Clifford's Blues (9 page)

In the camp, after looking through the canteen and seeing nothing to do, I took a stroll around. Oh, shit. I headed right for the Infirmary. Menno wasn't there. Nyassa told me he was down at the
Priesterblock
ministering to the new Witnesses. I sat down. Nyassa looked sad. There weren't too many patients around. There never are in summer. It's the winters that kill people. I asked how it was going and he said all right, but his wife would have to divorce him. Kids? He said no. It was tough enough in Germany for a black adult. Why have kids go through that, too? Me? Not married, no kids, I told him. Had I really been in Dachau three years, he wanted to know. I knew why he was asking, of course. He could see himself in here for three years or longer, too. He didn't know his sentence.

Then he started to talk fast, I mean up-tempo. He said he'd just written to his wife, telling her to go to America and wait until he got out. They all want to go to America. Me, too. I asked what made him think it would be better for him there than here. Told him that where I came from, if you even looked at a white woman, you'd be dancing at the end of a rope. He said he'd heard that, but didn't believe it. Why? he wanted to know. I said that's just the way things were. Wasn't he in jail for being black
and
marrying a German woman?

Ernest Just was involved with a German woman, he said, and would probably marry her and take her to America, Washington,
DC
. I said the man must be crazy. He said some people thought so, but he himself had found him to be a brilliant scientist. He was always struggling, though, to find money and places where he could do his work, which was difficult to do in America, but not so hard here. At least they did let him work right here in Germany at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, before he went to Naples. Nyassa was talking even faster, his eyes bucking bigger. And Just could have worked in France, too, if he'd wanted to, Dr. Nyassa said. “Brilliant!”

Man, he ran on with this Just, throwing out all this stuff—marine biologist, head of the department of physiology (or did he say psychology?), mostly working with worms, had reversed the sex of some worms (oh, yes?) in an experiment, made more chromosomes (?) in animals, reproduced the histological characteristics of human cancer cells (or did he say historical characteristics?). Then he asked me if I'd ever heard of a Dr. Domagk, but didn't wait for me to say no. This man had invented a miracle drug, Nyassa said, to kill bacteria and therefore infection.

“Hummm,” I said.

Then he said it was called Protonsil, sulfanilamide. Domagk was the director of the I.G. Farben Research Institute, and Nyassa said he'd written to him for his help in getting out. I said I wished him good luck. What was his own work about, I asked, and he said it was cellular physiology (or philosophy?).

I didn't have one damned idea what he was talking about, but I could see that it made him feel better to talk about such things, so I sat there for an hour, thinking, Here are two darkies stuck in the middle of a cotton field, a concentration camp, and one is talking about all these ologies, and the other is hoping his officer is having a good time with his wife so he can go back where he lives and slip downstairs to his bed in the cellar and not be bothered. Didn't neither one of us say anything about how strange it was for us to be here. When I got up to go, the glaze went out of his eyes and he suddenly started talking like a normal person. He asked me to tell him about jazz music, how it was played, how it felt to play it. He sounded just like white folks. I sat back down and I asked if he'd ever gone back to his father's home in Tanganyika, and he said he had not, that he was sure he'd find it too primitive for him, but he liked jazz music because it was American. I said it wasn't like any other music, because it was always changing. Not like playing Bach, I said. But is it fun playing? he wanted to know. I said it sometimes wasn't.

He smiled when I spoke. My German was street German, Berlin Alexanderplatz German, and I guess that's why he smiled so much when I talked. Then he wanted to know if I knew Bessie and Jelly Roll, or Duke and Louis and Sidney, and I told him I'd met them, of course, and then went into Mr. Wooding and how I came to Europe with him and stayed, and now wished I hadn't. He excused himself and came back with some “medicinal brandy,” he called it, and I said it was good for the Dachau Blues. Then I told him about this music running around in my head, new sounds, and then he said all this reminded him of music by an Austrian named Schoenberg, who developed a 12-tone scale. He wasn't blue anymore. Nyassa poured some more “medicine,” and we just sat there, looking out the window at the Appellplatz.

Nyassa asked me about my crime. He said real quick that he'd never known criminals until he came here and that I didn't seem to be like the rest of them. I stroked my face with my finger and said “Black.” Then I got up and left.

While I was walking across the 'Platz, through the
Jourhaus
gate and through the section where they were rebuilding the ammunition factory, and down the street to the officers' quarters, I wondered, maybe for the first time with my dumb ass, if Malcolm would have done what he did to me if I'd been white. I cried when I got in and went downstairs without running into Anna or Dieter Lange, cried because there are some things you never let yourself know, even when you do know them.

Sunday, Sept. 22, 1935

Last night Dieter Lange had me playing the piano along with some new records he got somewhere. Know he didn't buy them. But he had Charlie Barnet's “A Star Fell out of Heaven” with “When Did You Leave Heaven” on the flip side, and a Cab Calloway, “Avalon” up and “Chinese Rhythm” over. Dieter Lange loved them because they were new, but they weren't nothing special, even though Doc Cheatham was playing lead trumpet. It was nice playing with Doc again. Made me homesick and sad. Benny Payne was on piano, but I cut him good (or at least it sounded that way to me, because mine was real music and his was on a record). It's been a little while since we had a good house-rent kind of party. Sometimes it just isn't too good to move up in the world.

So this morning, while Anna and Dieter Lange stuffed themselves with ham and eggs American style, and with biscuits I'd made and strawberry jam Annaliese's mother had made, he talked about the latest new law. Every time you turn around, these Germans've got themselves a new law or two or three. Can't do this, can't do that, can't do the other, just like living in a colored section back home. Jews can't vote any more and, on top of that, the government took away their citizenship. Jews can't marry anybody who's not a Jew, and Germans can't marry anybody who isn't German. Can't cross the line, boy, can't even diddle a liddle. Do you suppose the Nazis—that means everyone who isn't in a camp—been studying with some of those crackers like Bilbo and Vardaman and Ben Tilman and Hoke Smith? “Racial desecration”? Well, that's what they got old Nyassa on—even before they passed the goddamn law. Nothing changes. Wherever you are, if you're colored it's all the same.

When Anna wasn't watching, Dieter Lange looked at me and winked. I knew what that meant. Fuck the Nuremberg Laws. He was going to fuck me whenever he wanted to, and, as he once told me, he didn't have to worry whether or not I had “the rag on.”

Thursday, Nov. 28, 1935

Yesterday Dieter Lange came back from a trip to Amsterdam. (Annaliese had a good time while he was away, and I'm glad she did.) He brought a Brunswick-French record and a Decca-Dutch record, both cut by Freddie Johnson. And he had another one cut by Willy Lewis. “Freddie Johnson and His Harlemites.” “Willy Lewis and His Orchestra.” Both had been in the band. Both were free. Now, I never liked Freddie because he played the piano too sometimes, when Mr. Wooding didn't want to. Mr. Wooding figured it was best to have two other piano players, since he thought I was “delicate,” and whether I played or not, I could do the vocals. But I could have made a lot more money if it hadn't been for Freddie. Willy played alto, so he wasn't in the way.

Here I thought they'd all gone back home, and the bastards are still in Europe. Dieter Lange knew what I was thinking and he laughed; he laughed and I cried. Did he see them play? Did he talk to them? Did he tell them about me? What did they say? (Being in the sweet life, I didn't pal around with the guys in the band too much. They teased me. Asked if I wanted to dance. Tried to goose me with drumsticks and then pretended they didn't know what they were doing. But this was a different time, different place, and they were free and I wasn't, so I kept on with the questions.) Could they help me get out? Did you tell them to see somebody who could help? The more questions I asked, the harder he laughed, spinning around and pounding the floor with his feet. I knew for real then, if I didn't want to know it before, that Dieter Lange, even after all this time, had never meant to let me go.

I got so mad, I snatched the records and slammed them on the floor. They broke. He stopped laughing then. But that wasn't all. I went crazy, and I slapped him as hard as I could. Spun him around. Then he tried to punch me. I scratched his face. He started hollering that I was going into the camp right away; he didn't have to take this shit from some black fairy. I screamed back that I'd tell the Gestapo he was a coal-digger and that would finish him, too. He said no one would believe me, so I was wasting my breath, and anyway, it'd be nothing to shoot me and tell them I tried to escape, and I said that never happened to a calfactor and they'd certainly know something was funny, and that was when Anna said from behind us, “I believe. I know.”

Dieter Lange went red. He was shitting chitlins. Anna was standing in the doorway. She had that look on her face—the one she has when she's been with Bernhardt. There we were, both of us, in her fat little hands. I could see that Dieter Lange was trying to think of something to tell her,
anything
to tell her. She waddled into the room, the big room where the piano is. She walked across the floor to the couch and sat down. She slid her dress up to the top of her stockings, unfastened the garters and rolled them down. Then she reached up behind her dress and loosened her girdle. When she was finished with that, she pulled down her bloomers and threw them on the couch beside her. She pulled her dress way up, letting all that bloated white skin show. She looked like a partly skinned hog, and in the middle of all that was the hair on her pussy. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. She opened her legs wide and her eyes were like she'd been smoking Mary Jane, or had had some cocaine. She looked at me and smiled. She looked at Dieter Lange and said way down in her throat, “Eat me, sweetheart, eat.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Dieter Lange took a couple of clumsy steps forward, collapsed on his knees, and slid toward her. He buried his head between her thighs, and her body snapped up and settled back quivering around him. Dieter Lange was at it like a pig at a trough, slobbering and grunting, grabbing her thighs, and she was working those hams up behind his back and moving his head this way and that. Her mouth was open, her lips wet, and she kept saying “Ahh, yes, oh, yes, yes, ahh.” Once, while sucking in her breath, she opened her eyes, looked right at me but didn't seem to see me. It was like I was just a part of the furniture in the room, like I was blind.

I came down here. I closed my door. I heard them grunting and moaning, heard Dieter Lange's feet sliding on the floor. And then there was quiet. Then some moving around, some walking, Dieter Lange's brisk, Anna's kind of clumsy. I know their footsteps better than I know my own. Then they talked, his voice going loud and then soft; hers did the same thing. I'd never heard her being sharp with Dieter Lange before. I sat and shook. I was scared thinking of what was going to happen to me. Then, suddenly, they were shouting and screaming at each other. But there was a new sound in Dieter Lange's voice, like someone pretending he's as tough as he was before he got his behind kicked. I kept waiting for his footsteps on the stairs. I knew he'd never get over that slap I gave him. And I knew as sure as cotton is white that he's sorry he brought those records back and laughed at me.

I thought about Anna. She said she believed, that she knew, and Dieter Lange must sure believe that, the way he did that crawl. The bitch had him. Now, what was she going to do with him—and me? How did she get to know? Did Bernhardt know? I heard them go into the kitchen, heard pots and pans. I waited for the footsteps and Dieter Lange's yell: “Cleef!” The smell of food. One minute I was hungry and the next the smell of it made me want to puke. Voices, then silence; silence, then voices. I crept to the furnace and quietly opened the door. The fire was low. I tiptoed to the coal bin and grabbed a handful of coal and one by one tossed the pieces in. I made four trips while waiting for the sound of his feet on the stairs, his shout. I slid open the vents so the fire could catch and, still shaking, crept back to my bed. I didn't bother to undress. I must have dozed off, finally, because when I heard Anna calling from the head of the stairs, calling for me to fix breakfast, I could see daylight through the cellar windows. And I had to go to the bathroom bad. Thanksgiving Day back home.

Sat., December 7, 1935

Something's changed in the house. Dieter Lange doesn't say much, and Anna smiles all the time like she's got a pat hand. Guess she isn't as dumb as she looks. And coming from a farm where every time you look around you see one animal fucking another, she's probably got lots of tricks she can do. I thought by now I'd be over in the camp, maybe even dead, but things just go on here. They went to some rally in Munich tonight. Yesterday Anna had a bunch of women, officers' wives, over. They sewed swastika flags. That was in the morning. In the afternoon, when they'd gone, Anna wanted to do some more English. Do I think she's really better, or am I afraid not to think that? I don't want her mad at
me
.