William Kennedy: Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

The doorbell rang.

Quinn entered the hall, his very black hair thick in a torsion to the right, giving him the air of a casual savant with warrior tendencies. He smiled at the group, mostly men, a few women among them. The audience seemed to be diminishing, but so imperceptibly that he wasn’t sure it was happening. He had his text in hand but did not look at it as he spoke.

“All wars are similar,” he said. “We have just witnessed the battle intensifying from matriarchal complaint to anarchic threat. With four unfinished, unfinishable books the warrior Hemingway hung the sign ‘Former Writer’ on the door of his room at the Mayo Clinic, where he was receiving shock treatments.”

No one seemed to understand the connection Quinn was making .

“Money is the evil the poor cannot do without . La buena vida es cara. The good life is expensive. There are other ways of life that are not expensive, but that’s not life.” Then he added, rhythmically, “Doosaday sosadah spokety spone.”

The audience erupted with raucous laughter and Quinn grew confident, even though only a handful remained in the hall. He spoke about political duplicity and how we need it to survive, which was a gaffe, for everyone in the audience was dead.

“We treat our political divinities like pets,” he said. “Without the resolute will to enter into significance, there can be no access to the heroic.”

He expected major applause from this remark but the two remaining women in the room silently left their chairs.

“Ours is a cosmos in motion,” he said, “moving relentlessly in an arc of justice.” He smiled, fully aware his remarks were menacing. The room was now empty.

“In an arc of justice,” he said.

What a line.

“In an arc of justice,” he said again.

Always leave ‘em laughing.

This novel is full of true stories of both revolutions it addresses, and of the people in them. I have changed dates and names, and telescoped time and events to control the story; any real people have been reimagined.

I am indebted to many Cubans for providing me with personal or historical memories of the revolution, most notably Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui, who gave me abundant access to her remarkable life story; I have drawn on it, but she should not be held accountable for the behavior of any Cuban women in this novel, unless she wants to be. I am also profoundly grateful to Norberto Fuentes, a longtime friend and chronicler of the revolution in fiction and nonfiction. His counsel on Cuban political and cultural history has been invaluable to this book.

Among the many witnesses to the revolution who told me stories I must mention Manuel Penebaz, the late Amadeo Lopez Castro, the artists Aldo Menéndez and Ivonne Ferrer, Rafael Del Pino, Patricia Gutiérrez, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, the late filmmaker Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, Helmo Hernández, Pablo Armando Fernández, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Burton of Miami, William Irizarry, Max Lesnick; also Joanne Dearcopp, the late artist Peter Taylor of Troy, who knew Hemingway; also Omar Gonzalez, Alfredo Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

There are too many books to list but I must note an important few: El Asalto al Palacio Presidencial by Faure Chomón; Asalto , edited by Míriam Zito; The Mambi-Land by James J. O’Kelly; Diary of the Cuban Revolution by Carlos Franqui; Cuba by Hugh Thomas; Episodes of the Revolutionary War by Ernesto Che Guevara; Salida 19, Operación Comando by William Gálvez Rodriguez; Fidel Castro: My Life with Ignacio Ramonet; The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes; Fidel by Tad Szulc; Behind the Burnt Cork Mask by William J. Mahar; Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Writings of Daryl Pinckney, Julian Mayfield, and Caryl Phillips were of particular importance, as was a Florida State University master’s thesis by Scott Freeland, Kinking the Stereotype: Barbers and Hairstyles as Signifiers of Authentic American Racial Performance.

In Albany I am indebted to Leon Van Dyke of the Brothers, whom I have known for forty-six years; also Brothers Earl Thorpe and the late Sam McDowell; also my old friend Peter O’Brien; the late Olivia Rorie; the late George Bunch; the late jazz pianist Jody Bolden (a.k.a. Bobby Henderson); Hank O’Neal, who salvaged Jody’s work; my legal counselor, David Duncan; Father Nellis Tremblay; the late Reverend James U. Smythe; Larry Burwell; the late Dottie Ann Kite; Jane Schneider; Michael Nardolillo; Richard Collins; my splendid researcher, Suzanne Roberson; my editor, Paul Slovak; my agent, Andrew Wylie; my perennial translator, Betsy Lopez Viglucci; and my early readers: the poet Peg Boyers, my son Brendan, and my gorgeous wife, Dana.