Marcus Garvey de Harcourt’s last class of the day was H.E., meaning “Health Education,” meaning climbing up ropes in the smelly, bare gymnasium of P.S. 388. It was a matter of honor with him to avoid that when he could. Today he could. He had a note from his father that would get him out of school, and besides it was a raid day. The police were in the school. It was a drug bust, or possibly a weapons search; or maybe some fragile old American History teacher had passed the terror point at the uproar in his class and called for help. Whatever. The police were in the school, and the door monitors were knotted at the stairwells, listening to the sounds of scuffling upstairs. It was a break he didn’t really need, because at the best of times the door monitors at P.S. 388 were instructed not to try too hard to keep the students in—else they simply wouldn’t show up at all.
Once across the street Marcus ducked behind the tall mound of garbage bags to see which of his schoolmates—or teachers!—would come out in handcuffs, but that was a disappointment because the cops came out alone. This time, at least, the cops had found nothing worth an arrest—meaning, no doubt, that the problem was over and the teacher involved wouldn’t, or didn’t dare to, identify the culprits.
One-forty, and his father had ordered him to be ready to leave for the prison by two o’clock. No problem. He threaded his way past the CONSTRUCTION—ALL TRAFFIC DETOUR signs on Nostrand Avenue, climbed one of the great soil heaps, gazed longingly at the rows of earth-moving machines, silenced by some sort of work stoppage, and rummaged in the dirt for something to throw at them. There was plenty. There were pieces of bulldozed homes in that tip, Art Deco storefronts from the 1920s, bay-window frames from the 1900s, sweat-equity cinderblocks from the 1980s, all crushed together. Marcus found a china doorknob, just right. When it struck the nearest parked backhoe it splintered with a crash.
They said Bedford-Stuyvesant was a jungle, and maybe it was. It was the jungle that young Marcus de Harcourt had lived all his life in. He didn’t fear it—was wary of parts of it, sure, but it was all familiar. And it was filled with interesting creatures, mostly known to Marcus, Marcus known to a few of them—like the young men in clerical collars outside the Franciscan mission. They waved to him from across the road. Bloody Bess at the corner didn’t wave. As he passed her she was having a perfectly reasonable, if agitated, conversation: “She having an
abor
tion. She having an
inflatable
abortion. He having intercourse with her ten
times,
so she having it.” The only odd part was that she was talking to a fire hydrant. The bearded man in a doorway, head pillowed on a sack of garbage, didn’t wave either, but that was because he was asleep. Marcus considered stealing his shoes and hiding them, but you never knew about these doorway dudes. Sometimes they were cops. Besides, when he looked closer at the shoes he didn’t want to touch them.
One forty-five by the clock on the top of the Williamsburgh Bank Building, and time to move along. He trotted and swaggered along the open cut of the Long Island Rail Road yards. Down below were the concrete railguides with their silent, silver seams of metal. Marcus kicked hubcaps until he found a loose one. He pried it off, one eye open for cops, and then scaled it down onto the tracks. Its momentum carried it down to crash against the concrete guide strip, but the magnetic levitation had it already. It was beginning to move sidewise before it struck. It picked up speed, wobbling up and down in the field, showering sparks as it struck against the rail, until the maglev steadied it. It was out of sight into the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in a moment and Marcus, pleased, looked up again at the bank clock. One fifty-five; he was already late, but not late enough for a taste of the cat if he hurried. So he hurried.
Marcus Garvey de Harcourt’s neighborhood did not look bleak to him. It looked like the place where he had always lived, although of course all the big construction machines were new. Marcus understood that the project was going to change the neighborhood drastically—they said for the better. He had seen the model of the way Bedford-Stuyvesant was going to look, had listened to politicians brag about it on television, had been told about it over and over in school. It would be really nice, he accepted, but it wasn’t nice yet. Between the burned-out tenements and the vacant lots of the year before and the current bare excavations and half-finished structures there was not much to choose, except that now the rats had been disturbed in their dwellings and were more often seen creeping across the sidewalks and digging into the trash heaps. Marcus ran the last six blocks to his father’s candy store, past the big breeder powerplant that fed a quarter of Brooklyn with electricity, cutting across the scarred open spaces, ducking through the barbed wire and trotting between the rows of tall towers that one day would be windmills. He paused at the corner to survey the situation. The big black car wasn’t
there, which was good. His mother wasn’t waiting for him outside the store, either; but as he reached the door, panting a little harder than necessary to show how fast he’d been running, she opened it for him. His father was there, too, with his coat on already. He didn’t speak, but looked up at the clock behind the soda fountain. “Damn, Marcus,” his mother said crossly, “you know your daddy don’t like to be kept waiting, what’s the matter with you?”
“Wouldn’t let me out no sooner, Nillie.”
His father glanced at him, then at the storeroom door. Behind it, Marcus knew, the cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging. Marcus’s mother said, “You want trouble, Marcus, you know damn well he’s gone give it to you.”
“No trouble, Nillie. Couldn’t help it, could I?” There wasn’t any sense in arguing the question, because the old man either would get the cat out or wouldn’t. Most likely he wouldn’t, because this thing at the prison was important to him and he wouldn’t want to waste any more time, but either way it was out of Marcus’s hands.
The old man jerked his head at Marcus and limped out of the store. He didn’t speak. He never did talk much, because it hurt him to try. At the curb he lifted an imperious hand. A cruising gypsy cab pulled up, surprising Marcus. His father did not walk very well on the kneecaps that had once been methodically crushed, but the place they were going was only about a dozen blocks away. You had to sell a lot of Sunday newspapers to make the price of a cab fare. Marcus didn’t comment. He spoke to his father almost as seldom as his father spoke to him. He hopped in, scrunched himself against the opposite side of the seat, and gazed out of the window as his father ordered, “Nathanael Greene Institute, fast.”
Because the Nathanael Greene Institute for Men was built underground, the approach to it looked like the entrance to a park. Nathanael Greene wasn’t a park. It had forty-eight hundred residents and a staff of fifty-three hundred to attend them. Each resident had a nearly private room with a television set, toilet facilities and air-conditioning, and its construction cost, more than eighty-five thousand dollars per room, slightly exceeded the cost of building a first-class hotel. Nathanael Greene was not a hotel, either, and most of its luxuries were also utilitarian: the air-conditioning ducts were partly so that tear gas or sternutants could be administered to any part of the structure; the limit of two persons per cell was to prevent rioting. Nathanael Greene was a place to work, with a production line of microelectronic components; a place to learn, with optional classes in everything from remedial English to table tennis; a place to improve oneself, with non-optional programs designed to correct even the most severe character flaws. Such as murder, robbery and rape. Nathanael Greene had very little turnover among its occupants. The average resident remained there eleven years, eight months and some days. If he left earlier, he usually found himself in a far less attractive place—an Alaskan stockade, for example, or a gas chamber. Nathanael Greene was not a place where just anyone could go. You had to earn it, with at least four felonies of average grade, or one or two really good ones, murder two and up. Major General Nathanael Greene of Potowomut, Rhode Island, the Quaker commander whose only experience of penology had been to preside over the court-martial of John André, might not have approved the use of his name for New York City’s most maximal of maximum-security prisons. But as he had been dead for more than two centuries his opinion was not registered.
Of course there was a line of prison visitors, nearly a hundred people waiting to
reach the kiosk that looked like a movie theater’s box office. Most were poorly dressed, more than half black, all of them surly at being kept waiting. Marcus’s father nudged him toward the big Bed-Stuy model as he limped to take his place in the queue. The boy did what was expected of him. He skipped over to study the model. It was a huger, more detailed copy of the one in the public library. Marcus tried to locate the place where his father’s candy store was, but would not be any longer once the project was completed. He circled it carefully, according to orders, but when he had done that he had run out of orders and his father was still far down the waiting line.
Marcus took a chance and let himself drift along the graveled path, farther and farther away from the line of visitors. What the top of Nathanael Greene looked like was a rather eccentric farm; you had no feeling, strolling between the railings that fenced off soybeans on one side and tomato vines on the other, that you were walking over the heads of ten thousand convicts and guards. It looked as much like Marcus’s concept of the South African plains as anything else, and he imagined himself a black warrior infiltrating from one of the black republics toward Cape Town—except that the concrete igloos really were machine-gun posts, not termite nests, and the guard who yelled at him to go back carried a real rifle. A group of convicts, he saw, was busy hand-setting pine-tree seedlings into plowed rows. Christmas trees for sale in a year or two, probably. They would not be allowed to grow very tall, because nothing on this parklike roof of the prison was allowed to grow high enough to interfere with the guards’ field of fire. A squint at the bank clock told him that if he didn’t get inside the prison pretty soon he was going to be late for his after-hours job with old Mr. Feigerman and his whee-clickety-beep machinery; a glance at his father told him it was time to hurry back into line.
But his father hadn’t noticed. His father was staring straight ahead, and when they moved up a few steps his limp was very bad. Marcus felt a warning stab of worry, and turned just in time to see a long, black car disappearing around the corner and out of sight.
There were a lot of long, black cars in the world, but not very many that could make his father limp more painfully. For Marcus there was no doubt that the car was the one that the scar-faced man used, the one who came around to the candy store now and then to make sure the numbers and the handbook that kept them eating were being attended to; the one who always gave him candy, and always made his father’s limp worse and his gravelly voice harder to understand; and it was not good news at all for Marcus to know that this man had interested himself in Marcus’s visit to the prison.
When they got to the head of the line the woman gave them an argument. She wore old-fashioned tinted glasses, concealing her eyes. Her voice was shrill, and made worse by the speaker system that let them talk through the bulletproof glass. “You any relative of the inmate?” she demanded, the glasses disagreeably aimed toward Marcus’s father.
“No, ma‘am.” The voice was hoarse and gravelly, but understandable—Nillie had told the boy that his father was lucky to be able to talk at all, after what they did to his throat. “Not
relative,
exactly. But kind of family,” he explained, his expression apologetic, his tone deferential, “’cause little Marcus here’s his kid, and my wife’s sister’s his mother. But no, ma’am, no
blood
relation.”
“Then you can’t see him,” she said positively, glasses flashing. “The only visitors permitted are immediate family, no exceptions.”
Marcus’s father was very good at wheedling, and very good at knowing when other tactics were better. “See him?” he cried in his gravelly voice, expression outraged. “What would I want to see the son of a bitch for? Why, he ruined my wife’s sister’s life! But the man’s got a right to see his own kid, don’t he?”
The woman pursed her lips, and the glasses shone first on Marcus’s father, then on the boy. “You’ll have to get permission from the chief duty officer,” she declared. “Window Eight.”
The chief duty officer was young, black, bald and male, and he opened the door of his tiny cubicle and allowed them in, studying Marcus carefully. “Who is it you want to see here, Marc?”
“My father,” the boy said promptly, according to script. “I ain’t seen him since I was little. Name’s Marcus, not Marc,” he added.
“Marcus, then.” The officer touched buttons on his console, and the file photograph of Inmate Booking Number 838-10647 sprang up. HARVEY John T., sentenced to three consecutive terms of twelve to twenty years each for murder one, all three homicides committed during the commission of a major felony—in this case, the robbery of a liquor store. There was not much resemblance between the inmate and the boy. The inmate was stout, middle-aged, bearded—and white. The boy was none of those things. Still, his skin color was light enough to permit one white parent. “This your daddy, Marcus?”
“Yes, sir, that’s him,” said Marcus, peering at the stranger on the screen.
“Do you know what he’s here for?”