He was alone, my old Herbert Jenkins. He had food before him. Yes. I thank my wife Edna Bradshaw for making possible the recall of that fact. More than simply food. He had breakfast before him. He had sausage and eggs and a biscuit and home fries. In my mind I pull back out the window of the diner and I see in neon: BREAKFAST SERVED 24 HOURS. It is cold out here, I realize. There is a frosty haze around a streetlamp. There is dirty snow mounded against the diner’s outer wall. A siren sounds in the distance and a dog barks. Herbert Jenkins comes out now. Time has lurched forward in my head. He has finished his breakfast. His coat is too thin. He pulls up his collar and he puffs a plume of his breath into the dark. On that night thirty-two years ago it was time to encounter this man, and I moved my hand to the panel to bring him up to the spaceship, and now I move my hand to hear his voice again, and I find my fingers stiff before me. Lately this has been happening with alarming frequency, these spasms of fear. In my memory I have also paused. And both of me watch Herbert Jenkins hunch his shoulders against the cold and turn to walk away. And this is why I am afraid: I am Herbert Jenkins. Yessir, I did too have a suit just like yours. Lord have mercy. I feel like a fool thinking back on it. Not that you should. I don’t mean it like that. You look fine for a space alien. But I was the oldest zoot-suiter on the South Side of Chicago in and about 1942. Fit me just pretty much like it fits you there. But when I was togged to the bricks in bluff cuffs, I could jump with my angel cake till it was brightin’. And that’s the Bible.
Now listen to me there. I haven’t thought of those words for twenty some-odd years. Not to mention let them pass out of my mouth. Not even sure I could tell you what they all mean right now, exactly. But my zoot suit was the color of a singing canary and I was big inside that thing, real big, and all those words I said was like singing. I was forty-four years old at that time. My one child, my daughter Carolyn, was living with her husband by then in Milwaukee and my wife, Sadie, bless her heart, which was big as all of Lake Michigan, she went along with my second adolescence just fine. I miss her bad now, I can tell you. I was hoping when you took me up that I just had died and I was about to see her again.
Some people think the zoots was a Mexican thing. But our man Cab Calloway was the first to billboard himself like that, make his shoulders wide and his drape long and you could see that he was master of something, bigger than anybody would expect him to be. Not that I’m saying the Mexicans couldn’t be like that, too. They went through the troubles like we did, I expect. And they paid for their threads with blood out in Los Angeles. In ’43, I think it was. There was an actual zoot suit riot, with the police and the soldiers and the sailors out there hunting down the cats with the reet pleats and beating them to death for being who they are.
Doesn’t take much, does it, for the bad guys to go putting a world of hurt on you. These things going on in Chicago today and Detroit and all around. In my own street. People forget it’s happened before in this town. I come here with my daddy and my mammy from Mississippi before the first war and I was just a kid. Missed that war, too. I was too young. Like I was too old for the second one. Not that it was so easy to be able to fight for your country if you was a Negro, but I would’ve tried. Still, let’s see, what was I? I was nineteen when President Wilson finally had to start sending us over. I guess I could’ve died in France or somewhere at nineteen. But like I say, it was a known fact that they didn’t want Negro kids in the Army. We wasn’t worthy of dying for a country.
What we could die for was a water fountain or a seat on a bus or some damn miserable little thing like that. Or a place to swim. See, there was a riot — just like this one — back right after the first war. It was a real hot summer, July or August, and it must have been about 1919. A Negro boy was out swimming in the lake and somehow he got in a current or something or he got turned around. But anyways he show up just off the shore at the Twenty-ninth Street beach and that was forbidden. People think it was just the South that have a white this and a colored that, but we couldn’t go nowhere near the Twenty-ninth Street beach at that time. That was before the whole South Side from Twenty-sixth to Fifty-first and from the lake to the Rock Island tracks had gone and turn into Bronzeville. We was already living pretty thick over near the railroad but there was still a bunch of German Jews and Irish Catholics living in the area, especially along Douglas and Grand Boulevard and they let us clean their houses but we couldn’t mess up the water off their shores. So some of those boys saw this Negro swimming out there and they threw stones against him till he went down and drowned. Just for being in the water.
Lookit. There’s this thing that happens right here in the center of my chest when I say that. Right now. That’s interesting to me. I get to thrashing around in there. It’s enough that I might could do something real angry if I was a young man still, or even a forty-four-year-old man, and if I let myself dwell on what they did to Reverend King and what they did to Muhammad Ali and what they doing to all our Negro boys in this war in Vietnam. It’s only too easy now for a Negro to die in a war. And nobody kids himself it’s to save our country or save the world or nothing like that. So let the Negroes die in Vietnam, they be thinking. Do us all some good.
I don’t know why I didn’t go and get into fights and burn some things down when I was twenty-one years old and we had a week or more of fighting in the streets over that boy being stoned to death in Lake Michigan. Guess it was ’cause I only just did started out at the Stockyards and I was glad to have a job, even for fifteen dollars a week, and even if it was just as a driver at that time, wading around ankle-deep in pig shit herding those animals from train car to holding pen and from holding pen to killing room.
Even going to work, though, I had my chances to do something about how I felt. There was plenty of Irish living west of the Rock Island tracks, in between us and the Yards, in a place they called Canaryville. I think May or Daley lives there right now. And I remember we had to go through there to get to work, through that Irish neighborhood, and it was real rough, especially during that week or two in 1919. We took some tough words and we took some spit and all like that. But I just turned the other cheek, so to speak. No matter how angry I was inside.
I guess I feel a little ashamed of that now. I had plenty of cause to act on this thrash-around feeling in the center of me back then. I was a young man. I could’ve picked up a rock and throwed it. Or done something. And I can be thinking about white folks like they think about us. Whitey this. Whitey that. Ain’t no good Whitey but a dead Whitey. But lookit here. I figure that’d be a way for those white people who be racists, all the dumb shits with the bed sheets on or the spit flying out of their filthy mouths, it’d be a way for them to get the Negro real good once and for all. You know how that is? By turning us into them, that’s how. Make us think like they do. Make us see a color, no matter what it is, even if it’s white, and we think we know that person because of it. If we do the Whitey this and the Whitey that, then we’re being just like them boys in the sheets. That’d give them a good laugh, wouldn’t it. See, I got to go back now and say that in the time they killed that Negro boy who was just swimming out in the lake, it was only some particular Irish Catholics and German Jews who done it. I know there be plenty of good folks among them, just like we want them to know that we got plenty of good folks among us.