A young woman and her child came forward, trying to pass the demonstrators. “When I say step on them, I mean step on them,” she said, scolding the child. And the little girl gingerly put her patent-leather shoe on my grandfather’s chest. Fletcher began to cry. “Don’t cry, Fletcher, it doesn’t hurt,” my grandfather whispered. “Please don’t cry.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said to my grandfather. “And involving that little boy in this, too! You should be locked up!”
“We are not ashamed,” my grandfather said.
“What are you? Nigger-lovers, is that what you are?”
“Nigger-lovers,” the visitors shouted to my grandfather and Fletcher. “Those two are nigger-lovers,” and they laughed.
The newspapers would read, “The oldest and the youngest to be arrested at the civil rights demonstration on the opening day of the New York World’s Fair were from the same family. Pictured here, Angelo Turin, 67, and his grandson Fletcher, j, being taken away by police.”
“Careful with the kid and the old man,” one policeman said, shaking his head as he put them into the paddy wagon, as my grandfather called it. “You feel OK, Pop? You know what you’re doing?”
“Yes, we know exactly what we’re doing, thank you. Don’t we, Fletcher?” And Fletcher nodded.
They were thoroughly drenched. The rain had not let up much all day. A whole truckload of black men and women, young white people, and my grandfather and Fletcher were taken to some invisible part of the fair grounds.
At the makeshift jail they were an immediate attraction. “Are you for real?” a man said, coming up to my grandfather and seeing that he was quite real indeed, shaking now uncontrollably from the cold.
A few beatniks immediately befriended my brother. “You’re lucky,” a girl in sunglasses said to him. “You should see my grandfather.”
When we finally realized that Fletcher and Grandpa w ere not going to come back, my father grew panicky. “We never should have come,” Grandma said. “Opening day in the rain!”
“Perhaps they’ve gone back to the car,” my father said, his voice so nervous that it seemed to divide into two voices.
But it was my mother who finally spoke up. “Come with me,” she said. “I know w here they are.”
We watched as my mother walked in the rainy half-light up to a policeman who began pointing this way and that, but who finally volunteered to take us there in the police car.
She was right, of course.
As we got nearer we could hear a large group of human voices, chanting. The chant grew louder and louder. “Jim Crow must go, Jim Crow must go” was the message rising from the soaked earth.
“Hey, there’s Mom!” Fletcher screamed, high and sweet, and he broke away from the group and ran into her arms. He was muddy and drenched, and Father took off his jacket and put it around him.
“Where’s Grandpa?” we asked Fletcher and at that moment we heard Grandma’s long, low “oh, Angelo!” She had spied him standing in a semicircle of people, dripping wet. They were looking at photographs.
“These two are ours,” my father said. “This one and that one over there in the bow tie.”
“Not so fast, Mister,” a red-faced officer replied. And he took him into a glass office in a green building where I could see Father signing things. My grandfather waved at us but continued talking to the men, and Fletcher began telling the day’s story. He was so excited and spoke so quickly that his sentences ran together.
“OK,” my father said, coming out after a while, “everything’s taken care of,” and he went over to get my grandfather, who introduced him to his new friends.
“Grandpa,” Fletcher said, “tell them about the paddy wagon!”
“Oh, I will,” my grandfather said. He looked very tired, and, moving away from the makeshift jail, he grew quiet, withdrawn almost, as if with one moment of reflection he could see clearly what had happened. Having seen injustice, smelled it, and been touched by it, he felt alone with it. He spoke only once on the long walk back to the car, and it was in a whisper to my father.
“Michael,” he said, “they showed me pictures — of ghosts, a secret society of ghosts. Well, they looked like ghosts, but their heads were pointed and they carried earthly weapons, torches and lead pipes.”
“I know,” my father nodded. “It’s the Klan,” he said very quietly. “You’re wet, Dad. You’re going to be sick.” But my grandfather was not listening.
“Criminals,” my grandmother hissed as my grandfather and brother got into the car. “I won’t sit with criminals,” she said, getting into the front seat, and so I sat in the back with them.
As Father started the car, we were not aware that back at the fairgrounds Grandfather and Fletcher had joined that part of the population whose names have been permanently on a list.
Turning around in the parking lot toward home, we noticed that the lights had come up. There were a multitude of colors: reds and blues, greens, glowing whites, domes illuminated by yellow, turquoise, and magenta beams. On the gigantic Unisphere, continents and oceans and islands were lit in purple and white. Dots of white marked the world’s great cities.
It seemed impossible to me that, in this awesome, shining world of light, evil could exist at all.
In front of us, atop the Kodak Building, a luminous Kodachrome Emmet Kelley gestured for us to come forward. To our left rose the Federal Pavilion glowing yellow and red and blue. Far off we could see the green egg of the International Business Machines Corporation, casting its pale hue. And, most magnificent of all, across the Grand Central Parkway stood the two largest buildings of the fair, drenched in white light — the pavilions of the General Motors Corporation and the Ford Motor Company.
My grandfather thought, looking at this exquisite show, that we had traded something important for all of this. Primitive man was better, he thought. He could not help but think that, along with the beautiful lights and the sports cars and the stairs that moved and the fusion display, we had invented a system of hatred and fear so elaborate and so subtle and efficient — in short, so perfect — that it would be nearly impossible to crack. Everything he saw suggested it.
The Pool of Industry exploded with fireworks and fountains of color and light as we watched.
“Primitive man was better,” he said out loud.
I looked at my grandfather and saw the imprint of a young girl’s patent-leather shoe emblazoned on his chest.
Fletcher was already asleep. I put my head on mv grandfather’s lap, closed mv eves, and listened to the droning of the rain on the windshield as we pulled away.
My grandfather turned around for one last glimpse of the fair.
In 1939, FDR opened the fair in New York as a symbol of peace. But nothing, of course, could stop w hat had already begun to happen, and before even one season was over, world war was declared and the lights in many foreign pavilions went out.
The World of Tomorrow was the fair’s theme and, standing there on opening day, the sixty thousand who gathered to hear the president must still ha\e been filled w ith dreams w hen thinking about the future.
But they could hardly have imagined w hat tomorrow would bring.
My grandfather turned his back on the lights finally and shook his head with the tremendous sorrow of someone w ho has been betrayed at the core. I watched him as he closed his eyes and extinguished, one by one, every beautiful light in the fair. I le patted my head, “everything’s going to be all right,” he whispered, but his voice cracked. And with those words on that April night, suddenly gone dark, in 1964, he began his journey back through time, to a simpler place, where he would live the last years of his life.