From
Reading Room/7:
On This Night
—Stanley Crouch
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“It is a simple tragedy. We are the best librarians,
the finest scholars, the most ruthless, and we have managed to have very fine
ideals also. It is because of this that all of the little countries may howl
and frown, but they have absolutely no interest in our failing. What we have
become, yes, is these caryatids of world civilization. That is what we have
become. Actually, I would say that what they want, the little countries that
can do nothing about how the world is, what they want is very simple. They
want to be able to do what the urchins of New York do with the subways — spray
graffiti on the walls and the windows. But they do not want the machine to
stop running. It is the fact that they do not want to stop the machine, only
autograph it, which makes the pile of merde we call international politics
send its highly tragic stench up to the heavens.”
Ekkehard was pontificating again, and by now she was deeply
tired of it. She didn’t mind the thinking but something went wrong inside her when his
voice and his diction took on an artificial quality unlike what it seemed to
be when they met in Manhattan. There was actually nothing wrong with him. Not
that she could see. Oh, he was still tall, immaculate, muscular, and handsome,
with great intelligence and the experience of hard work adding luminosity to
his looks, but she now yearned for that shining in a Negro vernacular, which
made her feel stupid and provincial. Leola’s former husband, the father
of her two aborted children, had had it, but he had proven incapable of being
satisfied with her alone and had pulled her into a dark lane of frustration
that had cracked her soul and filled it with a a brine for which she would
never forgive him. She thought about him as infrequently as possible because
he had made her so happy with his ambition, his talent, and his willingness
to stand behind himself and his dreams, no matter how rough it might get in
the art world where he had made a substantial name.
Leola despised the fact that she could never completely stop
reminding herself that there were always certain Negroes who would intentionally
charge the rail in the last stretch of the race. If they were really inferior,
she wouldn’t
mind. Then, she thought, we could all just enjoy being doormats in the richest
country in the world. But courage, not inferiority, was the problem. Sometimes
it was. Sometimes. Nothing except the basics of birth and death applied to
everyone and nobody ever knew enough people individually to say anything other
than what was seen in front of one’s own eyes. The rest was just theorizing.
Shit-talking. Maybe self-assurance, not any kind of palace or throne, was the
brass ring everybody was reaching for and maybe it was what so many fell off
of their horses trying pull out.
Whatever in the hell it all meant, Leola was still where
she was, now and again being embarrassed by unmentioned desires that had no
effect on the change that had come to loom over the life that she was living
inside herself, silent dreams so increasingly far from Ekkehard had offered
her with so little doubt. It had taken a year or so for this mood to build
up but it was right here now, too present to be ignored. At some point every
day the odd unpredictability of feeling had thumped her very hard on the heart
and that smarting throb had become part of her secret identity.
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