Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  Malcolm felt he owed her at least that much, owed it to her to be there.

  At some point, he slept.

  “June?”

  The sound of it drew him out of himself. Malcolm’s eyes blinked open.

  “June?” Her eyes were open. Her voice was a small, fluttery thing.

  “Yes,” he said. Hope all but strangled him.

  She tried to lift her head, failed. “Where am I?”

  “At St. Joe’s,” he said. “You had…” He swallowed something dry and withered that had died in his throat and tried it again. “You had a heart attack.”

  Her glittery, luminous eyes seemed to struggle to take this in. Then they flared with remembrance. “The march,” she said. “Young people started breaking windows?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  Malcolm’s face was wet with tears he knew nothing about. Guilt gnawed him like some small, mean animal trapped in his gut. “It was me,” he said.

  She looked confused. “What?”

  “It was me. I was out there with them. I broke a window. I’m sorry, Miss Parker. I am so very sorry. I should have told you. I should have warned you.”

  She studied him for a long moment. A long moment. Then, all at once, she smiled and her face glowed with beatific certainty. “No,” she assured him in a tender voice. “You wouldn’t do nothing like that. You’re a good boy.”

  “Miss Parker, please…”

  “A good boy,” she said again. She patted his cheek. Her hand was as dry and weightless as a dead leaf. “I know you,” she said. “You wouldn’t do that.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Lord, I am so tired.” And she closed her eyes. She was still smiling.

  “There’s a curfew,” the nurse was saying. She had a pleasant, sympathetic face. “You all have to be off the streets by seven, can’t go out again til five in the morning unless you have a police permit.”

  “We all?” Malcolm doubted even Henry Loeb would have imposed a curfew that applied only to blacks. But then, this woman was probably right about the spirit of the thing, if not its exact wording.

  She shrugged now, helplessly. Malcolm checked his watch. It was 9:05.

  Nanny Parker had died an hour and a half before and he still felt drained by grief. The doctors and nurses had pushed him out of the room when she coded. He had paced the hall talking to a Jesus he hadn’t spoken to since his mother died. It had not helped. They had come out of the room half an hour later and a doctor had said, “I’m sorry, son. We did our best but we couldn’t save her.” They had pulled the sheet over her and allowed him to sit with her until two orderlies came and wheeled her—wheeled the body—down to the morgue.

  Now Malcolm stood there, lost. He did not know what to do. He could not go home. He simply could not. But he didn’t want to go to work either. Besides, if this white lady was right, he had no way to get wherever he was going anyway. Not if the whole city was under curfew. Malcolm shook his head. He had not known a worse day since his mother died.

  The woman saw him. “Would you like a ride?” she said. “I get off in an hour. You could maybe lie down on the floor in the back of the car and I could cover you with a blanket. They won’t bother me.”

  His incredulity must have shown on his face because she added quickly, “You seem like a nice young man. I’d hate to see you get in trouble because you were visiting your grandmother. Especially with…you know… what happened.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and then he had to stop. He regarded her, this white woman—late 20s, he would guess, brown hair pinned back beneath a white nurse’s cap—offering him, this unknown black guy, safe passage through the city on this day of all days. You never knew about people. You just never knew.

  “Thank you,” he said again, “but I’ll be all right.”

  He spoke with a confidence he did not feel and he saw the doubt in her eyes, but she only nodded and said, “Well, okay. If you’re sure.”

  Malcolm said he was, even though he wasn’t. But then, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  Moments later, he was downstairs near the hospital entrance, unchaining his bicycle from the rack to which he had locked it. He straddled the bike and began pedaling slowly toward the hotel on the river.

  Memphis lay largely silent that night, largely still beneath a haunted absence of cars, people, movement. No one was out and Malcolm had the city to himself, but for the occasional police car sliding past, lights flashing in silence. When Malcolm saw them coming he found shadows and doorways in which to hide.

  In this way, he worked slowly west toward the river, figuring to ride along the bluff and come upon the hotel from behind. Most police and National Guardsmen, he figured, would concentrate their patrols in the center of town and in the areas south of that where black people lived.

  But there was no way to avoid City Hall, which sat just a couple blocks off the river with its back to the water. That area, he thought, would surely be heavily patrolled.

  Malcolm rode with caution, eyes and ears alert, avoiding streetlights. He kept to the alleys, slipped down North Front Street, and zigzagged through the backhoes and bulldozers of the construction zone where a new bridge was taking shape. It struck him that elsewhere in Memphis, families were settling in for an evening of television. It was Thursday night. That meant Bewitched, The Flying Nun, That Girl, Dragnet—a TV universe of white people in foolish situations, white people keeping the peace, white people running things. It seemed impossible that Sister Bertrille could be soaring above the convent San Tanco on some silly errand or Samantha Stephens twitching her nose to turn some man into a frog in the same world at the same time as Malcolm Toussaint was ducking through shadows in fear of being seen.

  The heavy rumbling of the engine yanked him from his reverie. Malcolm whipped his eyes around to downtown Memphis on his left. He was passing abreast of City Hall. The building was ablaze with light and he felt distantly pleased to know the city government found it necessary to work so deep into the night. Then he saw what had made the sound: an armored personnel carrier came lumbering down Adams Street on the south side of the building, asphalt crunching beneath its treads. He could see the shadows of the helmeted men in the vehicle, tense, ready, scanning every direction.

  Malcolm froze. The heavy green carrier seemed to be coming right toward him, as if it could smell him, as if it knew exactly where he was. It came closer, crossing Front Street, moving down the bluff toward Promenade Street. Here it paused, and it seemed to Malcolm as if whoever was driving the thing must be staring directly at him. He was so close that he could make out voices and hear the squawk of a radio, though he could not decipher words. Malcolm did not breathe. He made himself a shadow. The decision to spurn the white nurse’s help suddenly seemed a very foolish one, indeed. He began to think of what he would say when he was arrested.

  Then there was a sound of gunshots. Two of them, echoing faintly off the buildings somewhere to the east. A moment. Another moment. Then, abruptly, the vehicle reversed itself, swung around, and climbed east on Adams, looking for the shooter.

  Malcolm almost collapsed from relief. It was a minute before he could gather himself and when he did, he pedaled on shaky legs toward the Holiday Inn, still far in the distance. He hugged the river, using the bluff as cover, racing through a park named for Jefferson Davis, in the shadow of another park high above that was named for the Confederacy, under the glare of cotton brokers’ offices—all these symbols of whiteness and power and the Old South, co-opted as cover on this night by a frightened black man, sweat streaming on his brow, heart hammering within his chest.

  Voices.

  Malcolm stopped. High above him on the sidewalk, he saw the shadows, saw the orange-tipped glow of a cigarette. Two cops walking along in the opposite direction.

  “All this shit over one man,” said the first.

  “Ol’ Martin Lucifer Coon,” said the other with a soft, nasty laugh. “He gets the shit star
ted, then runs away.”

  “Yeah,” said the first. “Mr. Nonviolence. I don’t know about you, but what I saw today looked pretty violent to me. Got these niggers all riled up.”

  “Somebody ought to put a bullet in his ass.”

  “Would not break my heart at all.”

  Malcolm waited until they were gone. He waited five minutes more. Then, his breath loud and ragged in his ears, he hoisted his bicycle and carried it across the uneven cobblestones that had been laid into the riverbank a hundred years before. It was hard going. He tried to listen above the sound of his own breathing for more voices. Finally, hearing none, he chanced it. He climbed the bank to the sidewalk, hopped astride his bike, and pedaled as fast as he could, all attempts at stealth abandoned. Moments later the hotel rose before him.

  Malcolm’s shift began at 11:00. He walked into the hotel a few minutes after 10. The white girl at the counter glanced up at the sound of his entrance. Her eyebrows leapt and he knew she was surprised to see him. Malcolm wheeled his bike to the closet off the hallway behind the desk and stored it there. Then, with nothing else to do, he sat in the lobby.

  The lobby was much like the city—wrapped in a dead silence. The lounge seemed busier than usual, though. From behind him, Malcolm heard the clink of glasses, the muted hum of chatter, the occasional music of a woman’s laughter. With nowhere else to go, the hotel’s guests had apparently decided to amuse themselves by getting drunk in the bar.

  Ronald Whitten came through the lobby doors at 10:30. He stopped when he saw Malcolm. “Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. “Did you get a police pass?”

  “No,” said Malcolm.

  “You just drove through the curfew?” Whitten seemed impressed.

  “Yes.”

  An approving nod. “Well, that shows some real dedication, son.”

  “I don’t have my work shirt,” said Malcolm, meaning the shirt with his name in a little oval on his left breast pocket. “I wasn’t able to get home to get it.”

  Whitten waved it off. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s enough that you made it in. I’ll see about getting you a police pass for tomorrow. Why don’t you just punch in now, since you’re already here, and you can take out the trash in the bar. Evening shift was down a man—he got arrested for rioting—so I expect you and me are going to have a lot of slack to pick up.”

  He took a step, stopped, then turned back to Malcolm. “Real glad you made it in,” he said. A tight nod, and he was gone.

  Watching him walk away, Malcolm almost laughed. Somehow, on this godawful day, he had managed without trying, without even really caring about it, to impress his boss. Ronald Whitten had mistaken having nowhere else to go for initiative. Life was funny sometimes. Malcolm sighed and got up from the couch.

  Moments later, he was bear-hugging a barrel of empty liquor bottles through the kitchen when he saw Melvin standing there in his white busboy’s uniform, scraping food off plates before washing them. He looked up. “You made it,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Malcolm, remembering the personnel carrier and the police on the sidewalk. “Barely.”

  “How’s the old lady?”

  “She died.” Malcolm lowered the trash barrel.

  “Oh, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Malcolm. She was a nice old lady. I know she meant a lot to you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Melvin regarded him for a moment. He said, “Look, Malcolm, I been thinkin’: you been my ace boon coon since we were little fellas. Don’t hardly seem right for us to be walkin’ ’round here not talkin’ to each other ’cause of Pruitt’s fat ass. Yeah, he’s a bastard, but you know well as I do, sometimes you got to—”

  He stopped. Malcolm was crying. “Malcolm?” he said.

  Malcolm said, “I killed her, man. Killed her as sure as if I put a gun to her head. I knew what was going to happen down there, I knew what they planned. I should have told her to stay home. I should have made her stay home.”

  Melvin said, “Brother, you can’t take that on yourself. She had a heart attack. Ain’t no way you could have stopped that.”

  Malcolm looked at him. He wanted to believe. He wanted to be comforted, desperately so. But he could not—and he was not. There was no escape from the awful thing he knew he had done. The simple truth, the truth he would bear like a weight through the rest of his days, was that Melvin Cotter was wrong. Malcolm could indeed have stopped it, could have prevented what happened to the old lady who had been like a mother to him. He could have, but he didn’t.

  So Melvin’s words of intended comfort fell on him like rain on a sidewalk. They did not sink in. They made no difference. Without a word, Malcolm hefted the barrel and took it out back to empty it into the Dumpsters. The private haulers the hotel had contracted would take it away to the dump.

  Melvin called after him. Malcolm did not reply.

  The next hours passed in a routine whose very mindlessness made him grateful. He did work that, even after only five weeks on the job, he felt he had already done a million times—clean the bathrooms, empty the ashtrays, run the buffer—but he gave himself over to it gladly, willed his entire self to be concentrated into the task of picking soggy cigarette butts out of a latrine or rubbing a shine into a heavily traveled floor.

  It was tough, thankless work. But it was easier than thinking.

  Malcolm had been working for a few hours when Whitten happened by, carrying an armload of paper towels for the lobby-level restrooms. He stopped to appreciate the mellow gleam of the floor in front of the bank of elevators. “Good work,” he said with a nod of approval. “You keep it up, you’re going to have my job some day.”

  The words jolted Malcolm. He realized suddenly that he could see this happening. A month ago, this had been a temporary stop, a brief respite on the way to whatever his destiny might be. But now, it seemed almost a more welcome and, certainly, a safer thing: something to do where you didn’t have to think. You could collect a check, put food on your table, and not have to ponder anything beyond the next task. You could simply be. In this moment, at least, something about that seemed very attractive.

  “It’s after two,” Whitten was saying. “Don’t you usually take a break long about now?”

  “Yes, I usually do,” said Malcolm. He had gotten lost in the work. He hadn’t realized so much time had passed.

  “Go ahead,” the white man encouraged him with a nicotine-stained smile.

  “Okay,” said Malcolm. “Thank you.” And he powered down the machine.

  Malcolm stopped through the kitchen of the sleeping hotel and plucked a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the big refrigerator, took a salt shaker and a paper towel, popped a bottle of Coke with an opener, and went to stand out back by the Dumpsters to watch the river meander past him in the darkness.

  This, too, he had done so many times in just a few weeks that he did it automatically, did it without thinking—or seeing. So he was right up on the man before he even realized he was there. The stranger stood in shirtsleeves contemplating the endless river, a cigarette burning low between two fingers of the same hand that meditatively swirled a shot glass half full of some brown liquid.

  The man turned at the scrape of Malcolm’s feet and for an instant, they stared at each other in mutual surprise. Then Martin Luther King said, “I’m sorry I startled you. I didn’t think anyone else would be out here this time of night.” It was the voice Malcolm knew from a hundred newsreels, the same great baritone with the same soft Georgia drawl, but it was different somehow, too—less solemn, less portentous and formal. It was an off-duty voice, an after-hours voice.

  Malcolm coughed, trying to find his own voice. “I work here,” he managed. “I usually take my breaks out here.”

  King dropped the cigarette and ground it out beneath the toe of his shoe, lifted his glass in a salute and said, “Well, then, I’ll leave you to your solitude.”

  “No, no,” said Malc
olm. “That’s okay. I mean, I can go somewhere else if you’re thinking or praying or something.”

  “None of the above,” said King, lifting the glass again—this time as an explanation, not a salute. He smiled. “I’ll tell you what, my man. It’s a big river. Why don’t we just share it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yes, sir?

  Malcolm’s brain was screaming at him to say something more, but that same brain was locked tighter than a bank vault. It would not open, would not give him anything. There he was, right in front of him, the man he had scorned, the man he had mocked and called “De Lawd.” There he was, that ponderous, prayerful, far-too-patient preacher so joyfully rebuked by younger men like Malcolm who said what they meant and damn well meant what they said when they lifted clenched fists and yelled, “Black power!”

  And he was yes-sirring him?

  Martin Luther King reached across. “I’m Martin,” he said.

  “I know who you are,” said Malcolm, taking King’s plump, soft hand in his own.

  “Yes,” said King, “but I am afraid I cannot say the same.”

  “I’m Malcolm,” said the former Mozell Wilson, Jr., shaking a hand he had never expected to shake. “Malcolm Toussaint.”

  King’s eyebrow lifted. “Toussaint? Like Toussaint L’Ouverture?”

  “Yes,” said Malcolm. “It’s not my real name. I mean, it is my real name—I had it legally changed—but it’s not the name I was born under.”

  “I see,” said King, taking a sip of the brown liquid. “Why did you change your name, then? And why Toussaint?”

  “Because he was a revolutionary.”

  “Aha. So ‘Malcolm’ is…”

  “For Malcolm X, yes. And my middle name is Marcus, after Garvey.”

  “Three revolutionaries,” said King.

  Malcolm was stunned by what he heard himself say next. “I believe in black power,” he announced to this preacher who in recent months had been chased from one end of the country to the other by angry young men shouting that very thing.