My first meeting with Miss T’pani Ngawa took place at a PAUL meeting held on a rainy Thursday night in a storefront church on Lenox Avenue at 138th Street. I lived several blocks and a few light-years away on 107th Street near Broadway, and so I walked to the meeting through the cold, impartial rain, which fell alike on black and white, and through the cries of Hey, Whitey! and What you doin’ up here, Mr. Charlie?

PAUL is the Pan-African Unity League, and what I was doin’ up there, Mr. Charlie, was going to a meeting of it. The climate at the meeting itself was drier and warmer in every respect. There was a brief report on the slaughter of Ibos in Nigeria, a somewhat more extended lecture on conditions in the Congo, and, finally, a report by Miss Ngawa on social and economic progress in Kenya.

When the meeting ended, she and I went out for coffee. We had an immediate common bond. I was the only Caucasian at the meeting, and she was the only African. All the others in attendance were American Negroes.

“The Back-To-Africa bit,” she said. “Bwana and simba and the bloody drums in the bloody jungle. Sheeit, baby, like it is all something else, you dig?”

As a man is, so does he speak. Tuppence, being a highly unorthodox combination of things, spoke an English all her own. She was the only child of a Kenyan mother and an American father. Her father, one Willie Jackson, had been a follower of Marcus Garvey and an African Nationalist. The Army sent him to North Africa during the Second World War, where he rather promptly deserted and headed south. He changed his name to Willie Ngawa, married Tuppence’s mother, and conceived Tuppence.

Later, during the Mau Mau uprising, Willie Ngawa was sentenced to death for miscegenation. Like most American Negroes, he had a certain amount of Caucasian blood in his veins and arteries and capillaries; thus an extremist wing of the Mau Mau felt that it was criminal for him to marry a full-blooded Negress.