Dreamer (20 page)

Except for books and a closet of threadbare clothing, I owned nothing. (And even this pitiful studio was a Winter Palace compared with many places where blacks lived.) I wondered: if the minister was right in saying we must not think about what we might get but rather what we might give in a relationship, then what in this world could I offer Amy Griffith? How could I serve
her
? Looking around this room, I saw what a poor catch I was. Very unhip. An old fuddy-duddy at (now) age twenty-five when American culture in the mid-'60s was becoming so fluid, so polymorphous you could change your identity—reinvent yourself—as easily as you restyled your hair. It was the first truly
theatrical
decade. A moment when role-playing and how things appeared took primacy over reality (and who, after all, knew what
that
was anymore?). And me? In this world of flux, I was cursed with a shy, Victorian personality, one Smith's powerful presence had begun to change when I fell into his orbit; but away from him, back in Chicago in my dismal room, I felt again like a moon unmoored. As a colored man raised in the 1950s, I'd learned the hard way to guard my emotions, particularly when I was around white people. I was stiff and proper. Formal and guided by religious principles almost everyone around me (except for King) regarded as obsolete. On the dance floor I drew a blank. (What the hell was “The Bop” anyway?) In social situations I was easy to lose. Or shout
down. I tried to be polite, as my mother had taught me (and the minister urged us to do), by patiently listening closely to other people and letting them finish their thoughts, no matter how long that might take, but most often they cut me off or interrupted me in midsentence since I was not an imposing presence and I often quoted from literature or philosophy to reinforce my point, so what I usually had to say went unfinished until I reached home and pulled out my journal and, in the privacy of my studio, completed my end of the conversation there. Hadn't Amy once told me that in a movie I'd make a good prop? That together the best we would ever create was
mud
? Slowly it dawned on me that perhaps her postcards of the last few months were not declarations returning the love I felt for her, but simply examples of her kindness, the sort Amy might show to anyone she pitied.

If that was so, how could I call her?

Two weeks passed before I mustered up the courage to pick up the phone. I busied myself with cleaning the refrigerator and stove, filling out college applications, and at last when I could stall no longer, I picked up the phone and dialed her extension at work.

“You're
here,
Matthew?” In the background I heard the voices of other Operation Breadbasket workers, “What about Chaym?”

“He's downstate. I think hell be okay. Uh, listen … I was thinking if you're not busy tonight, maybe we could go out for dinner, then take in a show—”

“No.”

“Oh …”
I should have known
.

“There's somewhere special I want to go.”

“Where?”

“It's a new place I've been hearing about. Some of the people I work with here have been raving about it, but only
black people can get inside. Can you pick me up at five when I get off work?”

“Sure. I'll rent a car. But, Amy, where are we
going
?”

“It's on the West Side, not far from where I used to live. I don't know much about it, Matthew, but I think it's called the Black People's Liberation Library.”

The library was in a poor neighborhood, squeezed between a pool hall and a tavern. To its left was a vacant lot filled with garbage. Children were playing there, knee-deep in refuse the building's residents dumped from their windows. The smell of decay was overpowering, but no less so than the heartrending sight of black and Puerto Rican families crammed into a building that should have been condemned by the Housing Authority decades before. The El ran right behind the building, rattling its windows. On the first floor, in what had once been a storefront, we found the Black People's Liberation Library. When I parked directly in front of its door, it was 6
P.M.
There were about fifteen people inside, white and black, examining the ceiling-high shelves of books on the library's back wall. Nothing about this place seemed exceptional, except for its impoverishment.

“It's
supposed
to look unimportant,” Amy said. “People at work told me this is just a front. C'mon, we better get inside before they start.”

After checking that the rented car's doors were locked, I followed her through the entrance. Just inside the door, a young black woman sat at a folding card table, a blackbound register open before her. We signed our names, as she asked us to do, then mingled in the small room with other visitors examining titles on the shelves. I saw seminal works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of other cultural nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. I noticed several volumes by Yahya Zubena, a prominent local activist who often got his picture in black publications like the
Daily Defender
and
Jet
. I'd never seen him, but I knew his story. His real name was Willard Bailey, and he was sentenced to twenty years downstate in Marion Penitentiary for murdering a nineteen-year-old black filling-station attendant during a stickup (Willard had cut off the boy's genitals and stuffed them in his mouth). But that was only the crime he was convicted for. There were others, ones he wrote about after his release from prison—rape,
dozens
of rapes on the South Side, with some of his victims being only twelve years old. After them, he moved on to assaulting white women on the North Side. In prison, Willard discovered the pleasures of poetry in a creative writing class, as well as the very texts I'd seen by Du Bois and Garvey. According to his interviews and published essays, he was reborn after those experiences, “baptized in blackness,” as he was fond of saying. He apologized for his crimes in scathing liberation verse that flowed from his prison cell to periodicals like
Ramparts
. There, a few prominent white authors who published on those same pages declared him too brilliant to be behind bars; they agitated for Yahya's release, and by 1967 he was back on the
streets of Chicago, reading agitprop poetry in Lincoln Park (“Nigger, Nigger, Wake Up!” was his best-known piece), and some said he was organizing street gangs for the Revolution. Amy pulled down one of Yahya's books and, after pushing her eyeglasses back up her nose with two fingers, began flipping through its pages and frowning. Truth to tell, I found his work puerile, and while I pretended to peruse a copy of
The Souls of Black Folks,
which I deeply respected, I was actually watching Amy from the corner of my eye, wondering if I'd completely blown my first evening out with her.

Half an hour earlier, I'd picked her up outside the office for Operation Breadbasket. She stepped from the building in a group of chattering black women, but I singled her out instantly—my heart trembled ever so slightly, picking up speed—as did other black men on the street, for Amy, with her bee-stung lips and eyes full of laughter, was so striking that it wasn't uncommon for brothers to drive their cars right up on the curb to hit on her. She was wearing a simple, beltless blue dress that clung nicely to all her corners and, smiling, handed me a map scrawled on office stationery. I was, of course, tongue-tied during the thirty-minute drive to the library, and just listened as she described her new job, her co-workers, and how enticingly they'd talked about the Liberation Library. To be honest, I'd hoped for a kiss when she got in the car, a chaste peck on the cheek, a hug, or
some
thing. Try as I might, I was unable to read her feelings about me. Nor was I reading myself very well that afternoon (
We always lose
), all of which made me gloomy as I guided the car through rush-hour traffic. There was so much I wanted to say, but I left my thoughts unvoiced, despite my feeling that Amy was always watching me, waiting for me to disappoint her in one of the dozens of ways brothers she'd dated had done before; I always felt she was testing me, and even though we were alone in my car I sensed a chorus line of her
erstwhile boyfriends at my elbow, all those black men who'd failed at being faithful, strong, committed to her, aware of her needs; and with my every action I sensed, rightly or wrongly, that I was guilty of their mistakes until I proved otherwise. Only a black American woman could place that burden on a man. Yet it wasn't simply about her. Or me. No, it was all that painful history behind us, the centuries of black men and women hurting and betraying and possibly hating each other since the days of slavery when a Negro risked death if he defended his family; the damage wrought by centuries of discrimination was always there, right at the heart of something as private as passion, despite pleas for forgiveness and promises to forget the past and make a fresh start. It was about my mother Ellesteen's bitterness toward my father, that pathetic bastard, after he took off and left her to raise me alone. Oh yes, all
that
was in the car between us, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, and I hadn't the faintest idea in such an uncertain world how we could begin.

“Matthew,' she said, reeling me back from remembrance, “I think they're starting.”

White visitors drifted outside, obviously bored by the Liberation Library's familiar titles. Once the last white person stepped to the street, the young woman at the table stood up and latched the door, locking in the eight blacks who remained. She walked to a section of the bookshelves, reached behind a row of works by Chester Himes—I heard a click—and that section of the shelf swung open into the outer room, as grandfather clocks do in old British movies set in haunted houses. I made an in-suck of breath, as startled as the other black visitors, for behind the tiny room in which we'd waited, there was a larger space, with huge colored maps of every major city in America on the walls, and five rows of folding chairs before a podium.

Yahya Zubena welcomed us inside.

“Matthew,” Amy whispered, “this isn't what I expected at all. Isn't he supposed to be in jail?”

“I read in
Jet
that he got out last year.”

“No one at work told me this was his library.”

Her reaction to him was visceral, the recoil any woman might feel in the presence of a man who, after his prison conversion, confessed in his books that he raped blacks as “practice,” as a warm-up to perfect his technique for whites in the suburbs. But we couldn't leave. We were locked inside. I had to nudge Amy between her shoulder blades to coax her into entering the back room, but I was so dazed myself I don't exactly remember walking in, only that Yahya said, “Now that the ofays are gone, we can get down to business.” He ordered us to follow him to a map of Chicago at our left. By any measure, he was a big man—linebacker big—with a Farmer Burns build, full-bearded, and a complexion one shade up from sepia. He wore faded jeans, work boots, and a dashiki of red, black, and green, the colors of Marcus Garvey's flag. As large as he was, Yahya made the back room's sparse furnishings feel as flimsy as constructions of pasteboard and papiermâché. In a word, he was one of the darlings of the white media, one of King's competitors for press coverage, and every parole officer's worst nightmare.

“Brothers and sisters,” intoned Yahya, “I want y'all to look at that map and tell me whereabouts you live.”

We all did so, indicating addresses in south and west Chicago. That pleased Yahya. He steered our group toward the map of Detroit. “If y'all got relatives there, show me where they live.” A few people pointed toward the heavily industrial portions of the city. Again Yahya smiled. He moved us on from map to map, from Oakland to Harlem, Cleveland to Philadelphia, and each time he asked, “Where do most black people live?” The answer unfailingly was in some urban district near factories and commerce.

“Now, I want y'all to sit down and listen carefully.” He waited until we were all seated on the folding chairs. “I took you through those maps because I wanted you to see for yourself that it ain't no accident where we live forms a
pattern
. A concentration camp. We've always near highways or factories or warehouses or railroad tracks. Ain't that so? You might say we're
contained
. We're concentrated in the areas where the Man wants us—
away
from him. Segregation did that, but from a strategic standpoint it did something else. What you think that is?” Fingers in his beard, he paced, sometimes pausing to stand directly over visitors in the front row where Amy and I sat, looming over us with his face only inches from ours. “I'ma tell you. Being concentrated like that means when y'all start rebelling against your miserable conditions, tearing up the city like you did a year ago, all Charlie's got to do is move his tanks and trucks and National Guard troops right down the freeways and Illinois Central tracks to your front door.”

“Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “What about blacks who don't live there? Aren't we a little more dispersed than these maps show?”

“I don't
think
so, brother. Maybe you better look again, or clean them Coke-bottle glasses of yours.”

A couple behind Amy and me chuckled. The skin on my face tingled. “I was just asking if—”

Yahya scowled me into silence.

There was a pleat between Amy's brows. “Why are you telling us this?”

“So you can
prepare,
sistuh.”

“For what?”

Yahya stepped toward her, so close we could smell him; he forced her to look up at him. I felt Amy stiffen. She placed her right hand on top of mine. “Why you think, girl? For the coming race war.”

“I don't believe there is one coming, not if people of goodwill, white and black, do everything they can to make things better. Until a little while ago, I worked with Dr. King. Right now I work at Operation Breadbasket—”