If that was so, how could I call her?
Two weeks passed before I mustered up the courage to pick up the phone. I busied myself with cleaning the refrigerator and stove, filling out college applications, and at last when I could stall no longer, I picked up the phone and dialed her extension at work.
“You’re here, Matthew?” In the background I heard the voices of other Operation Breadbasket workers, “What about Chaym?”
“He’s downstate. I think hell be okay. Uh, listen … I was thinking if you’re not busy tonight, maybe we could go out for dinner, then take in a show—”
“No.”
“Oh …” I should have known.
“There’s somewhere special I want to go.”
“Where?”
“It’s a new place I’ve been hearing about. Some of the people I work with here have been raving about it, but only black people can get inside. Can you pick me up at five when I get off work?”
“Sure. I’ll rent a car. But, Amy, where are we going?”
“It’s on the West Side, not far from where I used to live. I don’t know much about it, Matthew, but I think it’s called the Black People’s Liberation Library.”
9
The library was in a poor neighborhood, squeezed between a pool hall and a tavern. To its left was a vacant lot filled with garbage. Children were playing there, knee-deep in refuse the building’s residents dumped from their windows. The smell of decay was overpowering, but no less so than the heartrending sight of black and Puerto Rican families crammed into a building that should have been condemned by the Housing Authority decades before. The El ran right behind the building, rattling its windows. On the first floor, in what had once been a storefront, we found the Black People’s Liberation Library. When I parked directly in front of its door, it was 6 P.M. There were about fifteen people inside, white and black, examining the ceiling-high shelves of books on the library’s back wall. Nothing about this place seemed exceptional, except for its impoverishment.
“It’s supposed to look unimportant,” Amy said. “People at work told me this is just a front. C’mon, we better get inside before they start.”
After checking that the rented car’s doors were locked, I followed her through the entrance. Just inside the door, a young black woman sat at a folding card table, a blackbound register open before her. We signed our names, as she asked us to do, then mingled in the small room with other visitors examining titles on the shelves. I saw seminal works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of other cultural nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. I noticed several volumes by Yahya Zubena, a prominent local activist who often got his picture in black publications like the Daily Defender and Jet. I’d never seen him, but I knew his story. His real name was Willard Bailey, and he was sentenced to twenty years downstate in Marion Penitentiary for murdering a nineteen-year-old black filling-station attendant during a stickup (Willard had cut off the boy’s genitals and stuffed them in his mouth). But that was only the crime he was convicted for. There were others, ones he wrote about after his release from prison — rape, dozens of rapes on the South Side, with some of his victims being only twelve years old. After them, he moved on to assaulting white women on the North Side. In prison, Willard discovered the pleasures of poetry in a creative writing class, as well as the very texts I’d seen by Du Bois and Garvey. According to his interviews and published essays, he was reborn after those experiences, “baptized in blackness,” as he was fond of saying. He apologized for his crimes in scathing liberation verse that flowed from his prison cell to periodicals like Ramparts. There, a few prominent white authors who published on those same pages declared him too brilliant to be behind bars; they agitated for Yahya’s release, and by 1967 he was back on the streets of Chicago, reading agitprop poetry in Lincoln Park (“Nigger, Nigger, Wake Up!” was his best-known piece), and some said he was organizing street gangs for the Revolution. Amy pulled down one of Yahya’s books and, after pushing her eyeglasses back up her nose with two fingers, began flipping through its pages and frowning. Truth to tell, I found his work puerile, and while I pretended to peruse a copy of The Souls of Black Folks, which I deeply respected, I was actually watching Amy from the corner of my eye, wondering if I’d completely blown my first evening out with her.
Half an hour earlier, I’d picked her up outside the office for Operation Breadbasket. She stepped from the building in a group of chattering black women, but I singled her out instantly — my heart trembled ever so slightly, picking up speed — as did other black men on the street, for Amy, with her bee-stung lips and eyes full of laughter, was so striking that it wasn’t uncommon for brothers to drive their cars right up on the curb to hit on her. She was wearing a simple, beltless blue dress that clung nicely to all her corners and, smiling, handed me a map scrawled on office stationery. I was, of course, tongue-tied during the thirty-minute drive to the library, and just listened as she described her new job, her co-workers, and how enticingly they’d talked about the Liberation Library. To be honest, I’d hoped for a kiss when she got in the car, a chaste peck on the cheek, a hug, or something. Try as I might, I was unable to read her feelings about me. Nor was I reading myself very well that afternoon (We always lose), all of which made me gloomy as I guided the car through rush-hour traffic. There was so much I wanted to say, but I left my thoughts unvoiced, despite my feeling that Amy was always watching me, waiting for me to disappoint her in one of the dozens of ways brothers she’d dated had done before; I always felt she was testing me, and even though we were alone in my car I sensed a chorus line of her erstwhile boyfriends at my elbow, all those black men who’d failed at being faithful, strong, committed to her, aware of her needs; and with my every action I sensed, rightly or wrongly, that I was guilty of their mistakes until I proved otherwise. Only a black American woman could place that burden on a man. Yet it wasn’t simply about her. Or me. No, it was all that painful history behind us, the centuries of black men and women hurting and betraying and possibly hating each other since the days of slavery when a Negro risked death if he defended his family; the damage wrought by centuries of discrimination was always there, right at the heart of something as private as passion, despite pleas for forgiveness and promises to forget the past and make a fresh start. It was about my mother Ellesteen’s bitterness toward my father, that pathetic bastard, after he took off and left her to raise me alone. Oh yes, all that was in the car between us, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, and I hadn’t the faintest idea in such an uncertain world how we could begin.
“Matthew,’ she said, reeling me back from remembrance, “I think they’re starting.”