“How can death be sacred? Talk about being middle class!” the woman said angrily. “Haven’t you been reading the papers? Thousands of people are dying over there, thousands of people!Bombs, napalm, burning gasoline—flaming gasoline, it runs along in a stream, and if peasants are hiding in a ditch it runs into the ditch like water, flaming water, and burns them up alive! How can you say death is sacred? The death of a bastard like Johnson sacred? He should be put through a meat-grinder and fed to hogs! He should be plowed under and used for fertilizer!”
“Don’t talk so loud, please—”
“I don’t give a damn who hears me!”
“But if someone is listening—”
“Who’s listening, there’s just us in here!”
“Let’s return to the initial problem. Let’s not get excited. The problem is assassination—a political method that is respectable or not? Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, along with burning everything down.”
“I don’t want my books burned down!”
“I don’t mind my books being burned! I’ll give them up!”
“But if Johnson doesn’t come, what then?”
“Then Romney. Kill the Governor of the state.”
“Won’t that make him a martyr?”
“So what?”
“What would he be a martyr for?”
“I don’t think that Romney is significant enough to kill. Listen. Well, yes, he is worth killing, speaking in general political terms…as a way of breaking down the existing structure…and though I dislike him I think—”
“I’d rather kill Cavanaugh actually.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s more immediate, he’s the Mayor.”
“But you’re working for him!”
“I’m taking his money. Actually I despise him. He has some good ideas but he doesn’t move fast enough. None of them moves fast enough to keep up with history—”
“He’s gotten too fat. It’s a bad image.”
“Well, we can always kill him. He’ll be in the city for a while.”
“But if Johnson doesn’t come—and I doubt that that bastard is stupid enough to come here, after a riot, even for votes—I don’t think we should bother with Romney, that’s just flattering the Republicans. I think we should kill someone significant like Keast—”
Everyone laughed.
“Keast! Kill Keast! Why, nobody’s ever heard of him! Who gives a damn about the president of Wayne State? My God!”
“He has more significance than people know—he’s a symbol. And the black revolution and the youth revolution should converge on the university, should get together on the campus. The campus will be the battlefield, not the slums—”
“You think a university is that significant? A university president in comparison with a senator?”
“Which senator?”
“After the riot they’ll both come, everyone will get into the act, certainly Hart will show up—”
“He’s a good man.”
“Shit! There are no good men in government. It all has to be destroyed!”
“But do you think Hart is important enough nationally?”
“Who’s heard of him outside Michigan?”
“What about a Negro leader, what about King?”
“Yes, he might show up if the riot is bad.”
“If King was shot—”
“King is a half-assed bastard, he’s betrayed every Negro in the country, he deserves to be shot,” Mort said angrily. “Actually, the kids in the community—the Canfield Babes we were working with, that gang—they’d all love to be in on shooting King. They don’t give a damn about Johnson or even know who he is—”
“But what has that got to do with Vietnam? King is against Vietnam.”
“We could change the message from Vietnam to just the race issue, or to doing away with existing leaders—”
“Why Martin Luther King?”
“What have you got against him? Isn’t he as important as Johnson? Just because he’s a black, isn’t he important? It would be very dramatic, killing him, and it would be blamed on the right wing.”
“Then we don’t control the assassination! We don’t give it its meaning!”
“Yes, we control it, but very cleverly.”
“The message will be lost!”
“It will not be lost! We’ll control it, we’ll write a letter!”
“Blaming it on the right wing? On the National Rifle Association?”
“But it would be more logical to kill Stokely Carmichael if you wanted to blame it on the other side,” someone said impatiently. “Jesus, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Everyone knows that King is working for the right wing, why the hell would they shoot him? Talk, talk, talk! Carmichael is the man—he’s a saint—he won’t be afraid to show up here, and his death would be worth something!”
“But, excuse me, to go from Johnson to Carmichael—I mean, haven’t we sort of gone down? I mean, not morally, but in terms of publicity? Frankly, nobody will give a damn about Carmichael except the people who are already prepared to burn this country down.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“The headlines will look wrong, won’t they? Or will it be better? It would show the other nations how racist America is, like when the CIA killed Malcolm X.”
“The other nations know all that and don’t give a damn! Why should they? They’re being paid off!”
“I have an idea. We could kill them all, everyone we mentioned! We could kill all the bastards who come to Detroit to make speeches! Why not? It would teach them to respect a riot, to stay the hell out of a riot area—”
“For a dramatic effect—”
“No, it would not be for a dramatic effect, it would have the opposite effect! You don’t have any sense of balance! Let’s say that Robert Kennedy shows up here and we shoot him, and also the others—who do you think would get the headlines? Him and Johnson! The others would only go on the inside pages. It would just be a waste! You’re talking bullshit! I wish you people had a slight sense of theater, of history!”
“This is giving me a headache,” Mort said. “The way you throw things around! I supply the money, I’ve got the know-how, I’ve got the kids anxious to pull some triggers, but you won’t let me organize it! You fight me, you’re always picking on me!”
“Nobody is picking on you, Mort,” the woman said.
“Jesus, this depresses me. Sometimes I’m up, now I’m down; now I soar, now I’m plunging; poor Mort is plunged to the very bottom of the sea. I’m lost in some miserable icy channel up by the North Pole, the stars are very small. How can I find my way back to earth? Jules, have you been listening to all this crap?”
Jules had just noticed the Bhagavad Gita, in paperback, under someone’s restless elbow.
“What is your opinion, Jules?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Who should we kill, Jules? If you had your finger on the trigger, who would you kill?”
“Nobody.”
“Why not?”
“Why? Why kill anybody? People die anyway, sooner or later,” Jules said. He looked at the colorful cover of that book, remembering something urgent about it…he must have wanted to read it at one time. “It wouldn’t change anything.”
“Wouldn’t change anything! What? Everything can change!” Mort said. “Everything can be changed with the right people in charge! You should meet the kids in this gang of mine—we’re trying to find jobs for them supposedly—kids who’ve been working all their lives running numbers and pimping, pimping at the age of ten, handling dope—trying to find jobs for them! This one kid, his life has been so lousy, somebody in his family fed him ground glass when he was four years old, and he grew up to be thirteen and a first-class little pimp—he just bought his mother a fur coat. You thi
nk their lives shouldn’t be changed? You think everything should continue the way it has been for centuries?”
“He sounds like a goddam Catholic or something, this Jules of yours,” said the woman, shaking her head at Mort. “The futility of history—what crap! The gears of history must be oiled with blood or nothing will move. History isn’t a natural sequence, it’s made by man. We create it. Man does and undoes everything. I could change a small part of human history by just tossing a bomb into someone’s window, believe me. According to Fanon—”
The girl across the table from Jules giggled suddenly, covering her face.
“What are you laughing at?” said the woman. “What’s so funny?”
She peeked out through her fingers. “I’m afraid.”
“Oh, Christ!”
Everyone began talking at once. Mort pounded the table. His forehead was greasy with sweat, so was his nose, his lips worked busily and hungrily…the woman next to Jules smelled strongly of perspiration, in her excitement very female, husky and female…the other men pulled at their chins, their lips, their noses, as if hating their faces, nervous and irritated and impatient, bewildered, while Jules caught the girl’s eye and saw that she was a pretty girl and that there was no future to her face, nothing. She was like the hot, humid summer itself, which had hardly begun—it was only mid-June—but which seemed to have lasted months already and had blotted out all memory of cooler weather. The floor was very flat, like the sidewalk and the street. The summer seemed to Jules flat, its horizon flat. He reached out slowly and put his hand over hers.
Her eyes jumped to his face.
“Don’t be afraid, why are you afraid?” he said softly.
She pulled her hand away. Mort, watching them edgily, pretended to see nothing and interrupted someone’s argument with an explosive laugh, almost a hiccup. “Burn everything down! I offer my books into the bargain—a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of books! My parents’ house in Grosse Pointe! Fine, fine! Everything for the fire! Burn it all down and at the very bottom, fine white bone dust at the very bottom, let it not be Johnson or Romney or any of those bastards but a very ordinary person, a black kid, a victim and martyr to the whole establishment we call civilization—isn’t that the way it is? Symbolically and literally? The whole establishment resting on the pulverized bones of a kid?”
“You stole all that from Thomas Mann! From The Magic Mountain!”
“I’ve never read Thomas Mann,” Mort said, offended. “Where are you going?” he said as the girl rose.
She was on her way out. “Good-by,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
She waved him away. Jules got up to follow her. Mort, deflated, sat and stared after them while his lips worked silently.
“Hey, friend,” Jules said in a singsong voice, hurrying after the girl, “why don’t you smile upon your brother? Hey, wait.”
She did not look back.
“Where are you going in such a hurry, honey?”
On the sidewalk, in the sunlight, she stopped to look at him. “I felt afraid in there, all of a sudden. I don’t know why.”
“Nothing to be afraid of.”
“The things they were talking about—I just started trembling.”
“Where are you trembling? Your knees?”
“Yes, my knees. I’m only eighteen. He was my teacher in Intro to Soc, you know, Mr. Piercy—I mean Mort. I sort of fell in love with him last semester but now I don’t know, I don’t know what to think. He made us read The Wretched of the Earth and it changed my life.”
“Are you still trembling?” said Jules.
“A little.”
“Why don’t you walk this way, along here,” said Jules. His voice was not hollow now but kind; it sounded kind. “Walk along here,” he said, pressing with his knuckles the firm column of her backbone, urging her along. Vacated stores, old election posters, his everyday walk. He was walking it backwards now. “Tell me about yourself, honey. Talk to me.”
“I don’t know what to think. I came down here with a suitcase and some things, a few dollars. I had a bad fight at home. I’m fed up with them, they’re hopeless, and I was thinking maybe I would…well, I would live down here permanently. But I don’t have any money. Your name is Jules? I know you, I’ve met you before. You go around with a woman named Marcia? She’s got a little kid? Why can’t I stop trembling, I feel so strange.”
“You’ll feel better in a few minutes. The sun will warm you up.”
She shivered. Her teeth were chattering.
“Honey, why are you so afraid? You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
“You…I was watching you all the time, in there. I could hear them talking, but you were looking at me. But where is that woman? She’s a nice-looking woman, your girl friend, do you live with her? Her and the kid? Do you all live together?”
“Off and on,” said Jules. “But tell me about yourself.”
They were walking slowly in the sunlight. Jules watched their shadows. The girl’s legs made long, filmy shadows, very graceful shadows.
“I don’t know what to say. Jules, I met you before. I don’t know why I’m walking this way, I should be going the other way. Maybe I should get the bus up to Six Mile, or telephone my father. I had to drop out of school because I got so mixed up—I failed English composition, I couldn’t organize my thoughts. What a hell of a break it must be, to be born with brains, like Mort and that what’s-her-name and the rest of them. I admire all of them, and you too. You never get afraid.”
“That’s true. I never get afraid.” He touched her backbone again, more gently. He stared at her back and ran his fingers down it.
“What are you doing?” she said, drawing away. “You’re so strange, acting like this. I don’t know what to think. I met you one other time but you didn’t remember me—”
“I’m thinking about you now. I can’t think about anything else.”
“But you shouldn’t touch me like that! What are you doing?” she said weakly, moving away. Jules’s hand fell free. “What can I say about myself? Are you listening? I want to come alive and be a real person, I want to love—I want to love in a strong, permanent way, I want to give myself up entirely to it, but it has to be worthy of me and I’m afraid, I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell, I won’t know how to recognize it—I could be locked in a coffin and never get out. I don’t know the right words. I know that I’m pretty but people like Mort don’t give a damn about that, they want the right words and I don’t have them. I feel all locked up in a coffin.”
“This way. Turn this way,” Jules said as they reached a corner.
“But I don’t want to go this way.”
“Yes, this way,” he said, taking her arm.
She walked with him up the street, stumbling a little. “I haven’t eaten since last night. Supper last night. I ran out this morning without eating. I feel so faint…”
Some Negro boys ran past them, shrieking. The girl bumped into Jules, in a panic. He touched the back of her neck and caressed her, beneath her hot, heavy hair.
“I know how Mort feels,” she said, shaking her head to be free of Jules’s hand, “I know what he means about burning everything down. There can’t be any other way. A big bulldozer to even everything, to level it all down, people and trees and houses, and what’s left after the fire, piles of rubble, white and black both. Sometimes I sit up, wide awake, and have a dream when I’m high, of a building on fire falling to pieces, every brick falling away from the rest and falling by itself down into the street, far below, tilting over and then collapsing…all so beautiful…and the firemen, crushed beneath the fire…and in every room people waking up, trying to run on stairways that burst into flame beneath their feet and collapse, and everything would keel over, burning, the people themselves burning…”
Jules caressed her back, leading her along.
“But do I
want to be one of those people? I don’t know what I want, I can’t think straight, I don’t think I’m well. My mind is all mixed up. I have dreams about blood and the insides of people coming out, from my high-school biology class, where we had to dissect a frog and I hated it, hated it—my God, Jules, please don’t do that!”
He stepped around to her other side, shifting his hand. “Let me protect you from the street, honey. Too many people.”
“I can hear cars but I can’t see them. I can smell them.”
“There are too many cars on the street.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Tell me about yourself, anything,” said Jules. Inside him, far inside him, something was dissolving and falling. But he did not let it fall. He said, “Do you like to sleep? Do you dream at night? What do you dream about?”
“I used to like to sleep but now I’m afraid of it. I could dream anything, I’m free to dream anything…”
“Don’t you want to be free?”
“Yes, I want to be free, there’s nothing I want more, but…I’m afraid of the kind of dreams I have, I can’t control them. I have one dream where I’m armed with a belt, carrying a belt! Why am I carrying a belt? Why is everything so crazy!”
Her teeth chattered. She gave Jules a frightened sideways look, strangely coquettish.
“Cross the street here. Wait for this car,” Jules said. He put his arm around her shoulders to guide her. She stared up at him and then broke off her gaze with an effort, looking around. She stumbled at the curb. Confused, neutral, she stood on the sidewalk looking around.
“Where is this? Detroit? Is this still Detroit?”
“Yes, honey. Always Detroit.”
“Are you on that program with them—what’s it called—action against poverty? United Action Against Poverty? Do you work with them on that, getting money and faking reports, buying guns? Or are you one of the poor people?”
“I’m one of the poor people.”
“But you’re not black. Are you very poor?”