Page 75 D The One remains, the many change and pass; Heavens light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. prncy pysstte sueiey, Adonais . .. plough through thrashing glister toward fata morganas lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore. nonexrnavoen, "Middle Passage" Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he'd bumped when he'd been staring through the planks. "Yes," Sam said. "That's right. I am." “| know it's none of my business," the man said. “But I'd bet a lot of people meet you and think you're white." Well, a lot of people up here did. "Some of them." "The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored frienda writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they're much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on thePage 76 fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls' laughter. His name is Jean “ "Toomer?" Sam supplied. “Now don't tell me you're related to him. . . ?" The man laughed. “Though you look somewhat like him. You know, Jean just ran off with the wife of my very good friend, Waldoso I don't think I'm really supposed to like him right through here it's the kind of thing you don't write your mother about. But I do like him, that is. He's handsome, brilliant, talented. How could one help it? Maybe that's why I took a chance and spoke to you because you do look something like him. New York is the biggest of cities, but the smallest of worlds. Everybody always turns out to know everyone else " "No," Sam said. "No. I'm not his relative. But he's a friend of my . .. " How did you explain about your brother's strange girlfriend who was the one who knew everybody. "A friend of my brother's. Well, a friend of a gift my brother knows." Though Clarice had said he looked like Toomer, she hadn't mentioned the absconsion. "She was the one who told me about him." He couldn't imagine Clarice approving of such carryings on. "Oh, well, there you see. You know, that man you were watching, in the boat do you mind if I sit down?" "No. Sure... !"The young man stepped around the bench’s end, flopped to the seat, and flung both arms along the back: "Lord, he was hung! Like a stallion! Pissed like a racehorse, too!" He looked over, grinning behind his glasses. “To see it from up here at all, someone's got to throw a stream as thick as a fire hose. It was something, ‘ey?" Sam was surprised and found himself grinning at the ridiculousness of it. People didn't strip down to stand up and make water before all New York but if someone did, even less did you talk about it. That both had happened within the hour seemed to overthrow the anxiety of the last minutes, and struck him as exorbitantly comic. “But did you see what he did?" Sam asked. “Did you see?" "I saw as much as you, I bet maybe more, the way you ran off."Page 77 The fellow hit him playfully on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “[ mean, he must have jumped in . . . for a swim. Or maybe" "No," the man said. "I don't think he'd have done that." He seemed suddenly pensive. "It's much too cold. The water's still on the nippy side, this early in spring." "But he must have," Sam said. He'd stopped laughing. “I saw the boat, later on over there." He pointed toward Brooklyn. "There was no one in it. I know it was the same boat. Because of the hat, and . . . because of his hat." “No one in it?"The man seemed surprised. “It was floating empty. He must have fallen overboard or jumped in. Then he couldn't get back up. The boat was just drifting, turning in circles. Really there was no one in it at all!" The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sky while a train's open-air trundle filled the space beneath them. Through the green v's of the beams supporting the rail, over the walkway's edge, Sam could see the car tops moving toward the city. Finally the man said: "No, I don't think that's what happened. He was probably one of the Italian fishermen living over there. I live over there, toonot too far from them. A clutch of Genovesi." He toowaved toward Brooklyn. "God, those guineas are magnificent animals! Swim like porpoisesat least the boys do. You can watch them, frisking about in the water just down from where I live. Fell in? Naw... !" He burlesqued the word, speaking it in an exaggerated tone of someone who didn't use it naturally. "It's a bold swimmer who jumps into the midst of his own pee. You think he went under in his own maelstrom, while your white aeroplane of Help soared overhead? Oh, no. The East River's not really a river, you know. It's a saltwater estuary complete with tides. So even that whole herd of pissers from the Naval Shipyard, splattering off the concrete's edge every day, doesn't significantly change the taste. Jump? I'll tell you what's more likely. After he spilled his manly quarts, he lay down in the bottom and let his boat float, with the sunlight filling it up around him as if it were a tub and the light was a froth of suds. And when, finally, he drifts into the dago docks, he'll jump up, grab hold ofPage 78 it, and shake that long-skinned guinea pizzle for the little Genoese lassies out this afternoon to squeal over, go running to their mothers, and snigger at. No, suicidal or otherwise, his kind doesn't go in for drowning." Sam started to repeat that the boat had been empty. Butwell, was there a chance he'd missed the form stretched on the bottom? Sam said: "You live in Brooklyn?" because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remembered the oar. The boat had been empty, he was sure of italmost.) The man inclined his head: "Sebastian Melmouth, at your service. One-ten Columbia Heights, Apartment c 33." The man took his glasses off, held them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on. Sam said: "I think he fell over, Maybe he was drunk or crazy or... drunk. Maybe that's why he took his clothes off?" “to piss in the river?" The man cocked his head, quizzical. "It's possible. Those guineas drink more than I do. A couple of quarts of dago red'll certainly make your spigot spout." He looked over at Sam, suddenly sober-faced. "My name isn't really Sebastian Melmouth. Do you know who Sebastian Melmouth was?" Sam shook his head."That was the name Wilde used, after he got out of Reading and was staying incognito in France. Oscar Wildeyou know, The Ballad of Reading Gaoleach man Kills the thing he loves'?" "The Importance of Being Earnest," Sam answered. "The importance of being earnest to be sure!" The man nodded deeply. “They did that down on the school campus the play where I grew up." "School?" The man raised an eyebrow. “The college it's a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama's Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it." The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. “I'm sorrybut the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in blackfacePage 79 well, not blackface. But as a minstrel" The man's laughter fractured his own sentence. ". . . Really!" He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. “That's just awful of me. But maybe" he tumed, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laughs detritus"they only used the lighter-skinned students for the?" “No," Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. "No, they had students of all colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines." “Really?" the man asked, incredulously. Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this. "You know," the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. "I would have loved to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than excitingit might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the sort of thing that all white people should be made to seeShakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!" Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was overthough the