It built up slowly, but by the third tie score it was starting to get ugly in there. Then came the swish, and everyone snapped.
Until that morning, I was your average American numskull boy. A person who believed in progress and the search for a better tomorrow. We’d cured polio, hadn’t we? Racism was going to be next. The civil rights movement was the magic pill that was going to turn America into a color-blind society. After that punch, after your punch, I suddenly got a lot smarter about a whole lot of things. I’m so smart now, I can’t think about the future without feeling sick. You changed my life, Luther.
For what it’s worth, Luther said, that punch changed me, too. The feelings of the crowd got inside me that morning, and the anger of the crowd became my anger. I wasn’t thinking for myself anymore, I was letting the crowd think for me, so I lost control when the crowd lost control, and I ran down onto the court and did that dumb thing. Never again, I said to myself. From now on, I’m the one who’s in charge of me. Christ. White people were sending me to school, weren’t they? What did I have against white people?
Just wait, Amy said. You’ve been lucky so far.
I know, Luther replied. Plan A: Work to become a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, work to become the first black mayor of Newark, work to become the first black senator from New Jersey. But if that doesn’t turn out, there’s always Plan B: Buy myself a machine gun and follow the words of Malcolm. By any means necessary. It’s never too late, right?
Let’s hope not, Ferguson said, as he raised his glass and nodded in assent.
Luther laughed. I like this stepbrother of yours, he said to Amy. He tickles my funny bone — and knows how to take a punch. His arm might have hurt that day, but what about my hand? I thought my knuckles were broken.
THE SCARLET NOTEBOOK was going to be difficult, far and away the most challenging work he had ever attempted, and Ferguson had serious doubts about whether he could pull it off. A book about a book, a book that one could read and also write in, a book that one could enter as if it were a three-dimensional physical space, a book that was the world and yet of the mind, a conundrum, a fraught landscape filled with beauties and dangers, and little by little a story would begin to develop inside it that would thrust the fictitious author, F., into a confrontation with the darkest elements of himself. A dream book. A book about the immediate realities in front of F.’s nose. An impossible book that could not be written and would surely devolve into a chaos of random, unconnected shards, a pile of meaninglessness. Why attempt to do such a thing? Why not simply invent another story and tell it as any other writer would? Because Ferguson wanted to do something different. Because Ferguson was no longer interested in telling mere stories. Because Ferguson wanted to test himself against the unknown and see if he could survive the struggle.
First Entry. In the scarlet notebook there are all the words that have yet to be spoken and all the years of my life before I bought the scarlet notebook.
Second Entry. The scarlet notebook is not imaginary. It is a real notebook, no less real than the pen in my hand or the shirt on my back, and it is lying in front of me on my desk. I bought it three days ago in a stationery store on Lexington Avenue in New York City. There were many other notebooks for sale in the store — blue notebooks, green notebooks, yellow notebooks, brown notebooks — but when I caught sight of the red one, I heard it call out to me and speak my name. The red was so red that the color was in fact scarlet, for it burned as brightly as the A on Hester Prynne’s frock. The pages inside the scarlet notebook are of course white, and there are many of them, more pages than a person could possibly count in the hours between dawn and dusk on a long midsummer day.
Fourth Entry. When I open the scarlet notebook, I see the window I am looking through in my mind. I see the city on the other side of the window. I see an old woman walking her dog, and I hear the baseball game playing on the radio in the apartment next door. Two balls, two strikes, two men out. Here comes the pitch.
Seventh Entry. When I turn the pages of the scarlet notebook, I often see things I thought I had forgotten, and suddenly I find myself back in the past. I remember old telephone numbers of vanished friends. I remember the dress my mother was wearing on the day I graduated from elementary school. I remember the date of the signing of the Magna Carta. I even remember the first scarlet notebook I ever bought. That was in Maplewood, New Jersey, many years ago.
Ninth Entry. In the scarlet notebook there are cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, and robins. There are the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Red Stockings. There are roses, tulips, and poppies. There is a photograph of Sitting Bull. There is the beard of Erik the Red. There are left-wing political tracts, boiled beets, and hunks of raw steak. There is fire. There is blood. Included also are The Red and the Black, the Red Scare, and The Masque of the Red Death. This is only a partial list.
Twelfth Entry. There are days when a person who owns a scarlet notebook must do nothing but read it. On other days, it is necessary for him to write in it. This can be troublesome, and on some mornings when I sit down to work I am not certain which activity is the correct one to pursue. It seems to depend on which page you have come to at that moment, but as the pages are unnumbered, it is difficult to know in advance. That explains why I have spent so many fruitless hours staring at blank pages. I feel I am supposed to find an image there, but when nothing materializes after my efforts, I am often gripped by panic. One episode was so demoralizing to me that I was afraid I would lose my mind. I called my friend W., who also owns a scarlet notebook, and told him how desperate I was. “Those are the risks of having a scarlet notebook,” he said. “Either you give in to your despair and wait for it to pass or you burn your scarlet notebook and forget you ever had it.” W. might have a point, but I could never do that. No matter how much pain it causes me, no matter how lost I sometimes feel, I could never live without my scarlet notebook.
Fourteenth Entry. On the right-hand pages of the scarlet notebook a soothing, crepuscular light appears at various moments during the day, a light similar to the one that falls on wheat and barley fields at dusk in late summer, but more glowing somehow, more ethereal, more restful to the eye, whereas the left-hand pages give off a light that makes one think of a cold afternoon in winter.
Seventeenth Entry. The startling discovery last week that it is possible to enter the scarlet notebook, or rather that the notebook is an instrument for entering imagined spaces so vivid and tangible that they take on the appearance of reality. It is not just a collection of pages for reading and writing words, then, it is a locus solus, a microscopic slit in the universe that can expand to allow a person through if he presses the scarlet notebook against his face and breathes in the smells of the paper with his eyes closed. My friend W. has warned me how dangerous it can be to go off on these impromptu excursions, but now that I have made my discovery, how can I resist the urge to slide into those other spaces every now and then? I pack a light lunch, throw some things into a small overnight bag (a sweater, a collapsible umbrella, a compass), and then telephone W. to let him know I’m about to take off. He worries about me constantly, I’m afraid, but W. is much older than I am (he turned seventy on his last birthday), and perhaps he has lost his feel for adventure. Good luck, he says to me, you moron, and then I laugh into the phone and hang up. Until now, I have not been gone for more than two or three hours at a stretch.