get the clap in Paris?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “I didn't.”

“You look well rested, Max.”

“I feel just fine.” She looked cool and evenly tanned. A light, summer perfume hung about her and edges of her hair had been bleached by the sun. Max started to remember things he shouldn't.

Regina blew out a large cloud of cigarette smoke from behind which, partially obscured, she asked, “How's your love life, Max?”

“Kind of dull since I've been back. I suppose it'll happen if it's meant to. But tell me about yourself. You look fantastic.”

“Don't use that tone of voice, Max. I know that tone.”

“It slipped.”

“Okay,” she smiled. “Max, I'm in love. That's supposed to make one look good, isn't it?”

“They tell me. Anybody I know?”

“No. I'd like you not to call me anymore, all right?”

“Sure. Anything you say. That's a whole lot of love you've got there.”

Regina opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and then said, “It's good for me. He's a little weak in some ways. I can help him. I told you once that was important for me.”

“Yes.” Looking through the window Max could see that the sky was covered with a silver sheen. Moisture in the air; humidity. “I'm glad everything's okay for you. I worried while I was away.”

“I thought you might. But it's all right. I'm over everything. Really. Why do I feel guilty? You don't love me, do you, Max?”

“No, Reg.”

“Okay then. I'm' a big girl now. Max, I am so proud of what you've done with your life. I never think of you without thinking of beans and ham hocks. I wish we could be friends forever and ever. But I'd lose this man if he even thought—well, you know how some men are.”

“Yes, I know.”

Regina asked about the new job, then they smoked and drank in silence. She slid one tanned leg over the other; she wasn't wearing stockings. Max looked up quickly. Had he been hearing signals? She had mentioned guilt. Maybe she had come to wash it away. But then, would she feel guilty with her guy? “Stay,” he said at last. Regina looked at him, blinking her gray eyes once. “Welcome me back home.”

“I thought you might ask,” she said. “Thanks for the invitation. I will. The last time. The goodbye. You refused me the last time I offered.”

Max made more drinks and Regina put on records. He had heard correctly, Max thought. How do people make out who don't know how to send and receive signals? They went to bed at midnight. In the morning Max woke to find coffee on and her note. She thanked him for having contributed his protein to the strength of the baby, now almost two months old; the marriage was taking place in three days. She hoped he wouldn't think her horrible but she had wanted to share something important with him, she owed him so much and, in a way, loved him so much. Now, she might daydream years hence, when looking at her child, that Max had contributed, not to the skin or face or anything superficial, but to the interior, the bones, perhaps the heart. She thanked him for asking her, thus saving her from having to ask him. She would think of him forever and wished him long life, luck and love.

Max read the note a couple of times while he was drinking the coffee and thought, I get the ass-end of everything on the way to someplace else.

He was still thinking of her note when he arrived at the office. He wondered how many white women who had married white men had had Negro lovers and kept that secret locked in their hearts? Did they never, in some delicious moment of sleep, cry out—to be questioned in the morning, as the husbands threw coffee and toast at them and punched the kids in the mouth? How many, tortured with that secret, had finally confessed it, expecting tenderness and understanding and promptly finding themselves divorced, if they were still alive? How many had made the confession, stayed married and suffered only when the husbands, thinking themselves unequal to that faceless Negro ex-lover, heaped the ashes of scorn on their heads? How many secretaries or researchers or research assistants he was now looking at would leave the office at five o'clock and meet a Negro lover in the Village? How many Negro men would be in white women's beds tonight, or vice versa? All Max knew was that he had never met another Negro man who had not slept with at least one white woman.

His door opened behind him. Shea, smiling, said, “You start to earn your money now.”

Max looked around and grinned. It was true;
Pace
hadn't used the material Max had written on Taney and Warren and their Courts. And he hadn't done much of anything else except to observe.

“Dempsey wants to see us. There's some desegregation trouble in Delaware. You've been tagged.” Dempsey handed Max his press and cable cards. “The townspeople are saying no to desegregation; the school officials say yes. The people are stoning the Negro kids. You'll meet a man from the Washington bureau. Work with him.”

“We need the copy by Friday noon, Max,” Devoe said.

Irritably Shea said, “He knows that, Mannie.”

“I suspect,” Dempsey said, “that the lawbreakers will look at the color of your skin before they look at your credentials, so be cautious.”

“Be careful, Max. Keep your eyes open,” Shea added.

Max was surprised at the concern he heard in Shea's voice. “Don't worry. I start earning the money now.”

The Delaware incident, which ended with the mayor of the town pledging no integration during his tenure, was quickly followed by a brief action in a small Tennessee town. The mayor of that town, however, together with the chief of police, had met a mob on a downtown street, told them that there would be compliance with the new law, and the mob had melted away. Two men, one with a .38 gripped in a sweating fist, the other with a 12-gauge shotgun previously used for rabbit, squirrel and bird, both dribbling a bit in their pants, had taken the long walk, and won. But without bloodshed, Max thought, those two men,
men
, would soon be forgotten.

Then 1954 was over. The first editions of the magazines for the new year blithely predicted real outbreaks of violence for 1955. Max wrote a 300-line story about the desegregation scene for next fall, noting the hard-core resistance states and the few areas where compliance had been indicated by the school boards and the citizenry. On the whole, moving into spring, it looked as though the problem of desegregation would smoulder for a long time and not be as explosive as Dempsey had thought. Then came Altea and the Reverend Paul Durrell, and Max was quickly pulled off general writing in National Affairs and dispatched west.

Negroes in the small, South-like border town had attempted to secure from the school board a pledge for integration on all school levels for the coming fall. Now they were launching a city-wide boycott of the public transportation system and department stores. The first week the boycott stuttered, slowed and dribbled along, and there was spotty news coverage. Who'd ever heard of Negroes using a boycott as a weapon? But by the end of the second week, the area bureau chief called New York to say that the boycott was becoming effective. Streetcars passing through Negro neighborhoods were empty. Stores where the bulk of the Negro middle class bought were half empty on Fridays and Saturdays. The rednecks and country Negroes couldn't begin to take up the slack because they didn't make that kind of money; they were also used to buying in the smaller stores. The Altea Negroes had set up an organization, the Altea Advancement Group, and were cooperating with it 100 per cent. The streetcar company and mercantile losses were reported up to $75,000 going into the third week of the boycott, which was being led by a middle-aged minister, whose name was Paul Durrell.

In the
Pace
staff meetings it had been decided that here was a new Negro leader, perhaps better fit for the times than the old ones guiding the quiet fortunes of the NAACP and the National Urban League. But Max realized that for Dempsey and Shea, Durrell was the old and comforting image of the Negro preacher as a leader.

Altea was a less than ordinary town. The road from the airport was lined with tall, slender pines, long and lean. The land was tufted with withered, scraggly hunks of grass, as though something in its history had trod its surface and left it restless and resisting the seeds that had been dropped into it.

For the
Century
the chief target of concern had been the already-lynched Negro. But there was no lynched Negro here, no quiet, head-bowed black folks slipping in and out of the shadows or sitting around Civil War memorials, or when there were no shadows, crossing the silent streets ablaze with the white light of a midday sun hoping they would go unnoticed by the whites. Here in Altea, the Negroes were on the offensive.

Max did not seek to see Durrell at once. Instead he stood around outside the drab, brown-shingled church where the Negroes waited for rides in private cars and trucks. Max had never seen such confidence in so many black faces. But that confidence was not boisterously expressed; it was quiet and sure. Patient, now that something concrete was at hand. The area where they waited for the cars and trucks, all in a neat line, hummed with the idling of dozens of engines; the sharp odor of gas and oil hung in the air.

The people laughed at the cops and nudged each other when white female employers drove to the car pool to pick up their maids and cooks. The white women, in curlers and coats over their gowns or pajamas, ducked when photographers rushed to take their pictures. There was enough ignominy in having to transport the help; why have it recorded to remind people in the future just when the Old System started to crumble? Crumble, that was what everyone felt. The Old System was going. The Old Ark's A-moverin'. Going with every shift of the cars' gears, with every tread of every foot, with every empty streetcar and department store, with every old sister and brother who was hoofing it, delighted that before they died they'd been given a chance to protest.

Durrell wore a wide-brimed hat and a genteel suit that could almost have been zoot. That almost put Max off; in Negro communities one saw and heard so much about Negro preachers that was both laughable and charlatanic. Durrell spoke with a soft upland Louisiana accent. A shade or two lighter and he could have gone
passé blanc
. He was a thin man of medium size and his face was sharply angled as if some Choctaw ancestor were breaking through. When he spoke, his words came slowly and deliberately and softly, as if belying some inner violence. Durrell called the men, whatever their ages, “brother.” He called the women, old and young alike, “sister.” He listened to the complaints of his people with bowed head, nodding once in a while, his face impassive, as if hewn from the meat of a buckeye. Durrell walked the streets with his people; he shared their car pools and joked with them. The older people, the ones used to having their preachers for leaders, idolized him; but the younger people, even though they were caught up in the boycott (it suited them and it was about time), were watching and waiting. They knew that generation upon generation of preachers had led their fathers and fathers' fathers into dead end after dead end. They did not plan such an abysmal journey in their time.