The Street Sweeper (7 page)

It was impossible to begrudge anyone trying to protect Denise McNair, impossible to begrudge anyone trying to help her people fight unmitigated evil, impossible to begrudge your father. But William McCray, who had fought both Hitler
and
Jim Crow, had managed to be a good father to his son Charles, now head of History at Columbia, and William McCray was someone his son
could
find, someone his son had
always
been able to find. But on the corner of 43rd and 5th Adam Zignelik couldn’t find his father.

‘Hold on to your suitcase.’

That was him, but when Adam looked around he wasn’t there any more. Adam was there, trying to look out for Denise McNair as everybody else on 5th Avenue brushed past, oblivious to the danger. They were killing abandoned children on that very block. There had been Jake’s legacy, but it was largely Charles McCray’s example and later, his assistance, that had led Adam to the History Department at Columbia. He went there first as an undergraduate. He graduated with a history major but, uncertain what to do next and with some guilt at leaving his mother alone, Adam returned to Australia and tried to make a career for himself as a journalist. For almost six years he toiled away but it irked him that he wasn’t progressing faster. It was Charles McCray, with whom he had kept in regular contact, who got him to consider a PhD in history with a view to becoming an academic historian. At twenty-eight, Adam moved back to New York and enrolled in the PhD program of the History Department at NYU. The fashion within civil rights history over the previous decade or so had been to eschew the ‘great man’ theory or school of civil rights history in favour of social history that focused on the nameless people who constituted the bulk of the movement.

Adam used his father as an inspiration for reacquainting scholars with the importance of the civil rights legal strategy. His argument was a reminder that without concomitant changes in the law there would have been no grounds on which the local activists could base their fight. It was because of the success of the legal strategy in cases such as
Brown versus Board of Education
that the local activists were able to galvanise black communities around the country, particularly in the south, and tell them the law was now on their side. The fight could be taken from there. Adam’s dissertation served to remind historians in the area just how difficult it was in those days, in that climate, to win the cases from first instance all the way up to the Supreme Court and how hard it was to get civil rights legislation enacted. He wrote of the need to look again at the legal strategy, not as engaged in by one great man or great woman, but as the outcome of the concerted efforts of a group, a group of lawyers.

All the while he was at NYU he stayed involved in the Columbia community. He took classes at Columbia and once a month came uptown for a ‘Twentieth Century Politics and Society’ seminar. He met and maintained friendships with Columbia graduate students from the History Department. It was through one of them that he met Diana, the woman who had grown not unaccustomed to the rhythm of his recent nightmares. And of course, there was Charles McCray, who was for him a cross between a mentor, an older brother and a ‘co-conspirator’. The ‘conspiracy’ was one between children of the movement. They could say things to each other that it was almost impossible to say to anyone else.

It was a game Charles and Adam used to play, alone and in private. It involved saying things that were unacceptable within mainstream political discourse. Sometimes the ‘things’ were statements or propositions many people knew to be true or likely to be true. At other times they were simply defamatory statements they came up with to amuse each other. But none of the ‘things’ could be said, at least publicly, without contravening political correctness. Often after a few drinks, the ‘things’ were just things they both knew the other didn’t believe. This latter category of ‘thing’, even more than the former, would have them in tears of laughter by the end of an evening.

It was on the strength of his PhD and, again, with the assistance of Charles who, though not yet chairman, was already a highly respected member of the department and a well-regarded scholar of the Reconstruction, that Adam joined the faculty at Columbia. His dissertation became the basis for a book. As the telegenic son of Jake with a Britishoid accent, Adam, for a time at least, was plucked up by the media as ‘the son’ and, consequently, the book had sold better than anyone, including Adam, had expected. He wrote a few non-scholarly articles in newspapers and magazines and was even asked to be a ‘talking head’ in a television documentary for public television.

But even as this was happening, he wondered whether other people were wondering whether his public persona was going to his head. It wasn’t. His anxiety over what his colleagues might be wondering would not permit this. It crowded out most other things. Whether they were wondering this or not, colleagues did start to ask, ‘So what’s your next project about?’ More importantly, he started to ask himself the same thing. When he didn’t have an answer for himself it amplified a deeper question he had long fought to silence. Was he an intellectual lightweight? Perhaps he was only ever going to have one idea. He wondered if he was capable of writing another book that would contribute to scholarly debate in any meaningful way.

But worrying if he would
ever
have another sufficiently good idea was now a luxury he could no longer afford because it wasn’t enough to have a good idea one day. It probably wasn’t enough to have one even now. He really needed to have had one before now because, having spent five years at Columbia with only one book to show for it, an untenured academic seeking tenure was in very big trouble. It would take an internal departmental committee to decide to put him up for tenure. That was standard practice. If this happened, the matter would then go before a university-wide committee, the ‘ad hoc’ committee, which consisted of academics from all over the university. But the real cut-off point was his own department, now headed by his friend Charles McCray, and Charles had more than an inkling that Adam had nothing about to come out. Adam would have discussed it with Charles if he had. What Charles didn’t know was that it wasn’t a matter of simply buying time, even were
that a simple matter. Adam had hit a brick wall. He didn’t have even the seed of something interesting. He felt he was finished and he didn’t want to put Charles through the unpleasant task of having to confirm that he was indeed finished. Charles had been leaving messages gently suggesting that they needed to talk. Their friendship and history would allow only gentleness. But for how long? The days in which it was legitimate not to have yet responded to any of Charles’ messages had evaporated till there were, so to speak, only hours left. Soon Adam’s failure to respond would itself become the first topic of their next conversation. Perhaps, after all, that’s what Adam wanted.

Adam was going to have to talk to him sooner or later about Diana, who lay beside him every night. He had almost struck her in his near convulsion shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, she lying asleep beside him, and he, in a time unrelated to real time, an eight-year-old boy craning his neck on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. He had never discovered the little girl’s name, the name of the orphan in the city of orphans, and even then, just before 4.30 am that Monday morning, only hours away from teaching, from assaulting a class with his particular version of ‘What is History?’, he was still, all those years later, replacing the missing picture in his mind of the little girl victim of 1863 from the Colored Orphan Asylum with the image of Denise McNair, who had been killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for the same reason by the same people a hundred years later.

Adam saw little eleven-year-old, feisty yet caring Denise McNair. He could have fixed on any of the other child victims. It was her eyes. More than anything else, it was her eyes. Not merely beautiful, they were expressive. They held more than a child’s eyes should hold; mischief, warmth, intelligence, sweetness, yes, but also a kind of understanding, as though she understood things you were going to need to understand. That’s who Adam saw when he saw the little girl victim of 1863 from the Colored Orphan Asylum.

‘Dad!’

On a black-and-white television screen a newsreader read the news for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A little boy sat cross-legged
in front of the television waiting to hear something to remember that might interest his father at the end of the week when he spoke to him over the telephone all the way across all those oceans. His father had once told him he ‘liked the sound of this Hawke guy’. What was his name? Bob Hawke. Ever since then Adam had collected as many facts as he could about Bob Hawke to tell his father.

Bob Hawke, an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar, was the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ first paid advocate before the Arbitration Commission, the body that determined the minimum wage for the whole country. Subsequently a president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and a member of the governing board of the International Labour Organisation, he campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, among other ills. Jake Zignelik liked the sound of the guy.

Searching for something to tell his father that might interest him, Adam would phone him from his mother’s house and talk about Bob Hawke. And Jake, when stretched for something to say to his son that mattered even a little, would often ask, ‘How’s your mate, Bob Hawke?’

The little boy sat alone cross-legged on the carpet in front of the black-and-white news broadcast and then ran around the house from room to room looking for somebody to tell. But each room was empty. Diana was still asleep. She wanted to have a child. She wanted to marry Adam and have a child with him.

‘Dad!’

Charles had been leaving messages gently suggesting that they needed to talk. Adam had hit a brick wall. He wanted to spare Charles the embarrassment of having to tell him that it was all over for him. Diana wanted them to have a child. If you have a child you have to be able to feed it.

‘Watch your suitcase! Always watch your suitcase.’

When the eight-year-old boy craned his neck to look up at the corner of 43rd and 5th he saw the face, the eyes, of Denise McNair. If you have a child you have to know its name. Don’t you have to know the names of all the children? Can you have a child and not give it a name? Can it be done? Maybe someone would tell him because he really didn’t know.

‘Dad!’

By the time Hawke had been elected Prime Minister of Australia, Adam’s mother had died of breast cancer and his father, Jake Zignelik, had died of a heart attack. Shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning Diana woke up beside the writhing Adam, her Adam, and put her arms around him to try to calm him.

‘Shhh! It’s okay. It’s okay.’ She whispered it soothingly in the greyish-blue light of their Morningside Heights apartment in the north-west corner of an island in the city of orphans.

‘Shhh!’

She warmed his back with her body and hugged him. Adam, exhausted, was gasping for air. His cheeks were wet. She held him tighter. She loved him. She wanted to have a child with him. Adam was awake now. In a couple of weeks they would be separated.

T
HE BUS JERKED TO A STOP
at a set of traffic lights on its way uptown. The sudden change of momentum woke Lamont Williams. He had made it through the day, his fourth day as a probationary employee in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He had even managed to find a seat on the bus, a window seat, on the first of the two buses he needed to catch to get home to the Bronx. For a moment he had fallen asleep, his head against the window, and in that moment he relived random snatches of the years he had spent in Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. He sometimes dreamed he was back there or in Woodbourne where he had spent three years before being transferred to Mid-Orange. Sometimes he dreamed of his daughter who, when he woke on the bus going home, was eight years old. Her age was one thing that didn’t depend on whether he was able to find her or not. These dreams, the ones with his daughter in them, didn’t require him to be asleep.

It was the end of his shift and the bus was crowded. His head was still against the window and no one watching would have realised he was awake as he looked around through almost closed eyes. The man seated beside him was reading the
New York Post
. An older white woman next to this man stood trying to read what she could of the man’s paper while holding a small cage that contained a very docile cat. Lamont had trouble making out the age or breed of the cat but preferred not to risk looking more carefully in case the cat-lady, observing he was
awake and taking an interest in her cat, attempted to press a claim to his seat.

Lamont’s daughter might be anywhere in the city. Then again, she might not be in the city at all. She might not even be in the state. And yet, she could be on that very bus. It was too crowded to see everyone but even if Lamont could, he hadn’t seen his daughter since she was two and a half, so who exactly was he continually looking for since his release? How many light-skinned black girls could he find on buses, on the subway and on the street if he looked hard enough? He knew he could get arrested for looking too hard, not that that was going to stop him.

Somewhere in the city there was another bus crawling through the streets, exhaling fumes and edging its nose tentatively between the traffic. This one was just moderately crowded and only a handful of people were standing. One of those standing was a child. A light-skinned black girl with braided hair tied tight with red ribbons, she was aged somewhere between seven and ten. On top of a red T-shirt she wore a mid-season jacket, unzipped, as if in anticipation of a change of season in the middle of her day. Seeing a newly vacant seat towards the back of the bus in the section with the row of seats that flip up to accommodate wheelchairs the young girl took it. She could not have been sitting for much more than a minute when she offered her newly acquired seat to a man she’d just noticed who was standing talking to a seated friend of his.