Reggie rises, unlatching his leather bag. Ariyeh glances at him, anxious. From the bag he pulls a handful of orange fliers — melty and pale in the bar’s yellow light — and begins to pace the room, leaving them on tables or beer crates within people’s reach. Folks stare at them, then him, lips twisted, angry, as though they’ve just been ordered to leave.
You get them at midnight all alone in your bed when the body goes cold and the no-noise of your house wakes you like a smoke alarm, alarm, alarm, ah, you know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the blues.
I pluck one of the fliers from a beer puddle:
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Voice of the Voiceless
Free All Political Prisoners
and Prisoners of War
Bitter also peruses one of the sheets. “Hey!” he shouts at Reggie, grimacing, squinting. “What’s all this Mumia-Jumbo?” Ariyeh shakes her head.
“Read it,” Reggie tells him.
“Don’t make no sense.”
“Mumia’s on death row in Pennsylvania, wrongly accused of killing a cop. The government wants to silence him.”
“Oh, the gov’ment, huh?” Bitter tugs his bottom lip. “And why’s that?”
“He was a founding member and minister of information of the Black Panther Party of Philadelphia. He had a radio show, and he exposed the cops’ racism in bombing the MOVE house, burning all those children — ”
“Brother ‘bout the people’s business,” Grady says, grinning. He slurps his malt liquor.
“That’s right, brother” Reggie hisses. “While you old poot-butts sit here getting wasted night after night, listening to this retro shit”—he nods at Earl — “some of us worry about the fact that the government is about to murder a prominent black revolutionary — ”
“Reggie,” Ariyeh sighs, her face behind her hands.
“Whoa, boy, watch it now, watch it, you ‘bout to mess up with a capital F!”
“Sho that’s right. Bet a fat man going through a doughnut hole!”
“—some of us worry that the informal executions of the sixties — Fred Hampton, Martin — have become, in the nineties, formal executions. Legal lynchings, dig? You know how many black kids are sitting on death row right now?”
“Ooh, he an E-Light, Bitter. Best back off him, man!”
“He got da butta from the duck!”
“Man say, ‘Gimme some dap!’”
You get them when you lick the sweet honey and you know you shouldn’t have even opened the jar.
Bitter smiles patiently. “Let me drop some science on you, Reggie,” he says. “You an earnest, sincere fella — I’ve never doubted that — but this Black Nationalism shit is strictly po-ass. Generation just ahead of you learned that during the civil rights years. You only cut yourself off, you make it us-against-them, see, start believing the gov’ment out to crush us all. Gov’ment don’t have that much imagination.”
“Government is about power, pure and simple. And you’re an ignorant old fool if you think it’s not out to absolutely annihilate the black man.”
“Geek sho got a hellified way of’splaining thangs,” Grady says.
“Look at the Crime Bill Congress passed, hm?”
The men just stare.
“Makes joining a gang an ‘aggravated circumstance,’” Reggie says. “Who you think that’s aimed at? White folks? And who are the Congress and the army? Gangs! Rich ofays who felt free to steal a whole continent from its original inhabitants — ”
“Shit, boy — ”
“—to rape girls and sell poppy all over Southeast Asia, or to bomb kids in Philly — ”
You get them in rain and fog, in sunshine and snow. Wherever you go, the blues’ll surely know.
“Imagination tops power, ever’ time,” Bitter insists. “Fellas my age, we know this, ‘cause it’s how we’ve got by. And you know imagination’s secret? It integrates, man. Mixes memories, songs, poetry, ideas — little bit here, little bit there. From the white man’s world, from the black man’s world, making us all a little richer. You cut yourself off, pretty soon you use up all your own air. See, me, in my time … I may have been barred from certain places physically, but I saw black style making its way into white dress, white talk, white music. Slow but sure, our imagination chipping holes in that wall. And wherever I worked, I was sneaking access to white spaces, man, seeing more of them than they could ever see of me, studying up on them, learning, gaining power to go long with my dreaming, don’t you know? You give away your best advantage, boy, you prance and shout, ‘Black is beautiful!’ Keep it on the down-low, is all I’m saying.”
“Old man, you can talk from appetite to asshole, and I still won’t buy it. You’re not on the street the way I am, sifting through the wreckage. Nine-year-olds hooked on crack. Last week, Ariyeh’s school? Pair of fifth-graders caught freebasing in the boy’s room.” He swings his head; his dreads look enameled in the room’s streaky light. “Better recognize the structure of the fix.”
“What you talk’m ‘bout?”
“All right, one example? Just one, ‘cause I know that’s all you can hump.”
Bitter snorts.
“Listen up. Used to be, powder coke went for two hundred bucks a gram — it’s a rich man’s drug — till the government and the drug cartels figured they could score a hefty profit and kill our kids, flooding the ghettos with that same shit in rock form. Now a rock sells for ten bucks. Dig — most coke users are still fat-cat ofays, all right, lee people, but most the jail time’s done by our brothers doing crack. Follow me here.”
Oh, he’s got the spirit now. Cooking with propane. I can’t keep my eyes off him.
“Feds allow probation for first-time possession of five grams of coke. For the same amount of crack — the street version, the black version — it’s five years, automatic. That’s power, my man. A cold, deliberate attempt to crush our families, our youth, our future, and our hope.”
Bitter runs a hand across his chest, wrinkling his shirt. “Young’uns with ‘tude, tight as Jimmy’s hatband, think they invented it all. Injustice, righteous anger. Don’t know they own history. You think like lit, boy. Don’t come into my house trying to Martin-and-Malcolm me.”
“Well, don’t you mammy-and-uncle me, old man.”
Ariyeh is anguished, listening to her lover and her father go at it, but me … despite my fears of Reggie’s temper and my worries about Bitter’s health, I find myself exhilarated by their exchange. I know what Reggie’s talking about: I’ve seen stone-cold power-plays in the mayor’s office. And I’ve survived on Bitter’s “down-low.”
But more than this, I realize I really was cut off — airless, alone — in my stepdaddy’s home. Dale Licht couldn’t imagine two black men disagreeing. Or a black generation gap. To him, all dark-skinned folk were a monolith, thinking alike, acting alike, a fearful enemy when freed from their proper place (serving well-done rib eye in the country club). I remember one day, during O.J. Simpson’s trial, I stopped by the house to lunch with Mama. Dale was home from the law office that afternoon, studying briefs at the kitchen table. Next to the microwave, sound low, a portable TV showed Johnnie Cochran talking about the bloody glove found on Simpson’s property. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” he said, electrifying me, echoing the slightly mocking, singsong signifying language I remembered from Houston street corners. Dale’s neck turned red (Cochran wasn’t speaking to him). “How can all the blacks think this man is innocent?” he said. I wanted to tell him, “All blacks don’t think that,” but it’s a measure of how much I’d sponged up his world that the same question had plagued me. Eventually, Dale’s fury dwindled into sadness. He looked old and defeated, his gray hair rumpled into quills. In moments like this, when I saw his vulnerabilities or when he was kind to Mama or me, which was most of the time — he was, is, a nice man — I could concede he was a more complicated package than I gave him credit for being. He’d call the country club waiters — men his own age — “boys” and think nothing of it, but he’d also married my mama, whose dusky past he knew all about. He put up with my sullenness, even when, half the time, I didn’t know why I felt sulky. Since I’ve been on my own I’ve avoided him, and surely he feels the bitterness of my rejection. Still, if I were to call him, he’d do anything I asked. Like it or not, I understand his world is also mine. I don’t know how to square this with the fact that, if he were sitting with me here, he’d be trembling with fear and disgust. At the moment, I’m shaking with pleasure.