Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  This chant rose full and lusty from somewhere in the middle of the mob ahead, contrapuntal with the sweet, patient lyric being sung in the front. It made him grin. “Now that’s more like it!” he cried to no one in particular.

  “You got that right, baby,” said the man next to him.

  If it wasn’t fair the sanitation men’s march was being overtaken, overrun by kids, well, life itself wasn’t fair. And maybe the kids knew something the old folks didn’t know or, being old, had allowed themselves to forget: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Too much patience only gave whitey permission to ignore you. No, what you had to do was make yourself impossible to ignore.

  “Black power!” he shouted. It came from out of nowhere and it felt good. He liked the urgency and the immediacy of it, the implicit reminder that “someday” was not nearly soon enough. So he shouted it again. “Black power!”

  A group of them picked up the chant, bringing up the tail end of the march. “Black power! Black power! Black power!”

  Beale Street was just ahead.

  The crowd was moving too fast.

  Bob had always imagined that a protest march maintained a dignified pace, the better to emphasize the long suffering that motivated it and the righteousness from which its power sprang. But this march was moving at a quickstep, pushed along from behind by young people, still cutting through the crowd, still running along the outskirts, trying to get close to Martin Luther King.

  King seemed to be getting the worst of it, at least as far as Bob could tell from his vantage point several rows back. His head lolled on his neck from time to time and the men to either side of him seemed less to be marching with him than simply holding him upright.

  Bob stumbled as some student shoved past on his left, yelling over his shoulder. “There he is! There King right there!”

  “Watch it!” yelled Bob, his voice sharp.

  The boy didn’t even notice. It made Bob fume. This was not how it was supposed to be.

  He remembered Janeka, then, and worried, because she was a small woman and could easily be hurt if this march, this mob, got much more out of hand. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she said in a voice that quivered slightly and did not convince him at all. Her hand clung to his as another impatient teenager tried to push between them.

  “You don’t look fine,” he told her as the teenager finally gave up and went another way. Her eyes were round and mostly white.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated, trying for definitive emphasis, but not quite getting there.

  “Maybe we should go,” said Bob. “These people are getting out of hand.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “These people?”

  It irked Bob. “You know what I mean,” he told her. “Don’t start that. I’m just saying this crowd could be dangerous. Maybe we should get out of here while we can.”

  “And how would we do that?” she asked.

  This, Bob was forced to admit, was a good question, hemmed in as they were on all sides by walls of humanity. Getting out would require hacking his way through with one hand, Janeka trailing behind holding onto the other. It was possible, but it would not be easy. Not at all.

  Bob was still trying to figure out what to do when he heard the sound. Everybody looked to everybody else. “What was that?” asked Bob.

  But he already knew.

  The pine sticks that had been designed to hold the placards high in the air were thin and so, made poor cudgels. The boys had to hammer the clothing store window several times before it finally broke, caving in on itself in a cascade of glass that chimed and tinkled like some devil’s xylophone.

  A cheer went up. Fists went up. “Black power!” someone cried. “Black power!”

  The store had been breached; the remains of the window hung in jagged shards, but no one even bothered to go inside. Malcolm watched, frozen in amazement, as a couple of boys grabbed items from the broken display case—a man’s hat and a pair of shoes—and then ran, holding the items above their heads like trophies. Looting the store, he realized, this wasn’t the point. No, the point was the breach itself, the line crossed, the barrier broken, and whitey forced to see that this was a new day and nobody was taking his shit anymore.

  “Black power!” they cried.

  And the cry echoed and doubled back upon itself. “Black power! Black power! Black power!”

  “Damn it! They’re breaking windows back there!”

  This is what one of the sanitation men cried as the march leaders paused, looking back toward the sound.

  “They’re ruining the march!” cried a minister right next to Bob.

  Another minister—Bob recognized him as the same stocky man who had conferred with King when the white car pulled up—took a bullhorn and started walking toward the back of the march. “You are hurting the cause,” he called out. “This is a nonviolent campaign.”

  There was the sound of another window breaking.

  Bob still had Janeka’s hand. It was small and sweaty in his.

  “What about you, brother? You just going to watch?”

  This was Eddie, coming up behind Malcolm, sweat beading on his brow. And Malcolm realized he had indeed just been standing there transfixed, as the second window caved in and another cheer went up. Somehow, he felt sickened and exhilarated all in the same instant. He did not know how that was possible, but it was.

  “Well?” demanded Eddie. “What you gon’ do?”

  Malcolm looked at him. He felt himself teetering, as if on the deck of a ship rolling across the waves. He felt himself balancing as if on a tightrope between the life he had lived all these years until this very moment and everything that would come after.

  On the ground was an abandoned stick from one of the placards. With a nod to Eddie, he reached down and snatched it up. He held it high as he charged forward like some soldier in a forgotten war. Screaming some cry beyond words, he brought the stick down hard upon the head of the rapist Rupert Pruitt, upon the head of a white cop with a can of Mace, upon the head of a long-haired white college professor who had once patronized him with a smile and asked him to describe to a class of earnest white faces what it was like “for our black brothers in the ghettoes”—and upon the window of a pawnbroker notorious among black people in Memphis for miserly loans and usurious rates.

  He broke the glass with one fury-driven blow. The sound of it shattering was symphonic.

  Malcolm heard himself laughing, joyous in madness.

  With the exception of the helicopter hovering overhead, there had been no real police presence. The apparent absence, Bob assumed, had been a tactical decision to avoid unnecessary provocation.

  That all changed now with a suddenness.

  Behind him, he saw police pouring out from side streets, batons high, Mace cans in hand.

  “Oh, my God,” said Janeka.

  Martin Luther King’s men saw it too. One of them said, “We’ve got to get you out of here, Doc.”

  King shook his head. “No,” he said, “we must get this under control. If I leave now, they’ll say I ran away.”

  The other man was exasperated. “Martin, it is not safe for you to be here.”

  Something pained showed on King’s face. “Perhaps we can talk to them. Get them to settle down.”

  The other man swept his hand toward the other end of the street, where police could be seen chasing teenaged boys in and out of buildings, nightsticks flashing. “Does that look like something we can settle down?”

  Another man spoke to Abernathy. “I understand Martin’s concerns,” he said, “but you need to get him out of here.”

  King surrendered with a palpable reluctance. Bob watched as two of his men linked arms with him and led him down a side street. There, one of the men flagged down a white Pontiac. Moments later, it roared away with King and Abernathy inside.

  Watching this, Bob felt…abandoned.

  This was his hero? This was the great Martin King, this
stocky little man being hustled away to safety as all hell broke loose around him?

  For a long moment, Bob just stood there, chaos swirling around him. The police helicopter hovering above. Someone yelling, “Go back to the church!” The sanitation men dutifully obeying, turning around and walking in a group back toward the temple. A police officer yelling, “Get back here, you black son of a bitch!” as some fleet-footed young man outdistanced him. Glass breaking. People running every which way.

  He was still holding Janeka’s hand. Now he looked down into her face and saw his own fear reflected. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he told her.

  He didn’t wait for her response. They took off, running.

  Now the looting began in earnest, people clambering through broken windows, taking whatever there was to take.

  Malcolm stood breathing heavily by the broken window, still frozen by the wonder of what he had done, until Eddie clapped him hard on the back, breaking the spell. “Come on, fool. Stop daydreaming and get your ass on in there. You the one broke it. You get first pick!”

  Malcolm didn’t want first pick. He didn’t want anything. The triumph that had sizzled through him an instant ago, the righteous vindication of watching that window cave in on itself, had dissipated like fog under the sun. All he felt now was an abrupt wrongness, a deep unease that bubbled like nausea in his gut.

  But how to say this? What words might encapsulate it, especially in this moment where there was no time for words because everything was moving so damn fast?

  Malcolm didn’t even try to say it. He didn’t resist. How to resist? Everywhere you looked, everybody you saw was climbing in a window, coming out with sport coats and whiskey and toy trucks and trumpets and women’s hats. The windows were down, the barriers were crossed, the rules no longer applied.

  “Yeah,” said Malcolm, “all right.” And he joined the crowd pouring through the window into Johnson Brothers Pawnbrokers.

  Bob and Janeka ran hand in hand back down Beale Street.

  It was dangerous going this way, but they had no choice. They did not know the city and Bob was scared of getting lost in this madness if he tried to improvise a new route back to his car. So the only thing he could think to do was run straight back the way they had come, through the heart of the madness.

  And it was, indeed, madness. Boys with rocks squaring off with police. A violin sitting broken and useless right in the middle of the street. Some boy, for no apparent reason, heaving an empty whiskey bottle so that it struck an older black woman in the back of the head, driving her to her knees. Now, teargas canisters were hitting the asphalt with metallic clinks, hissing their noxious fumes into the air.

  It burned. Bob buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his forearm. Then he thought about Janeka. “Are you all right?” He tried to yell this, but his voice was muffled and she didn’t answer. He lifted his head and turned to look behind him, still running. “I said, are you—”

  Bob never even saw the fist that came from out of nowhere then and landed flush on his jaw. He had been running at top speed and now, like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, his legs ran right out from under him. He landed hard, banging his head on the sidewalk, skidding on concrete littered with broken glass.

  Before he knew what had happened to him, a man came down hard on his chest and started pounding him with a manic glee.

  “White motherfucker!” he cried. “Hate all you bastards!”

  Malcolm had picked up a little transistor radio, just to be picking something up, just to make Eddie stop haranguing him about taking first pick of the merchandise. Now, they were the last two stepping through the broken pawnshop window. Eddie’s arms were loaded down with a bizarre assortment of loot: suits and a typewriter and a guitar and a vacuum cleaner.

  He was grinning derision at Malcolm. “All that shit in there, I don’t know how you end up with a little cheap-ass radio,” he said.

  Malcolm never got a chance to reply.

  “Freeze!” the cop cried. Just like on television. And just like on television, he had the drop on them, stood with gun drawn and ready to fire.

  Malcolm’s hands went up. Eddie dropped his stuff and was raising his own hands.

  Their salvation came in the form of a brick. It arced in from across the street and struck the cop hard on the back of the head. He was wearing a riot helmet, so it didn’t hurt him, but he staggered from the blow and turned automatically to see what it was. Too late he realized his mistake.

  Before he could turn back, Eddie had taken him to the ground and they were wrestling for the gun. The cop was fending Eddie off with his forearm, trying to yank his gun hand free from Eddie’s grip. “Officer down!” he cried. “Officer down!” Then Eddie punched him, two hard kidney shots that brought the cop’s forearm down to protect his side. Now Eddie went for the hand that held the gun, sinking his teeth deep into the white man’s thumb. He cried out, his hand came open, and the gun clattered free. Eddie snatched it up and sprang to his feet. His sunglasses had come off in the struggle and his eyes were twin dots as he pointed the weapon at the police officer lying at his feet. Eddie’s triumphant grin showed bloodstained teeth.

  The cop’s hands came up. “I’ve got kids,” he said in a slow, careful voice. “Ezra and Sally.”

  Eddie just grinned. And without even knowing he was going to do it, Malcolm put himself between the cop and the gun.

  “Get out the way, brother,” Eddie told him. In contrast to his mad eyes, his voice was deliberate and calm.

  “Don’t do this, man!” cried Malcolm.

  Eddie sneered. “Come on, baby. What you care about some whitey? Some cop at that?”

  And how to explain?

  It was one thing to be mad at whitey. Who wasn’t mad at whitey? But it was another thing to watch a man about to be killed right in front of you, to see his hands come up as he spoke his children’s names, to look in his frightened eyes and see reflected there the terrible realization that everything he was and everything he would ever be had reached an end. This was an awful thing to see, no matter what color the man you saw it in.

  But he did not know how to say this, so he said instead, “This ain’t black power, brother. This is just murder.”

  Eddie didn’t answer. A forever crept by in silence, Eddie staring down the length of the revolver to the man lying so still on the sidewalk.

  All at once, the mad eyes softened. Eddie raised the gun to menace only the sun. Then he tucked it in the small of his back.

  “Fine,” he said. “You like this pig so much, you can have him, ‘brother.’”

  He put something nasty on the last word, something that made the word contradict itself, even hate itself. He smiled. And then he left. He did not run away. He strolled. Malcolm watched.

  “You saved my life.”

  It was the police officer, his voice shaky. Malcolm had forgotten all about him. The cop had come to his feet and his outstretched hand was the first thing Malcolm saw when he turned. Malcolm took it automatically, because what else do you do when a man offers you his hand? Then the officer lifted the riot shield on his helmet and for the first time, Malcolm saw his face. He froze.

  Who…?

  He knew this face, but he could not place it.

  And then he could.

  He had seen this man on Main Street two blocks south of City Hall a little over a month ago. The man had sprayed him in the face…

  (like a damn roach)

  …called him a nigger and told him to go jump in the river.

  He pulled his hand back. He could see the cop wondering why. Malcolm tried to speak. He laughed instead. It was a bitter sound, but he could not make himself stop. The cop was still staring in confusion.

  Malcolm’s mouth laughed until his eyes wept.

  “Get off of him!” Janeka was screaming.

  She seemed far away, her voice barely audible behind the blood roaring like rapids in Bob’s ears. Presumably, the man who sat stradd
ling him could hear her just fine, but if so, he ignored her cries, concentrating instead on battering Bob with his heavy fists.

  “Leave him alone!” Janeka said, still screaming.

  The man on top of him snarled, apparently intent on holding Bob accountable for the sins of every white man since Columbus.

  Bob managed to get his forearms up, turning his head this way and that, trying to dodge the blows. But the fists kept coming down like pistons.

  Then, all at once, there was a sound like an axe makes when it splits a log and the blows stopped. Bob squeezed one eye open. He saw the man on top of him sway like a palm tree in a Hawaiian breeze, his eyes rolling up like a broken slot machine. Then he slid off Bob and fell onto the curb, insensate.

  And Bob saw his girlfriend, his partner in the struggle for nonviolent social change, his colleague in a group whose middle name was “unarmed,” standing there with a broken, bloodstained chunk of masonry so big she had to use both hands.

  Janeka threw the masonry down and extended her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Can you walk?”

  She braced him and he climbed through levels of dizziness and pain until he found his feet. “Lean on me,” she said and he did and they made their way down the street as police officers trotted past them. A child stood in the middle of Beale Street screaming for his mother and a policeman stood dumbfounded as some man on the other side of the street laughed crazily and then began to cry.

  “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” said Janeka.

  He shook his head, and this brought a new explosion of pain. “Home,” he said. “You drive.”

  “Bob, you might be hurt. Something might be broken. You have to see a doctor.”

  “I will,” he said. “Just not here. Take me back to school. We’ll call an ambulance from there.”

  “Bob,” she began.

  “Home,” he said. “Please.”

  So they walked. Beale to Hernando, down past the temple where sanitation men stood congregated, watching the disorder at the other end of the street. Some of the men looked toward them with concern as they passed on the far side of the street.