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been able to make until Muhammad Ali came along — why, the optimistic element of the Black community, looking now at every commercial horizon in America, began to gaze at writing. Hang around this man went the word. Something might rub off!
    Once, he would have been miserable at being able to prosper from such values. But his love affair with the Black soul, a sentimental orgy at its worst, had been given a drubbing through the seasons of Black Power. He no longer knew whether he loved Blacks or secretly disliked them, which had to be the dirtiest secret in his American life. Part of the woe of the first trip to Africa, part of that irrationally intense detestation of Mobutu — even a photo of the President in his plump cheeks and horn-rimmed eyeglassesigniting invective adequate to a Harvard professor looking at an icon of Nixon — must be a cover for the rage he was feeling toward Blacks, any Blacks. Walking the streets of Kinshasa on that first trip while the black crowds moved about him with an indifference to his presence that succeeded in niggering him, he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible. He was also approaching, if not careful, the terminal animosity of a Senior Citizen. How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse. When the sheer evidence of Africa finally overcame these newly bigoted senses (when a drive over miles of highway showed thousands of slim and probably hungry Zairois running like new slum inhabitants for overcrowded buses, and yet in some absolute statement of aesthetic, some imprimatur of the holy and final statement of the line of the human body, these Blacks could still show in silhouette, while standing in line for the bus, almost every one of those thousand slim dark Africans, an incorruptible loneliness, a stone mute dignity, some African dignity he had never seen on South Americans, Europeans, or Asiatics, some tragic magnetic sense of self as if each alone and all were carrying the continent like a halo of sorrow about their head) then it became impossible not to feel the unique life of Africa — even if Kinshasa was to the rain forest as Hoboken to Big Sur — yes, impossible not to sense what everyone had been trying to say about Africa for a hundred years, big Papa first on line: the place was so fucking sensitive! No horror failed to stir its echo a thousand miles away, no sneeze was ever free of the leaf that fell on the other side of the hill. Then he could no longer hate the Zairois or even be certain of hiscondemnation of their own Black oppressors, then his animosity switched a continent over to Black Americans with their arrogance, jive, ethnic put-down costumes, caterwauling soul, their thump-your-testicle organ sound and black new vomitous egos like the slag of all of alienated sewage-compacted heap U.S.A.; then he knew that he had not only come to report on a fight but to look a little more into his own outsized feelings of love and — could it be? — sheer hate for the existence of Black on earth.
    No, he was hardly surprised when his illness flared on return to the States, and he went through a week and then ten days of total detestation of himself, a fever without fantasies, an illness without terror, for he felt as if his soul had expired or, worse, slipped away. It was enough of a warning to lay a message on him. He got up from bed with the determination to learn a little about Africa before his return, a healthy impulse that brought him luck (but then, do we not gamble with the unrecognized thought that a return of our luck signifies a return of our health?). After inquiries, he went to the University Place Book Shop in New York, an operative definition of the word
warren
, up on the eighth or ninth floor of a wheezing old office building below Fourteenth Street — the smell of the catacombs in its stones — to find at exit from the elevator a stack and excelsior of books, cartons and dust where a big blond clerk with scraggly sideburns working