The Man Who Cried I Am (57 page)

“I can't tell. Let's get going anyway.”

Within a minute they were back on the northbound lane to Amsterdam. Angrily Edwards considered the papers. He'd have to stop and call and get Roger into other hands. Then he'd have to get back to Leiden. The woman. Goddamn it, he thought, and it might not even end there.

It was late afternoon now and Margrit Reddick was still sitting at the outdoor table of the American on the Leidseplein. She toyed with a Campari. The wind had died and great patches of blue sky were chasing the gray clouds. The factories and shops were closing and traffic streamed all around the Plein. Max would enjoy watching the female cyclists, she thought. That pert one with her knees going in every direction, good Dutch legs showing way, way up. Margrit smiled. She looked at the fountain with its two fish with crossed tails spouting water from their mouths and christened them Max and Maggie. From now on there will be no more spouting water. Two lovers, a black man and a white woman, moved past the front of the hotel and their movements caught at her. Life could be good; life was good. Max had come back. He needed her; one look told her that, but as ill as he might be she needed him more.

Across the Plein, high on a neoclassical building, great letters spelled out
HET PAROOL
. The password, the word. She knew it now. Love-Need, Need-Love. How presumptuous she had been! Didn't Max know his own country and the people in it as well as she knew Holland and Hollanders? What right had she to protest his actions the way she had? She would tell him this. Once more, together, after a long talk. He needed to get back to his writing; he suffered without it. It was his life. And anytime he felt they should go to the country to take target practice, she would go, gladly. She became very excited thinking of the talk they would have about their future. Didn't he, too, have something he wanted to tell her?

Then Margrit had an idea. She signaled the waiter and ordered a Pernod for Max to have when he returned, like yesterday, and that would be any minute. The sun was out now and the tables around her were filling up. She and Max would sit at the table drinking and talking until dinner. Maybe they would eat inside again, at their window. After, they would go home.

Afterword

This novel, now close to forty years old, has once again found a life that may seem to have predicted some elements of a future that is now present. The idea for the book began to take shape in the early sixties while I was traveling in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States for magazines, newspapers, and the newly created WNET Public Television. It was completed in the mid-sixties and has been published in five previous American editions, twice in England and France, and in the Netherlands.

For some time I'd been curious about several people I'd met in publishing, the news media, and elsewhere. I recall those wonderfully liquid lunches and scrumptious dinners, and the manner in which some of my hosts abruptly signed off a topic (typically the antics of government) with a softly swung finger to the lips and slight frown. Others added nothing to certain parts of the conversation, but smiled in a fashion one could describe as “knowingly.”

Last year at the University of Rochester's Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the library, where my papers are archived and have been exhibited, the director, Richard Peek, discovered a letter from my editor of the first edition of the book. (I'd worked with him a few years earlier on a magazine.) It was his suggestion to bulk up the King Alfred Plan. At that time there were some other well-traveled editors and writers who seemed to have known one another quite well in the past. They are still to be found, not only at magazines and book publishers, but consulates and embassies and other entities around the world. These, I assumed then, might be “cadres.” After all, the cold war with the Soviets provided cover for a lot of activity, much of it, in my estimation, superfluous.

But the editor's suggestion was right up my alley. I reworked the “memo” in a few days. The Plan also became a five-page broadside with the name of the publisher, book title, and, of course, my name. Inside was a map with ten contiguous districts in the United States where The Plan would first take effect. “Minority members”—African-American citizens—would be detained. The Mexican and Canadian borders, however, would not be sealed. If you could get your hat in time, therefore, you'd be free—but gone, and alive. All this, of course, was to be (and in most cases was) a publicity hype, but soon that broadside was being passed around without attribution, which created an additional degree of curiosity, if not uneasiness.

My editor had taken to calling the novel “our book” and maybe in some ways I did not know, it was; he'd approved draft sections, but of course,
he
didn't do the work. We later fell out one day over lunch when, during our conversation, he meant to say—I think—
Ne
gro but it came out
ni
gger. I never had another word with him; whatever he
really
thought of me was far too deep for him to ever shovel out. I've never forgotten that lunch and his unseemly scramble to rectify what his head and heart seemed unable to control.

I'd begun the actual writing of the novel in 1964, but really got rolling with it at the beginning of my second marriage the following year. My wife, my very best friend, editor, and reader, Lori, and I planned to spend a year in Europe for me to finish it. However, a few days before leaving, I developed a bleeding ulcer (Lori jokingly chalked it up to our recent marriage), so we postponed the trip for about a month, which gave me a chance to stay in touch with my two sons from my previous marriage, Gregory and Dennis, and polish up the plans for our stay abroad. Then we took off in late November, just beating the worst of the bad-weather Atlantic seas, docking at Southampton first and then Le Havre, where we picked up a Citroën Trois Cheveaux we'd ordered. Then we drove to Paris to deliver a special brand of cat food Chester Himes had asked for. We left it in the new
Ebony
magazine office because we couldn't find him.

I returned with my bride to the village of Castelldefels near Barcelona, where I'd lived a few years earlier near the beach. I'd been seduced by Richard Wright's
Pagan Spain
(1959), the people, the low cost of living, and the little Spanish I could speak. Soon after Lori and I settled into a modest house on a hillside with a view of the sea, we met an American poet who had just arrived with his wife and family and was living not far from us. They were Phil and Fran Levine and their three sons, Mark, John, and Teddy, eleven, fourteen, and eight.

Through publisher friends in New York, Sid Solomon and Henry “Chip” Chafetz, of Pageant Books/Cooper Square Publishers on Fourth Avenue, we were alerted that the author of
Call It Sleep
, Henry Roth, was about to arrive with his wife, Muriel, in Seville, and they gave us his address. Sid and Chip had published a book of mine for young people in 1962,
Africa: Her History, Lands and People
. A couple of years before that, Chafetz and Solomon had raised
Call It Sleep
from twenty-six years of obscurity with a hardcover edition, which got the novel back into print. However, it did not sell until an Avon paperback edition hit the stores, where it sold at an out-of-sight rate, and as a result, it secured another, larger hardcover publisher. The rest is history.

Catalonia, the region of Spain where we were, was the perfect place in which to live and write. You got just a taste of winter—mostly at night—but most of the time the weather was perfect. It was quiet and beautiful and, although the control by Franco and his Guardia Civil was plainly visible, the Fascist hand was not at all heavy—at least not with foreigners—and it was easy to believe that the U.S. didn't give a damn about Fascism as long as it could lease space for air and sea bases to fight what our leaders believed was the Soviet “threat.” But the average folk appeared to be more concerned with having jobs and a good life than with who ran the country. As for me, most of my time was spent pounding out
The Man
on the typewriter and scrounging wood, “blowdown,” for the fireplace. There was no heating stove or furnace.

I had chosen the name
Max
Reddick for my major character; it rhymes with blacks. Although I had not thought of it, some readers wondered if Max's
last
name implied that he spent a great deal of time making out and had thus earned the name. Truth be told, I had a boyhood friend whose last name was Reddick, so the fanciful presumption was a comical surprise to me.

My middle name is Alfred, but I was thinking of King Alfred “The Great” (849–899) when I used it to name The Plan. Alfred the Great may still be considered a cornerstone in the development of Western civilization. Much of my fiction is grounded in history, and I've never strayed far from that, although I am not always aware at the beginning of a work how it is going to get where I want it to go, historically or otherwise.

After exchanging letters, we finally met Henry and Muriel Roth in Seville while we were taking a trip around the country. Both were gray-haired, she taller than he. She looked rather partrician with her neat bun, Lori and I thought; there was a quiet, determined air about her. New England tough, for sure. Henry usually wore black pants, gray shirt and dark tie, tweed jacket, and a black beret. He would jostle a pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other when he was not speaking with his distinctive New York accent. His sense of humor turned out to be so sly one could sometimes miss it altogether.

In our prior correspondence, I'd asked if I could interview him for WNET's new series,
The Creative Mind
. We discussed it again in Seville, and he said he wanted a bit more time to think about it. (But I
knew
he would do it in the end, and he did, despite his reservations about appearing on television.)

Three months later the Roths moved from Seville to Barcelona, Henry by then being agreeable—after much writing and phoning between me, my agent, and people at WNET—to the interview. Cameraman Peter Winkler, with whom I'd worked earlier, was first to arrive. He stayed with us. Lori made arrangements in a small local hotel for the Roths. They were coming from Barcelona. Then we booked the producer-director into another nearby hotel. Once we go started it was clear that Winkler and the P/D disliked each other intensely, and this affected the entire shoot, which we did, however, complete. The Roths left for the States soon after. Although we liked each other and did correspond sporadically over the years, after they moved to the Southwest, except for one visit I made to New Mexico, we eventually lost touch. Winkler and I remain friends to this day.

During that year in Europe I sometimes felt I'd wandered into a strange place and absorbed the material there that later helped me create the King Alfred Plan. McCarthyism had seeped, then poured, into a democracy still trying to be one in various, shallow disguises, and too many Americans thought that we were quite all right. At the various functions we attended in Barcelona, sponsored by the American Consulate or other U.S. organizations, people seemed to be peering over their shoulders, hoping the U.S. government, directly or through the Spanish government, was not sticking its spoon too deeply into our pots. That was my sense though no one gave voice to this. Maybe that was why Barcelona was “blessed” with what seemed to be so many American writers and artists at that time.

This was the period, a dozen years or so following World War II, when numbers of African-Americans left the States for Europe, hoping to live in a less harsh racial and/or political atmosphere. One of the responses to this movement, however, was the belief among many black people who had earlier fled to Europe, that some of the later arrivals, black as well as white, were not what they seemed to be. Thus not all black newcomers were welcomed with open arms by other black persons; they were often more suspect than the whites, for it was always a puzzle as to how they'd managed to get away at all and survive in Europe with no visible means of support. In many ways it was a bewildering circus, poignant as well as pitiful. Of all those who fled the States, then, only a very few I knew remained in Europe to die, vanish, or in very rare cases, consistently manage to make a living. This last was most notable among a small number of creative artists.

Lori and I had no plans to remain in Spain or anywhere else in Europe. We both had extensive families and had never once thought of living in Europe forever. Many Americans with whom we made friends, like us, planned to return home, with the exception of two white American artists who were married to Spanish women—Norman Nartozky, the painter, and Tony Keeler, the photographer. (Keeler's photo of me was used on the back cover of
The Man
. For years after, when I wore the distinctive sweater in which I was photographed, people, recognizing it, would come up to me to talk.)

I spent a good part of nearly every day writing. We'd brought along a portable L.C. Smith typewriter, one of the most durable I'd ever had, a stack of typing paper, carbon sheets, and some extra ribbons. When the weather was mild, I worked on a balcony overlooking the valley between our house and the sea. With its view of the Mediterranean, it was a splendid place to set up a work table. In December Phil Levine asked if we would see to their newly arrived guests, who would be staying in their home while they traveled around Spain and southern France with their kids. The poet Tom McGrath and his wife, Jeannie, were surviving on a meager traveling fellowship that required them to spend most of it on the move. Lori and I had them to our house for New Year's Eve. They brought the champagne, and Lori had mastered the Spanish oven, so things went smoothly. We ate, talked, and later walked them back to their temporary quarters at the Levine's. They had to start preparing, as demanded by Tom's grant, to move on to some other region or country when the Levines returned.