Atlantis: Three Tales

  But Hubert cut the thought off: “You know, I used to work in the tobacco fields—and by and large, it’s a pretty ordinary sort of Negro you find there.”

  “That’s right. In Connecticut. What do you mean?” Sam asked; because Hubert was speaking in his serious, older-brother voice. Another sort of thunder.

  “Well, you got hardworking Negroes. You got lazy Negroes. Then you got no-accounts—that shouldn’t be news to you . . .”

  Sam nodded.

  “But you got another kind you’re going to run into up here—only thing to call ’em is animals. Maybe there’re white people like that too—I guess there must be, someplace. But, now, there were some good men working with me in the Connecticut fields. And there were some lazy ones. Lots of them were no-accounts—but even more of them were just animals.” Hubert pointed his finger. “And that’s why I don’t smoke no cigarettes.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “When they pick tobacco,” Hubert said, “they cure it before they make those. But they don’t wash it.”

  “I still don’t–”

  “Where does an animal make water or do his business?”

  “Right where he’s standing.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean,” Hubert said. “And I don’t mean once or twice; I mean all day every day—right in the row where they’re hooking tobacco. They don’t even go to the side. And at least ten times or more I come across some feller doing a lot worse than making water or his business—grinning and telling you he’s gotta do it now ’cause there ain’t much more to life but that and getting drunk and he’s just got to do it! Right on top of what you’re putting in your mouth and sucking into your body! They know white people going to be smoking them things—they think it’s funny.”

  “What’s a lot worse?” Sam took the delicate white paper from his lip, feeling its faint adhesion unstick, to look at the tube of fire and flavor in his clubbed fingers.

  “If you can’t figure it for yourself,” Hubert said, “it’s not my place to tell you. It’s not my place to preach to you, neither. And I’m not going to talk about it to you anymore.” With a theatrical finality Sam found much more maddening than any preaching (that, at least, with Hubert, meant you could turn it back into an argument), Hubert got up from the wing chair and walked, slowly and with the deliberation of a silent, primal force, into the other room—and did not close the door. Sam watched him pull out the chair, move two heavy law books over, sit down, settle one forearm on the desk, and begin studying.

  Within the silence, which was almost a rumble, like a train’s thundering off somewhere, Sam tried to detect the instructions that would release him from his own paralysis. He really didn’t know what Hubert meant by “a lot worse.” But the veiled suggestions went immediately with the things that could happen to you in the vestibules of subway cars. It wasn’t scarifying so much as it defined an area wholly constituted of his ignorance. Sam hated that and felt stupid before it.

  It didn’t stop him from smoking. But it stopped him from smoking in the house when he was around Clarice—or Hubert.

  c

  He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.

  —HORACE GREGORY, “Far Beyond Our Consciousness”

  Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter

  to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.

  —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Middle Passage”

  The intricate interpenetration of the senses, woven into that proto-historic textile—the tapestry of day—sleep and forgetfulness unravel, as effectively as any Penelope, largely before the next day’s panel is begun. (Forget a city in which you’ve once lived, and it might as well have fallen into the sea.) But it would be as naive to think that all forgettings are random as it would be to think thus of all dreams: the first things to go are, systematically, the incidents confirming our own weaknesses which, because we are lucky enough not to have to talk about, there’s no particular reason to recall. The incidents we will, likewise, retain are among those that tell of a certain strength. We may talk about them or not. In between are all the positive and negative lessons of life that life itself will not let us lose. But even among these, on imagination’s intricate loom, one can be reworked into the other with astonishing rapidity, strength into weakness, weakness into strength.

  It was astonishing how quickly Sam forgot Poonkin. Guilt he’d felt for not trying to see him on Ward’s Island was replaced by guilt at not wrapping up some of the magazines, trudging to the post office—stripped now of its green and red and silver—, and mailing them to Lewy, who, with his small dark hands, with his chocolate chest, with his crisp-haired enthusiasm, would pass them on to tobacco-colored John: a much smaller guilt, since they’d all already traded so many. Back home, they’d received dozens from Sam; Sam had received dozens from them. Probably they’d seen most of these anyway. (Five among the eighteen Sam had actually read before.) But when the last bedsheet-sized pulp was closed and returned to the pile under the daybed beside the wicker, both guilts extinguished each other. He never thought of Poonkin again.

  Or anything Poonkin might have remembered.

  Over the next few years, half-a-dozen-odd encounters with Paul Robeson, now in a concert, now in another play—along with the tremendous presence Robeson acquired in the black community—soon muddled for Sam the exact memory of the first time he’d seen Robeson on stage. Had he seen All God’s Chillun? No. But then, what was the name of the play he’d seen at the Lafayette? Had he seen Robeson in The Emperor Jones, that alternated with Chillun at the Provincetown through that spring and summer? No—but some years later he saw the movie. And there was so much talk about, and so many articles on, Robeson, that, on occasions one or two decades by, Sam said he’d seen Chillun because he knew he’d seen something with Robeson in it from around that time. And when, in 1944, Sam and his second wife attended—with Hubert and his second wife—the Robeson production of Othello at the Metropolitan Opera House, with José Ferrer as Iago, Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Margaret Webster as Emilia, and Phillip Drury as Cassio, they all went very much as Negroes who’d frequently seen Robeson perform.

  Sam had seen him just not quite so frequently.

  He remembered the little girls at the post office a good while. Taking care of them for even those moments had allowed him to retain their ruined visages with a kind of pleasure.

  But the other thing Sam remembered was the first time he walked across Brooklyn Bridge.

  Two weeks after the full moon, Clarice told him: “If you’re going down there, honey, you’ve got to dress warmer than that. May up here just isn’t like May where you and Hubert come from.”

  Thoughtfully, Sam stood at the secondhand bureau Hubert had gotten him just for his things. (He had on Hubert’s long johns.) With what little was left over from his pay, after he’d contributed his two dollars a month to Corey and Elsie for food and three-dollars-fifty-cents a week for his half of the rent, Sam had still saved enough to buy first one, another, then a third magic trick from underground Cathay.

  Sam fingered the objects on the dresser.

  Just that afternoon, down on the table in the hall, he’d found a brown paper package, wrapped in twine, the mailman had brought—from Lewy! Ripping off the paper, he’d found May’s Weird Tales, featuring the first installment of a novel by . . . Harry Houdini!

  Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.

  Folded up and slipped around the first pages, Lewy’s letter said: “High Priest Manetho here to Imhotep off spying in the Upper Kingdom,” which made Sam smile at their mutual joke from the afternoon before he’d left that he’d forgotten till now: that Sam was supposed to be a spy in the north and report back to Lewy and John what was going on. “Hi, y’all! You have got a birthday coming up, as I recall. And I got this yesterday—just finished it last night. (I wonder if it’s really by Houdini?) Consid
er it your present. And write back quickly and tell me what you think. Though I don’t expect a letter from you too soon, as I’m sure you’re awash in beautiful women and bathtub gin (while freckled Rust-Top and I do content us with simple moonshine) and the general sins of the northern fleshpots—and you simply haven’t the time. But I know you: you’ll wait (or try to wait) for the next two installments and read the whole thing at a swoop! But if, in another two months, I haven’t heard from you, then I shall do me magic and ju-ju spells on the assumption that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands.”

  Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he’d really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night.

  The first of Mr. Horstein’s tricks he’d bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight.

  The most effective trick—and the most expensive (eighty-five cents)—was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared—magically—to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole.

  The third one—though it had cost only a dime—didn’t work at all: a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb’s first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further—only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good—then opened both your hands.

  The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one.

  The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert’s hands weren’t small. Still, Sam’s own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn’t look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam’s fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn’t look like anyone’s skin color she knew—black, white, gray, or grizzly!

  Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. But then, though he liked Mr. Horstein, he was still a little afraid of him (he was a Jew, after all), and a dime wasn’t a lot.

  Sam pushed all three tricks off the dresser, into the drawer on top of Weird Tales, and closed it.

  And, for Clarice, he put on his suit jacket. And his cap.

  “Remember—” That was Hubert, reading the paper in the wing chair; he had folded it back to an advertisement for a new kind of suitcase, made from something called . . . Naugahyde? “Elsie wants us all over there by four.” Hubert looked across the dark room from under the tasseled lamp. “Since your birthday’s this coming Tuesday, she and Corey are probably going to do something a little special today. So don’t you be late, now.”

  When he asked the man behind the bars how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge from the station, Sam was told he should have gotten off at City Hall—which was closer. This was the old stop (Brooklyn Bridge) for workers who repaired the bridge—not for people who wanted to walk across it. But if he went two blocks to the east and turned left, he’d come to the walkway.

  Beyond the Oriental ornateness of the Pulitzer Building, he saw the structure between—and above—the swoop and curve of trolley tracks, the girders of the El.

  It really was immense!

  He turned left onto Rose Street, which took him down under one of the bridge’s stone archways. The arches left and right were walled and windowed, with padlocked doors.

  Did people live there, in the base of the bridge? Sam turned into the stone underpass.

  Hung from the middle of the overhead stone, its rim painted fresh green, a wooden sign read:

  BRIDGE WALKWAY

  Beside it was an opening in the stone. The stairway’s walls were close set. As he stood there, two colored girls with gingham showing from under their yellow cloth coats ran down. He glimpsed their shiny shoes, their white socks over their little-girl ankles, bare little-girl legs above—and smiled, as they descended toward him, out of the shadow, laughing—while an older sister in a straw hat with a grownup-looking bluejay feather came down behind, more sedately. She was almost as old as Clarice—and, from the way she turned her shoulders and nodded so faintly without a smile, clearly considered herself to look smart.

  And (he turned to look after her) she did.

  Then all three were gone.

  He was left only his own smile and their brief memory. Shrugging his suit jacket together, putting his big, country-boy hand against one stone wall, he started up.

  And came out onto the concrete ramp rolling toward the first stanchion. Beyond green rails, cars passed left and right of him—along with a trolley. As its troller crossed beneath sustaining guys, its antenna jangling under the overhead wire, sparks spit down. Rocking away toward Brooklyn, a cart lagged behind, its gun-gray horse and its colored driver, in his gray slouch brim, impassive beside the electrical crackling, the blue-green shower of light.

  Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio. He was the only child of Clarence Arthur and Grace Hart Crane.

  Between him and the traffic, a cable thick as an oil drum lifted slant and vertical cords toward the double vault of stone. Sam started forward, walking toward where the cement flooring gave way to wood. And as hundreds on hundreds of thousands of pedestrians had thought so many times before, Sam thought: Lord, this is marvelous!

  In July of 1923, Edna St.-Vincent Millay married Dutch coffee importer Eugen Jan Boissevain. The couple lived at 75% Bedford Street, at nine feet wide the narrowest house in New York City.

  At first it seemed the walkway stopped when it hit the bridge’s stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourteen, ran round the central stone column, down—those were metal steps up to the higher level, not a ribbed green metal wall—the stairs. Check these off.

  Braithwaite died in 1962. Angelina Grimké in 1958. Fenton Johnson in 1958 also . . . . Effie Lee New-some was doing poorly this past summer, I was told by a lady from Wilberforce, but she was still alive. Her address has been Box 291, Wilberforce, Ohio.

  Nanina Alba’s address is 303 Fonville Street, Tuskegee, Alabama. Shall I write her for bionotes, or would you like to? . . . There is a Charles E. Wheeler, Jr. listed in the Chicago telephone directory, but I can’t get an answer there—yet. Will try again. I am not sure (in fact, I doubt) this is the poet . . . . Jean Toomer is still in a nursing home in Doylestown, Pa. His wife Marjorie Toomer can be reached at their home, “The Barn”, R. D. 2, Doylestown. She will answer letters promptly. I have visited her twice. She is active for civil rights. Jean’s literary disappointments after Cane were shattering. He tried desperately to repeat that artistic achievement (but not as a Negro) and failed . . . . I persuaded her and him to give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that Cane may be reprinted along with some of Jean’s unpublished writings . . . . The sonnet by Allen Tate is perfect for The Poetry of the Negro. His background as a Fugitive and redhot I’LL TAKE MY STANDer adds to its effectiveness. As Countee said about himself, Allen’s “conversion came high-priced,” no doubt . . . . and there are letters from him in the Toomer Collection. Hart Crane was trying to arrange for the two (Toomer and Tate) to meet. In any case, we can now see that the early anti-Negro expressions of the Fugitives probably reflected guilt feelings, as this “Sonnet at Chris
tmas” makes clear in Tate’s case. . . . By the way, I also sponsored Frank Lima for his Opportunity. We should let him pass for colored, if he wishes. I thought he was Puerto Rican at the time. Nobody would object to a Mexican identifying as a Negro. Not even a black muslim or a black panther. And I will not object to a couple or so poems by Mason Jordan Mason so long as we make it plain in the biographical note that at least we are not sure. He certainly writes in Negro, as Karl Shapiro says of Tolson. And he’s good.

  Once Lewy had made a clock from a ten-gallon kerosene can, a hole punched in the bottom to dribble water (“No, no—!” Mama said. “Don’t bring that in here. Set it out by the pump!“) and a board float in the top, fixed to a cord, that, as the float lowered, turned a spool on another board that rotated an elaborately scrolled hand, from an old clock Lewy’d found, about a cardboard dial. The first dial Lewy had drawn was marked with minutes in five-minute groupings. It kept time for practically three-quarters of an hour. But that evening Lewy came over and closeted himself with Papa in the study, and the next day he’d replaced the dial with one far more elaborate, drawn on a piece of parchment, inked in reds and blacks and greens and suggesting some medieval illuminated compass, now marked with a time scale of three fourteen-minute intervals, each divided in two, then further divided into three, with the major divisions indicated by signs from the zodiac and the smaller ones notated in Hebrew letters, representing a special, ancient, mystic time scale, out of Africa from before the dawn of the West—which Lewy had just made up. Lewy had explained, laughing, to Sam and John: “Now white boys do not do things like this. Your daddy told me that when he was helping me with the letters last night,” and John said, “You should’ve used Arab letters on it! Or Egyptian!” And Lewy, who knew what John was getting at, said, “I like the Jewish letters. They’re easier to remember. And the Bishop doesn’t speak Egyptian—yet.” Helping Lewy fill the clock, or sitting, the three of them, out by the pump, watching the hand’s imperceptible progress across the mystic signs, at such moments Sam could forget the occasional throbs of desire to be the same clear and earth-dark hue as Lewy and his own father. Well, nobody had trouble telling John was colored, for all his rusty hair. Strange though, Sam thought; such an instant as that was what let him look with sympathy at such a group of city white children—who, he was sure, from their ragged socks, worn shoes, and the rope tied around one’s waist in place of a belt, were just the boys who didn’t do things like that.