Word: friends
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...short story is like an old friend who calls whenever he is in town. We are happy to hear from it, we casually fan the embers of past intimacies, buy it lunch. But we seem to have less in common these days. It is a bit of an embarrassment. The short story is earnest and intense as always. It is hard to tell it that movies are more fun. And there are other reasons for unease: the short story is a financial failure and its domestic life is a mess. Most of the old mass magazines that once made room...
...would like some day to explore them to find out why I have turned out as I have. That day is going to be a long time coming, for I am not about to explain my life in the primitive vocabulary of this ignorant writer and her Dear Friend. How can you reach people who are obliviously struggling underneath a welter of preconceived notions and prejudices, people whose mental neon flashes when you come near them, Black Experience...Inner City...Hypertension..Sickle Cell Anemia...all important subjects, and all, when treated in a simplistic, reductionist way are rendered into...
...entered the room where the meeting was held in a mood of excited expectation that the meeting with someone whose work you admire inspires. She arrived a half-hour late, coming from a dinner held in her honor and accompanied by a woman described as a dear friend whose wrist the elderly writer clasped throughout the evening, as if for strength. An adulatory hush came over the room as she began to speak in her rambling, stammering, repetitive way. After about twenty minutes of this, I broke in and asked what seems now a rather academic question. I did feel...
...emotional apparatus is a little jammed, whenever acutely upset I begin to laugh hysterically; so I suppose I conformed very nicely to her sterotypical fancies about blacks. She talked on and on, every now and then mentioning blacks while casting a significant look in my direction. Her Dear Friend was no better, periodically contorting her facial muscles in expressions suggestive of profound empathy. I marveled at the speed with which, after speaking at such length in her flatulent way about the arrogated rights of the individual, she could forget her own preachings and attempt to make me into a stereotype...
Another Third World friend of mine tells me that whenever he is singled out like this he feels he probably "deserved" it. I don't agree. I don't believe that it's my due to be made an example of in such an unnecessary and insensitive fashion, to be the recipient of gratuitous history lessons. And possessed of a formidable memory, I have absolutely no difficulty recollecting that I am black. Her expressions of magnanimity and alleged rapport enraged me. Moment by moment as she alienated me, I kelpt trying to keep in mind her wonderful stories and beautiful...