George Washington Street North and George Washington Street South met North Jefferson Street. There were suddenly no trees. The intersection was like a parking lot, with wooden houses, lights still on in them, only a few yards back from the curb, with no grass on the lawns in front of the houses. He could no longer smell patchouli and wet grass.
Under a weak street lamp, he searched in his jacket pockets, then his trousers pockets, and finally his shirt pockets. He had no money. He had no wallet. He had no passport, no Blue Cross card and none of the five identifying pieces of Yale plastic he’d been given.
George Washington Street, North and South, was a highway. The white lines were clear and painted thick, on the black asphalt. He looked right, he looked left. In both directions, there was only darkness, tight, a rustling in the darkness all round him, and the asthmatic sound of the wind.
He saw some men and women far down the highway. He could see them rocking from side to side, walking in the distance as if they had no feet, like sailing boats in an accommodating sea, with a slight but assisting wind.
He knew where he was. He had been in the country often enough to know, to associate Jefferson, Washington and Wilberforce on street signs with the areas where only black people lived, even in crowded, large cities.
The road was wide. The men and women were closer. He was passing high brick walls on both sides of the road. He realized he was walking between graveyards; large thick crosses were embossed in the brick; bottles or vases, shimmering in the night, with sprigs, flowers, dried leaves sprouting from them. Of a sudden, the road was bathed in a bright light from powerful overhead lamps. He could see names on the plaques in the walls: Benjamin Washington, died 1899. A former slave? Certainly black. His name betrayed him. Julius Jefferson Walker, born 1898, died 1950. Then he saw a name that rooted him to the earth. Perhaps he was dreaming. He read the name a second time. The date of birth. The date of death. He became frightened. It was his name. With the correct spelling. And with his middle name, too.
He threw aside his jacket and rolled up his trousers and made a jump at the wall, but it was too high and too slippery with moss. He made another leap. There were no cracks in the well-made, sturdy masonry of the wall, to put a hand in, the toe of his shoe. He took off his shoes. His third attempt was hapless, he was too tired.
A slowly moving car pulled up behind him, its dull lights had become high beam headlights. They showed him a gate. He ran to it.
As he stood inside the gate of the graveyard, the car with high beams came abreast. He felt chilly though the night was hot and humid. He started to panic. He could see the face behind the car window. And he could see the shield on the ten-gallon khaki-coloured hat, the roll of fat on the man’s belly. He could see the gun that lay against that belly. He tingled with sweat, fear, excitement.
The car had City Taxi written on the side.
He had been told, most taxi drivers at night are cops.
He had never seen a state trooper before. The trooper was eyeballing him.
“You work here, boy?”
He didn’t understand the fat drawl to the vowels. But he caught the “boy.”
He nodded.
“Burying many, today, been many deaths lately, boy?”
He nodded.
“Two o’clock is a goddamn early hour to start, ain’t it, boy? The early bird getting on them worms. And this here is a ripe enough worm farm. ”
Without a word of goodbye or good morning, the cop moved on, easing the car forward, off the shoulder by the gate, on to the highway. This was a dream, he thought. It could have been, it should have been a dream.
The graveyard was not well tended. Clumps of grass grew between graves and in the paths. A beer bottle held a sprig of a flower, now dead and withered. A cheap vase held a cluster of flowers; one white bud was still alive. Some graves withstood a towering architecture of tombs; little houses with no windows, and no doors to let in a breath of redemption or allow the escape of a doomed soul. Some were merely mounds, like fat bellies upon the body of the earth, wet with dew. Among all these, he did not find a cross that bore his name. But he had seen his name. It had not been a dream, not as close to unreal as the state trooper in his taxi, with his belly and his gun.
He was far from the iron gate, down a knoll, and into a small gully, still thinking about the state trooper’s strange behaviour. Why hadn’t he gotten out of the taxi – if it was a taxi – to order him about, to push him, to slam him against the peeling paint of the car door, to spread his legs like wishbones, to pass stubby fingers over his groin, touch his testicles, feel up his buttocks, perhaps weigh the heft of his scrotum in the palm of his hand, to cuff his wrists with iron bracelets, to dump him into the backseat of the cruiser-taxi cab…?
Overhead the trees were large and healthy, a rich emerald green. They were not fruit-bearing trees. In Barbados, where there was a graveyard on a beach, where English sailors had been dumped after they had been shot at sea, there were small, brown, gnarled trees that bore fruit. Beach grapes. He had eaten the fruits of those sailors’ graves. In this graveyard, there were no trees he knew by name. Where the outside walls met at a corner, at right angles, where it was very dark, and there was a smell of fallen leaves rotting, he hunched into a squat, his trousers down to his ankles, but clear of the rotting leaves, arms crossed, his spine arched, muscles in his back tightened, head bent down, eyes flashing right and left, in case of real grave-diggers who come to work early in the morning.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
His mother had often said this to discipline him. Here he was, going to take a shit.
The moment he closed his eyes, there was a loosening, a relaxation of the bowels, and he surrendered his body to indifference, an indifference at being caught.
With his eyes closed, and in the easing of a simple function, the thing that came out of him, slipped to a sliding end and was on its own cut off there in silence on that space of land.
IV
The lone black man who had given the power salute to the crowd at an angle of 60 degrees, an audience of academics, all of them white, came at him out of the high noon sunlight, crying. “Bro, call me Calvin, you and me, we going to lay down some saving shit this night.”
He had said he was a doctoral student, when he called him at the dormitory.
They agreed to meet, Calvin promising to pick him up in his “aut-o-mobile.”
It was Saturday, late afternoon, six o’clock, the skies cleansed so well he could have been in Barbados. There was a constant breeze like a sea breeze though they were inland, a tinge of coolness to the air.
Dressed in a black dashiki, sleeves and hem trimmed in red and green, Calvin sat alertly behind the steering wheel of a small Volkswagen, holding himself erect.
“Didn’t tell you I had me these wheels, eh brother? Thought I would be driving me some big wheel deals from Detroit, didn’t you? Well, shit, I says to myself,” and he put the car into gear, so they could drive off. “I says, shit, let me make a protest and be radical with a foreign car. Boycott the Detroit motherfuckers! You dig? Got me these Nazi wheels off a none-too-bright white student. Two bills. Two of the lean green. So, here we be, you and me. After what you been through, shit, I thought you could do with a bit o’ sightseeing. Paperbag’s in the glove compartment, sippin’ whiskey, bro. Just keep the bag down, if you see a cop.
“An’ I don’t know,” he said, slowing down, “if you can handle this shit, brother. You West Indians are some crazy bastards. Where we are is where you were walking that night. What you thought were houses, only they is garages or servants’ quarters, Jack. Matter o’ fact, you ain’t seen nothing! There be houses, estates, that would make your motherfucking head turn.
“Dig that place over there. With the white gatepost, with the light? That light always be burning. Day and night. Rain or shine. Sonofabitch living there got more bread than Paul Getty. The mother got some mean-faced dogs trained to kill black people on
ly. No postman delivers on foot. Mother’s got a special car, Jack! Aut-o-mo-bile! Special delivery.
“All these estates along here, all along Hyacinth they got private guards, private dogs, burglar ’larms and guns, so any crazy motherfucker wanting to integrate the massa’s property, he be looking down a double-barrel. I know. Almost got my ass tore up, bro, by two Kraut dogs.
“Shit! And here I is. I be driving German wheels, and the rich be keeping German bloodhounds! Ain’t that a bitch? Integration. We and them be radical protesters against the American system.”
“Can a dog be trained to attack only blacks?” concerned that he might sound naïve.
“Only blacks?”
“Isn’t a dog colour-blind? Like a child?”
“Ever read White Dog?”
“Not yet.”
“Check it out, brother. Blacks? Niggers! Tear up their ass! Check it out, before you start strutting your stuff through a neighbourhood like this, especially after six o’clock.”
“Six?”
“Six be the hour to leave town, brother. You broke curfew that night. Cowboys and crooks. Western Justice. Rednecks and rascals. That house back there, with the gate lights? That’s the man. That’s the Klan. Nineteen miles due south, man, the Klan was born, so, being a social scientist, you can figure out how many of those mothers along Hyacinth still have their cards and their sheets. But they don’t come out even for the full moon, these days. We got their names, we sent ’em postcards, man. Neighbour Dan is the man in the Klan, Jack!”
The VW, rollicking and wobbling along the road, passed the pillars he had seen in the night, except they turned out to be the white-painted posts of a gazebo holding a swing and white-painted iron chairs and tables. The grass was precision cut, in the brush-cut hairstyles of the American Armed Forces. And the grass was blue. More blue than green. There were men with mowers and men, bent almost like hairpins, who stood close to the grass, as if they were examining it; and from his safe distance in the VW, these men looked like large wild mushrooms because of their wide-brimmed hats worn against the sun, and probably, too, against recognition. They moved their hands, like mechanical toys, as if playing with the grass. Showers of grass trimmings rose up on the wind. These men looked as if they were growing out of the lawns, natural to the habitat. Even when the land, in this present dispensation, belonged to other men.
“If you can kill any one of those mothers cutting the grass, or any black for that matter, with one shot in the heart, three in the back of the head, and then have a sheriff say it’s an act of justifiable homicide, and have white liberal intellectuals write books and end up agreeing, then according to the logic they taught me in Logic and Scientific Method, 105, certainly a man like me, a nationalist, should be able to kill one of them mothers and demand that what I do be called an act of justifiable homicide. Dig it?”
“Calvin, you got that out of a book. Not your ideas. Not even your words, never mind your thoughts.”
“I was writing a paper.”
“This thing, this thing that’s going on in this country, which is your country, has really got screwed up. None of us can even talk in a natural way. We can’t even fire a pee, by the side of the road, without analyzing our piss, and calling it an act of defiance. I pee on a wall of a house owned by a rich white man, and I am therefore making a Marxist statement.”
“But you shat on the man’s property, Jack! Shat mister-soon-to-be tenured man.”
“Graveyard communal property.”
“You kidding? The gate light house? The man that owns that estate, he owns the land the graveyard is sitting on.”
“Justifiable homicide?”
“For goddamn sure! And dig it, agree or don’t agree, I say your act was defiance. Was revolutionary, brother. How many niggers in this place would dare to shit on a burial ground? When I gave the story out to the brothers, they agreed you was a real mother. Matter o’ fact, those brothers’ll be at the club tonight. Waiting to meet the new man. Drinks, and not Ripple shit this time. J & B! J & B! And ribs!”
“I don’t usually shit in cemeteries. It was an urge of nature.”
“Urge, my black ass, brother! You ever had the urge to hump a white chick you meet in a shopping plaza? You ever had the urge to tell a professor, Fuck off! You ever had the urge to grab all the bills in a bank? You ever had the urge to rip off textbooks, because you had no bread? One day, you will join the motherfucking struggle. It’s blood, brother. It ancestry. I don’t give a sweet goddamn how much West Indians like to own houses and save money in the bank, and get their goddamn education, it’s still blood. You were safe. You motherfuckers from the islands be even more crazy revolutionaries than we with all our Panther shit when the man tickle you in your ass. Check out Marcus Garvey. You West Indians be field-niggers more than house-niggers, as Malcolm X says.
“But dig, I checking out a book last night, blew my goddamn mind. I was reading this thing, I start to think. What the fuck am I getting this ofey college education for? Why the fuck am I not in the ghetto, close to the brothers, checking out the scene. The real scene. Making it real, man, compared to what? Building a nation, a black nation, what the fuck I’m writing papers on Black Aesthetics for? One minute, my model is Ralph Bunche. Then he’s a Tom. Then it’s Martin. But Martin get his ass whupped, on television, in the newspaper, and I was there at Selma. So, I want to have Miles, or Coltrane be my idol. Man, to blow all night. Let the sounds that go round do it. Like Barry White says, Let the music play. Let the motherfucking music play, Jack.
“I’m Miles. Coltrane. Otis. I’m Nina. And I’m Areefub! On stage. Thousands be out there, in the darkness, heads raised up, in wonder, Jack. My voice. My trumpet. My axe, man. Same fucking thing! Same fucking instrument. Let the motherfucking music play.
“So, I’m checking out this book. A slave narrative. I been blowing my brains out writing papers on philosophy, white philosophy and black philosophy, and the philosophy of philosophy. I been breaking my bad ass on Black Aesthetics and juking my way through Judeo-Christian ethics. I been in graduate school for the past eight years, book by book, index card by index card, Xerox by Xerox, borrowing, stealing and inventing notes to make sure, brother, that not another mother in my graduate seminar can match belly-up to my grades. And for what? What goddamn for?”
Calvin slouched in the driver’s seat.
“After all that shit, after eight years of cops with guns, guns, and billy clubs, Jack, an’ after I’m fucked up with revolutionary rhetoric like a motherfucker in my brain, I come across a goddamn slave narrative.”
“A slave…?”
“Check this out.”
He brought the VW to a shuddering stop. Under a tree. In the shade. He moved his body in the driver’s seat as if he were improvising a shuffle. He ripped open the brown paperbag that held the Ripple, and placed the bag on his head, like a hat, and chanted:
“Howsomedever, one day Mars Walker – he was the oberseahfoun; out Dave could read. Mars Walker wa’n’t nuffin but a po’ bockrah, en folks said he couldn’ read ner write hisse’f, en co’se he didn’ lack ter see a nigger w’at knowed mo’ d’n he did; so he went en tole Mars Dugal; Mars Dugal sont fer Dave, en ax’ ’im bout it.
Dave didn’t hardly knowed w’at ter do; but he couldn’ tell no lie, so he ’fessed he could read de Bible a little by spellin’ out de words. Mars Dugal look mighty solemn.
Dis yer is a serious matter,’sezee; it’s ’g’in de law ter l’arn niggers how ter read, er ’low them ter hab books. But w’at yer l’arn out’n dat Bible, Dave?’
Dave wa’n’t no fool, ef he wuz a nigger, en sezzee:
Marster, I l’arns dat it’s a sin fer ter steal, er ter lie, er fer ter want w’at doan b’long ter yer; en I l’arns fer ter love de Lawd en ter ’bey my marster.
Mars Dugal sorter smile en laf’ ter hisse’f, like he ’uz mightily tickle bout sump’n, en sezzee:
Doan ’pear ter me lack readin’ de Bible done yer much ha
rm, Dave. Dat’s w’at I wants all my niggers fer ter know. Yer keep right on readin’, en tell de yuther han’s w’at yer be’n tellin’ me. How would ter lack fer ter preach ter de niggers on Sunday?”
He could hear cars roaring by; in the distance, he heard the heavy rumbling of a freight train. Even in his small home country, in his small chattel house, he had heard the sagas of freight trains, men on the run travelling on them. Men in chains rode on them. A rumbling that was interminable as a toothache that came at sunset in a dark small room when the only light was the dull golden snuff of a kerosene lamp. He heard a siren. An ambulance?
He heard Calvin’s unscrewing of the bottle of Ripple.
“What you make of that, Professor?”
“Fucked up. By our education.”
“What education you talking bout? Some few sociology books written down by people who don’t know dick, and don’t like us?”
“The man in the story, he understood the importance of education…”
“The Bible, it was not invented for you and me, brother!”
“We can use it to suit ourselves.”
“You’re talking like my grandmother.”
“My grandmother said the same thing.”
“They were fucked up, too, then, brother.”
“They survived. They survived.”
Calvin lit a menthol cigarette. After Calvin had filled his lungs, and had shot two thin jets of white from his nostrils, making him look in his moment of anger like a walrus, he said, “We are over-educated. And our education still excludes us, you and me, you a professor and me, a goddamn graduate student, from all the intellectual considerations of this country. So, what can we do?”
“Revolution?”
“We got to express our own conclusions, man, black conclusions, our own fears, black fears and feats, our own black aspirations about this country, in a different language.”
“You mean a different rhetoric.”
“Yeah!” Calvin said, as if he wanted to have said that himself. “Yeah! A different motherfucking rhetoric. An antagonistic rhetoric, too!”
They Never Told Me Page 6