Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (47 page)

He had not been in my country long, he said, only about eight years; he was part of the multitude driven here by the latest European debacle; thus, one of the lucky ones—but he said this with a sad and winning irony. Then he said, with a smile, that he did not pretend to understand my country, or the place of black people in this strange place. I was wondering what all this was leading up to, naturally, and I was already half convinced that he was just a nice intellectual nut, who probably couldn't direct me across the street. But I think he caught this in some expression on my face, for he smiled, and said, “I am
not
a lecturer. I
am
a director. I thought that I would try a little experiment.” He paused, and looked at me, now, very narrowly indeed. He said, “I don't know if you agree with me, but I don't think that any of these
problem books and plays and pictures
do
anything”—we were in the era of
Earth and High Heaven
and
Gentlemen's Agreement
and
Focus
and
Kingsblood Royal
and
Pinky
—“I don't think that they're even
intended
to do anything. They just keep the myths alive. They keep the vocabulary alive. Of course, we can all feel unhappy about the poor unhappy darkies—we can afford to, we've got so many happy ones. Why not feel sorry for the Jews, we've killed so many. But a gas oven is a gas oven, and isn't a darky still a darky?”

I sipped my coffee, and watched him.

“Now,” he said, very attentive to the quality of my attention, “the experiment I have in mind is
just
an experiment. The principal element of this experiment, that is, the play, is far from ideal. I mean, I don't want you to think that I think it's a great play. But it's a relatively truthful play, and sometimes very touching, and there are elements in it which I think we can make very exciting.”

I was watching him while he spoke—watching him more than I was listening to him, which is a habit of mine. I always think that you can tell a great deal from the way a man looks at you when he's talking. Konstantine—Connie—
was
a kind of nut, as it turned out, and he was to pay very heavily for this later, for the voice of Senator McCarthy was loud in the land. But he was
my
kind of nut. He had real convictions, and he'd thought some of them through, and he tried to live by his convictions. Not even later, when his reputation and his means of making a livelihood were on the block, and nearly all of those who could have helped him had turned away from him, did I ever hear him complain. He only said,
“Well, I guess it's time to take a deep breath and hold your nose and go under. Thank God, I learned that long ago.”

That morning, while he was talking to me, he looked me directly in the eye, and he was much too involved in what he was trying to say to me to have energy left over to hand me any shit. He wasn't trying to impress me, and he wasn't blackmailed by my color. He talked to me as one artisan to another, concerning a project which he hoped we would be able to execute together. This was a profound shock, he couldn't have known how profound, and it was a great relief. No one in the theater had ever talked to me like that. No, I had become accustomed to the smile which masked a guilty awareness. Americans are always lying to themselves about that kinsman they call the Negro, and they are always lying to him, and I had grown accustomed to the tone which sought your complicity in the unadmitted crime. The directors I had talked to had to suspect, though they couldn't admit, that the roles I was expected to play were an insult to my manhood, as well as to my craft. I might have a judgment on the clown or porter I was playing. They could not risk hearing it. Of course, I couldn't risk stating it, though there were also times when I couldn't resist stating it. But this tension, created by the common knowledge of an unspeakable and unspoken lie, was not present in Konstantine's office that morning. He was the first director I'd met with whom I really wanted to work. For that matter, he was the first director I'd met who talked to me as though I could.

He poured more coffee, and he said, “One of the things that's most impressed me in this country is the struggle of black people to get an education. I always
think it's one of the great stories, and nobody knows anything about it. If there
were
a play on that subject, I'd probably do that. But I don't know of any, and so I thought I'd try this experiment with this play. I think you'll see what I mean when you read it. I certainly hope you do. Very few of the elements in the play are really alien to American life. You've got mining towns like that, for Christ's sake,
worse
than that, and people just like that, right on down to the squire. People don't really differ very much from one place to another, anyway.”

By now. I had caught his drift, and was dying to get home and read the play. I didn't know yet whether he was crazy or not, but he was beginning to excite me.

“So I thought,” he said, “I'd take this play, this mining town situation, with no comment, so to say, only making the miners and the servants, people like that, black. It's true that the play takes place in Wales, but I think we can make the audience forget that after the first few minutes, and hell, anyway, there
are
black people in Wales. And I figured we'd let the Negro kids improvise around the stretches of Welsh dialogue—dialect, really—and of course we've got tremendous musical opportunities with this play.” He looked at me and smiled. “How does it strike you, son? Oh. Of course, Ray Fisher must have told you that I want you to play the boy—to play Morgan Evans. That could be a Negro name, couldn't it?”

“So could most white names,” I said, and after a moment he laughed and I laughed with him.

“Can you read the script right away?” he asked. “And get back to me right away?”

“I'll read it today,” I said, “and I'll call you as soon as I've read it.”

“Call me this evening at home,” he said, and scribbled
his number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “I hope you'll like it. That'd be the only reason for doing it. There's not much money in it, and no glory.”

“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed now, “I'll call you this evening.”

“Right.” He held out his hand. “People call me Connie. May I call you Leo?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Well, good-bye, Leo. I hope we can do something.”

“Good-bye, Connie. I hope so, too.”

And we shook hands, and I left.

I read the play, of course, on the subway, and had finished the first act by the time I got uptown. I didn't want to go to work until I'd finished reading the play and so I went into a bar and ordered a beer and read to the end. It was a mad idea, all right, and I kept telling myself that, but I couldn't help getting more and more excited. I could see what Connie had in mind; I could see that it might work. Perhaps I didn't altogether like the faintly missionary aspect of the white schoolteacher, black-promise business, but it really couldn't be helped and if we played it right, it wouldn't be stressed. It was only going to play for seven performances, I reminded myself, but anybody in my business has to approach any project as though it has the possibilities of shaking the world. I didn't know how I was going to handle the boy, Morgan, but I felt that I could understand him and felt that I could do it. And, obviously, Connie felt that I could do it or he wouldn't have been looking for me. He was so sure that I could do it that he hadn't even asked me to read. So, it looked all right. It looked very nice. And, no matter what happened now, my morale had once again been
saved. And, after all, who knew what might come of it? Who could know? And I sailed out of the bar, with my script under my arm and sailed up the avenue to the barbecue joint in a beautiful gentle wind. I wasn't helpless anymore. Maybe I was going to live.

I called Connie that night from the barbecue joint. “This is Leo Proudhammer. I just wanted to say, thank you. You've made me very happy.”

There was a pause. Then, “You've made me very happy, too, Leo. Can you make it at ten in the morning?”

“Right.”

“Till then.”

“Till then.”

Well, this meant that I would be working nights in the barbecue joint, and rehearsing all day. But this was one of the greatest times in my life, and I'll never forget it. It was the very first time in my life, and after so long, that I was handled as an actor. Perhaps only actors can know what this means, but what it meant for me was that the track was cleared at last for work, I could concentrate on learning and working and finding out what was in me. I wasn't carrying that goddamn tray, and I wasn't at war with myself or the play or the cast. I didn't have the feeling, which I'd had so often, that I was simply hanging around, like part of the scenery, and was going to be used like that. It was the first time I was treated with that demanding respect which is due every artist, simply because of the nature of his effort, and without which he finds it almost impossible to function. I was being challenged and the very best was expected of me. And I was going to deliver my very best.

Connie worked me like a horse. Sometimes he'd say,
“Now, you know you're not telling me the truth. Don't you? You're cheating the boy.” So we'd do it again; I knew what he meant; I remembered everything he said. My first encounter with Miss Moffat I'm still not sure I ever really got right. It
is
a very tricky moment, deceptively cute—“Please, miss, can I have a kiss?” and she spanks me on the bottom, try being cute when you play it—and Morgan turned out to be the hardest role I'd ever been assigned. But it was also the best role, and I didn't at all mind being worked like a horse. He worked all of us like horses. I had trouble the first week or so with the actress who was playing Miss. Moffat. She had been a fairly big star in the thirties, a sort of second-string Janet Gaynor or Sylvia Sidney, and she was saddled with one of those awful Wampus Baby star names. She was known professionally as Bunny Nash, and though she was now far on the far side of fifty, she couldn't change it. She was having a little trouble adjusting to work in a settlement house theater. She was more than a little troubled, though she couldn't have admitted this, by finding herself surrounded by so many Negroes. Outnumbered, really: for Connie had cast all the serving roles, Bessie, Mrs. Watty, all the mine boys, and Old Tom, as black people. This meant that of fifteen speaking roles, ten were black. This made it hard on Miss Moffat, for, in the play, Miss Moffat's relationship to her peers is quite perfunctory. Her only real relationship is to Morgan. And, as Connie was directing the play, this is also true of all the “black” people in the play, who look on Morgan as their hope. For the first week, Connie concentrated on these subsidiary and unspoken relationships, leaving the center of the play virtually untouched. And
this worried Bunny Nash, who had looked on
The Corn Is Green
as a starring vehicle for herself. But Connie knew Bunny Nash, and it suited him to have her a little worried. He wanted a kind of tug of war between Miss Moffat and Morgan, in order to make vivid in the production what is only implicit in the script; that, whereas, clearly, Miss Moffat is a mystery for Morgan Evans, he is, equally, a mystery for her. And he wanted Bunny to play it not merely as the imperious, knowing, and rather noble spinster schoolteacher, but also as a woman more than a little frightened by what she has undertaken.

And, in fact, Bunny and I
were
frightened of each other in different ways, and for different reasons. Connie used this. Cruelly and painstakingly, he walked us, in our own personalities, over the ground we had to cover in the play. He never spoke of the tension between Bunny and Leo, but used this tension—or, rather, forced us to use it—to illuminate the tension between Morgan and Miss Moffat. It worked. He got what he wanted. It made our fight scene in the second act a really painful, tearing fight—Morgan, hateful, bewildered, weeping, striking out, and Miss Moffat, equally bewildered, terribly frightened and hurt, struggling for control. Having hit that peak, as it now seemed with no effort, and resolved that tension, our confidence mounted and we went to work in earnest. We had found our feet, and were able to play the difficult and, at bottom, quite improbable third act as friends whose friendship has cost them more than a little.

Connie used a lot of music in the play, and I had a solo, unseen. Before the curtain rose, I was to sing, accompanied by my guitar, an old mining song, “Dark As a Dungeon.” On the lines,

I always thought of my father, and I sang the song for him. But I hadn't been home. And I hadn't really told anyone very much about the play, for by now I knew a whole lot about the best-laid plans of mice and men and I didn't want to risk having to explain that everything had fallen through. The guys at the barbecue joint knew, of course, and they'd all been very nice. If they hadn't been, it would have been very hard on me, because I didn't want to quit my job and then be on my ass again, after seven days. And they were all going to come down and see me, with their wives or their girl-friends or whatever, on different nights. But, though I worked in Harlem, so close to home, I hadn't been home. I said to myself that it was because of my hours. We often rehearsed from ten to ten, and then I worked in the barbecue joint till dawn. Then, I grabbed a little sleep and went back to the theater. It was a schedule which I probably couldn't hope to survive today, but then it was nothing unusual. And I'd done it before, by this time I'd done it many times. Just because it's so impossible a schedule, one crams, without ever being able to recount how, a great many things into it. So, I could have gone to see my mother, whom I knew to be ailing. I had managed, on tighter schedules, to do less important things. My parents had no phone, but there was a phone at The New Dispensation House of God and I could have called Caleb. Or, I could simply have explained it to the guys at the barbecue joint, and they would have understood and would never
have given me a hard time about it. They were very nice guys and they liked me very much and they
did
very much hope I'd make it, even if it meant that I'd change and never talk to them again. So, there was really no reason for my not going home. Any psychiatrist will be glad to give you the reasons, of course, but I have always very keenly felt, in the psychiatric account, the absence of the two most important people, one of them being the psychiatrist and the other being me. Anyway: I didn't go home. Ten o'clock in the evening was too late, I said, and six in the morning was too early. And so, one night, after a particularly hard and rewarding day, I walked into the barbecue joint and found Caleb sitting at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for me.