Sister Egba held her beret through the driver’s window. She said that the treasury needed donations. Hans Hansen swallowed and said he didn’t want to do that. “I’m not asking you to, I’m allowing you to.”
“Who are you again?”
“I am none of your damn business.”
He fished out five dollars and gave the MG the gas.
I dressed up in my costume of revolutionary devotion and passively received the latest of Sister Egba’s “executive mandates.” My mother threatened to burn my new black turtleneck and flared trousers while I slept, she didn’t care if they were my “movie clothes.” I was careful to wear the same thing every week because Sister Egba did, ostentatiously so. She lectured the women cracking chewing gum around the kitchen table about throwing their money away in the street. One of the women suggested that they organize a clothes drive for the children. Sister Egba shouted, “Where do you see a sign in here that says GOOD WILL?”
Sister Egba said she would not take castoffs from no-butt honkies or pork-chop nationalists, because she did not want to itch for the rest of her life. If they learned to make their own clothes, she said, their minds would be free for more important matters. I thought of the hours Muriel had spent, hunched over like a diamond cutter, piecing together dresses for Aunt Clara.
One woman said that at least Afros had ended the agony of the hair question. Another woman said that fixing hair relaxed her. The youngest woman around the table rested her chewing gum on a saucer to light a cigarette and said that Afros hadn’t saved her any time because her hair was naturally fine and she had to sweat with a comb until her arms hurt to make it kinky. Sister Egba’s look was eloquent, as if to say that the journey to a higher level of consciousness was a lonely one.
Their talk reminded me of the humiliation of having to wait inside the ladies’ room when I went shopping with my mother as a child. I was never allowed to hang much with the men who
slid in and out of Sister Egba’s kitchen. They left, usually after a muffled conference with Sister Egba, who returned to the kitchen slamming cupboards and snorting about “foul traducers” and “avaricious individualism,” ominous phrases that she deployed in a less than discriminating manner in the organization’s single-sheet newspaper.
I couldn’t find out from Sister Egba how many revolutionaries were moving ever onward to victory in the Heirs of Malcolm or what its long-range plans were. She repeated more than once that she would ask the questions. The little I knew about her came from ashtrays stacked next to the sink: souvenirs of restaurants, motor inns, and a large factory where telephones were made. I decided that she’d been a waitress, a hotel maid, and a telephone assembly-line worker.
Whatever her past, the future was great. It was, however, far off. Sister Egba lived, as far as I could tell, solely in her present, spoke only in the language of the moment, and did nothing but direct the servants of the Revolution. Time off did not exist for freedom fighters: even television was “the aggressor.” You heard nothing on the news, she said, except propaganda and the distortions of some “flunky running off at the mouth.” She said her son watched television at his grandmother’s, but there was nothing she could do about that. I didn’t know how old Sister Egba was. When I asked about her life, she turned from the stove and said without emotion, “Tight we ain’t.”
She disliked initiative. My preparation for the momentous task of harassing the oppressor to his doom was confined to unsticking the blunt keys of the Underwood and assaulting mailboxes. I was introduced at the one basement meeting of twelve I was allowed to attend, but was told not to participate, not to raise my hand. If I took notes, they had to be turned over to Sister Egba. I thought that with a pen and paper I would look busy
and wouldn’t have to jump up and scream “Right on” with the others. Hans Hansen was proclaimed a potential white ally and granted a seat in the back because the heater in his MG was on the blink.
What Sister Egba clearly enjoyed was the awesome responsibility of purifying the organization, delivering final warnings, and then expelling offenders from the Heirs of Malcolm for life. It thrilled me, too, to take dictation of an order that began, in imitation of the Panthers’ style, “So let this be heard.” Use of drugs was the most serious offense against party discipline. A comrade on drugs could not be trusted with party funds and was not a positive example in the community, because he had made himself a slave.
It was therefore essential that she know what her comrades were up to. She tolerated a sluice of gossip, “cleaning up the walls,” around the kitchen table while steam rose from the soapy water in the sink and clouded the window. There was no telephone; the authorities had put too many bugs on her, so she said. It offended my vanity that she wasn’t interested in the rigor of my conduct. I was only a high-school student.
One night Sister Egba informed Hans Hansen that he had to drive her to an important engagement. He said he wasn’t going anywhere downtown without me. We were, I thought, moving up in the revolutionary hierarchy and there would be some liberator’s equivalent of a hazing.
She had received a report about a trusted comrade that called for immediate, firm action. She arranged herself around the gear shift of the MG and managed to dominate its two seats. We were packed together so closely that my ribs could feel what I took to be a nozzle in her trench coat. She said we could talk or play music if we wanted, but she had to think. I tried to sing falsetto
through my teeth, in terrified German, that she had a gun—Hans Hansen sat in front of me in German class—but he thought I was making up another crazy blues tune and joined in.
We pulled into the parking lot behind Bobo’s, a bar “on the avenue” that looked more shady than it really was. No lady, no one’s mother, went there, and for that reason it was a favorite of the big Negroes, chiefs of staff, judges, black radio station shareholders, members of Odd Fellows, of the Boulee Club, who liked to get nostalgic about Big Ma Bell, Jimmy Coe, the Pink Poodle, and their many byways of “trying to make it” before they “got over.” I felt safe, knowing they did not let customers who weren’t regulars get out of hand in there.
“Move,” she said. I looked around to see if I recognized any cars from my father’s bridge club. She almost tore Bobo’s door off its hinges.
It never crossed our minds to run. Perhaps we were afraid of Sister Egba, though she did not know where we lived; perhaps we wanted to stick around to see what would happen. She forced her way back into the MG and yelled out an address. She breathed heavily, like someone who had climbed stairs. Hans Hansen asked her twice not to smoke. “Drive, blanco.”
She directed us to a social club in a converted house down the block from the pitted gothic entrance to the old cemetery. The white steeple of a new Baptist church rose over the alley. Cars lined the narrow street; some were parked on the grass, as if the owners didn’t want them too far out of their sight. Blinds in the windows of the second floor opened and shut, emitting flashes of light, as if someone were signaling ship to shore. Sister Egba didn’t move.
I didn’t know how to tell her that some revolutionaries had curfews. “It’s late.”
“I’m hip.” Sister Egba didn’t look in the direction of the house.
She waited. We also looked straight ahead at the cemetery gates. Then we heard above the party murmur someone singing bits of a Marvin Gaye hit to himself, privately, disconnectedly, in the way, years later, people on subways would sing along with Walkmans, unable to hear how spacy or off-key they sounded because of the earphones on their heads. I turned and saw a slim man in a black beret grope toward the edge of the porch, lose his balance on the first step, and roll slowly and happily downward. “Yes, Willy my silly, your ass is surely grass.”
Sister Egba shoved me out of the car, stepped over me, and advanced toward the porch in a boneless, fluid motion. I looked through the rear window as Hans Hansen swerved the MG around the corner. She was standing with one foot on the giggling pile of clothes at the bottom of the porch and her right hand was deep inside her trench coat.
We studied murder stories in the newspaper for days and skipped two Fridays after Hans Hansen confessed that he preferred going to Laura Nyro concerts to parking on spooky streets and watching his hair turn gray.
We cleansed ourselves at football games, and at meetings of New Life, a group popular with jocks led by a middle-aged man in gym shoes and sweat pants who would not act his age. Women with stiff permanents and rhinestone butterfly glasses gave away suspect editions of the New Testament and glowing cheerleaders flew to greet us with the question “Do you know Our Lord Savior, Jesus Christ?” A screen was set up in front of the lodge fireplace. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water” swelled as each slide projected more oozing red, the blood of the Son of Man. The women in butterfly glasses hugged us and sobbed.
When I finally showed up, Sister Egba barred the door with
a harpoon look. She said she was in the process of writing out the executive mandate that expelled me from the Heirs of Malcolm for life. She had proclaimed that the “correct approach” would be to buy a bus for the relatives of prisoners held at the state penitentiary. I was in charge of the fund-raiser; she didn’t care where it was held so long as it was deep in the suburbs among my honky darlings and their checkbooks. I’d hoped she’d forgotten.
“You been wrong for too long.” Sister Egba was in my face. I smelled hot sauce. I’d been purged, tried in absentia for bourgeois thought, infantile Marxism, revolutionary decadence, and flunkyism. “Let me break it down for you: this shit is too serious for your shit.” I couldn’t argue, I was so relieved to have been “included out.”
Hans Hansen said that if I was an enemy of the people he’d be an enemy of the people, too. We drove around, searched up and down the barren avenues for the place funky enough for Baby Huey. A cool English teacher—it’s always an English teacher—once played us a warbly tape of Baby Huey singing, “There are three kinds of people in this world: white people, black people, and my people.”
We’d asked the English teacher questions about Baby Huey. He didn’t say much and we figured someone had given him the tape or he had stolen it, that he had never seen Baby Huey in person or made a pirate recording at all. It didn’t matter. The English teacher tired of the school board sending people around to listen to what he was saying and the winters made him cranky, so he moved to Tampa without saying goodbye. But we were desperate to hear that song again. If we could only hear that song again everything would be all right. Then Hans Hansen said he didn’t want to feel guilty for being white anymore. He just wanted to save himself.
“Europe,” Grandfather said, “is disastrous to the patriotism of colored Americans.” We were taking a turn around the barbed-wire fence of the golf course. The sky walked along with us, or just a little ahead. Maples closed ranks behind us. I knew this was to be a duel between large and small minds because Grandfather had removed his olive-green jacket.
He was outside in his shirtsleeves, in spite of what the neighbors might think, the better to “relate” to me—an expression he could not use without an involuntary pinch around the nostrils. Grandfather was going to save me from myself. High-school commencement exercises were over, and I knew that I’d be across the state line before the farmers again mounted their collateral tractors.
In a moment of weakness, I, then at the peak of my Ernest Pontifex phase, slipped and admitted to my parents that I had no intention of returning to the U.S. from my vacation, because student deferments for the draft no longer existed. I was not planning to go to college. I was going to make a name for myself, either as a revolutionary in exile or as a star of the West End stage, I didn’t care which, and the college admissions committee that had attempted to destroy me with a thin envelope would be sorry.
Back then, you couldn’t easily distinguish an irritatingly persistent adolescent breakfast theme from premature self-obliteration. Flower children renounced the world and joined communes where the babies were stillborn or suffered from malnutrition. Alarmed, my parents called in Grandfather, the big gun, because it was thought that we had a special relationship, that he understood me and had influence over me, one of those family fictions that grow up unbidden, like debris in a back lot, and which are sometimes useful to accept. I’d never been to a funeral because it was said I could not stand death.
Grandfather was divided about his commission, having discovered a new respect for Wanderlust. San Diego had not worked out for him, and in the five years since he’d left Louisville, Phoenix, Arizona, and two towns in northern Michigan also had proved wanting. The Oldsmobile, the old shoe, had given out; his furniture had ended up in a barn in New Jersey; his books were deposited with relatives in Boston; and his wife, the beige stepgrandmother, was also in storage, with her sister, either in the Bronx or in Brooklyn, he seemed grateful not to be sure where. The world was near and savage, he was homeless, but nevertheless he was more at ease than I had ever seen him.
He was pleased that for once his help had been asked for. Usually he just turned up in a phone booth at the bus station. He’d appeared so often that he no longer tried to justify his intrusions. My father said that our having busted into a white neighborhood probably accounted for Grandfather’s willingness to come to see us so often in his wanderings from sea to sea.