!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  In the street I started to shake. My legs had gone to rubber. I kept hearing a growl, then a snarl. I looked around for the dog, but saw nothing, and after a block I didn’t hear the sounds anymore and my legs were sturdier and the trembling had almost stopped. My stride was carrying me down the middle of sidewalks, and people were veering away from me as though I were the prow of a ship and they were waves. In the angle of a store window I saw my reflection. I was murder, was death, was the sudden New York end. Yet I had communicated something, had shaken my rattles, had barked, had readied my needles, and they were sensing it and moving away, careful not to bump or jostle, taking note of the large FRAGILE / DANGER sticker showing on my body from head to foot.

  9

  They killed Martin King.

  I imagined that back home winter was breaking that first week in April and Central Park was starting to green again beneath the still climbing sun; I saw the benches along Central Park and Broadway filling once more with the winos, junkies and the aged. I could imagine that and also sense the frenzy back there, what with Vietnam finally arriving on everyone’s hit list, the Weather Underground active and the many Days of Rage.

  America was a nation of slogans:

  Black Power! White Power! Red Power!

  Brown Power! Yellow Power! Jewish Power!

  Italian Power! Irish Power! Polish Power!

  Pussy Power!

  Before we left the madness, the ethnic bumper stickers had sprouted like fescue upon the rear ends of cars, and American pluralism was gaining desperate credence.

  They killed Martin King. I was down at the docks, the poor side of the Carénage, to buy some fresh tuna from the fishermen whose boats were entering the harbor. I’d left Allis and Mack at the Grand Anse beach.

  A man was sitting on a cluster of pilings, holding a transistor radio to his ear. The crowd of mostly women chatted and laughed as they unfolded their plastic bags, into which they deposited their pieces of fish. The man with the transistor shouted something, waved his hand as if to still the crowd. But it gasped (some had heard him the first time) and moved closer to him, a small sea of dark faces, legs, elbows. The crowd moved closer and then stopped, as if just outside a circle inside which they dared not step.

  “Mar-teen Looter Keeng! He just was shot!”

  “Wha?”

  “Wha you say, mon?”

  “You surely be jokeen, Alistair—”

  “No, no, lis’en, lis’en—”

  He held the radio away from his ear toward us and turned up the volume. The entire Carénage, clear to the other side, where the fine shops were, grew quiet, or seemed to.

  “He is dead!” the man with the radio shouted. “He is dead!”

  A shout went up. People turned to each other, uncertain.

  “Where this is, mon?”

  “Memphis, Tennessee.”

  “Lord!”

  “Dot dere is one crazy place. Hey, you, Mr. Douglass, what you tinka dot, huh, Mr. Negro American—”

  The women rose up in my defense.

  “Hush, you now, Hubert! Don’t be de fool now. Can’t you see de mon’s cryin’?”

  “Shame, Hubert!”

  I had backed away. I looked down at the earth for some place to grab hold of it and hurl it deep into space. I had never felt the compulsion to kill the way I felt it now; it was like having to have an orgasm. I sat down. I felt their eyes on me. Little waves splashed against the moorings. The battered gray boats of the ragtag fleet seemed to be coming in faster now, their crews calling to each other:

  “Dey have shot Dr. Keeng! Dr. Keeng’s dead! Dey have shot Dr. Keeng dead!”

  I returned to the Cortina and drove for a mile on the right-hand side before I remembered to move to the left.

  Allis, holding Mack in one arm and his stroller filled with beach things with the other, was waiting near the main entrance to the beach. She ran toward me, screaming, “Did you hear about King? Did you hear? They killed him, Cate, they killed him!” She was crying in rage. I got out and helped them in.

  “I didn’t get the fish,” I said.

  “To hell with the fish,” she said, and cried again, banging the dashboard with her fist.

  When we got to our rented house on Mustique Bay, I went directly to the radio and began switching from band to band. I fixed drinks and listened.

  We had come to these islands, these remnants of mountain peaks, on the edge of the southern end of the Puerto Rico Trench, over a mile and a half down, to escape, to work and to renew ourselves from the effects of the rampages of public and private disasters that were shaking our lives to bits.

  Paul and Betsy had gone to France, to divide their time between Paris and La Ciotat. We had not managed to get together before our mutual departures. Paul apologized for being so busy.

  Slowly, then, the pace of life much changed, the sight of people devoid of the tensions and ferocities of the blacks back home, and the ever-present sun and sea—all these brought us back to each other. Allis took the sun well, daily growing darker and darker until those parts of her body that remained covered—parts of her breasts, pelvis and upper buttocks—were startlingly white in contrast. She rarely mentioned her father, but when she did, it caused pain no longer.

  Mack was growing fat and learning to swim. When I finished working for the day, we moved to the beach.

  I took long, leisurely swims, sometimes out as far as where people were making love on the decks of their boats. (“Hi. Mind if I rest just for a minute before I start back to the beach?”)

  We read the papers and the magazines and listened to the radio and felt pleased that we were away from the insanity at home. We did not try to hook up with the other Americans there, black or white, though we were often asked for drinks or dinner.

  But today, back home, they killed Martin King. We sat as the night came down, not hungry at all, listening to the radio, and I kept thinking: I don’t belong in this time. Why am I here? To do something? What shall I do?

  I was glad when Glenn called. “You heard?” he asked.

  There was something odd about his voice.

  “Yes, we heard. You okay? You sound funny.”

  “Really? Maybe. I feel sort of exhausted since the word came—”

  “Where were you?”

  “On my way to our section of the cafeteria.”

  I laughed softly, remembering all the people who’d ever fought against having an our section that was imposed on them by “law,” and there were the kids, our sectioning right on.

  He said, “What’s funny? Where were you?”

  “Down at the beach; no, Allis and Mack were at the beach. I was at the docks, getting fish for dinner.”

  “You’re not sure where you were?”

  “I’m sure now. They catch anyone yet?”

  “Hell, no. You kidding? The folks’ve started to burn Washington, from what I hear, and Stokely’s told them to get their guns.”

  “Have they?”

  “It’s too early to tell, Dad.” There was a pause. I felt suddenly and acutely guilty of something. At first I didn’t know what.

  Glenn sighed. “I don’t know what to say, but I wanted to talk to you. Listen. It’s all coming down to color, isn’t it?”

  Then I knew why I felt guilty. I hadn’t prepared him enough. His voice told me that he wasn’t tough enough. He hadn’t grown up reading about lynchings in the Chicago Defender, the Afro-American or the Pittsburgh Courier; white men had never shot at him; he had never been segregated because someone else wished it. But he wasn’t alone; there was an entire generation of young blacks who would never know those things, which was all right; yet had they been told those things enough, over and over and over again, so that every beat of their hearts was a punctuation mark in the litany of our time in America? “Yeah, kiddo. I do believe so. A lot of people have been saying that for an awfully long time, though. Nobody wants to believe them—”

  “Goddamn it—why?”

 
“Color carries an imposed history. Shit, son, I don’t know.”

  His voice was shaking a little. “I’m so mad, man, mad. I could kill the first honky comes in sight.”

  I said, “Careful, Glenn.”

  “Did you tell me it was gonna be like this?”

  “I tried. Maybe you just gotta experience some things.”

  Allis was standing beside me now in her favorite telephone position, one of my elbows sandwiched between her breasts. She stood still, staring down at the floor.

  I went on. “You remember once we were talking about Bontemps’ Black Thunder, talking about old Ben, the house servant, how he wanted to be free, yet wanted to be comfortable? How he wanted to squeal, but knew in his heart he couldn’t?”

  “Yeah,” Glenn said with an angry rush, “but he did squeal on Gabriel—”

  “So did one of the toughies, Pharaoh, remember? What I’m getting at is that Ben did say, because he understood and also understood that he couldn’t cut it, There ain’t nothin’ but hard times waitin’ when a man gets to studyin’ about freedom. I remember talking about that line because, man, I couldn’t get down with you all the way. And even if I had, would you have believed me? Listen, I gotta pay for this call. You sure you’re okay? Allis wants to talk to you.”

  “Glenn,” she said quietly into the phone. Tears glistened in her eyes. “Glenn, I know how you must feel. But I really want you to know that I am not white; I’m a Jew. That’s something else and I’m not going to take refuge behind color—what?” She smiled and glanced at me. “He really, really is all right, honey. A little down, both of us, and the people on the island, too. Stand back from things a little for a couple of days, okay? Here’s your father again.”

  “I guess,” Glenn said, “whether you liked the man or not, when they killed him they killed a little of all of us.”

  “I guess that’s what it is,” I said.

  “G’night, Dad.”

  “Night, son.”

  The island was now tainted by the news and we decided to leave it and so went by boat, stopping at Petit Martinique, Petit St. Vincent (rich, awfully rich, where big private boats docked and private seaplanes landed and where, if you wished it, your haute cuisine was delivered from the main kitchen to the dining room of your ten-room “cottage,” and where no one was supposed to be except the very wealthy and their servants—concubines, pilots, captains, waiters, chambermaids, cooks, sommeliers and telephone operators) and on to that island with the loveliest of names, Carriacou.

  We got a house in Tibeau, not far from Jew Bay. Jew Bay? We had to discover the origin of the name; we would also try to find out where Negro Island, in Bar Harbor, got its name. (We never did, though through the years we discussed the names, and how they came to be, as if they were some well-liked dessert that we didn’t wish to devour too quickly.)

  A long letter arrived, forwarded from the main island from Paul and Betsy. They had been to Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War and were now back in La Ciotat, distressed at the news of King’s murder and unhappy that they, like us, would be returning home soon.

  Allis had been sending Mr. Storto picture post cards, and finally in response came a long scribble of a letter from him. The first, he said, he’d written in fifteen years.

  On Carriacou the people still killed goats and poured water on the ground to ensure good luck to a venture; people still claimed to be Mandingo or Yoruba or Ibo; still greeted you in the morning with ẹkaro and welcomed you with ekabo. There were still esusu societies, and people played the ancient games of adji, boto or wari. Some nights the generations of drummers, using nail kegs stretched over with goatskin, played down the night, their drumbeats clambering over the surf smashing in from the windward side.

  From our hilltop at dusk we could see the fishing fleets putting out, each splitting off from the main body until one fleet, spotting the schools offish, started up signal fires, and then all the fleets, nets ready, converged like ants on darkening glass around the fires. We were watching them the Tuesday before the weekend we were to return to New York; watching and thinking how simple, clean and cooperative it all was, and how the fishermen had been fishing that way long before the first caravel pulled in along the West African coast. It grew late. All we could see were the signal fires from the boats. Mack lay under his netting as much at peace in the limbo of his sleep as he ever would be.

  Allis and I were naked, tall, cooling, lime-filled drinks in our hands, savoring the moment when, finished with them, we would turn to each other.

  I saw headlights, long, cold beams coming up the hill. I watched them without wonder, believing they would be going past. But, no. Like the flashes from the muzzles of twin-mounted Bofors, they swung squarely around in the driveway, flashing on the ceiling. The car stopped and the driver got out, leaving the engine running, leaving the ceiling stabbed with light.

  “Corion,” I said. Corion Jones was the bartender at the Mermaid.

  “Must be bad news,” Allis said, leaping up and running for the bedroom.

  We had no phone and we no longer played the radio.

  I pulled on my trunks and went to the door.

  “Cato, Cato,” he said. “They have killed Robert Kennedy. Give me one of those. Why didn’t you get a house with a phone?”

  I poured him a mostly gin and some tonic. Allis came out in a robe. “They killed Bobby Kennedy?”

  Corion took a long swallow. “In Los Angeles. He won the election out there—”

  “You mean primary,” Allis said.

  “Whatever,” Corion said, shrugging. “They killed him.”

  I fixed another drink for Allis and one for myself. I looked at the signal fires out on the ocean.

  “They caught the man who did it,” Corion said.

  “Who was it?”

  “I think they said he was an Arab.”

  In the shadows Allis and I stared at each other.

  “He said he did it for the good of your country.” Corion chuckled and finished his drink. “Some place,” he said. “America. Whoooo-boy!” And he left. We watched him back out, the lights sliding off the ceiling as he did, and drive back toward Hillsborough.

  (“Have General Graham call me. I want him to say it to me. I want to hear a general of the U.S. Army say he can’t protect Martin Luther King, Jr.”)

  “What,” Allis said in the darkness, which now seemed even darker, “in the hell’s going on back there?”

  “Shhhhhhhhittttttt,” I said. It was not a response to her question. I didn’t have an answer; it was just something to say, a single, sibilant word with stop to express almost everything.

  “Shall I turn on the radio?” Allis looked like a ghost, even with her tan, there in the darkness. I turned to the sea again.

  “Shall I?”

  I didn’t realize that my hesitation had to do with not wanting to be overwhelmed by misinformation; with not wanting to be lured into frames of thought that veered me around the realities. “Oh, to hell with it,” I said. “If you want to, go ahead.” There. I had shifted the blame to her.

  “Don’t you want to know more?”

  “They aren’t going to tell us more! They never have and, goddamn it, they never will, and people’ll continue swallowing their shit just like it was candy! Go ahead, turn the thing on!”

  “I am! Stop shouting!”

  “Fuckers!”

  Allis could find nothing but music. She said, “Do they really think they can get away with this, too?”

  “They have. You’ll see. Aw, shit. What a time to have to go home.”

  “Where else, babe?” she said. “Let’s go to bed. It’s very late.”

  We lay, lust turned to listlessness. “The time went so fast,” I said.

  “Was it that the book went so well or the things that’ve happened?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  The stars seemed close to earth there, too, just hanging above us, companions as we rushed quietly through space. Everythin
g about us was perpetual movement, yet nothing fell off; everything stayed fixed. The experts explained it: “gravity.” On bright, sunny mornings, my mother would push open the kitchen window, just over the sink, inhale deeply, smile and say, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!” That phrase now seemed more fitting than “gravity.”

  “Cate. What are you thinking? I hear you thinking.”

  “About mysteries.”

  “Mysteries?”

  “Ordinary mysteries, like how the stars manage to hang up there the way they do.”

  “Oh. If and when we ever get to the moon and back, do you think it’ll make a difference? I mean, spiritually or whatever?”

  “I wish I knew, kid. The track record ain’t too good.”

  “Poor Ethel. With all those kids. Somehow, though, I wonder if Bobby would’ve made a good President. I mean, good enough for the times.”

  (“Have General Graham call me. I want him to say it to me.”)

  I turned over. “I’ve a feeling that no one knows just how much shit and how little power goes with the job until they get there; then they become absolutely paralyzed with the immensity of their mistake in wanting the goddamn job in the first place.”

  “Maybe we ought to be voting for corporations instead of individuals.”

  I laughed. “We are, honey.”

  “Yeh. Shot down the World Federalist movement, then picked up all the ideas—or was the whole thing theirs?”

  “Listen—you wanna?” I figured she did because she was talking so much.

  “You?”

  “Not really.”

  “I should shut up?”

  “Well—”

  “Okay.”

  We were back. We were rushing down the ramps like everyone else, fearful of being stuck in a long line, afraid there’d be no taxis. We rushed, clutching Mack and the handbags, working up a good sweat, hating to be back, yet excited that we were. I was already thinking of the apartment with the windows thrown open to admit a breeze, if one existed, and the Puerto Rican music that echoed up and down the block during the summer. We were not first on line, of course; that took a certain ruthlessness, a recklessness, that seemed out of joint with the goal obtained. Panting, we drew up before a sign that read: