“So I go to this meetin’ and they all talkin’ about getting organized and we say what we want to do and some of ’em laugh and say landlords won’t ever listen to you and you never gonna get no playground. But we knocked on doors and we got us some action and Father Matt was with us, chasin’ those fools away, gettin’ landlords to fix the pipes, tryna get a health clinic. He even walk into the Mayor’s office with us to get the garbage off our streets, which the city won’t do. But they don’t want him speakin’ up for us, the bishop don’t. Bishop say he gotta keep quiet what’s goin’ on in the South End. Father Matt knows everybody and everybody loves him and we don’t want him to go away. They took Martin Luther King and maybe they takin’ Bobby Kennedy and now our Father Matt who ain’t done nothin’ but good. That’s why I’m ashamed. But it’s the bishop oughta be ashamed, good holy man playin’ footsie with politicians. Father Matt bein’ punished for what he say about vote buyin’ and about the Mayor not doin’ nothin’, and they punishin’ us ’cause we tryin’ to make things better and they don’t want that. You stay where you are is what they’re tellin’ us. You live there and die there just the way it is. This ain’t any church talkin’ I ever know about.”
Father Thomas Tooher, a tall, fair-skinned man in his sixties, glasses, white hair, white collar, stood up from his seat in a middle row. Until two years ago he’d been pastor of a suburban parish with horseshows and celebrity parties if he needed money, but then he asked to be pastor of St. Joseph’s on Albany’s Arbor Hill, where he’d been raised when it was heavily Irish, but now was mostly black with a sparse congregation. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, “I’d like to say a word about the bishop.”
Claudia nodded to him.
“The bishop didn’t silence Father Matthew Daugherty,” he said. “The bishop is a very sick man and hasn’t been in touch with diocesan business for months. He doesn’t know what happened on your streets that led to Father Matthew’s silencing. That order came from the diocese in his name, but it didn’t come from him. I say this now because I can’t bear to hear one more attack on this very good, very sick man.”
“If he didn’t do it, who did?” Claudia asked.
“I have nothing to say on that,” Father Tooher said, and he sat down.
A voice called out, “It was Callaghan,” and Quinn remembered Matt’s whorehouse list and Monsignor Callaghan, the diocesan chancellor, calling Matt a Republican troublemaker.
“It wasn’t the bishop?” Claudia said. “Just one of his flackeys? I know that bozo Callaghan, and he be the one sayin’ Father Matt gotta be punished for sassin’ the politicians? He be the one lettin’ politicians tell the church which is right and which is wrong?”
Claudia speeded up her words, volume rising.
“He tellin’ this saint of a priest we can’t see him no more? This little bozo, he be the one cut off Father’s head so he can’t see us no more?”
Then she screamed: “They cut off his head! They hate us. They hate us’cause we black. THEY HATE US!” She jumped straight up with both feet, fists pumping, then jumped again, screaming, “We black and they hate us!” She jumped and jumped, her face streaming with tears. She jumped and no words now, just a long cry of rage and a long wail, and then she stood still, weeping. A nun came and gripped her huge left arm with both hands and led her to her chair. Claudia sat and could not stop weeping.
First Presbyterian pastor Bob Lamar stood and sang and the crowd joined him:“Oh-o freedom, Oh-o freedom,
Oh freedom over me, over me.
And before I be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord and be free, and be free. .”
When the song had run its course another voice rose from the back: Tremont’s.
“Hey! Mighty powerful, Claudia,” he said. “What you said about bein’ black, I’m black, and my daddy was blacker than me. I love that song about bein’ a slave. Slaves need them songs. My daddy was born and raised in Albany and he got slave ancestors back to the old timey Dutch who built this church we in. My daddy was a vaudeville singer and everybody knew him as Big Jimmy Van. He sang all over this country, made money, come home and went into politics. Wasn’t no politician in this town he didn’t call by his first name. He had power and he said a whole lot of what he wanted to say by singin’, and I want to sing one of his songs, which he got a big kick out of ’cause hardly anybody liked it. But it was one of the biggest song hits in this country.” And Tremont sang:“. . My gal she took a notion against the colored race.
She said if I would win her I’d have to change my face.
She said if she should wed me that she’d regret it soon,
And now I’m shook, yes good and hard, because I am a coon.
Coon, coon, coon, I wish my color would fade,
Coon, coon, coon, I’d like a different shade.
Coon, coon, coon, mornin’, night and noon,
I wish I was a white man ’stead of a coon, coon, coon.
“Hey, all you coons,” Tremont said.
People were hissing and booing, standing up to get a look at this maniac, who the hell is he? But Tremont saw Claudia smiling, and then Quinn was pulling him by the arm, moving him through the crowd into the vestibule and up the stairs to the street.
“You gotta get out of here before they lynch you,” Quinn said.
“Lynch me, lynch my daddy,” Tremont said.
Quinn saw Tremont was drunk, again, but drunk now doing an encore for Big Jimmy, suicide by music, a new way to go.
At the DeWitt Clinton Matt went in with Vivian and George to make sure nobody got lost again. In the lobby George looked around at the marble walls and said, “This is the DeWitt. Jimmy Walker lived here. His wife was never with him. He’d say to her, let’s go out and see a show, let’s go to a nightclub, but she wouldn’t go out of the house. That’s what happened to him.”
“What happened to him?” Vivian asked.
“He went out with somebody else,” George said.
The ballroom was full of people eating dinner, but Quinn wasn’t here and neither was Tremont. A six-piece band was playing the “Beale Street Blues.” Vivian negotiated with somebody in charge of tickets.
“Thank you for a lovely evening, Father,” Vivian said.
“You knew Martin in the old days,” Matt said.
“For a few years. We went to the same places, dances, excursions on the boats. He was well known, famous, really, after the McCall kidnapping. He brought the kidnapped boy home to his father. I read his column all the time. Everybody did.”
“You know he’d probably like this concert, if he’s up for it. If he is will you keep an eye on him?”
“That would be lovely,” Vivian said. “He’ll be my second date.”
Matt checked the front desk for room rates and availability, park him here for tonight, why not? All Matt needed was money. He’d borrow it from Quinn, or somebody. He liked all this — instant shelter, dinner, distraction, and Cody’s great piano. He booked a double room, maybe he’d stay here himself. He told Martin the plan, which jazzed him.
“You live a hurly-burly life for a monk,” Martin said.