Triangular Road: A Memoir (2 page)

Bill Kelley was another fledgling. A Harvard dropout who had abandoned his law studies for creative writing, he had also, like myself, so far published a novel and a collection of stories, both well reviewed. His novel, called
A Different Drummer,
was a highly experimental, mythic tale about a massive revolt in a southern town. Fed up with racism and a lifetime picking cotton, the entire black population suddenly picks up one day and abandons the place. They stage a biblical-style exodus, as it were, but not before they pour salt, tons of salt, over every cotton field in sight.

Mr. Hughes had promoted Bill Kelley’s work as well, and had even hired him as a research assistant when he left Harvard to write full time.

Our benefactor, cigarette in place, stood waiting for us inside the terminal, a suitcase and a small
satchel at his side. (The satchel I later learned held copies of his most recent books of poetry, which he intended to sell during the tour. Mr. Hughes was every bit a wandering bard in the old tradition, but a bard who also believed in the modern concept of TCB, i.e., taking care of the business of selling his books whenever and wherever possible.)

I had not seen him since the awards ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Letters four years earlier, and he appeared noticeably older, his aging like the merciless hand of a giant steadily, relentlessly bearing down on him. The pressure of that hand, however, the weight of it, in no way diminished the cheery, paternal smile with which he greeted us, nor the aura and authority of his long reign as poet laureate. I can’t speak for Bill Kelley, but I felt like bowing before his royal presence that day in the airport.

Rain. I awoke the Sunday morning following our arrival in Paris to an off-and-on spring rain outside my hotel room window. The State Department woman had been right after all. In a building across the way—which I later learned was the Moroccan student hostel; the Sorbonne
was nearby—a bored-looking young woman cracked open a casement window, flipped out her cigarette and disappeared back inside. On the rain-soaked sidewalk below, an exasperated French papa stood struggling with both his windblown umbrella and his small son who was having a full-blown tantrum at his side, the child’s screams desecrating the Sunday morning quiet.

A wet, noisy and inauspicious introduction to the City of Light. But no matter. It was nonetheless Paris, and I had at last set foot on its famous streets.

We were staying in the equally famous Latin Quarter, at a hotel named, oddly enough, the California. As hotels go, the California could not have qualified for even a one-star rating. (It has since been renovated and upgraded.) At the time, its small, plain rooms offered little aside from a bed, and its cramped lobby was made to double as a breakfast room: coffee and a single croissant each morning. Worse was the cubicle of an elevator. This was usually
en panne
—that is, out of order, not running. I’m sure that the State Department people on the ground in Paris would have gladly
arranged far better accommodations for us. Mr. Hughes, though, had probably insisted on the California. The humble little
pension
was where he always stayed when in the city he considered his second home after Harlem.

The first Paris phase of the tour quickly became a busy round of lectures, readings, seminars, panels, panel discussions, colloquia, roundtables, roundtable discussions—and talks. Invariably, each of these was followed by a reception and more talk at the end of an already long day. The principal venues for most events were the Sorbonne and the American Cultural Center on Rue du Dragon, which was also the headquarters for the State Department people in charge of our tour. In addition, a large two-day seminar was held at Royaumont, a centuries-old abbey outside of Paris that had been converted into a conference center. Our first evening there, the three of us read from our work in the great resounding stone nave of the abbey’s ancient sanctuary.

While the stated subject of the events was African American literature, the Q&A sessions that followed the formal presentations were invariably
less about literature and more about the Freedom Struggle underway in the States. The progressive-minded young graduate students and scholars who largely made up our audience were eager for first-hand information on the Movement and the government’s response to the mounting pressure for change.

Although he was the star attraction, Mr. Hughes, for whatever reason, tended to leave such discussions to Bill Kelley and myself, the young Turks, as it were. And we were only too willing to stand in for him. In the most graphic terms possible we described the violence meted out to innocent protesters in the Deep South—the police dogs being sicced on them, the policemen’s billyclubs beating them to the ground, the huge fire-engine water hoses turned on them full blast, and black children as young as twelve being thrown in jail. We also pointed out that the principal issue at the moment in the Civil Rights Movement was the passage of a comprehensive voting rights bill. All efforts were focused on pressuring Congress to pass such a bill this very year in spite of the fierce opposition of the southern members
in both houses and what was seen as stalling on the president’s part. At a recent meeting of the Association of Artists for Freedom held at Town Hall in New York, I had been among those, including James Baldwin, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Lorraine Hansberry and others, denouncing LBJ for his inaction on the bill.

Racism. Black/white relations. Our audiences repeatedly brought up the subject. Again, Bill Kelley and I didn’t hesitate, but spoke in detail about the deep and lingering racist nature of American society, citing the political, social and economic institutions and policies—including government policies—that sustained and perpetuated the problem.

Again, for the most part, Mr. Hughes usually maintained a reflective silence. He might have been remembering his own personal trials and tribulations at the hands of the U.S. government. Wasn’t he the poet, after all, whom said government had once labeled “perhaps the most dangerous radical in America”? The poet whom it had hauled before McCarthy’s infamous subcommittee in the early fifties? Where to save his career,
the poet, it’s said, had disavowed his socialist and communist principles? For this he had been severely criticized, even denounced by many in the black community: He had betrayed W. E. B. Du Bois; he had betrayed Paul Robeson—those two giants who had remained faithful to the cause.

All this the poet had endured only to find himself once again embraced by black America as well as called upon by the government to serve as a cultural ambassador around the world. The contradiction and irony, the illogic of it all perhaps accounted for the expression that read “white folks, black folks, there’s no understanding them” that came over his face at times.

Among my mementos of the tour is a photograph in
Paris Match
of Mr. Hughes and myself at a lecture toward the end of our initial stay in Paris. (By then Bill Kelley was no longer with us. Early in the tour, he received word from the States of an adjunct teaching job, and as a recently married man with a baby on the way, he immediately flew home. It would be just Mr. Hughes and me from then on.) In the
Paris Match
photograph I can be seen inveighing as
usual against Washington, while Mr. Hughes sits silent nearby, his aging face propped on his fist, his cigarette pasted to his lips, and what might well have been his own considerable outrage and anger kept carefully under wraps.
The Weary Blues,
published 1922. In the
Paris Match
photo Mr. Hughes seems to epitomize the title of his very first published book of poems.

Discussion at Centre du Dragon reported in
Paris Match
.

Not that the poet didn’t give way to anger at times. This occurred at Africa House in London, the second city on our itinerary. The lecture at Africa House followed the pattern established in Paris, in that our talk on African American literature was largely supplanted by a discussion of the Movement. Only this time the discussion took an ugly turn as a number of the young British-born blacks in the audience began personally attacking Mr. Hughes. They ignored me—I was an unknown after all—and leveled their criticism at him alone. Essentially they accused him of a lack of militancy. Why wasn’t he to be seen in the front line of the marches taking place in the South? Why wasn’t he speaking out in the same manner as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael
et al.? Seems that he was as conservative and as much of an accommodationist as Roy Wilkens, Ralph Ellison and their ilk. . . .

The Weary Blues
look on the poet’s face again. It lasted only briefly, though, this time. Instead, seated beside me at our table on stage, Mr. Hughes put aside his cigarette, drew the microphone close, and for the first time there was an unmistakable edge of outrage in his voice as he began speaking. Going on at some length, he informed his young critics that the revolution—Mr. Hughes used the word “revolution”—underway at present in black America had not begun yesterday nor would it end tomorrow. He and his generation had done their part: marching, demonstrating, picketing; they had protested the horrendous lynchings and burnings of the 1920s and ’30s; had defended the innocent—the Scottsboro Boys, 1931. Nine young black men their age falsely accused of raping a white woman and railroaded for life. The fight to free them, in which he had been deeply involved, had gone on for years. All of this happening long before any of them in the audience had been born. . . .

Mr. Hughes subjected the young black Brits to a crash course in twentieth-century African American history.

There was monumental work still to be done, he concluded. So that rather than passing judgment or making comparisons, instead of taking a superficial view of people and events, it was for them to educate themselves and to understand the complexity of a Struggle that fundamentally involved people of color around the world.

A shamefaced silence in Africa House.

There was yet another problem on the tour that, while completely different from the confrontation at Africa House, increasingly annoyed and then finally angered Mr. Hughes. This had to do with our meals. My benefactor loved to eat and drink well, and to do so on a regular basis—meaning three meals a day, with each meal, especially dinner, to be eaten in a leisurely way over good wine and nonacademic, nonintellectual, non-political conversation. He apparently had had his fill of those conversations over the years and had grown weary. However, the schedule in London, which also included a nonstop round of meetings
and talks in the city as well as visits to Leeds and Manchester, kept us as busy as we had been in Paris. We often found ourselves eating dinner so late in the evening that we would be too exhausted and talked out to enjoy it. Mr. Hughes was not pleased. “Paul-e . . .” (He insisted on calling me Paul-e, although the “e” on my name is silent. But who was I to correct him?) “Paul-e, these State Department folks in Paris are messing with us. Here, they got us singing for our supper morning, noon and night only to come up short every time on the supper, the main meal of the day.”

Matters came to a head one evening on a trip from London to Oxford, where Mr. Hughes had been invited to read by the university’s Poetry Society. Earlier in the day, we had again been kept on the go without a proper meal, so that by the time we boarded the train to Oxford late that afternoon, a thoroughly exasperated Mr. Hughes, with me in tow, headed straight for the first-class dining car—hungry. We were going to treat ourselves, he declared, to a steak dinner and the best wine to be had on the train. To our dismay there was a long English queue outside the first-class
dining car. Worse, by the time we were finally seated, then finally served, and had tucked into our steak dinners and wine, there came the announcement that Oxford was only minutes away. That did it. A still hungry and now thoroughly angry Mr. Hughes ordered the waiter to recork our bottle of wine, he instructed me to take charge of the food, and we alighted into the Oxford Poetry Society’s distinguished welcoming committee with the wine hidden amid the books for sale in Mr. Hughes’s satchel and with me carrying—as discreetly as possible—two doggie bags of half-eaten steaks.

Upon returning to our base in Paris for a second round of activities there, Mr. Hughes took the State Department people “on the ground” to task, and the schedule was changed to provide us with definite mealtimes as well as a few evenings to ourselves. Ever the guide and mentor, Mr. Hughes used those free evenings to introduce me—a little provincial from Brooklyn—to the city’s fabled nightlife of bars, cabarets,
boîtes,
cafés,
caves
(underground jazz spots), nightclubs,
brasseries
and more bars. Mr. Hughes had his
favorites and saw to it that I sampled any number of them in his company.

Also, a literary agent I had contacted during our initial stay in Paris had promising news on our return about a possible French edition of my novel.