Kin, Charles was wrong, you know. They ain’t build nothing back. Not for thirty years. Remember when I take you to D.C., begging you like hell to go to Howard. Nearly thirty years to the day, that’s when they start taking down some of them buildings and putting something new there. What you think that do to people’s minds, huh? How you think they feel living in the capital of the nation and it look like a war just happen?
But I respect the hell out of Charles. That winter before all this, I’m walking home and I see this man’s hand. Not Charles, someone else. Something black in it. Black, black, black. Heavy. The thing look impatient. I ain’t never see no gun in real life. My father ain’t like those things. Never wanted them around.
You got any money on you, sir? he say, polite as ever.
I tremble. I scared. I nod. Reach for my wallet. Slowly. I not trying to anger that gun.
Thank you, he tell me, still with all the politeness his mother teach him. He never meet my eyes. To this day I think his gratitude genuine, oui.
I see Charles the next day and I tell him what happen.
When all this go down? he ask, sitting there cool, cool, cool on his stoop. Yesterday? During the afternoon?
Yes. Bright as day, he jump out on me.
Charles nod. He grunt.
I go to pick up my mail the next day and beside the letters and thing there’s my wallet. Everything intact, except the money, of course.
Standing there on that street in D.C. with the riot all around me, I watch Charles disappear into the world. I want to follow. I see the last flicker of him in between the people and I feel swept up. Dust in the gigantic broom of history. This how they want it, huh? They negroes down bottom, frogs running from the river while giant children is chasing to crush them under they foot. Your grandmother used to say all the time — she ever say this to you? What is joke for schoolboy is death for crapaud. That was us, frogs scattering from the foot of a great white man.
I walk where I see Charles going; I don’t see he, but I walk. Just walk. I don’t know where I going. It’s just walk, I walking.
This all so different than how yesterday start. Yesterday I walk with purpose, nearly stomping to class. Nothing on my mind but the test I’m ’bout to take. When I get to campus, I see people huddled up. Seem like more people out on the Yard than usual. I don’t think nothing of it. No time to think of anything but this chemistry test, anyway. Besides, wasn’t nothing unusual about seeing people huddled up in intense conversation on campus. Howard was real. Someone always deep in political discussion. You look out and it’s a sea of Afros bobbing up and down furiously. Couple times we take over campus. That’s another story though. What I’m getting at is Howard was the center of black life, at least for us, at least in D.C. Wasn’t strange to see Stokely Carmichael walking round the Yard. He graduate from there. You know he come from your mother’s neighborhood in Port-of-Spain over in East Dry River? You know that, right? She brag they went to kindergarten together. What you laughing at, boy?
But I get by the library and I see Larry, your godfather. He say, Class cancel.
Class cancel? But I stay up all night studying. McGregor playing the ass—
All class cancel. You ain’t hear? Someone shoot Martin Luther King.
Shoot? King? Who—
Larry shrug.
That’s when the feeling start. That dislocation. It grow out a feeling that I always had with me when I ask myself just what the hell I’m doing here. I still ask myself that when the winter whip in and I think about how your Uncle Alton probably back home on the beach. That day I start wondering seriously why I’m here, though, like why I come to a place where they kill a man of peace just for spite? Not even a year before, the football team at Howard, we play some team down South and afterward we try getting something to eat. Now all of we is Africans or from the West Indies, black, black, black. Wouldn’t no one seat us, restaurant after restaurant. The coach, after he come from the last place, he get back on the bus, put he head down, and cry right there.
I ain’t want to cry, but I ask myself, why be here? Why I come to some place that hate me? I forget the book. That’s the answer to all that. The book. It flicker in my mind sometimes back then. Little shards of it. When I’m following the crowd in the chaos on that day after they kill King, I think of the book, a little bit. Not much, but I think of it.
When I walk home from campus after hearing King get shot, I start feeling dazed. On fire. You should see all the things passing through my head. I spend the fourth sitting in my room. I do schoolwork. I call your mother. I sleep. Dream. Wake and let myself get tortured by thoughts. Questions. Why am I here? Memories.
Right before I step on the plane to come over to America I hear about some negro bodies they find in the South all hung and twist up. Nowhere near D.C., but still. Alton read the article in the newspaper to me in disbelief.
Neville, is sure you sure you want to take this trip?
Naw, Alton, I sure ain’t.
But that wasn’t the truth, Kin. Your uncle Raoul had long split for Canada. Same with your aunt Janice. And your aunt Maisie was in England. I think Alvin was in Rochester by this time. When I get chance to go Howard, I learn D.C. not too far from Cross River in Maryland. I mean, it’s farther than I thought but, uh, I have to see Cross River, the place I read about in the book, the place of the Insurrection.
And since my father pass, I had been going and going and going. I had to slow it down just to get hold of my thoughts.
The fêtes and the girls and the football and the cricket and there was a drama workshop and of course the teaching and teacher’s college. I ain’t expect to come a teacher growing up, you know. My father was respected in the teaching community. Headmaster of the community school in Tacarigua, and he run the teacher’s union for a while. So one of his friends, a fellow teacher, show up after I finish high school and say, Come, Neville, let we take a ride.
Before I know it, I’m at the District Office filling out forms, and that Monday I get a letter assigning me to an elementary school in Tunapuna as an apprentice teacher. Teaching’s in our blood, Kin. I was happy when you start teaching at Freedman’s University. Your aunt Janice taught and Raoul taught and even Blair for a time. Now he the school resource police at District Central. That’s your grandfather speaking through us.
I keep digressing. Where was I? Ah, yes. Out on the street. Me and the crowd. We marching now. Moving like an entity. Every few steps someone join up. Every few steps someone break off. I see people mashing up windows of stores. Some places got Soul Brother or Black Owned spray paint across the front. The crowd leave those alone. Most people just want to make a little mischief. Then they got some that’s taking off with goods. In the truth, I thought about breaking off, running through one of them stores. I just lose my job taking customer calls at the Washington Post. It was either play football or take a Sunday shift they ain’t schedule me for. Guess which one I pick.
I get help from friends and thing, but it still hard. This before I start driving that illegal taxi for a while back in law school. Why you make your eyes big so for, huh? This after your brother born. You do what you do to survive. If you ain’t see that with Djassi yet, you will.
I march steady, steady, though. What go through my head is what my father would say he see me ransacking a store. I imagine Vernon Samson watching me.
My father. Boy, what can I say? I loved him. A lot. We was close. All of us. Everyone have he own relationship with Daddy. He a man without a past. You think I quiet about my old days. I an amateur next to he. After he pass, Maisie tell me a little what she know. His father may have been Indian, half Indian, something, but I never know any of his family. He an outside child and when he come an apprentice teacher, they assign him, coincidentally, out San Fernando near where his father live. Daddy tell his father, I never ask nothing from you and you never give me nothing much, but I getting my career start, I need a place to live out here while I apprentice. His father have a reputation. Lot of people look up to him. The whole world can’t know he have an outside child running round, so he tell him, Boy, I can’t help you and please don’t come back asking for nothing.