‘Insults should be well avenged or well endured.’ Spanish proverb
More than ten years ago I went on a national reading tour to promote the paperback edition of the novel I’d published the year before. The tour had its strange, moody hosts, its moments of validation from audiences, the schedule of fast-moving evenings that give you a Friendliness Hangover when it’s all over and done with, because you’ve talked so much and wanted to be liked so much you’ve tried to become best friends with everyone you met. The tour also had its forlorn venues. In Atlanta, during a terrible storm, the manager of the suburban bookstore where I was to appear assured me that it was not my fault that I was not Madonna and could not attract a crowd in such weather. Thunder rattled the panes. The shop was near empty. By 8.15 there were three black people seated in the front row; the rest of the chairs were vacant. Two white customers, sussing that a boring, poorly attended reading was about to take place, dived down the aisle toward the shelf of tax manuals. One of the three black people said that they ran an experimental theatre in Atlanta and knew the experience of finding more people on stage than in the audience, so if I wanted to read then they were prepared to listen. I hoped that anecdote would entertain and move the people in the publicity department back at my publishers. I had an obscure fear of them.
A few days later, in misty Portland, Oregon, I met up with an English friend, a poet, who the day before had read to an audience of 3000 in a downtown Portland theatre. Surprising, wonderful, cultured, hippy Portland. As my friend and I entered the bookshop where I was to give a reading, I put the paperback copy of my book in my pocket. Then this weird thing happened: ‘Hey!’ I paid no attention. ‘Excuse me, I’m talking to you.’ I turned about and saw a clerk, his tag around his neck. ‘Could you step this way, please?’ That was a rather brusque way to invite me to sign books, I thought. But, no, the clerk wanted to know if I’d just slipped something into my pocket. Yes. But that was all I was going to say. The clerk wanted to see what I had just slipped into my pocket. I saw the sign above the cashiers’ station, a sign that warned shoplifters that they would be prosecuted. My friend barked, ‘He’s reading here tonight!’ He couldn’t believe it either. I was being stopped as a suspected shoplifter. I know a painter who refuses to have anything to do with a canvas once he’s decided it’s finished. He wants his gallery to take it away and sell it as quickly as possible. The painting must begin its own life, one independent of the artist, immediately. The clerk didn’t blink at the photograph of the black guy on the back cover of the copy of High Cotton in my unsteady hand. My friend was going ballistic. I fled. I went outside for a cigarette. Someone came and got me when it was time for me to go on. I didn’t see that clerk. My friend sat in the rear, fuming. Otherwise, my audience amounted to about thirty people, seven of them either high-school classmates or the siblings of classmates. But I had a great time after all and I wanted the publicity department back at my publishers to be glad to hear it. As he held the door for us, the bookstore manager made apologies to my friend again. He’d really scared them, which nicely covered up for what I like to pretend was my complicated lack of reaction to being asked to frisk myself in a bookstore.