Pop and Sonny straggled through the door of the little house a few minutes after Malcolm did, dragging the signs that proclaimed their manhood. They looked stunned.
Malcolm was sitting in Pop’s chair in front of the television. He got up without being asked and Pop sat down. Malcolm and Sonny sat side by side on the ratty couch. No one spoke.
The television screen was filled with bedlam—police firing teargas, rioters throwing bricks, kids running past the broken windows of downtown stores. Pop watched this for a moment, listened to the reporter narrating the disaster. Then he reached across and turned off the television. The silence was fat and heavy.
“You was out there in all that mess?” As if he were just waiting for Malcolm to deny it.
“You know I was there,” said Malcolm. “You saw me.”
“You know what I mean,” said Pop. “Was you out there throwin’ bricks and breakin’ windows? Was you one of the ones done that?”
“He was out there, all right,” said Sonny. He spoke in a voice of low menace. “I can see it in his eyes.”
Malcolm was yanked to his feet as much by guilt as true indignation. “You don’t see shit, nigger!”
Sonny stood more slowly. He faced Malcolm. “Call me out my name again, boy.”
So much churned inside Malcolm Toussaint then. So much anger, so much shame, so much confusion. He had broken a store window. He had faced down a brother. He had saved a whitey he hated. And now there was this: his space invaded by this garbage man of impotent dreams. He said emphatically, “What you gon’ do about it, nigger?” And braced himself to fight. Wanted to fight.
But Pop spoke. “Bunch of young fools ruined our march. We out there tryin’ to show manhood. We out there tryin’ to show dignity. And all that get throwed away ’cause of a bunch of hard-head, dumbass young motherfuckers. So I ask you again, June, was you out there in all that riotin’? Did you have anything to do with it?”
Malcolm looked at his father. Pop’s eyes were cold with fire.
He heard himself say, “I took a stick, okay? I broke a window.”
And all of a sudden, he was sprawled on the couch, his hand cupping the pain in his jaw. His father had knocked him into the cushions and now stood over him, index finger cocked like a gun, voice coiled with fury.
“You took a stick. You broke a window. And I think you halfway proud of yourself for that.”
“Ain’t proud of—”
His father bulldozed the interruption like a locomotive through a snow bank. “You took a stick. You broke a window. You turned our march—our march, goddamn it—into a riot. And you ruined every goddamn thing we worked for. You and all the rest of them young punks.” He turned away, one hand plowing through his short-cropped hair. “I hope you happy, June. I hope you real happy.”
“We were trying to help.” Malcolm came fearfully to his feet, one hand massaging his jaw.
He flinched when his father wheeled around. “Help? Is that what you call it?”
Sonny shook his head. He even laughed. He said, “You know, boy, I used to admire you. You whip-smart and you done read all them books and you know a whole lot of shit. Here I am, a grown-ass man”—another laugh, sour as lemons—“but I used to look up to you. I used to think you was really somethin’. But now I come to realize: you ain’t shit, is you, nigger? You really ain’t.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” demanded Malcolm. He had had enough of them. Both of them. “You want us to march up and down the street singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ like y’all do? You want us to kneel and pray to blue-eyed Jesus while white folks beat the shit out of us? Is that your plan? Is that what your Dr. King tells you all to do?”
“It’s called nonviolent protest,” said Sonny.
“It’s called cowardice,” Malcolm said evenly. “But I guess that’s what you got to expect from a bunch of handkerchief-head, plantation niggers. The rest of us, we don’t believe in that Uncle Tom bullshit no more.”
“You think we Uncle Toms? You think we cowards?” Pop’s eyes were livid. “Marchin’ in that street? Tellin’ them white folks they got to respect us now? That make us cowards?”
Malcolm met his eyes. “You think it makes you brave? You think it makes you men?” A tiny smirk hooked one corner of his mouth. “Some of us, we don’t need no goddamn signs to know we’re men.”
And at that, the room went cold and still. Pop’s face changed. He stared at Malcolm hard, stared as if he did not know him.
Malcolm wanted to say something else, desperately felt the need to say something else, something that might wave away the terrible words as you would a stink in the air. But he couldn’t think of anything.
“Pop,” he began.
And then there was a knock at the door.
Sonny was closest. He threw one last look at Malcolm, his eyes furious. Then he opened it. Melvin Cotter stood there.
You could see in his face that he knew he had walked in on something. His wide eyes went from Sonny to Pop and, finally, to Malcolm, who said, “What are you doing here?”
Melvin said, “I thought you should know. The old lady got hurt.”
Something cold thumped Malcolm’s breastbone from the inside and it was a moment before he realized it was his heart. His fists fell open. “What?”
“Miss Parker,” he said. “I seen her. She was out there when all that mess started. She was yellin’ for ’em to stop, but ain’t nobody paid her no mind. Then she just kind of keeled over. I think it was a heart attack or somethin’. They put her in the ambulance. She didn’t look good, Malcolm. She didn’t look good at all.”
All at once, Malcolm could not suck in enough breath. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Where’d they take her?”
“St. Joe’s.”
St. Joseph’s hospital was about eight miles north. He could be there in under an hour, easily. Malcolm reached for his bike.
Melvin did not bother hiding his surprise. “Are you crazy? You gon’ take your bike over there?”
“I got to go,” said Malcolm.
“You don’t understand,” said Melvin. “It’s wild out there. Cops still out there bustin’ up everybody black they see. Done already killed some boy. Way I heard, he wasn’t even armed, and they shot him.”
“I got to go,” said Malcolm.
Pop spoke. “Fool,” he said, “ain’t no sense in you goin’ out there, ’specially on no bike. Ain’t nothin’ you can do for that old lady. How it gon’ help her if you get your head busted in?”
“I got to go,” said Malcolm. “I got to see about her.”
He pushed the bike through the door without another word as his father stood there, too dumbfounded by his defiance to protest it. Malcolm rolled the bicycle down from the porch, hopped astride in one smooth motion, and took off for the hospital without a backward glance.
The pain he felt was almost a physical thing. He could have stopped her. He could have stopped her. He could have stopped her.
Instead, he had allowed her to walk, in her church dress and her flowered hat, right into the middle of a riot that he had known was going to happen—that he himself had helped engineer. His reasons had been noble, hadn’t they? His reasons had been unselfish. All he had wanted to do was help the garbage workers, right?
Black power, right? Black power. Black power.
Malcolm felt as if he might vomit. He was dazed with guilt.
He rode north around trash fires, down streets of broken glass, past phalanxes of Memphis cops. He rode across an angry city tearing itself apart, but he was lucky: no one stopped him, no one challenged him. He rode to the hospital and made his way to the nurse’s station on Nanny Parker’s floor.
He asked for her and the young white nurse on duty asked who he was. The lie sprang readily to his lips. “I’m Malcolm,” he said. “I’m…I’m her grandson.”
The woman consulted a clipboard. “I’m afraid your grandmother had a heart attack, Malcolm. Poor thing. Apparently, she got caught up in that melee down on Beale.”
Melee. It almost made him laugh. It had not been a melee. It had been a riot. It had been a brawl. And he had been one of its main actors.
The nurse showed him to Miss Parker’s room. At the sight of her, lying there unconscious but, thank God, alive, he collapsed on the chair next to her bed, undone by grief and relief, but most of all, by an awareness of his own culpability.
The nurse was still looking at her clipboard. “Is there any other family?” she asked.
“No,” said Malcolm. “She had some friends with her. They went down to the…to the march together. Do you know what happened to them?”
The woman shook her head, still consulting the clipboard. “She was alone when the ambulance got there. Perhaps they got separated. I understand it was crazy down there.”
“She goes to a church,” insisted Malcolm. “My Hope Baptist. I don’t know the pastor’s name, but maybe somebody can look it up and you can contact him?” He hated the idea of Miss Parker lying here, unknown and all but alone.
It must have shown on his face. The nurse gave him what was meant, he supposed, to be a reassuring smile. Then she disappeared from the door. Malcolm took Miss Parker’s hand. It was bony and cool to the touch.
The room was a double, but the second bed was unoccupied and for this, Malcolm was grateful. It meant there was no one to throw him wondering glances, no one to ask him questions for which he had no answers, no one to see the tears straggle down his cheek.
She lay in this bed looking far too small, far too frail, her long gray hair stark against the crisp white sheets. She had no idea he was there, but Malcolm sat with her anyway, sat with her for hours as outside, shadows marched across Memphis and evening settled in. He didn’t want her to wake up in this strange place and find nobody there.
Malcolm felt he owed her at least that much, owed it to her to be there.
At some point, he slept.
“June?”
The sound of it drew him out of himself. Malcolm’s eyes blinked open.
“June?” Her eyes were open. Her voice was a small, fluttery thing.
“Yes,” he said. Hope all but strangled him.
She tried to lift her head, failed. “Where am I?”
“At St. Joe’s,” he said. “You had…” He swallowed something dry and withered that had died in his throat and tried it again. “You had a heart attack.”
Her glittery, luminous eyes seemed to struggle to take this in. Then they flared with remembrance. “The march,” she said. “Young people started breaking windows?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why would they do that?”
Malcolm’s face was wet with tears he knew nothing about. Guilt gnawed him like some small, mean animal trapped in his gut. “It was me,” he said.
She looked confused. “What?”
“It was me. I was out there with them. I broke a window. I’m sorry, Miss Parker. I am so very sorry. I should have told you. I should have warned you.”
She studied him for a long moment. A long moment. Then, all at once, she smiled and her face glowed with beatific certainty. “No,” she assured him in a tender voice. “You wouldn’t do nothing like that. You’re a good boy.”
“Miss Parker, please…”
“A good boy,” she said again. She patted his cheek. Her hand was as dry and weightless as a dead leaf. “I know you,” she said. “You wouldn’t do that.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Lord, I am so tired.” And she closed her eyes. She was still smiling.
“There’s a curfew,” the nurse was saying. She had a pleasant, sympathetic face. “You all have to be off the streets by seven, can’t go out again til five in the morning unless you have a police permit.”
“We all?” Malcolm doubted even Henry Loeb would have imposed a curfew that applied only to blacks. But then, this woman was probably right about the spirit of the thing, if not its exact wording.
She shrugged now, helplessly. Malcolm checked his watch. It was 9:05.
Nanny Parker had died an hour and a half before and he still felt drained by grief. The doctors and nurses had pushed him out of the room when she coded. He had paced the hall talking to a Jesus he hadn’t spoken to since his mother died. It had not helped. They had come out of the room half an hour later and a doctor had said, “I’m sorry, son. We did our best but we couldn’t save her.” They had pulled the sheet over her and allowed him to sit with her until two orderlies came and wheeled her—wheeled the body—down to the morgue.
Now Malcolm stood there, lost. He did not know what to do. He could not go home. He simply could not. But he didn’t want to go to work either. Besides, if this white lady was right, he had no way to get wherever he was going anyway. Not if the whole city was under curfew. Malcolm shook his head. He had not known a worse day since his mother died.
The woman saw him. “Would you like a ride?” she said. “I get off in an hour. You could maybe lie down on the floor in the back of the car and I could cover you with a blanket. They won’t bother me.”
His incredulity must have shown on his face because she added quickly, “You seem like a nice young man. I’d hate to see you get in trouble because you were visiting your grandmother. Especially with…you know… what happened.”
“Thank you,” he said, and then he had to stop. He regarded her, this white woman—late 20s, he would guess, brown hair pinned back beneath a white nurse’s cap—offering him, this unknown black guy, safe passage through the city on this day of all days. You never knew about people. You just never knew.
“Thank you,” he said again, “but I’ll be all right.”
He spoke with a confidence he did not feel and he saw the doubt in her eyes, but she only nodded and said, “Well, okay. If you’re sure.”
Malcolm said he was, even though he wasn’t. But then, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Moments later, he was downstairs near the hospital entrance, unchaining his bicycle from the rack to which he had locked it. He straddled the bike and began pedaling slowly toward the hotel on the river.
Memphis lay largely silent that night, largely still beneath a haunted absence of cars, people, movement. No one was out and Malcolm had the city to himself, but for the occasional police car sliding past, lights flashing in silence. When Malcolm saw them coming he found shadows and doorways in which to hide.
In this way, he worked slowly west toward the river, figuring to ride along the bluff and come upon the hotel from behind. Most police and National Guardsmen, he figured, would concentrate their patrols in the center of town and in the areas south of that where black people lived.
But there was no way to avoid City Hall, which sat just a couple blocks off the river with its back to the water. That area, he thought, would surely be heavily patrolled.
Malcolm rode with caution, eyes and ears alert, avoiding streetlights. He kept to the alleys, slipped down North Front Street, and zigzagged through the backhoes and bulldozers of the construction zone where a new bridge was taking shape. It struck him that elsewhere in Memphis, families were settling in for an evening of television. It was Thursday night. That meant Bewitched, The Flying Nun, That Girl, Dragnet—a TV universe of white people in foolish situations, white people keeping the peace, white people running things. It seemed impossible that Sister Bertrille could be soaring above the convent San Tanco on some silly errand or Samantha Stephens twitching her nose to turn some man into a frog in the same world at the same time as Malcolm Toussaint was ducking through shadows in fear of being seen.
The heavy rumbling of the engine yanked him from his reverie. Malcolm whipped his eyes around to downtown Memphis on his left. He was passing abreast of City Hall. The building was ablaze with light and he felt distantly pleased to know the city government found it necessary to work so deep into the night. Then he saw what had made the sound: an armored personnel carrier came lumbering down Adams Street on the south side of the building, asphalt crunching beneath its treads. He could see the shadows of the helmeted men in the vehicle, tense, ready, scanning every direction.
Malcolm froze. The heavy green carrier seemed to be coming right toward him, as if it could smell him, as if it knew exactly where he was. It came closer, crossing Front Street, moving down the bluff toward Promenade Street. Here it paused, and it seemed to Malcolm as if whoever was driving the thing must be staring directly at him. He was so close that he could make out voices and hear the squawk of a radio, though he could not decipher words. Malcolm did not breathe. He made himself a shadow. The decision to spurn the white nurse’s help suddenly seemed a very foolish one, indeed. He began to think of what he would say when he was arrested.
Then there was a sound of gunshots. Two of them, echoing faintly off the buildings somewhere to the east. A moment. Another moment. Then, abruptly, the vehicle reversed itself, swung around, and climbed east on Adams, looking for the shooter.
Malcolm almost collapsed from relief. It was a minute before he could gather himself and when he did, he pedaled on shaky legs toward the Holiday Inn, still far in the distance. He hugged the river, using the bluff as cover, racing through a park named for Jefferson Davis, in the shadow of another park high above that was named for the Confederacy, under the glare of cotton brokers’ offices—all these symbols of whiteness and power and the Old South, co-opted as cover on this night by a frightened black man, sweat streaming on his brow, heart hammering within his chest.
Voices.
Malcolm stopped. High above him on the sidewalk, he saw the shadows, saw the orange-tipped glow of a cigarette. Two cops walking along in the opposite direction.
“All this shit over one man,” said the first.
“Ol’ Martin Lucifer Coon,” said the other with a soft, nasty laugh. “He gets the shit started, then runs away.”
“Yeah,” said the first. “Mr. Nonviolence. I don’t know about you, but what I saw today looked pretty violent to me. Got these niggers all riled up.”
“Somebody ought to put a bullet in his ass.”
“Would not break my heart at all.”
Malcolm waited until they were gone. He waited five minutes more. Then, his breath loud and ragged in his ears, he hoisted his bicycle and carried it across the uneven cobblestones that had been laid into the riverbank a hundred years before. It was hard going. He tried to listen above the sound of his own breathing for more voices. Finally, hearing none, he chanced it. He climbed the bank to the sidewalk, hopped astride his bike, and pedaled as fast as he could, all attempts at stealth abandoned. Moments later the hotel rose before him.
Malcolm’s shift began at 11:00. He walked into the hotel a few minutes after 10. The white girl at the counter glanced up at the sound of his entrance. Her eyebrows leapt and he knew she was surprised to see him. Malcolm wheeled his bike to the closet off the hallway behind the desk and stored it there. Then, with nothing else to do, he sat in the lobby.
The lobby was much like the city—wrapped in a dead silence. The lounge seemed busier than usual, though. From behind him, Malcolm heard the clink of glasses, the muted hum of chatter, the occasional music of a woman’s laughter. With nowhere else to go, the hotel’s guests had apparently decided to amuse themselves by getting drunk in the bar.
Ronald Whitten came through the lobby doors at 10:30. He stopped when he saw Malcolm. “Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. “Did you get a police pass?”
“No,” said Malcolm.
“You just drove through the curfew?” Whitten seemed impressed.
“Yes.”
An approving nod. “Well, that shows some real dedication, son.”
“I don’t have my work shirt,” said Malcolm, meaning the shirt with his name in a little oval on his left breast pocket. “I wasn’t able to get home to get it.”
Whitten waved it off. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s enough that you made it in. I’ll see about getting you a police pass for tomorrow. Why don’t you just punch in now, since you’re already here, and you can take out the trash in the bar. Evening shift was down a man—he got arrested for rioting—so I expect you and me are going to have a lot of slack to pick up.”
He took a step, stopped, then turned back to Malcolm. “Real glad you made it in,” he said. A tight nod, and he was gone.
Watching him walk away, Malcolm almost laughed. Somehow, on this godawful day, he had managed without trying, without even really caring about it, to impress his boss. Ronald Whitten had mistaken having nowhere else to go for initiative. Life was funny sometimes. Malcolm sighed and got up from the couch.
Moments later, he was bear-hugging a barrel of empty liquor bottles through the kitchen when he saw Melvin standing there in his white busboy’s uniform, scraping food off plates before washing them. He looked up. “You made it,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Malcolm, remembering the personnel carrier and the police on the sidewalk. “Barely.”
“How’s the old lady?”
“She died.” Malcolm lowered the trash barrel.
“Oh, man.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Malcolm. She was a nice old lady. I know she meant a lot to you.”
“Yeah.”
Melvin regarded him for a moment. He said, “Look, Malcolm, I been thinkin’: you been my ace boon coon since we were little fellas. Don’t hardly seem right for us to be walkin’ ’round here not talkin’ to each other ’cause of Pruitt’s fat ass. Yeah, he’s a bastard, but you know well as I do, sometimes you got to—”
He stopped. Malcolm was crying. “Malcolm?” he said.
Malcolm said, “I killed her, man. Killed her as sure as if I put a gun to her head. I knew what was going to happen down there, I knew what they planned. I should have told her to stay home. I should have made her stay home.”
Melvin said, “Brother, you can’t take that on yourself. She had a heart attack. Ain’t no way you could have stopped that.”
Malcolm looked at him. He wanted to believe. He wanted to be comforted, desperately so. But he could not—and he was not. There was no escape from the awful thing he knew he had done. The simple truth, the truth he would bear like a weight through the rest of his days, was that Melvin Cotter was wrong. Malcolm could indeed have stopped it, could have prevented what happened to the old lady who had been like a mother to him. He could have, but he didn’t.
So Melvin’s words of intended comfort fell on him like rain on a sidewalk. They did not sink in. They made no difference. Without a word, Malcolm hefted the barrel and took it out back to empty it into the Dumpsters. The private haulers the hotel had contracted would take it away to the dump.
Melvin called after him. Malcolm did not reply.
The next hours passed in a routine whose very mindlessness made him grateful. He did work that, even after only five weeks on the job, he felt he had already done a million times—clean the bathrooms, empty the ashtrays, run the buffer—but he gave himself over to it gladly, willed his entire self to be concentrated into the task of picking soggy cigarette butts out of a latrine or rubbing a shine into a heavily traveled floor.
It was tough, thankless work. But it was easier than thinking.
Malcolm had been working for a few hours when Whitten happened by, carrying an armload of paper towels for the lobby-level restrooms. He stopped to appreciate the mellow gleam of the floor in front of the bank of elevators. “Good work,” he said with a nod of approval. “You keep it up, you’re going to have my job some day.”
The words jolted Malcolm. He realized suddenly that he could see this happening. A month ago, this had been a temporary stop, a brief respite on the way to whatever his destiny might be. But now, it seemed almost a more welcome and, certainly, a safer thing: something to do where you didn’t have to think. You could collect a check, put food on your table, and not have to ponder anything beyond the next task. You could simply be. In this moment, at least, something about that seemed very attractive.
“It’s after two,” Whitten was saying. “Don’t you usually take a break long about now?”
“Yes, I usually do,” said Malcolm. He had gotten lost in the work. He hadn’t realized so much time had passed.
“Go ahead,” the white man encouraged him with a nicotine-stained smile.
“Okay,” said Malcolm. “Thank you.” And he powered down the machine.
Malcolm stopped through the kitchen of the sleeping hotel and plucked a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the big refrigerator, took a salt shaker and a paper towel, popped a bottle of Coke with an opener, and went to stand out back by the Dumpsters to watch the river meander past him in the darkness.
This, too, he had done so many times in just a few weeks that he did it automatically, did it without thinking—or seeing. So he was right up on the man before he even realized he was there. The stranger stood in shirtsleeves contemplating the endless river, a cigarette burning low between two fingers of the same hand that meditatively swirled a shot glass half full of some brown liquid.
The man turned at the scrape of Malcolm’s feet and for an instant, they stared at each other in mutual surprise. Then Martin Luther King said, “I’m sorry I startled you. I didn’t think anyone else would be out here this time of night.” It was the voice Malcolm knew from a hundred newsreels, the same great baritone with the same soft Georgia drawl, but it was different somehow, too—less solemn, less portentous and formal. It was an off-duty voice, an after-hours voice.
Malcolm coughed, trying to find his own voice. “I work here,” he managed. “I usually take my breaks out here.”
King dropped the cigarette and ground it out beneath the toe of his shoe, lifted his glass in a salute and said, “Well, then, I’ll leave you to your solitude.”
“No, no,” said Malcolm. “That’s okay. I mean, I can go somewhere else if you’re thinking or praying or something.”
“None of the above,” said King, lifting the glass again—this time as an explanation, not a salute. He smiled. “I’ll tell you what, my man. It’s a big river. Why don’t we just share it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Yes, sir?
Malcolm’s brain was screaming at him to say something more, but that same brain was locked tighter than a bank vault. It would not open, would not give him anything. There he was, right in front of him, the man he had scorned, the man he had mocked and called “De Lawd.” There he was, that ponderous, prayerful, far-too-patient preacher so joyfully rebuked by younger men like Malcolm who said what they meant and damn well meant what they said when they lifted clenched fists and yelled, “Black power!”
And he was yes-sirring him?
Martin Luther King reached across. “I’m Martin,” he said.
“I know who you are,” said Malcolm, taking King’s plump, soft hand in his own.
“Yes,” said King, “but I am afraid I cannot say the same.”
“I’m Malcolm,” said the former Mozell Wilson, Jr., shaking a hand he had never expected to shake. “Malcolm Toussaint.”
King’s eyebrow lifted. “Toussaint? Like Toussaint L’Ouverture?”
“Yes,” said Malcolm. “It’s not my real name. I mean, it is my real name—I had it legally changed—but it’s not the name I was born under.”
“I see,” said King, taking a sip of the brown liquid. “Why did you change your name, then? And why Toussaint?”
“Because he was a revolutionary.”
“Aha. So ‘Malcolm’ is…”
“For Malcolm X, yes. And my middle name is Marcus, after Garvey.”
“Three revolutionaries,” said King.
Malcolm was stunned by what he heard himself say next. “I believe in black power,” he announced to this preacher who in recent months had been chased from one end of the country to the other by angry young men shouting that very thing.
Malcolm feared the man might be angry. But Martin Luther King only smiled. It was a smile filled with mystery and sorrow. “I believe in black power, too,” he said.
And apparently, although his brain was still locked, Malcolm’s mouth was open for business. “No you don’t,” it said in a voice both scandalized and incredulous. Hearing himself, Malcolm brought a hand up, but of course, the hand was too late. The words were already out.
King only watched him from the shadows of that smile. “Yes, I do,” he said. “Black power is a call for black self-determination, isn’t it? It means economic and political power, doesn’t it? It means men demanding to be treated like men, right? Isn’t that what black power means?”
“Well,” said Malcolm, flustered, “yes.”
“Then yes,” said King, “of course I believe in black power. What else have I been fighting for?”
Malcolm gaped. “But then, why…?”
King got there first. “Why do I oppose the slogan?” Something melancholy came into his face then. “Every word has two meanings, Malcolm, the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning. The denotative meaning is—”
“The denotative is what it denotes,” interrupted Malcolm, “what it actually means. The connotative is what it connotes, what it implies or suggests.”
It was King’s turn to look surprised. “Yes,” he said, “exactly. And while the denotative meaning of the words is quite clear and unassailable, the connotative meaning is another matter. A white man—or any man, for that matter—who hears you cry out for black power is going to hear it as a threat, a call for violence and black supremacy. Is that what you want, Malcolm? You want to dominate white people?”
“No,” said Malcolm. “I just want them to leave us alone.”
King sighed. “Well, you’re hardly alone in that,” he said. “Our people are saying that same thing all over the world. They want to be left alone. They want their freedom and they want it now.”
King regarded Malcolm for a moment, then said, “But have you ever noticed: Jewish people have gained power in this country, but you never heard them cry, ‘Jewish power!’ The Irish man gained power, but he never cried, ‘Irish power!’ You see, they had a strategy for achieving that power and they followed it. But our people—our young people, at least—have fixated on a mere slogan that has no strategy whatsoever.”
Abruptly he stopped. “Aren’t you going to eat that?” he said, pointing.
Malcolm’s eyes followed King’s index finger to the boiled eggs and Coca-Cola bottle he had forgotten he was carrying. “Would you like one?” he asked.
King accepted the egg with a grateful nod. “I can’t remember the last time I ate,” he said. “It’s been a long day.” There was a low stone wall overlooking the river. King nodded toward it. “Brother Malcolm, let’s sit and eat while we talk.” So the janitor and the Nobel laureate moved to the wall, sat down next to each other, and began peeling hard-boiled eggs. Some part of Malcolm was watching this happen and did not believe what it was seeing.
“Would you like me to get you another egg?” he asked. “There’re plenty in the kitchen.”
“No, this is fine,” said King. “I just needed a bit of nourishment, is all.”
His face was puffy. And there was, now that Malcolm looked closely, a mourning in his eyes that seemed to go down for miles. Malcolm was suddenly concerned. “Are you all right, Dr. King? You look tired.”
“That’s because I am tired,” said King, working his thumb beneath the shell of the egg. “I’m exhausted, to tell you the plain truth, but I can’t seem to rest. Andy Young says I’m fighting a war on sleep.” A melancholy chuckle. “Too many things pulling at me, I suppose. I’m sure you saw what happened out there today? All that violence?” He winced. The word itself seemed to pain him.
Malcolm nodded. He felt the guilt rising in him like floodwaters.
King made a sound of mild disgust. “The press is going to have a field day with that in the morning.” Shaking his head, he waved the thought away as if shooing a fly. “Enough about that.” King sprinkled salt from the shaker Malcolm had sat between them onto his egg and said, “Tell me about yourself, Malcolm.”
Malcolm lowered his head. “There’s not much to tell.”
“Are you from here in Memphis?”
“Yes, sir. Born and raised.”
King took a bite from the egg. “You’ve been a janitor for a long time?”
“Only a few weeks,” said Malcolm. “I was in college until last month.”
“You dropped out?”
“Yes. I mean, sort of.”
“Did you run out of money? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you did. That’s a problem many of our young men have to deal with.”
“No, sir. I had a full scholarship.”
Confusion narrowed King’s eyes. “Then, why did you drop out?”
“Well, first they put me out. They put me on what they call administrative leave, but they said I could reapply to come back next semester. I’m not going to do that, though. College is not for me.”
“Why did they put you out?”
“For protesting.”
“Protesting?”
Malcolm sighed, embarrassed. “Well, for painting protest graffiti on the side of the administration building.”
Martin Luther King stared at him. Slowly, he began to shake his head. “Malcolm,” he said, “do you have any idea what a waste that is?”
“I disagree,” said Malcolm. “Dr. King, I want to help my people. And I don’t see how getting some sheepskin from some white man’s college is going to enable me to do that.”
“Malcolm,” said King, “science isn’t white. Mathematics isn’t white.”
“Yeah, but Shakespeare is white. The history they teach us, that sure is white.”
“Then change it,” said King. “Demand that they broaden the curriculum to include the black man’s literature and the black man’s history.”
“I’d rather just leave,” said Malcolm, pulling a piece of shell off his egg and flinging it toward the river.
“Yes, but think about what you’re throwing away.”
“Are you saying there’s something wrong with me just being a janitor?”
King shook his head, chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of egg. “Of course not,” he said. “There is no shame in any honest work. The shame is in wasting an opportunity. Education is the key to much of what troubles our people, Malcolm. Education is the solution to joblessness and hopelessness. Education is the solution to the ghettoes and the slums. You say you want black power? Education is the source of black power. There are young men who would give anything they had to get an education. And they’ve given you one for free and you throw it away? That’s the waste, Malcolm.”
King paused. He considered Malcolm with a gimlet eye. “I’m curious,” he said. “What was the ‘protest’ graffiti you wrote that got you put on leave?”
Malcolm looked down. “I’d rather not say.”
“Oh, come now, brother Malcolm. There’s no one here but you and me and the Mississippi River. What did you write?”
Malcolm felt ten years old. “I’d rather not say it to you,” he clarified.
King laughed. It was a rich, homey sound. “Brother Malcolm,” he said, “you wrote it on a wall for the whole world to see. Surely, you can—”
“‘Fuck the system.’”
“Beg pardon?”
“‘Fuck the system.’ That’s what I wrote on the wall.”
“I see,” said King. “Yet despite your vivid scorn for it, the system still stands unchanged, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” conceded Malcolm.
“The only thing that was changed was your circumstance. You had been a student studying toward a goal of helping your people. Now you are a janitor working a graveyard shift.”
King sighed, ate the last of his egg. “Sometimes, if you’re not careful, Malcolm, the thing that makes you feel empowered can be the thing that destroys you. You do something to satisfy your immediate longing to strike back without giving any thought to how that might damage you in the long term. Unfortunately, that’s what happened yesterday on Beale Street.”
And at last, Malcolm could not take it anymore. “I broke a window,” he heard himself say. He spoke in a small voice and he wasn’t sure King had heard him. Then he saw surprise widen the great sad eyes and he knew King had heard him just fine.
“I see,” said King.
“I’m sorry,” said Malcolm. “I ruined your march.”
“Well, you had help in that regard,” said King mildly. “It wasn’t just you.”
“But still,” said Malcolm, “I was part of it.”
“Why did you do it?” asked King.
Malcolm’s eyes met King’s. “You want the truth?”
King nodded.
Malcolm steeled himself and said, “Because your way is too slow. I get tired of begging white people to give us what we should have had all along. I want whitey to pay attention. I want them to hear what we’re saying. That’s why.”
King didn’t speak all at once. He took a sip of the amber liquid, giving Malcolm’s words space to breathe. When he did speak, some indefinable hardness had crept into his voice.
“Do you think you’re the only one who is impatient, Malcolm Marcus Toussaint?”
“No, but—”
“How old are you, man? Nineteen, maybe? I am 39 years old, Malcolm. So I am 20 years more impatient than you. I am 20 years more frustrated. And I am 20 years more exhausted. Especially tonight, after seeing what happened and knowing what white people—some white people, at least—are going to say about it.”
He paused. He sighed. “You say you want them to hear what you’re saying? Violence is not a language that encourages people to hear you, Malcolm. It’s a language that encourages them to fear you.”
“Maybe I want them to fear me. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“And then what, Malcolm? They’ll give you better schools? They’ll provide more job opportunities? No. They’ll simply call out the army to lock you down in your own neighborhoods. Violence only begets more violence. Look at what is happening in Memphis as we’re sitting here, tanks and troops patrolling the streets, people forbidden to leave their homes. That’s what violence does. And the cycle won’t end until you end it, until you reach the place where you’re willing to meet physical force with soul force.”
Malcolm made a derisive sound. “You mean, let those crackers whip me upside the head and I don’t hit back? I’m sorry, Dr. King. That’s not going to happen.”
“So you hit them back.”
“Damn right.”
“And then what?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, they just hit you and you just hit back. What happens, then? They call the police?”
“Probably.”
“And let’s say the police officer hits you and you hit him back. Then what happens?”
Malcolm could see where this was going. He conceded the point with a sigh. “Probably, they pile on me and kick my ass.”
“Maybe they kill you.”
“Maybe. But at least I die knowing I stood up for myself. I didn’t let someone just walk all over me.”
“And then what?”
Malcolm shrugged. “And then nothing. I’m dead.”
“Yes, brother Malcolm, you’re dead. And nothing has changed. And the system is still in place. So your death is a futile act that accomplishes nothing. Just like writing graffiti on a schoolhouse wall.”
Malcolm shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dr. King,” he said. “I know you believe in nonviolence. But I just don’t. I can’t. I’ll never give the white man permission to believe he can do anything he wants to me and I won’t hit back.”
“‘The white man,’” repeated King. “You speak as if they were all one. They are not, you know. Viola Liuzzo was a white woman. She died for our freedom. James Reeb was a white man and he did, too. Jim Zwerg had his back broken in Montgomery for our freedom. White people are not all alike, any more than we are all alike. We seek to reach the ones who can be reached, to persuade the ones who can be persuaded. Violence can never do that. Only nonviolence can.”
Malcolm lowered his head. He found himself remembering the nurse at the hospital. He didn’t even know her name. All at once, he felt a sorrow welling in him. Somehow, it expressed itself in a smile. “You know,” he said, “I saved a white man’s life today. I don’t know how it happened.”
Malcolm glanced up. King’s eyes were steady on him. “He was a cop,” he heard himself say. “And this guy, this brother, had got his gun and was about to shoot him and for some reason, I jumped in front of the gun. I don’t know why I did that.”
Malcolm’s voice trembled. He was surprised to feel a tear overflow his right eye. “I saved his life, but this old woman who lived next door to me, she went out in the middle of that mess and had a heart attack. She died tonight, right before I came to work. And I could have stopped her, Dr. King. I could have told her what was going to happen, could have told her to stay away, but I didn’t.”
He brushed impatiently at the tears sliding down his cheeks. “She was like a second mother to me and I didn’t save her, even though maybe I could have. But this guy I did save, he was a white cop. And what’s worse, when I got a good look at him, he was the same white cop who sprayed Mace in my eyes last month and told me, ‘Nigger, go jump in the river.’”
King spoke softly. “Life is cruel sometimes. Unforgiving and cruel and filled with tragic paradoxes like this. You must try to learn to live with what happened today and your role in it, Malcolm, just the same as I. It won’t be easy, but you must. You cannot change what has already happened. But you can use the lessons learned from it to change the future. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Malcolm nodded. “I think so.”
“You’re going to have to forgive yourself, Malcolm. God will forgive you if you ask him. But you must also forgive yourself.”
Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t know if I can. Ever since the day that cop sprayed that Mace on me, I’ve just been angry. Sometimes, I feel like I can hardly breathe. I bought a gun and I’ve been carrying it ever since, because I said I’d never let that happen again, never let whitey treat me that way again.”
Malcolm looked back up into those eyes, still steady as high beams. King said, “A gun won’t give you comfort, Malcolm. A gun won’t ease your pain.”
“But they have to know they can’t keep pushing us around.” Malcolm’s voice was a plea. “They have to know we’re ready to fight back.”
There was a moment. Then King said, “You want to give up on white people, don’t you? All of them.”
Malcolm nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Especially lately.”
King smiled that sad smile. “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes I do, too. Sometimes, they can be bitterly disappointing—even our white liberal allies have their moments when they just don’t seem to understand, when they just don’t seem to hear what is coming out of their own mouths. But you know why I don’t give up on them?”
Malcolm looked up. “Because of Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb and that other guy, Zwerg?”
“Well, yes,” said King. “But also because I can never figure out what happens next.”
“What do you mean?”
King regarded him for a moment. Then he said, “You’ve named yourself after three revolutionaries. Well, Toussaint fought a war. But we’re not going to fight a war—22 million Negroes against 176 million whites? Even if I believed in violence, I would not like those odds. Garvey wanted to go back to Africa. How are you going to move 22 million Negroes—assuming they all wanted to go—to Africa? And why should we go to some developing nation to start all over again when all our claims are here, when our ancestors cleared this country’s fields and fought its wars? That leaves Malcolm X, and we both know black supremacy is no more of an answer than white supremacy. He himself said as much before he died. So if we’re not going to fight a war, and we’re not going away, and we’re not going to set up our own black supremacist government here, what other options do we have, Malcolm?”
The question was not rhetorical. King was looking hard at him, waiting for an answer. Malcolm lowered his eyes. He had none.
“Exactly,” said King. “So the only thing we are left is to wrestle with white people, to contend with them, try to make them see what they can’t see or won’t see. We have to trust that something in our humanity will touch something in their humanity so they’ll finally be able to recognize us as brothers. That’s really our only option. We can’t give up on white people, Malcolm, because if we do, we give up on ourselves. We might as well stop struggling and just accept our lives the way they are. No, we have to believe they can be redeemed—and we have to struggle until they are. We have no other choice.”
“That’s easy to say,” said Malcolm.
“We have no other choice,” repeated King.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” said Malcolm.
King looked at him. “We have no other choice,” he said.
Malcolm sighed. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Maybe I am.”
Malcolm started to push up from the wall. “I should probably be getting back to work.”
“Malcolm?”
He paused. “Yes?”
“You are a bright young man with a sharp mind. Don’t waste these gifts. You say you want to help our people? You say you want to change the system? Go back to school.”
“I don’t know if—”
One last time, King got there first. “Yes you do,” he said. “Go back to school.”
There was a moment. Then Malcolm said. “I’ll think about it.”
“That’s all I ask,” said King.
Malcolm was about to reply when a voice behind him said, “There you are. Been looking for you. Break time’s about over, ain’t it? Still need you to—”
Ronald Whitten’s next words died as he came closer and saw who it was Malcolm was talking to. “Oh,” he stammered. “Oh. I…I…”
King stood up with a gregarious smile. “Please don’t chastise the young man on my account,” he said. “I’m afraid I am the cause of his tardiness. I asked to him to sit and talk with me and I guess we both just lost track of the time.”
“No, sir,” said Whitten, still struggling to piece words together. “No, that’s…that’s…fine. It just…I just…”
“Yes,” said King. “Please excuse me, I have to try to get at least a little sleep. I expect that this is going to be a very demanding day.”
Its job done, the gregarious smile faded like morning mist. King looked tired. Indeed, in that moment, Malcolm thought this might be the most thoroughly exhausted man he had ever seen. He stood with Whitten and watched as Martin Luther King walked alone into the sleeping hotel, absently swirling the glass of brown liquid in his hand.