The Man Who Cried I Am (53 page)

1—Capital region

2—Northeast region

3—Southeast region

4—Great Lakes Region

5—South central region

6—Deep South region

7—Deep South region II

8—Great Plains, Rocky Mountain region

9—Southwest region

10—a, b—West Coast region

No attempt will be made to seal off the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Secretary, Department of Interior

Combined Memo: Department of Justice

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Central Intelligence Agency

There are 12 major Minority organizations and all are familiar to the 22 million. Dossiers have been compiled on the leaders of the organizations, and can be studied in Washington. The material contained in many of the dossiers, and our threat to reveal that material, has considerably held in check the activities of some of the leaders. Leaders who do not have such usable material in their dossiers have been approached to take Government posts, mostly as ambassadors and primarily in African countries. The promise of these positions also has materially contributed to a temporary slow-down of Minority activities. However, we do not expect these slow-downs to be of long duration, because there are always new and dissident elements joining these organizations, with the potential power to replace the old leaders. All organizations and their leaders are under constant, 24-hour surveillance. The organizations are:

1—The Black Muslims

2—Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

3—Congress of Racial Equality

4—Uhuru Movement

5—Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL)

6—Freedom Now Party (FNP)

7—United Black Nationalists of America (UBNA)

8—The New Pan-African Movement (TNPAM)

9—Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

10—The National Urban League (NUL)

11—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

12—Committee on Racial and Religious Progress (CORARP)

NOTE
: At the appropriate time, to be designated by the President, the leaders of some of these organizations are to be detained
ONLY WHEN IT IS CLEAR THAT THEY CANNOT PREVENT THE EMERGENCY
, working with local public officials during the first critical hours. All other leaders are to be detained at once. Compiled lists of Minority leaders have been readied at the National Data Computer Center. It is necessary to use the Minority leaders designated by the President in much the same manner in which we use Minority members who are agents with C
ENTRAL
and F
EDERAL
, and we cannot, until there is no alternative, reveal K
ING
A
LFRED
in all its aspects. Minority members of Congress will be unseated at once. This move is not without precedent in American history.

Attorney General

Preliminary Memo: Department of Defense

This memo is being submitted in lieu of a full report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That report is now in preparation. There will be many cities where the Minority will be able to put into the street a superior number of people with a desperate and dangerous will. He will be a formidable enemy, for he is bound to the Continent by heritage and knows that political asylum will not be available to him in other countries. The greatest concentration of the Minority is in the Deep South, the Eastern seaboard, the Great Lakes region and the West Coast. While the national population exceeds that of the Minority by more than ten times, we must realistically take into account the following:

1—An estimated 40–50 percent of the white population will not, for various reasons, engage the Minority during an Emergency.

2—American Armed Forces are spread around the world. A break-out of war abroad means fewer troops at home to handle the Emergency.

3—Local law enforcement officials must contain the Emergency until help arrives, though it may mean fighting a superior force. New York City, for example, has a 25,000-man police force, but there are about one million Minority members in the city.

We are confident that the Minority could hold any city it took for only a few hours. The lack of weapons, facilities, logistics—all put the Mininority at a final disadvantage.

Since the Korean War, this Department has shifted Minority members of the Armed Forces to areas where combat is most likely to occur, with the aim of eliminating, through combat, as many combat-trained Minority servicemen as possible. Today the ratio of Minority member combat deaths in Vietnam, where they are serving as “advisers,” is twice as high as the Minority population ratio to the rest of America. Below is the timetable for K
ING
A
LFRED
as tentatively suggested by the
JCS
who recommend that the operation be made over a period of eight hours:

1. Local police and Minority leaders in action to head off the Emergency.

2. Countdown to eight hours begins at the moment the President determines the Emergency to be:

A. National

B. Coordinated

C. Of Long Duration

8th Hour

‘O' Committee Report:

Survey shows that, during a six-year period, Production created 9,000,000 objects, or 1,500,000 each year. Production could not dispose of the containers, which proved a bottleneck. However, that was almost 20 years ago. We suggest that vaporization techniques be employed to overcome the Production problems inherent in K
ING
A
LFRED
.

Secretary of Defense

Max smoked and read, read and smoked until his mouth began to taste like wool and when he finally pushed King Alfred from him, he felt exhausted, as if he had been running beneath a gigantic, unblinking eye that had watched his every move and determined just when movement should stop.

Yeah. Jaja had done his work well. He could have embarrassed and startled a lot of people, blacks and whites, but you have to weed a garden for the flowers to grow. Those dossiers, he knew pretty much what was in them. Well, he had known it; there are always dues to pay. A smoldering anger coursed through Max's stomach. Yes, those leaders clearly had left themselves vulnerable, vulnerable for the hunters who, for a generation and more, sought Communists with such vehemence that they skillfully obscured the growth and power of fascism. How black skins stirred fascists! Perhaps because it was the most identifiable kind of skin; you didn't have to wait until you got up close to see whether a nose was hooked or not; a black skin you could see for a block away. And in the face of the revelations in Jaja's papers, Harry and Jaja both, made giddy by the presence of that massive, killing evil, had dared to toy with it; had dared to set their pitiable little egos down before that hideous juggernaut. And they had hoped to live. That hope had revealed their inability to accurately measure what was readily measurable. Jaja for greed, and you, Harry, it's just starting to come. They didn't let their minds go out.

They did not let their minds go out to picture the instability of what seems static; they did not see planets colliding with each other, or picture Sahara or Kalahari as lakes, or picture plains where the Alps, Andes and Rockies now stand; nor did they picture oceans above the sands that crunch softly beneath the feet in the sweet-smelling paths of the Maine or Vermont woods. No, they did not picture the extinction of man and beast and places. If they had,
then
they could see four million dead because they themselves, like the later nine million, refused to see evil rearing up before them, quite discernible, quite measurable. Man is nature, nature man, and all crude and raw, stinking, vicious, evil. And holding that evil lightly because the collective mind refuses to recall the sprint of mountains, the vault of seas and, of course, beside that, the puny murder of millions.

It is still eat, drink and be murderous, for tomorrow I may be among the murdered.

This seeing precisely, Max told himself, is a bitch!

Moses Boatwright. Seeing precisely. And then Max thought:
Everybody knows everything, now, past and present
.

Yes, Harry, with the unopening mind that opened in one, small, killing direction, I have the picture now. I see it clearly. “
Pace
's liberal image …” You know better than that; you
always
knew better than that. That slowed me up for a second. But what brought me to the full stop was that line about everybody knowing. Charlotte found out about Michelle and you found out about Charlotte and me. She told you about that night twenty-two years ago. It was
then
, wasn't it Harry, that you thought to pass Jaja's papers on to me? So I guess everybody
does
know about everything. She knifed you back. What a night that must have been, or did it happen at breakfast? During an afternoon when she burst into your study? Let's do it in your study:

HARRY AMES
sits at his desk typing half-heartedly. His mind is not on his work. He keeps turning to the window behind him and he is making a lot of errors for he keeps X-ing over. There is a sudden crash at the door and it springs open, bounces off a bookshelf and back against his wife,
CHARLOTTE
, who pushes it away again as she runs into the room.

CHARLOTTE
: You sonofabitch! You
dirty
sonofabitch!

HARRY
(Rising first in confusion and then in anger to meet her charge, which carries her around the desk. They stand face to face): What the hell are you banging in here for? What did you call me? I'll slap the shit out of you, bitch!

CHARLOTTE
: If you so much as touch me, ever again, I'll kill you, Harry. Kill you! You and Michelle, all these years, you and Michelle. Goddamn, I hate you—

HARRY
(Trying to make his anger cover his surprise): What in the hell are you talking about? Michelle
who?
Is that why you ran in here cursing me? You're crazy, woman, crazier than hell and you'd better get out of here right now, because I've got short patience with crazy people. You ought to know because I've been married to you for so long.

CHARLOTTE
(Lighting a cigarette now, sure of herself, but still trembling with anger): Michelle Bouilloux. Ever since we came to Europe. Seventeen years, seventeen goddamn years you've made a fool of me.
Seventeen
years!

HARRY
(Resignedly. Such fury carries total knowledge): I didn't make a fool of you. I imagine you've had your little good times, too?

CHARLOTTE
(Pressing closer): Yes! I have (Turning from him casually, like Rita Hayworth in an old, bad movie with Glenn Ford) Shall I name them?

HARRY
(Sitting down): Get out of here, Charlotte.

CHARLOTTE
(Smiling like Jane Russell in another bad, old movie): I'm going. (Walks to the door, takes the handle, poses like …?) My best time was with Max Reddick. He not only writes better than you, he makes love better than you! (Exits)

It
way
only once, Charlotte, once and then only in friendship! Don't you remember?

HARRY AMES
sits at his desk typing half-heartedly. His mind is not on his work. He keeps turning to the window behind him, frowning now, and his lips move as if pronouncing a one-syllabled word or name. He is making a lot of errors as he types, for he keeps X-ing over.

It was that, huh, Harry, that and the books, huh, baby? The writing, the White House, and all the time you were getting tired and weak and bitter. All the things you thought I had, you should have had, being Harry Ames. Man, I know how that can be. This revenge is worthy of you. But—anything to get even with me? Even Michelle? Jesus. But do you know what you've done, finally,
finally?
You've shared with me! Now your generosity is supposed to kill me. I got you, clear as hell. You were the father. I'll never take your place as you knew very well when you wrote that last line. You must have been laughing your ass off. Ah, so! This is the jungle side, then, thick with years of pretense and so normal in appearance! This is where the crawling things are, in this place and all around us. Well. All right. I was almost believing some of those fine phrases about me. But your last paragraph shook me awake. You are a writer!

But let me tell you how it was with me, Harry. That last book brought in a whole lot of money. Maybe that pushed you over the edge first. But that parody of success found me at the doctor and guess what he found? Cancer in the butt. Eating me up. There were all kinds of tests. No mistake. I led Margrit into an argument and she left. I didn't have to tell her. Pride. And she cries easily, you know. She went back home, which was right because, being married to a splib, she would have had very little to look forward to in the States. It ain't changed that way. I took cobalt treatments, met a nice chick with a name that knocked me out—Monique Jones—where does that grab you? She wore falsies and contact lenses, and I got to like her, but not well enough to tell her either. Then
Pace
asked me to spell Devoe in Nairobi for three months. I hadn't told them. That was the last time I saw you alive, Harry, when I stopped in Paris on the way to Israel. (By way of Munich—Dachau drew me and it seems hard now to imagine what went on there twenty years ago with the neat ovens and shrubs and flowers. There is a lesson there for a black man to learn and never forget. Pity you never went to one of those places, Harry.) The shooting war in Israel didn't break out. I lived it up in Tel-Aviv and Haifa, then went up to Jerusalem and saw the jars of Zyklon B and the bars of soap. Harry, I read the parts of your letter having nothing to do with you or me, and Jaja's papers, and I
know
those things have never left us. How could you not have known? I went on to Addis Ababa. There was a shooting war on the Ethiopia-Somalia border. I went up to Diredawa to get into it because what I wanted to happen, I couldn't do myself, then; I didn't have the balls. I figured the Ethiopians or Somalis would do it for me. I got into a tank with an Ethiopian colonel named Tekla, who wanted medals and therefore was the right kind of man to be with. We crossed the border at Tug Wajale, heading straight for Hargeisa and where we were bound to get all the lead we wanted. But the Emperor wasn't going to get caught out like that, not the founder of the Organization of African Unity. He, personally, called the colonel back. In Addis once more, by the way, I met Minister Q returning from a visit to Mecca. He sent you his regards and said it was time for you to return home. I went down to Nairobi, did that short hitch, then returned home and quit
Pace
. Last month I went to the hospital, but I knew I didn't want to go like that. Then there were two people I wanted to see: my wife, but that had to be devious. What did I have to say to her, after all? And I wanted to see you. No rushing back and forth to Orly or passing through; I wanted to sit and talk with you.
Father, I wanted you to give me an assessment of my life and work, for then I might be able to answer the question: was it worth what it cost?
I left the hospital and went to Paris, but you, who had planned to have me killed, had been killed already. Now, you understand, at the moment you decided to kill me this way, I was already dead. All these years I've been running to you, paying homage to you because to so many of us you were larger than life. Your name mentioned at parties still brings a momentary hush. Critics still hate you. In our time, you were first. You opened your mouth and you said it. Harry Ames, you were, finally, a sorry sonofabitch. Larger than life? How you shrank! You of all people. And you of all people let them do this to you.