The Vulture (18 page)

I was very relieved to see Natalie step into the room.

‘By any means necessary,’ I said, quoting Malcolm.

Mrs Walker stood and smiled a bit. In spite of the cross-examination, I felt myself starting to admire her a bit. Most people her age leaned on the crutch they call the ‘generation gap’ and would not confront young people for their opinions. Many times I felt this was because they thought they might come up short in the knowledge department. She walked with Natalie and me to the door.

‘What time may I expect you home, Nat?’

‘About two.’

‘All right. Have a good time. It was nice to have met you,
Tom.’ I turned when I heard her use my first name, but the door was closing. Natalie was smiling.

‘She likes you,’ was her comment.

‘Maybe,’ I admitted. ‘But that wasn’t what you wanted me to do. I was supposed to try to get her to wear a natural and blow up Wall Street, wasn’t I?’

‘No. I don’t even think Martin Luther King could have done that.’ We both had a laugh as the elevator opened in front of us.

‘You sure you won’t come to the party with me?’ she asked.

‘Positive,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Go home and read, maybe watch a little TV.’

Natalie turned to me and kissed me. I put my arms around her for a second and then put her down gently. She turned away as we landed on the first floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I act like a fool sometimes. It’s a very romantic thing, though. Being saved from the tower by a prince. That’s almost what it reminds me of.’

The two of us walked outside and started toward I didn’t know what.

‘Where are we going?’ Nat asked.

‘I thought we might go down to the Cobra and have a drink and talk about ogres and princesses and night queens and all that.’

‘You think I’m kind of silly, don’t you? I mean, you think the kind of things that I do are silly.’

‘Yep. I do. But in a way they’re beautiful, because they seem very real. I can see a whole lot of beauty in you.’ I paused. ‘Do you drink?’

‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘I get drunk kinda quick.’

‘Well, then, my dear, we’ll order you a dragon in milk.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A large Coke with a scoop of ice cream.’

August, 1968

I started seeing Natalie every weekend. There was nothing serious between us. She was good for my ego, and because of me I think she abandoned her plans for going away to school. Her mother and I still had talks from time to time. Once I sat in their apartment and talked until almost four in the morning. The organization became successful, too. The classes that we held for the first week had only about eight students, but by the third week of August our teachers were holding sessions for twenty-five children per night, three nights a week. I had gotten two of the HAR-YOU summer workers to come in during the evenings and work with math and science problems in the tutorial meetings. Sister Mason and her brother covered just about everything else. I was trying to figure out how I could seat eighty students during the school year. I knew that by then I’d have at least three more capable faculty members who were knowledgeable in black history and literature. The men in Harlem sent down an exchange student who attended Colgate to teach Swahili.

N’Bala’s was becoming a hot spot. I had put out the word for my friends that I would be expecting to see them come in and buy something. And when the kids in the neighborhood realized that school was sneaking up on them, they started to get their wardrobes together too. That brought the women in, and pretty colors always fascinate women and make them buy more than they had planned on. Many times N’Bala was too crowded and busy to go to lunch. He was as happy as he could be.

* Black American Men for Black Unity

Phase Four

January 1, 1969 / 1:00 A.M.

There was only one light bulb in the room, and it was placed in such a position that Afro never saw who was talking to him. He could only hear the voice and be sure that the man was black. He had been told to show up at the main office on 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem at one a.m. for a high-security meeting within the division leaders of BAMBU. There were three other black men seated around the table when he got there, but he didn’t recognize any of them.

‘Have a seat, Brother Hall,’ the voice from the shadows said. ‘I’m glad you were so punctual. I realize that this meeting was probably a great inconvenience for you, but there are some things that we as an organization must realize and deal with. Are you ready?’

‘I had a little trouble with the Hawk, but I’m all right.’

‘A drink, perhaps, to warm your innards?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I will tell you, then,’ the voice continued, ‘that the purpose of BAMBU is good, but we are still allowing ourselves to be defeated even within our own areas by the devil. He is infiltrating in more and more abundance every day and destroying the foundation we need in order to start a rebuilding of the American black man.’

There was a pause in the narrative as the speaker cleared his throat.

‘Just how much of a revolutionary are you, Brother Hall?’ the voice asked.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said weakly. He felt intimidated, caught off guard. The other three men were looking at him.

‘Are you a fair-weather revolutionary? Be aware of the fact
that Brother Malcolm said that there is no such thing as a
bloodless
revolution. Are you willing to sacrifice your life for the black people in America if it will help to free them?’

‘Yes I would,’ Afro said.

‘Fine!’ the voice boomed. ‘Fine! It may not be necessary, but it’s good to know that the movement is that important to you . . . The Man has gotten into our neighborhoods and into the very soul of black people, the very bloodstream, by their use of drugs. I am speaking particularly in terms of our young people. They are the rocks, the foundations upon which all our hopes must be placed. And this must be stopped!’

The voice paused again, and the only sound to be heard whatsoever was the roaring trucks that rolled outside, splashing melted snow and slush against the basement window. Afro sat with his back to the door of the basement room, waiting for the voice to speak to them from the darkness. He was wondering what would happen if he suddenly leaped to his feet and turned on the light switch.

‘Already in Harlem BAMBU has started an extensive rehabilitation program for the users of drugs, in hope that their souls may not be lost to us. We have also started a movement to get rid of the pushers and sellers of the various narcotics. It is the sort of thing that had to be done sooner or later to keep our people from the continuous robberies and conning that goes on in the community. We are trying to cleanse ourselves of a disease.’ Another pause. ‘Brother Hall, you know the geography of the Chelsea area better than any other member of our group. For that reason we are asking you to aid us in our attempt to rid black people for all time from this great plague. I feel it only fair to tell you, however, that once a project like this is begun, your actions will be of interest to the syndicate if they should have any idea that you are behind the events that come to pass. If you feel that you will be taking too much of a personal
risk, all you need do is indicate this, and we will think no less of you.’

‘I’m prepared,’ Afro said quickly.

‘Fine, my son. Take a look at this picture,’ the voice said. A picture was passed to Afro, and he looked at it for only a second. ‘In the Chelsea area this is the largest distributor of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and pills. It would be a tremendous benefit to your area if he, for some reason, discontinued service.’

‘I’m sure this could be arranged. Is it important how it is done?’

‘Technique is not important, only results. I am not trying to rush you, Brother Hall, but unless you have more questions, I have some information to pass on to the other brothers here that would only endanger you further if you heard it . . . Pass him the package.’

A small square box was passed to Afro. He took it and put it in his coat pocket.

‘That is a .32-caliber automatic pistol and a box of shells. The gun is a hand-load Remington with a range of approximately fifty yards. Six-shell maximum.’ The voice rattled off the figures with the same even drone with which he had conducted the entire conversation.

‘Thank you,’ Afro said, and got up to leave. The men heard his footsteps clicking through the door that led to the basement meeting room. Then his echoes were heard on the stairs leading to the street.

‘Do I need give any more instructions to you gentlemen at this time?’ the voice asked.

There was no indication from any of the men in the room.

‘In that case, when we get the first indications that Brother Hall’s mission has been accomplished and the little matter of Mr Valsuena taken care of, I will be in contact with you again. In the meantime, I will tell you only this: we are starting
with the smallest possible areas. In this particular case we will handle from 112th Street and Third Avenue to 102nd Street and First Avenue. Our infiltration will begin tomorrow. Our second move will be in the Chelsea area. We are not strong enough to allow any detection of a pattern just yet. That is why I will decide when and where we will take over. Is that understood?’

The other three men in the room nodded.

‘Don’t worry, gentlemen. With the help of young men like Brother Hall, soon BAMBU will be in control of all drug traffic in New York City.’ There was an almost maniacal laugh from the voice in the dark. ‘Black Power!’

Afro

January 4, 1969 / 12:25 A.M.

I took Natalie home about midnight and started toward the 17th Street park. The weather had been about the same for two weeks. Two days before Christmas it had started snowing, and it hadn’t stopped until about eight o’clock Christmas Eve. In the daytime, while the sun was out, the gray-brown slush would melt, but at night the freezing temperatures would harden everything back to ice. I skidded momentarily as I walked by Isidro’s house. I had been so busy looking for lights in the building that I hadn’t watched where I was going.

There were no lights in the building. On the second floor I knew Isidro’s parents lived with younger children. There were six kids in all. Isidro’s father was the superintendent of the building. On the third floor Paco, Jessie, and Slothead lived. On the fourth floor Isidro lived by himself. He had been married, but his wife left and took the kid when she found out that he was shooting dope.

I surveyed the scene from the park. Between Eighth and Ninth avenues there is not a lot of cover for anything. On the south side of the street came the park, José’s grocery, and then Isidro’s. I wanted to get in and out without anyone seeing me, naturally, but the only door that led out emptied into 17th Street. Nervously I fingered the .32 in my pocket. I checked to see if the silencer was in place.

I got through the lobby to the stairs with no trouble. I had taken a look at the door, and it looked as though at one time a buzzer system had been used, but it wasn’t there anymore. I walked slowly and carefully, trying not to have the
old wood creak beneath my feet. I pulled the coat up around my shoulders. The hallway was cold and damp, like a wine cellar in a castle.

When I got to the top floor, I stopped. There was a melodramatic silence that hung in the air when my hand touched the doorknob. I reached out and started to turn the knob and felt the door give way. The door hadn’t even been shut. I pushed in just far enough for me to peek inside, but there was nothing but darkness. The dim bulb from down the hall didn’t even penetrate the threshold. I squeezed into the room and closed the door behind me. I was flat against the wall opposite the bed. I took one step forward and heard something swish through the air toward me. I tried to duck, but there was no way to avoid the contact. I felt everything in the room crashing down on me.

I don’t know how long I was there. I don’t really know if I was knocked out. I could see strange visions creeping past my eyes in slow motion. The sounds of the traffic seemed to play a waltz or something that swung to and fro and swung into my head like a hammer. I expected to see Isidro standing over me with a bat, but the lights were still out. I turned over on my stomach, and the room turned with me. Pain shot through my head, and I wanted to throw up. I moved my hands out in front of me and touched something that felt familiar. I rolled it around in my hand. It was a bullet. I kept feeling in the dark. One, two, three, four, five, six, I counted. I shoved them into my pocket. As I raised to lift myself, my head banged against a foot. Squinting a little, even in the darkness I could see that the foot belonged to a body that was sprawled across the bed.

I jumped for the light switch on the wall, ignoring the pain in my skull. It didn’t work. I scrambled through my pockets and came up with a match and lit it. Isidro was lying face up on the bed with a bullethole squarely between his eyes and blood still trickling from the wound. His eyes were open, staring vacantly
at the ceiling. I saw that the window that overlooked the back of the park was open and felt the freezing wind rip against my face and chest. I threw the match down and took off for the window. With a slight jump I caught onto the screen that protected the window from foul balls, and I climbed down with as much speed as I could manage. My right glove got caught in the screen halfway down, and I had to take my hand out of it. The wind then took it upon itself to slice my fingers like an ax. I took the last ten feet with a frightened leap and started running down the back alley toward 16th Street. I stopped under the corner light to look at my watch. It was ten minutes until one.

I was walking back uptown on Eighth Avenue when I heard the sirens, screaming and crying. There were more sirens coming from across 18th Street. I heard them answer like some wild animal’s mating call. But then I heard something even more clearly. Someone knew that I had been in the room with Isidro! That someone was a killer! That someone had probably done it with my gun! I reached for my gun and found instead only the six bullets. Slowly, as I felt something even more wrong, I pulled out the shells. To my surprise, I saw that there were only five bullets. But I had counted six! The sixth one, I discovered, was a cigarette butt – with a square tip.

March 18, 1969

‘Yes, I am glad you remembered,’ I said. I was talking to my mother, who was standing over me watching me eat every bite of the dinner she had prepared for me on my birthday.

‘You don’t look like you had a meal since you left. Look at him, Henry. I don’t like you . . .’

‘I know, Mom,’ I said. ‘We’ve been through this before.
It was time I took a place of my own. I had all of these things to do.’

‘And what do you make from it all? Two jobs, and you’re losing weight, and you get a hundred and thirty-five dollars a week after taxes!’

‘Mildred. Not on the boy’s birthday. He’s a man today. How does it feel?’

‘Just like yesterday, I guess. Only I got some a Mom’s fried chicken and potato pie in me,’ I said.

‘What do you weigh?’

‘How is the work coming, son?’

‘I bet you lost ten pounds since you left here.’

‘Oh, it’s coming all right. You know how it is, trying to get something started. But, considering the fact that I had never even taken part in organizing anything before . . .’

‘What you need to organize is a wife. How you gonna get married working forty hours a day? I bet you ain’t even met no women that looked like wives, with your nose in N’Bala’s stocks!’

‘Hold it, Mildred!’ I knew my father’s tone well enough to predict what was coming. ‘Tommy is a man. He will make his own decisions from now on. He has a place of his own, and he works. He is in good health, and we have plenty to praise God about. I don’t want to hear any more about any of that tonight. Is that clear?’

My mother’s reply was to walk back into the kitchen with an armload of dishes and toss them into the sink. My father and I grinned, and he leaned back and lit up his pipe.

‘What about this car we were talking about?’ he asked.

‘I think I’ll get it,’ I said. ‘It’s a sixty-four Rambler. The brother wants five hundred dollars for it.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘I drove around in it once. I told him I would send a friend to see it.’

‘Good. I know that everybody’s supposed to be brother this an’ that an’ the other, but it’s one thing to be dealin’ with the white man an’ quite anothuh when you’re dealin’ with each other. Have a mechanic look it over real good.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said.

‘Have some more pie,’ my mother said, coming out of the kitchen with the pie plate.

‘If he’s as bad off for food as you say he is, you don’t know anything about medicine,’ my father said. ‘You keep stuffin’ him like the fatted calf, an’ he’ll die of overexposure to good food.’

Everybody had a laugh. ‘I’m tryin’ to convince him to come an’ live with us again,’ Dad was told. ‘If he eats enough of my cookin’, he’ll stay . . . I don’t care ’bout twenty-one years old. He’s still my only child.’

I thought we were going to get into another one of those things about I-remember-the-time-when-you-were-only-so-many-years-old.

‘I want two things, Tommy,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘They’re for you,’ she said.

‘Now, there’s a switch,’ my father said. ‘Something that’s good for both of yawl.’

‘I want you to get married.’ Pause. ‘And I want you to get your hair cut.’

My father and I fell out laughing. ‘No bet,’ I said.

‘I heard you in here with Henry talkin’ ’bout a car that’s gonna cost you five hundred dollars. That won’t leave you any money in the bank,’ she said.

‘I’ll still have enough money in the bank to cover any emergency,’ I said.

‘I think you need a wife an’ family,’ she said. ‘I think that’s an emergency.’

I looked around the living room. My father had done well.
He was a book-store owner. I guess my tendency to learn and read everything had been gotten from him. My mother wasn’t much of a reader. She had always been after me to get the education she had wanted to have. My father hadn’t been a college graduate either. He had been a partner in the book store from the time he graduated from high school. The man he had shared the ownership with had been dead for nearly ten years now.

‘She thinks that if you get a wife and some children you’ll want to finish those other two years somewhere,’ my father said.

‘I wouldn’t want to support a family on what I make now,’ I admitted.

‘I think she has a point, though. Right now, you’re very idealistic. That’s because you haven’t got a lot of responsibility. I’m waitin’ to see what happens to you when you get out into the real world. Another mouth to feed. More bills to pay. I wonder if your idealism will support you and your family.’

‘I wonder if BAMBU and N’Bala will support you,’ my mother said.

‘It’s hard to say,’ I told them. ‘I’m doing what I like, though. That’s very important. To be able to enjoy your work and watch the young black children reach out for the ideas you’re trying to give them.’

‘N’Bala is no one’s young black child,’ my mother said.

‘N’Bala is a part of my doing what I believe in,’ I said. ‘We’ve been through all of this before.’

‘I want more for you than that,’ she said.

‘Maybe someday
I’ll
want more. Maybe someday N’Bala will give me a partnership. Like the one Dad had.’

‘This is just a fad. Those African clothes are stylish today and gone tomorrow. I want you to have something stable.’

‘Do you mean you want to have something you can brag to the neighbors about?’

‘Tommy!’

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry, Mom.’ Pause. ‘I love you both. I think I better be going.’

‘I was heating coffee. I thought you and your father were going to play a game of chess.’

‘Some other time, Dad,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could stand
another
beating tonight.’

I got my own coat, and instead of stopping downstairs, I went back out into the street. I knew that my mother’s questions hadn’t been what bothered me. I was still bothered about principles and morals and practicing what you preach. Revolution was on my mind.

There have been no bloodless revolutions. The thirteen states fought off the British Army. From the time of Rome and Greece, and probably further back, man had been fighting and killing for what he believed in. All of the brothers in Africa had had to fight bitter battles against the devil’s imperialism. That was the part I had played in doing what I would have done to Isidro.

But killing the white man was different. Shooting the oppressor and killing a man the day before you had called ‘Brother.’ I wasn’t sure. It seemed like the same old thing all over again. CORE against SNCC against Charles Kenyatta’s Mau Maus. It still seemed like brother against brother.

The voice in my head was arguing with the voice in my conscience. The voices were raging over my soul. There might never be a winner, I was thinking. They might always fight. There must be a winner!

This is only the first step in the revolution. Cleaning house before you go out to face the Man. This is still the preparatory stage, and there must be men who eliminate the ones who stand in the way of our freedom. When it comes to the Beast and the cleanliness of the community, there is no color. There are oppressors, and there are those who must be free. If the
people who are not free are not aware of the way that they must cleanse themselves, then it is up to us who think we have found the solution to help them, whatever the cost. And I had been willing to do that. I had been willing to stain my soul with the blood of another
man
in order to free those who needed freedom most.

I felt good. I felt as though I was right. I felt alive.

April 5, 1969

Dr King was killed a year ago today. He was shot down in Memphis by an assassin. I was watching the reruns on the TV and asking myself when it would all be over. Lindsay was walking around uptown telling the brothers and sisters in Harlem not to be angry. It was the act of one crazed man. But so was the death of Medgar Evers. So was the death of Mrs Liuzzo. So were the deaths of the children of Birmingham and of Cheyney, Goodman, and Schwerner. These were all the acts of crazed men. Slavery itself was the act of madmen. Where would it all end? Be cool? Be calm? Don’t riot? Don’t tear up? Where would it all end? Every time another Mack Parker story hit the world, it slapped America in the face. Every time there was another bombing or another man like James Meredith was shot at, it was another boisterous round of applause for the United States. One by one the men who stood up for black freedom in this country were being slaughtered, and the only answer was ‘Be cool’? It was at times like these when I would say, ‘Burn it all down, goddamnit! Burn down every goddamn brick and stick and store! Burn down every piece of concrete and cheap house that the white man ever constructed in this hellhole of a country, and shoot to kill! If we should die today, then what have we lost? Nothing comes from living like dogs. Burn it down!’

May 5, 1969

‘I’ve always wanted you, Tommy. I’ve always loved you. Since the day I met you.’

‘Quiet, Princess. You’ll wake up the night.’

‘You never believe anything I say, do you?’

‘I believe everything you say.’

‘Why haven’t you ever brought me here before? You’ve known that I was in love with you.’

‘I brought you here because I needed a woman.’

‘How did you know I’d come?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘But that’s all there is to it?’