Not long after that their little gang disbanded. The twins discovered girls, Sug got expelled, and Rhoden went out for football. For a while the Lecturer explored the campus still, and every now and then he was joined by Mark or Marvin, but for the rest of school he was mainly a loner. By the time he started college, he had largely lost track of the gang, except that Sug had joined a real gang and dropped out. When the Lecturer returned to New Haven for his father’s funeral, his mother told him that Rhoden was in medical school down south somewhere. The Packer family had moved to Brooklyn. She had no idea what had happened to the children. Sug was dead.
In May of 1969, the Lecturer returned to New Haven for the last time, recruited to serve on the jury that tried Alex Rackley at the Black Panther headquarters on Orchard Street. He traveled clandestinely. He was careful to avoid places where his mother or family friends might show up. Later, when the police and the FBI were busy scouring the entire Northeast for Rackley’s accused killers, the Lecturer was concealing two of the suspects almost in plain sight—underneath the Yale campus. He led them down into the tunnels he had learned so well as a boy, showed them the corners where no maintenance man ever trod, and left them to their own devices. Their occasional forays upward to find a bathroom led to rumors about homeless men living in the dormitory basements.
Junie accompanied him on this trip. She was just back from Chicago, where she had attended the convention of the Students for a Democratic Society. The Lecturer had been present only for a day, but he had heard reports. Junie had made a nuisance of herself by buttonholing fellow radicals in coffeehouses and safe houses to suggest that the time had come to renounce violence as an instrument of social change. She preached the same sermon to the Lecturer as they drove up to New Haven, where, masquerading as husband and wife, they stayed in a motel out on the Long Wharf. Even as they lay in their separate twin beds she would not leave the subject alone. He was not at all surprised when Junie turned out to be the only member of the jury who voted to spare Rackley’s life. She had once been a law student, and was a demon for due process and proper burdens of proof.
(5)
That was four months ago. Since then the remnants of Agony have begun to scatter. The handful who holed up in this once-elegant Harlem town house were the last. The Lecturer stands at the front window once more, squinting at Edgecombe Avenue through the sniper sight mounted atop the Remington Gamemaster. The sharp little circle dances along the block, pausing here and there to pick out details in the gathering dusk as he tries to decide whether he is watching the random Brownian motion of life or the carefully scripted changing of the guard. The blue van has finally moved on, as have the men on the front stoop of the aging low-rise apartment building across the way who looked a little too alert to be passing a bottle back and forth. A Con Ed truck has broken down. The driver is cursing as he hunts around beneath the hood. The Lecturer sees nobody else in the cab, but he is willing to bet that a repair crew will be along soon, and FBI agents love to play repair crews. Lights have come on in a few windows across the street, and any one of them might mark a static observation post. The stalled truck looks like a good place to conceal heavy weapons. He watches the scene for a few more minutes, then shrugs. Either the pigs are here or they are not. There is nothing he can do. He sets the Gamemaster back in its place, checks the booby traps on the attic door, and returns to his desk. As he picks up the Flair, his eye falls once more on the Gamemaster. The rifle is mostly for show. Frederick procured it for him. Frederick can procure most things, and enjoys being secretive about how he does what he does. Sharon, rather smarmily, accused the Lecturer of bourgeois sentimentality for wanting a Gamemaster in the first place. But Frederick in his strange, shadowy way understood. So did Junie. Like the others, she did not much care for the symbolism, but she understood. A year and a half ago, a Remington Gamemaster was used to murder Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Lecturer catches himself wondering what Kimberly would have thought, but it’s too late to ask.
(6)
The boy turned out to have a flair for mathematics, and when he finished high school he won a scholarship to Cornell to study physics. His parents could scarcely contain their pride. The church gave a party. People came up to the boy and shook his hand and tucked envelopes in his jacket: a quarter here, a dollar or two there, it all began to add up. He was saving to buy a car and he thought the gifts from the party might put him over the top, but his mother kissed him and took the money away and put it in the savings account she had opened for him when he was born. Be patient, she told him. Let it grow. His father beamed, and told the boy how wise his mother was. The boy believed every word. Years later he would marvel at how his parents lived in such utter thrall to the property trap.
Ithaca, New York, was another world. Compared to his hometown, it was almost rural. Unlike New Haven, a Democratic stronghold with an uneasy balance of power among the Negroes, the Irish, and the Italians, all of them in turn subject to the hegemony of Yale, Ithaca was white and Republican, a town whose tiny colored population was seen but never heard. At Cornell, he performed respectably but not sensationally in his science classes. In the fall of his sophomore year, he enrolled in a seminar on cultural anthropology taught by a youngish professor named Tris Hadley. The Lecturer knew nothing about the field, but the course sounded interesting. As it turned out there were only five students. The class was being boycotted because the House Un-American Activities Committee had labeled Hadley a Communist. The professor heatedly denied the charge, and the university stood tepidly beside him, but the students had taken protective action on their own. Nobody wanted to explain to a potential employer or graduate school why Professor Tristan Hadley was on his résumé. In the classroom, Hadley did what any good seminar leader does: nudged them toward his point of view without ever quite saying what it was. He did not assign Marx but he did urge them to consider whether the culture of democracy and markets that the West was slowly imposing upon the rest of the world produced any significant good other than profits for the capitalist. He gave them the Opium Wars, he gave them the settlement of the Americas, he gave them the colonization of Africa. In which of these circumstances, he asked, was the West truly driven by any motive but the motive to profit off the labor and resources of others? In which of these circumstances, he asked, are the indigenous people made better off through the hegemony of the West? One young woman, an economics major named Bernstein, had the temerity to suggest that a rising tide lifted all boats. Hadley was scathing. Even if you’re right, he said, it’s interesting how it’s always the man in the fifty-foot yacht who tells the family in the leaky canoe that they’re better off at sea. As for the Lecturer, he at this time was still dimly in touch with the church of his childhood. Terrible things might have happened, he told the class, but at least people came to Christ. Jesus loves everyone. There were a few snickers. Hadley gave him a carefully measured look, less than scornful but more than pedagogical, a look the young sophomore was already coming to know, a look that says: I will let you off the hook this time because you are a Negro and I am a liberal, but sooner or later you will have to concede that I am right and you are wrong. What Hadley said was: If your Christ loves everyone, it’s an interesting coincidence that He always grants victory to the colonizer.
Two weeks later, the Lecturer went to his adviser and switched his major from physics to philosophy.
The following spring the Lecturer was part of a reading group that met twice a month at Hadley’s house well out in Cayuga Heights. The reading was heavy and radical, ranging from Lenin to Fanon at the hard end, and from Jean-Paul Sartre to Alphaeus Hunton at the soft. Over the course of the term, Hadley slowly weeded out those he considered less dedicated. By spring there were only two, and when the other young man took a position at his family firm on Wall Street for the summer, there was only the Lecturer. It was 1961, and Professor Hadley was headed south to do voter registration work. Why don’t you join us? he suggested. The Lecturer ne
ver hesitated. He told his parents that he would not be coming home to help in the church as he had promised. But at the last minute, the professor announced that he wouldn’t be going. So the Lecturer drove south instead with Hadley’s girlfriend, a colored graduate student named Kimberly Elden, who told him that the professor had stayed in Ithaca because, number one, he was a coward, and number two, he had run out of excuses to give his fiancée.
Kimberly was tall and dark and wise and reminded him of Miss Deveaux, who long ago had been his Sunday school teacher. She told him that Tristan had her cast as his Iseult, but without any of the messy dying-of-grief business. Kimberly was from a grand Negro family that was on the verge of disowning her, not because of her left politics but because she seemed to have no interest in marriage. During the drive she told him that her great-grandfather had been in the construction business in New Haven until the whites drove him out. Kimberly herself had grown up in Harlem, on 162nd Street, in one of those apartments overlooking the Polo Grounds that his father was always pointing out. You could use a pair of binoculars to watch the games through the window, she said. At this bit of intelligence, the Lecturer’s chest pulsed with hot resentment.
They did voter registration work together in Sunflower County, and spent their days raising great clouds of dust as they motored up and down the hardpan, usually with a white student or two along for what Kimberly liked to call coloration, by which she meant camouflage. A local activist was always in the car, someone who knew the lanes and the farms and the people. Not one of the thousands of Negroes in Sunflower County was registered to vote. The citizens’ council told the press that the Negroes simply were not interested. When the students knocked on doors, they found many of the stone-faced sharecroppers openly hostile toward the outsiders who brought such suffering upon their heads. All of them had friends who had tried to register and been thrown off land their families had farmed for a century. Even the middle class was uneasy. A doctor who had tried to organize a local chapter of the NAACP had been driven from town. The police chief of Indianola, the county seat, was said to be keeping lists of local Negroes who were considered unreliable, to be dealt with after the students and the press went home.
In the evenings at the boardinghouse on the edge of town, Kimberly would kick off her shoes and close her eyes and mutter that the work they were doing was pointless. Instead of helping the sharecroppers to form a revolutionary consciousness, they were urging them to participate in an illegitimate system that guaranteed their continued serfdom. The Lecturer was torn. He saw her point but also experienced a tug. He liked these people and wanted to help them free themselves. In bed, Kimberly told him he was a fool. Negroes could be lumpen, she said, or they could be petit bourgeois. The one thing they could never be was free. Freedom would require the elimination of racism, the elimination of racism would require the taming of the ego, and the taming of the ego would require the regimentation that only the Party could provide. He stared for a long moment, then cursed himself for his naiveté. It was the first time he had realized that Kimberly was a Communist.
She was his first lover, but grew bored of the way he constantly tortured himself with guilt for what he called their sin. After their third week together in Mississippi, Kimberly told him that she’d gotten a letter from Tris, who had invited her to join him in Mexico, where he was doing fieldwork in the mountains of Guanajuato. Packing her things in the car, she told him to try to grow up. A few days later, the Lecturer hitched a ride north with a couple of journalists. A part of him was distressed in turns by what had happened with Kimberly and by what had not, but the rest of him took pleasure in regaling the journalists with the tale of his three nights in jail, because the day after Kimberly’s departure, he and another student had been arrested while distributing flyers on the sidewalk outside the county clerk’s office in Indianola and charged with loitering and disorderly conduct. Although they unfortunately had not been beaten, he had remained behind bars until his proud parents were able to wire his bail money. He looked forward to telling Kimberly the story in the fall, but she did not return to school. Tris Hadley told him that she had moved to California to become a labor organizer. Five years later, the Lecturer would be called upon to decide whether to put a bullet in her head.
(7)
A faint creak shakes him once more from his reverie. In a single compact motion he slips from the chair and spins toward the door, the Ruger already in his hand. He flattens himself against the southeast wall, the only one with no window, and stretches his perception. That was what they called it in the camps. He shuts his eyes and listens until he hears the creak again. Not in the stairwell. Not on the landing. Above him. Either the house is settling or they are on the roof. He waits. Does his sums. Suppose they are on the roof. They will set charges in two or three separate spots, blow them all at once, figuring that the blast will disable him, maybe kill him; but if it doesn’t, there will suddenly be three different points of entry, and he cannot cover all of them at once, even with a machine gun, which in any case he does not have. Will they give him the chance to surrender or immediately shoot to kill? He guesses the latter. Prosecutions of radicals are nowadays occasions for big speeches in the courthouse and street fighting outside.
He gives them five minutes. Ten. Fifteen, all of which he spends crouching along the wall. He watches a beetle crawling across the floorboards. Prionus laticollis is his tentative identification, but he is guessing, because he knows only about a dozen names. Dark wings flutter and buzz but the creature never leaves the ground. It just goes on crawling. Still he waits. Nothing else happens. False alarm. The house is settling after all. The Lecturer straightens. He marches back to the table, returns the gun to its place. Just panic. At the camps they would have been laughing their heads off. His parents raised him to value dignity, and if he has shed most of their teachings over the past decade, he has never managed to surrender his pride.
Perhaps that is why he had the argument with Frederick. The big one, just last week. Frederick, the man of shadows. Frederick, who has been hanging around Agony from the beginning but is always magically absent when trouble rears its head.
The argument arose at the dinner table. Wayne, barely out of college, was declaiming about how much the black community had accomplished in the face of racism, and how important it was that everyone know the history, the great men and women the race had produced. Sharon or somebody asked him what accomplishments he meant. Wayne told her to look out the window, to consider the grand society that had once occupied these favored blocks. Sharon, who was quite high and not quite thinking, pointed out that the great buildings out there had been constructed when the neighborhood was white. Then, realizing her faux pas, she changed tactics slightly. Whatever they had built, they had built through the sufferance of their white masters.
Wayne’s smooth brown face trembled. He had just been slapped down by his commander. He was new to this life, too green to understand that he was free to argue back until a decision was made. But Frederick rode to the rescue. Wayne was right, he said. What had been built here was a remarkable thing. To succeed so in the face of such implacable hatred was a miracle that should be trumpeted.
The Lecturer felt the anger rise. But Frederick was constantly sticking up for those traitors to the proletariat. Of course he was. Most probably he was one of them. The Lecturer began to speak. He carefully reminded the group of how the petite bourgeoisie, clinging to their bits of property, constitute the greatest enemies of the revolution, more dangerous than the capitalists themselves. Frederick told him that he did not know what he was talking about. A silence fell. Nobody interrupted the Lecturer in full cry; well, Junie sometimes, but nobody else, and Junie was away tonight. The Lecturer stared at Frederick, so small and clever with his sepia skin and burning eyes and his air of being a person who has been places and seen things that others can only imagine. Of the handful of comrades who had been in and out of the town house over the past few months, he was the on
ly one—apart from Junie—by whom the Lecturer was even slightly impressed. The others were afraid of him. More afraid, maybe, than they were of the Lecturer.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 6