Still you get mad. You know? You still got to deal with that feeling in your chest. That’s probably partly why I was wearing a zoot suit when I was forty-four years old. I got robbed of something long before that. Like that boy in the lake. He was maybe twelve, thirteen years old and there was nothing more for him in this life. He got robbed of his childhood, is what. Well, that’s what happened to me, too. What happened to most of us. You don’t live like we all lived in those times from the cradle on up and ever get to wear the bright colors and the big shoulders and the floppy pants of childhood. That’s what they took from us and what I tried to get back dressing up like you there, Mr. Space Alien. I’m ready to believe there be some real good folks among you Space People, too. I hope you had a nice childhood. I sure wonder what it would’ve been like. But I want to shake your hand because I am not a prejudiced man. I won’t never let that happen to me. Man, you’ve got a lot of fingers. But that’s hep, Jackson. Meeting you’s money from home.
This voice vanishes now into the darkness. I look at my strikingly befingered hand and I think of slapping the skin with Herbert Jenkins and I am glad to have thought of him, to have listened to him at this moment. I realize that part of my present terror, facing my assignment, comes from a sense of those below who will look upon my body and be ravished by its differences from their own and see in me only their fears which they will turn to prejudice and then to hatred and then to rage and then to murder. Have things changed so much down there in the subsequent thirty-two revolutions about this frankly mediocre star? Dear Herbert Jenkins. I wish I could move my hand and bring back your body from that great darkness that puzzles us together, your species and mine. I wish I could hear new words from you. And that is the Bible.
10
The cowardice that came upon me in the corridor outside my guests’ sleeping quarters lingers in me now. I do not wish to seek any new voices. I miss my dear Herbert Jenkins, it is true. But it is also true that he is known to me and he is gone from me and that is an attraction to a coward. It is easier to give one’s devotion to the dead than to the living.
I rise. I make myself move out the door and back to the place where they lie dreaming. I am alone. I am flesh and blood, and though my blood is the color of Presbyterian Punch, it flows just as easily and disastrously as the blood of those who have been assaulted by prejudice and fear on this planet.
I am amidst the snoring and sighing and rustling now. Perhaps from respect for Herbert Jenkins I am moved to approach the man called Hudson.
“Hudson Smith, Esquire, attorney at law,” he elaborates in his half-sleep as I lead him down the corridor and into the place where our voices can join.
He sits. He wakes further. He looks at me.
“I’d advise you people to stay away from this planet,” he says, though his voice is gentle, almost sad.
I say, “There are some on my home planet who share that opinion.”
“They’re right,” he says. “Though maybe it’d be just the thing to finally fix race relations down there. The Irish and the English and the Poles and the Italians and so forth, they all finally stopped fighting each other in America when they agreed on the black folks to unify their hate. Maybe a bunch of folks who look like you would unify whites and blacks just the same way. We can all hate the gray bug-eyes together.”
This is not what I want to hear. But it is necessary, I tell myself. It is better to understand what awaits me.
A change comes over Hudson. He shifts in his chair, leans forward, his hand comes out toward me, lingering in the air between us. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I get caught up in my own fight and here I sit saying ugly things about you right to your face. My daddy’d whup me up side of my head for that and I’d deserve it.”
I nod and I suppose I should engage this self-reflecting male from this parallel species in a dialogue. But I am weary. And I wish to hear his inner self. So I wave my hand and I let go of Desi, I let go of my own inner voice. I am Hudson Smith. My father. I think of my father all the time. He believed in the Melting Pot. Nobody talks that shit anymore. The goddamn American dream. But God bless him, my father, he wouldn’t let any of us be anything but excellent and it was because of that big motherfucking Pot he could see in his head, that thing he thought this country was. You could go into the Pot as a beer-truck driver in Alexandria, Louisiana, which is what he was, and through your children, you could come out a Harvard lawyer, which is what became of his youngest son that he named after a river he never saw. That was me. And he also came out a pediatrician in Cleveland, a University of Chicago English professor, a Proctor and Gamble product manager, and so forth. We were eight of us — my father’s little black babies — which is what he still called us when he could get us all together. Not that that was very often, after we did what he told us to do and became excellent and scattered all over the country. When we did get together, for a wedding or once in a while for Christmas, and he had his captive audience at the dinner table, before we could eat he’d start orating to his grownup babies on the virtues of this Land of the Free where anything is possible, this being the very same table we grew up at and heard him question each one of us about our day, every day, and press us to do better, to be excellent all the time because we were worthy of excellence. We were worthy. And my mother was the same way. You could watch her cut a goddamn carrot into a pot and you’d know she was determined to do it better than anybody who ever cut a carrot before.
And if Wilhelmina and I had gone on and had a kid before she decided to grab the Lexus and God knows what else she’s going to get before this is over — no matter how good a lawyer my father’s youngest son is — if we’d had our own little African-American, culturally re-rooted, powerfully independent baby — how could I say the things to him that had done so much good to me? If I tried to say my own father’s words to him, I’m afraid they’d sound like lies. They’d sound like the bullshit of White America, trying to take away the dignity of somebody who was different from them. Get rid of your blackness. Melt down here and make it tan. Keep melting and we might even recognize you. Eggshell white.
We still crave that recognition. So many of us do. And it creates powerful heroes for us. Heroes as in archetypal heroes, bigger than life and carrying around in their bodies a bit of all of us, and they’re also carrying some real old baggage with them. Baggage full of feelings. Feelings that got melted into everyfuckingbody a long time ago. Take OJ, for instance.
Now that surely is a creature from the Melting Pot. O. J. Simpson come up out of there and he was a football hero and he was a movie star and he was running through airports pimping Hertz cars and he had this smooth off-white charm and he was good to every kid he saw and he had a gorgeous white wife so if you were white, you knew he didn’t hate you for it, and if you were black, you knew that here was a black man that whites not only would share a water fountain with, they’d go to bed with and have his kids — and if with him, then with us — and we all loved him, we all got melted down together in our love for this American hero.
So when he murdered that wife — and yo, wake up, I’m a lawyer and I look at the evidence, and if I’m the Man, if I’m Johnny on-the-spot Cochran, if I’m Johnny I-make-a-rhyme-and-he-don’t-do-time Cochran, I do the same defense he does because of course there’s racists in the LA Police, but anybody whose business it is to look at evidence and look at human nature is going to know in his bones OJ is guilty — I’m no traitor to my race to say he murdered her — so when O. J. Simpson murdered his wife, how’d we get to fooling ourselves about the truth, those of us of color, those of us who have — thank God — come around at the end of the twentieth century to finally telling the truth, generally, about where we are and what we are and what it is that we’ve been having to deal with all these years? Why are we going against our smart natural selves and making this man out to be innocent?