Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  “I’m telling the truth.” Willie was pleading.

  “I’m telling the truth, too,” said Jaworski. “And the truth is, the only reason I don’t run you in is because I don’t feel like doing the paperwork. But that could change real quick if you don’t get your ass to moving.”

  Willie stared. He tried to think of something, anything, he could say to make this angry cop understand: maybe he was crazy, but he wasn’t crazy. He knew what he had seen. He knew he needed help.

  But there was nothing he could say. And he could see Jaworski waiting, daring him. Willie’s head went down. He turned around and began the slow trudge back toward the old toy factory. Behind him, he heard Jaworski’s door slam with an emphatic thump and seconds later, the patrol car accelerated past him and was lost in the traffic on Michigan Avenue.

  Willie stopped. He almost felt like crying.

  At that moment, he felt something being pushed into his right hand. He looked down to see a little button-eyed white girl with dark hair staring up at him earnestly as she pressed a dollar bill into his hand. Beyond her stood her family—mother, father, two brothers, both older, though neither was older than ten. The parents were beaming, proud of their daughter’s selfless charity.

  Willie knew he should be smiling broadly to vindicate the parents’ pride. But he didn’t have it in him. “Thank you,” he mumbled instead in an ashen voice that did not sound like his own. “Thank you kindly.”

  “You’re welcome,” said the little girl in her chirpy little girl voice. And then she skipped off to rejoin her family. The father cast a last quizzical glance at Willie as he shepherded his wife and children away. Willie barely saw.

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  “Yeah,” said Willie. “That was very nice.”

  Fuck nice. What you going to do now, you dumb motherfucker?

  Willie shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said.

  seven

  He sat in his chair as he had long ago been taught, in darkness, both feet flat on the floor, both palms lying flat on his lap. And he swept his mind clear of clutter, imagined all the apprehensions and fears taking wing, lifting off him, leaving his thoughts a perfect oval of nothingness. And he breathed in on a seven count, held it on a seven count, released it on a seven count. And he said to himself, and listened within himself, for the sound of peace.

  Shalom.

  Shalom.

  Shalom.

  It did not work. Before this, it had always worked. Always worked. For years, he had meditated. For as long as he could remember, going back to when he was a kid with a ponytail whose every third word was either peace or love, he had meditated. And it had always taken the edge off difficult days, always transported him into a quiet oneness that stilled his worries and settled his heart.

  But not this time. This time, when he closed his eyes seeking serenity, he found only the guilty face of Malcolm Toussaint, freeze framed, looking up into a security camera on his way upstairs to destroy Bob’s life. And oh, what a job he had done. Twelve hours ago, Bob had gone to sleep reasonably satisfied and fully employed, albeit as a middle manager at a not-very-good newspaper. Twelve hours later, all of it was gone, as surely as if someone had planted a bomb. He had lost everything, he was 59 and out of work, all over some stupid racial garbage.

  Bob opened his eyes. Quiet oneness and serenity were a thousand miles away. And he realized with a start that he didn’t even want these things anyway. Not really. No, what Bob really wanted was to strangle Malcolm Toussaint.

  He switched on a lamp on the table beside him, flipped open his cellphone, and for the fourth time in the last hour, punched in Malcolm’s number. For the fourth time in the last hour, the call went straight to voicemail. “This is Toussaint,” began Malcolm’s voice. Bob snapped the phone shut.

  Obviously, the coward was hiding from him. Fine. Let’s see what he would say when Bob showed up at his door. Bob checked his watch. It was 10:17. He was having lunch with Janeka. No way he could make it to Malcolm’s house and then back to Michigan Avenue in time. Fine, then. After lunch, he would go and see Mr. Malcolm Toussaint and they would settle accounts.

  Malcolm was tired of white people’s BS? Fine. Bob was tired of black people’s BS. And he was especially tired of Malcolm Toussaint’s BS.

  Bob Carson was a racist.

  Or at least, this was what he secretly feared. He had feared it long before Malcolm published the tirade that ended both their careers. Indeed, Bob had feared it for a long time. Somewhere over the years, he had simply lost patience with black people—beg pardon, African Americans—constantly whining about this injustice or that unfairness. He could see it when there were actual laws on the books that kept them from voting or sitting down at a lunch counter to order a hamburger. But those days were long gone. These days, when blacks talked about racism, it was usually about affirmative action—lowering standards so some black person could get a job ahead of some more qualified white one. Or else, it was about trying to defend some lying lowlife. Heck, it was just a few months ago that every “African American” in Detroit had crowded into a church to declare racial solidarity with that city’s corrupt mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.

  Yes, Bob forced himself to admit, sometimes they had a point. Those kids in Jena, Louisiana, probably did get a bad deal—charged with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight—and it probably was because they were black. On the other hand, what else could you expect when they were responsible for such a disproportionate amount of violent crime in this country?

  Bob was tired of all the complaining. It just seemed like the blacks were never satisfied. Seemed like they just wanted to blame all their problems on “the white man.” Translation: on him. Was it too much to ask that they maybe clean up their own communities a little before they started crying about what the white man had or had not done? Hadn’t even Bill Cosby said as much? Was it too much to ask that they stop having so many babies out of wedlock? That their kids pull their pants up on their butts, stop robbing people, stop dealing drugs?

  Bob was a racist. Or at the very least, he felt, he had lost empathy with a people who seemed to want everything given to them. Who ever gave anything to him? Who ever gave anything to his great-grandfather, fresh off the boat from Ireland?

  And Malcolm, always on the race kick. Always writing about the unfairness or the mistreatment or the exclusion or the lack. Whine, whine, whine. It never ended.

  Bob stood. He paced through his house without particular aim, walking just to give his feet something to do. He stopped by the window overlooking the street, opened his cellphone to call Malcolm again, then snapped it shut just as quickly. What was the use?

  Bob was a racist. Or at least, he thought he was. He hated this in himself. It was something he very much did not want to be.

  And he wondered how he could have come to this. It seemed a perverse turn of events for a man who had once marched with—okay, seven rows behind—Martin Luther King, Jr. It seemed an unthinkable fate for a man who had once loved, and been loved by, the incandescent Janeka Lattimore.

  Bob sat. He was not the Christian he once had been. Back when he was a young man, back when he had shared the Word with other longhaired young men and women, faith—the certainty that God’s hand moved in human affairs—had seemed as real, as tangible, as the person kneeling next to you, eyes closed, mouth moving without sound, breathing out her deepest hopes to the spirit in the sky. That was the sort of Christian he had once been.

  Now he was an Easter Christian, a Christmas Christian, when he bothered to be any kind of Christian at all. His faith seemed to have gone the way of his empathy. So it surprised him a little when he lowered his head and closed his eyes and breathed out a fast prayer. He prayed for clarity and courage. He prayed to stop wanting to murder Malcolm Toussaint. He prayed to know what to say when he walked into that restaurant and saw Janeka for the first time in 40 years.

  Amen. As he opened his eyes, he wondered what she would look like.
Would she be gray as a raincloud? Would she be big as a house? And what would she think of him, still trim enough, thank goodness, but balding and kind of dull looking, his face the unimpressive mask of a million white men, middle aged, middle class, middle managers, just counting off the days til retirement? When had he become…middle?

  Certainly, he had not been middle in 1968. No, he had been—the memory bent his lips in a private smile—a revolutionary armed with nothing more than the Word and the audacity to believe it would protect him from angry white men furious at having their prerogatives challenged, apoplectic at knowing some of the challengers were every bit as white as they.

  Bob was a dentist’s son from Minneapolis who had spurned acceptance letters from USC and Yale to attend a small Christian academy no one ever heard of in northwest Mississippi. But he wanted to go there, he explained to his bewildered parents, because “the South is where it’s at.” “It,” meaning protest and snarling dogs and Freedom Riders and marches and injustice and voter registration and ferment…and change.

  His parents had resisted, citing those exact factors. But he wore them down and, in the end, they had relented to their devout and determined son. He arrived on campus in the summer of 1967.

  Bob liked to say that he had majored in English and minored in activism. He went to class, he did enough work to pass, but only just. Earning a degree was not his priority. Changing the world was. So unless classwork absolutely demanded it, he was to be found on the quad, passing out leaflets, getting signatures on petitions, or just sitting cross-legged in the grass discussing strategies for ending racism, poverty, and war.

  Before long, someone invited him to a meeting of a campus group, Students Organized in Unarmed Love, or SOUL. They met for an hour, about 60 blacks and whites, in the cafeteria in the basement of the student union. The meeting opened with a prayer and then they got down to business, the presiding officer (the group rejected the term “president,” sullied as it was by the unjust war being prosecuted by the madman in the White House) asking for status reports on several ongoing projects.

  One committee was finalizing plans to have agricultural students do a presentation for local farmers on new scientific methods of soil conservation. Another was trying to raise funds to invite a speaker from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—maybe even King himself—to appear on campus. Yet another was seeking permission from the dean’s office for a program that would provide tutoring to local middle and high school students.

  Listening to them all from a seat in the back, Bob had the unmistakable feeling that he had found his way home—that this was a place, and these were people, that he understood. He belonged here.

  And then it was her turn to present. She stood.

  She was not tall. Even counting the perfect semicircle of her Afro, she was probably no more than about 5-5. But she was commanding. And Lord, but she was beautiful. Her skin was like the color of the sun just as it fell into twilight, her lips were proud as the prow of some sailing ship, her eyes the shade of sea foam on some remote island in the tropics. Her breasts were small and pert and just…right. And her butt…

  Bob had stopped himself, mortified. What was he thinking?

  This was his sister in the body of Christ. She was his colleague in the struggle for human rights. More than that, she was a human being with a mind, and emotions and a soul and inherent, intrinsic worth. Yet, here he was cataloguing her, the pieces of her, as though she were a side of beef. What kind of loathsome male chauvinist pig had he suddenly become?

  Worse, she was talking—he could see her lips moving—but he had no idea what she was saying. Bob was scalded by shame. He changed his posture. He concentrated. He forced himself to listen.

  Voting rights. She was talking about voting rights and the fact that, although the Voting Rights Act had been passed two years before, there was still fear and intimidation among the blacks in these rural counties that kept them from registering or going to the polls. And what was worse, when they got to the polls, they really had nothing to vote for.

  Yes, King’s movement had shamed the Democrats into supporting legislation to address the most flagrant human rights violations, but at the end of the day, they were still Democrats, as evidenced by their betrayal of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in Atlantic City. Not to mention the Democrat Johnson’s continued prosecution of a useless, immoral war that was chewing up lives at a rate of more than 30 men a day.

  “And for what?” she demanded, her voice rising, her fist smacking into her palm. “For what?”

  Bob shifted in his chair again. She was not just beautiful. Her passion was energizing.

  The problem, she argued, was not just voting rights. It was the fact that black people—poor people of all stripes, really—were being asked to choose between two flavors of the same ice cream: Democrat and Republican. Each was packaged a little differently, each appealed to different prejudices and hopes, but at the end of the day, there was not a whole lot of difference between them. At the bottom line, it didn’t matter all that much if you were black or white. If you were poor, you were powerless and you were going to suffer economic exploitation, going to be kept struggling for the same meager crumbs from the same overladen table, going to be so busy fighting against one another on the stupid basis of color that it never occurred to you to get together and fight the real, common enemy.

  Meaning the capitalists and fat cats who built and maintained their wealth on the suffering and misuse of others. Economic exploitation, realized Bob with a start. She was talking about economic exploitation and the fact that both blacks and whites—Chicanos and Indians, too, for that matter—were its victims.

  Janeka proposed that SOUL confront this situation by forming its own political arm, the American Alliance, to go into rural areas, register impoverished black and white voters, and educate them to go to the polls and vote in their own economic interests—to vote their wallets, not their whiteness; their bank statements, not their blackness. The American Alliance would demand that office seekers all over the state—eventually, she hoped, all over the country—answer a simple question: if elected, what will you do to alleviate poverty? In the long run, she said, she hoped the American Alliance would become a political party itself, fielding its own slate of candidates so that poor people would no longer be restricted to two flavors of the same ice cream.

  Janeka’s eyes searched the room. “I need volunteers,” she said. “I need people to help me register voters.”

  It was an audacious plan. Moreover, it was stunningly naïve. Bob knew this in 2008. He had known it, at least a little, he thought, back in 1967. But what is youth for if not for being stunningly naïve? What is change made of if not the hard work and sacrifices of the stunningly naïve?

  Bob lifted his hand. It rose slowly, but with the irrevocable certainty of an elevator. Searching the room for support, Janeka’s eyes came to rest on him and she smiled in relief. “Well, I’ve got one,” she said, and he grinned, knowing that she was righter than she could ever know. She had him, indeed. Bob felt himself being born.

  It was August of 1967. Bob Carson was 18 years old.

  Dwayne McLarty slid the old Ford four-seater pickup into a parking slot beneath the building. It had been just like he told Clarence, easy peasy. Hell, he hadn’t even had to break the window or hot-wire the ignition. The thing had been sitting right there in the parking lot of some designer coffee shop with the window down and sure enough, when he lowered the sun visor, the keys fell. The world was just full of assholes.

  He paused a moment to check his reflection in the rearview mirror. A lock of hair on the side where he still had hair had fallen across his forehead. He brushed it back. It was at moments like this, moments when he was just trying to pass for a regular citizen, that he sometimes regretted having such a memorable haircut. But, he reasoned, there was nothing he could do about it now. And besides, it wouldn’t matter after tonight.

  Still, Dwayne zipped his win
dbreaker to cover his T-shirt and tattoos—and also the pistol wedged into his waistband. It was a Luger, a good German gun his grandfather had taken off some dead Nazi officer in the Second World War. Mindless Americans under the influence of corporate media elites and biased liberal educators had been taught to hate the Nazis. His own grandfather had hated the Nazis. But more and more, as you looked at the state of the world—the Jews and ragheads fighting over a few godforsaken scraps of land, niggers making it impossible for decent people to walk the streets in safety, fags agitating for the right to marry other fags—you could see that they’d had the right idea, even if they were ahead of their time. It was more and more apparent that the Christian white man needed a homeland of his own.

  Over the years, Dwayne had occasionally toyed with the idea of buying a new gun, but he never had. Carrying his grandfather’s Luger just felt right. He was sentimental about such things.

  Dwayne slammed the truck door behind him, took the elevator up to the lobby level. When its doors slid open, he saw some big nig rent-a-cop sitting at a marble counter next to a turnstile with a swipe card reader that controlled access to the elevators serving the tower. The nig was talking to some old lady who was pissing and moaning about missing coupons in that day’s paper. He was telling her he had nothing to do with that, but would pass on her concerns to the appropriate department. Still, the old bitch kept yammering and at one point, the nig looked past her and made eye contact with Dwayne. The look said, “I’ll be with you soon as I can.” And also, “Can you believe I have to put up with this shit?”

  It angered Dwayne that this nig would think he and Dwayne had even that much common ground, but he made himself smile. The smile must have looked as false as it felt, because the nig’s expression stiffened. Dwayne stopped smiling. He made himself look around the lobby. Ancient headlines screamed from framed front pages.

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