Tropic of Night Read online

  Which was why I was standing alone on the veranda, getting my bag on, when Lou came out and said, “Hey Janey, there you are! I want you to meet someone. Jane, DeWitt Moore; Witt, meet Jane Doe.”

  The usual widening of the eyes at the name. My eyes must have widened, too, as he extended his hand. There was a definite tingle. The first thing that hit me was his skin, not the butterscotch color of it, but the texture, which was smooth as ivory, like a child’s skin. Lickable skin; it looked like it would actually dissolve sweetly on your tongue. He was a fine-boned, medium-size man, only a hair taller than I was, dressed in a blue-striped button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, chinos, and the same kind of Sperry deck shoes I had on. He was holding a large plastic cup with a Bears logo on it. Our eyes met; his were hazel, intelligent, sardonic, wary, amused, which was exactly the look I was then practicing myself with my green ones. So we had a little something, even before either of us was aware of it. A little too long on the handshake, that was another danger sign. Lou was talking away, supplying background, his canned version of my adventures, and his connection with Witt.

  “Old Witt and I went to school together.”

  “At Notre Dame?”

  “Yeah,” said Witt, “on the football team. We were both linebackers.”

  Lou laughed. “No, in high school, in Morristown.”

  “That’s right. Lou used his mighty thews to protect me from the racists.”

  I looked inquiringly at Lou, but at that moment, a huge chocolate-colored woman strode out on the deck. She was wearing a scarlet and pink print muumuu and a sparkly pink turban and was carrying the kind of box people used to carry 45 records in. She dragged Lou off into the apartment, promising serious Motown.

  I drained my drink. Witt made no move to leave, just looked at me, smiling, making me nervous. I said, “That’s interesting. Was racism much of a problem in Morristown? I mean what was it, white gangs … ?”

  “Yes, everyone assumes that, but these particular racists were black guys. They thought I was being too white. There’s a certain stratum of black society that responds to uppity niggers in about the same way as your basic Alabama ax-handle cracker does. Or did, since we’ve officially solved our racial problems here in America.”

  I ignored the theatrical bitterness. “That must have been extremely painful.”

  “Extremely. But enough of me. Lou talks about you all the time. Apparently, you’ve had some wild adventures. Central Asia. Maurice Vierchau …”

  “Marcel.”

  “Right. What’s he like? Lou says the latest on him in the profession is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. A plausible charlatan.”

  “Read his book.” My usual line. “Decide for yourself.”

  “I was hoping for the scoop. Secrets of primitive rites.”

  “Well, you won’t get them from me,” I said coolly. “Marcel is … an unusual man, but I can’t practice his kind of anthropology myself. I prefer a little more distance from the subject. What’s your subject, Witt?”

  “Me? I’m in hibernation,” he said, and that’s when I got the Ellison line. We talked about Ellison awhile, and we agreed that it was one of the half-dozen best books of the century. I pressed him a little about what he did.

  “I’m a poet. A promising black poet, as the expression has it.”

  I was getting irritated with this. “What sort of black poet are you? Very black? Langston Hughes raisin-in-the-sun black? Or black like Maya Angelou, passionate songster of the unforgivable sins inflicted on your people? Or are you a black poet like Aleksandr Pushkin?”

  He held up his hands in front of his face, in a mock cringe. “Wow, what a blast! I guess I have to take my identity politics elsewhere.”

  “You do. And I need another drink.”

  We talked until the sun sank over the western city, and the trees in the yard turned into silhouettes and disappeared, with the party swirling around us, and the air cooling and then thickening sweetly with the smoke from many barbecues. We talked a bit about anthro, not much, because he didn’t know anything about the field and because my work bored me then, smothered by my lies, and a lot about poetry, which he knew deeply and I a little. He recited some of his for me, shyly, including the one from his first book, that got into all the anthologies later, that starts, There is a plantation in my brain, broad wet acres under the arching skull. The book was Tropic of Night, and it had won some kind of poetry award, and five hundred whole dollars for him to spend any way he wanted.

  “It must have been pretty good to win a prize like that,” I said.

  He checked me out to see if I was putting in the needle, but I wasn’t. He was needling himself pretty well without my help. So we talked about Tropic of Night. That was the steamy zone where the white folks stuck all their nasty shadows, the zone of projection on the Others. Who were mainly Negroes in America, but other weirdos, like Catholics and Jews, would do, too. The great thing about black people, though, he said, is that they were so conveniently identifiable. Every time we look in a mirror, all that shit is reinforced, he said, and so that’s where we live, at least part of the time, every day: permanent denizens of the Tropic of Night. I asked him if he really believed that, and he laughed, and said he didn’t know. A lot of people did, and he liked to inhabit different kinds of mentalities. He liked to play with roles and masks. But what did he really believe, then, I asked in my crudely earnest way, but he let the question slide away with a shrug. Did I ever get an answer to that one?

  He said he had written a sort of opera, which I thought remarkable, and I wanted to hear all about it. That turned out to be Race Music, which made him famous later, a wonder boy at what was it? Twenty-six or twenty-seven. I was actually the first white person to see Race Music, in a basement he had rented from a church out on Garfield. When it opened later at the Victory Gardens there was practically a riot. Makes Spike Lee look like Aunt Jemima, that was in one review. And afterward the same in New York.

  But that first night we were being careful. Witt was always careful about relationships, and I was … burned doesn’t quite encompass my emotional state. Cratered? Incinerated? The oggas were in charge, at any rate. So we didn’t actually touch the first night, although our hormones were flowing thick enough to bead up on the skin surfaces. When it got dark, the whole party wandered down to the shore and watched the fireworks. I was with Lou, but Witt was sitting on the other side of me on the grass, radiating on the microwave band hot enough to brown meat. In a moment when we were alone, he asked me where I lived and I pointed to it, a big fancy apartment house by the lake shore.

  “You must be rich.”

  “Stinking.”

  “You want to invest in my play?” he asked.

  We drive back to our house and I make dinner and afterward we play. I do sleight-of-hand tricks for Luz. She fools around with her chicken, which I am having a hard time thinking of as a magical ally. Later, I stand on a kitchen chair and heave myself up into the crawl space via the plywood-covered hole set into the kitchen ceiling, and have a look around, eyeballing dimensions. I do some rough figuring.

  What am I thinking? Making a bedroom for Luz so she will be able to hold her head high in day care? Something to do while we wait for Armageddon. No, it feels right.

  It will be a bitch to build, a cramped, oven-hot workspace, and I will have to enlarge the access hole to drag standard-size plywood and drywall sheets in there, but love will find a way, I suppose.

  When Luz is in bed, I walk across to Polly Ribera’s house. The family?Polly herself, Jasper, who is twelve, and Shari, who is fourteen?are watching TV. Polly waves me in and I sit. It is a Steven Seagal movie, and the hero is knocking over the bad guys like duckpins, using aikido moves. I could comment on his technique, but instead I tell her my plan. I want to build a bedroom for Luz in the crawl space of the garage. The roof peak is a good seven feet high and there is enough room for a kid, and also there are louvered windows set into the gable on
either side for ventilation. I would do all the work myself: insulation, drywall, paint and plaster, flooring, wiring, if she will take care of the materials and the tool rental. I give her the rough estimate I have cooked up and she agrees it’s a good deal for her. She says jokingly that she won’t raise my rent when it’s done.

  So, the next day, Saturday, I drive Luz over to Trapp Avenue, to the Pettigrews’ lovely home, and drop her for a day, fortunately prearranged, of exotic pleasures. Yes, I am taking advantage, but it is so easy to play on the guilt of people like Mrs. P. and I try to keep the contempt and resentment out of my heart. Such people flocked to my husband’s plays in great numbers to delight in seeing themselves abused on the stage.

  We did actually get married, which for people of our age and class and intellectual pretensions was unusual. He asked me, too; even more unusual. Now that I look back, I must resist the impulse to put a malign light on everything that occurred between us. I could, for example, say that he asked me to marry him to see whether a cloud passed across my eyes, whether I was worried about what my parents might think. I was worried about what my parents might think, but it was the religion, not the race, something that never would have occurred to him. I had drifted considerably from the church, but my father had looked forward to giving me away in Saint Patrick’s, in the presence of a thousand or so Doe family and friends. Witt was not merely not-Catholic, but an aggressive atheist. He would not be married in a church, nor speak with a priest, nor make any commitments as to children’s education, not that he had any intention of having children. Nobody takes that shit seriously anymore. As he often remarked. The only thing that really mattered to him, I suppose, was his writing. And race, as it turned out.

  And the hatred. I thought in the beginning that I could cure him of that if I just loved him enough, that we could somehow build a magic circle within which we could have real life, not life strained through the mangle of racism. I have to think he truly loved me then, and the love was doubly precious because it was obvious that I was the only thing he actually loved. While it is the case that some of the African-American men who go with white women take out upon those women the suffering imposed by the famous Four Hundred Years Of, Witt never did, not in New York, anyway.

  We only had one fight before Africa. He had told me from the outset that he was an orphan, that his parents were dead, that he had been raised by an elderly aunt and uncle, also deceased. (Faithful Lou Nearing, who knew the truth, never said a word.) I can’t imagine how he thought he would get away with it after he became notorious. Shortly after Race Music opened in New York and created pandemonium among the great and the good of both races, an enterprising reporter for the Voice located the two people who had raised DeWitt Moore from infancy. The man was a professor of English at a New Jersey community college and the woman worked for a state social welfare agency in Trenton. Both of them were impeccably liberal, both were terribly hurt that their son had not contacted them in over seven years, and both of them were white as Senator Bilbo.

  The reporter called me for a comment just before the story broke. I no-commented him, slammed down the phone, stormed into the big room at the end of our loft where he worked. I confronted him, spitting with rage. Is it true? He admitted it. Made a joke. How could you! How could you lie to me. Me! I was so mad I kicked him in the shin. His eyes got wide, his teeth bared in a grimace of rage, he swung a clumsy slap at my face. I caught the blow in ude-hineri and tossed him across the room. Then I walked out. I stayed in the Plaza under a fake name for a week, watching television. The talking heads made the most of it, anatomizing the self-hating black male, comparing him to the self-hating Jew, blaming it on the Four Hundred Years, on the collapse of the black family, on the great and perhaps excessive power of the black family, on liberal mollycoddling, on ineradicable racism, on affirmative action, on lack of affirmative action, and on drugs, because it emerged, too, that Witt had managed to locate his birth mother some years back, a burnt-out junkie whore in Newark, lately deceased.

  So I went back. He was pathetically glad to see me when I came into the loft. He looked like he hadn’t washed, shaved, or eaten since the thing broke. He apologized, I apologized, we talked, we turned off the phone and ordered in, and had an extraordinary amount of sexual intercourse for something like ten days.

  I haven’t thought of all this in years, but now I am, as I drag heavy pieces of drywall and plywood up the ladder to the loft, which becomes hot enough to make pizza in as the day wears on. By three, I have the floor in and the insulation tacked up between the rafters, and with my rented recip saw I have cut the hole for the exhaust fan. I eat lunch in the mango shade of the yard, and wonder why I am doing this crude and wearisome task. As homage to my dad? Could be. The thing about being rich is that you never ever have to move an object from one place on the earth’s surface to another, unless you are playing a game. My father thought this corrupting, and so he, and later I, spent many hours doing sweaty, abrasive, back-straining work on old cars and on boats. I built my first boat, an eight-foot lapstrake tender, when I was eleven. My mother and sister in contrast never, as the phrase has it, lifted a finger. Nor did my husband, another interesting contrast. This is truly odd because sorcery is a physical thing, and clearly he learned to do that very well, the collecting, the mixing, the stirring, the boiling. The cutting.

  While I am eating, Jasper comes by and asks if he can help. He is a strong, stocky kid with a big mass of dark curls and a bright and humorous eye, and I am glad to have him, because I need someone to hold the other end of the drywall panels as I tack them up to the rafters with the nail gun. By the time the sun goes down, I have the ceiling and the walls done, and the exhaust fan fitted into place. Polly Ribera comes by and takes a look and praises clever Dolores, who feels pretty good herself, having let old Jane out of the cage for a little stretch.

  I take a cool shower, put on fresh clothes, eat some mangos with cottage cheese and feed Luz’s chicken some bran flakes. I knock together a little box for it out of scrap wood and hardware cloth. Then I sleep, dreamlessly as usual. The Olo regard dreamlessness as a very serious malady, on the same order as aphasia or paralysis. You really still dream, Uluné explained to me, but some curse or malign entity is blocking the vital messages from coming through. I dreamed vividly all the time I was in Africa, and at breakfast each morning, I would share these with Uluné and he would share his with me. Some were not so pleasant, as I am starting to recall. Did you ever have a nightmare in which you “awakened” into yet another nightmare? And couldn’t move? And thought it would never stop? The witch dreams of the Olo are to that sort of thing as the aircraft carrier Chester A. Nimitz is to Uluné’s twelve-foot log pirogue.

  The next morning, I awake early, with unfamiliar hunger pangs. Jane is getting rambunctious, obviously. I make myself a batch of French toast and eat it with maple syrup and jam, a pot of coffee, a whole Hayden mango at the picnic table in the backyard, serenaded by the birds. I used to like honey on French toast, back before Africa, but now the idea of honey makes me a little faint. I examine the birds and listen to them carefully. There don’t seem to be any honeyguides among them. Then I go out and pick up Polly’s Herald from the front yard where the paper boy has dropped it. I glance at the headline. I rip it out of its plastic wrapper and read the story. Then I drop it on the ground, stagger into the bushes, and throw up my breakfast.

  SEVENTEEN

  10/2 Lagos

  Dave Berne is here. Originally a Brit, famous womanizer, not with me, tho, been at Stanford for ages. He said M. had told him all about me, and sent his love, and said we would get along. Been here many times, speaks all the languages, is completely at ease. As we drove from the airport, he regaled us with a story (in mixed English and Yoruba) about a grad student of his who couldn’t get the Yoruba language tonalities right. No one would talk to him after he asked, very politely, when the next circumcision ceremony was to take place. Berne asked him exactly what he had said and t
he kid repeated it & what he’d actually said was, ‘Please, I require to have intercourse with three billy goats.’ Tunji laughing so hard he could hardly steer.

  Back at the Palm Court, Berne insisted on running off to Yaba Market for a big street lunch and so we all did, plus W. Berne found a horrible-looking little stand that he said sold the best akara in Lagos & we all sat around on rickety stools and ate the fried pastry, dipping it in blazing chili sauce, and washing it down with beer & it was very good, too. Someone tried to sell him an old Gelede mask, D.B. instantly identified it as fake, explained why, brilliant rap on aesthetics and symbology of the western Yoruba, grad students in awe. I thought it was pretty good myself, but my awe is all dried up, now, M. used to do shit like that all the time. Greer slipped into the background, grinning tho, I think he finds it a relief not always to have to be the big kahuna. W. not in awe at all, shooting D.B. daggerlike looks.

  Good discussion at dinner, talked about origins?where do religious ideas arise, can you trace a myth back to some primal source and say, oh, here marks the spot where that particular belief entered the consciousness of a people? Greer talked about Mami Wata, a Ewe cult he’s been studying for years, where we know the origins with some precision, since it dates from the coming of Europeans to the West African coast. From POV of Africans, these people appeared in floating islands that arose out of the sea. Their skins were the color of drowned corpses. They possessed tools and weapons of a kind and power never before seen on earth, clearly of magical origin. They worshiped carved figures, like real people do, & placed them in front of their floating islands. The Ewe adapted existing water spirits into a new cult, giving it a name in pidgin?Mother Water, or Mami Wata?& began to worship the figureheads of trading vessels. Mami Wata wants you to be rich like the white man, is the message. Her devotees dress in white and smear their faces with chalk or flour, and dance around figures painted bright pink, which still bear the expression of benign stupidity found on the original carved figureheads.