Black Water Rising (19 page)

“The concept of integration is based on the assumption that there is not value in the Negro community…”

Mm, hmm. That's right.

“So they siphon off
acceptable
Negroes into the middle class…”

Preach on it, brother.

“And each year a few more Negroes, armed with their passports—their university degrees—escape into middle-class America…”

Come on now. Tell it.

“And one day the Harlems and the Wattses and the
Fifth Wards
will stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration.”

Right on, man.

“You know, Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wished to abolish itself. And if one listens to some of our ‘moderate' Negro leaders, it appears that the American Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. And, my black brothers and sisters, it stops tonight.”

The crowd was clapping and stomping, so loud that Jay could feel it backstage, as if the walls were shaking. He could not believe the heat this man was generating, like a lightning rod in a prairie
storm. It wasn't just the man, but, really, the ideas, the words…
two
words:
black
and
power
.

“So what you're preaching, man,” one of the white students down front asked, a cat dressed in cords and a denim patch jacket, “isn't it just racism of a different color? Isn't ‘black power' inherently anti-white?”

“See, you're still putting yourself at the center of it, jack. That's what you ain't yet getting. Black folks ain't talking about you, or
to
you, no more.”

He had to be escorted out the back entrance that night, not because of rioting, but because so many people wanted to shake his hand, wanted a word with the brother. Jay had to shuttle him out of the rear of the auditorium to avoid a mob. He shoved Stokely into Lloyd Mackalvy's VW bug, and the three of them rode on to Austin that night, to accompany Stokely at the antiwar rally at the University of Texas.

That was the first night somebody put a gun in Jay's hand.

The Klan had threatened publicly to meet Mr. Carmichael on Highway 71 that night, stopping the car before it got past Bastrop. They promised a good show for anyone man enough to come out and watch. Lloyd kept a little .22 pistol under the front seat. He handed the gun to Jay and appointed him lookout.

Stokely talked the whole way on the road that night, his head leaned against the passenger-side window, coat turned around and tucked under his chin like a blanket. He was mumbling softly over the radio about how they were gon' change the world, how it was gon' be better for their kids. Jay remembers Aretha had a new cut out that spring, a haunting cover of Sam Cooke's “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The music was so slow and pretty that Lloyd turned up the radio, and the three of them rode in silence in the car, smoking cigarettes and listening to Aretha sing of hope, Jay with Lloyd's pistol still in his hand.

Stokely would shortly leave SNCC for the Panthers, joining Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton and Elaine Brown. The civil rights movement as any of them knew it would never be the same. Black nationalism became the order of the day, less a focus on integration than on self-reliance and full-scale support of black pride and culture, entrepreneurship and political uplift, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Bumpy got on this big-time. He pushed for the complete disbanding of COBRA. The old Scott Street group reinvented itself as AABL, Afro-Americans for Black Liberation, or “able.” Bumpy and Lloyd Mackalvy had fallen head over heels in love with black nationalism.

But something else was happening to Jay.

His political focus was beginning to shift to a higher plane. The more he read, the more he was starting to see injustice as a global problem. Oppression was pandemic, like a cancer; wherever it existed, it would spread. And maybe justice could work the same way; maybe it could spread too. Which meant that the problems in Africa, say—poverty and the imperialism that created it—were as important as the problems here at home; they were actually one and the same.

While Bumpy and Lloyd got more and more heated about “black power”—refusing to coordinate rallies with SNCC or any white groups on campus—Jay kept an eye on the war and communism, and global economics in particular, working the topic into speeches and editorials for local papers and traveling on his own dime across the lower states to speak to other colleges and political leaders.

He knew he was being followed.

They found bugs in the phones on Scott Street. They spotted undercover cops at every rally. And Jay knew somebody was staging break-ins, stealing drafts of speeches and fund-raising ros
ters. But it wasn't until the feds shot those boys in Chicago that Jay began to believe his life might be in danger—not just a random act of violence, but a planned execution. By 1970, you could feel the tension running under everything. There were suddenly guns on the table at every meeting. No one knew who they could trust. Even brothers and sisters who went way, way back, had been friends for years, were suddenly tight lipped around each other. They started spending almost as much time testing each other's loyalty as they did talking about their fledgling political programs.

It was a brilliant strategy.

If no one knew who the rats were, then no one could be trusted. It was just the kind of thing that would tear a political organization apart.

In all this, Roger Holloway had completely escaped Jay's attention. His lack of political passion and his high-level interest in bedding most of the sisters affiliated with Jay and Bumpy's group made Jay think of him more as a lazy lothario than a revolutionary, a fox who'd found his way into a well-stocked henhouse. He did, however, take a strong interest in something Jay was trying to pull together: an African liberation rally to be held on campus. It was already shaping up to be the biggest political move of Jay's life. Jay wasn't sure Roger could find Africa on a map, but he was willing to do grunt work—making cold calls and mimeographing flyers—so Jay kind of took him in, teaching him how to organize a rally, who to call for money, and what lies to tell the administration to keep them off your back. Alfreda Watkins was on fund-raising then, a one-woman committee. She was a beautiful, long-limbed sister with a big soft Afro, and Jay had a sneaking suspicion she was Roger's true African inspiration.

 

Cynthia turned away from the water, turning her whole body around to face him. She wrapped her hands behind his neck, locking them. He could feel the heels of her bony feet digging into the small of his back. She rested her forehead on his. “I love you,” she whispered. “You know that, right?”

He dug his fingers into her flesh, the folds of her skirt.

Please stay,
the song went.
Stay in my corner.

Cynthia pressed her cheek against his.

She whispered in his ear, “I'm just saying…be careful, Jay.”

He would think about this night many times over the years. He would remember her face in the moonlight and the salty kisses. And he would wonder why he hadn't noticed Roger sooner, why he needed Cynthia Maddox to point out Roger's suspicious behavior…and why she had been so eager to do so.

When Jay first started practicing law, when he first went out on his own, he was interested only in criminal law; he initially built his whole practice around it. He was six months in before he realized there was no money in it. Maybe for men like Charlie Luckman, with his political connections and well-financed clients who are capable of spending large sums of money to take care of their legal indiscretions. Most of Jay's clients are walk-ins or people who get his name out of the phone book or friends of Bernie's extended church family. People who, for the most part, cannot afford to pay him. Over the years, he's engineered all manner of creative financing plans. Monthly installments and deferred payments. In lieu of cash, he's taken everything from used furniture to free haircuts. One client actually tried to pay
him with fresh buttermilk he said he'd drive up once a month from a cousin's farm in Victoria.

But Rolly Snow was a different story altogether.

Sometime in the spring of 1978, Rolly walked into Jay's office and took a seat across from his desk. Half Creole and half Oklahoma Chickasaw, he was long and lean, with caramel-colored skin and jet black hair that he wore in a short ponytail. He never shaved, and he had his name tattooed across the knuckles of his right hand. He'd shared a cell once with Marcus Dupri, who had apparently gotten heavy into drugs about a year or so after Jay's trial, after AABL disbanded for good. Rolly announced that Marcus Dupri had said Jay was an all right dude, that Rolly wouldn't have nothing to worry about.

His problem was domestic in nature. About a month prior, HPD had responded to a neighbor's late-night phone call reporting loud noises and shouting and a woman screaming. The cops showed up at Rolly's apartment and found his girlfriend with a three-inch gash across the side of her face. She was bleeding heavily and cursing Rolly's name, and he was arrested inside of three hours. He swore up and down he wasn't home when the beat-down occurred, that he'd never hit a woman in his life—though after a few hours in lockup, he told Jay, he was starting to rethink his position. He'd only let the girl in his apartment that day so she could do her laundry and maybe get a little something to eat. And with an alarming lack of gratitude, she'd gone behind his back and fucked some other dude in his bed. Rolly knew it was the other guy who had popped her. All he needed was a lawyer to help him prove it in court.

It turned out to be one of the easiest cases Jay ever had.

His client had done all the work.

Rolly ran a bar on the north side, out in the Heights, a working-class, largely Hispanic area of town, but he picked up a sec
ond income working as an amateur sleuth, a poor man's private eye. For a few hundred dollars, he could find a distant cousin or a husband who'd taken off in the middle of the night. He could tell you who your wife was seeing on the side, where the dude lived, and what he liked to eat for dinner every night. If the price was right, Rolly Snow would go through anybody's trash, follow anybody you asked him to.

He worked his own case as well as he would for a paying customer. He found a fingerprint on his headboard that the police hadn't even bothered to lift. He went to the biker bar his girl liked to frequent and got the name of the dude she was two-timing him with, and he found a witness who could put the two of them together on the night in question. The whole thing was settled in a preliminary hearing. The judge threw out the prosecution's case and offered Mr. Snow an apology. Jay was so impressed with Rolly's investigative work that when it came time to settle his bill, he offered Rolly an alternative to paying cash: would he like to do some work for Jay on the side? When Jay assured him, several times, that he would not have to wear a suit, Rolly agreed. They met on a case-by-case basis. Rolly helped Jay find witnesses or dig up dirt on defendants or find out which of Jay's civil clients were lying about their injuries. Rolly seemed to like the work at first. He even asked Jay for engraved business cards, and when Jay refused, Rolly made up some of his own, going around for months telling people that he worked in a law firm until Jay had to order him to stop. The arrangement didn't last long. Much as Rolly liked the idea of doing “serious” legal work, he also liked to drink a lot and smoke weed on a daily basis. Jay couldn't always find him when he wanted to, and Rolly didn't like being tied down. He kept meticulous records, creating a homemade balance sheet on the back of an envelope he stashed behind his bar, keeping track of all the work he'd done for Mr. Porter. He knew,
down to the hour, when he'd finally paid Jay everything he owed him. After that, the two men parted ways.

 

Jay can't recall the name of Rolly's bar, or the street it sits on.

He will have to do this by memory.

He leaves the Criminal Courts Building and drives east, out of downtown.

The air is cooler out here in the Heights. Less concrete and more trees, tall oaks reaching out to touch their neighbors across the street and weeping willows so full of the blues their leaves almost dust the ground. There are Victorians dating back to the turn of the century and sturdy bungalows built by the early craftsmen who moved to the Heights in the late 1800s to get away from the swampy, mosquito-infected city of Houston.

Time has not been good to the area.

Once-grand homes have fallen into disrepair, carved up into cheap rental units with sagging porches and chipped paint. There are cracks and potholes along Heights Boulevard. And too many Laundromats and liquor stores to count. Despite its perch some twenty feet or so above Houston's city center, the Heights have, over the years, taken on a distinctly inner-city look. Jay drives past aging, boarded-up storefronts and
taquerías,
discount supermarkets and tire yards.

The name of the bar comes back to him suddenly: Lula's, at Airline and Dunbar. Named after Rolly's mother or sister or some girl he picked up along the way. Jay crosses over to Airline and drives in the direction of Dunbar, keeping his eyes open for a squat black box of a building with steel bars over the windows and, out front, a painted mural of an Indian chief at a disco.

There's a baby-blue El Camino parked in front of Lula's,
beneath a flamingo-pink neon sign that's off at this hour. Jay remembers that Rolly used to drive a truck just like it. He shuts the engine on his Buick and crosses the street. Inside, Lula's is hot and moist and smells like peanuts and spilt beer, not to mention the faint, skunky aroma of marijuana. There's crushed-velvet wallpaper on the walls and Billy Dee Williams on posters advertising malt liquor. The air-conditioning unit in the front window is blowing out useless puffs of air.

Rolly is behind the bar, wearing a vest and no undershirt, flipping through a beat-up copy of
McCall's
magazine and playing a hand in a card game at the same time. He hasn't gained an ounce in three years, doesn't look like he's aged one bit. His only customer is a tubby white guy in short sleeves and a tie. He lays a spread across the bar and calls out, “Gin!” Rolly barely looks up from the magazine. The only other person in the bar is a woman with her feet up, fishing at the bottom of a bag of Lay's potato chips. She's wearing white jeans, a gold leotard, and no shoes. “I help you with something?” she asks Jay.

Jay steps over the threshold, letting the door swing behind him. It lands with a soft thud, and the room falls into a kind of bluish haze, courtesy of the bedsheets someone's tacked over the windows and the film of cigarette smoke in the air. Rolly finally glances his way. A corner of his mouth turns up. “Well, look what the devil drug up,” he says, smiling. “Ain't this some shit. Jay fucking Porter.”

“It's your hand,” the tubby at the bar says.

“Let Carla sit in for me.”

“I hate gin rummy,” Carla says, licking potato chip grease off her fingers.

Rolly walks to the end of the bar. “Jay motherfucking Porter,” he says, smile widening. “What the hell you doing here, man? Can I get you a drink?”

Jay runs through the last twenty-four hours in his head: he was face-to-face with a .45; he talked to Cynthia Maddox for the second time in ten years; he buried nearly $25,000 in his office; he rifled through someone's mail; and he bribed a county clerk. By his count, he's committed at least two felonies, and nearly lost his life, and the sun hasn't even set yet. “Yeah, I'll take a drink.”

He watches Rolly pour two shots of whiskey. Jay sucks his down in a single gulp, then asks for a beer chaser. When he pulls out his wallet, Rolly waves away his money, making a point to add that the
first
one is on the house. The beer is cool and crisp and feels good going down Jay's throat. He taps a cigarette from his pack to go with it. Rolly pours Jay a second shot without being asked. “What are you doing out this way, man? You still doing the law thing?”

“There somewhere we can talk…in private?” Jay asks.

Rolly nods down the bar. “They're cool, man.”

Jay lowers his voice anyway. “I need your help, Rolly. It's serious.”

From his pants pocket, he pulls the folded pages of Elise Linsey's arrest records. He slides them across the bar. “I need information on her.”

“How much do you want to know?” Rolly asks, getting right down to business. “And how badly do you want to know it?”

Jay rehearsed this part in the car, the negotiation, and made a brash decision that when the time came, he would go for broke. He pulls the two rolls of money from his pants pockets, $1,500 total. “I want to know everything.”

He sets the money on top of the arrest records. Rolly pockets it without counting it. The weight tells him everything he needs to know. “Who is she?”

“You tell me,” Jay says.

Rolly picks up the arrest report. He flips through the pages, stoically, as calmly as he'd been reading the women's magazine just a few moments before.

“Where you want me to start?”

“The last few years,” Jays says, watching as Rolly pulls a ball-point pen from the back pocket of his Levi's, making notes in the margins of the arrest report. “She stays out on the west side,” he adds, “14475 Oakwood Glen. I want to know how she's been spending her time and with whom. And most important, I want to know where she works…and how she gets her money.”

“She got money?” Rolly asks, his interest piqued.

“I don't know,” Jay says flatly, keeping quiet about the $25,000. “But, hell, look at it, Rolly,” he says, pointing to the arrest report. “She was in and out of shit for years, and then
poof,
it just stops. Suddenly she's sitting in a town house on the west side. No more arrests, no more problems. What the hell happened?”

“Maybe she cleaned up her act,” Rolly offers.

“Well, I'm willing to bet she got some help.”

Rolly nods, following the logic.

Jay is afraid to tell him more: the money and the murder, his fears about a setup, people coming after him. He doesn't want to scare Rolly off the job…or get him killed. He remembers Jimmy's cousin and the high price he paid.

“I want to know who she's working for,” he says vaguely.

“What's your piece in it?” Rolly asks. “Why you so interested?”

“Just find out what you can,” Jay says.

“I got you.” Rolly nods, respecting his client's need for discretion.

“Be careful, though. You might not be the only one sniffing around.”

“Cops?”

“Maybe.” But, of course, it's more than that. “Just be careful.” Jay says. “There might be trouble, for both of us, if anybody knew you were looking into this.”

“Won't nobody know the difference then.” Rolly holds out his hand to seal the deal, giving Jay a lopsided smile. “It's good seeing you again, man.”

 

Jay buys a six-pack with his gas card on the way back to the office.

He drinks two of the beers sitting at his desk, hiding the paper bag underneath, down around his feet. About four thirty, Eddie Mae asks to cut out early, claiming she's got to pick up one of her grandkids from band practice. By Jay's count, she's got something like twelve grandchildren, all boys, half of whom he's long suspected she made up (he once asked her to name them all, watching as she got confused around number seven, repeating Damien and Darnell twice). She's always got some dentist appointment or after-school program or T-Ball game she has to leave work early for. “Got to be there for my grandbabies.”

Once she's gone, Jay pulls down the shades and locks the door. Then, on his hands and knees, he counts and recounts the remaining cash in the lockbox and has a fleeting, drunken thought of spending it all. He eventually returns the money to its hiding place at the bottom of his filing cabinet, but not before peeling off a couple of hundred-dollar bills, telling himself it's only for the ride home, only 'cause banks are closed and it's hot and he doesn't want his wife to cook. Maybe he can pick up a chicken dinner on the way. Another $200…what difference does it make?

He's drunk by the time he gets to his car.

On the way home, he stops at Mimi's, on Almeda, and forces
himself to drink three cups of black coffee. He orders two number fives—baked chicken and peas, mashed potatoes with spiced gravy—before leaving. By the time he's back in his car, his hands are shaking and the muscles in his arms and legs feel like warm butter, soft and useless, the caffeine and alcohol meeting at a crossroads in his nervous system. He pulls over unexpectedly, into the back lot of a Rice supermarket, parking by the Dumpsters. He opens the car door and vomits.

 

Kwame Mackalvy is in his living room when he gets home.

He stands when Jay, takeout platters in his hand, walks in. Bernie is sitting on the couch. She's wearing a pink-and-yellow maternity dress and brown slippers. She looks at her husband and shrugs. “He just stopped by.”