The Drifters

  ‘What’s your last point?’ Akbar Muhammad asked.

  ‘The one you won’t like,’ I said. ‘The one thing that prevents the Negro from accomplishing these things when the white man does allow him to try …’

  ‘Goddammit!’ Akbar shouted, leaping from the bed. ‘Don’t speak like that! The day is past when you white people are going to allow us anything. We’re going to take things like jobs. And if you try to stop us, there has got to be blood.’ He raged about the room, kicking at discarded mimeographed sheets containing his manifesto. ‘If a man like you, who understands the problem … if you still speak of allowing us to try our skills … goddammit, what hope is there?’ He ended with his pugnacious beard a few inches from my nose.

  ‘I’m sorry. I understand.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand!’ Akbar shouted. ‘Damn it, you do not understand. I am telling you right now that I expect to be shot down in the streets of Philadelphia … before I’m thirty years old. You, tell him!’

  The thin man said in a voice I could scarcely hear, ‘I expect to be gunned down. But I’m gonna take half a dozen white men down with me.’

  ‘You! Cato! Tell him!’

  ‘I’m positive we’ll have to go into the streets to win equality. We realize you have the guns … you got us outnumbered … I expect to die fighting here in Philadelphia.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I shouted. ‘Akbar, you have a college degree. Cato, you’re getting one. There’s a place for you in our society.’

  ‘You don’t seem to understand. It’s no longer enough for me to get a job. I want every black man to have a fair chance. I want the brothers to be free, and I’ll die for it.’

  Vilma had said nothing while the others uttered their manifestos, but now she did something that was even more dramatic. She crossed the room, yanked open a closed door, and showed me a small arsenal of guns and ammunition. Standing like a black Joan of Arc beside this lethal cache, she said nothing, then closed the door and resumed her place on the bed beside the thin man.

  ‘What was your fourth point?’ Akbar asked.

  I pointed to the arsenal and said, ‘After that it would be anticlimactic.’

  ‘I want to hear it.

  ‘It’ll only make you angry.’

  ‘No angrier than I already am.’

  ‘Here goes. Up till yesterday I had an office manager named Nordness. Brought him with me from Geneva. He quit. Why? He told me that all he got from the Negroes in Philadelphia was ulcers. Because at levels lower than you and Cato, he found no sense of responsibility. If he gave a man a job on Monday, the man took off for three days on Friday. If he opened a branch on the edge of town and staffed it with Negroes, next week it might or might not be open for business. Nordness believed that union leaders were dead right whether you like it or not when they said, “Sure, the Negro can learn, but you never know whether he’s going to report for duty.” So until your inner society is restructured, this dreadful self-condemnation will haunt you … and keep you from the good things you want.’

  To my surprise, Muhammad listened to my criticism, pursed his lips thoughtfully, and said, ‘Nordness was right. We know this—painfully—and only our program will change things … I mean, change the character of the black.’

  ‘What program do you have?’ I asked, pointing to the two sets of papers, which seemed determined to isolate the Negro further.

  ‘Self-respect,’ Muhammad said ‘When blacks are able to organize things their own way … do their own thing …’ He stopped, fumbled for a concept that apparently he had not adequately formed, and said nothing.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘And I agree. Negroes must erect their own citadels of self-respect. In all things. All men have to do that. But if you think this means you can run a grocery store on Negro principles, or a factory, or an insurance office, and that you can ignore cost efficiency studies or reporting to work regularly and on time … You know, Mr. Muhammad, there will not be special rules for you Negroes.’

  ‘There you miss the whole point,’ he said eagerly, as if recovering the standards of thought he had lost. ‘We are going to establish enterprises whose primary motives will be to instill self-respect in the blacks who run them and patronize them. Competing with white stores in the neighborhood will be secondary.’

  ‘One hundred per cent wrong,’ I said flatly. ‘The inescapable motive of every store, black or white, is to earn a profit which will enable it to keep functioning. You establish your Negro store and run it as poorly as I see Negro establishments run, and every Negro in your district will patronize the white store, because it’ll be a better store.’

  ‘Will you give our committee a hundred thousand to try it our way?’

  ‘I won’t give a committee anything. But if knowledgeable men like you and Cato want to try, I’ll lend you the money to get started.’

  ‘My job is not running grocery stores,’ he said.

  ‘That’s why they’ll fail,’ I said.

  ‘Then you see no hope?’

  ‘On the terms you suggest … no.’

  ‘There will be no other terms,’ he said, and on this cold note our discussion of economics ended, but another of more significance started.

  The thin man had lit a cigarette, but instead of smoking it as one usually did, he inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, kept the smoke in his lungs a very long time, then blew it slowly out He took two more such puffs and handed the cigarette to Akbar Muhammad, who inhaled even more deeply, for he had powerful lungs, and ejected the smoke in heavy rings that hung round and yellow in the air.

  ‘Drag?’ he asked, offering me the cigarette.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘A reefer.’ When I showed no recognition, he growled, ‘Grass, man. Grass.’

  ‘You mean marijuana?’

  ‘What else, man?’

  I started to smile, and he asked belligerently what was so funny about grass, and I said, ‘It’s seven o’clock in the morning. We haven’t had breakfast yet,’ and the thin man said, ‘You got to get through the day,’ and Akbar said, ‘We’re with friends. We’ve been talking sense. Let’s celebrate.’

  I started to pass the cigarette on to Cato, but Muhammad grabbed my arm and asked, ‘You not partaking?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He held my arm and said, ‘I told you we were celebrating. Smoke.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ the thin fellow said. ‘It ain’t gonna stone you, one puff.’

  I appealed to Cato, who nodded, so I took a cautious drag on the cigarette, tasted the sweetish smoke, found it both inoffensive and unimpressive, and passed the cigarette along to Cato, who took two deep puffs before handing it to Vilma. In this way the cigarette passed around the circle three times, after which the thin man produced a second, which was used in the same way.

  In all, I had about six small puffs of the marijuana, which, so far as I could judge, had no effect on me, but the four Negroes inhaled deeply, held the smoke for long intervals, and blew it out slowly, and since they took three or four substantial puffs to each of my token ones, they were affected in whatever way it is that marijuana affects the human consciousness.

  So far as I could see, the cigarettes made them more relaxed, pleasanter, a little more inclined to laugh at the contradictory positions in which they found themselves. Put succinctly, they were more agreeable and I found myself liking them more. For example, Akbar Muhammad grew positively congenial, placing his powerful naked arm about me and speaking frankly, as if our earlier conversation had been a testing and not a true exchange of ideas. ‘Mr. Fairbanks,’ he said confidentially, ‘we are going to press our demands in ways that will startle you—that might turn you off—but we’ll get the money. One way or another, we’ll get the money, because just like you and your friends in Geneva, the white man has a guilty conscience. He knows that what we say is right. He knows he has defrauded us—that he owes us a perpetual debt—and the white man is smart. He acknowledges the
truth, and the truth is that we have a right to compensation. We’ll get it, and when we do we’ll set up our own stores, in our own way, and we’ll run them according to the best black principles.’

  ‘And they’ll go out of business in three years,’ I said with no rancor.

  ‘You’re right!’ he said. ‘The first wave will go broke—every goddamned one of them. And we’ll learn from our mistakes. And we’ll start a second wave. And in them we’ll follow all the rules you’ve been trying to teach me tonight. And those stores will succeed.’

  ‘So why don’t you follow the rules the first time?’

  ‘Because we have got to learn,’ he said softly. ‘And we have got to learn our way—the way every white man on this earth learned anything. Our own way. All it’s going to take is time and money. We have the time. You have the money. And the experiment can be most productive for all.’

  ‘You have some busy years ahead,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed we do,’ he said jovially. ‘For we’re going to remake a people, and in so doing, we’re going to remake a nation.’

  Perhaps the marijuana had touched me more deeply than I had suspected, for when he said this I began to laugh, and instead of his getting angry he laughed with me, then asked amiably, ‘What’s so funny?’ and I said, ‘Did you know that for some years I was practically an advisor to the Republic of Vwarda? Yes, I’ve been working rather intimately with the Negro republics. And in the heart of Africa they said precisely what you just said. “We are going to remake the people, and in doing so, we’ll remake the nation.” ’

  “What’s so funny about that?’ he asked, laughing at the joke he did not understand.

  ‘That Negroes in Africa and Negroes in North Philadelphia should be saying the same thing … and for the same reasons.’

  ‘What you’re really saying,’ he suggested, poking me in the ribs and chuckling, ‘is that we’re both savages.’

  ‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ I cautioned, laughing at his audacity.

  The thin man lit another cigarette, and we smoked it as before, and again I took only ceremonial puffs.

  Akbar Muhammad, dragging deeply on the aromatic weed, said, ‘I suppose you’re right, in a way. All black people have the same problem—Vwarda on a national scale, us on a local scale. But it isn’t a black problem only. It’s the problem of all emerging people. When I was at Michigan State we had one great professor. This cat could see right into the heart of the black man. Big Irishman, educated at Notre Dame. Third team in football. He came from Boston, and when he saw sixteen blacks in his class he interrupted his planned lectures and gave five talks on how the Irish established themselves in Massachusetts. You know what he said? For twenty years every Irishman elected to office in that state turned out to be either a crook or a fraud. Every Irish business failed because somebody stole the cash register blind.

  ‘The Protestants had all sorts of jokes about the Irish, and they were true, but they were also irrelevant. Because in time the Irish learned. They began to elect honest politicians. And they learned to hire honest clerks. And after a couple of generations, America found itself with Jack Kennedy. The patience paid off.’

  He reached for the cigarette and took four deep puffs before passing it on to Vilma. ‘In their years of discovery and settling down, the Irish had whiskey to console them. We have marijuana.’

  ‘Be sure that it doesn’t have you,’ I said.

  It was now nearly nine o’clock, and Vilma said, ‘It’s time for me to go to school.’ In the euphoria that had settled over our meeting, this caused general laughter, and Akbar said in broad dialect, ‘When teacher ask, “Where you been, chick?” you gonna say, “Smokin’ pot wid de New Muslims?” ’

  I asked Cato, ‘Are you a New Muslim?’ and Akbar intercepted the question: ‘He doan know hisse’f yet. He doan know what he is.’

  ‘I’m one,’ Vilma said, not belligerently but with a degree of pride. I had not figured out whose girl she was, but now she rose, went to the door, and said, ‘Cato, you gonna walk me to school?’ He leaped up to join her, then turned and said to me, ‘You better come along.’

  We left the tenement and walked slowly down Eighth Street toward Classical High, and as we moved through the Negro neighborhoods we saw many children starting off to school, and I wondered how many of them had been puffing at special cigarettes. There was no way of telling, just as no one could have detected that Cato and Vilma were walking in a rarefied atmosphere in which colors were just a little brighter and sounds more persuasive.

  In Muhammad’s room I had thought it strange when Vilma asked Cato to walk her to school, but now we entered an especially grubby neighborhood not far from Classical and I began to understand, for here several large groups of Negro girls gathered at street corners to abuse Vilma as she walked by.

  ‘Scab!’ one girl of sixteen yelled at her.

  ‘You spend all night fucking with Whitey?’ another shouted.

  Hideous charges were made against her, but she ignored them, moving closer to Cato as we walked. After he had run the gauntlet, I asked, ‘What’s this all about?’ and Cato said, ‘She refuses to join their gang.’

  ‘What gang?’

  ‘Boys mostly. They’re the ones that do the killing. Thirty-two murders last year by kids under the age of twenty. The girls are the hangers-on. Corner girls, they’re called.’

  ‘They sounded pretty tough.’

  ‘They can get very tough,’ he said.

  We were now at the entrance to Classical High, in years gone by one of the great schools of America, in which the Irish and German and Jewish boys whose parents had come to this country learned the ground rules that governed life in America. In addition to Latin and patiently taught English, those earlier boys had also acquired an insight into how to manipulate the system of which they were now a part. From Classical, young scholars had left to become heads of industries, authors of good books, chiefs of police departments and professors at universities. Quick-moving Irish boys had become quarterbacks at Michigan and Alabama; studious Jewish boys had become philosophers at Harvard. It was a school of noble tradition, one which had play a significant role in the building of this city and this nation. Today its major intellectual problem was coping with the twenty-eight per cent of its students who could not read; its principal disciplinary problem, preventing rape and stabbing in the halls.

  As we approached the school, Cato and I were halted by two policemen. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ they warned us.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Crackdown on adult pushers,’ they explained, and when they moved on, Cato told me, ‘Lots of trouble in this school. Grown men sneak in to sell the kids heroin between classes.’

  As we stood on the corner with Vilma, I had a chance to inspect the famous school; spelling was no longer one of its specialties, for signs scrawled across its façade read: Join Omaga Phi, Danise Love Fillip and All Power to the Madadors, and farther along—in red—was the ominous Death to the Madadors.

  ‘That’s the gang that wants Vilma to join,’ Cato said. ‘The girls’ branch is called the Madadoras.’

  One of the girl gangs that we had passed now swaggered menacingly by, whispering threats to Vilma as they went. The police stopped them and a woman officer was called over to search them. She took away four switchblade knives, then allowed the girls to enter the school. ‘There’s been a lot of cutting in this school,’ Cato said.

  Now a group of four Negro mothers appeared from Grimsby Street, escorting their daughters to school. In a white community such mothers would not, in the first place, have been accompanying fifteen-year-old girls to school, but even if they had been escorting infants, they would have left them at the corner, once the traffic of the streets had been safely passed. Here, however, the mothers brought their daughters directly to the school entrance, where police could protect them, for in recent months there had been fearful assaults on the approaches to this school.

  Si
nce it was now time for classes, we delivered Vilma into the area protected by the police. Cato said goodbye to her and we watched as she made it safely to the entrance, but as she disappeared, a group of three girls passed Cato and whispered so that the police could not hear, ‘We gonna get that chick. Nobody ain’t gonna rat on the Madadoras and live.’ I looked at the girls as they went by, attractive fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who should have been worrying about history class and boys, but who were obsessed by a death feud which seemed a normal aspect of their society.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Cato said as we left the school, but I at least was badly shaken. ‘You scared?’ Cato asked. I shook my head and went back to my hotel for some sleep.

  The days that followed were a phantasmagoria. Mornings and afternoons were spent with Reverend Claypool Jackson’s committee discussing Negro economic problems as if Negroes in Philadelphia were old-time Germans or Irishmen with a few specialized problems. Never did we come to grips with youthful leaders like Akbar Muhammad and his New Muslims or with the girl gangs that terrorized approaches to high schools. The toll of drugs, murders and despair we glossed over as if it were not important, but in my mind’s eye as we talked were the four Negro mothers convoying their daughters to school, insistent that their girls get an education and remain free of the gangs. I was able to accomplish nothing and prepared my return to Geneva.

  In the evenings I entered another world—part fear, part hope—with Cato Jackson as my cicerone. I found that he was dating Vilma regularly, but that she was also dating Akbar Muhammad. How she arranged matters, I never understood, but when she was with Cato she was as delightful as she was pretty. She had an ironic sense of humor, and I judged that if she kept away from marijuana she would do superior work in school. We often had dinner together, and one night I asked her if she was planning on college.

  ‘Me? No … no.’

  I could see that she did not automatically reject the idea, so I asked her reasons, and with some hesitancy she said, ‘For me there’s no Mister Wister.’

  ‘Who’s he? I asked.