The Drifters

When he said this we were walking over a bridge across the Schuylkill River, and from it we could see the lovely silhouette of Alexander Hamilton Square, named for that noble immigrant from the West Indies whom Cato, suspected to have been part Negro, like his countrywoman Joséphine de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon married. Hamilton had labored intelligently and well in Philadelphia and it was appropriate that one of the finest residential squares, overlooking the western river, should honor him.

  ‘When I look at the skyline of this square,’ Cato said, ‘what do you suppose I see? First, you tell me what you see.’

  ‘I see some very fine old buildings,’ I said. ‘They’re worth preserving … if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I don’t mean that at all. I mean those highly polished brass nameplates.’ He led me around the square so that I could read the names of the organizations that used these distinguished buildings as their Pennsylvania headquarters: women’s clubs, youth groups, church societies, foundations, art leagues, and all those voluntary groups which are so essential to the well-being of a society.

  ‘Every group tax-exempt,’ Cato said. ‘Every group collects funds from the city and spends them in the suburbs. This square is the spiritual capital of surburbia. There’s not one goddamned committee headquartering here that does a shred of good for the city. And it’s all exempt from city taxes.’

  He led me to other squares where the same condition prevailed: ‘In this square sixty per cent of the buildings are tax-exempt, and every one of them operates solely for the benefit of the suburbs. In this square fifty-one per cent tax-exempt. Over here factories shut down, paying no taxes. Wherever you look, the guts torn out of the city and either moved to the suburbs or thrown into tax-exempt status.’

  ‘I take it you’re studying this problem at Penn?’

  ‘No! Penn is worst of all. That huge operation in the heart of the city, paying no taxes for the services we blacks have to pay for.’

  ‘But they’re giving you an education.’

  ‘Grudgingly.’

  We proceeded through the city, and for the first time I saw a major American metropolis through the eyes of an embittered young Negro: ‘Even though the rich white Protestants have fled with their wealth, and even though they’ve sold their used-up churches to people like my father, they won’t relinquish control. They use tax exemptions to cripple us. They use the state legislature to prevent us from governing ourselves. They emasculate the city, rob it blind, then throw it at us and say, “Now it’s your problem.” But they give us no money and no control.’

  Two policemen in a prowl car moved slowly past us, properly curious as to why a white man would be walking in that part of the city after midnight. When the occupants—one black, one white—saw my age and Cato’s, they assumed we were homosexuals. ‘You keep your noses clean,’ they warned us.

  ‘One thing Whitey does keep control of when he leaves the city,’ Cato said as the car slowly disappeared. ‘The police department. They sure as hell keep control of that. You know why?’

  When I said no, he did a strange thing. He dropped his university accent and lapsed into an ancient dialect his family had acquired during their stay in the coastal swamps of South Carolina. Geechee, Cato called it, and I found it practically indecipherable, composed as it was of African words, grunts and mocking pronunciations. Fortunately, it was intermixed with what Cato termed ‘high middle-period Stepin Fetchit,’ and it was this mélange that Cato and his friends used when engaging in put-ons, the art of kidding white folks by expounding in exaggerated form the race phobias they nurtured. Cato was a master of the put-on, and although I cannot reproduce the African words he used and the full fantasy of his illiterate grammar, what he told me that first night came out something like this: ‘Yassuh, Mistuh Charley, me’n mah boys, we gonna ass-emble one night ’n we gonna march wid clubs and knives and ropes right out to Chestnut Hill ’n Llanfair ’n Ardmore ’n all them fancy places ’n we gon’ to dem fine’—he pronounced it fahn—‘residential areas like Jenkintown and Doylestown ’n we gon’ murder ’n rape ’n burn all dem people in de suburbs. Yassuh, Mistuh Charley, dat’s what we got in mind to do.’

  ‘You murdered one of them a couple of hours ago,’ I said, impatient with the put-on,

  ‘Have you seen the district where I live?’ he asked soberly.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Aren’t you surprised there haven’t been more murders?’

  ‘I shrink from even one.’

  The finality of my reply caused him to drop the subject. Abruptly he said, ‘You asked me if I got my ideas at Penn. I said no. Would you be interested in seeing where I do get them?’ When I nodded, he looked at his watch, a rather good one, and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  He led me far uptown to an extremely dirty street in North Philadelphia, where he looked up and down to be sure no police had trailed us. Satisfied that we were alone, he ducked into an alleyway, then doubled back to the side door of an incredibly filthy apartment house. ‘Just for the record,’ he said, ‘this building is owned by one of the gang that unloaded the church on my father.’

  We climbed stairs that no sane man should have trusted and kicked open a door whose latch had not worked for years. The room was dark, but in one corner I could vaguely discern a bed with at least one sleeping form. Cato made a clatter, knocking over a chair and a kitchen utensil of some kind. Finally he found a light, which disclosed an unkempt room with scarred furniture, including a chipped iron bed on which two men were lying.

  One was well bearded, naked to the waist and surly. The other, a very tall thin man with a scraggly beard, made no impression on me. When the first climbed out of bed I saw that he was wearing green basketball shorts emblazoned with the most honorable name in the business: Boston Celtics. ‘This is Akbar Muhammad,’ Cato said. ‘He’s the professor who taught me.’

  Akbar reached for a towel, dipped one end in a pitcher of water, washed his hairy face, and asked, ‘Why you come here?’

  ‘This Whitey you ought to know,’ Cato said. ‘He’s the cat from Geneva.’

  ‘With the millions?’ Akbar asked.

  ‘The man,’ Cato said.

  Akbar dropped the towel on the floor, kicked it aside and strode over to greet me. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he said, grasping my hand firmly. ‘You made a lot of sense.’ He pushed a chair my way and sat down on the end of his bed. ‘You find anything worth investing in?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘There was another murder tonight,’ I said. ‘Right near the church where we were meeting.

  ‘There’ll be more.’ He reached back and rapped the thin man on the forehead. ‘Go get Vilma,’ he commanded, and the thin man dressed quickly and left the room.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘You know my name. You’re probably asking what it used to be. Eddie Frakus. Detroit. Parents from Mississippi. I graduated Michigan State. Mr. Fairbanks, you might just as well go back to Geneva. It’ll be ten years before the blacks of Philadelphia will be able to comprehend your offer.’ He paused, stroked his beard with his right hand, then pointed at me with a long finger. ‘And by then well have changed so much that even men of good faith like you won’t offer us the help you offer tonight. No, believe me! The things we’ll have to do will alienate you … totally. But that won’t matter, because then we won’t need your help.’

  He spoke so forcefully, with such clear comprehension of what he was saying, that I had to like him. I asked, ‘Why are you so sure you’ll lose me?’ and he pointed to a mimeographing machine in the corner. ‘Go ahead. Find the message yourself. It’ll give you a sense of discovery.’ He watched as I walked to the corner and picked up one of the first copies of a document that was to become famous, Akbar Muhammad’s bill of charges against the Christian churches of Pennsylvania.

  It was a document so inflammatory that I had to wonder if the same man who had just shown himself to be so reasonable h
ad composed it. The preamble was a call to revolution, the first paragraphs a program for black control of the city. The mayor’s office, the chief of police, the president of the Board of Education and the director of welfare were all to be black, and the funds to ensure this takeover were to come from contributions made voluntarily by the white churches not only in the city but also in the suburbs to a distance of twenty-five miles. When I was finished with the document, which was well reasoned and persuasive, I realized that it had been calculated to enrage the white reader as no other statement could, for it insulted his prejudices and parodied his most precious beliefs.

  Jesus Christ was portrayed as a cheap sentimentalist whose contradictory mouthings had been used by whites to subdue blacks and by blacks as a narcotic to make their perpetual servitude tolerable. Church leaders were depicted as gangsters who had systematically robbed the Negro and kept him in a position from which he could not extricate himself. Church members were proved to be damned fools who sanctimoniously approved what was happening and capitalized upon it. The general taxpaying public was depicted as being in collusion with the churches, to their detriment. The final paragraphs had about them the icy coldness of the November nights before a revolution: ‘We therefore demand, in the name of Akbar Muhammad and black humanity, as reparations from the white churches of Philadelphia, an immediate sum of $10,000,000 in cash, to be provided as follows …’ and the names of forty denominations were listed with specific amounts due from each. ‘We likewise demand from the white churches of suburban Philadelphia an immediate sum of $20,000,000 in cash, to be provided as follows …’ and now came the addresses of about ninety wealthy churches from Paoli on the west to Doylestown on the north. The manifesto was signed ‘Akbar Muhammad.’

  It was about dawn when I finished reading the challenge, and before I could ask any questions, the thin man returned with a most beautiful young Negro girl, whose relationship to the three men I was never to get straightened out. Apparently she was not the girl of the thin man who had fetched her, but Akbar Muhammad treated her with such indifference, if not contempt, that I doubted she would have been long content with his sponsorship. Young Cato, on the other hand, was painfully careful not to express an interest in her, so I judged that one of the other men must have warned him away, but I could sense that he was deeply affected.

  She was like a young forest animal, sleek, innately graceful, fawn-colored and somewhat petulant. Her features were Grecian in their regularity, as if carved from some precious golden marble from North Africa. She was comely, in the words of the Bible, and it required little imagination to see her standing coolly under an Arabian palm while Solomon sang to her.

  ‘You got the labor union material typed?’ Akbar Muhammad asked as she joined us.

  ‘Like I tol’ you, it’s in Paul’s room.’ Impatiently she left us and climbed to another floor, where I could hear her rummaging about. In a few minutes she returned with a sheaf of papers, which Akbar handed me. They presented his demands on the labor unions of Philadelphia, similar to those planned for the churches but in my opinion more justified.

  First he recited the adroit chicanery by which the white unions had forbidden Negroes to learn the basic skills that might have supported them. No Negro could be a bricklayer, an electrician, a plasterer, a roofer, a carpenter, a structural-steel man. ‘But I’ve seen Negro carpenters,’ I protested. ‘Read on,’ Akbar growled.

  He then quoted from the rules of the various unions, citing high-flown pharses from constitutions which ensured all honest men a fair entrance to the unions, if only they served their apprenticeship, mastered the basic skills and paid their union dues. Next he cited the actual figures of union membership, after fifteen years of Negro agitation for a fair deal:

  The list went on and on, with one very large construction unit having more than four thousand members, of whom seven were Negro. This union was training 218 apprentices, of whom three were black. No one could look at these disparate figures without seeing the oppression that was sanctified by the union movement. What made the figures doubly insane was that this was happening in Philadelphia, where the working population was at least fifty per cent Negro.

  ‘And there’s no sign that things will ever be better,’ Akbar said coldly. ‘At least not until we sock the unions for eight million dollars, which we shall do.’

  ‘Here’s the real trouble,’ Cato broke in, and as he spoke with rapier efficiency, I got the idea that he was interested more in impressing Vilma than me. ‘The one avenue which the Negro has for escaping his ghetto is work. Yet here in Philadelphia his opportunity to work is totally blocked by the unions. And who are the unions? Good Catholics, good Protestants whose churches have condoned this evil state of affairs. And who are these good Catholics and Protestants? Italians, Poles, Germans and white immigrants from the south who fear we’ll take their jobs. Can you see the pressure cooker they keep us in? No taxes so that we can run our own city. Nothing but eternal frustration.’ He turned to me and asked, ‘Now do you understand why these documents are needed?’

  I asked Akbar, ‘Could we send the man out for some coffee and doughnuts?’ I handed the thin fellow five dollars, and later he returned with a fistful of paper bags. ‘There ain’t any change,’ he said. ‘I got sandwiches for the men upstairs.’

  I sat on the bed and recalled certain experiences I had had in this field. ‘You’re interested in what a practical-minded white workman thinks about the problem?’ They nodded. ‘I want to say four things. You’ll agree with three of them and thank me for having told you. I can imagine you using them in your speeches later on. You’ll despise me for the fourth, and when I leave, it will be with mutual animosity. But here goes.

  ‘First, some years ago I was on the border of India and Tibet, watching a gang build a difficult mountain road. They were using woman-power. Thousands of women at the mountain face quarrying rock by hand. Thousands of other women with little reed baskets carrying large rocks. Thousands of still other women sitting in the roadbed breaking the rocks into pebbles. They laid about two feet of road a day, but that was all right, because they had nothing better to do, until you figured that with proper machinery and direction, a few men could have done in one day what these five thousand women would accomplish in one month. I spoke to the foreman about this, and he said, “But we get the women for almost nothing.” He was ruining his whole project because the labor was so cheap. Wherever I went in Asia after that I looked at the work force and found the same thing. In Japanese steel mills before the war they used hundreds of workmen instead of one machine, because they got the workman cheap, and they also got a cheap product that couldn’t compete in the world market. In China they used thousands of workmen where ten would suffice, because they got them cheap, and the results suffered. I concluded that the most expensive product in the world is cheap labor, because it lures you away from rational operations. You pay a man a high wage, you demand a high return, and from high returns you pick up a good profit. So ever since, I’ve believed in paying a man high wages, then taxing him like hell for the welfare of the state. The thing that appalls me about America’s philosophy regarding the Negro workman is that we’re doing with him what the government in India was doing with the five thousand women, misusing them because they’re cheap. And we hurt ourselves more than we do the Negro. I’d pay every Negro at least five dollars an hour, and then tax hell out of him for schools and public parks.’

  Akbar and Cato had followed my reasoning with delight; it was what they had already figured out. ‘Man, you see the problem,’ Akbar cried enthusiastically. ‘The white honkies that keep the brothers out of the labor unions are hurting themselves as much as they hurt us.’

  ‘Second,’ I said, ‘when I was working with the navy in Guadalcanal—in the bad days, that was—we didn’t have enough men to go around. Anyone who could shoot a rifle was needed on patrol, because those Japanese were murder. Henderson airfield posed a difficult problem, because we had to kee
p it operating to give our planes a place to land and refuel. You know what we did? It still sounds incredible, but we did it. We took Stone Age cannibals from the nearby island of Malaita … this is the most backward island on earth, believe me. And we took these men right out of the jungle and put khaki shorts on them and within two weeks we had them driving ten-ton trucks and refueling airplanes. Nothing infuriates me more than the argument of the white American unions that blacks can’t learn. If the plantation system of the south still prevailed—with Negro slaves—you can be dead sure that Negroes would be the electricians, the plasterers, the bricklayers. They were in the old days, and they would be now. And they’d be better technicians than the free whites in the neighborhood, because to be so would be a source of pride. So the simple skills you can perform. What about the complicated ones?

  ‘That brings me to the third point. When I was connected with that big dam in Afghanistan, I saw our people take men from the desert, train them for three months, and then turn over to them one of the most complicated of modern machines. It’s a big dredge … thousands of tons. It goes into swampy land and cuts drainage channels. How does it keep from sinking into the mud? It carries its own highway with it … great chunks of steel marsden matting. With a long crane it lays a length of matting, crawls out onto it, then swings the crane around to the back, picks up the matting it has just used and lays it through the swamp ahead. At the end the damned machine is a mile out in the middle of the swamp, marooned on the platform it built for itself. Would you believe that we could teach Afghans from the Stone Age to operate that machine? We did. Today you can teach a capable man almost anything. With less than a year of training, Negroes could man every union job in Philadelphia, and the output would scarcely suffer.’

  This theory met with wild agreement. Even the thin man said, ‘My brother, he can fix television like you never saw.’ Vilma also spoke for the first time. ‘The brothers could learn. I know they could learn.’