Free The Tenants by Bernard Malamud Page B

turned to Lesser.
    “Also I will admit it got me thinking. What I am thinking about after reading your book—both of them —is I understand a little different now some of those ideas you were preaching about form and that jazz, and which way it gives proportion to the writing. I also realize some things I could have done better in my book, and why I wasn’t sure what was giving me the feeling of words and ideas shifting and moving after I thought I got them nailed down tight. In other words, Lesser, I am revising some of my thoughts and ideas about writing, though not all the way, don’t get me wrong about that. But like I am thinking things through more than I did before on some of them.”
    Bravo, Willie—I mean Bill.
    “What’s the matter, man, don’t you feel right?”
    Lesser felt not too bad, he said.
    “Got a belly cramp?”
    No. Just something on his mind.
    “What I said about revising some of my ideas don’t mean I’m changing how I feel on black writing in
comparison to white. Art is O.K. when it helps you to say what you got to, but I don’t want to turn into a halfass white writer or an ass-kissing Neegro who imitates ofays because he is ashamed or afraid to be black. I write black because I am black and what I got to say means something different to black people than it does to whites, if you dig. We think different than you do, Lesser. We do and we are, and we write different. If some white prick tears a piece of black skin off your ass every day, when somebody says, ‘Sit down,’ it’s gonna mean two different things to me and you, and that’s why black fiction has got to be different than white. The words make it different because the experience does. You know that, man. Also we are the rising people of the future, and if the whites try to hold us down it ain’t no secret we might have to cut your throats. You have had your day and now we are gonna have ours. That’s what I got to write about but I want to write it in black art, in the best way I can. In other words, Lesser, I want to know what you know and add on to that what I know because I am black. And if that means I have to learn something from whitey to do it better as a black man, then I will for that purpose only.”
    Bill blew his breath into one large fist, then the other. There were two creases on his brow.
    He said he had decided to put aside the book Lesser
had read—he would work on it again later—and start something new with an idea that had been flapping around in the back of his mind since he was a kid trying to understand what his skin color had to do with why his life was so weird and crazy.
    “It’s about this black kid and his mama and how they burn off and work against each other till they kill themselves off, but not before—when this guy is a man—he goes out and gets him his revenge on the whites, maybe in some kind of riot, maybe in some personal way, because whitey is the real cause of his main troubles. Maybe he shoots twenty ofays before the pigs get to him. The point I am making, Lesser, in case you not with it, is I think this is the main way the blacks have to head along—to kill whites till those who are alive vomit with pain at the thought of what wrongs they have done us, and better not try to do any more. Now all I want you to do for me, Lesser, and I wouldn’t be asking if we both wasn’t writers, is not to spend any time criticizing the subject of any stuff I might show you, but to tell me the best way how I can write the same thing, with the same ideas, better. Only about the form of it, in other words, dig?”
    Lesser, dreaming of new light in his book, beheld in his dark thoughts Bill Spear, potential executioner, requesting him to midwife his bloody fable.

    He said he wondered whether that was such a good idea, considering how their talk had gone the other day. Subject and form were inseparable. Suppose he said something that was ultimately critical of an idea or two, would he have to