Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

I didn’t believe it, or that there had been such an area as Little Cheyenne. The madam had a parallel business in venereal disease treatment, giving mercury oil applications and sarsaparilla baths, I was told. A lot of deaths in the neighborhood went unrecorded the summer Scott Joplin played at the Chicago World’s Fair. This information came to me from a short-order cook I met at the new library. Fat, eloquent, and dark, an Irish American drunk, he and I went on costly binges together in his flophouse. I still don’t know how I got away from him.

* * *

Potsdamerplatz was a sandy nowhere, blond and chalky in the sunrise of the north. We were riding the side of the earth that was getting higher, hanging out over bowls of coffee at a long wooden table, like farmers. The commune I’d been accepted into on Afer’s recommendation was several hundred meters from the Wall, but you could see it and one of the guard towers when you looked east from the old wagon doors. Near to it, a sort of phantom Wall, an unfinished elevated electric train track, ran for some time and then stopped abruptly, as if it had suddenly realized its pointlessness. We sat down when birds I couldn’t name and forgot every day to ask about flew over the Wall in the morning and again in the evening as they went back to the East.

The building, a former factory, stood on Theodor Lohmann Ecke. Empty lots bordered it on three sides, but a blank wall, made up of the sides of prewar working-class apartment houses, abutted the empty lots. Ahead of us, by itself, out there in front, like the bull of the herd, getting ready to face the Wall, was a blackened building with a short tower. It had been a brewery before the war. It was the last building on Potsdamerplatz. Everything else around it had been bombed, the ranges of brick and dust carted away by the famous rubble women, the women of Berlin who after the war cleaned up the wreckage of their own infatuation with uniforms.

At my interview, the twenty-one members of Co-operative One-Fifteen-Nineteen, or the January Initiative, as founding committee people also sometimes referred to it, weren’t concerned about my politics or lack of a coherent philosophy as I alternated between tense verbal blocks in English and borrowed German disquisitional phrases. To them — the seventeen white members of the Co-op, that is — the color of my skin was my radical politics. The four black and brown members questioned me closely in English. Afer in particular seemed angry that I was ignorant of the lies that the Voice of South Africa and the British prime minister were spreading about his country.

I may not have had much Marxist theory or an opinion about the wisdom of the Spartacist uprising of 1919, but the whole house got that, like most American queers in West Berlin, I was in love with Weimar culture. I’d given Dram’s name as a reference, but they stressed that they hadn’t asked for any references, that that was not how the decision process worked with them. It wasn’t clear to me why Afer was taking so much trouble to help me. I didn’t want to be his political project. But we had been in a street battle together and that meant something where he came from.

In my ignorance I thought at first that the existence of the Spartacus International Gay Guide was why the Co-op 1-15-19, Co-op J.I., avoided calling itself Spartakusbund or anything like it when the original ten people squatted in the large derelict building in 1980. But then I learned that the name Spartacus was more than taken. Every Trotskyite group used it.

I had the morning shift in the Café Rosa. To avoid a house meeting discussion about the white apron with wraparound strings that I’d bought myself in spite of its connotations of bourgeois service, I stopped wearing it. The commune also ran a bookstore, and a performance space, ZFB, initials for what translated loosely into the Time of Fossil Fuel. Jobs in these departments, so to speak, came only with seniority.

Lotte von der Pfalz, as he, she, called herself, was always standing at the door when I opened up. She liked to be the first customer, the first to get the fresh coffee. She was quiet for the first half hour, too. Then she talked all morning, patting her thin pageboy lightly when she thought she’d said something especially good. She said that Leda and the Swan had been Hitler’s favorite painting, so it, like Wagner, should be forbidden. After all, Mendelssohn had been banned during the war. She carried petitions, wads of pages of what she wanted suppressed in peacetime. Pretzels, the Eurovision Song Contest, henna rinses, miniature dog breeds, Gottfried Benn.

I tried to call her Madame at first, but she really didn’t like that.

“I am Lotte, simple, Jed, my old friend.”

I was suspicious of white people who boasted that they treated everyone the same, that they did not see color. Then, too, she was proud of her mezzo purr. She would not retouch her lips in public and wore androgynous black orthopedic nun pensioner shoes. Unfortunately, the violet cloud around the print dress that she came in with turned brown after a while or wore off. She told me that the University of Chicago library got its start as a collection imported from a book dealer in Berlin, thousands and thousands of books at one time. I said that that was the American way and thought of the books I was having sent from Chicago, to be reunited soon with the boxes from Cello’s cellar.

* * *

Solomon’s dark-eyed bride said she couldn’t figure out why Frederick Douglass’s first wife never learned to read or to write. She was on the plantation he’d escaped from and he got her out, so he must have cared for her, she said. But he married his second wife, his white secretary who was twenty years younger than he, only months after his first wife’s death. Didn’t he try to bring this new wife to the Chicago World’s Fair, only to be prevented by the black Haitian government that didn’t want its official black representative photographed with his white wife? Francesca remembered her American Studies classes. She wasn’t pregnant. She and Solomon got hitched on impulse.

Solomon didn’t dare go over to his wife. He moved closer to Dad by the sink and they were both just not going to notice what was happening, if anything. I was in the refrigerator door, though we were headed out soon for lunch at Francesca’s parents’ club.

Mom said that Anna Murray Douglass’s parents were slaves, but she’d been born free and that she met Douglass when they were both working around the Baltimore docks. She knew him when he was still calling himself Bailey. She followed him to Philadelphia on her own. They were married for more than forty years and had five children. True, she stayed in the kitchen when company came. Two years after she died, he married his devoted secretary. Her family, abolitionist friends of Douglass’s, stopped speaking to her. His children resented her.

Mom said most men don’t know how to live on their own, especially not busy ones, never mind a great man in public life, a great black man in the nineteenth century. Douglass was a staunch advocate of women’s suffrage, Mom said. Francesca said she knew that. Mom said that Douglass hadn’t done anything wrong. He just fell in love again after his wife died. That’s not doing anything wrong. Francesca burst into tears. Mom didn’t mammy-comfort white girls, not even her daughter-in-law. She just kept telling her from her side of the table that it was all right, she was going to be fine, it was all right.

* * *

The European football championships would be on in a week and Odell got the big television nobody knew he’d been longing for. Zippi called me a kibbutznik and asked too casually how often Bags came to see Afer. I’d not seen Bags. Zippi looked up from soapy glass water and smoothed her bangs. Her wet hand shook. I didn’t look away. But we were different with each other in German. Something else was going on. I’d not sent a postcard this time. I lied and said I was not smoking stuff.