Eddie even wore shades indoors. The fluorescent lights got caught in them and with his waist-length black leather coat over a black turtleneck shirt, he had the look of some dark and anonymous automaton as he paced before the group of about 20 boys and young men.
“The worst thing we can do,” he was saying, “is let those brothers waste this opportunity by having just another march.”
Malcolm sat in the second row of folding chairs arranged in a basement rec room in the projects.
“I’m not going to front,” said Eddie. “The man made a powerful speech. One thing the man can do is talk. And his call for a work stoppage certainly has merit. But like he always does, the man pulled up short before reaching the conclusion toward which his logic was inevitably leading him. He is like a doctor who is brilliant in diagnosing the affliction, but unable to bring himself to prescribe the proper medicine to bring about a cure.”
There was soft laughter under the harsh lights. Eddie waited out their amusement, the fluorescents bright and hard on his shades. Finally, he gave them a tight smile. “I mean,” he said, “I heard the man say many things. I heard him tell our brothers they were deserving of dignity and I agreed with that. I heard him say that America is going to hell…and I sho’nuff agreed with that.”
This brought more laughter. Again, Eddie waited it out. Then he said, “But the one thing I did not hear the esteemed Dr. King say was how the black man will climb to a position where he can stop waiting for crumbs to fall from the white man’s table. The one thing I did not hear the celebrated Dr. King tell us was how the black man should seize his own destiny and show whitey we are not to be fooled with any longer. The one thing”—his voice rising to an angry pitch—“I did not hear the great dreamer say was that black people need to seize power by any means necessary—the power to control our own neighborhoods, our own lives.”
Fists shook in the air at that. The man next to Malcolm said, “Tell the truth, brother!”
Eddie grinned. “They act like they don’t know what we mean when we say, ‘black power.’ You read all these learned essays in all these highfalutin places, all asking with earnest confusion”—and here he adopted the pontificating voice of some white intellectual square—“‘What does the Negro mean by power?’”
He stopped pacing. “What the hell do they think we mean?” he cried suddenly, his voice raw with indignation. “Why is this such a mystery to them? We want black power just like the white man already has white power. That means we want to control our own damn destiny. It means we want to get rid of the Memphis PD and all the Pig Departments around the country that occupy our neighborhoods and abuse our brothers and sisters. It means we want to get rid of these broken-down schools that teach our children how to be ignorant. It means we want to buy from our own people, keep our money in our own communities. Let our money be used to build up the brother man, not the other man!”
He spoke right through the cheers that erupted.
“It means we want control over our own lives and our own neighborhoods. And it means we want—no, we demand—a seat at the table, and if we don’t get it, they have to realize we are ready to turn that motherfucker over!”
Malcolm shot out of his seat at that. The whole room did. “Yeah!” he shouted. “Yeah!” Fist punching at the air. This was what he wanted to hear. This was what needed saying.
Eddie let them go for awhile, then held up his hand. When the room settled, he spoke to them in an after-the-storm voice, a voice softened by sudden calm. “Don’t misunderstand. I am not opposed to what Dr. King wants. On the contrary, on that subject, he and I are in full agreement. No, brothers, where we part ways is over tactics. I don’t believe we can ‘dream’ our way to the so-called Promised Land. And I sure as hell don’t believe in any philosophy which tells you to let some white man hit you on your head with a stick and you just sit there and take it and tell him you love him anyhow.”
He took off the glasses. The eyes he showed them were bright and fierce. “Those days are over and thank God. No more of this ‘nonviolent’ shit. Dr. King is a brave man. But he is naïve in his tactics and foolish in his reasoning. There is nothing wrong with having a march, nothing wrong with the people coming together to speak their demands with one voice. But if whitey does not realize there is an alternative to peaceful demonstration, then all marching is going to do is wear out your shoes. A march cannot just be a plea. It has to be an ultimatum. Whitey must know he has a choice to make. And he has to know that if he does not make the right choice, we are prepared to escalate this thing.”
He looked out over the crowd of them, allowed them to see the seriousness and purpose in those angry eyes. Then, slowly, he replaced his shades. “Now, let me tell you what we need to do,” he said.
Eddie spoke for a few minutes more and when he was done, they looked to one another and grins stretched their faces and their heads bobbed and they said, “Yeah. Damn straight.” They would show whitey. They would show him what black power could do.
The meeting broke up shortly afterward and Malcolm hopped on his bike to ride to work. His head buzzing with the plans they had made, he cycled northwest, out of the clotheslines and dirt-patch yards of the projects, then turned west on Crump toward the river. He had only gone a few blocks when he came upon a company of firefighters spraying water on a burning heap of wood, paper, discarded food containers, and other garbage piled in a bonfire. A crowd of Negroes stood watching with sullen eyes. Two carloads of police were there, keeping everybody back.
So many people were crowded about that they spilled into the street. Malcolm had to get off the bike and walk it through the crowd.
It was a relatively small blaze and not all the firemen were needed. Two teams with hoses sprayed water at its base. The rest stood against the truck, watching the crowd watching them. There seemed to be no great urgency. But then, garbage fires were common now in this angry city.
“Y’all need to tell Loeb to treat them men like men,” cried a Negro man in a straw stingy brim, his voice sudden and loud. “That’s what y’all need to do!” The cops and the firemen affected not to hear. The crowd shouted its agreement. They affected not to hear this, either.
Somebody threw an empty whiskey bottle. It arced high in the night air, then shattered at the base of the flames. The cops and firemen all jumped as if there had been a gunshot. One cop had his hand on the service revolver at his hip. “Who did that?” he demanded. People in the crowd just laughed. There was an unmistakable air of festivity to the gathering. There was also an unmistakable air of menace lurking at its edges.
Malcolm worked his way through the crowd, got back on his bike, and continued west. He was still processing Eddie’s incendiary words. Demand a seat at the table—or turn the motherfucker over.
That last, he thought, was what was missing from Martin Luther King. Even as he spoke of power, he still offered the carrot without the stick. It was the same with the NAACP, CORE, all these Memphis preachers, all these tired-ass Negroes the press insisted on calling black leaders.
Leaders. That was good for a private chuckle. They’d had their day. They’d had their chance. It was time to get rid of the whole mealy-mouthed, hat-in-hand lot of them—and all their mealy-mouthed, hat-in-hand followers, too.
And it seemed fitting somehow as he was thinking that thought, that he rolled his bike into the hotel lobby and saw Melvin Cotter, car keys in hand, walking toward the door with Rupert Pruitt, both of them laughing. Maybe Melvin had told the white man a joke. Maybe the white man had told him one. It didn’t really matter.
Melvin saw him looking. Something sour appeared on his face. He turned back toward Pruitt.
The three men passed each other like ghosts. Malcolm went through the employees-only door behind the desk, parked his bike in the closet, and pulled the mop bucket out. Another night of cleaning up after whitey began.
He cycled home the next morning in a cold and persistent rain that gave the lie to spring. His jacket plastered itself to his shirt and the newspaper he used for covering as he steered the bike one-handed soon became sodden, shapeless, and useless. After a few moments, he flung it away. Under the sluice of gray water, the city looked…forsaken.
“Child, you soaked to the bone,” said Nanny Parker as he mounted the steps to his house. “You going to catch your death.”
She was standing on her covered porch, one arm folded across her middle, drinking from a mug of coffee and watching the water come spitting from the sky. Even rain was not enough to drive her inside. Miss Parker practically lived on that porch.
“Morning,” said Malcolm, through bitterly chattering teeth as he stood under the overhang and fumbled in his pocket for his keys.
“I heard Mozell and Sonny back there in my yard early this morning. Looked out and saw they done took all my trash down to the dump in Sonny’s car. Thank them for me, would you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me: Was you there when Dr. King spoke? Did you hear him?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He had his keys in hand.
“So, are you goin’ to the march tomorrow?”
This amused him and he struggled to keep it from showing. Oh, he was going to the march all right. She could damn well bet on that. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
It stopped him. “You?” he said. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Oh yes,” said the old woman, her eyes shining. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“It’s going to be a mess down there,” said Malcolm. “At your age, I mean…maybe you should stay home.”
She lifted the mug to her smile, gazing out over the rain. “My age ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” she said. “Them sanitation men doing a mighty work of God. We need to stand behind them.” She gave him a meaningful look. “We all need to stand behind them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Malcolm. He was racking his brain for another objection, a way to tell her she shouldn’t go. Couldn’t go. But he came up empty. Then he realized he was just standing there, and she was still looking at him. “Try to march up near the front,” he said. “You’ll…you’ll have a better view.” It was the best he could come up with.
Her gaze questioned him. Malcolm pushed the door open to escape. “You stay dry, now,” he told her.
It had been a moment when he should have said something, a moment when he should have done something. But he didn’t say and didn’t do, so it became a moment—a tiny, seemingly insignificant slice out of time—that he would live with until he died. For 40 years, the guilt of what he had not said or done, the guilt of all that happened afterward, culminating in that awful instant when he had a chance to save Martin Luther King and didn’t, had sat heavily as rocks upon Malcolm Toussaint. In that one pivotal moment, he had failed his father, failed Miss Parker, failed history itself.
He supposed he’d had some inkling of his failure even then, right in the moment, as he walked into the house to escape her questioning eyes. But he had fought it down. Nerves, he’d called it.
Conscience, more like.
But Lord knew he’d had his chances, even after.
The march didn’t even happen the next day as scheduled. It started to snow that same night. By the time Malcolm woke up to get ready for another night on the graveyard shift, it had been falling for hours. He washed and dressed, bundled himself in his heavy coat, grabbed his bicycle, and went out into the frozen dark. For a moment, he just stood there on the sidewalk in front of the house, breathing in cold air beneath the falling sky.
Snow. Of all things, snow. Malcolm lifted his gloved hands and watched a few flakes settle there and dissolve. They were big as silver dollars. He could not remember the last time it had snowed this late in March. Shaking his head, he hopped on his bike and rode. It was slow and slippery going, even though there was not yet much accumulation.
The snow was still falling nine hours later when Malcolm got off work. It had piled itself deep and there was no question of being able to ride his bike home. He was standing in front of the hotel with it, wondering what he would do, when Ronald Whitten came up behind him. “Come on, kid,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift.”
Malcolm pondered turning the offer down; he didn’t like being around white people any more than he had to. But then what would he do? How would he get home?
“Okay,” Malcolm said, his voice stiff. “Thank you.”
They walked to the lot behind the building. He lifted the bike into the bed of Whitten’s old pickup truck and climbed into the cab as Whitten cranked the engine. Even for the truck, the streets were a difficult go. It slid and slipped slowly east through a world leeched of color, movement, and sound. Parked cars had become only humps of snow. Garbage heaps had become white mountains. You had to guess where the streets were because curbs lay buried.
The two men didn’t speak much—what did they have to talk about? The overheated cab of the truck was filled with blue smoke from Whitten’s cigarettes. Country and western music provided the background to Whitten’s occasional cursing when the truck slewed sideways on the slick white surface.
There would be no march today. It was as if nature herself had intervened, had doused the trash fires, stilled the angry words, frozen all of Memphis in place.
“You’ve been doing good work.” Whitten spoke out of nowhere.
Surprised, Malcolm glanced over. “Thank you,” he said.
“Most of ’em I hire, I’ve got to back after ’em, check up on ’em. Never had that problem with you.”
“Thank you,” said Malcolm again.
“Good work habits,” said Whitten. “That’ll carry you far.”
“Turn up here,” said Malcolm.
“You learn them work habits from your daddy?”
“I guess,” said Malcolm.
“What’s he do?”
“Sanitation worker,” said Malcolm.
Whitten arched an eyebrow. “The ones on strike?”
“Yeah.”
“Bad business, that strike.”
“Mmm-hmm,” said Malcolm. It was the most noncommittal thing he could think of.
“They may have a legitimate beef, you know, but they’re going about it all wrong.”
“Right turn,” said Malcolm, hoping the white man would shut up.
Whitten obeyed, still talking. “Pushing the mayor in the corner, bringing in that Martin Luther King—who does that help, you know? I’ll tell you who: the communists. Now there’s even talk the city may have to cancel the Cotton Carnival.”
The Carnival was a Memphis tradition, a misty-eyed homage to the “good old days” of dutiful slaves and benevolent masters. It was the highlight of the city’s social calendar, climaxed with the crowning of the new cotton king and queen. Whitten shook his head, miserable at the thought of cancellation. “Now what those men should do…” he began.
Malcolm cut him off. “Right here,” he said. He was still three blocks from home. But he’d had enough of listening to Ronald Whitten.
The truck slid as Whitten applied the brake. Malcolm was lifting the lever on the door even before the truck came to a full stop. “Thanks for the ride,” he said, opening the door.
Whitten was squinting at the sky. “Been here all my life,” he said. “Ain’t never seen it like this, especially in damn near April.” He looked at Malcolm. “You don’t make it to work tonight, I’ll understand. Hell, not sure I’ll make it myself.”
“Yeah,” said Malcolm. He slipped out of the truck, lifted his bicycle from the back, and stood there in snow that came halfway up his shin, watching as Whitten picked his way gingerly down the street, a fantail of slush spraying off his back tires.
Then he hoisted his bike and started walking. It was a tough slog, what with the weight of the bike and the depth of the snow. Malcolm’s breath, ragged and loud in his ears, was the only sound in all the world. Memphis was entombed in a stillness that felt sacred. The angry city had become a blank slate, a sheet of white paper, a chance to do it over and get it right.
And perhaps it was the recognition of this that made him pause when he got home and look over to the house next door, remembering what he had not said and had not done 24 hours before. But Miss Parker was not out on her porch. She was always out there. Rain, heat, sleet, snow, it didn’t matter; she sat out there all day witnessing life. But this morning, when he was looking for her, when he was half-hoping for her, the porch was empty.
Would he have said what he should have said, done what he should have done, if she had been out there? Would he have told her emphatically to stay away when they rescheduled the march? Would he have taken this second chance? Malcolm had never been able to answer the question—not then, and not 40 years later.
He stood there a moment watching the empty porch. Finally, he hoisted the bike and slogged his way up the stairs. There, he stamped snow from his feet and shook it from his body as best he could, then opened his front door and let himself in. Behind him, snow tumbled from the sky, hiding all signs of human movement—footprints, tire tracks, bike treads—beneath a shroud of forgiving white.
Except that, as it turned out, nothing would be forgiven. In the end, they would all be denied the balm of grace and mercy: Memphis, the sanitation men, Martin Luther King, Malcolm Toussaint.
The memory of it was never too far away. Especially since Marie died. He had thrown himself into work and work had thrown itself right back at him and instead of healing, it was anger that had built in him like trapped fire. He had gone to bed night after night and seen Martin Luther King die right before him or sometimes (which was arguably worse) be saved right before him. Then Donte Stoddard had walked out of that fast food restaurant, innocent of any crime on the books, but black, young, and male in an instant when those were dangerous things to be, and he had been executed for no good reason and Malcolm had written about it, had held the cops accountable (which, after all, was his job) and the same stupid fucking white racist assholes had written the same stupid fucking white racist emails they always write when things like this happen and…
and…
…and he had finally had enough of it, had more than he could bear, and now here he sat, chained to a chair in a forgotten warehouse by some fat lunatic, and he was probably going to die in some ridiculous attempt to assassinate a man who didn’t even need assassinating because he was never going to be elected president, not in this racist fucking country, and it was all just…just…
Malcolm’s head hung. His muscles ached. His spirit ached. He was exhausted. No, he was spent. Body and soul, there was nothing left.
Somewhere behind him, beyond his line of sight, lay the body of the little drunk who had almost saved him. Malcolm was only dimly aware that Clarence Pym was pacing now, agitated. For the fifth time in fifteen minutes, he checked his watch.
“After 3:00,” he muttered, raking a hand back through his unruly cowlick. “Where the hell can he be?”
And it was at that moment that the man-sized metal door rolled up with a loud clatter and Dwayne McLarty stepped through, pushing some frightened-looking black woman about Malcolm’s age. His jaw was swollen and purple. So was hers. The butt of a pink pistol was visible in McLarty’s waistband. He looked pleased with himself.
Pym, astounded, wheeled around on his friend. “Dwayne! Where the hell have you been?”