If you weren’t black, you didn’t know what it was like to be black, you couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like. So whatever you wrote sympathetic about being black, why this was suspect, man, because without the pain thing you just didn’t grab the main thing. Being black was all about pain. Striving to rise above the daily pain. Or giving in to the pain, letting it take over, letting it lead you to ways that were unpro ductive, man, the choice was always there. This was what he tried to write in his songs, how the people had inside them the power to rise above the pain,be something. So when he wrote something like…
Dig the pig, man…
Dig the big pig, man…
See how he strut, man…
Kickin yo butt, man.
Wanna be a pig, man?
Wanna join the force, man?
Wanna take thelifeforce outta yo ownforce?
Wanna kick some butt, man, wanna kiss some butt, man?
Go put on theblue,man, cover up the black,man fo’ get that you a black man, juss go be a pig,man…
When he wrote something like that, he wasn’t saying the police were no good, he was only saying that for a black man to join the police was for the black man to become a traitor to his own people because it was the police holding down the people, it was the police looking the other way while the dealers did their thing on every street corner in every black hood in this city, looking the other way while the kids got poisoned and the fat fuckin wops in Sicily and the fat fuckin spics in Colombia got richer and fatter doing their thing.
Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer in the world didn’t know how this thing worked. More cocaine in America now than there was vanilla ice cream, the nation’s favorite flavor…
You dig vanilla?
Now ain’t that a killer!
You say you hate chocolate?
I say you juss thoughtless.
Cause chocolate is the color
Of the Lord’s first children
Juss go ask the diggers…
The men who find the bones
Go ask them ’bout chocolate…
Go ask them ’bout niggers…
That was another one of his songs. Got up to seventeen on the charts, never went higher because they didn’t understand the archeo logical shit in it, the proof that the first man on earth was a black man, standing tall and proud a hundred light years from a gorilla. You got your kids dropping out of school in the seventh grade, the fuck they knew about scientists digging up the bones of the first man and he’s a black African like you and me.
No pain back then.
Just went around doing your thing, hunted, fished, picked berries from the bushes and plants from the ground, moved with your group from place to place, living off the land, no drug dealer standing on a street corner offering you goodies cheap, this was before pain was invented. Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer alive who didn’t know how the triangle worked. America was saturated with cocaine now, there was hardly room for anybody else to snort even another tiny little speck of cocaine up his nose or inhale another puff of crack, which was base cocaine, as if you didn’t know, man. Everybody wanting to do coke was already doing coke, just ask your kid sister. That’s why you could get a six-bit hit now, try to get new customers that way. He sometimes thought the entire country was one big fuckin crack house spreading from New York to L.A. and every place in between. Which is where the triangle came in. The Colombians needed new markets for their goods, so what better place to go than Europe? Spit Shine played a gig in London at the Palladium last fall, Sil asked one of the other musicians—a brother who lived in Bloomsbury, wherever that was—asked him if there was any crack in London, the brother said the police here had heard of it but they’d never actually seen it. The brother was on hashish. Heroin, man. Hoss was still the big thing in Europe.
So that was the arrangement, that was the triangle. The Mafia was bringing in opium from the East and turning it into heroin, and the Colombian cartel was growing the coca plant and turning it into cocaine. So down the line all these ships arrive in Sicily and they offload cocaine and onload heroin. In Europe, the cocaine is turned into crack—look what we got, kiddies, a whole new thing for you to try along with democracy! And in the United States, a bag of H is sold for five slim ones, reviving a market that had begun to die when crack became all the rage. In no time at all, brothers and sisters would be begging for it all over again. Unless someone like Sil explained in his words that the only thing the wops and the spics had to offer the black man was contempt. The same contempt the Jew had for anyone who wasn’t lily-white vanilla. Sil wouldn’t be surprised if when they got to the bottom of the triangulation, it turned out a Jew was running the whole show. Try to tell any white man about a black man’s pain. Try even explaining it to somebody black as you were, but with a name like Gomez or Sanchez, which took the curse off it, made it sound like you were descended from Spanish nobility instead of somebody carried here in chains on a slave ship. The pain. Try to explain it. Write about it.
He wrote on a lined yellow pad, looking out his window. It was another sunny day like yesterday. Saturday morning, lots of people out there enjoying the sun, heading out to do their chores…
Dealer standing there on the corner of Ainsley where it joined the park…
People jogging or cycling in the park…
Not too many whites ventured this far uptown in the park.
His pencil was poised over the pad.
He saw a black woman in jogging shorts and a tank top walk into the park and then begin running the moment she was inside the wall, almost as if a starter’s pistol had been fired.
He began writing:
Black woman, black woman, oh yo eyes so black,
Tho yo skin wants color, why is that, tell me that.
Why is that, black woman, don’t confuse me tonight…
THEY HAD BURIED peter Wilkins at ten-thirty this morning, and now the funeral party was back in the three-story brownstone on Albermarle Street, partaking of the coffee, sandwiches, and cakes that relatives and neighbors had set out on the long dining-room table. There were perhaps two dozen people gathered in the living room when Kling arrived at a little before noon. He located Debra Wilkins standing in a circle of several other people, one of whom he determined was the minister who’d delivered the graveside eulogy and who was now modestly accepting compliments on how wonderful it had been.
Debra’s green eyes were streaked with red, and her eyelids were swollen. She stood listening to the others, nodding, a pained, numbed look on her face. Kling caught her eye. Recognizing him, she came to him at once.
“Have you…has there been any…?” she started, and he told her immediately that there hadn’t been any significant developments in the case, and he knew this was a bad time, but there were some questions he would like to ask her, if that was all right with her. Otherwise, he could come back some other time. She said now would be fine, and asked him if he would like a cup of coffee, something to eat. He told her No, thanks, this would just take a few minutes. They sat on chairs that had been arranged against the wall at the far end of the room. Everywhere around them there was the hushed conversation peculiar to these ritual gatherings. The people in this room were here less to honor the dead than to pay tribute to the living. Life goes on, these tribal meetings said. That was their essence and their importance. But the voices here were not raised in celebration; they were simply lowered in recognition. Kling, too, lowered his voice.