The Man Who Cried I Am (42 page)

Or words to that effect.

Max stopped at a bar and ordered another stinger. He drank half of it, then called Zutkin at home. “Bernard,” he said. “What's in this for you?”

At home, Zutkin smiled. A little slow, but in another few hundred years Max would make a good Jew. “Ah, Max. What's in it for me? You mean what's really in it for me?”

“Yes, man, that's why I'm calling.”

“Patriotism. You wouldn't buy that, would you?”

“Bernard, it's like this—”

“I didn't think so, Max. Money—”

“Bernard, I know there's no money involved. Look, almost twenty years of knowing each other through good and evil times. I have a right to know
why me?
”

“Jesus, Max. You really examine a gift horse, don't you?”

“Damn it, I gotta know if it is a gift horse or not. Besides,” Max said, doggedly, “I want to know.”

“It's very simple—”

“I'm listening.”

“Are you listening carefully? Want to come over for some of Lottie's tea?”

“No. I've got to get back. Are you going to tell me?”

“As I said, it's simple. We need each other. Got the picture?
We need each other.
”

“I thought it was something like that. I'm glad I called.” Yes, there was always something.

“I wondered when you would.”

“Bastard. You white folks are something else, Bernard.”

“Sure. Listen. The tea is really good. Lottie would put some whiskey in it. She likes you. Can't imagine why.”

“I've got to go.”

“It's simple, Max, but important.”

“Yes, I know.”

And I also know that I am not free and never have been. No, people don't do things for nothing; there's always something they want. Always.

He would have been freer on the Lagos desk, he told himself, as he hung up, walked past his half-finished drink and went back into the street. He would have been away from New York, free to act on his own more rather than less. Perhaps there are degrees of freedom. He would have been guided only by occasional cables and his own conscience. That was half the battle, getting away from the hectic G
ET A
N
EGRO
demands being brought on by the times, which in some quarters, particularly the press, always ready with a name for anything, was being called the Negro Revolution.

Hullo, Max
.

Back are you?

Never been away. How can the Saminone ever be away?

Get the hell away from me
.

Now, boy, simmer yourself down. Just wanted to 'mind you that it was you whut wanted back in
.

Shut up
.

Beggin' around them offices, you hat in you hand, feared they was gonna turn you 'way, and they surely did
.

Shut
up,
I said
.

It was you whut grabbed that slave at the
Century
and then the one at
Pace,
gettin' all that white man's sal're. Tee hee
.

Why not? I deserved it. I worked hard. I earned every penny of that money
.

Oops! Don't get salty now. It was
you
took all 'em trophies and plaques wit dat shit writ all over 'em, and you knew in you heart that they give 'em to you 'cause you was
back in;
a black-ass nigger, but back in all th' same
.

How does a man trap himself so completely?

Is you askin'?

Yes, I'm asking
.

Pride, pride, turrible pride
.

You've got to do better than that
.

Oh, no I don't. You so goddamn busy tryin' t' prove you am
.

You were talking about pride
.

The same thing, burr-head, the same goddamn thing. Hee, haw … safe an' secure from all alarm, leaning, leaning
…

Motherbugger, you
.

Aw hell. Here we goes agin
.

24

WASHINGTON, D.C.

In swift succession Max saw Dempsey, Dempsey received a phone call from the White House, and Max found himself on a plane for Washington to see the President. He had almost walked into a trap, he told himself. He saw the Africa desk slipping out of his grasp, and his future in Washington unsure. Maybe he was all for the cause now, and in full accord with Zutkin's idea that they needed each other. But who knew about next week? He recalled the Negro who had served in the White House during the last Administration and how even the secretaries had refused to work for him. That man had been used very little; he hadn't even been a good figurehead, for the Administration seldom trotted him out. This, however, was supposed to be a new era. He'd see. He'd asked for a leave of only five months to feel the new job out, and Dempsey agreed.

Max had last gone to Washington by train many years ago; he hadn't liked Washington then. It had been Jim Crow for much too long, and if J.C. was virulent in the nation's capital, did it not have the excuse to run rampant throughout the country? On that last trip Max had been on his way to the South; he took the Jim Crow train at Washington. You did that as a matter of course then, because the railroad companies went right along with the Southerners' programs. From Washington the trains plunged southward over the blood-red fields, the crowded Negro cars filled with people carrying bag and box lunches. No one wanted to suffer that final indignity of sitting behind the segregated green curtain in the dining room out of sight of the white diners. In those days you paid your money, but you had no choice. Max had known an endless number of Negroes who had come to the capital from the Deep South and, finding it too much the way it had been back home, struggled the few hundred miles farther north, if they could. Washington not only had a southern exposure, it had been controlled by Southern legislators whose politics both decimated and dominated the land. In those days it had been commonplace for them to stand in the Senate or House and say “nigger” while everyone pretended not to hear.
That
Washington pressed against the memory now as a point of specific reference. Now the trains ran southward without Negro sections, without the green curtain in the dining room; now, if a Southerner even said “nigra” in either House, he was subject to loud and immediate correction from the gallery, or from the legislators themselves—and quite possibly, Max hoped, a chiding word or two from the President.

This Washington was new indeed. Perhaps it was because of the President, who rose tall and smiling as Max entered his office that afternoon. Max had seen him in person only once before. That was during the campaign when he held a rally on upper Broadway in New York. He seemed golden then with the summer's sun, and he smiled down at the housewives and joked with them; he reached over white people to shake hands with black people, all the while nodding his large, almost brutally square head.

Now, Max took the President's hand and could not help smiling. “Let's sit over here,” the President said, gesturing to a couch with one hand and stroking his rib cage just inside his jacket with the other, as Max had seen him do many, many times on television. “How was your flight down, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Max said. “It was all right.”

“You look bigger on the dust jackets of your books, Mr. Reddick. Is that calculated?”

“No,” Max said with a smile and wondering which of his books the President had read.

“You come highly, very highly, recommended, Mr. Reddick. I have the greatest admiration for Julian Berg and Bernard Zutkin. And Oscar Dempsey tells me that
Pace
owes much of its preeminence in reporting civil rights to you.”

“Dempsey had to be willing to gain that position, Mr. President.”

“Yes, well, the coverage is good, quite good. I've had some journalistic experience myself, you know. Dempsey says you're free to join us, but that you have some reluctance. Now, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Reddick.”

“Indecision is a better word, Mr. President. I want to do what I can to help—especially in this area. At the same time, I have to be concerned with my own future, my own work.”

“What do you propose?”

“Dempsey has given me five months leave. That ought to tell both of us about the future—whether you'll want me to stay—”

“I understand.”

Max went on: “While I am honored that my friends thought enough of me to recommend me, and that you want me to be here, and while I believe in your program, staking what future I may have on someone else's four years is not the kind of gambling that I, as a Negro, can afford. That's the heritage of the lack of equal opportunity you've pledged to improve.”

The President smiled and Max followed his eyes to the wide expanse of the White House lawn. “Say, did you vote Democrat?” the President asked as he toyed with a cigar case. “It's true that we are given four years at a time, Mr. Reddick, but we owe it to our people, who are gamblers in a sense, to give them the best we can during the time and for the future. I know you're not unaware of that.”

“No, sir, I'm not.”

“I appreciate your loyalty to Dempsey, and I can understand your eagerness to be in Africa; it is a very exciting place—but we think Washington is, too. We can promise you vigorous activity for however long you choose to stay, and if you're the kind of man I think you are, that other people say you are, then I'm not worried—you'll be around long after your five-month tryout period.” The President stood; the interview was over. At the door the President said, “Mrs. Agnew, my secretary, will get you set up across the street, and the other fellows, Gus Carrigan and Jim Bonnard, will take you in hand. We'll get together in a week or so.”

The day Max took a small flat on Fairmont Street, not far from Howard University, the Civil War Centennial Commission announced that it would maintain segregated facilities for the observances of the celebrations. Max hustled to his office in the Executive Office Building. Surely, now that he was here, and the announcement was still echoing around the land, the President would take some action. Hell, he had to. Who was the Civil War all about, anyway? You couldn't properly have that kind of celebration without Negroes. And surely, you couldn't honor the one-hundredth anniversary of an event and not want to discover that some improvements had been made. Hadn't those four years and all those dead counted for something? Max laughed. The Union had almost had Russia as an ally then, just as the South and England were exchanging signals. All over colored people, but the white people had forgotten that; they were always forgetting. Max began his paper with Lincoln's statement that, had it not been for black troops, the Union could not have won the war.

Jim Bonnard was tall and thin; his elbows and knees seemed to pierce the very cloth that covered them. He had a cold, sharp sense of humor, and drank hard. He was an excellent writer, Max knew from his novels. Bonnard's face showed his drinking; his complexion was like yellow paste. Gus Carrigan was also tall and thin. He was dry and humorless and always enveloped in invisible scholar's robes. Bonnard, despite a thorough education, had remained a man of the street. Carrigan might have been cut from white marble—or ice. His eyes were made tiny by the horn-rimmed glasses that encapsuled them. He had a full head of dark blond hair; very little remained of Bonnard's brown hair. Carrigan's view was the long one, the highway of history, but Bonnard moved with the crises of the moment.

Now, they were both reading Max's paper on the Centennial. Bonnard, puffing hard at his cigarette, looked up. “Did Lincoln really say that?”

“You could look it up,” Max said.

“Why haven't we used it before?” Bonnard asked, looking from Max to Carrigan. “It puts the whole thing into some kind of focus, doesn't it, Gus?”

“I'll give it to the President,” Carrigan said. He turned to Max. “Well, how's it going?”

“It's all right,” Max said, “but it would be better if I knew precisely what I'm to do and when.”

Bonnard laughed.

Carrigan smiled. “When it comes, it'll come with a rush. In the meantime, I'd like to get your views on what's going on in the Negro community.”

“My views?” Max asked somewhat incredulously.

“Yes,” Carrigan said. His eyes never reveal anything, Max thought.

“All right,” Max said, suddenly conscious of being on guard.

“Well, let's have some tea in,” Carrigan said. “How's your time, Jim?”

“Time I got plenty of today. Tea and talk it is. Save the Union.”

It was clear to Max that Carrigan was the boss of the writing team. Both men had been with the President since the start of his campaign. Okay, Max thought. His eyes roamed to the windows. He could see Pennsylvania Avenue and the tourists along the fence, Lafayette Square and behind it, St. John's church. My God, he wondered, do I really have to tell them the way it is on the other side of the tracks? Can they be
here
, in this day and age and
not
know something about the way it is? Yes, he could talk generally, pull together what the black man in the street was saying; that he could do.

The Negro communty, he told them, expected the President to live up to his campaign promises to them. The community was tired, sick and tired, the phrase went, of candidates coming into the community, shaking hands and making promises they never delivered. Pressure was mounting already. Negroes believed he would do what he said, but too many whites were fearful that he would keep those promises. The President was going to have to do, or pressure would make him do. Negroes were tired of asking. The signs were obvious; a Minister Q does not appear unless there is a need, nor does a Paul Durrell, not to mention the others.

“Is Minister Q for real?” Bonnard asked.

“Just as real as Jim Eastland,” Max countered. “He has the confidence of many a Negro—and there are more Negroes who agree privately with him than you can guess.”