“Couldn’t you move off the couch, change your seat or something?”
“Sure. I did that one night.”
“What happened?”
“She never asked me back again. Kind of a shame. She had great hors d’oeuvres. Crackers spread with cream cheese and a black olive in the dead center of each one.”
“She wasn’t a genuine liberal!” Penny said with a touch of self-righteousness.
“That she wasn’t. I met up with a genuine white liberal later though. He was kneeling on the steps of a church and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.”
“Was it a sit-in? A pray-in, I mean?”
“No. It was a Harlem church. He was just tying his shoelace. Everybody else was singing, so he was singing too. Still, don’t get the wrong idea. He was real gung-ho for integration. I tripped over him; that’s how we met. And not long after that, he had me just as dedicated to the cause as he was. The only thing is, he was white and I was black.”
“But you were fighting for the same thing,” Penny reminded XX.
“Maybe. But when it came right down to it, I was the one who had to do the integrating. For instance, we began on schools. You see, he’d discovered an absolutely segregated high school right here in New York.”
“How appalling! What did you do?”
“We set about integrating it, of course. And we succeeded. That’s where I came in. We’d decided on deliberate speed, you see, and I was elected to be the token integrationist. I was the first Negro to attend that all-white school.”
“How did they react to your presence?”
“It’s hard to say. You see, they didn’t speak any English. Only Yiddish. As it happened, this school was a Hassidic Yeshiva. So, once we’d made our point, I didn’t hang around. And by that time my avid white liberal friend had other plans for me, anyway.”
“What sort of plans?”
“Housing. He’d decided that housing was the answer to all the Negro’s problems. What we’d do was, every Sunday we’d get into his car and go to where some new development was going up on Long Island, or in Westchester-you know, the $35,000-per-unit kind of development-—and look over the model houses. We’d talk real loud about how we were going to plant a watermelon patch here and put the barbecue pit there and things like that. Boy, we sure scared the hell out of some real estate agents. But after a while it began to pall and my white friend decided that the real answer was employment.”
“That’s certainly one of the big problems to be solved,” Penny granted.
“Uh-huh. Only I think my integrationist pal got off on the wrong foot. He got all fired up over the wrong field of endeavor, you might say.”
“I don’t see how he could,” Penny objected. “Every field is important. They all have to be integrated.”
“Well then, at least he started off with the wrong complaint. It was against CBS, and it’s hard to buck those big outfits. You see, there was this Negro fellow in the movement with us who applied for a job there as a television announcer and got turned down cold.”
“Disgraceful! You should have protested. You should have picketed. You should have boycotted. You should have staged a sit-in!”
“We did. We did all those things. But it didn’t help. They still wouldn’t budge an inch. They just wouldn’t hire this fellow.”
“You should have brought it to the F. E. P. C.”
“We did. And it looked like we might win, too, until the applicant for this announcing job got on the stand.”
“Why? What happened then?” Penny asked.
“Not much. They heard his story. They heard him out. But then they decided against him.”
“But why?”
“Just one reason. The same reason we shouldn’t have made a federal case out of it in the first place. He was asking for a job as an announcer, and he stuttered something fierce.”
“Oh! What a shame! But I hope you realized that one setback like that didn’t negate the need to end discrimination in employment.”
“Oh, absolutely. My white friend was more resolute than ever. And the next time around I was elected to be his test Negro. He aimed big, this boy. With him behind me, I took on one of the largest ad agencies on Madison Avenue. It was his idea they were discriminating in the choice of the models they were hiring. So he picked one specific account to tackle them on and demanded that they hire me to replace the white model being used.”
“Was sort of an account was it?”
“Suntan lotion. It was one of these before-and-after ads. It showed a picture of a real pale-faced white man with a caption under it reading: ’Why look like this?’ Next to it was a white man with a real good tan and the caption read: ‘When you can look like this!’ It was my integrationist friend’s idea that I should substitute for the man in the second picture. He argued that I had a far superior tan to the fellow in the ad and that therefore I was obviously more qualified for the job, and if I wasn’t given it, it was obviously due to pure discrimination.”
“Did you get the job?”
“No. The company claimed that no matter how much white people might want a tan, they didn’t really want to look Negro like me. The court upheld them. But that didn’t daunt my friend. He took out after something really big then. He got on the tail of the U. S. Government’s astronaut program. He said they were discriminating because there were no Negro astronauts. He insisted they make me an astronaut.”
“How wonderful. You must have been thrilled at the idea,” Penny enthused.
“Thrilled hell! I was so scared I damn near turned white! I get airsick riding an elevator! Still, I let myself be convinced it was for the good of my people. I went for it hook, line and sinker. I even came up with a slogan for the campaign.”
“What was it?”
“ ‘A coon to the moon by June’,” XX told her.
“Even coming from a Negro I don’t think that kind of language is in good taste,” Penny said indignantly. “You shouldn’t make jokes like that! Think what it would mean to your people if a Negro astronaut did go into space.”
“You mean if the jig was up? All right! All right! Don’t get excited! I’ll withdraw that remark. Anyway, fortunately for me, this project was just as much of a flop as all the other ideas my integration-minded friend got so hopped up about. When it came to the physical, they turned me down because I had flat feet—probably from all the picketing I’d been doing. By then I was pretty fed up with my white friend’s projects and I gave him the brush-off. But as far as white people generally were concerned, it was just the beginning for me. You see, it was around that time that I started hanging around the Left Bank.”
“The Left Bank? You mean you went abroad? To Paris? You mean the left bank of the Seine?”
“Nope. The left bank of the Harlem River’s what I mean. Where all the existentialists hang out, you know? Ever since Norman Mailer wrote that piece on The White Negro, hipsters-black and white together —have been congregating there to compare their orgasms. I got involved with one gang that was trying to take out a patent on a machine that would measure orgasms. The machine was made out of old switchblade knives and obsolete zip-guns. Then one night, at the Crillon-—that’s a local motel—-I met Lady Pratt Gashley and because of her my whole life was changed.”
“You fell in love,” Penny guessed romantically.
“We did. She was an English girl in her early thirties, a noblewoman who had forsaken her title to serve as a nurse in the war against discrimination. I met her when I was wounded in a battle on the Italian front. You may recall the battle. It was known as the Battle of Pizzeria. It was triggered when a Negro opened a pizza parlor in the section of East Harlem that borders on the Italian section. The Italians blockaded 116th Street and refused to let the Heinz trucks delivering tomato sauce through the blockade. The supporters of the Negro pizza-maker retaliated by sitting in at an Italian restaurant and draping their ravioli in black. Violence broke out when the Italians attempted to lynch one of the Negro demonstrators by stringing him up from a lamppost by a long strand of spaghetti. In the thick of the ensuing fray, I was wounded by a flamethrower spraying hot minestrone. When I came to, I found myself in an ambulance looking up into the beautiful hazel eyes of this white nurse. And that’s how I met Lady Pratt Gashley.