ETA

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!”