Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
“Well, the atmosphere is all a part of it,” I said without energy. “But I’m not looking at the mystery as secondary. That’s what holds it . . .”
He cut me off again. I was beginning to see getting interrupted as more a matter of his style than just happenstance.
“I know that you authors tend to take everything you write as the holy grail, but the most important person in these discussions is the one who isn’t here, the reader. That’s
who editors represent. I’ve been at it quite a while, and rather successfully.”
“I’m not questioning your résumé,” I said, “or the positive contributions you make to your writers. I’m just not that anxious to throw the mystery
away.”
I tried to make it sound like a joke, and found a way to smile. “You know, I got two or three bodies I gotta do something with. I can’t just leave them laying around the
neighborhood.”
There was a noticeable change in the atmosphere in the room. Things had chilled. As if I needed more proof, the editor began straightening the various folders and papers on his desk, leaned back
in his seat, and lit another cigarette.
“I’m gong to give you time to think about things,” he said. “Right here we have a two-thousand-dollar check made out to you. And over here we have your manuscript.
I’ve been clear about the changes we need to make to get it published. Now you have to decide if you want it published.”
Yeah, that had been pretty clear. I remained seated with my thoughts focused on the five-dollar bill that was pretty much all I had in my pocket, and in the world for that matter. It was so
amazing to consider how far things had changed in the year since I had started writing this book. First I just wanted to see where the idea led me. Then, when I came back to school, I just wanted
to have a clear schedule, uncluttered with classes to go to, papers to write, text books to read, and exams to take. I quit school for this. All the time, I just wanted to finish something. I had a
list of ideas as long as the road from Jackson, Tennessee, to West Seventeenth Street, all unfinished and blowing along the highway, scraps of paper, pieces of thoughts I never developed. So, more
than I needed to compete with the hall of fame school records of my mother and her siblings, more than I needed to stifle the snickers of my Lincoln classmates who called me crazy, I needed to
finish one thought. And I had.
But, since I had never finished anything to speak of, never had anything in print beyond a line or two in this or that school publication, I had never projected my work beyond the hoots and
hollers that were tossed my way by Lincoln’s hardcore “Rabble Crew” who insisted my disappearance from class was due to my complete dedication to smoking marijuana and that the
only writing I did was scribbling apologies to everyone I had lied to when I said I was writing a book. And on this desk in front of me was not only a chance to slap them in their faces, but a
check for $2,000. Imagine that? I could walk back onto campus next year showing the benefits of a two-grand advance, and have the opportunity to shove copies of a book with my name on it down the
throats of the big-mouthed jokers in front of the student union, guys who’d made me look like a reefer-smoking idiot for months. And a chance to see my mother smile and justify her faith and
squelch my uncle’s scalding critiques. All I had to do was sign that paper and walk out.
Walk out and leave my manuscript. Leave my manuscript like leaving a pet at the vet to have it neutered. Leave a deer on the taxidermist’s table to have its guts ripped out and replaced
with sawdust, its head removed to hang over this smug, smirking egotist’s fake apartment fireplace. I tried to add it up again while I sat there feeling cold and clammy, poker-faced, like
some leather-jacket-clad form of dead.
I got up slowly with what I’m sure was one of my worst attempts to look like I was smiling. The editor had turned away in his swiveling chair and was concentrating on not looking at me. So
he probably didn’t see me pick up my manuscript and walk out of his office.
People speak in a certain key that’s similar to a musical note. When you talk to people naturally, it’s comfortable because there’s no strain or stress on
your vocal cords. Sometimes when people speak too fast or make vocabulary choices that don’t ring true, it occurs to me that something is wrong with what they are saying. That was what I
heard at the editor’s office in New York.
I have always told folks that I left with my manuscript that day because of a feeling. I did have a feeling. But I got it from a hearing. That day in the editor’s office I was so full of
myself that I might have missed most of the discussion if every word had not been so momentous and magnificent to me. What I missed instead of words was meaning.
I heard every word. Almost as individual elements, isolated as though they had nothing to do with me or with each other. But I didn’t tune in on his meaning until the middle of a solo
about Junior imitating Spade. I heard him hit a false note, a note that shouldn’t have existed in this conversation. Something like an F-flat. There is no such note. Not for a musician. And
not from one musician to another. Not from people playing the same tune.
The editor wasn’t just testing me. There were more notes that didn’t belong. His voice went totally out of tune. I can’t read minds, but it sounded like he was establishing his
domain over a rookie writer who wouldn’t be a factor after today. His intention was to hurt, to insult. Not to pay me, but to pay me off. For me to disappear and be grateful for a couple of
grand.
I took the subway to 23rd Street with some semblance of a plan pushing its way through alternating pulses of panic. Plan B felt like what it was and what I didn’t want it to be, what I had
never seen coming, had foolishly not even considered. Here’s some other shit I can’t talk to anyone about, that probably nobody but my mother would believe. An offer of two thousand
dollars. An opportunity to have the book published that I’d thrown together on a beat up old Royal typewriter at the university cleaners.
A gritty Manhattan mist felt chilly and uncomfortable on my face and bare head as I emerged on the northeast corner of 23rd, one block west of the bakery where I would spend my remaining dollars
before going to 17th Street and taking ten bucks from my mother’s cold cash, a coffee can in the fridge. I would leave her a note, a lie, and catch a bus back to Lincoln.
In front of the 23rd Street YMCA, I ran into Freddy Baron, a guy who had been a classmate of mine at Fieldston. He was with his father. It was good to see Freddy, and I had always liked his
father, too. Freddy and I had played on the football team together our senior year, a team that finished 4-4. My favorite memory of the season was a game in which Freddy and I scored our
team’s only two touchdowns in a 14-8 victory. Freddy scored his when he intercepted a pass from his defensive end position and ran it back forty yards. Mine was a bit more complicated. I was
standing about ten yards in front of our punt returner, ostensibly to serve as a blocker. The kick, however, was high but short, and the would-be tacklers went past me, angling toward our return
man. I fielded the punt and took it back seventy yards past the opposition’s massive right tackle.
Recollections of high school heroics were a relief at that moment, but none of us was feeling too good about standing there in the rain. The Barons had just finished a workout that included a
mile run and a few laps in the pool. They were both flushed and looked fit and healthy. But within the thickening wall of April gloom, they proposed that I join them at their home for dinner and
assured me that Mrs. Baron, who I’d also met, would be happy to see me again. I couldn’t have sworn I had better plans, so we got on a crosstown bus going east.
I caught up with Freddy, heard how unbelievably cold the winters were in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was adjusting to college life. I talked about Lincoln and how I’d finally dropped out
of school and what had just happened at the publishing office that day. We had a pleasant dinner and Freddy and I went downstairs to the rec room to play table tennis and shoot pool.
When we got back to the apartment, Freddy ran directly into the bathroom and I was about to collapse onto the sofa when I saw that Mr. Baron was seated under a reading lamp in the corner with
his reading glasses on and my manuscript in his lap. He read on for a few minutes after I took a seat near him. Then he closed it up and put it carefully back in the plastic cover.
He smiled, folded his glasses carefully, and put them back in their case. Of all the Fieldston parents, he had always been the most approachable, the most available to drive guys to a band
rehearsal or stand on the sidelines alone to watch a lightly attended football game. He spoke with my mother fairly often. I had stayed at their house a few times, too. The Barons lived in
Stuyvesant Town, on East 23rd Street, which was practically next door to West 17th by Manhattan standards.
“Gilbert,” he said in his rich baritone, “I’ve read about forty pages here and I must admit I don’t know a lot about the life you are describing. But I know more
than I did because you know it so well. I’ve got two friends who write commercials and they’re always talking about the art of telling a story in one minute. That’s what they do.
I’d like to show this to them and see if they couldn’t put a few things in the margins.”
When he stopped, Mr. Baron took a furtive look toward the bathroom, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out a fifty dollar bill and handed it to me. I understood that he didn’t want
Freddy involved, but I hadn’t said anything about the current state of my finances. I appreciated his perception.
“Look,” I said hastily, “I’ve got a tax refund due . . .”
He cut me off.
“No,” he said seriously. “Let me tell you a story. When I was just getting started, I almost didn’t make it. I had rented a space and had my whole line of dresses and
everything there. And I had made arrangements for everything to go out, most of the pieces had been ordered and I was confident that they would be moved. But my rent was due on the warehouse and if
I paid it I wouldn’t have money left to ship the pieces out and all of my outlets had thirty and forty-five day leads before money would be coming in. I had cut every corner imaginable and it
just wasn’t going to happen. It was about midnight and I was writing my landlord a note about getting everything out of there and a little about what else had happened when I saw him walking
down the hall. When he saw my light on, he stopped by.”
Mr. Baron said the landlord came to his space and after hearing the situation, told him to hold off on paying the rent, said they could work it out when the money started coming in. “I
tell you Gilbert, I’d only talked to the man when I rented the space and seen him a few times going in and out. Very businesslike, short on conversation. But he raised my spirits. And I never
forgot what he said then. ‘If you ever get a chance to help someone else get started, do that for me and tell them to pass it on.’ Then he waved and was off again. I believe in that,
Gilbert. I don’t want this back, but I do want you to remember it and pass it on.”
Mr. Baron smiled and got up. “I’m going to hand this over to my friends and have them get in touch with you at this number.” The number on the manuscript was the pay phone at
the diner across Route 1 from the dry cleaners where I worked.
I still felt washed out, but the kind of help Mr. Baron gave me was help in its purest form, when somebody does something for you for nothing. But I still intended to get him back that money in
two weeks, three at the outside.
About ten days later, before I’d had a chance to square that debt, I was wrestling with the day’s dry cleaning load when the niece of the owner of the diner called me from across the
road.
“It’s the telephone, Spider,” she said in her soprano. “It’s a call from New York.”
The lady on the phone was named Lynn Nesbit. She was a literary agent with a firm on the Avenue of the Americas. A week before, a friend had dropped a manuscript by and asked her to take a look.
She had read it all in one sitting. The following day she’d shown it to a friend at World Publishing. They agreed that it needed some work.
“But would you be willing to accept five thousand dollars as an advance?” she asked.
I don’t remember whether I accepted before or after I fainted. Whichever it was, I agreed to meet Lynn Nesbit in her office in three days. I was so happy I could have peed in my pants.
World Publishing also bought the rights to
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox
, a volume of poetry released simultaneously with
The Vulture
. That one I dedicated to my mother, because
she always appreciated the poetry so much and had helped me with some of the lines and ideas. The novel I dedicated to Mr. Jerome Baron, “without whom the bird would never have gotten off the
ground.” And I have tried to follow his advice and pass it on every time I have the opportunity.
After taking what would have been my sophomore year off from schoolwork and grades, I was registered to return to Lincoln in the fall of 1969. That summer, though, with the
books in the process of being published, I used some of the advance money to buy an old Nash Rambler convertible, a 1965 with 100,000 miles on it. Before heading back to school, I drove to Fayette,
Mississippi, with a friend of mine from Lincoln named Stevie Wilson to witness the election of Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’s brother, who was about to become the first Black mayor elected in
the south since Reconstruction.
First we spent a slow-moving day slogging through nearly tangible humidity in my old home of Jackson, Tennessee. I spent a couple of evening hours with a girl who was starstruck over a New
Yorker; Stevie drank.
I was going to Mississippi looking for something else to write about. I was afraid to think about being back at Lincoln with nothing to write about. I’d always wanted to write novels, but
I had come to think that a writer was writing all the time and, after my mystery, I didn’t have any idea what I would do. There was no doubt that my state of mind had been attached to
finishing
The Vulture
. And my ability to pay for returning to school had been connected to earning some tuition and room-and-board money. My personal credibility had been saved when I got
the deal but I honestly didn’t know what I could do next.