Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

The statue of Saint Maurice in the Gothic Cathedral of Magdeburg was my idea of Black Power. The look of him, helmeted, mailed, thirteenth century, and black. But I never much liked the story of this longtime patron saint, the Theban soldier of the Roman Empire. He got along with the pagan power structure, but when ordered to ravage a Christian town, he refused, his Christian legion was twice decimated, and then finally all were slaughtered. Europe brought people from Africa as slaves and the church had no problem with that and Europe made sure one of the wise men in the paintings was always black as coal.

* * *

I stayed behind, in Isherwood’s last days in Berlin, as he put them down in the final journal entry of his novel. I used to carry Isherwood around with me. I’d skip class for the day and go from the bar on North Wells Street to the bar on Woodlawn, lost in the daydream of being the rootless stranger in Berlin who seduced tough German boys.

At the end of his novel, Isherwood makes a tour of the dives before the police close them. In a communist bar near the Zoo, a whitewashed cellar of students at long wooden tables, he finds a beautiful boy in leather shorts and a Russian blouse wholly unaware of the torture he will face under the Nazis. History is not a game, Isherwood warns us — and himself, angry at the loss of the city where he could be what he most wanted. It was clear to me what he wanted from his portrait of Otto, who, in real life as Heinz, I read at Powell’s Bookstore, had nice legs. Isherwood explained in a memoir that he felt he had to chill how gay he was sounding in his novel by making Otto’s legs unattractive.

I’d read Isherwood’s novel so often I had no trouble inserting myself into its scene. I am the negro boxer — small n of the British 1930s — whom Isherwood sees at the far end of Potsdamerstrasse, working at a fairground, in an attraction of fixed boxing and wrestling matches. I take my turn knocking guys out and getting knocked out. And I, the black boxer in his stance, am going to meet Otto’s brother, Lothar, a smoldering Nazi whose bed Isherwood was given when he moved in with the working-class Nowaks. I am going to guide him to the light and we will never age.

* * *

I knew that one day I would get too old to move those boxes of books, but I could not give them up. They held my undying love. I looked back and saw myself standing in the rain with a suitcase. The salaat al-mahgreb drifted from an innermost courtyard. Rise up with your bad self one last time, O splendid Susan Sontag. She told me home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain.

Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books , is the author of a previous novel, High Cotton (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and two works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature . He is a recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York. You can sign up for email updates here.