Brightness Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

argue their merits in person were the worst.
    "I'm in conference," Washington proposed. "Probably won't be available for the rest of the day."
    "I'll tell him."
    Now he would have to cower in his office until the coast was clear. If the siege lasted past lunch, he could slip up the internal staircase to the ninth floor and take the elevator down to the street.
    "I'm not in," he shouted out to his assistant. "You see anybody heading this way with a manuscript under his arm, tell him Mr. Lee has moved to Zimbabwe."
    He was on the phone talking to an agent when a fat bearded man in a sweatsuit announced from the doorway that no white bitch was going to tell him where he couldn't go.
    "I just wanted to see what color you were," the speaker said, a scowl deranging his chipmunk features. He clutched a manuscript box out in front of his huge belly, holding it like a shield as he advanced into the office. Experiencing a rapid liquefaction of his internal organs, Washington attempted to appear cool.
    "What's your problem, Jack?"
    "My problem is I'm a black artist. I'm, like, twice removed from this American fascist racist so-called culture. And I'm trying to create an Afro-American literature which the white man does not want to know about and the white establishment wants to suppress." Washington's assistant had disappeared. He could only hope she was fetching some serious help.
    "What's this got to do with me, bro'?"
    The author reached into the half-zipped front of his sweatshirt, pulled out and unfolded a limp, ragged piece of paper and recited, without consulting the text: " 'Dear Mr. Jamal, thank you for letting us see your manuscript. I'm sorry to say that the editorial board has concluded that we cannot publish your work at this time. We wish you luck in finding another publisher. Sincerely, Washington Lee.' What kind of fucking letter is that? Sincerely? I show you my life's fucking work, the true story of the Black Experience in Babylon exile, and that's all the answer I get? And what's this 'we' shit? I sent my book to one man, dude called Washington Lee I heard was a brother, not the house nigger on some editorial board."
    "Maybe I could take another look at it," Washington said, playing for time. He had no idea if he'd read it to begin with. He looked at hundreds of manuscripts a year, and sometimes looking was all he had time for. Being one of only two black adult trade book editors in New York, he was expected to be an advocate for his ostensible community, which, in his experience, wrote no better as a rule than any other group. Washington was as willing and eager as any man could possibly be to discover the next Invisible Man, but being black and writing a book didn't necessarily make you Ralph Ellison.
    Not a moment too soon, security arrived: two uniformed, deracinated white men who stood sheepishly in the doorway.
    "Get this fucking maniac out of here," Washington suggested.
    "Don't you touch me," the author screamed.
    The security men hung back, helpless in the face of what they took to be an internecine dispute. Only when the enraged author hurled himself across Washington's desk did they intervene. Rasheed Jamal threw one of the guards to the floor and was wrestling with the other, larger one when Washington said, "Freeze, motherfucker." He pointed a shiny gray Walther automatic at the fat man's belly.
    The security guards, recovering themselves, seemed uncertain of their own role in relation to the firearm, till Washington said, "What've I got to do, carry him out my own fucking self?" Each seizing an arm, the security men pulled Rasheed Jamal to the door, then turned sideways to extract him from the office.
    "You ain't no black man," he screamed at Washington.
    "And you ain't no writer," Washington responded, having finally remembered reading several chapters of the thousand-page-plus novel that lay in two boxes on his desk. It was only through the exercise of enormous willpower that he restrained himself from