by Attica Locke
There was another couple on the beach that night, their feet hanging out of the front seat of a baby blue Ford Fairlane that was parked across the sand. Jay could hear the woman laughing, high-pitched squeals that melted into the soft, wet air, sounding like wind chimes. He thought he could stay out here all night. He rested his chin on Cynthia’s shoulder. She smelled like cloves.
“He come around Scott Street?” Cynthia asked, still on Roger.
“He wants to get more involved with the Africa thing.”
“You know he was hanging around SDS last semester,” Cyn
thia said.
She picked up his right hand and held it open like a seashell. She ran her fingers across the inside of his palm. “He asks a lot of questions. You ever notice that?” She looked up, staring at the shoreline, the salty caps doing a languid two-step, back, then forward, then back again. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Roger Holloway had indeed been coming around the duplex on Scott Street for months. He was a skinny kid they were always bumming smokes from, who always had extra change in his pocket if somebody was hungry. He said he’d dropped out of Prairie View A&M the year before, but Jay suspected he’d never 198 Attic a L o c ke
spent a day inside a college classroom. Not that Prairie View was Harvard, but still, Roger seemed to lack some basic grasp of American history, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But he knew who Karl Marx was and claimed to read the Work ers World newspaper. And he was hot on Africa. Which was Jay’s baby, where he was finally finding his true political voice. Years earlier, Jay had stumbled on his first sit-in on the way to class and decided then and there he’d rather be a part of history than study it. After that, there was no turning back for him. Once one dorm was integrated, they all had to be. Once one black pro
fessor was hired, there had to be a dozen more. He would settle for nothing less than total equality. Jay rode this initial wave of activism as a rank-and-file member of SNCC, the Student Non
violent Coordinating Committee, which had a strong presence on campus and across the South. SNCC came out of the SCLC tradition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King’s group through the ’50s and ’60s. It was a tradition steeped in the assumption that moralism is a real and potent weapon, or the presumption, rather, that you could shame white people into acting right.
Well . . . that was one way of doing it.
But it required a kept tongue and an unyielding faith in a higher power, something Jay did not have. Much as he would go on to preach on the limits of a spiritual approach to civil rights, much as he would chide the churchified for taking it lying down, he always, deep down, admired men like King, for whom the ability to love was a gift, like an ear for music. Jay, on the other hand, lived a life of constant struggle against his own cynicism, his well-earned knowledge of the limits of human grace. To tell the truth of it, he was as angry with his stepfather as he was at any white man, and angrier at his own father for leaving him behind.
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 199
But it wasn’t just Jay. A lot of the young people were getting tired of the we-shall-overcome way of attacking an increas
ingly complex problem. So in ’67, Jay and Bumpy Williams, Lloyd Mackalvy and Marcus Dupri started meeting at Bumpy’s mother’s place on Scott Street. She was a night nurse at Ben Taub Hospital and rarely home. They named their organization Coalition for Better Race Relations and nicknamed it COBRA. They were still doing stuff with SNCC, but beyond the campus agenda, they worked within the local black community to help find decent housing for folks, get somebody’s son a lawyer if he needed one, and they funded ( Jay pointedly never asking Bumpy where the money came from) an after-school program at Yates High School.
Sometime in the late winter of that year, Bumpy got arrested for passing out flyers on Texas Southern University’s campus. He was promoting a rally in support of two older gentlemen who’d been picked up for loitering while waiting at a bus stop on Dowling. Bumpy was booked on charges of trespassing and being an all-around public nuisance. It was Jay who came up with the idea for a march to the courthouse downtown. He walked the campus, going dorm to dorm, walked the neighborhood around the college until the soles of his feet bled, until he got nearly five hundred people to agree to march with him. They would meet on campus, cut up Wheeler to Main and walk in unity, storm
ing the courthouse, not leaving until they got justice for Brother Williams and the two other men in lockup. He wrote the press release himself, stayed up typing all night, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes, listening to Otis Redding on his turn
table.
They were at the courthouse almost seventy-two hours, a round-the-clock vigil. Jay didn’t have a law degree then, but he knew enough to know the cops couldn’t hold people indefinitely, 200 Attic a L o c ke
not without a formal indictment. He got the Post and the Chronicle there, got his name and face in the paper. He made the mistake of sending the clipping to his mother in Nigton. She mailed it back about a week later with a note saying she’d raised him better and wasn’t he due for a haircut. Still, Jay became something of a hero. Bumpy was released, and a few days later, they let the other two men go as well. COBRA was now a force to be reckoned with, getting more attention than the local SNCC chapter. It was Jay Porter whom Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the national chapter of SNCC, called when he was coming through Texas for the first time. An antiwar rally was happening in Aus
tin that April, and Stokely wanted to speak in Houston while he was visiting the state. All through that winter and spring, he’d been traveling the country, speaking on campuses or wherever he could get a hall, reworking and refining a position paper he was calling “Toward Black Liberation.” The remarks, which Jay and his group had not yet heard (as no Houston paper would print them), were apparently so inflammatory that Carmichael was being blamed for riots all across the country. According to local police, wherever Stokely spoke, there was gon’ be trouble. Texas Southern, just a few minutes from the U of H campus, flat-out wouldn’t have him. The University of Houston also said no. Jay simply ignored them. The night Stokely came through town, Cullen Auditorium was free. So that’s where they held the rally . . . just went in and took it over. Word got around campus, and some three hundred people showed up, more than the hall could hold. They were spilling out into the hallway, onto the grass lawn outside. Some of them curious, wanting to be a part of the thing that everyone was talking about. But there was also a contingent of rebels—conservative white students who didn’t want this loudmouth nigger on their campus—and they raised painted signs and fists to make it known. And just beyond the Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 201
doors, in martial formation on the lawn outside the auditorium, were a hundred officers from the police and sheriff’s depart
ments, dressed from head to toe in riot gear.
It was after 9:00 p.m. by the time Stokely took the podium, after Bumpy and Marcus Dupri gave two fiery introductions. Some of the rebels had pushed their way to the front row. The air in the hall was muggy, thick with the breathy heat of anticipation, everyone waiting and wondering . . . just what was this brother gon’ say? Stokely came onstage dressed clean as a whistle, in a pressed suit and thin black tie, not a wrinkle on him, and he was wearing shades, black and wide, like Ray Charles. Dude looked like the bass player for Booker T. and the MG’s, like a blues phi
losopher. He leaned over the podium, into the mike, pushing his shades up on the bridge of his nose as if they were prescription glasses, as if their darkness helped him see things clearly. Jay can still remember his first words.
Stokely looked directly at the white rebels and said, “One of the most pointed illustrations of the need for ‘black power’ in a society that has degenerated into a form of totalitarianism is to be found in the very debate itself.” Then to everyone else, “Wel
come, brothers and sisters.”
The crowd went hog wild, black
students whooping and cheering.
The white students in the audience, rebels and liberals alike, were struck dumb, silenced by the sheer force of words they didn’t understand, their own language turned against them. Backstage, Jay felt his whole world was busting wide open. Here was this brother onstage, achingly hip and capable of intellectu
ally skating over all of their heads. No one had heard a speech like this, a framing of the fight for justice in such fundamentally political and theoretical terms. The term “black power” was rela
tively new; it had started at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, the 202 Attic a L o c ke
year before, one night after Stokely was arrested for the twentyseventh time. “The only way we’re gonna stop these white men from whuppin’ us is to take over,” he’d said. “We been saying
‘freedom’ for six years and we ain’t got nothing. What we gon’
start saying now is . . . black power.”
The term caught on and contributed to Stokely’s militant reputation, but as he began to lay it down that night in Cullen Auditiorium, to lay out his case, it sounded less radical to Jay and more like good old common sense. It was, frankly, gospel. The black students waved their hands in the air, clapping and calling out to Brother Carmichael as if they were in church.
“The concept of integration is based on the assumption that there is not value in the Negro community . . .”
Mm, hmm. That’s right.
“ So they siphon off acceptable Negroes into the middle class . . .”
Preach on it, brother.
“ And each year a few more Negroes, armed with their pass
ports—their university degrees—escape into middle-class Amer
ica . . .”
Come on now. Tell it.
“ And one day the Harlems and the Wattses and the Fifth Wards will stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration.”
Right on, man.
“ You know, Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wished to abolish itself. And if one listens to some of our ‘moderate’ Negro leaders, it appears that the Ameri
can Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. And, my black brothers and sisters, it stops tonight.”
The crowd was clapping and stomping, so loud that Jay could feel it backstage, as if the walls were shaking. He could not believe the heat this man was generating, like a lightning rod in a prairie Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 203
storm. It wasn’t just the man, but, really, the ideas, the words . . . two words: black and power.
“So what you’re preaching, man,” one of the white students down front asked, a cat dressed in cords and a denim patch jacket,
“isn’t it just racism of a different color? Isn’t ‘black power’ inher
ently anti-white?”
“See, you’re still putting yourself at the center of it, jack. That’s what you ain’t yet getting. Black folks ain’t talking about you, or to you, no more.”
He had to be escorted out the back entrance that night, not because of rioting, but because so many people wanted to shake his hand, wanted a word with the brother. Jay had to shuttle him out of the rear of the auditorium to avoid a mob. He shoved Stokely into Lloyd Mackalvy’s VW bug, and the three of them rode on to Austin that night, to accompany Stokely at the anti
war rally at the University of Texas.
That was the first night somebody put a gun in Jay’s hand. The Klan had threatened publicly to meet Mr. Carmichael on Highway 71 that night, stopping the car before it got past Bastrop. They promised a good show for anyone man enough to come out and watch. Lloyd kept a little .22 pistol under the front seat. He handed the gun to Jay and appointed him lookout. Stokely talked the whole way on the road that night, his head leaned against the passenger-side window, coat turned around and tucked under his chin like a blanket. He was mumbling softly over the radio about how they were gon’ change the world, how it was gon’ be better for their kids. Jay remembers Aretha had a new cut out that spring, a haunting cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The music was so slow and pretty that Lloyd turned up the radio, and the three of them rode in silence in the car, smoking cigarettes and listening to Aretha sing of hope, Jay with Lloyd’s pistol still in his hand. 204 Attic a L o c ke
Stokely would shortly leave SNCC for the Panthers, joining Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton and Elaine Brown. The civil rights movement as any of them knew it would never be the same. Black nationalism became the order of the day, less a focus on integration than on self-reliance and full-scale sup
port of black pride and culture, entrepreneurship and political uplift, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Bumpy got on this big-time. He pushed for the complete disbanding of COBRA. The old Scott Street group reinvented itself as AABL, Afro-Americans for Black Liberation, or “able.” Bumpy and Lloyd Mackalvy had fallen head over heels in love with black nationalism.
But something else was happening to Jay.
His political focus was beginning to shift to a higher plane. The more he read, the more he was starting to see injustice as a global problem. Oppression was pandemic, like a cancer; wher
ever it existed, it would spread. And maybe justice could work the same way; maybe it could spread too. Which meant that the problems in Africa, say—poverty and the imperialism that cre
ated it—were as important as the problems here at home; they were actually one and the same.
While Bumpy and Lloyd got more and more heated about
“black power”—refusing to coordinate rallies with SNCC or any white groups on campus—Jay kept an eye on the war and com
munism, and global economics in particular, working the topic into speeches and editorials for local papers and traveling on his own dime across the lower states to speak to other colleges and political leaders.
He knew he was being followed.
They found bugs in the phones on Scott Street. They spotted undercover cops at every rally. And Jay knew somebody was stag
ing break-ins, stealing drafts of speeches and fund-raising ros
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 205
ters. But it wasn’t until the feds shot those boys in Chicago that Jay began to believe his life might be in danger—not just a ran
dom act of violence, but a planned execution. By 1970, you could feel the tension running under everything. There were suddenly guns on the table at every meeting. No one knew who they could trust. Even brothers and sisters who went way, way back, had been friends for years, were suddenly tight lipped around each other. They started spending almost as much time testing each other’s loyalty as they did talking about their fledgling political programs.
It was a brilliant strategy.
If no one knew who the rats were, then no one could be trusted. It was just the kind of thing that would tear a political organization apart.
In all this, Roger Holloway had completely escaped Jay’s atten
tion. His lack of political passion and his high-level interest in bedding most of the sisters affiliated with Jay and Bumpy’s group made Jay think of him more as a lazy lothario than a revolution
ary, a fox who’d found his way into a well-stocked henhouse. He did, however, take a strong interest in something Jay was trying to pull together: an African liberation rally to be held on cam
pus. It was already shaping up to be the biggest political move of Jay’s life. Jay wasn’t sure Roger could find Africa on a map, but he was willing to do grunt work—making cold calls and mimeo
graphing flyers—so Jay kind of took him in, teaching him how to organize a rally, who to call for money, and what lies to tell the administration to keep them off your back. Alfreda Watkins was on fund-raising then, a one-woman committee. She was a beautiful, long-limbed sister with a big soft Afro, and Jay had a sneaking suspicion she was Roger’s true African inspiration. 206 Attic a L o c ke
Cy
nthia turned away from the water, turning her whole body around to face him. She wrapped her hands behind his neck, locking them. He could feel the heels of her bony feet digging into the small of his back. She rested her forehead on his. “I love you,” she whispered. “You know that, right?”
He dug his fingers into her flesh, the folds of her skirt. Please stay, the song went. Stay in my corner. Cynthia pressed her cheek against his.
She whispered in his ear, “I’m just saying . . . be careful, Jay.”
He would think about this night many times over the years. He would remember her face in the moonlight and the salty kisses. And he would wonder why he hadn’t noticed Roger sooner, why he needed Cynthia Maddox to point out Roger’s suspicious behavior . . . and why she had been so eager to do so.
C h a p t e r 1 6 When Jay first started practicing law, when he first went out on his own, he was interested only in criminal law; he initially built his whole practice around it. He was six months in before he realized there was no money in it. Maybe for men like Charlie Luckman, with his political connections and well-financed cli
ents who are capable of spending large sums of money to take care of their legal indiscretions. Most of Jay’s clients are walk-ins or people who get his name out of the phone book or friends of Bernie’s extended church family. People who, for the most part, cannot afford to pay him. Over the years, he’s engineered all manner of creative financing plans. Monthly installments and deferred payments. In lieu of cash, he’s taken everything from used furniture to free haircuts. One client actually tried to pay 208 Attic a L o c ke
him with fresh buttermilk he said he’d drive up once a month from a cousin’s farm in Victoria.
But Rolly Snow was a different story altogether. Sometime in the spring of 1978, Rolly walked into Jay’s office and took a seat across from his desk. Half Creole and half Okla
homa Chickasaw, he was long and lean, with caramel-colored skin and jet black hair that he wore in a short ponytail. He never shaved, and he had his name tattooed across the knuckles of his right hand. He’d shared a cell once with Marcus Dupri, who had apparently gotten heavy into drugs about a year or so after Jay’s trial, after AABL disbanded for good. Rolly announced that Mar