Echoes of a Distant Summer

S
ampson Davis was thinking about death when the hired black Cadillac stopped on the corner of Eddy and Fillmore streets in what had once been the heart of the black community in San Francisco. He was eighty-five years old and dying of lung cancer, yet he was not thinking of his own death. He was pondering why such a vital neighborhood as the Fillmore was in its death throes; it was a pale relic of what once had been. He remembered how it was in the forties and fifties: the streets filled with shiny new cars; storefront barbershops with gambling and numbers rooms behind them; bakeries; Russian delicatessens; five-and-dimes; restaurants; diners and chop suey houses; movie theaters; hole-in-the-wall blues and jazz joints; and always the streets filled with people in their many shades of black and brown. It was the death of vibrancy that haunted his thoughts.

Sampson looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty in the evening and despite the new high-rise apartment buildings and the modern facades on the Fillmore corridor businesses, the streets were relatively quiet. There were still some black people on the street, but they did not look affluent. They were not the ones living in the new apartments. They probably came from the towering, ugly, pink Section Eight apartments over on Buchanan Street, the last remnants of Fillmore’s heyday. Sampson saw whites and a sprinkling of Asians going in and out of the new apartment buildings and grimaced. Asians he could understand. The northern part of the Fillmore had once been the heart of the Japanese neighborhood, until World War II policies had taken their properties and placed them all in prison camps. It broke Sampson’s heart to see so
many whites nonchalantly walking down streets that they had feared to tread in the fifties unless they were the police.

He was overcome by a bout of coughing, which caused his eyes to water. He was getting more things caught in his throat all the time and it was getting harder to catch his breath after each bout of coughing. If he could just last until this assignment was finished, death would come easily. He took a moment to take slow, measured breaths until it seemed that he was back to normal, whatever normal was for an eighty-five-year-old. The driver opened the door for him and he received unrequested assistance to his feet. A quarter of a block off Fillmore on Eddy Street was one of the few remaining black businesses. It was Ezekiel J. Tree’s Billiard Parlor. This was Sampson’s destination. He scribbled a quick note on the small pad that he carried and handed it along with a hundred-dollar bill to the driver.

The note read:
I am going into that pool hall. If I do not come out within two hours, call the police
.

The driver, who was Hispanic, nodded and said, “I’ll park somewhere close. If you look to your left when you come out, I’ll be parked down the street.”

Sampson shook his head. He wrote:
I don’t want the car seen. You must wait until I have walked to the end of the block
.

The driver read his note and frowned. He asked, “Are you sure you can make it that far?”

Sampson nodded and smiled. He tapped his chest, checking to see if he still had the envelope in his interior breast pocket. He heard the crinkle of paper and felt reassured. Taking his time, he crossed Fillmore and walked slowly toward the billiard parlor. He moved fairly easily for a man of his age. Other than his cancer, the only time he had ever been ill in his life was when he had been made mute by a blow on the head, and really it was the terrible beating that he had received after that which had jeopardized his life.

When he pushed open the door of the pool hall, he knew that there was a very good chance that he might not come out alive, but that didn’t cause him to hesitate one moment. In the thirty years that his wife, Wichita Kincaid, had been dead, living had become decidedly more unpleasant. Death was not nearly as frightening as the changes that he saw going on around him. This new, modern world was sickening. Therefore, when he had been informed that he had lung cancer
and that a regimen of surgery and chemotherapy could prolong his life, he had refused it.

He stepped into the establishment and saw that it was an extremely large room with a video arcade in the front which was being used by boys of different races from about ten years of age to those in their late teens, and behind that were pool tables lined up three across and five rows deep. Along the right wall was a long wooden bar which served beer, wine, and soft drinks, and cheap packaged snacks. The bar also doubled as the place where the pool balls were rented.

Sampson walked over to the bar and pointed to the draft-beer sign. He sat down on a stool at the end of the bar as far away from the front door as possible and surveyed the hall. The place was doing good business for a Sunday evening. There was an unwritten rule in pool halls like Tree’s: The front tables were for walk-ins, people off the street, and casual players. The middle tables were reserved for the petty criminals and gang members, and the rear tables were for the real pool players and high rollers who bet their money under the table. True to this design the front tables were full with blacks, whites, and Asians, all recreational players. The middle tables, which were directly in front of him, were all occupied by young black street toughs and their girlfriends. They were all swaggering and talking loud, wearing lots of gold rings and chains, which they took special pains to show off. At the table closest to him, Sampson saw a young black man suddenly spin on his girlfriend and slap her hard across the face. “Listen, bitch!” the young man snarled. “You don’t tell me what to do! If you want to keep those teeth in your mouth, you better shut the fuck up!” The young man looked around challengingly, daring anyone to take notice of his act. The girl sat silently and made no effort to protest.

The young man saw Sampson looking at him and challenged, “What the fuck you lookin’ at? You got a problem?” Sampson merely shook his head and turned back to the bar. Behind him the young man continued, “That’s right, you old motherfucker! You better turn around! I’ll kick your ass too!”

Sampson took a deep breath and thought, This is what has happened to the black community. It has lost its respect for its women and elders. This young fool doesn’t know, less than thirty years ago, how hard black men struggled to have their women respected, how the black woman was at the very bottom next to the Indian in taking shit from
everyone, how black women had held together families torn apart by racism and poverty, how black people died of the simplest things because the nearest hospitals wouldn’t give them medical attention. This fool doesn’t know his history, because if he did he wouldn’t dare treat his woman in such a profane manner.

Sampson began writing on his tablet and when he finished he tore the sheet off.

The bartender, a squat brown-skinned man with a broken nose and a missing front tooth, came over and asked, “You all right, old-timer?”