Sunday, May 28, 1933
My name’s Clifford Pepperidge and I am in trouble. I’m an American Negro and I play piano, sometimes, and I’m a vocalist, too. I shouldn’t be here, but they brought me. Didn’t listen when I was in Berlin, either. I am in Protective Custody, they call it. They’ve said I’ll be out as soon as they finish their investigation. I hope so. God, I hate this place…. Damn. I’d even go back South to get out of here.
And with this the reader is introduced to the first person narrator of the novel, the titular Clifford himself. These lines also do a fairly decent job of establishing what might be the cause of his blues. Stuck in Germany, circa Crazy with Nazis.
I figured that Dieter Lange had substituted the second for the first so he wouldn’t be suspected of being a queer, too.
It’s not enough that Clifford Pepperidge is an African-American in Germany on the verge of Hitler rising. He’s also gay. And his survival is dependent upon a transactional relationship with a protector; a German who also happens to be gay. What could go wrong?
“Just wait till they find all the other camps.”
The revelation of the existence of Auschwitz and its purpose did not exactly inspire an instantaneous wave of honest regret among Germans who didn’t even have anything to do with it. For quite some time, the tendency of most Germans was denial; pretend it didn’t really happen because you had ever heard—or believed—the rumors. Clifford’s expression is chilling and an example of what always happens when a massive lie to cover up one aspect of an abomination simply will not be able to withstand the force of excessive revelations of the same nature.
Sometimes when I pass a bunch of Jews and hear quiet, secret laughing or under-the-breath singing—not those work songs but something harder and deeper—it reminds me of colored men on the chain gangs that you pass on the roads in the South.
For the most part, Cliff avoids making a direct correlation between the circumstances faced by the enemies of Nazism and the experience of blacks in America. Since that is essentially the driving mechanism of the novel and of its whole points for existing, it is certainly not absent by any means. Typically, however, the narrator approaches the comparison more allusively by planting clues that suggest and allow the reader to make associations on his own terms. And then, sometimes, the comparison is just too difficult to ignore. For black Americans, anyway.
