“There’s another black family out here?” he asked half rhetorically.
The mother sighed. Earlier, she’d almost been happy that Tyrone was late, that he hadn’t been there when Schwartz had brought the young man to the cabin. It had allowed her another day to avoid the issue or think there might be a time when she could bring it up with Schwartz before Tyrone’s arrival. Would things have been more difficult but somehow simpler if her darker child had been present when Schwartz’s young man was introduced? Would the young white man have filled in the gaps?
“Honey, your brother’s got a point. Did you tell the young man? You know what he probably thinks. Seeing me didn’t help any.”
“How do you know he even cares about it, that it even matters?”
“A white boy, in Virginia no less, who doesn’t care about race?” Tyrone said incredulously. “Be for real.”
Schwartz dropped her book and walked swiftly out of the cabin into the woods.
“You’ve got to go easier with her, Tyrone. She doesn’t see things as . . . clearly as you, sometimes.”
He reached for his mother’s hand, looked to the woods where Schwartz had disappeared, and reluctantly realized he needed to talk with her.
“How do you know he doesn’t know?” Schwartz asked defensively.
“How many black people have blond hair and pale skin?”
“My lips are thick as yours and you can’t even have a fro.”
“There are white people with fros these days, in case you haven’t noticed.” He had not wanted to become agitated. He knew they were on the one subject that could take his sister over the edge. But he couldn’t stop himself and began talking emphatically with his hands.
“Most white people are not like—”
“Don’t give me that ‘mom is the exception to the rule’ crap for the umpteenth time,” she said angrily, mocking his hand movement.
“Be for real!” he shouted. “Look at the world. I didn’t make it. Did I drag people over here in chains?”
Sitting outside the cabin, she hoped no one could hear her children shouting. She was about to go inside when she heard gunfire echoing from the woods. The shots opened a chasm of fear and regret from an unclosed wound, the death of her husband.
***
She had met her husband, a wiry, tan-skinned, handsome man with thick glasses, at the University of Michigan bookstore a year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was a cashier and he held court with a handful of other Negroes (were there more than that on campus? why had she not noticed them before?) in a lounge just beyond the checkout counter. He had tales of a bohemian weekend in New York and the politics of the new bebop jazz movement. But it was his knowledge of opera that fascinated her. That was an art of both magic and privilege, a harbor. They spent their rare leisure hours in the library’s listening room, worlds away from where they sat.
People stared, but just as many remarked that they made a beautiful couple. They managed to find a justice of the peace willing to conduct a small civil ceremony and then embarked on a visit to astonished, apprehensive, but mostly cordial relatives. Reluctantly, he agreed they would go south to visit his oldest relative.
“I’ll get to meet your great-grandmother, finally.”
“Let’s hope that’s not the operative term,” he had replied.
His great-grandmother was bedridden in rural Alabama, where marriages such as his were tantamount to attacking the local Ku Klux Klan. The now obvious pregnancy (with what turned out to be twins) did not mitigate the situation. The image she would always hold of the great-grandmother was of her eyes. When the elderly woman saw the two of them together for the first time, her eyes widened, then narrowed. There was no malice. It was as if the old woman was trying to read something barely fathomable.
On his way to the closest grocery store, miles from the house, her husband had called from a gas station to say he was having car trouble. She never heard from him again. The car was found torched. Diplomatic but insistent inquiries from the University newspaper and her husband’s doctoral committee prompted authorities to conduct a nominal investigation. Services were held without the body.
***
Tyrone had pushed Schwartz to the ground after the first shot. After the second blast, he was overcome and ran toward where the shots rang out. She looked up and shouted his name just as she saw someone with a rifle turn and dart through the trees. The flash of the face she saw stabbed at her heart.
He was almost out of ammo and the colored boy was coming for him, moving with the legendary swiftness he thought those people had. Would his fleeing make him seem less of a hero to her? He knew the woods. Surely, a few twist and turns would leave the black bastard in the dust. He miscalculated.
Catching a glint of sun on the gun barrel edging through the knot of a tree, Tyrone crouched and, despite his anger, almost laughed to himself. He could hear his mother telling him the story of a changeling being left in a tree, traded for a human baby.
“I got your changeling,” he thought and gritted his teeth. The ground was soft with moss. Only the occasional faint snap of a twig betrayed his movement and he left plenty of time between those sounds.
When he’d seen it was a white boy shooting, he knew it was his sister’s lover and that she would be torn by the assault. But that somehow made him all the more furious. It took him back to the process of slowly learning why his father was not around.
Their mother had carefully fed them age-appropriate bits of information until one afternoon, when it all collapsed into the ugly truth of a body burned beyond recognition. It had left the three of them with an unspeakable bond.
Tyrone managed to surprise him from behind, but not before the white man in the hollow tree pulled the gun from where it had been pointing. He tried to re-aim, but Tyrone was on him. They were bloodied in the struggle before the gun went off.
Later, Tyrone lied to his mother and sister and said he’d been outrun. They would be leaving the next morning anyway.
Months later, when the police came to their mother’s door, she told them she didn’t know where her son or daughter were. The circles beneath her eyes caused the police to pity her and suspect she was lying. She didn’t tell what little she knew, that something terrible must have happened to cause her son to leave with no explanation and for her daughter, denying pregnancy, to insist on going with him. As much as anything, their false cheerfulness had disturbed their mother’s sleep.
***
Schwartz and her brother were looking for a fresh start, albeit in the city of their birth, where their mother had moved in with in-laws after her husband’s murder. Though she had eventually moved them all back to Detroit because the factories paid more than the universities, Tyrone and Schwartz knew enough about DC to pretend they’d always lived there, that they had not arrived from a distance with a story.
On the long bus trip to the nation’s capital, they had argued over the question of making a living. Details eluded them. It always ended in the same place—something menial until something better came along.
The apartment they rented had once clearly been some sort of store. The door opened directly onto the sidewalk: no steps, lawn, or porch. The bathroom was tiny and the shower jerry-rigged into place. She found it functional but, though he tried to hide it, it depressed Tyrone deeply—not so much the physical place but that it had come to this, that he would be lucky to stay out of prison, to say nothing of fulfilling his dreams. Despite her misgivings about spending money they didn’t have, she agreed to go to the bar with him after they’d stored their meager belongings.
The place, a few blocks from the university, was crowded, but they managed to find a table. He went to stand in one of the lines at the bar to order. He returned to find his sister talking with a white couple at the next table. They tried to hide their surprise seeing Tyrone sit down with what they had assumed was a white woman. They were equally surprised and a bit relieved to notice the incredible resemblance be
tween the two.
“I know how you feel,” the young man was saying to Schwartz as Tyrone sat down. “We should both be back at the dorm working on the same doggone paper.”
The woman with him, close to being drunk, almost sputtered, “It’s so stupid, though. I mean I can’t even tell my mom. She would be so pissed-off to know that I have to write about a brother and sister having sex, even if it is in an opera.”
“Sigmund und Sieglinde,” Schwartz piped up. “Actually, their incest is supposed to be an outrage; it’s the result of, well, it’s a long story, as I’m sure you know, but it’s not glorified or anything.”
“Wow, are you opera fans or something?” the man asked.
“It was our dad’s dissertation,” Tyrone said with a sad smile.
“Can we call your dad?” the woman said with a look that was half joke and half desperation.
“He’s dead.”
“Sorry to hear that. We uh . . .”
“He died before we were born.”
“Oh, God,” the woman frowned.
“We’re gonna stop bugging you now,” the man said, looking slightly embarrassed.
“Wait,” the woman interrupted. She placed both hands on the table and mustered as serious an expression as she could under the circumstances. “You’ve obviously read the dissertation. How fast can you write? We can pay.”
Rick saw Schwartz walking towards the house from the bus stop. The closer she got, the sadder she looked.
“What’s the matter?” He was afraid to ask about Tyrone. He felt a low gray ceiling descending over the summer. Without Tyrone and Schwartz, Rick would be constrained to the pool halls where Andre had not run scams, and the sections of the Smithsonian where Andre’s status as a guard allowed Rick free access, all of which Rick had already thoroughly perused.
Even though he had refused Tyrone’s pleas to help churn out papers, he had actually begun writing a paper for a business student taking a philosophy course, comparing Hamlet and Bigger Thomas, entitled “Choosing a Course of Action Even When There Seems to Be No Choice.” He had wanted to return to Schwartz and Tyrone’s because he wanted to talk books. He told himself writing the paper was the price of admission.
“Did they tear the place up?”
“You know they did! And he didn’t even try to hide. He gave himself up because . . .”
She looked down, her hands on either side of her face. “He didn’t want them to harm me.”
“Did they find the stuff he wrote, I mean the memoirs and the play, The Report?”
“Who the hell cares? They weren’t there because of what he wrote.”
Rick only had the slightest clue as to why the police would be after Tyrone, things Tyrone had muttered when he was really high.
***
Andre had been assigned to the new part of the museum, a theater where they reenacted the trial of John Brown. He was looking forward to it, a much welcomed break in the monotony. He was standing near the turnstiles, waiting for more detailed instructions from his supervisor, when he noticed a group of men approaching. Some were in wheelchairs; some were in military uniform. A young, black, nearly bald GI ran to catch up with them and approached Andre, smiling.
“Got a bunch of vets here on field day.” He handed Andre about a dozen tickets.
“The ticket taker isn’t here yet, she’s—”
He recognized Wilson in a wheelchair and walked over to him. The man in the chair looked up, unsmiling but not unfriendly.
“Hey, man. How’s it going?”
“How the hell does it look like it’s going?”
“I didn’t mean anything like that. I—”
Wilson dropped his head. “I know you didn’t.”
He reached into his breast pocket, unfolded a piece of paper, looked at it, and handed it to Andre. It had the time, date and place for the anti-war march.
***
Andre didn’t get home until long after dark and Rick could tell he had been drinking. He wasn’t as funny as usual. After Rick introduced him to Schwartz, Andre joked in his best Butterfly McQueen voice that he “don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies,” then remarked that white folks wouldn’t understand the joke about the joke. When that was met with silence, he stared at Schwartz for a moment.
“You’re not . . .”
“My mother is!” she snapped.
“Don’t get mad at me. It’s dark, I’ve had a couple of shots, and it’s been a long day, all right? I assume a lot’s been happening ’cause you’re here without your husband.”
“He’s her brother, not her husband. There’s stuff I need to tell you.”
“Tell me in the morning. I’m going to bed. You and me are going to the anti-war march and they start gathering early. You can come too if you want,” he said to Schwartz.
***
Andre woke up before everyone else and fixed breakfast. Rick came down and Andre began talking about Wilson. They were about to walk out of the door when Schwartz came down. She seemed somehow more pregnant than the night before and had to convince the two guys that walking was good for a pregnant woman.
They walked over to the stadium and got on the bus that would take them to the National Mall. The bus was already packed with young white people. It seemed all the men had long hair. Some of them stared at the trio of Andre, Rick, and Schwartz as they paid their fares. A woman got up to let Schwartz take a seat. One young man thought she looked familiar, but when he realized where he knew her from, decided to stay silent.
None of them had ever been to a protest march before, to say nothing of one that large. Schwartz first learned about it because Tyrone paid to have some of the flyers printed. Rick had first read about it in an underground paper he found on a table in the Museum cafeteria while he waited for Andre’s shift to end. They saw dozens, then hundreds of people walking to the National Mall. They arrived overwhelmed by what seemed like millions.
The crowd was overwhelmingly white, as Andre had expected. The few black men he saw made him think of Wilson handing him the flyer from a wheel chair. The image wore on him. He zoned out during the speeches. After buying a Black Panther paper from a woman he knew, he was besieged by white people trying to sell him other papers. He was very ready to leave.
Schwartz was the one who noticed Rick was missing. She began looking for him as Andre tried to convince her they needed a plan find his cousin. She made it to the edge of the crowd where the police presence was evident. Andre was beginning to feel the effects of the previous night’s drinking and to question why the hell he was there with this white looking black woman he barely knew. Suddenly, he couldn’t even remember her name.
“Hey, hey wait,” he shouted.
But she couldn’t hear as she approached a police officer to ask if there were somewhere lost minors were gathered. Another cop who had seen them emerging from the crowd assumed Andre was an unwanted pursuer, approached, and shoved him to the ground. Andre hopped to his feet as the crowd around him gave way and two other cops rushed in for backup.
Acknowledgments
Any fault you find with this text rests with the so-called author. All that engages you is the result of the collaborative effort of the following gracious people: Tyrone Williams, Karla Passalacqua, Jane Slaughter, Dennis Teichman, Peter Markus, Melba Joyce Boyd, Chris Tysh, M. L. Liebler, Rick Ward, Annie Martin and the entire wonderful team at Wayne State University Press, my family Kathryn Savoie and Anika Hunter for putting up with my hours away from them as well as for their deep listening, and my mother for seeds from decades ago that remain.
About the Author
kim d. hunter has published two collections of poetry: borne on slow knives and edge of the time zone. His poetry appears in Rainbow Darkness, What I Say, Black Renaissance Noire, 6X6 #35, and elsewhere.
He received a 2012 Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts and he works in Detroit providing media support to social justice groups.
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kim d. hunter, The Official Report on Human Activity
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 19