A Different Drummer

by William Melvin Kelley

  I couldn’t remember anything about the depot, except my parents holding hands; I remained silent.

  He frowned; perhaps really disappointed with me. To tell the truth, I was disappointed with myself. “Negroes, Mister Willson, Negroes. Colored folks. Darkies. Coons. Boots. Spooks. niggers. Negroes. More Negroes in the New Marsails Municipal Depot, I daresay, than had ever been there before, and more than will ever be there again.”

  I couldn’t remember. “Well, so what?”

  He pointed straight down. “This is where it began, Mister Willson. Your friend Tucker Caliban started it all. You must give him credit. As for me, I stand corrected; I’d never have imagined such a movement could be started from within, could be started at the grass roots, through spontaneous combustion, you might say.”

  I was unbelievably dense. “What movement?”

  “All the Negroes, Mister Willson, are leaving, going away.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked as if I didn’t believe him.

  “All right, come with me. Let’s go in and watch it.” He opened the car door for me.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go anywhere with him, but on the other hand, I knew I was going. “What about my bike?” I said stupidly.

  “We can put that in the trunk.”

  The trunk of the car was large enough to hold my bicycle and perhaps another one besides. With the chauffeur’s help, I secured it with rope so it wouldn’t bounce and rip the upholstery. Then I climbed in beside Reverend Bradshaw and we set out for New Marsails.

  “Why don’t you tell me all you know about Tucker’s nose-thumbing at the world.” He settled back and turned to me.

  “Like what?” I had gone over what I knew by myself, but perhaps he could help me to bring something to light.

  “Like anything. Strange doings around the household, you might say. A set of the jaw, a determined stride. Anything.”

  “He wrote me a letter. I don’t understand it at all.” I pulled the letter from my pocket and read it to him, then told him what I remembered of my tenth birthday. And perhaps because I knew I had an ear and a mind that would hear and give it thought, I didn’t stop with my recollections but continued, speculating. “You know, when he says, ‘But you would have learned anyway, because you wanted to learn so much,’ well, I don’t know if I would’ve, I don’t know if I could’ve learned without him, but maybe he was trying to say I could do anything if I really set my mind to it. But that doesn’t really mean very much, does it! That’s what everybody tells you. I guess that’s too simple.”

  He seemed excited. “No, I don’t think so. You forget who you’re dealing with, Mister Willson. We’re not talking about a sophisticate drawing inspiration from Plato; we’re talking about an ignorant southern Negro. We’re not talking about the new, complex ideas: the unique thunderbolts of thought that come to men of genius. We’re talking about the old ideas, the simple ones, the fundamental ideas that perhaps we’ve overlooked, or never even tried. But Tucker Caliban cannot overlook them; he has just discovered them. I like your analysis, Mister Willson. What else can you think of? I can see him already, raging against untold and countless wrongs and humiliations; this anger welling up in his soul, the blood of vengeance just behind his eyes.”

  “No, that’s wrong. You’re wrong. There’s no anger in Tucker. He accepted everything almost as if he knew it was going to happen and there was no way he could stop it.”

  “Perhaps so. Well, continue.”

  I was thinking about last summer again, but trying to sort out the important parts. I didn’t say anything for a few moments. We were passing through Sutton now, past Mister Thomason’s porch, which perhaps because it was around dinner time was empty, or perhaps it was because of this movement Reverend Bradshaw was talking about. “Well, something finally made those loafers move.”

  “And why not? Tucker Caliban has made us chase up and down the countryside trying to find out what makes him tick.” He shook his head. “This is truly remarkable, a miracle.”

  We climbed up and over the Ridge, and in the orange dusk light, far off down the hill and across the river, we could see the city, from this distance seeming just as it had always been, blissful, carefree.

  I had last summer sorted out now, and told him, finishing with my surprise that my father had ever sold Tucker the land and farm in the first place.

  Reverend Bradshaw smiled to himself. “Men do strange things sometimes, Mister Willson, especially of our—your father’s and my—generation. Don’t forget, we came along in a time when people were truly idealistic, when discontentment with the existing order of society caused us to break the pattern of our lives, break patterns our ancestors, our parents, had formed for us.”

  I started to laugh. “My father? My father. If you knew him, you’d know better.”

  “I do know him,” he stated flatly. I turned to him astonished.

  “You know him?”

  He smiled at me this time. “No need to be alarmed, Mister Willson. I know him as I know them all. All of the boys, now men, all of us who grew up with the Depression, cut our teeth on the Spanish Civil War, and flirted with Dame Communism. Some of us even married her. Others married, then divorced her and could never really fall in love again.” His eyes went dull, far away, as if he could not only remember but see and feel those days.

  “Not my father!” I broke in on his memories.

  He turned to me. “Men, I still maintain, do strange things when weaned in strange times.”

  “Not my father.” I repeated softer this time, then laughed because I sounded like an echo.

  Reverend Bradshaw didn’t laugh. “You shall discover many a strange thing about your father as you grow older.” He smiled again, but it was more a leer.

  We had moved closer to New Marsails, past the empty, darkening fields where already corn and cotton shot small green plants in rows, and now crossed the black bridge into the Northside. The streets were littered with the bits and scraps of a vacated, discarded life: worn-out clothing, mattresses, broken toys, picture frames, chipped furniture, all the things the Negroes could not carry in their satchels or on their backs. There were not many people, a few stragglers carrying bundles of brown paper tied with cord or white laundry string. On a cane, an old man hobbled by, probably toward the depot. He wore a Mexican sombrero, sported a knotted white beard. A woman, alone, sped along the gutter in a wheel chair, a small suitcase in her lap. She was a pale gray color, though she should have been very dark, and looked like she hadn’t been out in the sunlight in many years.

  We drove on toward the depot, but when we came within three blocks we found we couldn’t go any farther because the way was cut off by state troopers in cowboys hats and steel-blue puttees, and New Marsails policemen in light blue. Beyond the roadblock, crushing toward the depot, were the Negroes, all kinds, light, dark, short, fat, thousands of them. A few sang hymns and spirituals, but most stood quietly, inching forward, thoughtful, triumphant, knowing they couldn’t be stopped. They shuffled steadily forward, gazing ahead and slightly upward at the depot building, seeing only the very crest of the white stone dome.

  Bradshaw bent to a microphone at his left side. “Clement, we’re getting out. Wait for us here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Clement’s voice coming through the wires was metallic. “I’ll back up and park, sir.”

  “Come, Mister Willson, and with God’s blessing we’ll have some questions answered.”

  I nodded. We got out of the limousine, skirted the roadblock, and found ourselves almost immediately engulfed by the crowd. We moved forward next to a family of seven—two adults and five children, ranging in ages of ten to a baby in the woman’s arms. The father already had his fare out, a number of bills clutched in his fist. He was very tall, as thin and strong and black as a weathered fence post. His hair was straight. His wife was as tall as I was, and
a murky brown. The children tagged after them, wide-eyed and sleepy, walking like little zombies. “Elwood, I’m tired. I’m tired.” A small girl, just beyond toddling years, turned to her brother. He was a little older.

  “Mama say we’ll be there soon. Quiet.”

  “But I’m tired.”

  Reverend Bradshaw reached out and put his hand on the father’s arm. “God bless you, brother. I’m the Reverend Bennett Bradshaw of the Black Jesuits. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” That surprised me; so that was his interest in this.

  “Elwood, I’m tired.”

  “Hush up down there, Lucille, else I’ll fetch you a slap up side your head.” He looked down at Reverend Bradshaw. “No, go on.”

  “Elwood, I’m tired.”

  The father turned to his wife. “Woman, can’t you keep that child’s mouth closed? You go on now, Reverend…what was your name?”

  “Bradshaw. I just wanted to ask you where you’re going.”

  “We’re going to Boston, I reckon. Got some people live in Roxbury.”

  “I still thinks this is crazy, we packing up and going North. What’ll we do when we gets there?” The wife leaned over and spoke to both Reverend Bradshaw and her husband.

  “Quiet now, I told you we going because it’s right to go.” The husband looked at the woman menacingly.

  “Yes, well, that’s what I’d like to know. Why do you think it’s right to go? Whatever gave you the notion?” We moved on as the man thought of his answer. I noticed from time to time small knots of whites standing along the edges of the crowd, their hands in their pockets. They didn’t look like city people; they must have come in from the small towns in the country. They looked dazed, realizing, I imagine, there was nothing they could do to stop the Negroes. They may have been afraid to try, for anything they might have done could be turned violently against them by the quiet, steadily moving crowd of dark faces.

  Finally the man we had been talking to spoke. “Well, now, I reckon I don’t know where I got the notion. Yesterday, I was coming from work—I sweep up in the Marsails Market, you know—and I meets a cousin of mine. ‘How do, Hilton,’ I says.

  “ ‘How do, Elton,’ he says. ‘When you leaving?’

  “ ‘Leaving where, man?’ I says.

  “ ‘Why, ain’t you heard?’ he says.

  “ ‘Heard what?’ I says.

  “ ‘man,’ he says, ‘man, don’t you know what’s happening? All us black folk is moving out. We all leaving, all over the state we just a-rising up and going away.’

  “Well, you know, I reckoned he was fooling, so I just looks at him for a while, but I sees he ain’t busting out all smiles; he’s serious as a naked man sitting in a barrel of razor blades, so I says, ‘Say, Hilton, what’s this all about?’

  “ ‘Well, it all started Thursday or Wednesday, I ain’t sure, but it seems like all the black folks up in Sutton got it into their heads they just won’t stand for it no more. It ain’t worth fighting because things ain’t getting any better for us here. Even the colored folks in Mississippi got it better and that’s going some. Seems like if this state had really got its ass whipped in the War Between the States we colored folk’d be better off. But this state was the only one in the Confederacy what the Yankees didn’t beat up on.’ At least that’s what Hilton told me this colored man up Sutton way said. He, Hilton that is, he says that there was this colored man up in Sutton who told the Negroes all about it, all about history and all that stuff, and that he said besides that the only way for things to be better was for all the colored folks to move out, to turn their backs on everything we knowed and start new.”

  Reverend Bradshaw turned slightly to me. “Thus begins a legend, Mister Willson.”

  I understood.

  “So anyways, after I talks to Hilton, I runs on home, and tells my wife here to pack up because we leaving tomorrow, that is today, and I don’t want no fooling.” He turned to his wife, forgetting completely about us. “Don’t you see, baby? We got to go. It’s the only way because if…”

  “We’ve seen enough, Mister Willson.” Reverend Bradshaw took my arm and we cut diagonally through the crowd until we had reached the sidewalk. Then we started back toward the car, past a group of whites. I could hear them whispering about me. “He’s a mulatto, that blond one. Why else he with a nigger? He ain’t white, that one, he’s got to be a nigger. But he could sure fool me.” I flushed all over, and then, strangely enough, I felt a bit proud.

  When we made our way back to the roadblock, through which Negroes still streamed, Reverend Bradshaw said, “Well, Mister Willson, it’s unbelievable, but true.” He couldn’t stop shaking his head. “I never would have…” He let it die away. We reached the car, got in, and Reverend Bradshaw bent to the microphone. “Clement, take us back to Sutton.”

  The chauffeur started the car, moved slowly until he found a small alley, took it, cruising cautiously past the garbage cans and debris, until at the other end we could see the darkening sky. We followed small alleys and streets north until the crowds thinned, and by that time were in the Northside, about to turn out onto the Highway and the black bridge.

  Driving now, past those same flat-faced, shingle-roofed, two-window dwellings we’d seen before, which came into view for a second in the headlights of the car, I leaned back, feeling good. “Reverend Bradshaw, do you realize how amazing this all is? Tucker Caliban! who taught me how to ride a bike. Wow! I can just see my sister. When Bethrah said she was marrying Tucker, my sister couldn’t understand it, she thought Bethrah was too good for him. What a coup!” I smiled and shook my head, glanced at Reverend Bradshaw, and to my surprise, found him sitting sadly, his face gloomy, his head on his chest. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, Mister Willson, indeed a coup. It’s wonderful.” He didn’t mean it at all. “You haven’t lived long enough, Mister Willson, to grind away your life for some cause, and then see someone else succeed where you’ve failed.”

  “What difference can it possibly make who did it? It was the thing to do; it might have happened anyway. They didn’t even need Tucker to show them. They could have just got up one day and gone about it. So what difference does it make?” We were climbing to Harmon’s Draw.

  “I’ll tell you the difference.” He pulled slowly forward, looking very tired; when he spoke he took me by surprise with the sadness and resentment in his voice. “You spoke of the Tuckers not needing you, not needing their leaders. Did you ever think that a person like myself, a so-called religious leader needs the Tuckers to justify his existence? The day is fast coming, Mister Willson, when people will realize there isn’t any need for me and people like me. Perhaps for me that day has come already. Your Tuckers will get up and say: I can do anything I want; I don’t need to wait for someone to give me freedom; I can take it myself. I don’t need Mister Leader, Mister Boss, Mister President, Mister Priest, or Mister Minister, or Reverend Bradshaw. I don’t need anyone. I can do whatever I want for myself by myself.”

  I was still too enthralled by it all to realize I couldn’t ever convince him. “But this is what you always wanted, what you Negro leaders worked for. These are your people and they’re freeing themselves.”

  “Yes, and they’ve made me obsolete. How would you like to awake to find yourself obsolete? It’s not particularly heartening or pretty, Mister Willson. Not pretty in the least.”

  I could only stare at him, seeing his eyes lighted sad by the reflection of the head lamps, his fist clenched.

  Then I couldn’t look at him any more. I turned away and found we were hooking down into Sutton, that already the car lamps were lighting the fronts of the stores on the western side of the street. I could see the yellow band that the bulb in Mister Thomason’s store laid out across the Highway.

  And when, after a few seconds, I turned back to Reverend Bradshaw, he was even more sad, his eyes g
lassy and faraway.

  Camille Willson

  LAST NIGHT was almost like twenty years ago. We didn’t have that wonderfully open feeling we used to have, but we talked; and we haven’t done that in a long time. And today, walking down the platform, going to meet Dewey’s train, I felt his hand on my elbow, then sliding down my arm until he was holding my hand. He was almost like the David I loved so much, not young again of course—we won’t ever make up the years we lost—but that David I married aged twenty years in the same way that David would have aged. And I felt a little of the same things, like when we were first married, and I couldn’t hardly wait to get him in bed with me. If he got anywhere near me, I’d be putting my arms around him, getting real close to him or rubbing up against him so only the points of my breasts touched him. I’d squirm around until I knew he could feel them on his chest. And then I’d let him go and act like nothing had happened, like I didn’t know what I was doing. I guess that was all silly, but I loved him so much I couldn’t get enough of being near him.

  Sometimes, even in the middle of the afternoon, I’d get more bold and I’d write him a note:

  Dear David:

  You have ten minutes to finish what you’re doing. Because I’m coming to get you. I love you,

  Camille

  I’d go into where he was reading the newspaper or writing and say, “This note came for you.”

  “Oh?” he’d say.

  “Yes, sir. And she was very pretty, too.” Then I’d just turn around and go out and I’d hear him laugh and say, shouting to me.

  “What am I going to do with you?”

  And I’d say: “You know the answer to that. Come in ten minutes.” And then I’d get everything cooking just right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and set the table. I’d run into the bedroom and get undressed and douse perfume all over me and everything else. By that time, ten minutes would be up and he’d come in unbuttoning his shirt and say, “Where’s the girl who left that note?”