“Right on,” says Don Cox.
Curiously, Ash Blonde doesn’t seem particularly taken aback by all this. If this dude in a pinstripe suit thinks he’s going to keep her off The All-Weather Panther Committee, he’s bananas . . .
And if they think this is going to deflect Leonard Bernstein, they’re all out to lunch. About five people are talking at once—Quat—Lefcourt—Lenny—Cox—Barbara Walters is on the edge of her chair, bursting to ask a question—but it is the Pastmaster who cuts through:
“I want to know what the Panthers’ attitude is toward the threats against these black leaders!” says Lenny.
Lefcourt the lawyer jumps up: “Mr. Bernsteen—”
“STEIN!” roars Lenny. He’s become a veritable tiger, except that he is sunk down so low into the Margaret Owen billows of the easy chair, with his eyes peering up from way down in the downy hollow, that everything he says seems to be delivered into the left knee of Don Cox.
“Mr. Bernstein,” says Lefcourt, “every time there are threats, every time there is violence, it’s used as an indictment of the Black Panthers, even if they had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
“I’m hip,” says Lenny. “That’s what I’m trying to establish. I just want to get an answer to the question.”
Lefcourt, Quat, half a dozen people it seems like, are talking, telling Lenny how the threats he is talking about, against Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, were in 1967, before the Panthers were even in existence in New York, and the people arrested in the so-called conspiracy allegedly belonged to an organization called Revolutionary Action Movement, and how the cops, the newspapers, TV, like to aim everything at the Panthers.
“I think everybody in this room buys that,” says Bernstein, “and everybody buys the distinction between what the media, what the newspapers and television say about the Panthers and what they really are. But this thing of the threats is in our collective memory. Bayard Rustin was supposed to be here tonight, but he isn’t here, and for an important reason. The reason he isn’t here tonight is that he was warned that his life would be in danger, and that’s what I want to know about.”
It’s a gasper, this remark. Lefcourt and Quat start talking, but then, suddenly, before Don Cox can open his mouth, Lenny reaches up from out of the depths of the easy chair and hands him a mint. There it is, rising up on the tips of his fingers, a mint. It is what is known as a puffed mint, an after-dinner mint, of the sort that suddenly appears on the table in little silver Marthinsen bowls, as if deposited by the mint fairy, along with the coffee, but before the ladies leave the room, a mint so small, fragile, angel-white, and melt-crazed that you have to pick it up with the tips of your forefinger and thumb lest it get its thing on a straightaway, namely, one tiny sweet salivary peppermint melt . . . in mid-air, so to speak . . . just so . . . Cox takes the mint and stares at Bernstein with a strange Plexiglas gaze . . . This little man sitting down around his kneecaps with his Groovy gear and love beads on . . .
Finally Cox comes around. “We don’t know anything about that,” he says. “We don’t threaten anybody. Like, we only advocate violence in self-defense, because we are a colonial people in a capitalist country . . . you know? . . . and the only thing we can do is defend ourselves against oppression.”
Quat is trying to steer the whole thing away—but suddenly Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa where he’s sitting, also just a couple of feet from Cox: “He used one important word”—then he looks at Cox—“you said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I dun’t beleef zat.”
Cox says, “Let me answer the question—”
Lenny breaks in: “When you say ‘capitalist’ in that pejorative tone, it reminds me of Stokely. When you read Stokely’s statement in The New York Review of Books, there’s only one place where he says what he really means, and that’s way down in paragraph 28 or something, and you realize he is talking about setting up a socialist government—”
Preminger is still talking to Cox: “Do you mean dat zis government is more repressive zan de government of Nigeria?”
“I don’t know anything about the government of Nigeria,” says Cox. “Let me answer the question—”
“You dun’t eefen listen to de kvestion,” says Preminger. “How can you answer de kvestion?”
“Let me answer the question,” Cox says, and he says to Lenny: “We believe that the government is obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income . . . see . . . but if the white businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessman and placed in the community, with the people.”
Lenny says: “How? I dig it! But how?”
“Right on!” Someone in the back digs it, too.
“Right on!”
Julie Belafonte pipes up: “That’s a very difficult question!”
“You can’t blueprint the future,” says Cox.
“You mean you’re just going to wing it?” says Lenny.
“Like . . . this is what we want, man,” says Cox. “We want the same thing as you, we want peace. We want to come home at night and be with the family . . . and turn on the TV . . . and smoke a little weed . . . you know? . . . and get a little high . . . you dig? . . . and we’d like to get into that bag, like anybody else. But we can’t do that . . . see . . . because if they send in the pigs to rip us off and brutalize our families, then we have to fight.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more!” says Lenny. “But what do you do—”
Cox says: “We think that this country is going more and more toward fascism to oppress those people who have the will to fight back—”
“I agree with you one hundred percent!” says Lenny. “But you’re putting it in defensive terms, and don’t you really mean it in offensive terms—”
“That’s the language of the oppressor,” says Cox. “As soon as—”
“Dat’s not—” says Preminger.
“Let me finish!” says Cox. “As a Black Panther, you get used to—”
“Dat’s not—”
“Let me finish! As a Black Panther, you learn that language is used as an instrument of control, and—”
“He doesn’t mean dat!”
“Let me finish!”
Cox to Preminger to Bernstein to . . . they’re wrestling for the Big Ear . . . quite a struggle . . . Cox standing up by the piano covered in the million-dollar chatchkas . . . Lenny sunk down into the Margaret Owen easy chair . . . Preminger, the irresistible commandant of the sofa . . . they’re pulling and tugging—
—whereupon the little gray man, the servant of history, pops up from beside the other piano and says: “Mr. Bernstein, will you yield the floor to Mrs. Bernstein?”
And suddenly Felicia, serene and flawless as Mary Astor, is on her feet: “I would just like to quote this passage from Richard Harris, in The New Yorker,” and she is standing up beside the other piano with a copy of The New Yorker in her hand, reading from an article by Richard Harris on the Justice Department.
“This is a letter from Roger Wilkins to Secretary Finch,” says Felicia. This is Roy Wilkins’s nephew, Roger Wilkins, former head of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, and now with the Ford Foundation. “ ‘A year ago I figured that a black rebellion was out of the question, because black leaders—even the most militant of them—knew that all they would accomplish was to get themselves and their followers killed.’ ” Felicia looks up at the audience, as during any first-class reading, and her voice begins to take on more and more theatrical lift. “ ‘But I think that the despair is far deeper now. You just can’t go on seeing how white men live, the opportunity they have, listening to all the promises they make and realizing how little they have delivered, without having to fight an almost ungovernable rage within yourself. ’ ” Felicia’s voice has taken on the very vibrato of emotion. And in the back of the room, standing close to Gail Lumet, is Roger Wilkins himself. “ ‘Some black children in this country,’
” recites Felicia, “ ‘have to eat dog food or go hungry. No man can go on watching his children grow up in hunger and misery like that, with wealth and comfort on every side of him, and continue to regard himself as a man. I think that there are black men who have enough pride now so that they would rather die than go on living the way they have to live. And I think that most of us moderates would have difficulty arguing with them. The other day, an old friend of mine, a black man who has spent his life trying to work things out for his people within the system, said to me’ ”—Felicia looks at the audience and sets up the clincher—“ ‘ “Roger, I’m going to get a gun. I can’t help it.” ’ ”
“That’s marrrrrrrr-velous!” says Lenny. He says it with profound emotion . . . He sighs . . . He sinks back into the easy chair . . . Richard Harris . . . Ahura Mazda with the original flaming revelation . . .
Cox seizes the moment: “Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can’t find a meaningful life . . . you know . . . maybe we can have a meaningful death . . . and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.”
Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, “When you walk into this house, into this building”—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doormen downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front—“when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!”
Cox looks embarrassed. “No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . . That’s a personal thing . . . I used to get very uptight about things like that, but—”
“Don’t you get bitter? Doesn’t that make you mad?”
“Noooo, man . . . That’s a personal thing . . . see . . . and I don’t get mad about that personally. I’m over that.”
“Well,” says Lenny, “it makes me mad!”
And Cox stares at him, and the Plexiglas lowers over his eyes once more . . . These cats—if I wasn’t here to see it—
“This is a very paradoxical situation,” says Lenny. “Having this apartment makes this meeting possible, and if this apartment didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have it. And yet—well, it’s a very paradoxical situation.”
“I don’t get uptight about all that,” says Cox. “I’ve been through all that. I grew up in the country, in a farming community, and I finally became a ‘respectable Negro’ . . . you know . . . I did all the right things. I got a job and a car, and I was wearing a suit and getting good pay, and as long as I didn’t break any rules I could go to work and wear my suit and get paid. But then one day it dawned on me that I was only kidding myself, because that wasn’t where it was at. In a society like ours I might as well have had my hairguard on and my purple pants, because when I walked down the street I was just another nigger . . . see . . . just another nigger . . . But I don’t have that hate thing going. Like, I mean, I can feel it, I can get uptight. Like the other day I was coming out of the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by . . . see . . . and he gives me the finger. That’s the pig’s way of letting you know he’s got his eye on you. He gives me the finger . . . and for some reason or other, this kind of got the old anger boiling . . . you know?”
“God,” says Lenny, and he swings his head around toward the rest of the room, “most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted!”
Most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted. There it is. It’s an odd feeling. Most-of-the-people-in-this-room’s . . . heads have just spun out over this one. Lenny is unbeatable. Mental Jotto at 3 a.m. He has done it. He has just steered the Black Panther movement into a 1955 Jules Feiffer cartoon. Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis, Transference, Id, Superego, Archetype and Field of Perception, that wonderful 1950’s game, beloved by all educated young men and women in the East who grew up in the era of the great cresting tide of Freud, Jung, Adler, Reik & Reich, when everyone either had an analyst or quoted Ernest Dichter telling Maytag that dishwashing machines were bought by women with anal compulsions. And in the gathering insulin coma Lenny has the Panthers and seventy-five assorted celebrities and culturati heading off on the long march into the neural jungle, 1955 Forever. One way or another we all feel insecure—right? And so long as we repress our—it’s marvelous! Mr. Auricularis! The Village Explainer! Most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted—
Cox looks at him, with the Plexiglas lowering . . . But the little gray man, the servant of history, jumps in once more. He sends a lovely young thing, one of the blondes in the room, over to whisper something in Lenny’s ear. “Livingston Wingate is here,” she tells him.
No slouch in such situations, Lenny immediately seems to dope this out as just an interruption to shut him up.
“Oh, why don’t I just leave!” he says. He makes a mock move as if to get up from the chair and leave the room. “Noooo! Noooo!” everybody says. Everybody is talking at once, but then Barbara Walters, who has had this certain thing building up inside of her, springs it loose. Everybody knows that voice, Barbara Walters of the Today Show, televised coast to coast every morning, a mid-Atlantic voice, several miles east of Newfoundland and heading for Blackpool, and she leans forward, sitting in the third row in her checked pants suit with the great fur collar:
“I’m a member of the news media, but I’m here as an individual, because I’m concerned about the questions raised here, and there has been a lot of talk about the media. Last year we interviewed Mrs. Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, and it was not an edited report or anything of that sort. She had a chance to say whatever she wanted, and this is a very knowledgeable, very brilliant, very articulate woman . . . And I asked her, I said, ‘I have a child, and you have a child,’ and I said, ‘Do you see any possibility that our children will be able to grow up and live side by side in peace and harmony?’ and she said, ‘Not with the conditions that prevail in this society today, not without the overthrow of the system.’ So I asked her, ‘How do you feel, as a mother, about the prospect of your child being in that kind of confrontation, a nation in flames?’ and she said, ‘Let it burn!’ And I said, ‘What about your own child?’ and she said, ‘May he light the first match!’ And that’s what I want to ask you about. I’m still here as a concerned person, not as a reporter, but what I’m talking about, and what Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Preminger are talking about, when they ask you about the way you refer to capitalism, is whether you see any chance at all for a peaceful solution to these problems, some way out without violence.”
Cox says, “Not with the present system. I can’t see that. Like, what can change? There’s 750 families that own all the wealth of this country—”
“Dat’s not tdrue!” says Preminger. “Dere are many people wid wealth all over—”
“Let me finish!—and these families are the most reactionary elements in the country. A man like H. L. Hunt wouldn’t let me in his house.”
Barbara Walters says: “I’m not talking about—”
“I wouldn’t go to his house eef he asked me,” says Preminger.
“Well I almost—”
“What about Ross Perot? He’s a Texan, too, and is spending millions of dollars trying to get de vives of prisoners of war in touch wid de government of North Vietnam—”
Cox says: “I would respect him more if he was giving his money to hungry children.”
“He is!” says Preminger. “He is! You dun’t read anyt’ing! Dat’s your tdrouble!”
“I’m not talking about that,” Barbara Walters says to Cox. “I’m talking about what’s supposed to happen to other people if you achieve your goals.”
“You can’t just put it like that!” says Julie Belafonte. “That needs clarification.”
Barbara Walters says: “I’m tal
king as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists, and I am, too, and I want to know if you are to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go!”
Barbara Walters and her husband, Lee Guber, a producer, up against the wall in the cellar in Ekaterinburg—
Cox says, “For one person to be free, everybody must be free. As long as one whole class is oppressed, there is no freedom in a society. A lot of young white people are beginning to—”
“Dat eesn’t what she’s asking—”
“Let me finish—let me answer the question—”
“You dun’t even listen to de kvestion—”
“Let me finish—A lot of young white people are beginning to understand about oppression. They’re part of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s a different class from the black community, but there’s a common oppressor. They’re protesting about individual freedoms, to have their music and smoke weed and have sex. These are individual freedoms but they are beginning to understand—”
“If you’re for freedom,” says Preminger, “tell me dis: Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?”
“Let me finish—”
“Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?”
Most people in the room don’t know what the hell Preminger is driving at, but Leon Quat and the little gray man know right away. They’re trying to wedge into the argument. The hell with that little number, that Israel and Al Fatah and U.A.R. and MIG’s and U.S.S.R. and Zionist imperialist number—not in this room you don’t—