“The hair, man! The hair!” Boysie was chuckling. “Man, you look like one o’ them fellows, them beatniks from up in Yorkville, them hippies, or like that fellow from the States called Rap Brown …” And Boysie made that ridiculing laugh, laughing and holding his head to the floor, and then pointing at Henry, and then laughing some more. “Man, you need a haircut bad, man.”
“My wife likes it long so. My wife says it makes me look like a real Afro-Canadian! Me, a fucking Afro-Canadian! Man, Boysie, I don’t even like the word, ‘Africa’!”
“That’s it! This picture that Agaffa draw make you look like a African, a Watusi!”
“Heh-heh-hahhha-haaa!” And this was the first time Henry laughed since he got married. Agatha had said the same thing, exactly, word for word. And Henry had slapped her goddamn hard in the face. “Never a-fucking-gain call me a Nafrican, you hear me? I don’t call you a Jew!” But this time, coming from Boysie, it had perhaps told him the truth; and if Boysie could see it, and Agatha, then it must be the truth. Henry was beginning to like the idea that he looked like an African. The tension, the guarded replies to Boysie’s questions (after all they were still friends), and the sarcasm in his own voice about his wife — all this disappeared. Boysie got up from the footstool, and saw the framed pictures on the wall — in what little space was left back from the bookcases. They were all, each and every one, of black people. Agatha had clipped them from various magazines. She had framed them herself with cheap unpainted frames which she also painted. “What I want so many black people’s faces in here for?” Henry had said. “Black people looking at me wherever the hell I turn. Even in the goddamn bathroom! Goddamn, woman, are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” The only previous picture Henry had on the walls of his room was one of himself in the uniform of a porter of the Canadian National Railways, as Porter of the Year — a picture which showed him shaking hands with the prime minister at the time, Lester Bowles Pearson. There were added three or four photographs of Agatha, at various stages of her academic development, in penguined white and black, intellectually unfashionable, so far as Henry was concerned.
“I see Elijah Muhammad, man! He is a great man for black people. For white people, too. And this is Malcolm X. He’s a giant. Somebody tell me he is a West Indian, too. A great man! But who is these three black children?”
“Ask my wife.”
“I mean, she knows them?”
“Knows them? Where the hell would she meet three black girls? Up in Forest Hill playing in her backyard, or in her swimming pool? She tore them out of that goddamn magazine, Boysie! Now, look at those three goddamn half-starved little bitches! You tell me, if you see anything beautiful in their goddamn undernourished faces? Because I want to know if I am going stark-fucking-crazy! … or my wife? All three of them girls are teethless, toothless. One is wearing rags. The other two are not dressed much better. And my wife tells me they’re beautiful, ‘What marvellous faces!’ she says … and I want to kill her! Do you think that my wife is trying to tell me something, in a zoological way?”
“You mean that since you are black, a black man, and these children are black too …”
“Boysie, you’re a fucking genius! You are more educated, in my books, than Agatha is, with all the Ph.D.s and M.A.s and B.A.s behind her fucking name. She is trying to give me a inferiority complex, Boysie! And she is calling it beauty. I don’t see one fucking beautiful thing in being poor, or in being black, or in being hungry. I happen to be born black and poor — and perhaps ugly — and goddammit, don’t mention it no more, ’cause I can’t change that!” And he made a feigned grab for the framed picture of black infant beauty, making as if he wanted to tear it from the wall. But he had tried to do so before, even when he was alone, once, and he could not tear the picture from the wall. There was a greater power which Agatha had over him, a power that cancelled his ability to destroy the picture of the three little black girls. “Man, I feel I am under a fucking microscope twenty-five hours a-fucking-day! That woman knows too much ’bout black people, baby!”
“She is a good woman, though. You lucky as arse!”
“Lucky?” Henry took a piece of paper from his hip pocket. It was a page from an expensive writing pad. Agatha’s name, her new name, Agatha Barbara Sellman-White, was printed on the top. Henry gave the piece of paper to Boysie. Boysie took it. Boysie read it. Boysie started laughing. Then he gave it back to Henry. “Read it, man. I asked you to read it, and I mean that you should read it out loud. Not to yourself. I could do that myself.”
“You really want to hear it? Okay. ‘I love you because you are black. I love your black black skin. I love your black hands. I love your black face. If you were lighter in complexion, like Estelle, I would not like you so much, because that would not be a perfect match of opposites. I love your thicky woolly hair. I love your thick purple lips …’ Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you was so black?” (Boysie was shaking with an enjoyable laughter. Henry was laughing too.) “ ‘… I love you, I love you, I love you, you big black beautiful black beast.’ Ohjesuschrist, man, ho-ho-ho-ho!”
“Does your wife write you love letters like that? Tell me, man. And
