Free The Tenants by Bernard Malamud

understand at all. White fiction ain’t the same as black. It can’t be.”
    “You can’t turn black experience into literature just by writing it down.”
    “Black ain’t white and never can be. It is once and for only black. It ain’t universal if that’s what you are hintin up to. What I feel you feel different. You can’t write about black because you don’t have the least idea what we are or how we feel. Our feelin chemistry is different than yours. Dig that? It has to be so. I’m writin the soul writin of black people cryin out we are still slaves in this fuckn country and we ain’t
gonna stay slaves any longer. How can you understand it, Lesser, if your brain is white?”
    “So is your brain white. But if the experience is about being human and moves me then you’ve made it my experience. You created it for me. You can deny universality, Willie, but you can’t abolish it.”
    “Bein human is shit. It don’t give you any privileges, it never gave us any.”
    “If we’re talking about art, form demands its rights, or there’s no order and maybe no meaning. What else there isn’t I think you know.”
    “Art can kiss my juicy ass. You want to know what’s really art? I am art. Willie Spearmint, black man . My form is myself.”
    They faced each other, their eyes reflecting their images, Willie fuming, Lesser cursing himself for having lost the morning.
    “What a blackass fool I was to let you read my book.”
    Lesser desperately makes a final suggestion. “Why don’t you send your manuscript to a publisher and get somebody else’s opinion if you’re not satisfied with mine?”
    “Because I tried ten of those rat-brained Jews and they all turned it down for a lot of horseshit reasons, because they are afraid of what the book says.”
    The black, his eyes tumid, beats his head against Lesser’s wall, as the writer, not without pleasure, looks on.

LESSER BEACHES HIS BATTERED RAFT.

    A woman appears on the dunes.
Mirage, he mutters; but it’s the real thing.
He leaves no footsteps following hers.
“If she be black and thereto have a wit,
She’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit.”
    WILLIE SHAKESPEAR

    Though he can’t speak her language, nor clearly remember her face although he has invented it, they comprehend each other at a glance and are at once locked in four arms.
    The lovers lie in the hot hungry grass, canaries flitting through the feathery palms above. Just as he is having it as he always hoped to with a black gal, a white hand touches his shoulder and he wakes against the will on this snowy cold morning in Manhattan, trying to remember if it was as good as they say.
    Lesser hungers to sleep again and does for a change after awaking. Fog lifts on the beach. The sea at the
shore is green—purple beyond, the salt air warm, ocean-fresh. In the distance clouds of islands float on the swelling sea.
    He finds her in the dunes, dancing to herself, her nude blackness dancing in the dance.
    As he runs to her a crow, cawing, with a rush of wings swoops down between her legs and flies off with a puff of black wool.
    Holding her plucked member she curses the bird.
    She curses Lesser.
    Willie raps on the door.
    “Lesser, I need my fuckn machine. I got to get on to my work.”
     
     
    Willie, bleary, taut, suppressing rage, hauled out his typewriter the morning after their unhappy talk and did not return come siren, come noon. He didn’t show up that day or the next, Thursday. Lesser vaguely worried but did not seek him out. Had he let a fellow writer down? Said it wrong? Could he have put it more tactfully? He had told Willie what he thought he must but wondered if he mightn’t have said it more subtly, in a way that eased frustration and avoided anger. He might have encouraged him more actively, kept from hassling with him, gong to gong, though
that wasn’t easy when you were dealing with a man whose writing wore his own thin skin, not to mention color.
    After work Lesser went