Then, gauging the crowd’s reaction and replacing his hat, he looked the guard in the eye and stepped forward.
“Son,” he said in a quiet tone of bemusement, “just looking at you makes a man wonder. Here with all this heat coming down you’ve worked yourself into a clothes-soaking sweat, but all you’ve done is let yourself interfere with matters that don’t concern you. What happened to you, son? Did you forget that you’re only a guard? Or is there something about a man like me that makes you think that you’re a mind reader? If so, you’re so wrong that it’s a shame and a pity! Because if you could read my mind, instead of working up that sweat trying to keep me out—just look at that uniform!—you’d be trying to get me up to that office as fast as you could. And considering the fact that I’m a citizen who’s only trying to see a member of his government, I’d say that you’ve allowed your stupidity to overstep your authority. Which suggests to me that you aren’t even a first-class guard.”
“… Now you listen,” the guard shouted, “you …”
“You’d better think before you call me that,” Hickman warned, “think! Because now you’re making me wonder what you’d do if I actually came here intending to make trouble….”
Sweeping the crowd with his eyes, the guard braced himself with thumbs stuck in his Sam Browne belt. “You just try me and see,” he said. “Go ahead, try me!”
“And you’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Hickman said, “but there I’ll have to disappoint you, because wasting time with the likes of you is not on my schedule. But I would advise you to get hold of yourself, you hear? Otherwise, you’re liable to forget to tell the Senator that the Reverend Hickman was here to see him and left word that he can be reached at the Hotel Longview. Think you can remember that?”
“Man,” the guard began, “you must be out of your cotton-picking mind….”
“… You see,” Hickman said with a shake of his head, “there you go again! With all these folks looking on you’re trying to cut everything down to your own limited size and missing completely the importance of what I just told you. Son, what is it with you? Do you think that simply being white makes you automatically older and wiser than a man like me? Than any man like me? That you were born knowing more about life, about this country and the world than me?
“I know, you think of men like me as ‘boys,’ but, son, I’m old enough to be your grandpappy! I’ve studied your kind for years and I’ve seen the coming and going of the generations out of whose passions and loins you sprang! Therefore I know just about from whence you came, what you’ve been, and where you’ll end on your dying bed!
“It’s in your talk, and in your manners, and in your ornery meanness. It’s in your constant looking for someone else, and especially someone like me, to blame for your own lazy incompetence! Son, I have your number! I even know what you eat, and what you drink and dream! It shows in your bullying walk! It sounds in that flat-toned, self-inflating imitation of what you think is a high-class Southern accent! When in fact it sounds like somebody pretending to be General Robert E. Lee while chattering like a blue jay in a green persimmon tree!
“Son, I hear you, but you refuse to hear me. I see you, but you refuse to see me! That’s why you tell yourself that you know all about me and try to dismiss me by telling yourself that you’ve got me covered, hemmed in, and without room to maneuver. But you’re wrong, son; you’re wrong!
“Because in this big, crazy country it’s hard to keep men like me fenced in. In spite of everything folks like you do they find ways of getting over the walls and through the cracks, and they go on probing and making their way by using whatever paths that are here to be discovered. Otherwise they act like pioneers and blaze their own trails, then they cover their tracks to protect what they learn from your ignorant meddling. That’s because they’re Americans! Son, they’re Americans! And in the process of exploring the land’s possibilities they take risks! They observe the difference between what folks like you hold to be true and what proves to be false and shameful!
“Oh, yes, and they remember many things, both good and bad, which men like you try to erase from memory and then think they’re done and ended. Yes! And they know that you want to think that the Lord stacked humanity in a pile and doomed men like me to always be at rock-bottom. But you’re wrong again! Because even though folks like you try to deny the fact that this is an open society, it’s still open, both top and bottom—thank God!—to those who are willing to test it! That’s what all this endless, cutthroat struggling is all about! Folks move around and around, and up and down, trying to discover the true nature of its confusing freedom. Son, they’re searching for the key…. They’re searching for that ever sought but seldom found key to happiness! And because they do, men like me have seen many things, both high and low, that you’ll never have the opportunity to share, eyes to see, the heart to remember, or the mind and will to grasp. They went to war along with Washington, and to the North Pole with Peary! They saved Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill, then helped subdue the Boxer Rebellion! They’ve shadowed the best and seen the worst, so they have a good idea of what both are missing. What’s more, it’s a natural fact that you don’t have to be high to see the high, or be low in mind to see the lowly. Neither can the high and mighty get so far out of sight that they can’t be seen and judged from below! Because that depends on your mind, your heart and vision! But you do have to live with hope, unselfish hope, and identify with all the mixtures that make us human. And, most of all, you have to think about the amazing mixture of this country’s life and try to grasp its meaning!
“So now you ask yourself this question: What would you do if you were a passenger in an airplane taking a nosedive and someone like me was the only passenger who might save your life? What would you do? And how would you want me to respond? Then think of how you’d feel if you had cancer and the only physician who could cure you happened to be black. What would your decision be? Would you choose life or untouchable whiteness? Think about that, and then maybe you’ll be sensible enough to ask yourself what possible business could a black man like me have with a United States senator? And finally, I want you to ask yourself why on earth such a man as me would waste his good time in giving someone like you a lecture? Come up with reasonable answers and you might begin to learn who you really are and where you stand in the scheme of things!
“So now I’m leaving, but when you see the Senator I want you to tell him that Daddy Hickman has arrived. Remember to do that and you just might turn out to be the important man you’d like to be.”
Pushing through the crowd, Hickman walked away until, reaching some ten paces up the walk, he looked over his shoulder to see the dumbfounded guard and the crowd still staring in his direction.
“Don’t forget,” he called. “I want you to tell him that Daddy Hickman has … arrived.”
[MESSENGE(R)]
YES, HICKMAN, he thought, you’ve arrived, but so far that’s all you’ve accomplished. And what would you have done if he’d reached for his pistol—preach him a sermon? So by asserting your pride you ended up acting ridiculous. And you did it in spite of knowing full well that whether he’s black or white, a clown is a clown. Shame on you! But as he continued away and recalled the guard’s reaction to a black man’s addressing him as “son,” he exploded with laughter.
I kept hitting him with “son” to make him realize that I was the older and more experienced, he thought, but he reacted as though I were playing the dozens and insulting his mother. So maybe the shock of it made him realize that just as white men have fathered black children, [black] men have fathered white children. Yes, and gotten away with it in cases where there was no screaming of rape and no traces of blackness in their offspring’s features. So maybe he was finally facing up to what’s long been a wide-open secret—at least among black folks.
But then I lost self-control over his snatching my hat. Because it stirred memories of what happened years ago to a well-dressed Negro who was se
en in a white neighborhood smoking a fine Havana and wearing a derby. Which in the twenties was considered so threatening to white supremacy that a mob of white folks destroyed his hat and gave him a beating!
Hailing a taxi, he climbed in and asked to be driven back to the Longview. But once under way and thinking of the members’ disappointment when told of his failure he decided to try a different approach.
What I need, he thought, is help from someone who keeps an eye on everybody from the President to cops on the beat—which would be one of our veteran “white-folks-watchers,” and that has to be Millsap. He’ll probably laugh his head off when he hears what we’re up to, but if so, I’ll just have to grin and bear it. Because if he has even the slightest suggestion it’ll be all to the good….
And postponing his return to the Longview, he directed the driver to drop him off in one of the neighborhoods where Millsap had often killed time.
Since his last report he’ll probably have nothing new to tell me, he thought, but since I’ve gotten nowhere on my own, there’ll at least be the pleasure of reminiscing over the good times we shared in the old days. And reaching the neighborhood where he hoped to find Millsap, he left the cab at a corner and began walking.
The street was crowded with pedestrians, but unlike the old days most were white folks; a detail which became incongruous as he reached the middle of the block and had his ears assaulted by a blast of the “Jelly Roll Blues.”
Female, disembodied, and bawdy, the voice ricocheted off storefronts and buildings with a crackling abandon that stirred old memories and scenes from his days as a jazzman.
“Well, I ain’t gon’ give nobody none of my jelly-roll,” the voice exulted as an innocent product of bakeries was endowed with sly undertones of innuendo which reminded him of “blues queens” who had reigned during the old days. And with the sound grating his ear he visualized a stately, plump, brown-skinned empress of the blues who wore a headband of silver, a necklace of pearls, and a gown of red satin as she stood in the curve of a grand piano while delighting her listeners with the bitter-sweet spell that had made the blues so consoling and popular.
Hickman, he thought, since your footloose days in this town there’s no question but that things have changed! But why should a man on a life-saving mission have to come all the way to Washington and have his ears punished by something like that? Whoever’s broadcasting that stuff on this Washington air must be getting back at those ladies who refused Miss Anderson the use of their hall. If so, they’re probably none the wiser, but he’s giving the blues a function that’s most unexpected…. Falling in step with the sidewalk’s traffic, he moved along behind three young women who wore blue uniforms, and as they strutted and swayed in time with the music he wondered if they were getting the message of the Jelly Roll Blues.
Looking in vain for the source of the air-blasting sound, he thought, Millsap once mentioned a record shop being in this neighborhood, yet this sound seems to be moving. So maybe it’s coming from a sound truck. But as far as I can see through this traffic and crowd there’s no such truck in the area.
And, addressing his self from his jazz days, he thought, Hickman, what kind of product would anyone hope to persuade folks to buy on the strength of some down-home gal yelling in the streets about her jelly-roll—no, I withdraw the question. So please don’t tell me that it’s Cadillacs! Anyway, a sound truck wouldn’t be this skin-prickling shrill.
And now, looking far up the street past neon signs and buildings decorated with patriotic bunting, his eyes were drawn to a huge sidewalk clock that loomed high above the heads and shoulders of passing pedestrians. Mounted on an ornamental pillar and enclosed in a round, weathered bronze case with its white dial, black hands, and Roman numbers protected by glass, the clock towered like the head of a giant above widespread arms formed by a long bronze bar which extended from the curb and over the sidewalk. And suddenly reminded of his mission, he thought, So there stands a figure of time on a cross, and here I am at the crossroads of time—or am I simply being reminded of those stations of the cross that mark the thorny path which we know down home as “colored people’s time”? Either way, time is something which mankind keeps striving to redeem and recover; even though all kinds of time—black time, white time, time-past, and time-future, and in whatever regions and zones you find yourself—keep ever flowing into timelessness. For between the mechanical ticks and the tocks of what we choose to call “time” all notions of “was,” “here,” “now,” and “shall-be” get mixed in the mind….
Am I the “me” I used to be, or someone or something I’m still becoming? That’s the question. And if you rely only on clocks to guide you you’ll find yourself in time suspended. But see the Cross—thank the Lord!—and you’ll remember the Promise. Go seeking a man to find a boy who got lost in time-past like I’m doing, and right away you’re tangled in newsprint, double-talk, radio jabber, and broadcast images—not to mention the man’s own cussed orneriness. Therefore how in time redeem lost time when time itself has hidden the man it embodies in the blinding hot spotlights of high places?
Stop it, Hickman, he thought, the answer is simple: You keep trying, you keep seeking and striving against the time when your own time is ended. ‘Cause as the old saying goes, time’s flying, souls dying, and the coming of the Lord draweth nigh….
And now, drawing closer, he saw that one of the clock’s hands pointed toward a bank whose name appeared on a plaque underneath and the other toward the avenue—where, now, a frustrated hearse followed by a string of black limousines with headlights aglow in the brightness was steering a slow solemn path through a stream of agitated cars, taxis, and trucks. And hearing the singer’s tribute to her “jelly-roll” continue he thought, Yes, madam, its promise still sounds in the music, but by now, as the boys on the block used to say, it’s probably grown old and got weary….
And reminded suddenly of Janey’s account of her dream, he thought, Time! One way or another everything seems to be yelling Time! Which I can’t deny but would rather not hear—how long has it been since I heard those blues? Twenty years? Thirty?
Then, catching a whiff of rum-flavored pipe tobacco he eyed the clock and snapped open the lid of his watch to compare their readings. But in the interval between his glance at his watch and the clock a flock of pigeons appeared; and as he watched them circling the clock in a sun-dazzling swing and setting wings in a gliding approach to its widespread arms there came a blare from the blues band and a shout from the singer. And struck by the shock wave of blues the birds were flaring and whirling in a wing-flapping cloud and the clock’s face was veiled by a whirlwind of fluttering.
“Jelly-roll, Jelly-roll, from my bakery shop,” the singer sang above a mocking riff from trombone and trumpet, “Get it while it’s juicy, Get it while it’s hot….”
And with birds swooping and diving in a wing-beating frenzy people were skittering close to the buildings or making for the curb in quick-stepping panic; and as they bumped and clung to their briefcases and packages, some were brushing past with annoyed expressions; while others, rushing in opposite directions, were looking back and shouting at something up the walk beyond them.
What’s going on up there? he thought, and as he pressed past pedestrians and headed for the area where the clock’s sun-flecked shadow slanted upon a mounting confusion of forms that were ducking and fleeing the music became ever more strident. Then, in looking past the heads and shoulders of two men wearing identical white suits and panama hats, he realized with a start that the source of the sound and confusion was a small Negro man.
White-haired and dressed in a black frock-tail coat, a white T-shirt, baggy striped pants, and soiled tennis shoes, the man appeared to be much older than himself as he approached with his right hand on hip and arm akimbo while shouldering a large portable radio which was pressed against the left side of his white hatless head like a cake of black ice applied to an ear that was aching! Which it should be, Hickman thought as h
e listened to the radio’s shrill blaring of, “Jellee, Jellee!, Jelly-jelly all night long!”
Well, would you look at that, he thought, and as the little man rocked to the music’s loud beat with a limp, and a pause, and a hand-on-hip strut he realized that he was advancing with his eyes closed and smiling as though so entranced by the sound of his blues-spouting burden as to be totally unaware of the panic being stirred by the inchworm’s pace of his progress.
And as he watched people clearing the walk before the little man’s advance, he thought, I should have known it! Who else but one of our old-timers who’ll exploit any opportunity the white folks leave open by dismissing them as crazy could cause such confusion! And with nothing more than a funky blues number, an old tinny radio, and a crabbed way of walking! No more than a frail bundle of bones but still taking on the world’s most powerful city. And what’s more, the little clown is getting away with it! Truly, Hickman, this thing called democracy is not only unpredictable, but far more fragile than anyone wants to admit—Sister Bea, where are you now that I need you?
And spurred by a sudden impulse to see if the little disturber-of-the-peace was simply taking advantage of the self-flattering condescension which the white public extended to those of his color and style, or actually as hard of hearing and blind as he appeared to be, he rushed up the walk with footsteps pounding.
Okay, Mister Casey Jones, he thought, if you’re only playing games get ready to jump, otherwise us two old-timers are about to bump….
But just as he drew closer he saw the little man pause with one foot in midair and his eyes popped open. And even as he thought, I knew it, he realized that the little man was sizing him up with a snaggled-toothed grin.
“Hey, now!” he heard through the radio’s blaring. “They don’t make ‘em like that these days—am I right or wrong?”
“That’s right,” Hickman said, “nor your type either. And maybe it’s a good thing”—and broke off, his ear suddenly arrested by the attack and modulations of a muted trombone and in recognizing the pulse and timbre of his own gut-bucket style from the old days he gaped in amazement.