“The park down the street from where you’ll be staying is Brick territory. Stay out of it.” Prez looked at him, his brow furrowed, a single eyebrow raised. The professor almost burst out laughing. What a kid, he thought. “Look, man. I know this city. I’m telling you this stuff for your own good so that you can be successful in your studies. You do want that, right? Nod if you understand.”
He reached over and opened his glove box to reveal his hidden radio. He tuned it to WSDM-FM where the sultry voice of Yvonne Daniels soothed souls with jazz sounds on her “Daniel’s Den” radio show. Prez smiled, slumped down in the car seat, and closed his eyes.
After dropping Prez off, Professor Mackey was faced with a quandary. He had a hot date waiting in Old Town and the quickest way to get there was up the despised Dan Ryan Expressway. But that would mean driving through the Robert Taylor Homes, which he hated. He wanted to be cheery. He took South Parkway north instead. He and his boyfriend had already decided to spend that night and all of the next day, a Sunday, in bed.
*
He could hear his phone ringing as he pulled himself up the stairs to his apartment and fumbled through his bag, grabbing for his door keys. The ringing stopped just as he entered. It was barely 6:00 a.m. He wondered who could be calling so early as he lay down on his sofa for a short nap. His first Monday class wasn’t until 11:00 a.m.
A couple of hours later he was roused by his phone ringing. He launched himself over the sofa toward the phone on the end table.
“Hello, hello. Gene? What’s wrong? Was that you calling before? Well, man, talk. You’re where? At O’Hare? What are you doing here? I’ll come pick you up. Which gate? Alright.”
*
“Going Brit, are you?”
“Well, hello and great to see you, too, little brother.”
“You always try to pull twenty-minutes older rank when you’re nervous, Reg.”
“Well, you always try to deflect onto something that ridicules me when you’re nervous, Gene. What’s happening?”
“We have to stop, Reg. Otherwise we end up being like those slaves who sold out Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner. You don’t know do you? Yesterday three kids doing civil rights work went missing in Mississippi. They’re dead, man. Everybody knows that.”
Reg Mackey reached over and turned off the radio. “Where?”
“A shit-hole called Philadelphia, Mississippi.”
“I’ve peeped at some reports on that place in Wicker’s files. About eight other blacks have gone missing down there.”
“Eight?!”
“Yeah. You should see the stuff that gets filtered through the Chicago office. Families down there have reported those people missing. A couple of names I remember off the top of my head; Henry Dee, Charles Moore, even a fourteen-year-old kid—another one—Herbert Oarsby. What’s so special about these recent three?”
“Two of them are white.”
“Ahh, so now missing men most assuredly murdered by the Klan are in the news?”
“How can you be so detached, Reg? I’m all messed up inside, man. I cried all night.”
“You know me better than that, Gene.”
On Tuesday, June 23, Dick Gregory announced a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Reg Mackey wondered where he got the money because CORE was broke. He had surreptitiously seen that file, too.
40
Chicago, Wednesday, June 24, 1964
“Hello. Hello, yes, good morning. I’m sure he is waiting for my call. Thanks. I’ll hold a minute, yes. Hey, hey, Wicker. I suppose you heard. Don’t play dumb, you guys trained me too well for that. If you want to know what I’ve heard come right out and ask me. Don’t insult me. Tell me, how did the FBI manage to allow those three boys to go missing? What? Don’t give me that shit about another regional office being responsible. You know I know a significant portion of the national operation is being run out of Chicago. So please dispense with the bullshit. Please, no football metaphors. We’re talking about human lives, not a fucking football being dropped. This isn’t a game, which, as I recall, were your precise words to me when you recruited me. All I asked was that to the best of your ability you would see to it that brutality ceased and that there would be no lives lost. Yes, yes. I’m aware there’s no confirmation about where those boys are. But you and I both know what the chances are of those boys being found alive. C’mon, stop trying to bullshit me. I know some folks in New York too and I know you all knew when Schwerner left town and headed south. Whoa, whoa! Let me tell you something, I’m doing this because I believe in America. Don’t get fucking confused. I do not trust you or the agency. You got a lot of nerve talking to me the way you have, and now asking me about Downs. Fuck you! It’s my show anyway. I can run it any way I want or I won’t run it at all. Oh yeah, Wicker, one more thing, in case you didn’t hear it the first time: Fuck you!”
Professor Mackey slammed the phone down so hard he spilled coffee all over his shirt. “Sweet fucking Jesus!” he exclaimed as he dropped everything he had in his hands on the floor and rushed to get his shirt off. “Those goddamned sons of bitches. Fucking redneck crackers. Anglo-Saxon pimps. Goddamn fascists. That’s all they are. They don’t give a shit about America.” He caught a glimpse of himself talking to no one as he rushed past the mirror on his dresser. He paused, shook his head and said, “You’re pathetic.”
Reginald Mackey, Ph.D, professor of sociology at the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois, and director of the newly established Alternative Modes Interdisciplinary Studies Program, was a complex amalgam. He often wondered if his lack of religious conviction made it too easy for him to surreptitiously engage with the people over on 1100 W. Roosevelt Road. In their file was a manila folder that identified him only as “Informant TK2011IQ00.” He knew he wasn’t doing it for the money, which was so little he donated it to a local soup kitchen.
*
He cleaned himself up, changed his shirt, and marveled that his papers had not been soiled by coffee. He made another call.
“Good morning, Mrs. Grant. Is young Mr. Downs awake yet? Oh, has he? Up at five and went out for a run where? Washington Park? He’s back, I trust? In the shower. Indeed. Tell him I’ll be by to pick him up at eight. Yes, thanks. You, too.”
Prez came out precisely at eight.
“Good morning, Mr. Downs. Sleep well?”
Prez got in. He reached into his bag and pulled out five typewritten pages.
“Here’s your first thousand, Professor. I look forward to doing many more thousands for you.”
Professor Mackey took the paper and read its title aloud: “Du Sable Would Love Buddy Guy.” Then he let out a raucous laugh. He glanced over each page then asked, “How do you know about du Sable?”
“There was a little book about him in my room. I was shocked to learn that Chicago was founded by a black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He’d hate this place if he saw it now. Buddy Guy could save his grace, though.”
“Can you drive?”
“Of course.”
“Alright, you drive. I want to read this.” They switched seats. “Go to the end of the block. Turn left. Go two blocks, turn right. Keep going towards the lake and take the exit for Chicago, Loop. And Mr. Downs, do not, I repeat, do not drive my car like you’re on a race course.”
Prez wondered about the race car reference. Then quickly forgot it as he said, “I saw Dick Gregory on TV. He was talking about the Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner murders. He spoke of America’s hypocrisy in trying to tell other nations how to do democracy when racists are blowing up churches here and killing good people like those three civil rights workers. He said the FBI could easily solve all this stuff and even prevent it but that the FBI doesn’t because, and I paraphrase, the FBI itself is a very vicious group and a second Ku Klux Klan.”
> Professor Mackey couldn’t read any more after that.
41
Chicago, Fall 1966
The 1966 Fall semester had started and Prez was already knee-deep in his research and writing. There were days when it felt like quicksand. He knew it was because he was spreading himself too thin. He was organizing on the west side so frequently, he wondered if he should move there. It would save a lot of travel time. But he would miss the lake. And he really liked Hyde Park. More importantly, he lived a short walk from Eckhart Hall, whose second-floor library he used so much he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking he was there.
One rainy evening as he bounded out the library door and jumped over a puddle of water a girl shouted in a thick British accent, “Excuse me! Hey! Can you help me?” She was standing right in the puddle, her long toes going up and down. She held a pair of Buffalo sandals in one hand and a sheaf of papers tied with cord in the other. Her wafer-thin body looked frail under the lumberjack shirt she wore. Prez wondered how she kept her baggy, torn bellbottoms from falling off her hips. Her little pink mouth was turned up at the corners in a perpetual smile and the whites of her brown eyes reminded Prez of the Cleary marbles he and his boyhood friends would hoard but never expose to the abuses of an actual game of marbles. “Is this Eckhart Hall, where J. Ernest Wilkins studied?”
“Yes. And yes.”
“Terse, aren’t you?”
Didn’t everyone know about the thirteen-year-old African-American math prodigy who entered the University of Chicago at the age of thirteen, received his Ph.D in mathematics at the age of nineteen, and later worked on the Manhattan Project?
“No. I have to be somewhere. Maybe I’ll see you later.”
The very next day his professor made a special request, that he mentor three exchange students from England. Prez agreed to meet them at a place called the Soul Tavern later that evening so that they could get better acquainted. Just as he rounded the corner up the street from the tavern has noticed two white men sitting in a dark-gray four-door sedan. They were parked across the street from the tavern. Prez could hear the squelch of a two-way radio. He paused and leaned against a tree and watched.
The fellow on the passenger side got out and opened the trunk. He took off his trench coat and threw it in. He put on a varsity jacket and a baseball cap. Next, he crossed the street and went into the tavern. Then he came back out and leaned against the fender. Soon after, a young white guy came out and they walked a few paces down the street and talked for a few minutes, at times heatedly. The older guy in the baseball cap opened the trunk and pulled out a dark-green rucksack. He tried to hand it to the younger guy, but he wouldn’t take it. They had a heated exchange. Then the younger guy snatched the backpack from the older guy’s hand and went back into the tavern. The fellow in the baseball cap got back into the car, which then drove off.
Prez waited a few minutes, trying to make sense of what he had just witnessed, before going into the tavern to look for a black girl with a purple scarf tied around her forehead. She was seated at a booth and rose to wave at Prez. That was odd, he thought, as he went over to meet Jenny “call me JB” Broadwell, Percival “everyone calls him Percy” Longstreet, and Elizabeth “please call her Lizzy” Beckert.
“I’m Preston Downs.”
“So, that’s your name, rude boy,” said Lizzy.
“Better than Mister Terse.” He laughed.
“What’s going on?” asked Jenny. “You two are behaving like you know each other.”
“Soon,” said Lizzy.
They all began to talk in some detail about what they aspired to accomplish that summer and how they hoped to make a difference when they returned home. Prez promised to do what he could to acclimatize them to their new environs. All the while his foot was busy feeling around under the table for the backpack. There was something hard in it.
Jenny leaned on Percy’s shoulder. I think I still have jet lag. Percy stroked her face and her hair. From his shirt pocket he pulled out a joint. “This will help.”
“Not in here, man. And if you see the cops, throw it away,” cautioned Prez.
“Let’s get back to the room,” said Jenny.
“I’m going to stay and talk with Preston here,” said Lizzie.
“Everyone calls me Prez.”
“But I like Preston. There’s nothing you can do about that.”
“May I compliment you on your black velour jacket? It really looks good on you.”
“Thank you! It’s my favorite crinkly-comfy dressy jacket.”
They talked so much that midnight crept up on them.
“Okay,” said Lizzy. “Your girl is in Washington, but you’re not engaged.”
“Correct.”
“Well, I have a guy back in London. But I ask myself, suppose we knew the world was ending tomorrow. Here we are now, you and me. The perfect pair. Do we spend our last night alive together or not?”
“That’s such a crazy-ass question, Lizzy. You’re really nuts.”
He took her home.
42
Chicago, August, 1966
It was a during a sweltering summer’s morning jog around Washington Park that he noticed the police had shiny new blue-and-white 1967 Chevrolet Biscaynes. One sat at Fifty-ninth Street. He pretended not to see it. But he didn’t try to pretend that he didn’t see the two Bricks sitting on a picnic table watching him go around and around. They both wore do-rags around their processed hair, black nylon athletic shirts, green khakis and black combat boots. On his fifth lap around his jogging route, Prez stopped and walked over to them. One was twirling a toothpick in his mouth with his tongue, the other was hunched over cleaning under his fingernails with a switchblade.
“How you soul brothers doing?” asked Prez.
Switchblade kept concentrating on his manicure. Toothpick, who had locked eyes with Prez the instant Prez stopped running, said, “How you know we soul brothers?”
“I dunno. Something tells me. I got a feeling, ya know. I get these feelings about things and I’m always right. I’d hate to be wrong. What about y’all, would you hate that I was wrong?”
Switchblade snickered and kept attending to his fingernails. “Nigga, you real funny.” He closed his knife and stuck it in his pocket. Then he stood up—but not just any old standing up. The motions started from somewhere in his lower back and rolled up to his shoulders, which lifted his butt off the table top. Then it went back down to his thighs, which stretched his legs and torso, leaving only his neck and head to raise. He looked down at Prez and offered a hand. “I’m Eldee, Eldee Stricmore.”
“And I’m Prez.” Prez gave his hand a hearty shake. Then he turned toward Toothpick, took his hand and shook it.
“Yeah, man,” said Toothpick, “I’m his brother Kelly. They call me Kel-Mel ’cause Kel likes to be mel-low. Ya dig it? Women and weed. Live life until the shit goes down, then we soldiers. Like now, we on guard duty.”
Prez frowned. An eyebrow raised. He theatrically tilted his head. “Is it pro or anti? And I don’t mean ante like laying your money down in a pot before you start gambling, though you may be thinking there’s a game going on here right now. Are you here in a pro or anti mode?”
They looked at each other. Kel-Mel said, “What the fuck you talkin’ ’bout, man? I didn’t understand nuthin’ you jus’ said.”
“You said y’all are soldiers on guard duty.”
“Yeah,” said Eldee, “that’s right. And we got the scars to prove it.” He pulled up his shirt to reveal several round scar tissue-covered holes and a long scar with obvious stitch marks running its length. “Minh Thanh Road, Viet Nam.”
Then Kel-Mel pulled up his shirt to reveal almost identical wounds. “Sixty-seventh and Stony Island. Chicago. USA. So, what the fuck you wanna know now?”
“Are you following orders to protect something o
r to prevent something? Are you for something or against something?” said Prez.
“Uncle sent us over here to make sure the cops don’t bust caps in your ass. We respectful of your presence around here. Uncle knows you’re from D.C. That’s the East. He always said a prophet gonna come to us from the East. That he’ll be smart, fearless, and wise. He heard you speak about Malcolm X, that important question—whether socialism is good for black folks. He was impressed.”
“How do you know I’m fearless?”
“You knocked the fuck outta Jilly and Stu in front of the Regal. They our boys. You think we don’t know about that? It was some years back but we remember. Uncle say they had it coming. We not supposed to be acting like thugs no mo’. We supposed to learning how to be Soul Brothers, black men. Uncle thinks you should be a Big Brick and show us the way.”
“Those cops sit over behind a couple of cars at Fifty-ninth Street like they trying to hide,” said Prez. “Don’t they know they can hide but they can’t run?” They all laughed at that riff off of Joe Louis’ famous quote. “Tell Uncle I really appreciate you all looking out for me. But don’t think because I’m out here like I don’t care that I don’t know. I know. This is called exercising my right to be out here whenever I want and knowing that all the cops can do is to leave me alone and let me exercise my constitutional rights.”
“Constitutional rights!” said Kel-Mel. “Nigga, are you stupid or something? Fuckin’ cops don’t care nuthin’ about your constitutional rights. They bust a cap in your ass and leave you bleeding and dying like they did my cousin over at the lagoon a few months ago. Shot that nigga eight or nine times, that’s at least two cops shooting. Then they holler out ‘Devil D Thang’ and go screeching off into the night like we stupid or something.”
“Wait a minute. They’re pulling that kind of false flag shit on the West Side too.”
“False flag?” queried Kel-Mel.
“Yeah. The cops cap a dude then try to make it look like a rival group did it?”
Exile Blues Page 23