The Drifters (19 page)

She found a room at the Berkeley Square, one of the English hotels, but was not often in it, for each evening she haunted the bars until the Arc de Triomphe opened, then reported there for the dancing, and before long she had attracted a regular group of followers, young men from different nations who were doing their best to get into bed with her, and also a few English and American girls who intuitively sensed that where Monica was, the action would be. They sat in the discotheque night after night, with the music so crashingly loud that conversation was impossible, yet somehow they talked and even conducted serious discussions in a cryptic shorthand that was incomprehensible to anyone over the age of twenty-five.

‘Well, you know …’

‘It’s a gas … like my old man … he digs it … big.’

‘Like I said …’

‘Look, I buy it. I buy it economy wholesale-size. You know, like what you said.’

‘Buster, you play it on a moog, my old man still wouldn’t … you know.’

‘Yeah, but if it keeps ’em happy—why should you sweat?’

‘Like you say—who’s gonna refute that?’

The preceding was a philosophical debate regarding the existence of a man’s soul, with the participants agreeing on an agnostic position as opposed to outright atheism. In such discussions, Monica attracted young intellectuals from the Sorbonne and Oxford, with whom she maintained a rapid bilingual debate, shifting automatically from English to French. Sometimes her group spoke in whole sentences.

One night as the two Japanese students walked back to the hotel with her, she experienced a sense of loss when they told her they were flying home next day. She kissed each of them goodbye, but then had the happy thought, ‘Why not stay with me tonight?’ and the three quietly entered by a back door and slipped into her room unnoticed.

She undressed quickly and popped into bed, indicating that if they could find room, they were welcome to sleep beside her, so they undressed and slid under the sheets, one on each side, and after a while one of them said, ‘I would like to make love to you. Saburo can sleep in the
bathroom,’ but she said, ‘I don’t think we’d better make love. Let’s just go to sleep.’

In the morning someone reported her to the hotel manager, and he said, stiffly, ‘We do not condone this sort of thing, especially with orientals,’ and she told him to go to hell, and he asked her to get out … immediately, so she yelled for the two Japanese students to join her and they marched out together with her shouting back over her shoulder, ‘You can send my clothes to the Arc de Triomphe.’

She was sitting there at four in the afternoon when the hotel maid appeared with her luggage, a small cardboard suitcase bought in Málaga and the handbag with which she had fled Vwarda. ‘Where are you going?’ a pleasant voice asked, and she looked up to see an attractive young man who said his name was Jean-Victor.

‘I’ve been kicked out of my hotel,’ she said.

‘Something serious, I hope.’

‘No. I allowed two very nice Japanese boys to sleep with me in my bed.’

‘Good! A groupie.’

‘Wash out your mind.’ She laughed and pointed to a chair. ‘Where’s a decent place to hole up?’

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m a self-supporting woman,’ she said.

‘Here comes my girl,’ Jean-Victor said. ‘Sandra, this is … What’s your name?’

‘Monica … Braham.’

‘You’re the one I read about … in the London paper.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes! Your father’s a well-known something or other. He’s been asking the police where you were. You ran away from some place in Africa, didn’t you?’

‘Oh my God! The newspapers. If you knew my father, you’d know he’d get it into the newspapers. Where’d you see it?’

Sandra explained that her father had mailed the clipping out from London, warning her not to do anything foolish like that. ‘I wonder what he thinks I’ve been doing?’ she asked in honest perplexity.

‘Have you the clipping?’ Monica asked.

‘It’s down at our digs.’

Sandra proposed that since Jean-Victor had work to do in town, she’d take Monica down to the apartment and
show her the clipping, so they left the center of town, with Sandra carrying the small handbag and Monica the light suitcase. In no time the two girls realized that they were kindred spirits, and they were in the apartment only a few moments—Monica said it was super—when Sandra said with a display of enthusiasm, ‘There’s an old sleeping bag in the corner. Why don’t you dig in here?’

‘Could I?’

‘Why not? We often have kids sleeping on the floor.’

‘Who’s in the other bed?’

‘A darling Norwegian girl, whom you’ll love, and a perfectly swell American … very quiet and well mannered.’

‘Look, if you have a foursome going …’

‘It’s not like that … not really.’ And she pulled the tartan sleeping bag from the corner, spreading it on the floor between the two beds for Monica to test. ‘Not bad,’ Monica said, and it was symptomatic of these young people that she was accepted into the group, invited to dinner, introduced to the Norwegian girl Britta and the American bartender Joe before anyone thought to ask, ‘By the way, have you any money?’

‘A small supply from home.’

‘You’re one of us,’ Jean-Victor said, and Monica asked, ‘Any of you kids have a joint? So we could sort of celebrate?’ Britta and Joe indicated that they did not use marijuana, but Jean-Victor and Sandra said they did and he produced a box of fine cigarettes from Tangier, and when Monica took her first deep puff she said, professionally, ‘Lots better than the junk we got in Vwarda.’

I am black but comely.—The Song of Solomon, 1:5

Stop it, Mom. How many white boys you know who are as smart as Ralph Bunche or as well behaved as Jackie Robinson?

One of the true mysteries of our civilization is the American businessman who sits before his television set marveling at the football prowess of Leroy Kelly, the basketball genius of Wilt Chamberlain, the baseball magic of Willie Mays and the boxing superiority of Cassius Clay but remains unwilling to give the Negro workman an even break on the grounds that ‘all niggers are inferior.’

The three most important building blocks of American history are black: anthracite, petroleum, slaves.

Advice to tourists: When you come to Philadelphia in the summer you have two things to look out for: the heat and mortal danger.

For 364 days a year the black man puts up with an agony that would drive the white man to suicide. On the 365th day he escapes by staying home drunk and then the social worker reports, ‘He was incapacitated, as usual.”

A black man is a pearl in a fair woman’s eye, and is as acceptable as lame Vulcan was to Venus.—Robert Burton

At the end of the first week of rioting the Committee to Save the University submitted its list of non-negotiable demands which the Regents would have to accept in toto before serious discussions could begin:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing.—Booker T. Washington

It’s a simple question of anatomy. For three hundred years we have been turning the other cheek. From here on out it’s gonna deal with eyes and it ain’t gonna be an eye for an eye. It’s gonna be three eyes for an eye.

For the American Negro one simple phrase summarizes the relevant history of our country: Last hired, first fired.

To introduce my next young man I wish I could show a photograph, because he occupied a prominent place in one of the crucial pictures of this century. As much as any other it crystallized emotions throughout the United States and, in a sense, the world. When you saw this terrifying photograph, you stopped and began to make an honest assessment of your beliefs and prejudices. When I saw it for the first time, on the front page of a newspaper in Vwarda, my head snapped back and I cried, ‘Good God, what are they up to?’

The photograph showed the front of an Episcopalian church in Llanfair, one of the Welsh suburbs of Main Line Philadelphia, standing between Bala-Cynwyd and Bryn Mawr. It was a bright Sunday morning in March at about the time when parishioners should have been filing past their minister to shake his hand. Instead, backing out of the church but looking over their shoulders to be sure of their escape route, came three Negroes carrying submachine guns at the ready. The first was bearded, disheveled and fearsome. The second was tall and emaciated, with a scrawny beard. The third was a good-looking young fellow of about nineteen with a totally inappropriate grin on his face. The caption said that the leader headed a committee which had just presented the Llanfair Episcopal Church with a demand for two million dollars in reparation for past crimes against the Negro. The men were carrying submachine guns because they had been forewarned that if they attempted to present their demands at that particular church they would be ejected.

‘Ain’t nobody gonna eject nobody,’ the bearded leader had shouted as his group burst into the church, and while he read his manifesto from the pulpit, his two henchmen stood with their guns leveled at the heads of the congregation. A newspaper photographer, who had been invited by white parishioners to be on hand to get shots of the Negroes
being thrown out, was waiting as the trio backed out of the church, and thus caught a photograph which would win him the Pulitzer Prize.

Unfortunately, when the flashbulb exploded, the second Negro, the tall thin one, became frightened and discharged his machine gun in the air, blasting a hole in the roof and subjecting the invaders to criminal charges. The police had already captured the two bearded men and were confident of finding the third.

The second thing I said that day in Vwarda was, ‘Hell, I know those kids!’ I checked the names in the caption, and of course one of them was Cato Jackson of Grimsby Street in North Philadelphia. I not only knew him, I also knew his father, Reverend Claypool Jackson, African Church of Our Redeemer, and the reason I knew the Reverend is an interesting comment on our times.

My employers in Geneva are American citizens. Before they launched World Mutual they had established good track records in states like Minnesota and Massachusetts. They elected to charter their new company in Switzerland because restrictions at home had become oppressive and they sought a freer arena in which to operate. They lost much by making this decision, for they would have preferred to work out of New York, but they gained a lot, too.

One thing they lost was personal contact with problems then emerging in the United States. I found that few men become heads of great companies without at least knowing what the score is. They may react conservatively or liberally, but the facts they know. If they didn’t they’d crumble. So our team knew what was happening in America and we wanted to participate … in our own way.

One area in which we cultivated a sophisticated interest was race relations. As an international outfit we could ill afford to look down our noses at any group of human beings; one of our most profitable deals had been with a consortium of apparently simple-minded Japanese entrepreneurs who were smart enough to drive a disgraceful bargain with us, and got away with it because they had something we knew we could make a profit on, a new kind of steel. I’ve already said I was consultant to a Negro republic.

So we were more ready than most to offer our brains and our money to any determined Negroes who might see
ways out of the jungle which America had created for them and to which they were still confined. Our group had no special love for Negroes, no illusions that they were better than anyone else. But we did know that they comprised twelve per cent of the American people, and we could find in world history no case of a successful nation which had condemned so high a percentage of its human resources to a life of less than full utility. Even the great slave-holding nations of history had encouraged their slaves to operate at top efficiency; for a democracy based on freedom to do less was unthinkable. So we spent a lot of time looking over the situation in America, seeking that viable situation into which we could pour thirty or forty million dollars in an effort to demonstrate what could be done when Negro and white businessmen cooperated.

We settled on Philadelphia, because this city contained a heavy concentration of Negroes moved up from the south, while its suburbs had a well-educated and generally progressive population. As usual, I was given the job of scouting possibilities, and one after another blew up in my face. In the suburbs white leaders were somewhat bewildered by the problem that had overtaken them; in the city the Negroes were so uninstructed in financial management that I could not even find a point at which to start. It was in this dejected frame of mind that I went one Sunday to the African Church of Our Redeemer simply to hear what kind of religion these leaderless people were consoling themselves with. It was a dismal experience. The minister was the Reverend Claypool Jackson, a benevolent man in his late fifties who, judging from the size and magnificence of his church, ought to have been a leader. Instead he was an obvious Uncle Tom repeating a Green Pastures vision of God and man. He preached in an exaggerated dialect, spending most of his sermon on a highly colored version of Daniel 3, which he called the story of the three little Hee-brew chir’n, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.’ He must have been a lineal descendant of the scribe who had composed this chapter of the Bible, for he was mesmerized by the three poetic names, shouting them again and again. In the Bible, within a space of nineteen verses, the three names are sung out thirteen times, always in the same order, and Reverend Jackson held that what was good enough for the Bible was good enough for him. The church resounded with the names, and whenever he called them
out, someone in the congregation would shout, ‘Oh, them poor Hee-brew chir’n.’