The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Leroy marveled at the warrior’s muscular arms and legs, their rectangular chests, square jaws. Flat on the page, the drawings came alive as Jim Ed weaved a spell of Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Greeks and Trojans, gods and goddesses, a wooden horse hundreds of hands high–a spell finer than any fairy tale ever told by Hannah or hex pronounced by Gideon. That night, Leroy dreamed he was racing across the Trojan plain in a chariot at the head of an army of thousands. Above the thunder of the horses, the warriors, his warriors, shouted Wallaca! so loud the voices reached up to the mountain top where the gods and goddesses covered their ears. King of kings, he led Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon and the rest of the Greeks into battle. He fought Hector. He breached the gates of Troy. He scrawled his name on the walls and ramparts of the city with the blood of dead Trojans. ‘Wallaca.’ Everyone worshipped the name. But in the morning, at school with Billy Sunshine teasing him again about being white-blooded Leroy knew it was only the dream of a kid pissed off because his old man answered his questions with a comic book instead of straight talk.

  Dreaming kept Leroy happy for a while; but, as he grew older, he realized dreaming was no more real than Wallaca. Night after night, he nagged Gideon. No matter how tired his old man was or how rested, he either booted him away with “It’s just a name,” or threatened to call down some voodoo curse if he didn’t shut up. Once Gideon whupped him, counting out the blows like a slave master counting lashes. Jim Ed knew no more and Hannah, fearing Gideon might beat on her instead if she interceded, never betrayed whatever secrets she held. “Make a name of Leroy Wallaca,” Jim Ed said; but, as time passed, the questions about his name burrowed deep into his heart, where they incubated, a virus of hate waiting to be triggered. Keep your fucking secrets, Leroy decided. Someday I’ll be creating my own name and it won’t be Leroy Wallaca.

  By his eighth birthday, Leroy had learned to read well enough to read the comic book himself and by the summer of 1967, the summer Boston burned with race riots, he knew Tales of the Trojan War by heart.

  That spring, the spring of 1967, the city’s whites concentrated on the Red Sox, who had not sported a winning record since 1957 and in 1966 finished ninth, a half game out of last place. Boston loved the 1967 Red Sox lead by Yastrzemski, Conigliaro, Petrocelli, Lonborg, Waslewski, Osinski, a team easily embraced by a bleached white city that elevated baseball to a religion. If Negroes like Foy and Scott in the infield, Smith and Tartabull in the outfield, Santiago and Wyatt on the pitcher’s mound, stained the roster, the fans tolerated their presence as penance for winning after so many losing seasons. Few Negroes attended Red Sox games, boycotting an ownership that had refused to sign Mays, Robinson, or Aaron because of the color of their skin and hired an alcoholic racist manager with a colorful nickname so the owner would have a drinking buddy. Ownership didn’t care. The seats were full of hungry whites who gorged themselves on overpriced hot dogs and beer, peanuts and popcorn, and Cracker Jacks. Boston’s crackers, a sizable minority many of whom professed otherwise, loved their Cracker Jacks. And the prize inside.

  One Friday afternoon in June, welfare mothers barricaded themselves inside the Grove Hall welfare office in the heart of Roxbury, one of Boston’s Negro neighborhoods, to protest changes in welfare eligibility rules. Soon, the Tactical Police Force gathered outside, milling about like a street gang ready to rumble. When the order to liberate the building came, the police, wearing riot gear with helmets, face masks, leather jackets, gloves, protective cups, and knee-high boots and armed with riot clubs–longer, thicker and harder than the standard billies–charged the front doors while a second squad stormed the building from the back, clubbing the welfare mothers into submission. The police action escalated into warfare, four nights of rioting, four nights of occupation by the police. Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue became a street like so many in Watts, Detroit, Newark. Furniture stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, variety stores, liquor stores, dry cleaners, all the stores along a fifteen-block stretch of Blue Hill Avenue between Grove Hall and Quincy Street burned, Boston’s contribution to the looting, vandalism and arson that plagued American cities during Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency.

  After four nights of sirens, tear gas, burglar alarms that rang unanswered, fires that burned unchecked, four nights of bloody heads and broken bones, four nights of mommas wailing and daddies bailing, calm did not so much return as rise out of the smoldering ashes of Blue Hill Avenue, spreading like mold on the rotting fruit sold by Roxbury supermarkets.

  June dragged on. The Red Sox continued winning, giving the police something to talk about as they patrolled the streets of Roxbury. Slowly, the ashes cooled. Negroes began meeting secretly in small groups behind closed doors. Gabe Tucker organized such a meeting in the basement of his tenement. Jim Ed, then seventeen, Leroy, eight, and sixteen others, crowded into a basement lit by a twenty-five-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. Police brutality obsessed everyone. Twenty injuries became two hundred. The news reported no casualties; rumors claimed twenty, thirty, forty, more.

  “Hear me, brothers,” Gabe Tucker said. “Last night two honky pigs cornered me in the alley and did their business on my face.”

  “On his face!” shouted Nate Garvy, a burly kid standing in the middle of the room.

  “That’s what this nigga said. On my face. We’re a new generation. No pushing us around no more. We need be showing them honkies a real burn.”

  Jim Ed said, “Whose backyard we burning?”

  Nate Garvey said, “Them muthafucks who busted heads at Grove Hall.”

  “How come they never bust heads in Southie or Bunker Hill?” Gabe swayed like he was taking a text. “’Cause no brothers living in them places.” Calls of Right on! rolled around the room until Gabe clapped his hands. “Now on, we be the Zuluz,” and he spelled it for them. “Them be our brothers in Africa,” Gabe said.

  “Fucking diesel mouth,” Jim Ed said, “with shit for brains and brains for shit.” Everyone knew Jim Ed had been taking fighting lessons in Chinatown, learning things with names no one could pronounce. Rumors flew ’round the ’hood Jim Ed could kill with either hand, either foot, take out five men at once. No one believed it, but no one dared challenge him. “Hear me good. What’s a gang gonna do? Rip off booze from the packy? The only work we getting these days is in Nam. When does Uncle call us nephew? When he needs bodies to ship out to replace them he’s shipping back. Zuluz gonna make that right?”

  “Study long, study wrong,” Gabe said. “If we don’t fight our fight, who will?”

  “Fighting your fight only the funeral makers be rolling in Franklins.” Jim Ed took Leroy by the hand and walked him up the stairs and out the door.

  “Why you go and do that?” Leroy asked when they reached the street.

  “We don’t need no gang.”

  “If this be revolution, we should be swinging, not singing.”

  “Since when you quoting Malcom X?”

  “I’s as deep as you is shallow.”

  “Dried-up piss be deeper than you.”

  “Someday I’ll be leading them Zuluz. I’ll make me a name so great people they’ll call you Leroy’s big bro’!”

  Jim Ed slapped him upside the head. “And Ed Brooke he’ll be living in the White House.” Brooke, a black man married to a white woman, had been elected to the United States Senate as a Republican in 1966 in a landslide victory–61 per cent to 39 per cent–over his Democratic opponent, a former Massachusetts governor.

  That night while Jim Ed worked out in Chinatown Leroy again dreamt about Troy; but this time, for the first time, he was a Trojan, fighting beside Hector to protect his home, his turf; sitting with Priam, king of Troy; plotting strategy; killing Achilles to avenge Hector’s death and the mutilation of his body; becoming leader of the Trojans. In his dream, he figured out the trick of the Trojan horse and roasted alive the Greeks inside, then raced down Blue Hill Avenue in a chariot, acknowledging the cheers of the ’hood. He knew then someday the Zuluz would become the
Trojans, his Trojans, and that he would no longer be Leroy Wallaca. In his dream, he stopped in front of his house where Jim Ed, never Gideon, never Hannah, waited. I got me a name, he shouted, saluting Jim Ed with a clenched fist, Priam, leader of the Trojans. In his dream, Jim Ed never saluted back.

  -4-

  An hour had passed, then a second, since Mabi had sent Beaujolais on her merry way to deliver his ultimatum to Ugolino. Now Mabi waited for the phone to ring. He tried to read the ticks of the clock. Juries that decided things quick, he knew from experience, always returned guilty verdicts. The longer the delay, the greater the chance for a not-guilty or a hung jury. If Ugolino intended to say no, he’d say no in an instant. Yes might take a while. He had time; not forever time, but time.

  His mind wandered, but always came back to one thing. His name. Mabi. This name, his name, still intrigued him. He never thought he’d give up Priam; but al-Saffah had offered him a past, a history, a heritage, a past where Allah, not Leroy, killed Billy Sunshine; a past where Allah, not Priam, killed Luke Shaw, a past where Allah, not Mabi, killed Bumper Sullivan. And a future. The turn of a page away. If he was a long way from Priam, he was a longer way, much longer, from Leroy Wallaca.

  Until Mabi strode through the front door of the Capablanca Chess Club in South Boston, no blacks had crossed the Club’s threshold other than Virgil or an occasional tradesman, delivery person, or waiter or waitress employed by a caterer working a private function. Those blacks entered and exited through the service entrance, which led to a labyrinth of cobwebbed basement hallways and a staircase to the kitchen. Their presence on the first and second floors was limited to the performance of their duties.

  Programmed by al-Saffah, Mabi had marched up the Club’s circular drive and through a front door so solid older members needed help opening it, past the coatroom to the right, through the foyer and into a living room whose centerpiece was an antique standing globe of the world at the time of Magellan. In each corner and behind each occasional table the broad green leaves of a supernal ficus pointed toward the nearest window. To the left, through double doors of dark polished wood with polished brass doorknobs, doors so perfectly balanced and precisely hinged they opened, so it seemed, with a mere breath, was the chess room where peaceful games of war descended from violent games of peace were played with an intensity bordering on the frenzy of actual combat. Yet, the only sound was the barely audible brush of felt pad against lacquered chessboard.

  At the reception desk, Brian Cairns, the club manager, glanced up from his newspaper, The Irish Times air-shipped daily from Dublin by Aer Lingus for the many emigrants and their children and grandchildren living in and around Boston. “Deliveries through the service entrance.”

  “I’s here to sign up.”

  “Army recruiting office on Union corner of Williams.”

  Cairns folded his paper, the sports section on top, a photo of Seamus ‘Sam Bam’ Cunningham dragging three defenders across the goal line to score the winning points for Leinster against Connacht in the Irish Rugby Union Cup finals.

  “For Capablanca Chess Club,” Mabi said.

  “No vacancies.”

  “This be a city place and the law says anyone living in Boston free to join.” He slapped his driver’s license with its Boston address down on Sam Bam’s muddy, bloody legs.

  “Law says building capacity is one-fifty and we’re full up.”

  “Millie Moran she still a member?”

  Cairns fidgeted with his left sideburn, curling, then uncurling its coarse hairs.

  “Poor Millie,” Mabi continued, “went to her eternal reward yesterday. Seen it in the obits. Her board, it’s now mine.”

  The laws forcing Capablanca to extend a membership to Mabi did not compel its members to play chess with him. Everyone except Avram Levy, a rabbinical student who recently relocated from Crown Heights in New York to Chelsea, refused whenever he talked up a game.

  “How they let you in?” Mabi asked Levy during their first match.

  “I’m the exception that proves the rule.”

  “They calling you Jewboy, kike, Christ killer, behind your back.”

  “And to my face.”

  “That be one fancy little hat.”

  “It’s called a yarmulke. I wear it as a sign of respect for Hashem. My father gave me a set of twelve for my bar mitzvah.”

  Mabi slapped the button on the chess clock. “Levy, man. Let’s fray and frazzle these lace curtains by trying out for the chess team.”

  Capablanca competed in the Boston Metropolitan League and the United States Chess Federation New England League. All members were eligible to vie for the six positions on the team.

  “The city games are Friday nights when I go to shul.”

  “Where?”

  “Sabbath services.”

  “Play me into shape and I’ll try out for both of us.”

  Mabi won his first four matches, one victory away from clinching a place on the team. “No,” al-Saffah said when Mabi bragged to him. “It will interfere with your mission.”

  “What you be meaning?”

  “It is not what’s written in the book.”

  “How you know? If doing be revealing, how you know before it be done?”

  Submitting to al-Saffah, Mabi eliminated himself by intentionally losing in the fifth and final round. In spite of his skill at chess, his good manners at the chess board, he still could not arrange matches other than with Levy.

  -5-

  The clock ticked. The phone did not ring. Mabi waited. His mind continued to wander.

  Mabi understood hatred. It was instinctive, his understanding, the way prey knew its predator must kill it, must eat it, to live. His realization that he could reverse the prey/predator relationship by being the hater rather than the hated was also instinctive. He was too young to understand, much less read, the dictionary definition of the word “instinct” when he started hating whites. It was on his sixth birthday when Gideon, first in line, was last served at that Boston Garden souvenir stand. The police response to the 1967 race riots gave him a second reason. Whites stoning school buses carrying black children into white neighborhoods after the federal court desegregated Boston’s public schools in 1974, a third. The murder of his brother in Vietnam by the collusion of a white cop, white prosecutor, white judge, white cunt legal aid attorney, the fourth and final reason. Jim Ed’s death killed any possibility that reason, rather than instinct, would control Mabi’s response to what happened around him, what happened to him.

  It was December, 1971. Jim Ed was a sophomore at Northeastern University studying electrical engineering and computer science, paying his way by janitoring nights and weekends in Boston’s office towers, cleaning toilets, polishing floors, emptying trash cans. One hawk-day Friday when gullies of snow made the unplowed streets in Boston’s black neighborhoods impassable, the intersections inaccessible to pedestrians because of the mountains of snow tossed up by traffic, Jim Ed boy-scouted an elderly woman across the street, carrying her groceries in one arm, supporting her with his other. Half-way across, the traffic light turned green. Horns blaring, cars and trucks surged forward, careened around them, drivers rolling down their windows to swear, shout racial epithets. Rather than stop traffic, rather than help them across, the cop on the beat ticketed them for jaywalking. “Fifty dollar fine,” he said, the joy of the holiday season dripping from each word.

  “The lady’s old with arthritis in her knees,” Jim Ed tried to explain, but the cop, Sean Meagher, Jr. according to his name tag, prodded Jim Ed with his billy. By instinct, Jim Ed raised his hands into a martial arts position, lowering them quickly. Meagher jabbed him again. “A & B on a police officer. You’re under arrest.”

  The sound of sirens in the distance mixed with the tinny music of Jingle Bells escaping from the supermarket whenever the door opened.

  Meagher poked him again, pushing him back. “Resisting arrest. Flight. How high you want me to pile these charges?”
<
br />   “High as your momma’s jelly.” Jim Ed grabbed the end of the billy and yanked Meagher forward, then laid him out with a punch to the jaw. “That’s A & B on a police officer.”

  Meagher’s partner, Patrick Turley, jumped out of the police cruiser and aimed his service revolver at Jim Ed. “Make your move, nigger. Save the taxpayer the cost of prosecuting and jailing your sorry black ass.”

  “You ain’t got the balls,” Jim Ed said.

  Up against the wall with his legs spread-eagled, Jim Ed knew he could take down Turley by slowly pushing back to create slack, then collapsing forward and kicking back with his heel, breaking Turley’s shin bone half way between his knee and foot.

  That night after Jim Ed’s arrest, Hannah said to Gideon, “The Emperor’s militia, they going to find us.” Stress fouled her diction, coloring her speech white to black. “The police will send his fingers to the FBI and one night the Emperor be kicking down our door.” The Emperor was the dictator who ruled Ethiopia.

  Leroy eavesdropped at the top of the stairs, standing where he wouldn’t cast a shadow on the living room floor. Who be the Emperor? Leroy wondered.

  “If the newspaper prints our name,” Hannah said, “they be writing up our death notices ’fore this done. We should’ve gone to court for the name change, like I begged.”

  Leroy snuck out the back door and hid in the alley behind the candy store, huddling on a box deep in the alley’s shadows. The cold numbed his feet, his feelings. He wished he could fall asleep and wake up in a land where there were no emperors and everyone knew the meaning of their names. The reds and greens of Christmas reflected off the brick wall above his head. They crooks? Escaped cons hiding from the man? Something worse? At his age he couldn’t imagine what could be spooking his folks. Gusts of wind swirled around him. Other people’s garbage piled up around his legs, newspapers, plastic wrappings from the supermarket, empty brown paper bags damp with the booze that dripped from the wino’s lips as he slurped his supper. Wallaca, he thought, it means no more than this garbage.