Clifford's Blues Read Online Free

she is. According to Dieter Lange, she thinks it’s perfectly normal for them to fuck every month or two. He doesn’t tell her otherwise.
    She touches me often, as though to reassure herself that I am a human being. Twice she has found me crying and she sat with me, not knowing what to do, clucking and saying “Shhh! Shhh!” She asked about my father, who was killed in a fight in a turpentine camp; asked about my mother, who, when I was eight, disappeared the same time Preacher Pollard did. My aunt Jordie raised me until she died of the TB s, and then the District took over. It seems to me that Annaliese takes a pleasure I can’t describe in watching me. She is very proud of Dieter Lange. Why not? As purchasing agent for the camps in Bavaria and part of the Palatine, he can get everything she wants and maybe never had before—food, liquors, clothing, cigarettes, French wine and perfume, furniture—the cellar is filled with it. The kitchen shelves are packed tightly with cans of everything. This bitch has probably never seen so much in one place in her life. But Dieter Lange travels a lot. When he’s gone I have to stay in a rear room of the canteen and go to his house in the morning and return to camp at night. I think Frau Lange is not happy with that, judging from the exuberant greetings she gives me when I report in the mornings. She does not seem to like being alone.
    The man with the square face and the sad eyes who lent me his shoulder is a Red, a political prisoner. The red triangle is for Communists and anyone else the government doesn’t want running loose. Some are people who just don’t like the Nazis—and made the mistake of saying so out loud. The prisoners may shout “Heil Hitler” when the guards are around, but when they aren’t, what they whisper is more like “Kiss my ass, Adolph.” Werner, the man with the square face and sad eyes, like most politicals, has an indeterminate sentence. He encourages prisoners to be strong. They are making the place bigger, because prisoners are coming in every day. This means Dieter Lange must purchase more food, clothing, and building materials, plus the luxuries it seems the SS must have.
    Sun., August 13, 1933
    It seems that I am a luxury in more ways than one to Dieter Lange. He has plans for me. I will help him advance his career. He will have parties and invite his friends and superiors. In spite of what Hitler and Goebbels say about jazz music, Dieter Lange says, nearly everyone who has ever heard it likes it. Of course, he would only invite those who did. They will be wonderful parties, he says, with me playing and singing, just like in a cabaret. What else can I do? Looks like he can find all kinds of ways to use me, and I can’t do a damned thing about it. Nothing. That made me think to ask him, again, if by chance there was any mail for me or if there had been any word about how long my sentence was. There was no mail, he said, and nothing about my sentence, of course, because he’d be the first to tell me about that. I don’t believe him, but what can I do? Who can I complain to? Werner said he would try to get some word out, but that I shouldn’t be too hopeful. Bert Brecht, he told me, had left Berlin and was probably on his way out of Germany. I asked how he knew, how he managed outside contacts, and he said prisons were just like other societies; some things continued to function in spite of restrictions.
    Once he said that, I could see it. Of course! Doesn’t life go on for colored people back home, North and South, in spite of Jim Crow and prejudice? When I am in the camp late in the afternoon, and when roll call and the evening meal are over, I see the men sitting on benches outside the barracks talking softly, their washed clothes hung on lines behind them to catch the last sunlight. The intellectuals are together. Werner is among them. There are even prisoners who are