The Richer, the Poorer Read online

But from that day and for years thereafter, I was terrified of evangelists. When television became a household habit I could not look at or listen to them without trembling. The emotion I had not shown on that terrible day always surfaced. Now I can stand the sight of an overzealous preacher, but I still cannot stand the sound of them. To me they stir up their followers and make them act crazy, flinging their arms around and going into fainting spells, the process becoming an anticipated ritual.

  It was in that same year, as I recall, that my undaunted mother took me to see the moving picture version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In my safe world I knew nothing of slavery, not even the word. She wanted Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pictures on a silver screen, to prepare me for the truth of slavery and its heritage.

  We went to the movies. I knew about movies. They were stories told with pictures. We went often, and had lively discussions on the way home. The motion picture began, and we were both absorbed. I had never seen a movie before about white people and black people and their interplay. The white people looked happy and the black people looked sad. The white people looked rich and the black people looked poor.

  Then there came a scene when a white man whipped Uncle Tom, and Uncle Tom just stood and took the beating. And I was suddenly aware that my mother was crying softly. Gently I patted her knee. It is still very vivid to me. I said softly, “Don’t cry. It’s not real. It’s make-believe. No man would beat another man. You said only children fight because they don’t know any better.”

  When we were walking home, she could have told me, “I was crying because it was real.” Perhaps she decided I was not ready to be told. I was not yet ready to bear the burden of my heritage. In this week I have watched the television series Eyes on the Prize, a documentary about the racial unrest of the sixties. And I have wept as my mother wept because it was real.

  AN ADVENTURE IN MOSCOW

  The Moiseyev Dance Company of Moscow was on tour in this country, and it brought to my mind a bittersweet memory of the world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet and the evening in Moscow that I spent in the company of its dancers, an enchanted evening that was to end in my humiliation and a torrent of tears. Though the other young Americans with whom I had come to Russia were present, by some mysterious process I had been selected to be the center of attention.

  It was very flattering and I was in a state of euphoria until the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the host of this gathering, who, in this period of the 1930s, was acknowledged the filmmaker without equal across the world, said to me in the kindest, coaxing voice, “Will you dance for me?”

  A little amused by the question, I said politely and pleasantly, “I don’t dance.”

  Still quietly, still gently, he asked me again to dance. Again I murmured a refusal. The exchange went on for fifteen minutes or more, though it seemed like a day and a night to me, and perhaps to him.

  Finally, his face and voice full of wrath, his patience completely exhausted, he rose to his feet and bellowed at me in a voice like God’s, “I am the great Sergei Eisenstein, and you will dance for me.”

  It was then that I burst into tears and fled from the room. I had never danced alone in my life. In my childhood I had learned to dance—little boys and little girls awkwardly clutching each other—under the calming eye of a dance teacher. It was one of the expected parlor accomplishments, designed to make all proper children feel at ease in social situations. I knew no dance steps that would fit the exigency that I was quite literally facing. There was only one way out. And I took it.

  I flung myself down the stairs, half hoping I would break my neck and never have to see the sun rise on Moscow again. There were steps racing behind me, and as I reached the outer door, four young male dancers of the corps de ballet caught up with me, their eyes full of sympathy for my tears.

  We walked five abreast with locked arms. They did not speak English; I have a tin ear and spoke no Russian. We did not talk, but we sang Russian songs all the way to my hotel, they lustily singing the words, I joyously da-da-da-ing along with them, my tears dried, my heart mended, the evening restored.

  I had come to Russia with a group of twenty-one young black Americans, the youngest just turned twenty-one, the oldest, I think, hardly more than twenty-five, to make a movie about the black condition in America. The film company Mesrephom had invited bona fide black actors to come to Russia, but all of them had declined. Though jobs on the stage or screen were scant for black actors, the paper rubles that Russia offered them would not buy them a cup of coffee when they returned to America.

  The offer was going begging until it sifted down to a group of adventuresome spirits, among them Langston Hughes, prose writer and poet, and Henry Lee Moon, who wrote fairly regularly for The New York Times and thought the experience would make good copy. They asked me to come along because they liked me. I liked the idea because I liked them.

  The nineteenth-century Russian writers were my gods of good writing, Fyodor Dostoyevsky becoming my master when I was fourteen and made my discovery of what the word genius meant in the very first book of his that I read. Russia had become communist, a state of being that for me was not the solution to man’s dilemma, but having learned from the Russian writers that salvation lay in the soul, I was glad to leave New York for a time and re-examine my own soul.

  We arrived in Russia, were greeted warmly, were well fed and well housed. Langston, as our resident writer, was asked to read the script and give his opinion. The script had been written by a Russian, and the writing fell far short of the intent. It was Langston’s assignment to rewrite it, a task which he undertook with reluctance, and despair that it would ever come out right.

  During that waiting period one of the pleasures planned for us was the meeting with Sergei Eisenstein. And until that moment of disaster I had been, to all appearances, the most popular person at the party. Every dancer of the ballet asked me to dance with him. I never sat down once. I felt as light as a feather. My pride in myself was monumental. Then came the moment when one by one the other couples left the floor, leaving my partner and me to whirl about the room alone.

  Suddenly my partner slowed, stopped, eased me out of his arms, kissed my hand, and left me standing alone on the floor, the center of an endless expanse of Russian eyes. I stood there frozen to the spot. There was thunderous applause, meant, I suppose, to be encouraging. When Sergei Eisenstein thought I was sufficiently encouraged, he asked me to dance. The rest, of course, has already been recorded.

  The next day some sorrowful member of my group tried to explain that what had been planned as a mild joke on me to unsettle my natural reserve had gotten out of hand. Word of dancing achievements—I couldn’t even tap—was passed from mouth to mouth until it got way out of bounds, and I became an event, the reigning jazz dancer in America, known in every major city. But I had one fault. I was so excessively modest when not onstage that I would never dance offstage when asked. Indeed I would deny that I could dance. I had to be coaxed to a tiresome degree, though in the end it was worth it.

  It was not worth it to Sergei Eisenstein. I never asked who had thought up the joke. Had it been someone I trusted, it would have hurt me too much. Had it been someone I was so-so about, it would have made our proximity intolerable to me.

  Two weeks later I received an invitation to a dinner party. I did not know, or I could not place, the people who invited me. But it was not unusual to be invited to a party by people who wanted to know an American better and polish their English.

  I found my hosts and their guests charming and worldly. It was a lovely gathering. At one point I happened to glance at the dinner table. I saw my place card, and the place card nearest it bore the name of Sergei Eisenstein.

  I could not embarrass myself again by running out of the room. Instead I prepared myself to meet my enemy. In Russia it is said that five shots of vodka drunk one after the other will help you achieve anything.

  I drank my five vodkas, with everybody laughing and cheering and calling me a true Russ
ian. I was young. I was healthy. I didn’t blink an eye. I must admit that to this day I don’t know how I did it.

  There was an excited murmur. Sergei Eisenstein had entered. Unconsciously I think the guests formed two lines with Eisenstein walking between them, being greeted on each side with the honor that was due his genius. I deliberately stood at the end of the line, and when he reached me my five vodkas gave me courage to say in clearest tone, “Ah, the great Eisenstein has arrived,” and make a very low bow.

  He reached for my hand, kissed it, and said, “I want to beg your pardon. I know now that a joke was played on you. I am sorry I was made a part of it. Will you forgive me?”

  I remember saying in what came out as a childish voice, “You didn’t believe me. And I never tell lies.” (And in those days I didn’t.) Then I gave him a smile that swelled straight from my heart.

  I’m certain it was he who asked his hosts to invite me to their party, and to seat me beside him for one of the most memorable evenings of my life. He had brought stills, wonderful stills, of his current pictures, and we sat together while I marveled. I know that I was fortunate to be in his presence. I am not unmindful.

  We never made the movie. It had become general knowledge that a movie on the black condition in America was being planned. America had not yet recognized Russia. And an American engineer who was building a great dam for them vowed that if Russia went on with the movie, he would bring his own work to a stop, and advise the President to postpone or withhold recognition.

  There was much sabotage in Russia in those years when she was reaching for the stature of a world power. One did not have to be a communist to work in Russia. Russia desperately needed the skills of skilled foreigners. Germans, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen were invited for their skills, not their sympathies with the communist cause, and with the hope that they would complete a project instead of sabotaging it. Russian suspicion of foreigners may have started in those highly crucial years. And outsiders’ suspicion of Russia may have started in those years, too. It is true that when one had something to say, it was better to say it outdoors.

  THE CART

  One morning in the summer that my nephew Bud was seven and here on school holiday, he went walking in the nearby woods and came across a wooden box. A wooden box has many possibilities, though at that moment Bud could not think of one. Nevertheless he brought it home as being too important a find to leave behind. He felt confident that my mother, who, in his unsophisticated judgment knew everything, would tell him what to do with his discovery.

  It was her voice, rising from the region of the side yard, that waked me. My mother often engaged in overstatement. She was doing so now.

  “You want to know what to do with a wooden box? I’m sure you’re the only boy in the world who’s ever asked that question. Every boy in the world knows the answer.”

  His voice was humble. “Do I have to guess or will you tell me?”

  “You’d probably give me a dozen wrong guesses. It will save my time to tell you straight out. Every other boy in the world would make a cart.”

  Every boy but himself could make such a miracle come to pass. He said in self-defense, “A cart has to have wheels and stuff. I haven’t got any wheels and stuff.”

  “I can see that as well as you can.”

  His voice was inquiring, not brash. “So?”

  “So we take the next step.”

  “What next step?”

  “We go find some.”

  “Where?”

  “I know where. Come on.”

  In the side yard there was silence now. My mother and Bud had gone to whatever hideaway place where the wheels would materialize. After a while I heard them returning and the sound of something being rolled across the lawn. Curiosity compelled me out of bed, into my robe, and down the stairs. Then, walking quietly into a room that overlooked the side yard, I could see the enterprise in progress. My mother and that boy and an assortment of tools were wrestling with the wheels of my aunt’s wheelchair.

  The year before, my mother’s sister Carrie had suffered a stroke and taken to a wheelchair. When my mother got tired of seeing her let a wheelchair control her existence, she took it out from under her, handed her a cane and told her to get going. And indeed the cane would fit her into places that her wheelchair could not, and give her more freedom of movement.

  When the splendid wheels had been wrenched away, both of them stood back for a moment, my mother to take stock, the boy to glow.

  “All right,” said my mother, “let’s start.”

  “Where do I start?”

  “With your common sense.”

  For the time it took them to turn a wooden box into a moving vehicle, my mother never stopped admonishing the boy for picking up the wrong tool, for asking what she called “fool questions,” for taking ten minutes to do what should have taken ten seconds. She rarely lifted a finger to help him. She made him do it all himself, do and undo until he got it right.

  My mother’s face was deep pink with impatience, a clear indication that her pressure was rising. The boy’s face was a deeper pink as he fought to hold back his tears over what my mother was constantly telling him was a “fool mistake.”

  A half-dozen times I started to rap on the window to attract my mother’s attention and make a fiery speech about all that great to-do about a wooden box. As soon as I could dress, I would take the boy downtown and buy him a red cart. Every little boy in the world was entitled to a store-bought cart.

  But time and again something stayed my hand, some feeling that I had no right to take part, that I must be a silent witness, and no more. Finally it was over. My mother said, “Well, boy, it’s done, and you did it yourself. Always remember you made it yourself. Go try it out, and don’t kill yourself.”

  A look passed between them that I could not fathom. I turned away and went upstairs.

  For the rest of that summer, Bud was the golden boy of the neighborhood. No other boy had a moving vehicle made by his own hands. Everybody wanted a ride. Going to the beach took second place.

  Then the summer was over. It was time for the round of goodbyes. Bud’s best friend, Eddie, said that he was going to get a bicycle for Christmas. Bud said joyfully that he was, too.

  But when I met Bud at the boat he got off without a bicycle. I didn’t go into the why of it. His parents had married young. They could not always keep their promises. I did not want him running behind Eddie’s bike like an orphan. We stopped at the bicycle store and bought what I could afford. As far as Bud was concerned there was nothing more he could want.

  For the most part, the little cart stayed snug in its nesting place, on occasion surfacing when some younger child asked to play with it, and my mother giving firm instructions about its return before sundown.

  She would grumble to me, “That’s Bud’s cart.” I would reply, “He’ll never play with it again. Why don’t you give it to the next nice child who asks for it.”

  She would say grimly, “Over my dead body.”

  Bud entered his teens, then his mid-teens, no longer coming to stay all summer, but working for an uncle in the city, and coming weekends when he could. He and my mother would sit together on the back porch and talk, that communication between an older generation and one much younger.

  A young mother, a charming new friend, whose summer cottage was some distance away from mine, asked if her children could play with the cart for the few remaining weeks that they were here. Her children had seen my neighbor’s children playing with it and had been entranced. I said of course, without adding the burdensome imposition that they bring it back every sundown.

  Fall came, the young mother left, and the cart went with her. She wrote me an endearing little note and sent me a handsome present, explaining that her children were in tears when she told them they must take the cart back. They wouldn’t stop crying until she put it in her station wagon. She would bring it back next summer, and she wished me a good winter.

&n
bsp; That was the winter my mother died. I wrote Bud’s mother that I didn’t want him to come. I wanted him to remember her strong and well and full of talk and laughter.

  But I was haunted by that cart. I do not really know why. Through the rest of that winter, the feeling of guilt recurred. Bud had not mentioned the cart to me in years. But I could not forget the morning he made it and their remembered faces.

  He came that summer. He came on a late boat, and there was a party to go to. He was in and then out of the house. He did not mention my mother, and I sensed it was because he could not.

  The next morning he left the house before I waked. He loved to take an early swim, to have the beach to himself, with his thoughts turning inward. He came back. I was on the back porch. I think now he must have looked for his cart, and had not found it. He said to me very quietly, “Where is my cart?”

  I had read it in books, but had never believed it, and had certainly never experienced it. My heart lurched. There really is such a feeling. I wanted to make a full confession. “I lent it to somebody who didn’t bring it back.” Now I wanted absolution.

  “That’s okay,” he said, the way he used to say it when he was a little boy, and he didn’t want you to know how much he was hurting.

  “Do you remember the morning you made that cart? She never forgot it. We talked about it often and always in a loving way.”

  “Nobody else had ever helped me make anything. It was one of the happiest days in my life.”

  He had remembered the good part and forgotten the rest, which is the dictate of wisdom.

  ELEPHANT’S DANCE

  In 1925 he came hopefully from the West Coast. He was twenty-five, and the Negro literary “renaissance” was in its full swing. He wanted to get on the crowded lift and not get off till it skyrocketed him, and such others as had his ballast of self-assurance and talent, to a fixed place in the stars. He died on Welfare Island ten years later, with none of his dreams of greatness fulfilled. Yet the name of Wallace Thurman is more typical of that epoch than the one or two more enduring names that survived the period.