The Man Who Cried I Am (9 page)

The name Moses Boatwright called up the image of a tall, rangy Negro farmer dressed in faded overalls, in the Deep South, standing astride a cotton patch, a shaggy felt hat pulled low on his head to beat back the sun. But Boatwright's picture, when it was splashed across the front pages of the downtown papers, utterly destroyed that image. Boatwright, despite the blurred and distorted photos—the better to really communicate to the readers of the tabloids that he was a cannibal even though a graduate of Harvard—appeared delicate and small, shy, and even, perhaps, tender.

At first, the managing editor of the
Harlem Democrat
, Dudley Crockett, ignored the downtown papers. After all, Boatwright did not live in Harlem; he had set himself apart from his black fellows. He lived in the Village. And there was something implicitly gleeful about the downtown headlines. You see, they seemed to imply, they
are
nothing but savages. No, Crockett thought, the
Democrat
was pledged from inception to “Negro Uplift.” Doing stories on cannibals would not help.

But the Boatwright case had disturbed Max in a nagging, indefinable way ever since it had broken. He had read the papers carefully. He had studied Boatwright's photos, and he had puzzled: How could one man kill and eat another? The more he thought about it, the more it became like a man studying a sore on his own body, a chancre. In the office there were jokes, but there was also an underlying tension, a curiosity, a strange, heady mixture of attraction and revulsion. But no one, maybe because Crockett had given a cue of some kind, brought the case up. Only Max Reddick.

“We ought to do something about this Boatwright guy, Crockett,” Max said one day as he handed in some copy, which Crockett promptly dropped as though it had been dipped in acid. He leaned back in his chair and stared at Max. Strange guy. Could be living in the Village—next door to Boatwright. Educated nigger. College even. Crockett didn't trust Negroes who had been to college.
He
had not been and had done all right. But he knew that if, suddenly, all the barriers fell away, he would have to stay where he was and people like Reddick would be the ones to move on ahead. That was the first thing out of white folk's mouths—education. He hated Max for being prepared. But the Boatwright thing: it
would
sell papers in Harlem, but there had to be a hook. Discrimination? Segregation? Cannibalism the result of? Derangement the result of? Crockett knew that the owner of the
Democrat
, a man who owned funeral parlors in four of the five boroughs took great pride in having a novelist on the paper. It was the owner in fact who had suggested that Max be moved from advertising to editorial and given a by-line. At the suggestion, Crockett, sagely nodding his head, said that he was thinking about getting approval for just such a move. What else could he say? He knew that Reddick was the owner's first choice to replace Crockett if he didn't behave. If Max took on the Boatwright case (the owner would be slow to anger if Max were the reporter) and flopped, Crockett got rid of a challenger. If Max succeeded, Crockett got some credit too. For initiative.

Crockett picked up the copy and scanned it. “You know we've got the pride, the racial uplift thing, Reddick. What kind of angle you got?”

“Just the Negro angle. I mean, was there something in his being black that made him do this? He may give us something he hasn't given the white boys downtown.”

Crockett tossed the copy in the ready basket “See how much you can get.” Crockett knew he shouldn't have said it. Reddick didn't need to be told how to do his job, and that disturbed Crockett too.

Max entered the jail, leaving a listless Indian summer day flooding the streets; he walked slowly. It was after all ridiculous for a man to be anywhere near a jail if he was not consigned to be in it. And he thought of all the people who had been placed in jail because they were poor and knew no one to help them, of the falsely arrested, the interminable democratic process which frequently placed a man inside with a minimum of effort, but took forever to get him out. This is the place, he thought, walking down the corridors behind a guard, where they locked up black asses and threw away the key. Where they locked up white asses and threw away the key, but not as far. He felt a stab of fear, just as he did whenever he saw a policeman and the cop put that extra something into his casual stare. Perhaps it was that the look carried a threat, a menace. Black boy, I could have you whenever I wanted to, it said, that look. It was not as though Max had not been inside jails and precinct houses before. Maybe it wasn't even the fear of jails and cops as such, but the knowledge that under the existing system they were his natural enemies. And it did not matter that the police blotter could read about a woman who had had love made to her by her dog so that her shoulders, buttocks and back were covered by deep scratches; it was really no concern of his that two men had been hospitalized, under guard, still together like dogs, one imbedded so deeply in the other that one had died and that the live one, still nude, tragedy roughly overriding their perversion, cried and hid his face; could he even bother to finish reading what one lesbian had done to another with her teeth and where? Bother with murders and beatings, why? When it was all said and done, the only clean job a cop could enjoy perhaps was the one where the enemy had but a single perversion—color.

And a cop who labored in the stables of human filth soon lost sight of human values. That was what Max feared. Still following the guard, Max now picked up the smells of the innards of the jail. They were more stark than those in the outer office, the booking desk. They were of urine, clothes worn too long, feces, flat-smelling foods, disinfected floors and walls and rust from exposed pipes. Max thought of the dungeons somewhere beneath him where confessions were beat out of hapless prisoners with rubber truncheons. He thought of the bright lights and circles of detectives, their sadism accepted as normal in that place, their jackets carefully hung, their sleeves rolled, their voices going soft with all the time and patience in the world to make a man scream “
YES
!”

Max and Boatwright stared at each other through the bars as the guard unlocked the cell. Boatwright held out a slender hand which Max took and moved up and down a couple of times. Boatwright applied no pressure to the handshake; it was almost as if he had no hand at all. “I'm Max Reddick from the
Democrat.
”

“They wanted me to see you in the public room,” Boatwright said in a high mournful voice, “but I told them white reporters had been in the cell, why not you, right?” Max tried not to stare at Boatwright's head. It was huge and reminded Max of the people on other worlds in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips. The hairless face narrowed down to a sharply pointed chin. The eyes were large, bulging almost, as if from a thyroid condition, and were thickly lashed, almost girlish.

“Thanks,” Max said, noting the position of the guard outside the cell.

They were still standing, looking at one another. “You're the first reporter from a colored paper to come and see me, do you know that?”

“Well …”

Boatwright flung himself on one of the unyielding bunks. He got up again. “Cigarette?”

“Yes,” Max said, taking one and allowing Boatwright to light it.

Boatwright laughed. “You should be the one to offer the cigarettes, you know. I'm in jail, not you. Like in the movies.” He went back to the bunk and laid down. “Are you ready for me to talk?”

“Any time,” Max said.

“Any special place?”

“Any place, please.”

Boatwright took a deep pull on his cigarette and began talking without looking at Max. “My full name's Moses Lincoln Boatwright. Isn't that classical American Negro—Moses Lincoln—always hated it. And people always called me Moses, never Mo. I'm from Rochester, New York, Kodak city. I went to the public schools there and got a scholarship to Harvard.”

“Howard?” Max asked.

“Harvard, Mr. Reddick,
HAR
-vard.”

“Umm,” Max grunted.

“I have a Master's degree.”

“In what?”

Boatwright snickered. “Philosophy. Ever heard of a Negro philosopher?” Max stopped writing and looked across the room at the prisoner. “I wanted so much to be different, special. Philosophy. Oh, I was great in it. Then I woke up one day, not too long ago, and I knew what had happened to me. They didn't want to tell me there was no place for me, but they didn't want to waste me either. Maybe the break might come.”

“Negro colleges?”

“Thank you, no.”

A snot, Max thought. “Why not?”

“I didn't want to be buried. You must know what those schools are like.” Boatwright sighed. “Anyway, they're going to put an end to my misery. I've had all my tests at Bellevue. I'm legally sane. I knew what I was doing.” Boatwright kicked himself off the bed. “At twenty-two I've learned many things, Mr. Reddick.”

This time Max offered the cigarettes.

“The white newspapermen asked me all kinds of questions. They knew they could never print the answers to them.”

“Maybe the questions were for themselves and not their readers. Newsmen are—”

“And that's why you're here!” Boatwright said. “I've been watching you study me. A man has to know evil, look it right in the face, touch it, take its cigarettes before one can really know evil in the flesh. It's always been abstract.”

Max shrugged. “I have a job to do. Read into that what you will.”

“I know you have a job to do,” Boatwright said, “but it took the
Democrat
a long time to get doing it.”

“Let's go back to Bellevue,” Max said.

“You want to go back to Bellevue, do you?”

Max nodded. Wise little bastard!

“Bellevue was very funny,” Boatwright said, laughing a laugh that came out a chill, curlicuing wail. Max felt a coldness at the base of his spine. “That psychiatrist asked me if I liked to eat it.”

Max scribbled hastily. Boatwright was looking at him with a sly expression. “Eat what?”

Boatwright shifted his cigarette into his other hand. His eyes lit up, then clouded. “Cunnilingus, fellatio—” He smiled at the floor. “You
do
know what those are don't you?”

“Yes,” Max said, “I know. But was the psychiatrist correct, I mean, well …”

“Ah,
HAH
!” Boatwright leaped to his feet in triumph. He reminded Max of a spider trapped suddenly in the middle of the floor. “You see! You can't print that! You can't!”

Max said quietly, “Haven't you ever read the phrase, ‘unnatural acts'?” But Boatwright continued as if he hadn't heard. “And he asked if I'd ever
done
those things and I gave him my answer. I knew where he was going, to Freud, naturally, and he had been reading psychiatric studies of Negro life, he told me. Why was it a white man, not a black man I ate, don't you see?” Boatwright was animated. His eyes were like two searchlights in need of cleaning. Max heard the thrumming of invisible wings in his ears. He changed the position of his head ever so slightly. He did not want to disturb—he didn't know whether it was the tableau: guard, Boatwright and himself—or some delicate balance that could implode in the cell.

“—and we went down to the cellar.” Boatwright had been talking rapidly and gesturing sharply with his long hands. “I showed him where I wanted to store the trunk. Then I hit him. He died instantly. I had the tools to take what I needed and got it back upstairs without dropping a spot of blood anywhere. I put it in the top of the ice box. I ate it when I was hungry.”

In the corridor the guard shifted. Max wrote with a sense of being far away. He felt lightheaded and he wondered what was the matter with him. Hungry maybe. He looked up at Boatwright who had paused to let him finish. “What parts did you take?”

Boatwright started to talk about something else.

“No, Moses,” Max said. “What parts did you take. That was never reported. Genitals? Part of an arm? Part of a leg? Did you cut out a hock for yourself? Did you slice out a steak?” Max felt in some astonishing and circuitous way that he was pleading with Boatwright.

“Do you know what it tasted like?”

“Genitals,” Max said, “is that what you got, Moses?”

“He tasted like—” Boatwright's eyes drew down. He pressed his lips together. His small body became one tight knot, frozen motionless, then thawing slowly. The eyes opened, flushed white. The breath was released. The body sagged. Max watched in horror and disgust. “He tasted like,” Boatwright continued, panting, “yams with a slab of greasy roast pork, the combination of sweet and heavy richness.”

From the pit of his stomach an ugliness gave birth and Max commanded it to die. But it struggled upward. Max struggled with the thing; it was reaching up to his gullet. He choked out one word. “Why?”

“Why? They all ask that.”

“And why shouldn't they?” Max said a little too loudly. He closed off his throat. The thing writhed in fury then slid back down where it pulsed hard against Max's belly.

“Look at me,” Boatwright said. “Look.”

“I am looking.”

“But you are not seeing—”

“I'm starting to see, Moses.”

“Yes, but you are not seeing
precisely
. I am an abomination. Ugly, black, cutting back on my thoughts so I wouldn't
embarrass
people, being superbly brilliant for the right people. I was born seeing precisely, Mr. Reddick. There
were
times when I chose to. Death, for example. A man would like to pick the way he wants to die. In bed in his sleep, mostly. By my acts I decided how I would die. But those acts had more in them. This world is an illusion, Mr. Reddick, but it can be real. I went prowling on the jungle side of the road where few people ever go because there are things there, crawling, slimy, terrible things that always remind us that down deep we are rotten, stinking beasts. Now, because of what I did, someone will work a little harder to improve the species.”