Collected Short Fiction, page 745
“Ought to be in the library,” Powell 43X said. “Read. Learn. That’s how we got where we are. You think we took over this city because we a bunch of dumb niggers?” He let out a colossal laugh. “We smart, man!”
James Shabazz wanted to say, “We took over the city because Whitey ran out. He dumped it on us, is all. Didn’t take no brains, just staying power.”
Instead he said, “I got a little time to take it easy yet, sir. I don’t go to college for another year.”
“Columbia, huh?”
“You bet. Class of ’05, that’s me.”
“You gonna fool with football when you get to college?”
“Thought I would.”
“You listen to me,” said Powell 43X. “Football’s okay for high school. You get yourself into politics instead up there. Debating team. Malcolm X Society. Afro League. Smart boy like you, you got a career in government ahead of you if you play it right.” He jerked his head to one side and indicated a girl striding by. “You get to be somebody, maybe you’ll have a few of those to play with.” He laughed. The girl was almost six feet tall, majestic, deep black, with great heavy swinging breasts and magnificent buttocks switching saucily from side to side beneath her sprayon wrap. Conscious that all eyes were on her, she crossed the park on the diagonal, heading for the Sixth Avenue side. Suddenly three whites appeared at the park entrance: weekend visitors, edgy, conspicuous. As the black girl went past them, one turned, gaping, his eyes following the trajectory of her outthrust nipples. He was a wiry redhead, maybe twenty years old, in town for a good time in boogieville, and you could see the hunger popping out all over him.
“Honkie mother,” James Shabazz muttered. “Could use a blade you know where.”
Powell 43X clucked his tongue. “Easy, there. Let him look! What it hurt you if he thinks she’s worth lookin’ at?”
“Don’t belong here. No right to look. Why can’t they stay where they belong?”
“Jimmy—”
“Honkies right in Times Square! Don’t they know this here’s our city?”
Marcus Garvey said:
The Negro needs a Nation and a country of his own, where he can best show evidence of his own ability in the art of human progress. Scattered as an unmixed and unrecognized part of alien nations and civilizations is but to demonstrate his imbecility, and point him out as an unworthy derelict, fit neither for the society of Greek, Jew, or Gentile.
While he talked with Powell 43X, James Shabazz kept one eye on the honkie from the suburbs. The redhead and his two pals cut out in the direction of Forty-first Street. James Shabazz excused himself finally and drifted away, toward that side of the park. Old windbag, he thought. Nothing but a Tom underneath. Tolerance for the honkies! When did they tolerate us?
Easy, easy, like a panther. Walk slow and quiet.
Follow the stinking mother. Show him how it really is.
Malcolm X said:
Always bear in mind that our being in the Western hemisphere differs from anyone else, because everyone else came here voluntarily. Everyone that you see in this part of the world got on a boat and came here voluntarily; whether they were immigrants or what have you, they came here voluntarily. So they don’t have any real squawk, because they got what they were looking for. But you and I can squawk because we didn’t come here voluntarily. We didn’t ask to be brought here. We were brought here forcibly, against our will, and in chains. And at no time since we have been here, have they even acted like they wanted us here. At no time. At no time have they ever tried to pretend that we were brought here to be citizens. Why, they don’t even pretend. So why should we pretend?
The cities had been theirs for fifteen or twenty years. It had been a peaceful enough conquest. Each year there were fewer whites and more blacks, and the whites kept moving out, and the blacks kept getting born, and one day Harlem was as far south as Seventy-second Street, and Bedford-Stuyvesant had slopped over into Flatbush and Park Slope, and there was a black mayor and a black city council, and that was it. In New York the tipping point had come about 1986. There was a special problem there, because of the Puerto Ricans, who thought of themselves as a separate community; but they were outnumbered, and most of them finally decided it was cooler to have a city of their own. They took Yonkers, the way the Mexicans took San Diego. What it shuffled down to, in the end, was a city about eighty-five per cent black and ten per cent Puerto, with some isolated pockets of whites who stuck around out of stubbornness or old age or masochism or feelings of togetherness with their black brothers. Outside the city were the black suburbs, like Mount Vernon and Newark and New Rochelle, and beyond them, fifty, eighty, a hundred miles out, were the towns of the whites. It was apartheid in reverse.
The honkie commuters still came into the city, those who had to, quick-in quick-out, do your work and scram. There weren’t many of them, really, a hundred thousand a day or so. The white ad agencies were gone north. The white magazines had relocated editorial staffs in the green suburbs. The white book publishers had followed the financial people out. Those who came in were corporate executives, presiding over all black staffs; trophy whites, kept around by liberal-minded blacks for decoration; government employees, trapped by desegregation edicts; and odds and ends of other sorts, all out of place, all scared.
It was a black man’s city. It was pretty much the same all across the country. Adjustments had been made.
Stokely Carmichael said:
We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy, not because we’re apathetic, not because we’re stupid, not because we smell, not because we eat watermelon and have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black, and in order to get out of that oppression, one must feel the group power that one has . . . If there’s going to be any integration it’s going to be a two-way thing. If you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts. You can send your children to the ghetto schools. Lefs talk about that. If you believe in integration, then we’re going to start adopting us some white people to live in our neighborhood . . .
We are not gonna wait for white people to sanction black power. We’re tired of waiting.
South of Forty-second Street things were pretty quiet on a Saturday, or any other time. Big tracts of the city were still empty. Some of the office buildings had been converted into apartment houses to catch the overflow, but a lot of them were still awaiting development. It took time for a black community to generate enough capital to run a big city, and though it was happening fast, it wasn’t happening fast enough to make use of all the facilities the whites had abandoned. James Shabazz walked silently through silence, keeping his eyes on the three white boys who strolled, seemingly aimlessly, a block ahead of him.
He couldn’t dig why more tourists didn’t get cut up. Hardly any of them did, except those who got drunk and pawed some chick. The ones who minded their own business were left alone, because the top men had passed the word that the sightseers were okay, that they injected cash into the city and shouldn’t be molested. It amazed James Shabazz that everybody listened. Up at the Audubon, somebody would get up and read from Stokely or Malcolm or one of the other black martyrs, and call for a holy war on Whitey, really socking it to ’em. Civil rights! Equality! Black power! Retribution for four hundred years of slavery! Break down the ghetto walls! Keep the faith, baby! Tell it how it is! All about the exploitation of the black man, the exclusion of the Afros from the lily-white suburbs, the concentration of economic power in Whitey’s hands. And the audience would shout amen and stomp its feet and sing hymns, but nobody would ever do anything. Nobody would ever do anything. He couldn’t understand that. Were they satisfied to live in a city with an invisible wall around it? Did they really think they had it so good? They talked about owning New York, and maybe they did, but didn’t they know that it was all a fraud, that Whitey had given them the damn city just so they’d stay out of his back yard?
Someday we gonna run things. Not the Powell 43X cats and the other Toms, but us. And we gonna keep the city, but we gonna take what’s outside, too.
And none of this crap about honkie mothers coming in to look our women over.
James Shabazz noted with satisfaction that the three white boys were splitting up. Two of them were going into Penn Station to grab the tube home, looked like. The third was the redhead, and he was standing by himself on Seventh Avenue, looking up at Uhuru Stadium, which he probably called Madison Square Garden. Good boy. Dumb enough to leave yourself alone. Now I gonna teach you a thing or two.
He moved forward quickly.
Robert F. Williams said:
When an oppressed people show a willingness to defend themselves, the enemy, who is a moral weakling and coward, is more willing to grant concessions and work for a respectable compromise.
He walked up smiling and said, “Hi, man. I’m Jimmy Lincoln.”
Whitey looked perplexed. “Hi, man.”
“You lookin’ for some fun, I bet.”
“Just came in to see the city a little.”
“To find some fun. Lots of great chicks around here.” Jimmy Lincoln winked broadly. “You can’t kid me none. I go for ’em too. Where you from, Red?”
“Nyack.”
“That’s upstate somewhere, huh?”
“Not so far. Just over the bridge. Rockland County.”
“Yeah. Nice up there, I bet. I never seen it.”
“Not so different from down here. Buildings are smaller, that’s all. Just as crowded.”
“I bet they got a different looking skin in Nyack,” said Jimmy Lincoln. He laughed. “I bet I right, huh?”
The red-haired boy laughed too. “Well, I guess you are.”
“Come on with me. I find you some fun. You and me. What’s your name?”
“Tom.”
“Tom. That’s a good one. Lookee, Tom, I know a place, lots of girls, something to drink, a pill to pop, real soul music, yeah? Eh, man? Couple blocks from here. You came here to see the city, let me show it to you. Right?”
“Well—” uneasily.
“Don’t be so up tight, man. You don’t trust your black brother? Look, we got no feud with you. All that stuff’s ancient history! You got to realize this is the year 2000, we all free men, we got what we after. Nobody gonna hurt you.” Jimmy Lincoln moved closer and winked confidentially. “Lemme tell you something, too. That red hair of yours, the girls gonna orbit over that! They don’t see that kind hair every day. Them freckles. Them blue eyes. Man, blue eyes, it turn them on! You in for the time of your life!”
Tom from Nyack grinned. He pointed toward Penn Station. “I came in with two pals. They went home, the geeps! Tomorrow they’re going to feel awful dopey about that.”
“You know they will,” said Jimmy Lincoln.
They walked west, across Eighth Avenue, across Ninth, into the redevelopment area where the old warehouses had been ripped down. Signs sprouting from the acreage of rubble proclaimed that the Afro-American Cultural Center would shortly rise here. Just now the area looked bombed out. Tom from Nyack frowned as if he failed to see where a swinging night club was likely to be located in this district. Jimmy Lincoln led him up to Thirty-fifth Street and around the hollow shell of a not quite demolished building. “Almost there?” Tom asked.
“We here right now, man.”
“Where?”
“Up against that wall, that’s where,” said James Shabazz. The sonic blade glided into his hand. He studded it and it began to whir menacingly. In a quiet voice he said, “Honkie, I saw you look at a black girl a little while ago like you might just be thinking about what’s between her legs. You shouldn’t think thoughts like that about black girls. You got an itch, man, you scratch it on your own kind. I think I’m gonna fix you so you don’t itch no more.”
Minister James 3X said:
First, there is fear—first and foremost there is inborn fear, and hatred for the black man. There is a feeling on the part of the white man of inferiority. He thinks within himself that the black man is the best man.
The white man is justified in feeling that way because he has discovered that he is weaker than the black man. His mental power is less than that of the black man—he has only six ounces of brain and the Original Man has seven-and-a-half ounces . . . The white man’s physical power is one-third less than that of the black man.
He had never talked this long with a honkie before. You didn’t see all that many of them about, when you spent your time in high school. But now he stared into those frightened blue eyes and watched the blood drain from the scruffy white skin and he felt power welling up inside himself. He was Chaka Zulu and Malcolm and Stokely and Nkrumah and Nat Turner and Lumumba all rolled into one. He, James Shabazz, was going to lead the new black revolution, and he was going to begin by sacrificing this cowering honkie. Through his mind rolled the magnificent phrases of his prophets. He heard them talking, yes, Adam and Ras Tafari and Floyd, heard them singing down the ages out of Africa, kings in chains, martyrs, the great ones, he heard Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali, Marcus Garvey, Sojourner Truth, du Bois, Henry Garnet, Rap Brown, rattling the chains, shouting for freedom, and all of them telling him, go on, man, how long you want to be a nigger anyhow? Go on! You think you got it so good? You gonna go to college, get a job, live in a house, eat steak and potatoes, and that’s enough, eh, nigger, even if you can’t set foot in Nyack, Peekskill, Wantaugh, Suffern, Morristown? Be happy with what you got, darkie! You got more than we ever did, so why bitch about things? You got a city! You got power! You got freedom! It don’t matter that they call you an ape. Don’t matter that they don’t let you near their daughters. Don’t matter that you never seen Nyack. Be grateful for what you got, man, is that the idea?
He heard their cosmic laughter, the thunder of their derision.
And he moved toward Tom the honkie and said, “Here’s where the revolution gets started again. Trash like you fooling with our women, you gonna get a blade in the balls. You go home to Nyack and give ’em that message, man.”
Tom said lamely, “Look out behind you!”
James Shabazz laughed and began to thrust the blade home, but the anesthetic dart caught him in the middle of the back and his muscles surrendered, and the blade fell, and he turned as he folded up and saw the black policeman with the dart gun in his black fist, and he realized that he had known all along that this was how it would turn out, and he couldn’t say he really cared.
Robert Moses of SNCC was questioned in May 1962 on the voter registration drive in Mississippi:
Q. Mr. Moses, did you know a Herbert Lee?
A. Yes, he was a Negro farmer who lived near Liberty. Q. Would you tell the Committee what Mr. Lee was doing and what happened?
A. He was killed on September 25th. That morning I was in McComb. The Negro doctor came by the voter registration office to tell us he had just taken a bullet out of a Negro’s head. We went over to see who it was because I thought it was somebody in the voting program, and were able to identify the man as Mr. Herbert Lee, who had attended our classes and driven us around the voting area, visiting other farmers.
Powell 43X Nissim said heavily, folding his hands across his paunch, “I got you off because you’re your daddy’s son. But you try a fool thing like that again, I gon’ let them put you away.”
James Shabazz said nothing.
“What you think you was doing, anyway, Jimmy? You know we watch all the tourists. We can’t afford to let them get cut up. There was tracers on that kid all the time.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You sit there mad as hell, thinking I should have let you cut him. You know who you really would have cut? Jimmy Lincoln, that’s who. We still got jails. Black judges know the law too. You get ruined for life, a thing like that. And what for?”
“To show the honkie a thing or two.”
“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy! What’s to show? We got the whole city!”
“Why can’t we live outside?”
“Because we don’t want to. Those of us who can afford it, even, we stay here. They got laws against discrimination in this country. We stay here because we like it with our own kind. Even the black millionaires, and don’t think there ain’t plenty of ’em. We got a dozen men, they could buy Nyack. They stay.”
“And why do you stay?”
“I’m in politics,” said Powell 43X. “You know what a power base means? I got to stay where my people are. I don’t care about living with the whites.”
“You talk like you aren’t even sore about it,” James Shabazz said. “Don’t you hate Whitey?”
“No. I don’t hate no one.”
“We all hate Whitey!”
“Only you hate Whitey,” said Powell 43X. “And that’s because you don’t know nothin’ yet. The time of hating’s over, Jimmy. We got to be practical. You know, we got ourselves a good deal now, and we ain’t gon’ get more by burning nobody. Well, maybe the Stock Exchange moved to Connecticut, and a lot of banks and stuff like that, but we run the city. Black men. Black men hold the mortgages. We got a black upper crust here now. Fancy shops for black folk, fancy restaurants, black banks, gorgeous mosques. Nobody oppressing us now. When a mortgage gets foreclosed these days, it’s a black man doin’ the foreclosin’. Black men ownin’ the sweatshops. Ownin’ the hockshops. Good and bad, we got the city, Jimmy. And maybe this is the way it’s meant to be: us in the cities, them outside.”
“You talk like a Tom!”
“And you talk like a fool.” Powell 43X chuckled. “Jimmy, wake up! We all Toms today. We don’t do revolutions now.”
“I go to the Audubon,” James Shabazz said. “I listen to them speak. They talk revolution there. They don’t sound like no Toms to me!”
“It’s all politics, son. Talk big, yell for equality. It don’t make sense to let a good revolution die. They do it for show. A man don’t get anywhere politickin’ in black New York by sayin’ that everything’s one hundred per cent all right in the world. And you took all that noise seriously? You didn’t know that they just shoutin’ because it’s part of the routine? You went out to spear you a honkie? I figured you for smarter than that. Look, you all mixed up, boy. A smart man, black or white, he don’t mess up a good deal for himself, even if he sometimes say he want to change everything all around. You full of hate, full of dreams. When you grow up, you’ll understand. Our problem, it’s not how to get out into the suburbs, it’s how to keep Whitey from wanting to come back and live in here! We got to keep what we got. We got it pretty good. Who oppressing you, Jimmy? You a slave? Wake up! And now you understand the system a little better, clear your rear end outa my office. I got to phone up the mayor and have a little talk.”
