“Hello, buckra,” he said, flashing his keyboard grin. “You lost?”
I was maybe a little gladder to see him than the situation warranted, and he perceived it.
“It’s awight, young white folks”—did he even remember my name? — “you among friends.”
You couldn’t have proved it by the phalanx of young men in their Invaders jackets backing him up. One of them wearing a sideways baseball cap had torn a stick from a pasteboard sign and was slapping it menacingly against his thigh. Another, the beetle brow I recognized from Beatnik Manor, asked pointedly, “What’s this crackerass mo’fuck doing here?”
Observing how his right hand was fisted in a black leather glove, I was ready to declare myself a gate-crasher pure and simple, then make my apologies and slope off into the wings, when Elder spoke up again.
“Be easy, Sweet Weeyum, the man’s here to see we get justice. Anyhow,” shading his eyes toward the sun peeping out from behind a dissipating thunderhead, “this a zippadee-doodah kinda day.” His genuine high spirits, it seemed to me, overruled the inherent sarcasm in his voice.
Then I was among them for better or worse, and we’d begun to push through the crowd that had itself started sluggishly to move forward. For the word had come down that Dr. King had finally arrived, and we could see the commotion up ahead where a white Continental had just peeled away from the curb. I could even make out the crowns of a few snap-brim fedoras and the tops of a couple of bare heads belonging, I supposed, to the dignitaries of the movement. One would be the reverend doctor himself, the knowledge of whose presence gave me a nameless sensation. They’d said he was played out, that Memphis was anyway an annoying diversion from more pressing concerns, but there he was and I felt my ganglia crackling like spark plugs.
He would be flanked by his retinue, among them his lieutenant, the hefty one with whom he was always shown arm in arm: Abernathy. I knew Abernathy and had heard of others — Kyles, Jackson, Young — heroes of a people who had only recently stepped out of the shadows. But I was ignorant of the identities of most. Of their trials — compared to which my own were kreplach, as Avrom might have said — iknew next to nothing; and again came the feeling of having trespassed an affair that was none of my business. But the smaller I felt, the larger seemed the moment I was in, and buoyed by the energy around me I couldn’t help it, I began to exult a little in the largeness of the event, wishing that Rachel could see me now.
As the march had started in earnest, the marshals strode up and down the line shouting through their bullhorns to stay in formation, keep the sidewalks clear, though no one seemed to pay them much heed. People were spread out all over the pavement, their haphazardness more akin to an unofficial parade than an orderly demonstration. The upstart clouds had parted, prompting the marchers to remove their coats and jackets, and I too welcomed the sunshine that dissolved the slight chill I’d felt earlier on. As we turned the corner into Beale, I relaxed in the moving current, and though I knew that negotiations between the city and the workers had failed, that Dr. King’s coming to Memphis was in fact a last resort, I thought I sniffed a shared sense of victory in the wind. I had an urge to take Elder’s arm but feared the gesture might be a liberty too far. Nevertheless I began to feel secure in the company I was keeping, its immediate members making their way through the crowd with more haste than the crowd itself was advancing toward Main Street. It was a joyful but restless multitude, everyone wanting, it seemed, to get closer to the front, anxious perhaps to be nearer their prophet, but Elder’s bunch with their sly expressions were pushier than the rest. Their obtrusiveness provoked the occasional irritated glance from their fellow marchers, and Elder, the adult among them, must have sensed the tension, because he assured me (or himself?), “My boys have done waited a long time to fix the world.”
Tikkun olam, I thought, which was Pinchas Pin’s term for the efforts of the Shpinker Hasids to repair the rift between heaven and earth — though I thought also that Elder’s “boys” hadn’t waited half so long as most.
The signs bobbed above the heads of the marchers, many of whom had begun spontaneously to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Members of the procession joked with those standing by on the curbs, beckoning them to “join us, brothahs,” and here and there some vagrant would hitch up his trousers and toddle into the flow. There was even a cohort of idlers with conked hair and flashy suits hanging out in front of a pool hall who stepped into the passing humanity, so that I began to think the whole colored race might be eventually swept into that mighty stream. No pretense was made of staying in line, everyone strolling at his or her own pace (with the exception of the Invaders, who continued to muscle their way forward). I understood that the destination was the Civic Center Plaza, where speeches would be made before the crowd was dispersed and sent back to whence they’d come. Still it was easy to imagine that the whole Negro nation was on its way to entering Beulah Land. Then an extraordinary thing happened: Elder Lincoln linked his arm in mine.
“I mon’ edumacate you, son,” he announced. I recognized the condescension whenever he resorted to minstrel show dialect, and as for the paternal term of address, Elder — his name notwithstanding — wasn’t much older than me. All the same, his sudden bonhomie gave me a charge. “Gon’ introduce you to the various genus and species of the nigra,” he continued, his words turning heads despite the surrounding din. “Now that one,” pointing to an ashen-faced old party wearing his sign about his neck like a mug shot tag, “that’s what you call your common or garden shine. Don’t matter they ain’t much shine to the boy. And the lady there,” indicating a sallow-skinned woman in churchy attire, “she’s what you call a mustard seed. Them deacons with their process hairdos, they arnchy niggahs, not to be confused with the dicty. And over there you got your standard-issue spade.” He seemed to be pointing at random now, closing one eye as if taking aim over the barrel of his forefinger, a bitter edge having entered his voice. “You got your dinge, your boogie, the eight-ball, the ink, Uncle Mose hisself, and that one”—he grabbed my chin with his free hand to direct my attention toward a slack-jawed character in a shower cap—“that’s your bluegum niggah — an extremely dangerous variety with a poison bite.”
I didn’t see why he felt the need to harass me with his commentary; it was unfair given the clear commitment I’d made to the cause. Offended, I searched for some topic that would prove I knew more about negritude than he gave me credit for.
“Elder,” I said, “remember the lynched fiddler you said your grandma had relations with?” He made a face as if shocked at the reference. “Well, he couldn’t have been anybody’s daddy ’cause he didn’t have any balls.”
The musician scratched his scalp vigorously and flashed his ivories. “You didn’t know the colored man’s ’nads is uniquely re-gen-er-a-tive?” he replied, then instantly retracted his grin.