The Receptionist (18 page)

A N
EW
R
OOMMATE

A
NDY LOGAN WAS RESPONSIBLE
for my one intimate experience with a person of color. Andy was the magazine’s reporter on city hall. She was held in such respect in the pressroom downtown that it almost rose to fear on the part of the other newsmen and -women. (
Th
ere were far fewer of the latter—Andy was as singular a figure there as Rosalind Russell was in
His Girl Friday.
) In the office, she was a down-to-earth presence, a small woman with short brown hair and straight bangs. In addition to writing a column in
Th
e New Yorker
’s back pages nearly every week, Andy was a wife and mother. How she did all this, and juggled two households—an apartment in town and a house on Fire Island—I cannot imagine. A Swarthmore graduate and a die-hard liberal, Andy was always looking out for the underdog. She was keen on winning recognition for the magazine’s Talk of the Town reporters.
Th
rough the end of William Shawn’s tenure, their pieces always appeared unsigned. Andy would find their identities (wrested from a reluctant production department) and post the Talk galleys—writers’ names added in Andy’s bold hand—on the editorial office bulletin boards. It was a measure of her clout that this gesture of protest was never interfered with.

Sometime in early autumn of 1964, Andy posted a notice on the eighteenth-floor board explaining that a young employee was urgently seeking new housing.
Th
e apartment she had been living in up in the Bronx had been broken into. It was deemed unsafe for her to return. So I gained a new roommate.

Sara Mitchell, a beautiful, nineteen-year-old African American, brought her possessions down to my place on West Twelfth Street the evening of the same day the notice went up. Sara, who had grown up just outside Macon, Georgia, lived with me through the winter of 1964 and on into the spring and summer of 1965. We were both small-town girls and churchgoers, so we had a lot in common, and we shared almost everything in those months, from cleaning and cooking to our thoughts on the universe. Most importantly, Sara shared with me her opinions about white people.
Th
ey were opinions she held in common, she was convinced, with most people of color. She voiced them with a candor and a trust I had not been accustomed to from any but my most intimate white friends. And then she went on to do the same with her opinions of black people. If I knew anything about the state of race relations in America then, I owed it all to the months I lived with Sara.

I never had the heart to use the little back closet I’d reserved for Fritz, so there was no problem finding room for Sara’s clothes.
Th
ere were so few of them that they scarcely made a dent. Sara had four dresses, all cut from the same sleeveless, narrow-waisted, dirndl-skirted pattern she had sewn herself.
Th
ey were all of cotton—one yellow, one work-shirt blue, one pink, and one a floral print with large red-and-black poppies on a white background. For the oncoming chill days of autumn she had a navy pleated skirt and a white blouse, over which she wore a light gray cardigan. I discovered that Sara had only two changes of underwear and stockings, which she hand-washed, along with a white cotton nightgown, every other day. One pair of two-inch heels and one pair of white sandals resided next to a pair of blue cotton mules on the closet floor. A tan raincoat and a navy polka-dot scarf completed the whole wardrobe. We had a harder time finding space in the minuscule bathroom for her considerable personal hair and skin products, until we hung a small four-shelf rack on the wall over the commode. A similar arrangement—new shelves mounted over the sink—was necessary for the storage of her vegetarian products in the kitchen, mostly health foods and herbal teas.

Always clean and neat, her slender figure and lovely features meant that Sara looked sweet whatever she wore. Her hair and nails and all the details of her person were healthy, gleaming, and fastidiously kept. I did not live in her presence for long before I learned there was no mystery about it—they were looks achieved by daily and nightly rituals of personal care. And while Sara washed, or ironed, or manicured or pedicured, or applied straightener to her hair, or otherwise busied herself in her amazing regimen, she made great conversation. A steady stream of softly accented talk came out of her mouth. She made no bones about the seriousness with which she took the way she presented herself to the world. She explained that it was a matter of black pride, to put to shame with the expedient of her own example any white prejudice she might encounter about black stereotypes.

Before we got very far along in the months we roomed together, Sara told me about the break-in up in the Bronx that had been the reason for our arrangement in the first place.

“I was just sitting on the bed in my little Bronx bedroom, taking off my shoes and thinking what was I going to do next, when this big dude with strung-out-looking eyes threw up the window on my fire escape—just as easy as if it had no locks on it at all—and stepped right in and started to tell me how I ‘better not make no noise’ or he would make me ‘sorry for sure.’ ”

“So what did you do?”

“I just kept talking to him, soft and soothing, as if I thought it was natural as could be that he’d come in to see me like that, and like I had no idea he would wish to harm me. Said I could very likely be happy to entertain the thought of sleeping with a good-looking fellow like him as soon as we got to know each other. Said he should just go ahead and tell me about himself. Was he from a big family? and all like that. How many brothers did he have? And did he have sisters about my age? I thought I’d give him a scare saying I was just sixteen.”

“My goodness,” I said. “And what
did
he tell you about himself?”

“Oh, he had the usual sad story,” Sara went on matter-of-factly. “Mother using, had five kids by five fathers. If any of the fathers stayed around, they mostly did it to beat up the kids or the mom.”

“Did he seem to be sober?” I asked, thinking of my own dad’s struggles with alcoholism.

“Dunno,” said Sara. “I think it more likely he was a user and was coming down from a fix. Probably I would have had no luck with my grand plan otherwise. Actually it was lucky it did work ’cause it was the only plan I had. Mama always used to tell my sister and me”—and here she lapsed into what must be the way her mama had sounded when she was living at home in Georgia—“ ‘Nobody gonna harm you if you can just make ’em remember they a human bein’. You got to treat ’em like one and that’s how you remind ’em they is one. Some poor souls ain’t never
had
that experience. It throws ’em off their sinful course.’ ”

“And did it with him?” I asked. “Did it . . . er . . . throw him off his sinful course?”

“For a time. I can’t say it would have been any use in the long run, but it kept him quiet and sitting on the bed and talking until Jamal—that’s this Nation of Islam brother I’ve been going out with—came by and hauled him out by his collar.
Th
en we got out of there right away and Jamal made me promise I’d get another place to live.”

I had not heard of the Nation of Islam until the year before, when I’d read an article on Elijah Muhammad.

But Sara said lately a younger spokesman for the Nation who called himself Malcolm X was the one Jamal followed. “Jamal said he’d be by for me about seven thirty. You can meet him for yourself.”

“Oh, that’ll be great,” I said, maybe a bit faintheartedly, as I was just then realizing that this little white corner of the West Village was going to be integrated whether my neighbors were ready or not.

It soon became clear that in my cool, hip building, some were not ready.
Th
omas Boggs was a case in point. He was a small-time accountant who lived in the one-room with a Pullman kitchen just opposite mine. We had become friendly enough that he introduced me to his sleep-over-every-other-weekend girlfriend, Margie. But that night Tom opened his door, found Jamal and Sara sitting on the top step chatting, and flipped out. Actually he said nothing in the presence of Jamal, but the next day he accosted me as I left for the office and reamed me out. He accused me of ruining the neighborhood and endangering the life of everybody in it.

Th
at night I got home to find a note pinned to my door that said in big, shaky block letters
FUCK YOU SALT & PEPPER.
Sara was not surprised. She got a kick out of me—Pollyanna, namby-pamby me—calling him up and, when he answered, giving him my version of a telling-off. “Oh, Boggs, I know that was you. Just go soak your head!” Well, the notes stopped. But in deference to Boggs’s nerves, Sara stopped holding conversations with Jamal and his pals out on the stairs. Instead she brought them in and they hung out in the living room.

One Saturday night my brother was in town from California and we stayed in for dinner. When Jamal came to pick up Sara, they accepted our invitation to join us. Of course, being Muslim, Jamal didn’t drink, so he refused the wine, and Sara didn’t drink anyway, and neither of them, being vegetarian, went in for the pot roast I had prepared, with its beef juices over everything. But they seemed fine with carrot sticks and fruit juice, and we all grew very companionable. Sitting around the table afterward, Jamal told a story about having to watch a shipmate drown and almost drowning himself in a storm off the Florida coast one time when he was working the shrimp boats. Grabbing our attention from the first moment, Jamal, it soon became clear, knew just as well as Sara how to tell a story.

“Me and Jorge were the only ones didn’t go down with the boat. We must have hung on to that little sliver of ship’s planking for a day and a night. Finally, Jorge started to cry and tell me he was slipping. ‘Help me, Himmy,’ he cried over and over.”

Here Jamal gave us each a long look. “My name was Jimmy then, and Himmy was what he called me. He was calling me for help until he went under.”

“Did you try to catch hold of him?” Joe asked.

Jamal shook his head. “I knew if I did help him, we would both be lost. I have learned there was no sin in that—there is no sin in fighting for your own life. In fact, it is your duty.”

He looked at each of us, and while it cost us something, each of us returned his gaze.

Shortly after that evening, on the twenty-first of February, 1965, Sara attended a Malcolm X meeting. She was in the fifth row of the auditorium, immediately in front of the stage and only feet away from Malcolm X, who was scheduled to speak and was making his way to the podium when he was shot and killed. Sara was traumatized by the gunfire and the ensuing pandemonium, in which the gunmen were able to escape.

When she got home, all she wanted to do was huddle under a comforter and drink tea. We said very little, she and I, but she gave me the impression that she thought some members of the Nation of Islam—with whom Malcolm had quarreled—were responsible.

Th
e meeting was on a Sunday. Sara did not go in to work on Monday but was well enough to return to her desk on the twentieth floor by Wednesday.
Th
at night Mr. Shawn called and asked to speak to Sara. It seemed one of the reporters on twenty who knew she’d been at the meeting and seen the assassination firsthand had mentioned it to Mr. S. He asked her to write something about it for the Talk of the Town. She did write a brief account of the event and her reaction to it—about five hundred words—but it didn’t run, perhaps because she was too open with her suspicions of the likely perpetrators.

Sara and I went on as companionably as before, but the atmosphere in the city was tense in the aftermath, and Jamal and his friends no longer came as far south as West Twelfth.

Sara told me that the talk uptown was not for blaming, as she did, a rival black group, but rather for expressing certainty that Whitey, the Man, had done in Malcolm X. In fact, there was talk uptown, Sara said, that the lid was going to come off black anger, and the revolution would soon begin.
Th
en, seeing my wide eyes, and perhaps bearing in mind my earlier confession that the only black people I saw, growing up, were in the movies, she patted my hand and laughed. “Don’t you worry, honey. I’m going to tell them to spare
you.
You’re OK.”

By early summer, Sara was telling me, “Black folks get sunburned, too. Didn’t you know that?” She showed me the inside of the back of her ears and the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet, which were lighter than the other parts of her. So we took turns rubbing sunscreen on hard-to-reach spots. Soon we moved from discussing Sara’s skin to discussing skin in general.

Sara went on to conduct what I think of now as a crash course on race. She told me of the prejudice light-skinned black folks had against dark-complexioned ones. And she said nobody gave the brothers more bad rep and cut them less slack than other black people. Anytime I asked, I could learn from Sara some new class distinction practiced inside the black community.

“How come I never hear any of this stuff from Jervis [Anderson] or Charlayne [Hunter] or Sam [Harris]?” I asked one time, mentioning other African Americans on the magazine’s staff. She put on her Georgia voice to answer: “
Th
ey too well assimilated to talk black in front of you, hon. It’s only because I’m a visitor up here in the North and you took me in, and I found in you a white sister who is a Christian I can trust, that I’m telling you these things. Also, don’t believe it’s love when brothers marry white women—it’s color moving on up, that’s what’s behind it.”

“Yeah, but”—I named a celebrity—“is married to a white guy—how about that?” I asked.

“She’s moving up and he’s making his guilty self feel more righteous,” said Sara.

“Oh. I can’t believe it isn’t love, too, at least some of the time,” I demurred.

Sara just looked at me and shook her head and laughed.

Maybe not all the things that Sara believed were right, but whatever she told me, she did truly believe, and I knew she made an exception to tell them to me.