“There’s that. But I was thinking of something different.”
“And that would be…?”
“You know how they sell cattle? Price them at so much a head?”
“Yeah…” Shalare said, cautiously.
“Well, with people, it’s not like that. Because some heads are worth a lot more than others. Especially when there’s a gesture of good faith involved.”
“Ah.”
“My sister always tells me, when someone gives you a gift, it’s low-class to look at the price tag. It’s the thought that counts, you’ve heard that?”
“Sure. I was raised the same way.”
“But that’s gifts, not business. In business, a man never wants to get shorted on a deal.”
“So, if you traded for a… single head of cattle, you’d want to know if you got the best bull of the herd?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I would. In an undertaking as big as this one, there’s a lot that has to be overlooked. You deal with men you wouldn’t have in your home,” Shalare said, glancing around the spacious room as if to underscore the bond between them. “The Jews killed Christ, and we’re dealing with them on this. What’s going further than that?”
“What did the coloreds ever do?” Beaumont said.
“I don’t under-”
“You deal with the coloreds, too, don’t you? Maybe not you, personally, but this whole ‘effort’ you’ve been talking about, the people running the show, they had better be doing that, if they want to pull this off.”
“Well, sure and you’re right,” Shalare said. “I didn’t mean we only deal with our enemies, just that we have to go outside the tribe-all of us do, to make this happen.”
“ ‘Tribes.’ That’s just a word, too. Like ‘blood,’ ” said Beaumont, contempt strong in his iron eyes. “Wasn’t it one of your own that shopped the Molly Maguires to the Pinkertons?”
“Huh!” Shalare said, surprised. “You’re a historian, for sure. But he was a-”
“-Protestant? So am I, I suppose. I know I’m not a Catholic or a Jew, so what’s left, being a Buddhist? You’re right, Mickey. I am a man who studies the past. I studied Centralia. I studied the trial of the McNamara brothers. Sacco and Vanzetti.”
“They were-”
“What? Italians? Anarchists? Catholics? Innocent? What does it matter? My point is, when you try and change governments, whether you’re assassinating a dictator or winning an election, you’ve got to be able to carry through after you take over.”
“We’ll have our own-”
“All I care about is my own,” Beaumont interrupted. “Dioguardi getting out of my hair isn’t a fair trade. But getting his people to stay out of Locke City forever, now, that could be one.”
“You have my word, Roy,” Shalare said. “My sacred word. And if that’s not enough, I’ll throw in a head of cattle, if you want. The finest of its kind for many miles around.”
1959 October 06 Tuesday 18:29
“You know what a pilgrimage is?” Rufus said.
“A holy journey,” Moses answered, as if he had been expecting the question.
“That’s right,” Rufus said, surprised. “And I took mine on September 3, 1955. On that day, I went to Chicago. So I could see that little boy, Emmett Till. See him in the coffin where the white man had put him.”
“I remember that.”
“His mother left the casket open so people could see-so the whole world could see-how they had tortured her child before they murdered him,” Rufus said, his voice throbbing. “It was supposed to be because the boy had whistled at a white woman. Not raped her, not killed her-whistled at her. Men came in the night and took him; didn’t make no secret about it. Everybody knew who they were. And they bragged about it all over town, too. Took some cracker jury about ten minutes to find them not guilty. Probably some of them on that jury, they were along for the ride that night themselves.”
“Mississippi,” Moses said.
“Yeah, Mississippi. And then the men who did it, they got paid for it. I read it in Look magazine, the whole thing. After that jury cut them loose, some reporter paid them to tell the true story, because you can’t try a man twice for the same crime. Every cracker’s dream, kill a black boy and get paid for it, too. Like a bounty on niggers.”
“I read that story,” Moses said, evenly.
“Didn’t it make you want to… kill a whole lot of whites?”
“I don’t believe in killing by color.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if I could pick, there’d be a whole lot of whites I’ve met in my life that needed killing. But I wouldn’t go kill a bunch of white men for what some other white men did.”
“You mean, like they do us?” Rufus said, every syllable a challenge.
“That’s not why they kill us,” Moses said, a teacher correcting a pupil. “Not for anything we ever did. That’s just their excuse. Like that ‘wolf whistle’ the Till boy was supposed to have done to that white woman.”
“There’s plenty of them would kill all of us, they had the chance,” Rufus said.
“Sure. Or put us back on the plantations. Or ship us back to Africa. But no matter how much they hate us, things is never going back to the way they was-the way they liked it. If things was going backwards, then that evil Faubus bastard would be running for president. I’ll bet he thought he was, when he stood there on the steps and barred our children from his schools. But he guessed wrong. All the crackers in this country put together couldn’t put their own man in the White House, not today.”
“You’re right about that,” Rufus said, thinking, This isn’t just an old river, it’s a damn deep one. “There’s too many of us now. Too many that vote, I mean. Maybe not down there, but up here, the white people-the bosses, I’m talking about-they got to pay attention. That’s why Eisenhower sent the troops in. It wasn’t for our people in Arkansas, it was for our people in Chicago. And Detroit, and New York, and Cleveland, and… everyplace we migrated to. That’s the way the NAACP wants us to think, too. Wait our turn. Be good Negroes, so the good white people can see they should be letting us go to their schools.”
“So they can learn how Lincoln freed the slaves.”
“Yeah!” Rufus said, his voice thick with hate. “And whatever other lies they want to put in our nappy little heads. You know a lot more than I thought, Moses.”
“You can’t tell what a man knows until you get with him,” the elderly man said, puffing on his pipe. “Just watching, that’s nothing. Ofay been watching us since we were picking his cotton, under the lash. But he never knew us, ’cause we learned to keep our thinking off our faces. That’s what I was telling you before, Rufus. The difference between experience and knowledge. I know about the Scottsboro Boys, too. And a lot of other things.”
“But you Tom it up, man. I see you, every day.”
“And you don’t?”
“I don’t do it because that’s me, man. I’m not just surviving, I’m playing a part.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Because you never… I mean…” Rufus sat silently for a moment, then admitted, “I… I guess I don’t.”
“I was born on the seventeenth day of August, in the year 1887,” Moses said, a resonant timbre entering his voice. “Does that date mean anything to you?”
“The Civil War was over, but your parents, they were slaves?”
“They were, but that’s not what I’m saying. A great man was born on the same day as me. Marcus Garvey. You ever hear of him?”
“Well, damn, man, of course I heard of him. Marcus Garvey, he’s our spiritual father.”
“I was in that,” Moses said. “The Universal Negro Improvement Association. Before they came and took it all down. But I never forgot. And I was with Wallace Fard Muhammad himself, when I was in Detroit, back in ’34.”
“Then you’re a Muslim?”