As I look back now, the whole thing’s like a cross-country bus ride, long stretches of inaction punctuated by brief release, the feverish bustle of stops.
There were the accommodations of early years when the walls first started giving way, when suddenly we were able to sit at lunch counters, to enter stores, theaters, rooms previously denied us-when we began to become visible. And when we were joyful at these changes.
I remember bathrooms marked Colored disappearing. I remember walking through front doors for the first time in my life.
We breathed the high, rich air of social challenge, justice, freedom, inalienable rights. But that road, we discovered, penetrated just so far into the wilderness. It ended abruptly, without fanfare or warning, pavement abutting implacable forest. Here ships fall off the edge of the world. Here there be tigers.
Then a great rage. Calls for revolution. Roving patrols of self-appointed guardians. Armies of liberation operating out of vans, storefronts, project tenements.
Later, depending who described it, an embracing of or assault on local politics. Councilmen in place, city and state representatives, a mayor or two. Increments of power.
And finally this unspoken apartheid we live with still.
While the rage turns back on itself. Gnaws away at individuals, families, communities, cities. Begins to consume them.
That evening Straughter came by and spirited me off to Dillard University where we stood close together among similar huddles of others sipping wine from plastic cups and choking down rubbery cheese cubes. An usher in a jacket shiny with wear pushed open double doors giving us access to the small auditorium. Within minutes the room filled to capacity. Latecomers stood shuffling feet, coats over arms, at the back of the hall.
A black man in his fifties, light-skinned, wearing the collegiate uniform of chinos, vest sweater, chambray shirt, tweed sportcoat, came onstage and spoke inaudibly into the microphone there on the podium. He looked off left, shook his head, tried again.
“… welcome you to the first in a series of programs of lectures, readings and performances celebrating African-American art.
“I’m John Dent, and I teach literature-English, we’re taught to call it-here at Dillard. Over the years I’ve likely taught many of you here tonight in this room. I may have tried to teach others.”
Polite laughter.
“Those of you who managed to stay awake while I talked about Claude McKay, Mark Twain, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Hemingway or Jimmy Baldwin no doubt will remember that I’ve a special place in my heart and mind for the man I’m about to introduce to you.
“And now I warn you: prepare yourselves.
“Chester Himes is angry. Very angry.
“Chester Himes has been angry for a long time. Those of us who bothered to listen began understanding just how angry he was, how damaged, with his first novels: If He Hollers, Lonely Crusade, The Third Generation.
“Then Himes, like many another before him, discouraged, despairing, fled these United States for residency abroad. He lives now, has lived for some time, in France. And from there he’s sent back to us a stream of project reports, communicados, indictments: mirrors showing this country’s true face.
“First there was The Primitive, dropped like a grenade into the maw of fifties placidity. Truly dangerous, and a novel to match America’s scant handful of almost perfect novels.”
Professor Dent cleared his throat. Swept his eyes over those gathered before him. This was something he knew how to do. He was good at it. There were not many things in life he’d been good at.
“When I was a child, growing up on the banks of the Mississippi, we would catch alligator gar, prop their mouths open with sticks and put them back in the water. They’d rise and dive, rise, dive, till finally they went down for good. Submarines, we called these drowning monsters.
“And that’s The Primitive. Subversive, ferocious. Rising out of depths America has never imagined, never acknowledged, and sinking back into them. Teeth bared. Dying.”
Another purposeful pause.
“More recently Himes has given us several short novels featuring Harlem detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Originally written for French publisher Gallimard at Marcel Duhamel’s instigation-written for quick money and quickly, unabashed potboilers in the tradition of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, a novel which greatly influenced them-these books appear in the States in paperback only, from various publishers, and on racks in drugstores alongside such monuments of American culture as I, The Jury, Housewife Hustlers and the current month’s new Perry Mason.
“In these books Chester Himes continues to document, as no one else has done, the range of the African-American struggle, from subjection and capitulation to challenge and change.
“I submit to you now that in writing these books-‘telling it like it is,’ our children would say-Chester Himes, again and again, has committed nothing less than. Acts. Of. Absolute. Heroism.”
Stepping back from the podium, Dent began applauding. Applause caught here and there in the audience and spread.
The man who shambled onstage did not look heroic. More than anything else, he looked tired. He was tall, light on his feet and subtly elegant in the way that dancers often are, with delicate features, close-cropped hair, medium skin. He wore a black suit that fit well enough to have been tailored, navy-and-maroon tie, starched white shirt. When the applause died and he looked up, his eyes were dark, intense and full, glimmers of emotion and understanding spilling out from them even as they swept in the finest details of the physical world around them.
Vitriol? Impassioned speech? Anger?
You better believe it.
But at the same time a rare truth: this gentle, cultivated voice, at first so low we could barely hear it, urging us on toward what we might be, imploring us to settle for nothing less than the best within us. To recognize that we had been set against ourselves, turned into our own worst enemy. Whenever walls get torn down, he said, the bricks are simply carried off elsewhere, another wall put up.
He read briefly from The Primitive and If He Hollers, and concluded:
“If our plumbing for truth, whether as a writer, like myself, or simply as individuals looking back over our experiences-if this plumbing for truth reveals within the Negro personality homicidal mania, lust, a pathetic sense of inferiority, arrogance, hatred, fear and self-despite, we must recognize this as the effect of oppression on the human personality. For these are the daily horrors, the daily realities, the daily experiences-the life-of black men and women in America.”
Too soon it was over.
Lights came back full. All around us people stood, retrieving coats, streaming into the aisle.
“You want to hit the reception?” Straughter said.
Why not.
So we ate more crackers and cheese cubes and drank more wine out of plastic cups.
At Dr. Dent’s house, amidst clusters of academics, students and activists, Himes sat on the couch pouring Jack Daniels into his coffee mug. When the other person there left, I sat down beside him, and without saying anything he reached over and poured into my own cup.
“Not a writer are you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Teacher?”
I shook my head.
“Good. You stay there.”
And I did, bourbon periodically splashing into my cup, till three hours later I struggled to my feet, said good-bye to Himes, somehow found Straughter and the door and walked through the latter with the former.
That morning once Leo and Clifford left (well, really now it was the day before), I’d toppled back into bed and slept straight through, fourteen, fifteen hours, till Straughter came banging at the door to bear me off. Verne had been by and left another note that said “Even zombies get up and walk around sometimes, Lew.” I think someone else pounded at the door at one point, but that may have been a part of the dream in which I found myself wandering in a foreign land where buildings, trees, the whole landscape were unrecognizable. Two groups lived there, neither of whose language I could understand at all, neither of which seemed much to care whether I stayed with them or straggled off again to the other. Mostly they spent their time gouging and pounding wood into canoelike boats they never used.
Straughter and I were both pretty drunk, and after an hour or so of stumbling around saying things like “We already been by here” and “House looks awful familiar,” we finally admitted that we had no idea where he’d parked his Falcon-or for that matter, after all this, where we were.
Probably just as well, Straughter said, he ought not be trying to drive anyway. So what the hell, he’d just hoof it on home. Could almost always do that in N’Orleans. Come back later today and hunt down the Blue Bird. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“Need to head over that way,” he said, absolutely certain of it. “Yep. To-ward Freret,” the preposition two syllables.
“River’s that way, Hosie.”
But he was adamant, mule stubborn as my folks used to say, so we parted.
I walked toward the river until (I was right!) I hit St. Charles. Then down it toward town. The streetcar had long since stopped running. There was little traffic.
At some point, I remember, for whatever reason, taking off my shoes. Striding along barefoot, oblivious to how broken and uneven the sidewalks were.
I remember stepping off at last into cool, damp grass for relief.
I remember dogs barking and leaping at fences just inches from me.
I remember a police car cruising slowly by me, once, twice, as I trod along, pacing me, pausing a third time alongside with the crackle of its radio audible, at last passing on.
Fragments.
I awoke that afternoon with feet so bloody and torn that I could barely hobble to the bathroom, to a tub of warm water with baking soda. Three beers lined up tubside to help quell pounding heart and head, nausea, shakes.
Not only had I taken to hot pavement in bare feet, I had first hiked to my old apartment on Dryades. When the key failed to work, I realized my lapse and walked back up to Washington. Though not by any direct route, I’m afraid: I had vague memories of far-flung parts of the city.
In the tub I swallowed beer the way a beached fish gasps at air and thought over what Leo and Clifford had told me yesterday morning.
Yoruba was an inkblot, they said: many things to many people. For some it was basically religious, a church. Others perceived it as essentially activist, which, certain ways, certain times, it was; and that was what attracted them. Some were drawn to, saw as foremost, its community service.
“I see what you mean. All things to all men.” Leo nodded.
“Tough part for any actor.”
“You have a lot of eggs, they won’t fit in a single basket,” Leo said. “You take care of them.”
“You’re saying Yoruba’s not straight? That the game’s fixed?”
“I’m saying the house always has the odds.”
Clifford spoke up: “There’s another thing. Another side of Yoruba, another service it provides.”
“Banking,” Leo said.
“A lot of people in the community resent white banks. Don’t trust them-or just don’t want to have to deal with them. Yoruba’s their bank.”