Damn, it was good to be home.
Yes, he had turned his life upside down, yes there were decisions to make, yes his father was apt to make his life miserable when he heard what had happened. But still…
“Man, I done missed this,” he heard himself say.
Melvin snorted. “Shit. You missed Memphis? Now I know somethin’ wrong with you. I had the chance to get my ass out of here, I be gone so fast my shadow have to run to catch up. Believe that.”
“Yeah, man, I know. I might have felt the same way, once upon a time. But I done spent a year up there at that college with them white folks. Don’t nobody say nothin’ to you up there. Don’t nobody smile or laugh or bullshit with you. Food don’t got no taste. No, man,” he said, waving languidly at the sister, who actually favored him with a smile, “Dorothy was right: ain’t no place like home.”
Melvin laughed. “Yeah, well, I been off in Oz, maybe I feel the same way. But you need to know, home ain’t like you remember. Lot of things done changed, just since you been away.”
“You mean ’cause of that strike?”
“Of course. What else is there?”
“I don’t get it, man. How a bunch of garbage men going on strike gon’ change a city? Make it smell maybe, but…”
Melvin looked at him sharply and Malcolm had a sense—it flashed through him like lightning, gone before it was there—that he had somehow…transgressed. No, blasphemed. “Your old man a garbage man,” Melvin told him. “You should ask him.”
“I’m askin’ you,” said Malcolm, and was surprised at his own defensiveness. “Besides, you know, talkin’ to him like talkin’ to a brick wall half the time.”
“Ask him anyway,” said Melvin. “Hard for me to explain, but it’s just different now. Feel like black people finally ’bout to rise up. Honkies feel it too. You can tell. They laughin’, but it’s the kind of laughin’ like you do when you tryin’ to prove you ain’t scared, even though you are. Hell, seem like everybody scared.”
“All that from a garbage strike,” said Malcolm and he did not bother to mask his skepticism.
“Ask your old man,” said Melvin. “Ask him, he tell you.”
As he spoke, he brought the car to a stop in front of Malcolm’s house. It wasn’t much, a box of ramshackle on a street of desolation, one more rendition of the ain’t-got-shit blues in a neighborhood where that song was constantly on everyone’s lips everywhere, all the time. It was a neighborhood of windows boarded, porches sagging, grass gone brown and scrawny, leafless trees. Malcolm’s screen door hung open on weary hinges—exactly as it had the last time he saw it.
Home.
It didn’t change. Nothing ever did.
Malcolm sat staring at it so long that Melvin finally said, “You gon’ sit there all day, or you gon’ get out?”
Malcolm shook his head and climbed out of the car, retrieving his bag from the back seat. He was leaning toward the car to wave thank you for the ride when a woman’s voice said, “Junie, is that you?”
A grin overspread Malcolm’s face automatically as he turned toward the old lady who had called him from the porch of the house next door. Nanny Parker, a spindly little woman with light skin and a head full of thick, gray hair falling haphazardly about her shoulders, had been something of a surrogate mother to him after his own mother died of breast cancer seven years before. “Mornin’, Miss Parker,” he said.
“Ain’t hardly recognized you, all that mess you got on your face.”
Behind him, Malcolm heard Melvin cracking up. He ignored it. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“You need to get a haircut.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What you doin’ here anyway? Thought you was away at that white college?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Malcolm. “But I heard my father was hurt, so I thought I’d come back to see about him.”
Even though he didn’t look back at his friend, Malcolm somehow knew Melvin’s eyes were rolling. And he was surprised and even a little embarrassed at how easily the lie now came to him. Not that it fooled the old woman who gazed down on him, arms folded. She stared at him with her skeptical eyes and said, “Oh really, now?”
It was all she said, but it was enough. She had heard the arguments and the slamming doors from inside his house. She knew better. But Miss Parker didn’t push it and for that, Malcolm was grateful. “Well, it was nice talking to you,” he said, making a move toward the door.
“He ain’t there,” said Miss Parker.
“Malcolm paused. “He’s not? But I heard he twisted his knee.”
She nodded. “He did. Twisted it totin’ one of them garbage tubs out some white lady’s back yard. Tripped over a tree root and fell. Doctor told him stay off it awhile. But you know your daddy. Stubborn. He gone back to the truck two days later. Say he can’t afford to miss the work.”
“That sounds like him,” said Malcolm, and it did.
“Now, with the strike, seem like he gone everyday, down there at the marches on Main Street. That’s where he at right now. Some big meetin’ at City Hall with all the big mules from the city council. Hope to God they get that mess settled soon and them mens get back to work. My trash pilin’ up somethin’ awful back there and it’s gon’ start attractin’ rats. I’m scared of rats.”
She paused, seeming to consider her own words. Then she said, “Don’t tell him I said that. Them mens, they fightin’ for something important. Lord know they got enough to worry about without me puttin’ more pressure on ’em.”
Malcolm was barely listening. His father? In a meeting at City Hall? With all those white men? The thought of it spilled some nameless sense of unease inside him, a premonition he couldn’t even understand, much less explain. He knew, rationally, that he should just go inside the house and wait, but…
Malcolm leaned down to the car window. “You mind droppin’ me off down there?”
Melvin shrugged. Malcolm left his bag inside the front door of the house, bid Nanny Parker goodbye, and climbed back in to Melvin’s car.
That same nameless disquiet chewed at him and he barely noticed the streets slipping past. The idea of his father—too stubborn and too poor to take a few days off even at the cost of his own health—out there hobbling through backyards as best he could, while Malcolm was off at school filling his days with learned, windy dialectics about oppression, socialism, and structural racism, kindled a burn in the bottom of his stomach.
It was filthy work his dad did. They called them tub toters because they walked into people’s back yards to carry out metal tubs filled with garbage, with people’s chicken fat and Kotex, their dead cats and coffee grounds, their watermelon rinds and pork bones. Sometimes the tubs filled with rainwater. Sometimes, they rusted through on the bottom so that you’d hoist the thing to your shoulder and a rancid sluice of cigarette butts, egg shells, fish grease, and Lord knows what all else would fall down on you.
How many times had Malcolm seen his father undress in the back yard, even in bitter cold, washing up with a garden hose in a little stall they had rigged out there next to a fire kindled in a metal drum for warmth, because he was simply too filthy to come into the house? How many times had Malcolm watched secretly from the kitchen window as his father scrubbed grime from his skin and picked maggots from his hair?
All for $1.27 an hour.
It was barely enough to keep up with the rent and electricity. They had no car. They had no phone. On his father’s salary, they couldn’t even afford to eat. They had done their shopping when his mother picked up her food stamps on the first of every month. His parents always argued when she did. His father was invariably surly and ill-tempered around the first day of the month.
Indeed, after Hattie Wilson died, for four months her husband had resisted going down to the welfare office to put his name on the roll for food stamps, until the day he conceded that he had no choice. There had been something naked in his face that day, something too terrible to look at, and Mal
colm had avoided him, grateful though he was to have food in the house again so that he would no longer need to “happen by” Nanny Parker’s place around dinner time if he wanted to eat. Still, what kind of man lives like that? He had too much damned pride to apply for food stamps, but too little to leave a job that made food stamps necessary.
Stubborn, stupid, hard-headed old man.
Even as a boy, Malcolm had thought the tub toters lived a miserable, humiliating excuse for a life, a life that sucked a man’s pride right out of him. He did not understand how his father and all those hundreds of other men—almost all of them black—put up with it. There was no way he ever could.
“How did this thing start?” he heard himself ask.
“The strike?” Melvin was making a left turn.
“Yeah.”
Melvin snorted. “Man, you have been out of touch. Couple of them tub toters climbed into the back of one of them trucks to get out the rain, guess it been three weeks ago by now. The hydraulic thing back there that mash up the trash, it started up on its own. Ain’t nobody pushed the button or nothin’. The men say they been complainin’ about them raggedy old trucks for years, but the city ain’t never done nothin’, ain’t never cared. So them men, they got crushed to death in the back of their own truck.”
It took Malcolm a moment. “Like garbage,” he finally said. His voice was soft.
Melvin glanced at him. “Like garbage,” he said. “They say one of them almost got out. But the truck snagged his raincoat and pulled him back and that was the end of him. And you know what the city done? It give they families about $800 apiece. That’s monthly salary plus $500.” Melvin looked straight ahead, then added, “Cost more’n that to bury them.”
“So that’s why they went out on strike, then? Good for them,” Malcolm replied. “’Bout time they quit bowin’ and scrapin’ to them honkies and start demandin’ instead.”
They fell into a silence. After a moment, the old Buick pulled up to the corner of Adams and Main—City Hall. A roughly dressed group of black men was milling about on the plaza in front of the building. Everybody seemed to be shouting, arms waving excitedly. Police were everywhere, some with linked arms, forming a human barrier against the black men. One cop was engaged in heated discussion with some black man in suit and tie.
“This don’t look good,” said Melvin.
“No,” said Malcolm, distracted. “It don’t.”
A moment. Then Melvin said, “I got to get to work. You be all right out here?”
Malcolm lifted a fist across his chest and shook it. “Yeah, brother. Solid.”
Melvin grinned. “You and that black power jive,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “Hey, you gon’ be lookin’ for work, since you back? ’Cause I’m in good with the hirin’ man at the hotel. I could probably get you on.”
“Yeah,” said Malcolm, his eyes on the confusion in front of City Hall. “That’d be fine.”
“Cool,” said Melvin. “I come by and get you on the way to work. We go talk to him tomorrow.”
Malcolm nodded. He barely heard. As Melvin pulled off behind him, he started forward across the plaza. More men came boiling out of the building. Snatches of angry words came to him on the breeze.
You seen that cartoon in the paper, ain’t you? That let you know what they think of you, don’t it?
I ain’t no goddamn boy. I was in Korea, goddamn it. I’m a man. Tired of these crackers treatin’ me like I ain’t.
Well, you seen how they feel in the way they treat you. Question is, what we gon’ do about it?
Bring the trash to City Hall. Dump it right here in front. That show ’em! That show ’em for sure!
“What the hell are you supposed to be?”
A policeman had materialized in Malcolm’s path, a sweating white man with furious, anxious eyes, his nightstick held out like a crossbar in front of him. Malcolm hadn’t seen the man coming, had been too focused on the angry black men coming out of City Hall. Some of them started singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a chorus of men’s voices, reedy and untutored and ugly and somehow, all the more poignant for that.
The cop jabbed Malcolm’s solar plexus lightly with his nightstick. “I asked you a question.”
“I’m not with them,” said Malcolm.
“I can see that,” said the cop, his disdainful glance traveling Malcolm’s length. Malcolm knew it set him apart, walking about in his dashiki and shades and towering Afro. That was the entire point. But right now, all that was keeping him from getting where he needed to be.
He tried to make himself unthreatening. “My father,” he said, seeking a tone that was polite and deferential, “he’s over there somewhere with the garbage men and I need to—”
But the cop was done listening. He shoved Malcolm with the nightstick. “Go on, boy, get out of here. I don’t have time to fool with you.”
Malcolm rocked back. His hands fisted and came up automatically. It was, he knew, a stupid thing to do. But luckily, the cop had already turned away, going to confer with some sergeant who had rolled up in a squad car, bubbletop lights flashing. Malcolm had that sense you sometimes get when the wind rises and you know the storm is soon to break. He had to find his father and get him out of here.
Slipping past the big cop, he hurried onto the plaza. He searched from face to face, seeking one that looked like his. He had been around these men the better part of his life. Most of them were older, in their thirties, forties, even fifties, with the sagging skin and beaten eyes that come from a lifetime of scraping the bottom and smiling like you’re happy to be there. Except that they were not smiling now. Their mouths bent around the lyrics of the old song, voices rising—“Just like a tree, that’s planted by the waaaaater…”—and bent, too, around angry shouts and defiant cries. And their eyes, something in their eyes, some light, some challenge, some sudden interest in their own fate where before there had been only a dull, almost bovine acceptance.
The crowd was growing, still more men pushing out of the building behind them, but it was held in place, locked fast by police, a phalanx of them. A black man, joined by a rumpled, limping white man in a suit, was in urgent consultation with two of the police officers.
“You’ve got to let these men march,” Malcolm heard someone pleading with the cops. “These are not militants. These are working men who are tired of being mistreated.”
The police officer said something Malcolm didn’t hear and then another voice said, “There’s a lot of anger here. If they don’t get some kind of outlet for it, I’m scared for what might happen.”
Malcolm recognized a face. Not his father, but a man who knew his father.
“Sonny!” he called. “Hey, Sonny!”
The man, who had been singing lustily, turned at the sound of his name. There was a moment of confusion—Malcolm was rapidly getting used to this—as the man registered the familiar, yet unfamiliar face in front of him, and then he smiled. “Junie?” he said. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. I’m lookin’ for my father. Do you know where he is?”
Sonny was one of the younger men—about 30, by Malcolm’s estimate—but he and Malcolm’s father had become good friends ever since Sonny joined their crew a few years before. They were an odd pair, given that his father was a brick wall of a man given to long, heavy silences and Sonny, as his father had once said, could talk paint right off the wall.
Sonny’s favorite topic was himself and his future. He would discourse at length on how this job and this city were just a way station for him, how he had bigger dreams than a Memphis garbage tub could contain, how he was going to go to college, start a business, live in the lap of luxury. Secretly, it always made Malcolm pity him. Sonny thought he could play by the white man’s rules and flourish in the white man’s system. But even if the white man’s idea of success were something to be envied—and it wasn’t—how realistic was it for Sonny to think he had a shot at it? You did not start a business and curl in the lap of luxury whe
n you couldn’t read beyond the sixth grade—especially if you were a Negro. No, Sonny was going to be a Memphis tub toter for the rest of his life. Some painful day, he would accept that. Malcom didn’t want to be around when that happened.
Even so, Malcolm had always liked Sonny—mainly, he supposed, because Sonny liked him. Actually—and Malcolm always found this strange, because Sonny was ten years older—Sonny looked up to him. He would seek out Malcolm’s opinion on current events or quiz him about history, not so much for the answers but just to hear Malcolm hold forth in learned self-confidence and polysyllabic erudition. His father would always scowl at them and often left the room when this happened—he called it “putting on airs” or “getting out your place.”
But Sonny saw it differently. He saw Malcolm’s precociousness, his raw, unshaped intelligence, as a reflection of promise—Malcolm’s promise, even Sonny’s promise, maybe even promise for the entire race. “Stop talking that nigger jive and come correct,” he would scorn whenever he heard Malcolm slip into slang or throw out a casual curse so that he could fit in, so that he would sound more like everybody else.
“You don’t need to do that,” Sonny had told him once. “You don’t need to fit in with them. Let them try to fit in with you. You the one goin’ places, youngblood. Rest’a these fools ain’t goin’ no further than the corner store.”
In his heart, Malcolm knew this to be true. Even Melvin, his best friend since the first day of kindergarten, would probably not go much further than he already had—a job as a busboy at the Holiday Inn that stood sentinel on a bluff above the river. But knowing it was true and accepting it were different things. In effect, Sonny was asking him to be alone—to be, if not exactly friendless, then set aside. A year into his college career, a year spent in the North where the food didn’t taste right and the people walked right by you on the street without so much as a nod, and Malcolm still didn’t know if he could live with that.
“Mozell?” Sonny scratched his head now in response to Malcolm’s question. “Ain’t seen him. But he like to be out here someplace. Just about all the mens here, I expect, ’cept for them few scabs ain’t had the guts to come out here with us.”
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