Gift of the Golden Mountain (26 page)

When finally the three of us were alone, I asked Hayes about Elmore.

     "I don't know him," he said, "probably he's one of the Panthers working on prison reform. I've been doing some legal work for them."

     Hayes looked at Israel, still sitting with his head in his hands. "Some of those guys have mean mouths," he told him. "I get the feeling they spend a lot of time figuring out which buttons to push."

     Israel looked up then. "He surely did get my goat," he said wearily—I had never heard Israel sound weary—"He certainly did that." He walked to the window and stood with his back to us, looking out on the rain-drenched campus, staring back at a weeping world. And then he said to Hayes, without turning around, "I don't know why you let them use you like that, those two. They aren't the answer, don't you know. They don't speak for us."

     Hayes surprised me then. He walked across the room, put his hand on Israel's shoulder, and simply stood there, without saying a word. After a while Israel sighed, "Oh, well yes," as if something had been settled.

All that night I lay awake and tried to sort out what had happened. It was a puzzle, a perfect conundrum. Israel and the man called Elmore, Eli and Hayes. Each of them a different, terribly complicated piece of the puzzle. Along about morning I became convinced that Israel and Eli and Hayes had something to say to each other, and I wanted to hear what it was.

     "Are you sure?" Kit said when I told her I was planning to invite them to a Friday evening. "Don't you think it might be a little risky?"

     "It will be the three of them and Karin, May, you and me, that's all," I told her. "I don't want Sam, or anyone else who might throw things off. But yes, you're right, I do think it's a risk but I believe it's one that needs taking."

May and Kit stood side by side at the kitchen sink, May washing the greens for the salad and Kit peeling an avocado. "Karin and Philip are going to Bishop this weekend to meet his son. I think she's a little nervous."

     "This sounds serious," Kit said.

     "I'm beginning to think so," May answered. "Philip's daughter, Thea, has already announced that she wants them to marry. Karin's thinking hard about it, I know."

     "There's quite an age difference, isn't there?" Kit asked.

     May laughed. "Somehow, coming from you that surprises me. Wasn't there
quite an age difference
between you and your wonderful Connor?" Then she remembered: "Philip said something about knowing you—I've been meaning to ask and I keep forgetting . . . when was that?"

     Kit concentrated on slipping the knife under the hard skin of the avocado. "Let's see," she said, "just after the war, I think—a long time ago. Before he went back East to teach."

     "He would have been . . . what? In his mid-thirties then? He's
about your age, actually," May said, but was interrupted by Israel's call for help from the front door. May grabbed a towel to dry her hands and went to open it for him.

     When she left I said to Kit, "I take it you and Philip didn't stay in touch."

     She had busied herself removing the crabs from their butcher paper wrappings. "No," she said, "you know how those things go . . ." and she let her voice trail off.

     Israel appeared, filling the door frame: "I saw Hayes circling the block, looking for a parking place. They'll be along in a minute. Now what can I do, Lady Faith? Shouldn't I move in here and get that crab all fixed up nice? Or would you want me to whip up some of Israel's Special Crab Dipping Sauce? Move over Lady K, make way for some fancy fingerworks here as I prepare to dazzle you with an impromptu concerto for six Dungeness crabs . . ."

     From the kitchen I could see May standing in the door, as Eli and Hayes approached; their smiles, I assumed, reflected her own. "Damned if it isn't the basketball kid," Eli said, slipping his arm easily around her for a hello hug. Then it was Hayes and May, facing each other. He put both hands on her shoulders, that's all. But until that moment I did not know how much there was between them.

I cleared my throat.

     "We are about to be called to order," Israel announced, coming back into the room with some freshly cut sourdough.

     "Something like that, I suppose," I began, surprised to find myself feeling a bit nervous. "All of us around this table are friends, I think. I hope. But we all know that those friendships have been complicated by race—by color. The incident the other day in the office—between Israel and that man named Elmore—brought it all rather sharply into focus, how much dissension there is, how quickly it can flair into violence." I glanced at Israel, but he was
calmly spreading butter on a slice of bread. "I thought if we could explore a bit, learn something of what each of us thinks about what is happening or what should be happening, we might . . . I suppose . . . be a little wiser about each other. For instance, I don't really know what 'black power' means—every explanation I hear is so fraught with fear, and I don't know what the goal is. I was hoping you could tell us, Eli, what it means to you. I am hoping you can make us understand."

     Eli shifted and put his elbows on the table. He opened his large hands once, showing the pale inner parts of his palm, spreading his fingers as if he might find the answers there. Then he began, his voice at first hesitant, but after a while gathering resolve:

     "Black power . . . it starts off sounding violent, or at least I think that's how the white world interprets it . . . as if blacks are going to rise up and put the torch to the white world. But that's not what it means, at least not to me. You don't get power without respect, and you don't get respect without respecting yourself. So to begin with it means accepting what you are and liking it: starting with your black skin, your family, your culture. That means not believing what you've been told all your life—which is that if you're black, you are inferior. I know that sounds pretty simplistic, and I also know the slogans would sound pretty pathetic to most white people, if they were linked to nonviolence. It's the threat— the fear—that makes whites listen. Martin Luther King, Jr., could have marched forever, preaching nonviolence, and some white people would have followed him and sung 'We Shall Overcome' and cried real tears forever, but it wasn't going to make any difference. In the end, blacks are going to have to do it themselves— nobody's going to give them a share of the power because it's the right thing to do. And violence, or the threat of it, is the only thing that seems to move the people who have the power. The white man that put a bullet in Martin may have done more for the civil rights movement than the marching ever did."

     "Is integration out, then?" Kit asked.

     "I think integration is only acceptable when it is between equals. It's time we quit begging to be allowed to live next door to people who don't want us, and create black neighborhoods we can be proud of. We've tried meekness and it hasn't worked. Now it's time to stand up and demand what should have been ours all along."

     "You say integration is only acceptable when it is between equals," May put in. "That sounds good, but I don't believe it ever has worked that way. 'Equal' means too many different things to too many different people. What I do understand is the idea of blacks demanding what should have been theirs all along, by law."

     Israel had taken a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and made something of a show of unfolding a piece of paper. "I brought this tonight," he spoke up, looking out at us over the glasses. "I read it back in 1944, when I was in the army, and for a long time I carried it around with me, and I'd recite it whenever I could. It was written by Mr. Gunnar Myrdal, a famous Swedish economist, in a book called
An American Dilemma
, which I found in the library in a little nothing town in Georgia."

     His face took on a pulpit demeanor, he cleared his throat, and in his preacher's voice he read: "America can never more regard its Negroes as a patient, submissive minority. They will continually become less well 'accommodated.' They will organize for defense and offense. They will become more and more vociferous . . . They will have a powerful tool in the caste struggle against white America: the glorious American ideals of democracy, liberty, and equality to which America is pledged not only by its political Constitution but also by the sincere devotion of its citizens. The Negroes are a minority, and they are poor and suppressed, but they have the advantage that they can fight wholeheartedly. The whites have all the power, but they are split in their moral personality. Their better selves are with the insurgents. The Negroes do not need any other allies."

     He took off his glasses, folded the paper, and returned it to
his shirt pocket. "I submit to you Eli," Israel finished, summing up what he had come to say, "that your Black Power movement will alienate the better selves of those white people who would help us. That young buck you brought up to the office the other day—he wasn't being proud of being black, he was being arrogant, he was doing everything he accuses the white man of doing."

     Eli shifted defensively. "I don't necessarily agree with all the brothers' actions," he began, "but I do agree it's time to take some action that shows we mean business. And I know that nonviolence is never going to work, not in any lifetime."

     "Where does that leave you, Eli?" I asked.

     He didn't answer for a while; then he looked up and surprised us all by grinning sheepishly. "Damned if I know," he said, breaking the tension, instantly transformed to the black kid who grew up in the white suburbs of Minnesota and felt most at ease with his white friends. "My problem is I've got these pale-faced pals I can't seem to shake off."

     He gave Hayes a playful poke. Hayes caught Eli's fist and held it for an instant in a gesture that signaled his own seriousness: "I guess I have to say I'm with Israel and Gunnar," he began. "The laws are on the books, now what we have to do is make people obey them. There are white people who know what is right—some of them might not like it, but they'll go with the law if it comes down to it. I hear myself saying this, and I can almost hear you thinking, 'another jive-ass white boy telling me to wait another generation or two . . .' I don't really have any answer, Eli."

     Israel spoke up, all thought of vocabulary abandoned in his passion: "Eli's the one's jiving. Talk about black people respecting themselves. Talk about that boy Elmore you brought up to the office the other day. He don't respect nothing. You think I'm ever going to respect that? No way, not ever. Eli, you going to be in big trouble if you don't stay away from that black trash."

     A flash of anger flared in Eli's eyes: "Don't talk to me about 'black trash'—that's not something I need to hear from a black man."

     "Isn't it strange," I stepped in quickly, "how epithets have a way of triggering anger."
(Black Tom nigger faggot
Israel had been called.) "They seem to short-circuit any rational feelings, all that verbal violence rolled into a couple of words and flung at a person."

     Israel, brushing away my interruption, answered Eli: "Maybe not, but there are some things you and your militaristic Black Panther friends could learn from the black men of my age, those of us who've actually been off to war. And maybe from the black kids who are coming back now from Vietnam. That's not playacting, that's not strutting around with guns spouting out slogans. We've already proved ourselves . . . as men and as black men. We've gone out and fought for this country by God, and some of us never did come home . . . and some black boys aren't going to come home from this war either. And what I want to know is, how the devil you and your Black Panthers friends think you can teach those boys and their folks pride?"