Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  Pop took the flier. Malcolm read it over his shoulder.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING has proven himself to be a yellow Uncle Tom. YELLOW instead of BLACK. Now BLACK POWER will have to finish what the YELLOW KING could not.

  It went on like that. It promised violence. “Burn, Baby, Burn,” it said.

  “These all over town,” said Sonny. “Young niggers and that black power bullshit. They gon’ fuck up everything, Mo. Everything we tryin’ to do.”

  He eyes were on Malcolm as he spoke.

  Pop, still staring at the flier, missed this. He shook his head slowly. “This town is a mess,” he said. “This whole thing is a mess. King shouldn’t of never come back. I wouldn’t have.”

  “They callin’ him coward,” said Sonny. “They sayin’ he run away. What else he gon’ do? Ain’t had no choice. He had to come back.”

  “Yeah,” said Pop in a reluctant voice, “I know.”

  Sonny said, “He had to prove he could have a march without young fools tearin’ it up.” And again he stared pointedly at Malcolm.

  Malcolm stared back. Then he looked away. He said, “Let’s get our seats, Pop.”

  From outside came the hiss of rain on stone and above that, the eerie rise and fall of civil defense sirens. Pop looked to the ceiling as they edged their way into an aisle. “Storm warnin’,” he said. “Must be gettin’ bad out there.”

  Pop and Malcolm sat together on the unforgiving wooden seats. Sonny sat behind them—close, but not too close. A local preacher was at the podium. Malcolm looked into the pulpit and was surprised. Abernathy had disappeared. He wondered where he’d gone.

  “I heard King’s not comin’,” said Sonny.

  At that, a man in the row ahead of them turned. “I heard he is,” he said, through a broad smile. “They goin’ to get him now.”

  So they waited to see. Storm shutters rattled. They waited. Yet another preacher who was not King spoke. A student from Northside High spoke, promising that he and his classmates would participate in the next march nonviolently. Someone sang. Ralph Abernathy reappeared in the pulpit. They waited.

  And then the side door opened and Martin Luther King walked in. The small crowd rose to its feet, all as one in their adoration, palms banging together in an ovation that rose and rose in volume. King grinned and waved at them before mounting the pulpit to shake hands with the various ministers and dignitaries.

  Everything was all right now, in spite of the storm.

  Malcolm remembered the small man standing out back of the hotel just a few nights before and how, soul-weary as he was, he had not backed down from Malcolm’s anger but engaged it. Malcolm remembered how the man had defined and claimed “black power” and made it something somehow higher than a clenched fist and a broken window, how he had defended, with heartfelt earnestness, the crazy idea that letting a man beat on you without resistance was some greater calling, how he had stubbornly refused to admit that white people were beyond redemption.

  He gave me a lot to think about.

  Malcolm leaned over to his father. “I’m going to try to talk to him afterward,” he said, still applauding. “I told him I’d let him know what I decided to do.”

  Pop was beaming. It made him look like a different man. “That’s a good idea, Malcolm,” he said.

  And it was a moment before Malcolm realized: his father had called him by his name, his new name, the one Pop had seen as a rejection just a few weeks ago. Malcolm was about to speak, about to say something to acknowledge this. But then the ovation crested, the audience began to be seated, and Malcolm took his seat as Abernathy came to the microphone. Abernathy’s introduction was a speech in itself. He spent almost half an hour lionizing this great friend with whom he had fought shoulder to shoulder for 13 years in the trenches of human rights. His remarks took King from birth to school, to college, to Montgomery, and finally to Memphis. “He has not yet decided to be president of the United States,” Abernathy joked, “but he is the man who tells the president what to do.”

  Finally, Abernathy sat and King came to the podium with a puzzled smile playing on his heavy features. He waited for the applause to pass, then started speaking in the slow preacher’s baritone so familiar from TV news. The great voice was back on duty, no longer addressing one college dropout out back by the Dumpsters. No, now it was addressing history. “It’s always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you,” said King. “And Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”

  He spoke for 45 minutes. He used no notes. His voice strong and true, King took them on a “mental flight” through history, the audience laughing appreciatively as he rattled off the names of Greek philosophers—“Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes”—even as he assured them that no matter the magnificence of that age, no matter the majesty of Rome’s empire, no matter the glory of the Renaissance or the courage of Franklin Roosevelt railing against fear itself, there was no era he would rather live in, if given the choice, than this one.

  This, he acknowledged, was a strange thing to say, given the sickness and troubles roiling the land. “But I know somehow that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century”—he tapped the lectern for emphasis—“in a way that men in some strange way are responding. Something is happening in our world.”

  King noted how the violence that destroyed the previous march drew attention to itself and away from the plight of the sanitation men. So they had to march again, he said. He spoke of the need for Negroes to make use of their power, to “redistribute the pain” by withdrawing economic support—boycotting—companies that did not treat black people fairly. Boycott Coca-Cola, he said. Boycott Wonder Bread.

  The preacher turned to the Bible then, recounting the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped on the Jericho Road to help a stricken man of another race. After others had passed by without stopping, the man from Samaria aided this stranger without thought to his own safety or inconvenience. And King located in that well-worn tale why the plight of Malcolm’s father and 1,300 other sanitation men mattered, or should matter, even to people who had never toted a tub of garbage or picked maggots from their hair.

  Perhaps, said King, the men who passed by that stricken man were afraid for their safety—after all, the Jericho Road was dangerous. Perhaps they wondered what would happen to them if they stopped there to help this stranger. But the man from Samaria, said King, reversed the question and asked himself: if I do not stop to help this stranger, what will happen to him? This, he said, was what people should be asking themselves about the sanitation men in Memphis.

  Something seemed to seize him then and he began to talk about the old days. He told them about the time he was stabbed by a deranged black woman while he was signing books in New York and how he almost died. And, oh, what he would have missed if he had.

  He would have missed students standing up for great American ideals by sitting down at lunch counters, he said. He would have missed students confronting segregation head on by riding for freedom in interracial groups on interstate buses. He would have missed Selma and Birmingham. He would have missed the chance to stand at the temple of Lincoln and tell America about his dream.

  He would have missed Memphis.

  Malcolm sat up straight. He looked at his father. Pop was clapping and cheering, yelling in response to the preacher’s call. “Preach, Doctor! Tell ‘em about it!” All around Malcolm it was the same, sanitation workers and women and young people, all roaring loudly enough to drown the storm. So maybe they didn’t hear it. But Malcolm did. Some ghost of valediction haunted those words.

  And then, even in the cacophony of the people’s adoration and applause, the valediction turned somber. Memphis, said King, was where he had been warned not to return because there was too much danger, too much risk, too many threats.

  “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve
got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop”—his voice trembled on that word—“and I don’t mind.”

  Don’t mind what?

  But Malcolm knew. Didn’t want to know, but he did.

  “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” King was saying. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seeeeen”—singing the word, making it almost musical—“the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!”

  The audience was on its feet roaring love. Malcolm stood slowly. He stared at Martin Luther King and he could tell that King did not see them or hear them. His eyes ticked back and forth in their sockets, as if he were listening to some voice only he could hear, as if he viewed some vista visible only to him. And then all at once, he threw his head back and thundered one last time in defiance.

  “And so I’m happy tonight! I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

  He turned abruptly from the pulpit, still speaking. The microphones did not catch the words and no one would ever know what they were. King all but slumped into the arms of Ralph Abernathy as he took his seat. All around Malcolm, people were cheering, people were calling, people were weeping with unrestrained joy.

  Malcolm applauded, too. His hands seemed to have a mind of their own. He cheered. And this was something his throat had decided on its own to do. His body was moving without him. But his mind was stunned. He felt as if he had been struck between the eyes with a hammer.

  “You still going down there?” Pop was at Malcolm’s shoulder.

  Down in front, people were swarming the podium, reaching for King, straining to touch him, to talk to him.

  “I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Malcolm, finding his voice. “He’s at the Lorraine, I think.” He still wanted to tell King about the decision he had made, the decision King had pushed him to. But there was something else, too. That ghost of valediction that had walked through the great man’s words, that had peered out through the great man’s eyes, seemed to demand something of Malcolm simply because he had seen it and heard it. Yet Malcolm had no idea what that something was. Was he to question it? Challenge it? Console it?

  Something.

  “I’ll see him tomorrow,” repeated Malcolm in an absent voice and they began to file toward the exit.

  But of course, tomorrow came too quickly. And what happened happened.

  Bantering one moment, about to turn a smile toward Malcolm one moment, and in the next lying on the balcony floor with one leg drawn up, the side of his face obliterated in a mass of wet, red pulp. And Andrew Young wailing. And Billy Kyles kneeling. And Ralph Abernathy cradling his best friend’s head. And policemen running with guns drawn. And people pushing past Malcolm. And a camera flashing. And Malcolm staring.

  And Malcolm staring.

  And Malcolm staring.

  And Malcolm backing slowly away. Sirens wailing. People screaming. Malcolm walking away now, the things he’d intended to say lost to him. Slowly, he went down the stairs. Slowly, he passed through the courtyard, buffeted by people running past, people screaming orders, people crying.

  He heard it from a distance, saw it from some far place. He found the bicycle he had left downstairs and climbed slowly aboard. One last glance above. He saw the sole of King’s left shoe. Malcolm put his head down and rode away.

  He rode without seeing and without destination, the riding itself being the entire point. He rode past people glued to car radios listening to terse bulletins. He rode past police cars traveling at high speed. He rode past black men with clenched jaws, their eyes dancing with fire. He rode past a white man who exulted to another white man, “They finally got the son of a bitch!” He rode past mountains of trash.

  He rode and then stopped. To his surprise, he found himself at the hotel. And right that instant, as if on cue, Melvin Cotter came boiling out the front door, ripping off his busboy’s smock as if it were burning his skin.

  “Malcolm! Did you hear? They done shot him! They done shot Dr. King!”

  “I was there.” Malcolm spoke in a voice he didn’t recognize.

  Melvin threw his smock to the ground. His eyes glittered with raw fury. “They done done it now,” he declared. “Fuck them! Fuck all of ’em! You was right the whole time, man. Black power! Black power! Violence the only language fuckin’ honkies understand!”

  “No, I was wrong,” said Malcolm in his new voice.

  But Melvin didn’t hear. “Done shot Dr. King! Jesus! They done gone too far now. You hear me? They done gone too fuckin’ far! We gon’ burn this motherfucker down tonight!”

  He stormed away, cursing the uncaring night.

  Malcolm walked inside. He met dazed eyes. The young white girl at the desk had her hand to her mouth. White people stared at him, waiting, he supposed, to see what he would do. Malcolm entered the Employees Only area. He opened Rupert Pruitt’s office without knocking.

  Pruitt looked up in alarm. He was behind his desk, holding his shotgun braced against his lap. He had been feeding shells into the breach.

  “Toussaint? What do you want?” Fear had stretched his eyes wide.

  “Wanted to give two weeks’ notice,” said Malcolm. “I’m quitting. I’m going back to school.”

  Pruitt was incredulous. “Give notice? Jesus Christ, boy! Ain’t you heard what just happened?”

  Malcolm spoke softly. “I heard,” he said. He closed the door and walked away.

  Back in the lobby, he paused a moment. The front door, the door through which he had entered, was to his left. Malcolm went right. He walked through the lounge where white people were hunched together, speaking in hushed, urgent whispers. He went out the back of the hotel to where far below, the Mississippi River carved its restless path to the sea.

  And there he stood. Just stood. Just breathed.

  The word was going out now, spreading by telephone, radio, teletype, television. Pretty soon, the whole world would know what Memphis knew, would know what Memphis had done. And when they heard, how many black people would feel like Melvin? How many would say, This is enough! This is war!

  Most of them, he supposed. Maybe all of them. Even now, he could hear the distant scream of sirens.

  Violence the only language fuckin’ honkies understand! We gon’ burn this motherfucker down tonight!

  And Malcolm would have been right there with Melvin, last week. Indeed, would have stormed ahead of him. A very long time ago, last week.

  But the memory of the tired man he had met in this place would not allow it.

  He knew what many black people would think. What had happened here was a reason to give up on all of it, all those sweet, integrationist dreams, all those homilies about the mystical power of nonviolence, all those gentle hymns of perseverance and overcoming and, most of all, the idea that white people would ever be anything other than white people, the idea that they would ever think of you as a brother or a sister in the human family, and treat you accordingly.

  King’s murder, they would say, tears in their eyes, Molotov cocktails in their fists, was a reason to give up on all those things. But for Malcolm, it was the opposite. It was the reason he could not.

  Because the question King had asked was profound: what happens then? And Malcolm still could not answer it.

  All at once, he became aware of the weight in his front pocket. He reached in and fished out the pistol he had bought when he was broken and looking to be whole again. He studied it for a moment in the light of a streetlamp near the Dumpsters, then turned it over in his palm. It was a snub-nosed revolver, an evil, ugly thing.

  Without even knowing he was going to do it, Malcolm suddenly screamed some cry without words, clenched the gun hard in his fist,
and flung it with everything he could muster. The pistol traced a high arc against the paling moon. By the time it landed with a distant splash in the river, Malcolm had already turned to leave.

  He wanted to get home before the fires started. He wanted to get home to his dad.

  twenty-seven

  Once they had established that he was not going to die on them immediately, the authorities had descended on Malcolm’s hospital bed—the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Chicago Police Department. They wanted to know if McLarty and Pym had said anything suggesting they might be part of a larger terrorist plot. They wanted to know if there was any hint of foreign involvement. They wanted to know how the homeless man (whose name turned out to be William Lincoln Washington) wound up dead. They wanted to know what the whole thing was all about.

  By this time, Malcolm had not slept in well over 24 hours. His body ached. His head thudded heavily. Between having his temperature taken, his chest palpated, his wounds dressed, he told them all the same story. He got rear-ended. He got kidnapped. He was held all day. And then one of the kidnappers turned on the other and started shooting the bomb and the resultant explosion—the roar, the wave of overpressure, and the feeling of being lifted off his feet—was the last thing he remembered until a paramedic stood above him, yelling to someone else, “We got another one over here.”

  At some point in their marathon interrogations, the various personnel from the various agencies all asked him variations of the same question: why him? Was it because of that inflammatory piece he ran in the paper yesterday? Each time it was asked, Malcolm tried to answer the question as if it were not stupid and as if they didn’t all know it was stupid, tried to answer patiently and reasonably, reminding his interrogator that it was next to impossible for Pym and McLarty to put together so elaborate a scheme mere hours after the piece came out.

  Each time he said it they looked disappointed, as if they had expected him to make sense of this thing for them and he had failed.