The Street Sweeper (5 page)

‘That depends,’ Adam said. At this his father hugged him.

‘That’s right! That’s exactly right. Perfect answer. It depends. Three years is a long time to hold your breath, right? Is it a long time to change
the mentality of more than half the nation? Is it a long time to shift vested interests? Is it a long time to break down generations of fear?’

It seemed to young Adam that his father was leading him towards an answer of ‘no’, but surely ‘no’ was the
wrong
answer so he waited before replying. But his father kept talking, as he knew he would, and he didn’t have to answer.

‘When was the Civil War?’

‘1861 to 1865,’ young Adam answered.

‘Right. And what was it about?’

‘Emancipation of the slaves,’ the eight-year-old shot back with a mouth full of sandwich.

‘Among other things, yes. Right. Right. And when did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation?’

‘1863.’

‘Well, Lincoln announced it in September 1862 but it didn’t come into effect until 1 January 1863. And when was the Supreme Court decision in
Brown versus Board of Education?’

‘Nineteen fifty-four.’

‘And what did that decision do, what was its intended effect?’

At this Adam spoke as if by rote, ‘Thurgood Marshall, now Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court, successfully argued
Brown versus Board of Education
in 1954. The Supreme Court decision led to the end of segregation in public schools and overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of the
Plessy versus Ferguson
decision of 1896.’

‘Absolutely right,’ his father answered.

Jake Zignelik had been there in 1954 in the US Supreme Court when Thurgood Marshall had argued
Brown versus Board of Education
. In 1949, fresh from Columbia Law School, Jake Zignelik, a New York Jew, went to work for what would later become known as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, later simply known as the LDF. He went on to be mentored by Thurgood Marshall. In a long career he represented Martin Luther King and many others, arguing numerous civil rights cases before the US Supreme Court. He represented black students attempting to gain admission to segregated colleges and
professional schools, black men charged with the rape of white women and black servicemen subjected to racial discrimination in the armed services. He later became the director-counsel for the LDF.

‘Very good,’ Jake Zignelik said to his son Adam. ‘Watch your suitcase. Always watch your suitcase, especially in the park. So these three years between the
Brown
decision and the “Little Rock Nine”, they were really part of some ninety-odd years when people waited for the government to keep its promise. And that’s exactly what Thurgood said. It was after the Arthurine Lucy case. He was asked if he was a gradualist. You know what a gradualist is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s a gradualist?’

‘Someone who wants change to come but gradually,’ young Adam answered as he’d been taught.

‘That’s right. After the Lucy case Thurgood said he believed in gradualism but that he also believed ninety-odd years was pretty gradual. You think he was right?’

‘Yep.’

‘Yeah, so do I. Ninety-odd years is a long time to wait to be treated with the same dignity everyone else is supposed to be treated with, supposed to according to law. See, what good is it having great laws that protect people and help people to live the best lives they can if those laws aren’t upheld, if they aren’t enforced? It’s really like saying there are some laws you have to respect and obey and others you don’t really have to worry about. And it just so happened that the laws you didn’t have to worry about always affected the same people. Which people?’

‘Black people.’

‘Right, black people. Right from the time their ancestors were kidnapped, taken against their will – can you imagine being forcibly separated from your family to be used as a thing, not as a person, just so other people could get rich? – right from that time there was never a time when black people didn’t face discrimination, didn’t find life harder than other people, just because they belonged to a group, a group they were born into. Of course, other people have had it very hard too, including your grandparents. All sorts of people suffer for all sorts of reasons
at different times but black people are the descendants of people who didn’t even choose to come here, who were often treated like animals just so that white people could make money out of them. And what did our government, their government, do? Despite the beauty of the Declaration of Independence, despite the beauty of the Emancipation Proclamation, even despite the Supreme Court decision Thurgood fought for in
Brown versus Board of Education
, the government turned its back on black people.’

‘So is the government the enemy?’

‘No, government can be an agent of fairness. That’s what government is meant to be.’

‘So … who is the enemy?’ young Adam asked with one hand holding his sandwich and the other resting on his suitcase.

‘The enemy,’ Jake Zignelik explained, ‘is racism. But, see, racism isn’t a person. It’s a virus that infects people. It can infect whole towns and cities, even whole countries. Sometimes you can see it in people’s faces when they’re sick with it. It can paralyse even good people. It can paralyse government. We have to fight that wherever we find it. That’s what good people do.’

So much of what his father would always too hastily tell him on those visits to New York stayed with Adam Zignelik. The names and the dates of the people associated with the struggle; and always that article of faith would come back to him again and again. As a mantra, it would come to him at times when other people might rely on a religious incantation or injunction. ‘That’s what good people do.’ It came back to him the first time right after his father had kissed him goodbye and put him on a plane to fly back to his mother. The very long flight to Australia allowed him plenty of time to repeat it over and over to himself as he sat strapped in his seat, a blanket on his knees, trying to hide the tears in his eyes from the passenger seated next to him or the flight attendants who always seemed to be on the lookout for such things from little boys who travelled alone on long flights. ‘That’s what good people do.’

When Adam would get home to Melbourne he would tell as many people as he could everything he remembered and he remembered everything his father had told him. He remembered about the work his
father was doing, about the people his father worked with, the places, the dates, the laws, the cases, the various decisions of the various courts and what they all meant. He told his friends who didn’t understand and didn’t care. He told all his teachers who understood more and, for the most part, could have cared more, which alternately distressed or angered him. Adam’s father was Jake Zignelik after all. Perhaps they had heard of him? Everyone young Adam met in New York had heard of him. Of course, the little boy was only meeting people his father introduced him to. Adam had met Justice Marshall, quite a few, even many, times. What were these people, adults, teachers; what were they doing with their lives? He was talking about Justice Thurgood Marshall for God’s sake! He
knew
him. He told his mother, who understood everything and cared very much. She had cared enough long ago to seek out Jake Zignelik from the other side of the world.

In the decade after World War I, pockets of Eastern Europe shivered with outbreaks of feverish pogroms against its Jews. At the same time in the United States the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act slowed what had been a flow of Jewish immigration to a drip. Any eastern European Jews hoping to start a new life in the New World now had to consider the even newer world. In the early 1930s Adam Zignelik’s grandparents on his mother’s side arrived in Australia, a country so far away they were never quite sure it really existed until they docked at Port Melbourne. They moved to the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Carlton. They eked out a meager living making knitwear such as cardigans and sweaters, or ‘jumpers’ as these were called in Australia, on a single at first manual and then motorised knitting machine in their dining room and selling it at a stall in the nearby Victoria Market. They had two children, a son who died before he was five and a daughter on whom they lavished all the anxious attention their fragile health, language difficulties and precarious social and economic circumstances permitted.

Always the brightest in her class, she eventually made her way to the sandstone lecture theatres of Melbourne University Law School in the early 1960s. It was there she heard about the work of the NAACP and by the time she graduated she had decided to go to New York to see if she
could obtain an internship there. When she met Jake Zignelik, an older still single man and by then the director-counsel of the LDF, she fell for him instantly. Mutual attraction, flattery and admiration blossomed in the hothouse of long hours and other people’s problems into an office romance. It might have ended there but Jake felt obliged to marry the young Australian lawyer when she fell pregnant. ‘It’s what good people do.’ Not long before Adam was born, his mother had to give up work at the LDF and she realised later that once she was out of Jake’s work life she was out of what really was the part of his life he cared most about. With ageing sickly immigrant parents on the other side of the world and already a widow in all but name, she joked that if ever she were to leave Jake it would take him years to find out. Adam never knew the precise mechanics of it but by the time he was three the marriage had been dissolved and he was living with his mother in Melbourne.

Jake Zignelik admitted on more than one occasion that he knew he wasn’t much of a father but the first admission, made privately during a US Supreme Court hearing, was not made to his ex-wife or to Adam. It was made to William McCray, his long-time friend and LDF colleague. A veteran both of the civil rights movement and of the segregated armed services during World War II, William McCray also had one child; a son. But he was a much better father to his son, Charles, than Jake was to Adam. It was not long after Jake had put his eight-year-old son on a plane to Australia that he found himself admitting as much to William over coffee during an adjournment in the hearing.

‘It’s not that I don’t love him because, of course, I love him very much,’ Jake Zignelik said, looking out beyond the steam that rose from his cup.

‘Jake, if you can’t be a good father to him, you could at least tell him that you
know
you’re not much of a father.’

‘I never see him.’

‘Well that’s not
his
fault. What did you talk about with him when he was here? You talked to him about the decision in
Brown versus Board of Education
, didn’t you?’

Jake thought a moment and even when he remembered he didn’t answer. He was thinking about his lunch with Adam in Bryant Park.

‘So it’s 1863 – you have to imagine it,’ he told his son. ‘It’s the middle of the Civil War. It’s a hot summer in New York. Lincoln had announced the Emancipation Proclamation the previous September but it had only been in effect since January. It was intended to free slaves in those parts of the country at war with the Union. By the way, any slave owner in any Confederate state that rejoined the Union between September 1862 and January 1863 got to keep their slaves. See, even the Emancipation Proclamation had a loophole. But now with the Emancipation Proclamation in effect, all sorts of people could blame the war on black people.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause now it could be said that the war was being fought on behalf of black people so if it wasn’t for them there wouldn’t be a war. You see how twisted that is, Adam? These people are being bought and sold like animals. Finally enough people agree that it’s just plain wrong and that you can’t do that to human beings. But there are vested interests, right? You remember who they are?’

‘The slave owners?’

‘That’s right, the slave owners. Well, they don’t want to give up what they regard as their property and they’re willing to fight and even secede from the Union. You know what “secede” means?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘They wanted to be a different country.’

‘That’s right. They wanted to be a different country and were willing to fight to achieve all this. The Union fought back and when people suffered because of the war there were those who thought this whole mess could be blamed on black people. A lot of poor white working people, a lot of Irish and German immigrants and their offspring, had been made to fear the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.’

‘Why did they fear it?’

‘Because they’d been told there’d be a flood of former slaves from the south coming to New York and taking their jobs. They thought the slaves would be willing to work for even lower wages than they, the Irish and Germans, were getting.’

‘Because the slaves had been used to working for nothing.’

‘Good boy! That’s exactly what they were told.’

‘Who told them that?’

‘Pro-slavery people.’

‘Were there pro-slavery people in New York?’

‘Sure.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Lots of people. People in the Democratic Party.’

‘You mean the Democrats?’

‘Yep.’

‘I thought the Democrats were good? Aren’t
we
Democrats?’

‘They weren’t always good. No one’s always good. Listen, things got worse. So it’s a hot summer in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War. Things aren’t going so good for the Union and, in order to get more troops, Lincoln introduces a new draft law. You know what that means?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘When a government wants to force people to do things for it that people aren’t volunteering to do, it “drafts” them. It coerces them into doing things against their wishes; in this case it drafted them into the Union Army.’

‘Like forcing them?’

‘Exactly. Lincoln introduced a federal draft law that was stricter than any before it. It was to be in the form of an enforced lottery. Any male citizen between twenty-five and thirty-five was liable to have his name drawn, and if it was, he’d have to join the army. That’s a lot of men who ran the risk of being forced to join and fight for the Union army. That’s a lot of men who were frightened they’d be called up, frightened or angry they might be called up.’