Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  Bob clicked on Doug’s computer and looked at the paper’s website. The video was on the front page. It now had more than 25,000 hits. And the message board beneath it was going crazy—a couple thousand postings. Bob began reading from the beginning.

  “HumanBeing01” wrote: “What a horrible video. Though I often disagreed with Toussaint’s column—and was particularly offended by what he apparently sneaked into the paper this morning—I am appalled to think this country has degenerated to the point where hostage taking and loose talk of racial war will now become an acceptable means of dissent.”

  “brotherwisdom” was affronted by this. “In sayin the brother ‘sneaked’ something into the post your only helping to further the psychosocial dynamic under which anything an african man in amerikkka does is presumed to be furtive and shifty. Your a racist.”

  “No,” retorted HumanBeing01, “go back and re-read what I wrote. I said he sneaked it into the paper because he sneaked it into the paper. Why is everything about race with you?”

  Here, “Thomas Edison” joined the conversation. “Everybody knows Knee Grows is the most racist people in America. Always playin da race card.”

  Bob shook his head, horrified and appalled. What planet did these people live on?

  “Where do I sign up to join WRA?” asked “Speaker Of Da Howze.” “I like there ideas. Get rid of all the niqqers. Starting with Barry Soetero.”

  “Me too,” added “Whats On TV Tonight.” “I would join them in a heartbeat. Time to take our country back from these long-lipped, wide-nose, buck-eyed, nappy-headed apes f-ing up everything. Send them all back to Africa. Worst mistake we ever made was to bring them over here.”

  “LOL,” replied “GarveyXFarrakhan,” “you racist crackers crack me up. Reason you can’t abide Toussaint is because he speaks the truth and you can’t handle it.”

  “You all better think twice about joining that fat guy on the video,” wrote “BettySue69.” “He might eat you. LOL”

  “LOL,” wrote “JohnD’oh!” “Guy’s so fat he leaves footprints in concrete.”

  “He so fat, they got to grease the door frame and hold a Twinkie on the other side just to get him out of the house,” wrote “Biteme.”

  “Guy got more chins than a Chinese phone book,” wrote “Kirby11.”

  “Hey.”

  Bob looked up. Amy Landingham was coming through the door.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Never did get my interview with you,” she said.

  A rueful smile. “Yeah, something came up. How you feeling? I heard that guy really clocked you one.”

  Her face was bruised. She spoke through clenched teeth, her voice slightly distorted.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “He broke my jaw.”

  “Why are you here?”

  She gave him an odd look as she sat down in front of Doug’s desk. “Where else would I be?”

  “They put the screws in your jaw? I had that once, I wasn’t any good for days.”

  “No screws,” she said. “He wired it.”

  “I thought they didn’t use that so much anymore.”

  “They don’t,” she said. “I asked him to. I wanted to get back sooner.”

  “You’re a trouper,” said Bob. “So I assume you heard? About Janeka, I mean? And Malcolm?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I heard.”

  “We’re waiting for the guy to call,” said Bob. “Me and Detective Raintree over there.”

  She glanced back at the detective, who nodded without ever looking up from his paper. She turned back to Bob. “So what’s that you’re looking at?”

  “Message boards,” said Bob. “Underneath the video.”

  She shook her head. “You shouldn’t do that. Whenever I read those things it makes me think NASA should launch a search for signs of intelligent life on Earth.”

  Bob nodded. “It is depressing,” he said. “Look at this one: ‘I’m not a racist, but it’s a fact the blacks commit more crimes due to their culture and their lack of education and their lack of self control. But the liberal media covers this up because they’re scared to offend the blacks due to their own cowardice.’”

  “Darn that liberal media,” said Amy.

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “Here’s another: ‘I don’t support what these guys have done but I understand why. They have been force fed the liberal media agenda all their lives. They have heard professional victims like this Toussaint who blame all the black man’s problems on the white man. And they had to ask theirselfs, Who is the real racist here? Sometimes, people just get tired. Martin Luther King even said that.’

  “God,” said Bob in disgust. “Makes you wonder for the future of the species. Makes you wonder if people ever learn.”

  “You know, I saw Malcolm this morning by the elevators,” said Amy. “He was heading out, I was coming in. I asked him why he did it. Know what he said? ‘I just got tired.’ I didn’t understand that. But I’ve been thinking about it all day. And I think maybe I’m beginning to.”

  “Yeah?” said Bob.

  “Yeah,” said Amy. She was watching him closely. After a moment, she said, “Bob, are you okay?”

  And that was when he realized he was crying. He knocked the single tear from his cheek with an impatient swipe. “This waiting is just getting to me,” he said. “I’m scared for her. All we’re doing is sitting here by the phone, and I don’t think this guy is going to call. They keep telling me he will, but they didn’t see his eyes.”

  Amy leaned across the desk. She spoke in a voice just for the two of them. “So let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go see what we can find out.”

  He searched her face for some sign that she was kidding. He did not find it. “We can’t do that,” he whispered.

  “Why not?” she asked in the same confidential voice. “I’m sidelined with a work-related injury. Hell, you’re unemployed. We don’t owe anything to anybody. We can do whatever we want, can’t we? Well, what I want is to get to the bottom of this.” As she spoke, she was removing her cellphone from her jacket pocket. It was the same model as Bob’s. With a glance back to make sure the detective was still absorbed in his paper, she reached across, pulled out the plug linking Bob’s phone to the digital recorders, and substituted hers instead. She pocketed Bob’s phone. Bob felt his jaw hanging open and closed it.

  “Dark-green Chrysler van,” she told him in the same whisper. “Level P1. Parked right by the entrance. Ten minutes.”

  Then she stood, speaking in a voice that made Raintree glance up. “Bob, you take care of yourself and let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. I’ll be curled up around a bottle of Motrin.”

  She nodded to Raintree and then was gone.

  Bob sat there, not knowing what to do. His eyes fell upon another posting on the message board.

  “ArchConservative” wrote: “The Dems buy AA votes with welfare money while the rest of the country gos down the crapper. That’s why people are mad.”

  “CaptainAmerica” replied; “Better watch yourself, Arch. If the libs see you revealing their scheme, they’ll send you off to a re-education camp. ROTFLMAO.”

  Debate, American style.

  Bob Carson had always been a man who followed instructions, a man who painted between the lines. His long-ago affair with Janeka was the exception that proved the rule. Other than that, Bob had always been a cautious man. He simply didn’t do the kind of thing Amy was suggesting. Besides, the cops knew best.

  They didn’t see his eyes.

  Bob checked his watch. It was after 4:00. It would soon be three hours since McLarty kidnapped Janeka. The video had been online for two hours. It was all over the Internet. All over the news. The whole world knew about it. Surely, McLarty knew it, too. Yet still, no phone call.

  It will be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.

  What if something already had happened? And here he sat,
following instructions, painting between the lines, waiting.

  Bob stood without meaning to. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he heard himself say. “Should I take my phone? He’ll be expecting my voice. He hears another voice, it might spook him.”

  Raintree looked up, thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “But if that phone rings, you get your ass back here ASAP. You got me?”

  “Yes,” said Bob. “I got you.”

  He snatched up Amy’s phone and walked out of Doug’s office. Raintree was watching, so he took a right toward the men’s room. In the hallway, he paused a beat, then doubled back, crouched down, and peeked around the edge of the glass into Doug’s office. Peggy Toyama watched him quizzically. Bob put his index finger to his lips. In the office, Raintree laid the sports section aside and picked up Metro.

  Bob came to his feet and scurried past the office. He scurried down the hall. He scurried through the newsroom, oblivious to the curious eyes that marked his passage, keenly aware that he had never done anything this crazy in his entire life. He scurried onto the elevator when it came, scurried through security when it let him off in the lobby, stabbed the button for the parking elevator, and looked over his shoulder for pursuers, feeling not unlike a wanted criminal.

  Amy’s van was parked right where she had said it would be and she was standing at the rear bumper. She tossed him her keys when he was still six feet away and he snatched them out of the air, one-handed. “You drive,” she said. “I’m in no shape.”

  “This is crazy,” said Bob.

  “Yeah, well the whole day’s been crazy,” she said. “Why should this be any different?”

  Bob couldn’t argue with that.

  He beeped the van open and got into the driver’s seat while Amy settled herself next to him. He started the car, adjusted the mirrors, looked over at her.

  “Let’s go see what trouble we can find,” she said.

  eighteen

  Eddie even wore shades indoors. The fluorescent lights got caught in them and with his waist-length black leather coat over a black turtleneck shirt, he had the look of some dark and anonymous automaton as he paced before the group of about 20 boys and young men.

  “The worst thing we can do,” he was saying, “is let those brothers waste this opportunity by having just another march.”

  Malcolm sat in the second row of folding chairs arranged in a basement rec room in the projects.

  “I’m not going to front,” said Eddie. “The man made a powerful speech. One thing the man can do is talk. And his call for a work stoppage certainly has merit. But like he always does, the man pulled up short before reaching the conclusion toward which his logic was inevitably leading him. He is like a doctor who is brilliant in diagnosing the affliction, but unable to bring himself to prescribe the proper medicine to bring about a cure.”

  There was soft laughter under the harsh lights. Eddie waited out their amusement, the fluorescents bright and hard on his shades. Finally, he gave them a tight smile. “I mean,” he said, “I heard the man say many things. I heard him tell our brothers they were deserving of dignity and I agreed with that. I heard him say that America is going to hell…and I sho’nuff agreed with that.”

  This brought more laughter. Again, Eddie waited it out. Then he said, “But the one thing I did not hear the esteemed Dr. King say was how the black man will climb to a position where he can stop waiting for crumbs to fall from the white man’s table. The one thing I did not hear the celebrated Dr. King tell us was how the black man should seize his own destiny and show whitey we are not to be fooled with any longer. The one thing”—his voice rising to an angry pitch—“I did not hear the great dreamer say was that black people need to seize power by any means necessary—the power to control our own neighborhoods, our own lives.”

  Fists shook in the air at that. The man next to Malcolm said, “Tell the truth, brother!”

  Eddie grinned. “They act like they don’t know what we mean when we say, ‘black power.’ You read all these learned essays in all these highfalutin places, all asking with earnest confusion”—and here he adopted the pontificating voice of some white intellectual square—“‘What does the Negro mean by power?’”

  He stopped pacing. “What the hell do they think we mean?” he cried suddenly, his voice raw with indignation. “Why is this such a mystery to them? We want black power just like the white man already has white power. That means we want to control our own damn destiny. It means we want to get rid of the Memphis PD and all the Pig Departments around the country that occupy our neighborhoods and abuse our brothers and sisters. It means we want to get rid of these broken-down schools that teach our children how to be ignorant. It means we want to buy from our own people, keep our money in our own communities. Let our money be used to build up the brother man, not the other man!”

  He spoke right through the cheers that erupted.

  “It means we want control over our own lives and our own neighborhoods. And it means we want—no, we demand—a seat at the table, and if we don’t get it, they have to realize we are ready to turn that motherfucker over!”

  Malcolm shot out of his seat at that. The whole room did. “Yeah!” he shouted. “Yeah!” Fist punching at the air. This was what he wanted to hear. This was what needed saying.

  Eddie let them go for awhile, then held up his hand. When the room settled, he spoke to them in an after-the-storm voice, a voice softened by sudden calm. “Don’t misunderstand. I am not opposed to what Dr. King wants. On the contrary, on that subject, he and I are in full agreement. No, brothers, where we part ways is over tactics. I don’t believe we can ‘dream’ our way to the so-called Promised Land. And I sure as hell don’t believe in any philosophy which tells you to let some white man hit you on your head with a stick and you just sit there and take it and tell him you love him anyhow.”

  He took off the glasses. The eyes he showed them were bright and fierce. “Those days are over and thank God. No more of this ‘nonviolent’ shit. Dr. King is a brave man. But he is naïve in his tactics and foolish in his reasoning. There is nothing wrong with having a march, nothing wrong with the people coming together to speak their demands with one voice. But if whitey does not realize there is an alternative to peaceful demonstration, then all marching is going to do is wear out your shoes. A march cannot just be a plea. It has to be an ultimatum. Whitey must know he has a choice to make. And he has to know that if he does not make the right choice, we are prepared to escalate this thing.”

  He looked out over the crowd of them, allowed them to see the seriousness and purpose in those angry eyes. Then, slowly, he replaced his shades. “Now, let me tell you what we need to do,” he said.

  Eddie spoke for a few minutes more and when he was done, they looked to one another and grins stretched their faces and their heads bobbed and they said, “Yeah. Damn straight.” They would show whitey. They would show him what black power could do.

  The meeting broke up shortly afterward and Malcolm hopped on his bike to ride to work. His head buzzing with the plans they had made, he cycled northwest, out of the clotheslines and dirt-patch yards of the projects, then turned west on Crump toward the river. He had only gone a few blocks when he came upon a company of firefighters spraying water on a burning heap of wood, paper, discarded food containers, and other garbage piled in a bonfire. A crowd of Negroes stood watching with sullen eyes. Two carloads of police were there, keeping everybody back.

  So many people were crowded about that they spilled into the street. Malcolm had to get off the bike and walk it through the crowd.

  It was a relatively small blaze and not all the firemen were needed. Two teams with hoses sprayed water at its base. The rest stood against the truck, watching the crowd watching them. There seemed to be no great urgency. But then, garbage fires were common now in this angry city.

  “Y’all need to tell Loeb to treat them men like men,” cried a Negro man in a straw stingy brim, his
voice sudden and loud. “That’s what y’all need to do!” The cops and the firemen affected not to hear. The crowd shouted its agreement. They affected not to hear this, either.

  Somebody threw an empty whiskey bottle. It arced high in the night air, then shattered at the base of the flames. The cops and firemen all jumped as if there had been a gunshot. One cop had his hand on the service revolver at his hip. “Who did that?” he demanded. People in the crowd just laughed. There was an unmistakable air of festivity to the gathering. There was also an unmistakable air of menace lurking at its edges.

  Malcolm worked his way through the crowd, got back on his bike, and continued west. He was still processing Eddie’s incendiary words. Demand a seat at the table—or turn the motherfucker over.

  That last, he thought, was what was missing from Martin Luther King. Even as he spoke of power, he still offered the carrot without the stick. It was the same with the NAACP, CORE, all these Memphis preachers, all these tired-ass Negroes the press insisted on calling black leaders.

  Leaders. That was good for a private chuckle. They’d had their day. They’d had their chance. It was time to get rid of the whole mealy-mouthed, hat-in-hand lot of them—and all their mealy-mouthed, hat-in-hand followers, too.

  And it seemed fitting somehow as he was thinking that thought, that he rolled his bike into the hotel lobby and saw Melvin Cotter, car keys in hand, walking toward the door with Rupert Pruitt, both of them laughing. Maybe Melvin had told the white man a joke. Maybe the white man had told him one. It didn’t really matter.

  Melvin saw him looking. Something sour appeared on his face. He turned back toward Pruitt.

  The three men passed each other like ghosts. Malcolm went through the employees-only door behind the desk, parked his bike in the closet, and pulled the mop bucket out. Another night of cleaning up after whitey began.

  He cycled home the next morning in a cold and persistent rain that gave the lie to spring. His jacket plastered itself to his shirt and the newspaper he used for covering as he steered the bike one-handed soon became sodden, shapeless, and useless. After a few moments, he flung it away. Under the sluice of gray water, the city looked…forsaken.