The Man Who Cried I Am (36 page)

Max wanted to be convinced that Durrell was all that he seemed to be, but inside him something persisted that said he was not. He couldn't pin down the feeling. He was conscious of waiting for something to happen.

Durrell's wife was as fair in complexion as he and that, Max thought, figured. In a society where the white female is exalted, a Negro refused a hundred and five pounds of exaltation all his own was going to get the next best thing.

One day close to noon, the number of people in Durrell's office thinning out, Max, sitting in the sun-filled window, noticed that Durrell seemed restless. He kept looking over the heads of the people he was talking to, his eyes not quite as bland as usual, seeking out a young woman in a corner. The woman, Max noticed, stood with her back to Durrell. Something inside Max quickened. Signals? Now she turned back and her eyes, too, swept above the heads that stood between her and the minister. Signals?

Max left the room. Outside in the sun he walked quickly to his rooming house. Maybe signals; if so, he didn't want to see them all. If not, fine. But Max carried his reservations with him when he left the town.

Back in New York, Max buried his reservations about Durrell. Perhaps Durrell, like others before him, would fall by the wayside if he had the kind of flaw that could wreck the whole movement. But the search for a new Negro leader went on and Reverend Paul Durrell was being selected. Max knew this when Durrell was invited to serve on the board of the NAACP. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, Max thought.

Max moved once more, to a larger place in the West Village. Perhaps the distance he now found between himself and Harlem was what brought him back to it each Saturday afternoon when he left
Pace
—that and the fact that he now had a fox, a real fox who broadcast remote from radio station WWWF in the Palm Gardens Cafe every Saturday. Killing time waiting for her to finish, he chatted with a graying Sergeant Jenkins, an aging Big Ola Mae whose jokes and gossip now came slowly. Sweet Cheeks at the Nearly All Inn was now the most pathetic of creatures, an aging homosexual. The fox was named Maida Turner and she had once been, as the phrase went, “a Negro model,” which was to say that her face was strikingly lovely, but everything else about her, unlike the white models, was full to bursting: her bust, her buttocks, her legs. She had appeared in ads for hair preparations, cigarettes and beer, and was in demand at the fashion shows sponsored by Negro women's clubs in and around Manhattan. It was this background, and a good voice and microphone poise, that had earned her the job; Maida had a women's fashion-hints show and a personality show.

Max had met her with the publication of his novel; she had been the only good thing about that book, which had been cautiously received, platitudinously reviewed and finally, unceremoniously thrust aside for the others coming up to their own publication dates. Maida had Max on her show and there was, of course, the fact that he was the first Negro hired by a major news magazine. In the course of drinks afterward—Max knew precisely the time—she thought he would be good for her career. He knew Durrell, Harry Ames and the famous gospel singer who never started her performance until the money in the box office was counted and her wages paid. He could get to people she could not. She could get new sponsors, run the show from fifteen to thirty minutes and get an increase in salary. The arrangement had been mutual. Max was tired of the parties, the word games, the maneuverings. It would be nice to have someone to see and go out with regularly. For a few contacts. But all life was, one way or another, a deal.

Quite by accident, on Saturday while he was waiting for Maida to finish her show, he discovered that a new group had come to Harlem. Max had a drink while waiting for Maida's show to go on. He always left her in the booth taking a final swallow of her gin and tonic, wetting her lips and glancing at the clock. He stepped into the street and strode the few steps to the corner, Harlem Square, Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. He glanced southward, toward the Theresa Hotel, and stopped dead still. The orator there looked familiar. He was a little man, very dark and old, and he wore, Max could see, a beret, a zoot suit, both faded. Professor Bazzam? Max crossed the street and stood at the rear of the crowd. Sure, it was the Professor, wasn't it? But he couldn't hold the people. They kept coming up and slipping away; Max slipped away with them. Back on the side of the street he had left, another orator, a dirty little American flag drooped listlessy over his box, delivered an illiterate diatribe against Jews, white men in general, and other Negroes; he spoke with a West Indian accent. “A Geechee,” someone in the crowd said.

Across the street, in front of Micheaux's bookshop, another group caught Max's attention. The men wore neat dark suits; their hair, to a man, was neatly barbered and their shoes were shined. The man who was speaking to them looked vaguely familiar to Max that first day, but everyone called him Minister Q of the Black Muslims. It was in a way laughable at first; each orator tried to outdo the others with gimmicks—African robes, berets, tuxedos. The people said that Minister Q's bag was “super cool.”

But with each successive Saturday, Minister Q was drawing the people away from the other orators who, cursing, would snatch the flags off their boxes and stuff them in their pockets and join the crowds swarming across the street to hear him. More and more people were doing more listening than laughing. One Saturday when Maida had finished her show and was standing beside Max, she said, “I want him on my show. That man is talking a whole lot of sense.”

Minister Q was an untainted, a pure African Negro such as is seldom seen in the United States today. Nothing Indian or white seemed ever to have touched his genes. He was all muscle and three yards wide; when he goes, Max thought, they'll have to make a special coffin for him. The Minister was quick on his feet. Later he confided to Max and Maida: “When I was younger I could Lindy all night, wear out four or five partners. I could do everything all night—and did it. Then I've been a bouncer and I worked as a molder in a foundry, you know, going all day like a slave, each mold weighing seventy-five pounds, and shaking out too. I thought I was pretty great because I could turn out more molds per day than any other man in the place. Those white devils just had a good thing and knew it.”

Minister Q was talking in his neat little office in the mosque. Maida was taking notes; Max was remembering, and now he remembered who Minister Q had been. “In the old days, before I found Allah, I was also a boxer.”

Of course, Max thought. Kid Go-Go, a middleweight, a forerunner of Sugar Ray. Even then—what had he been, about sixteen or seventeen? Even then he had the build of a heavyweight from the torso up. He'd never got a chance at the title. The last ten seconds of each round, the Kid had gone after his man without letup, hooking, jabbing, crossing, loosing a series of blinding fast combinations. Now the Kid—Minister Q—had a bottom lip that splayed out while the upper one protested swollenly. “I hadn't found Allah then,” the Minister went on, “but I had sense enough to know that I was being exploited. I fought the best of them, Graziano, La-Motta, and never got anywhere near the crown. I got out. Women, whiskey, horses, numbers, just wasting my life and didn't know it. I found Allah when I was in state prison for pushing junk. I don't try to hide it. I know what my life was and I know what it is
now
. And I know the whys and wherefores.”

Minister Q could have been the same age as Durrell, but he didn't look it. Now the Minister looked at them from across his little desk. “And you both work for them, the white devils.” He placed his broad, blunt fingers together. “May Allah be with you. May Allah watch over you.”

Where Durrell employed fanciful imagery and rhetoric, Minister Q preached the history, economics and religion of race relations; he preached a message so harsh that it hurt to listen to it. Max saw the shamed faces of the men in the crowd Saturday after Saturday. The Minister would raise his heavily muscled arms that had driven opponents from one corner to another and bring them down on the rostrum like twin judo chops. The crowd would flinch.

The Saturday Minister Q first came to prominence, Max and Maida were in his street corner audience.

The Minister said: “Those white devils took away our history. They hid the records and lied to us. We have a history, but no white man is going to reveal it. We have to dig it out ourselves and the work is not hard, brothers. That work is
sweet!
Sweet to learn of old and mighty empires, of kings and princes of such influence that it reached into Europe where the white man slumbered in his Dark Ages. Yes! That's the way it was! When he woke from slumber he grabbed Africa, ripped us from her and with his profits—from slave profits—he began his industrialization. Europe was already in slavery, they didn't need Africans. A serf was a slave! A serf, I tell you, was a slave! So we came here. They raped our women and over the generations bent the minds of our children so that only now, today! are they beginning to grasp the truth about the white devils of this society of his called America. Don't tell me about those white devils! There are no good white men! None!”

Max could feel a shiver run through the crowd. “Tell 'em, Minister!
Tell 'em!
”

“How many of you here,” Minister Q went on, “own one single brick in the whole of Harlem? How many? Not a single hand, not a finger, and do you know, brothers, that is exactly why you're here this afternoon! And here are all the so-called Negroes in America getting excited about dee-segreeegation. Why, in Allah's name,
why?
” The Minister flung his arms outward in mighty protest. “We don't want to be with them! We want our own land. They owe it to us. They've bled you [powerful blunt finger pointing at the crowd], your fathers, your grandfathers, your great-grandfathers, your great-great-grandfathers, to
death!
Don't you know that this country is based on the labors of the black man? They took the strength and wisdom that was ours and ground it under cotton patches, forced it to open its legs under magnolia trees. Allah endowed us with wisdom, strength and goodness. They tried to blot out our wisdom and the work made our strength ten times what it was. Listen: little Negro babies—” Here the Minister paused. “Little Negro babies
walk
sooner than little white babies. What does that mean? Strength. Now, brothers, the time for goodness is past. Allah
knows
the time for goodness is past. Look at the mark of the white man around you: those cops with those cannons on their hips; look at your skins, brown, yellow, white, tan—where did all the
black
go? You know: it went in the bedrooms, on the slave ships, in the fields, in the big houses—” Minister Q paused again: no sweat ever came to his face; he might have been created around a cake of black ice. “Now look at you. Tainted, owning nothing, cowed, pride in nothing, dignity in hitting the numbers or in drinking two fifths of the white devils' liquor.” The Minister set himself. “The time for that is past. Brothers, watch your women! Take your children in hand so they might have the dignity you've lost. Above all, watch the white devil. Too long has he marched back and forth across this land stealing, raping and murdering. I call now for black manhood. Dignity. Pride. Don't turn the other cheek any more. Defend yourselves, strike back and when you do, strike to hurt, strike to maim, strike to—”

The crowd leaned toward him waiting for the word. But Minister Q smiled; he would not say it. He did not have to say it. His meaning was clear. “Allah,” he said, “calls upon you to defend what is yours—yourself, your family, your dignity.” Long moments after he had climbed down from the platform, the crowd stood motionless, then it broke into cheers.

That night on television Max heard the commentators:

“The leader of an anti-white group, who calls himself Minister Q, today advocated the killing of white men …”

“Race hatred today reared its ugly head in Harlem …”

Max laughed. How self-righteous they had become all of a sudden. White people didn't want to be hated; it was all right for them to hate, but to be hated in return, virulently hated—it stunned them.

America had bred this time, Max mused, this time and people like Durrell and Minister Q. America bred them as surely as it bred sweet corn and grapefruit. Durrell's people came from the church-going middle class; Minister Q's from the muddiest backwashes of Negro life. The white man was going to have some choice to make between them, but he would, Max knew, choose to deal with the remembered image, and that would be Durrell.

With the fall, Max went South again, this time to a university town. For the first time in his life he saw a white mob howling and bleating, snarling and tearing. It's object was a lone, skinny, unattractive Negro girl who had been admitted as a freshman. During the war Max thought if he got out of it alive, he would never again know fear. Anger he had known.

He knew a new anger and a new fear as he listened to the coed tell her parents and uncles and cousins about the first day. Even now in the cities across the land the newspapers would be carrying pictures and the wire service stories. There were still strings and gobs of spit in the coed's hair that she hadn't managed to clean out. Max thought: They demand so much, the white people, from each and every one of us. These were the people so many white writers were proud of. Where were those lone, sensitive, heroic white Southern men, a little apart from the rest, a little unbalanced, gentle with animals and women, descendants of Civil War heroes and pioneers who had wrested giant homesteads from the earth?
Where were they?
And what were their offspring learning in their schools and colleges fretted with magnolias, azaleas and cypresses?

The older people, clucking and frowning, the women crying softly, fed the shocked coed, washed her hair and put her to bed. Among the men no word was spoken, but suddenly, lifted heavily from each car in the driveway, came a rifle or shotgun, boxes of ammunition. Standing at a window, Max could see them loading their guns, smoking, exchanging brief words with each other and glancing slowly up and down the nearby road. A pair of mockingbirds swooped across the yard as dusk came slowly and Max, still at the window, thought once again of Southern writers. The good ones, the truthful ones, were always the women. The women the Southern gentlemen had always protected. Perhaps it was the women of both races who would have to clean up the mess. Another car pulled into the driveway, the men paying it no attention because they knew the sound of its motor, knew its color a half-mile off on a straight stretch of road. The newcomer also had a rifle over which, coming out of the car, bounded an alert mongrel bird dog. Max watched in silent admiration. The men split up and soon vanished into the lengthening shadows, their guns held gently in the crooks of their arms. Somehow, there was no doubt that the girl would go back the next day; it was as if each relative knew that fact for himself and extended it to everyone containing his blood. Max sat in the living room. No white reporter could have been able to do this; he was not going to miss any of it. The relatives tiptoed through the house, those who stayed up. Once in a while Max joined the guards in the kitchen for coffee.