Melvin B. Tolson

I was a minuteman at Concord Bridge, I was a frigate-gunner on Lake Erie, I was a mortarman at Stony Ridge, I fought at San Juan Hill and Château Thierry, I braved Corregidor and the Arctic Sea: The index finger brings democracy. These States bred freedom in and in my bone— Old as the new testament of Plymouth Bay. When the Founding Fathers laid the Cornerstone And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say The hour on the hour, I nerved myself with them Under the noose in the hand of the tyrant’s whim. I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny Plow the sea mountains between the hemispheres. I’ve seen the Gulf Stream of our history Littered with derelicts of corsair careers. I’ve heard the watchman cry, “The bars! The bars!” When midnight held the funeral of stars. I saw horizontal States grow vertical, From Plymouth Harbor to the Golden Gate, Till wedged against skyscapes empyreal Their glories elbowed the decrees of fate. These States bred freedom in and in my bone: I hymn their virtues and their sins atone. The tares and wheat grow in the self-same field, The rose and thorn companion on the bush, The gold and gravel cuddle in the yield, The oil and grit and dirt together gush. The Gordian knot to be or not to be Snares not the free. My faith props the tomorrows, for I know The roots of liberty, tough-fibered, feed On the blood of tyrants and martyrs; the judas blow Tortures the branches till they twist and bleed; And yet no Caesar, vitamined on loot, Can liberty uproot! I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine. These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours; These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine. My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease Till the global war becomes a global peace.

At the Courthouse Square On the Fourth of July, Beneath Old Glory’s Pyrotechnic sky, The town fathers met, Minus Bible and rye. Against the statue Of Confederate dead The Mayor spat His snuff and said, “We need a slogan!” And he palmed his head. The Sheriff’s idioms Dynamited assent. The Judge croaked a phrase Latinistically bent. And the Mayor pondered With official intent. On a neon billboard, As high as a steeple, The travelers puzzle The amazing sequel: The Blackest Land And The Whitest People.

I judge My soul Eagle Nor mole: A man Is what He saves From rot. The corn Will fat A hog Or rat: Are these Dry bones A hut’s Or throne’s? Who filled The moat ’Twixt sheep And goat? Let Death, The twin of Life, Slip in? Prophets Arise, Mask-hid, Unwise, Divide The earth By class and birth. Caesars Without, The People Shall rout; Caesars Within, Crush flat As tin. Who makes A noose Envies The goose. Who digs A pit Dices For it. Shall tears Be shed For those Whose bread Is thieved Headlong? Tears right No wrong. Prophets Shall teach The meek To reach. Leave not To God The boot And rod. The straight Lines curve? Failure Of nerve? Blind-spots Assail? Times have Their Braille. If hue Of skin Trademark A sin, Blame not The make For God's Mistake. Since flesh And bone Turn dust And stone, With life So brief, Why add To grief? I sift The chaff From wheat and laugh. No curse Can stop The tick Of clock. Those who Wall in Themselves And grin Commit Incest And spawn A pest. What’s writ In vice Is writ In ice. The truth Is not Of fruits That rot. A sponge, The mind Soaks in The kind Of stuff That fate’s Milieu Dictates. Jesus, Mozart, Shakespeare, Descartes, Lenin, Chladni, Have lodged With me. I snatch From hooks The meat Of books. I seek Frontiers, Not worlds On biers. The snake Entoils The pig With coils. The pig’s Skewed wail Does not Prevail. Old men Grow worse With prayer Or curse: Their staffs Thwack youth Starved thin For truth. Today The Few Yield poets Their due; Tomorrow The Mass Judgment Shall pass. I harbor One fear If death Crouch near: Does my Creed span The Gulf Of Man? And when I go In calm Or blow From mice And men, Selah! What . . . then?

Down in the shipyard, day and night, The Galahads of the dock, Hard as the sinews of basin rock, Build an ocean cosmopolite. The rivets stab and the hammers bite Into the beams and plates of steel Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel. We, The workers of the world strike catholic notes On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats Epics of industry. Day and night The diapason puts The bent-winged gulls to flight And shakes the harbor and quakes the ground And leaps at the suns like Prometheus bound. Our matrix shapes our citizen of the world To cross the churning mountains of the sea, Nor fashions a canoe to sail a lake In cool felicity.

King Oliver of New Orleans has kicked the bucket, but he left behind old Satchmo with his red-hot horn to syncopate the heart and mind. The honky-tonks in Storyville have turned to ashes, have turned to dust, but old Satchmo is still around like Uncle Sam’s IN GOD WE TRUST. Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith, with her heart as big as the blues of truth? Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll, with his Cadillac and diamond tooth? Where, oh, where is Papa Handy With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar? Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly with his tall tales and 12-string guitar? Old Hip Cats, when you sang and played the blues the night Satchmo was born, did you know hypodermic needles in Rome couldn’t hoodoo him away from his horn? Wyatt Earp’s legend, John Henry’s, too, is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo when his groovy blues put headlines in the news from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow. Old Satchmo’s gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes set my soul on fire. If I climbed the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh Heaven, Satchmo’s high C would carry me higher! Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip? On Judgment Day, Gabriel will say after he blows his horn: “I’d be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe if old Satchmo had never been born!”

I Time unhinged the gates Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island, And worlds of men with hungers of body and soul Hazarded the wilderness of waters, Cadenced their destinies With the potters’-wheeling miracles Of mountain and valley, prairie and river. These were the men Who bridged the ocean With arches of dreams And piers of devotion; Messiahs from the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Old World, Searchers for Cathay and Cipango and El Dorado, Mystics from Oubangui Chari and Uppsala, Serfs from Perugia and Tonle Sap, Jailbirds from Newgate and Danzig, Patriots from Yokosuka and Stralsund, Scholars from Oxford and Leyden, Beggars from Bagdad and Montmartre, Traders from the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mona Passage, Sailors from the Skagerrak and Bosporus Strait, Iconoclasts from Buteshire and Zermatt. II These were the men of many breeds Who mixed their bloods and sowed their seeds. Designed in gold and shaped of dross, They raised the Sword beside the Cross. These were the men who laughed at odds And scoffed at dooms and diced with gods, Who freed their souls from inner bars And mused with forests and sang with stars. These were the men of prose and rhyme Who telescoped empires of time, Who knew the feel of spinal verve And walked the straight line of the curve. These were the men of iron lips Who challenged Dawn’s apocalypse, Who married Earth and Sea and Sky And died to live and lived to die. These were the men who dared to be The sires of things they could not see, Whose martyred and  rejected bones Became the States’ foundation-stones. III Into the arteries of the Republic poured The babels of bloods, The omegas of peoples, The moods of continents, The melting-pots of seas, The flotsams of isms, The flavors of tongues, The yesterdays of martyrs, The tomorrows of utopias. Into the matrix of the Republic poured White gulf streams of Europe, Black tidal waves of Africa, Yellow neap tides of Asia, Niagaras of the little people. America? America is the Black Man’s country, The Red Man’s, the Yellow Man’s, The Brown Man’s, the White Man’s. America? An international river with a legion of tributaries! A magnificent cosmorama with myriad patterns and colors! A giant forest with loin-roots in a hundred lands! A cosmopolitan orchestra with a thousand instruments playing America! IV I see America in Daniel Boone, As he scouts in the Judas night of a forest aisle; In big Paul Bunyan, as he guillotines The timber avalanche that writhes a mile. I see America in Jesse James, As his legends match his horse’s epic stride; In big John Henry, as his hammer beats The monster shovel that quakes the mountainside. I see America in Casey Jones, As he mounts No. 4 with the seal of death in his hand; In Johnny Appleseed, as his miracles Fruit the hills and valleys and plains of our Promised Land. I see America in Joe DiMaggio, As his bat cuts a vacuum in the paralyzed air; In brown Joe Louis, surfed in white acclaim, As he fights his country’s cause in Madison Square. I see America in Thomas Paine, As he pinnacles the freedoms that tyrants ban; In young Abe Lincoln, tanned by prairie suns, As he splits his rails and thinks the Rights of Man. V A blind man said, “Look at the kikes.” And I saw Rosenwald sowing the seeds of culture in the Black Belt, Michelson measuring the odysseys of invisible worlds, Brandeis opening the eyes of the blind to the Constitution, Boas translating the oneness in the Rosetta stone of mankind. A blind man said, “Look at the dagos.” And I saw La Guardia shaping the cosmos of pyramided Manhattan, Brumidi verving the Capitol frescoes of Washington at Yorktown, Caruso scaling the Alpine ranges of drama with the staff of song, Toscanini enchanting earthward the music of the spheres. A blind man said, “Look at the chinks.” And I saw Lin Yutang crying the World Charter in the white man’s wilderness, Dr. Chen charting the voyages of bacteria in the Lilly Laboratories, Lu Cong weaving plant-tapestries in the Department of Agriculture, Madame Chiang Kai-shek interpreting the Orient and the Occident. A blind man said, “Look at the bohunks.” And I saw Sikorsky blue-printing the cabala of the airways, Stokowski imprisoning the magic of symphonies with a baton, Zvak erecting St. Patricks’s Cathedral in a forest of skyscrapers, Dvořák enwombing the multiple soul of the New World. A blind man said, “Look at the niggers.” And I saw Black Samson mowing down Hessians with a scythe at Brandy-wine, Marian Anderson bewitching continents with the talisman of art, Fred Douglass hurling from tombstones the philippies of freedom, Private Brooks dying at the feet of MacArthur in Bataan. VI America can sing a lullaby When slippered dusk steals down the terraced sky; Then in a voice to wake the Plymouth dead Embattled hordes of tyranny defy. America can join the riotous throng And sell her virtues for a harlot song; Then give the clothes that hide her nakedness To help her sister nations carry on. America can worship gods of brass And bow before the strut of Breed and Class; Then gather to her bosom refugees Who champion the causes of the Mass. America can loose a world of laughter To shake the States from cornerstone to rafter; Then gird her mighty loins with corded strength In the volcanic nightmare of disaster. America can knot her arms and brow And guide across frontiers the untamed plow; Then beat the plowshares into vengeful swords To keep a rendezvous with Justice now. VII Sometimes Uncle Sam Pillows his head on the Statue of Liberty, Tranquilizes himself on the soft couch of the Corn Belt, Laves his feet in the Golden Gate, And sinks into the nepenthe of slumber. And the termites of anti-Semitism busy themselves And the Ku Klux Klan marches with rope and faggot And the money-changers plunder the Temple of Democracy And the copperheads start boring from within And the robber barons pillage the countryside And the con men try to jimmy the Constitution And the men of good will are hounded over the Land And the People groan in the tribulum of tryanny. Then Comes the roar of cannon at Fort Sumter Or the explosion of Teapot Dome Or the Wall Street Crash of ‘29 Or the thunderclap of bombs at Pearl Harbor! VIII I have a rendezvous with America At Plymouth Rock, Where the Mayflower lies Battered beam on beam By titan-chested waves that heave and shock And cold December winds That in the riggings pound their fists and scream. Here, Now, The Pilgrim Fathers draw The New World’s testament of faith and law: A government of and by and for the People, A pact of peers who share and bear and plan, A government which leaves men free and equal And yet knits men together as one man. I have a rendezvous with America At Valley Forge. These are the times that try men’s souls And fetter cowards to their under goals. Through yonder gorge Hunger and Cold, Disease and Fear, Advance with treasonous blows; The bayonets of the wind stab through Our winter soldiers’ clothes, And bloody footsteps stain the deep December snows. Here, Now, Our winter soldiers keep the faith And keep their powder dry . . . To do or die! I have a rendezvous with America This Seventh of December. The maiden freshness of Pearl Harbor’s dawn, The peace of seas that thieve the breath, I shall remember. Then Out of yonder Sunrise Land of Death The fascist spawn Strikes like the talons of the mad harpoon, Strikes like the moccasin in the black lagoon, Strikes like the fury of the raw typhoon. The traitor’s ruse And the traitor’s lie, Pearl Harbor’s ruins Of sea and sky, Shall live with me Till the day I die. Here, Now, At Pearl Harbor, I remember I have a rendezvous at Plymouth Rock and Valley Forge This Seventh of December. IX In these midnight dawns Of the Gethsemanes and the Golgothas of Peoples, I put my ear to the common ground of America. From the brows of mountains And the breasts of rivers And the flanks of prairies And the wombs of valleys Swells the Victory March of the Republic, In the masculine allegro of factories And the blues rhapsody of express trains, In the bass crescendo of power dams And the nocturne adagio of river boats, In the sound and fury of threshing machines And the clarineting needles of textile mills, In the fortissimo hammers of shipyards And the diatonic picks of coal mines, In the oboe rhythms of cotton gins And the sharped notes of salmon traps, In the belting harmonics of lumber camps And the drumming derricks of oil fields. X In these midnight dawns Of the vulture Philistines of the unquiet skies And the rattlesnake Attilas of the uptorn seas … In these midnight dawns Of the Gethsemanes and the Golgothas of Peoples, America stands Granite-footed as the Rocky Mountains Beaten by the whirlpool belts of wet winds, Deep-chested as the Appalachians Sunning valleys in the palms of their hands, Tough-tendoned as the Cumberlands Shouldering the truck caravans of US 40, Clean-flanked as the lavender walls of Palo Duro Washed by the living airs of canyon rivers, Eagle-hearted as the Pacific redwoods Uprearing their heads in the dawns and dusks of ages.

Aunt Martha bustles From room to room Between attic and basement, With duster and broom. Like an oven grenade, In cobwebby corners Her broom explodes A babel of wonders. Her summer crusade Havocs the bugs. Like an enfilade, She rakes the rugs. The sound and fury Of table and bed Whirs a panic of sparrows To the oaks overhead. Untenable grows The vast of the house For even the ghost Of Lazarus’ mouse. The fogies convert Back fences to staffs And sow their gossip With Pharisee laughs: Aunt Martha’s scowl Is a lithograph’s. As the fogies watch Her attic lairs Jettison the junk Of heirloom wares, She shouts: “Old houses Need cleaning upstairs!”

A State which, in the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world. —Mein  Kampf I The veldt men pray Carved wood and stone And tear their flesh To vein and bone. The idols scowl In the brassy sun Unmindful of Appeasement done. Yea, warriors cringe, Whose tauntings dare The regnant brute In regal lair. As tribal gods The brave confound, They bruise their heads Against the ground. Kennings of death Encyst the square, The mourners drool And children scare. Hyena laughs Spear to the stars, Dark bodies fall Like ruptured spars. Witch doctors whine Edicts anew And saint their mugs Of chloral brew. Fear grapples fear, Crinkles the knife: And life is death And death is life. And he who dies Bequeaths the chief His herd and flock, But not his grief. Who dares to mock, Who dares to shove The idols folk Are schooled to love? And graybeards croak One fool alone Reviled the hakims Of wood and stone: And headmen staked The wretch to die From dooms that crawl And dooms that fly. Ages fag out In cyclic nights, But sire and son Repeat the rites. II The rule-or-ruin class, in idols of the tribe, Creates narcissine images of itself; Defend its fetishes from the merest gibe, Like iron captains of the Guelf. The black-veldt god Behold, hair kinked and flat, Against the sun’s needling myriapod A cooling mat. The low wide nostrils ventilate The long head in the incandescent air. Insufferable sunrays cannot penetrate Black tissues as the fair. The python arm with reach to spare Are at the beck of tribal law: The black-veldt god is not aware Of civilizations buried in the jungle’s maw. The yellow god Behold, his mongoloid eye fold, The color of his sod. The cheekbones arched and bold, The broad index of face, The stoic mold Herald the myth of race. Lulled by the incense wisdom of repose, Millenniums of candlelight, The vegetarian god turns up his nose At odors of the carnivorous white. The Nordic god Behold, his blue-gray eyes Far-famed to conquer with a single prod A people mazed in a hinterland of whys. Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin, With Mongol, one in blood, with African, He makes a pseudo-science of his skin And writes his autobiography Superman. Race biases sow Hemlocks to maim and blind, Pile up Sinais of woe, Jettison the freedoms of mind, Breed the hydras of stealth, Set kind razeeing kind, Convert to potter’s fields the commonwealth. Drink, O Fool, the bias of the tribe, Autograph the epitaph of pain, Press to the heart the fangs of the moccasin bribe, Rape beauty’s flesh behind the crib of grain, Let dust bowls blight the soul’s topography, Eat, O Fool, the racist shibboleth— Damn the soul to sodomy! Damn the soul to death! III How many times Does a Southern town Waste white genius To keep the Blacks down? How many times Does progress stop To find the maimed A mythical prop? How many times Do a Führer’s claws Dig up dry bones Of the gray Lost Cause? How many times Does the ermine class Throw scraps of hate To the starved white mass? Five roads, the spokes of a county wheel, Mortise the hub of our Courthouse Square: Our graybeards fable our Daniel Boone, Who brothered the red chiefs where Five dark and bloody frontier paths, Crossbones old as the skull of the moon, Witnessed the sacrament pipe of peace, Grim as the grin of a dead buffoon. Gone are scalping-knives, Gone are red frontiers, Gone are homeborn chiefs, Gone are pioneers. Yet the town Five Points Worships myths of race; Like the veldt men, hates Alien norm and face. Sky the Jim Crow sign, Dam the ghetto’s wrath, Gibbet freedom’s sons— Tell it not in Gath! Out of the burial-crags of night The felon winds hawk down; Their devil claws riprap the roofs That visor the town. The stores on Main Street lean, Tome to mummy tome; The houses squat like smoking hulls Half-convexed on a shoal of foam, And glowworm windows in the deaf-dumb streets Are greeting cards of home. Idols of the tribe Jail the spirit fast. Scorn of lesser breeds Flash and bone outlast. Vandal Z’s of wind, Beggar vale and hill, As the myths of race Loot the people’s will. Upon the courthouse Justice stands, Eyes fated not to see; The town clock christens now the first-born hour Of a day of hate to be. Nor man nor beast prowls in his world, But on the Courthouse Square A statue of the Lost Cause bayonets Contemporary air. The skull and bones Of yesterday Haunts those who travel The American Way. Nobler to grope In the dusk of dawn Than to stumble back In midnight’s spawn. Mein Kampf is not A bible writ With hand of gore And heart of grit. Mein Kampf is lepra That whores the soul, And the brothels of race Nordic bawds control. Yet thunderbolt hells Of chastening rods Smite ever Gomorrahs Of tribal gods!

Bartender, make it straight and make it two— One for the you in me and the me in you. Now let us put our heads together: one Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun. I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw. When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent. What I shall tell you now, as man is man, You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran. It happened after my return from France At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance. We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then, The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again. But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn The Goddess Justice, like September Morn. Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof? I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head, As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said: “To make the world safe for Democracy, You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui? To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose That swung the Negro higher than a goose.” Bartender, who has dotted every i? Crossed every t? Put legs on every y? Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh Like a maniac on a broken phonograph. Bartender, make it straight and make it three— One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.

Her neon sign blared two Harlem blocks. In Aunt Grindle’s Elite Chitterling Shop the variegated dinoceras of a jukebox railed and wailed from everlasting to everlasting: Come back, Baby, come back—I need your gravy. Come back, Baby, come back—I’m weak and wavy. The talk of the town, I’m Skid Row bound— and I don’t mean maybe! (O scholars) this is the ambivalence of classical blues—and the coins came from the blue-devils’ pocket of Dipsy Muse. Across an alp of chitterlings, pungent as epigrams, Doctor Obi Nkomo the alter ego of the Harlem Gallery —as a news-waif hallooed, “The Desert Fox is dead!”— clicked his tongue —a residual habit from the veld— and —stout as a peasant in the Bread-and-Cheese War— said, “The lie of the artist is the only lie for which a mortal or a god should die.” Because nobody was a nobody to him, when from his thin charcoal lips irony escaped, it was malice toward none. The therapy of his slips by design into primitive objets d’art humanized the patrons of the Harlem Gallery as much as the masterworks he salvaged from the Lethe of the American Way in Black Manhattan. Mr. Guy Delaporte III cried out before the Regents, “Mr. Curator, what manner of man is this?” Unharassed by the ignis fatuus of a lost job, Doctor Nkomo clicked throatily and, with a chuckle whispered to me, “It’s not this buckle- head’s right or wrong if he does right or wrong.” Like a humming disk came the strophe of a rebel Bantu song. Hubris is an evil the Greeks (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) boned and fleshed to wear the mask. Pride is the lust- sinewed wench the churchman speaks of first in the Table of Deadly Sins: Doctor Nkomo’s All hail to Man was a vane on the wing to winnow the grain in person, place and thing. Too many (perhaps) of the Regents’ corralled hours Doctor Nkomo and I left gored in bull rings of pros and cons: without a horse-opera god, the Ultra dons the matador’s black of the wherefore and the why, or hoists the white flag and lets the red cells in the marrow die. His idée fixe ebbed and flowed across the dinner table: “Absurd life shakes its ass’s ears in Cendrars’—not Nkomo’s—stable. If, anchored like hooks of a hag-fish to sea weeds and patient as a weaver in haute-lisse tapestry, a Rivera or a Picasso, with a camel-hair alchemy, paints in fresco-buono the seven panels of a man’s tridimensionality in variforms and varicolors— since virtue has no Kelvin scale, since a mother breeds no twins alike, since no man is an escape running wild from self-sown seeds— then, no man, judged by his biosocial identity in toto can be a Kiefekil or a Tartufe, an Iscariot or an Iago.” Is philosophy, then, a tittle’s snack? History, a peacock's almanac? He laughed down at me, a kidney without anchorage, and said: “You must see through the millstone, since you’re not like Julio Sigafoos and me— an ex-savage.” His ebony forefinger an assagai blade, he mused aloud as the box played in Harlem’s juke: “Curator of the Harlem Ghetto, what is a masterpiece? A virgin or a jade, the vis viva of an ape of God, to awaken one, to pleasure one— a way-of-life’s aubade.” Black as cypress lawn, the crag of a woman crabsidled in. The breath of a fraxinella in hot weather, her unlooked-for grin evaporated; then, like a well’s spew of mud and oil and raw gas, she blew her top. Dipsy Muse slumped like Uhlan when his feet failed to prop, his squeal the squeal of a peccary ax-poled in its pen. The stem and stern of the Elite Chitterling Shop pitched and ditched in the chatter and squawks, in the clatter and guffaws, as a Yarmouth yawl yaws when struck by a rogue-elephant sea. Scragged beyond the cavernous door, clamorous as a parrot against the rain, Dipsy Muse’s vanity scrabbled in vain like an anchor along the neck-gorge of a sea-floor. The jukebox railed and wailed: The black widow spider gets rid of her man, gets rid of her daddy as fast as she can. If you fool around, I know what I’ll do— like the black widow spider I’ll get rid of you. A giraffine fellow whose yellow skin mocked the netted pattern of a cantaloupe opened his rawhide pocketbook to sniff of dope a whiff, with a galley curse and an alley gag; then—laughing, choking, brimstoning his spouse, he caved in like Ben Franklin’s beggarly bag. Doctor Nkomo sighed: “The nicks and cuts under a stallion’s tail spur him to carry it higher; but the incised horsetail of a man drains the bones of his I-ness drier.” A black outsider with all his eggs but one in the White Man’s basket, he quaffed his beer, stretched his beanpole legs; then —a rubberneck Robin Hood in a morris dance— readied a hobby with another color for a ride beyond the Afrikaner’s stance. “O, Romeo,” he said, “O Casanova, prithee, what is chivalrous—what, barbaric? (Why gnaw one’s thoughts to the bone?) When a cavemen painted a rubric figure of his mate with a gritstone, Eros conquered Thanatos.” His eyes glistening dots of an ice plant, he said: “My Western friends —with deserts to be turned into green pastures— rent diving bells to get the bends, curfew morals, incubate tsetse flies, stage a barroom brawl of means and ends in a cul-de-sac. (Eagles dying of hunger with cocks in their claws!) That rebel jukebox! Hear the ghetto’s dark guffaws that defy Manhattan’s Bible Belt! Aeons separate my native veld and your peaks of philosophy: I made the trek, Curator, on Man’s vegetable ivory, in threescore years and ten.” A whale of a man, I thought,a true, but not a typical, mammal. He absorbs alien ideas as Urdu Arabic characters. In a sepulchral corner, I glimpsed a Scarlet Sister Mary on the make, her lips dark and juicy like a half-done T-bone steak. The giraffine fellow eyed us with a dog-ape look and outed his impatience in a sigh; a single-acting plunger cast the die, “Mister,who are you?” His catarrhal eye baited by Doctor Nkomo’s hair (the silvery gray patina of a Japanese alloy), he was but a squeaking Cleopatra boy when the reply came like the undershot of a Poncelet water wheel: “Obi Nkomo, my dear Watson; but that is nil, a water stair that meanders to no vessel. If you ask what am I, you dash on rocks the wisdom and the will of Solon and Solomon. Am I a bee drugged on the honey of sophistry? Am I a fish from a river Jordan, fated to die as soon as it reaches an Asphalt Sea?” Not a sound came from the yellow giraffine fellow— not a sound from the bowels of this Ixion bound to the everlasting revolving ghetto wheel. Nearer the ground than Townsend’s solitaire, Doctor Nkomo raked his hair … his brain … but he did not blink the cliff of ice. “What am I?What are you? Perhaps we are twin colors in a crystal. When I was a Zulu lad, I heard an old-wives’ tale for seven-foot-spear Chakas to be. In a barnyard near a buffalo trail a hunter discovered an eagle eating dung with chickens. He carried the feathered rex to a mountain top, although it raised the dickens. The hunter explained, ‘You're not a chicken, Aquila.’ He launched the ungainly bird into space. A fouled umbrella! In the wing lock of habit, it tumbled in disgrace … down … down … down a ghostified cock! “Out of the visaing face of the sun swooped the falcon baron clarioning the summons of an aeried race. Twice the barnyard eagle answered the Solar City wight; thrice he spiraled the simoom-blistered height— braked and banked and beaked upward, upward, into transfiguring light. Old Probabilities,what am I? Mister,what are you? An eagle or a chicken come home to roost? I wish I knew!” His character (in the Greek sense) phrased a nonplus—needed a metaphor’s translation. As an African prince, kings and chiefs peacocked themselves behind him; and he, himself tough-conscienced, had slain heathenism, the Giant Grim, without a backward cry. Scot and plot, caste and class, rifted right angles to the curving grain. The dream of Abraham’s bosom bottled long ago, he walked the Pork Barrel’s porphyry street with the man in the ears; and the glassy rivers of talk —Heraclitean, Fabian, Marxian— in the lights and shadows of the illuminating gas, bona fides, limned a figure and cast of Homo Aethiopicus who knew all riverine traffickers pass beyond the Seven Walls of Water—to join … the Last of the Greeks … of the Romans, the Last. Once in a while his apology shaped itself like the symbol Q in a skipper’s log. During the falconry in the chamber of the Regents, Mr. Delaporte III flew off at a tangent and off the handle. Doctor Nkomo’s Dandie Dinmount terrier epithet sprang across the tables. My gavel big-talked in slang. Like a turtle’s head, the session withdrew into its shell. The old Africanist bowed cavalierly and said: “I’ve called the gentleman a liar —it’s true— and I am sorry for it.” Wealth of the fettered, illth of the lettered, left his realism, like rock dust, unweathered: one who eyes the needle of the present to knit the future’s garb. In his own buttoned guise he seemed to speak to the man Friday in Everyman boned and lined and veined for the twelve great fatigues to the Promised Land: “The golden mean of the dark wayfarer’s way between black Scylla and white Charybdis, I have traveled; subdued ifs in the way; from vile-canaille balconies and nigger heavens, seen day beasts and night beasts of prey in the disemboweling pits of Europe and America, in the death-worming bowels of Asia and Africa; and, although a Dumb Ox (like young Aquinas), I have not forgot the rainbows and the olive leaves against the orient sky. “The basso profundo Gibbon of Putney —not the lyric tenor, Thomas of Celano— hymns the Dies Irae!”