The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams Page A

man’s hell. Karl Marx was not thinking about niggers when he engineered The Communist Manifesto; if he was, why didn’t he say so? None of the ‘great documents’ of the West ever acknowledged a racial problem tied to an economic problem, tied to a social problem, tied to a religious problem, tied to a whole nation’s survival. And that’s why, man, none of them, unamended, are worth the paper they were written on.” Harry jabbed himself in the chest. “Somewhere you know this and you’re thinking twice about starting to work. Your job is to tell those people to stop lying, not only to us, but to themselves. You’ve written and in the process, somewhere in that African body of yours, something said, ‘I am—a writer, a man, something, but here for today. Here for right now.’”
    Harry waved to the waiter for more beer.
    â€œThat could make a man start thinking he’s pretty important stuff, couldn’t it, Harry?”
    â€œDamn, Max. Don’t you understand? If you don’t have the perspective of yourself, can you expect other people to have it?”
    But during the next weeks no amount of talking seemed to help. Max had a thousand abortive starts on the new novel, but none of them went past page three or four. In despair, he turned to his essays, but finally came to distrust them; he could not begin one with a question and answer it logically. “Does American democracy work?” Logically the essay could be completed by adding two letters: “No.”
    When he wrote, Max wanted to soar, to sing golden arias. But Zutkin’s editor friends wanted emotion: anger, unreasonable black fury; screeching, humiliation, pain, subjects which evaded the essay; articles, yes; the essay, no. Do not sing, Max, the editors seemed to be saying. Instead, tell us, in your own words, in ten thousand words or less, just how much we’ve hurt you! We will pay handsomely for that revelation.
    Until the Moses Boatwright case, few of the Harlem doings had touched Max. There were murders, yes, and reefer raids, the burglaries. There were the big bands at the Savoy and the Apollo; the Garvey diehards, the Ras Tafarian street fights, the dances. After Moses Boatwright Max didn’t want to sing at all, ever. Or, he knew it would take him a long time to learn how to sing again and even if he did, he would never sing the way he imagined he could. Maybe he would sing a rumbling, threatening basso like Harry Ames.

7
    NEW YORK
    It had been that fall, Max remembered, when the Germans had stopped jiving and started working; the next year, August, Trotsky got his, in Mexico. That somehow placed it all in focus: Trotsky and the Germans.
    The name Moses Boatwright called up the image of a tall, rangy Negro farmer dressed in faded overalls, in the Deep South, standing astride a cotton patch, a shaggy felt hat pulled low on his head to beat back the sun. But Boatwright’s picture, when it was splashed across the front pages of the downtown papers, utterly destroyed that image. Boatwright, despite the blurred and distorted photos—the better to really communicate to the readers of the tabloids that he was a cannibal even though a graduate of Harvard—appeared delicate and small, shy, and even, perhaps, tender.
    At first, the managing editor of the Harlem Democrat , Dudley Crockett, ignored the downtown papers. After all, Boatwright did not live in Harlem; he had set himself apart from his black fellows. He lived in the Village. And there was something implicitly gleeful about the downtown headlines. You see, they seemed to imply, they are nothing but savages. No, Crockett thought, the Democrat was pledged from inception to “Negro Uplift.” Doing stories on cannibals would not help.
    But the Boatwright case had disturbed Max in a nagging, indefinable way ever since it had broken. He had read the papers carefully. He had studied Boatwright’s photos, and