The Drifters

  She inclined her lovely brown forehead toward Cato. ‘He’ll tell you.’

  Perhaps because he was embarrassed, Cato lapsed into broad Geechee, saying, ‘This cat, Mister Wister, he b’long white folks’ church. Time come for them to sell to man pappy, he the one that say, “Mo’ bettah we give them the church. At least we all one religion.” De udders, dey laugh at what he say. So when de big deal concluded, what you think? Go ahead, give a guess. Mister Wister he come to man pappy and he say, “Reverend Claypool, we done God a grave injustice this day,” and mah old man, Uncle Tom to de bitter finish, he say, “Mister Wister, maybe God have His own purpose. We got a respectable home. We got somethin’ to work for.” But Mister Wister he say, “Reverend Claypool, I gonna send your boy to college.” So he fix it up I get into University of Pennsylvania. He pay all my fees. Das what he do, das just what dis good man do.’

  I suspected this to be another Cato put-on, but Vilma corroborated the story. Mister Wister they called him, pronouncing his name in one swift sound—‘Swister.’ He was a Quaker whose wife belonged to the Llanfair congregation that had unloaded their outgrown city church, and out of a sense of guilt he had given Cato the scholarship to his old university, Pennsylvania. Quarterly he stopped by Sixth and Grimsby to see how his protégé was doing, always pleased to find that Cato was able to hold his own with his white competitors.

  ‘A few more men like Wister,’ Cato said in ordinary English, ‘and we could hack this deal. But his kind is rare.’

  Vilma said she had no hopes of finding one for herself, an idea which I ridiculed. I said, ‘A bright Negro girl like you could win scholarships to a dozen colleges. They’re scouting for you. To tell you the truth, today it’s better to be a bright young Negro than it is to be white. Chances are better.’

  ‘Chances for what?’ Vilma asked.

  ‘For really doing something. You get yourself a college education, I’ll hire you.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Working as my secretary—executive secretary, that is—lots of responsibility when I’m away on trips. You’d live in Geneva.’

  ‘Is that in France?’

  ‘Switzerland.’

  The word was like magic and I could see it take effect. ‘I saw Shirley Temple. She’s running for Congress or something now. But in this movie she was a little girl in Switzerland. Do they have Alps in Geneva?’

  ‘Right next door.’

  ‘You putting me on?’ she asked. ‘You’d really hire me?’

  ‘Hundreds of companies are eager to hire you. Don’t you think we know as much about your headaches as Akbar Muhammad knows?’

  ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘You think you know? Come with me.’

  She led us to a part of North Philadelphia that I had never seen or even heard about. It was an alley called Dartmoor Mews, off Sixth Street and not more than five blocks from Classical High. There were low tenement buildings on either side, and it was filthy with garbage. It was completely ugly, except for the beauty of the children who crowded it.

  Vilma picked her way around the holes in the pavement, trying to avoid a group of girls who, in spite of Cato’s presence, muttered threats at her. She took us to a squat house that had been occupied in the latter years of the last century by an Irish trolley-car conductor; from it he had sent his son to Villanova. Later it had passed into the hands of an Italian bricklayer; from it he had sent his sons to St. Joseph’s, and one had gone on to St. Charles Borromeo to become a priest.

  ‘In those days an Irishman could become a conductor,’ she said as she led us up an incredible flight of stairs, ‘an Italian was allowed to be a bricklayer.’ She led us into an apartment which occupied one half of the second floor; four Negro families shared what one Irishman had rented. It was a dreadful hovel, with stained wallpaper and waterlogged flooring. The bathroom was in a shed on the floor below and was used by all the families.

  It was scarcely accurate to call Vilma’s group a family. It was a hard-working mother surrounded by six children, whom she tried to educate, doing so alone, for her three husbands had been of no help.

  Three consolations kept her operating: Vilma and her two younger sisters were going to be beautiful and would be eligible for exciting lives; Reverend Claypool Jackson was an inspiring preacher who brought God into his big church; and television was better than movies. With these three sedatives she could survive the misery of this alley and the insolence of the Jewish welfare worker whom she had to placate if she wanted her monthly relief check.

  ‘Mama, this man says that if I go to college he’ll give me a good job in Switzerland.’

  ‘What you talk? College?’

  I thought that in this reply one had the story of what happened to too many young Negroes in America. If they suggested college, or if someone suggested it to them, their peers and even their families ridiculed the idea, and hammered at their insolence in ‘thinking above themselves,’ whereas in Irish and Jewish homes, a child capable of going to college was accorded special consideration, for he was the one who might salvage the family. I remember back in Indiana when I returned to our farm home, from which no college student had ever come, and told my parents that the teachers thought I should try to go on with my education, my mother was overcome with visions of what I might become—minister, lawyer were as far as she got—while my father said that it was every boy’s right to get the best education he could handle and that he would help me make a go of it if I really thought I had the brain power. But when I assured Vilma’s mother that I meant what I said, she drew back, studied me cynically, then smiled in self-satisfaction because she had penetrated my deceit: no white man helped a pretty colored girl unless he wanted to get into bed with her.

  ‘You forget that college stuff … get yourself a job,’ the mother said.

  ‘But he says he’ll give me a good job …’

  ‘He says! He says!’

  On Friday morning, February 14, 1969, Vilma left her alley home carrying a comic valentine she intended mailing to Cato Jackson, but it had to be hand-delivered by the police, because as she reached the corner of Grimsby and Seventh, one short block from her school, four teenage girls from the Madadoras caught up with her, formed a menacing circle, and demanded that she join them. When she refused, they stabbed her eleven times with switchblade knives. They were easily apprehended, because when she fell to the pavement they stomped her, kicking in her face and rupturing her lower abdomen, which left blood on their shoes.

  This was the tenth juvenile gang murder so far that year, the forty-fourth within the past twelve months.

  Cato was studying in the University of Pennsylvania library that afternoon when he happened to see a copy of the Evening Bulletin bearing photographs of Vilma and the four young girls, none over sixteen, who had stabbed her to death. He gave a horrible cry, which resounded through the quiet library, then rushed into the street and shouted wildly until some students calmed him and took him home. I was there having a last futile meeting with his father, and it fell to me to try to console him.

  I was powerless. During his furious rejection of all his father stood for, he told us in savage words of his love for Vilma, and as he ranted I wondered if he had ever told her. I used every kind of logic I could muster up—that he was young, that he could have had no blame for her death, that such things were senseless, that he must not curse all white men, since in this affair they were not involved, but this last reasoning infuriated him. ‘You are!’ he stormed. ‘Who owns that filthy house she lived in? Who refuses to pay taxes to give us better schools? Who allows dope to be peddled right in the school hallways? The whole system is wrong, and you’re to blame as much as anyone else, Fairbanks.’

  With a bitterness that allowed of no consolation, he stormed out of the handsome stone manse and raged through the streets. I did not see him again, for I left shortly thereafter to check on the Vwarda dam, but that night on television I did see Vilma’s mother. She was telling the reporter, a
proficient colored girl, ‘I never wanted much for Vilma, only for her to be a good girl, to do what her teachers said. I brought her up careful and even walked to school with her before they got the cops to guard the place. What can mothers do in this city if their children can’t walk five blocks to school?’

  It was two weeks later that Cato Jackson, Akbar Muhammad and his thin, silent companion backed out of the Llanfair Episcopal Church, their guns ready to fire. For the latter two men, it was an act long planned and daring; for Cato, it was a gesture of desperation, a final rejection of the agony he had been experiencing in so many directions and particularly of his father’s supine religious solutions to those problems.

  The famous photograph was taken at three minutes to twelve, and within two hours the police had identified the three intruders and had raided the headquarters on Eighth Street, uncovering the cache of guns and ammunition that I had seen. Akbar Muhammad and his silent aide were arrested and charged with numerous felonies, but Cato Jackson could not be found. Detectives maintained a watch at the African Church of Our Redeemer, and much was made in the news stories of the fact that Cato was the son of a minister. Reverend Jackson went on television four times to explain that in these difficult times even the most careful parent was not immune to the tragedy that was engulfing our land. Permissiveness, marijuana, agitation over Vietnam, and above all, the confusions regarding race were just as apt to strike at the Negro family as at the white, and he hoped that white parents who had experienced similar problems with their children would remember him in their prayers. The young Negroes of North Philly listened to this rigmarole and told each other, ‘Cato smart. They ain’t gonna catch Cato Jackson. You know what I heard? He so smart he can’t get a degree at Penn because they ain’t but three professors in the whole world smart enough to understand what it is he’s studyin,’ and one of them was Einstein and he’s dead and the other two are in Russia. You think Cato gonna let the fuzz nab him? No sir, he smart.’

  Following the assault on the church, and half-blinded by the photographer’s unexpected flashbulbs, Cato, realizing that the affair had gone poorly and that the police would surely be after him, did a bold thing. Instead of fleeing back to North Philadelphia with Akbar Muhammad, who was certain to be caught, he took a wide circle through the Main Line countryside and wound up back in Llanfair, not three blocks from the church. The garage he had chosen to hide in belonged to Mister Wister, and when Cato saw that the rest of the family was preoccupied with telling neighbors what had happened in their church that morning, Cato whistled to Mister Wister and brought him to the garage.

  ‘My goodness! What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I need advice.’

  ‘I’ll say you do!’

  ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘I take it nobody was hurt. I can’t make head or tail of what the women are saying, and since I wasn’t there …’

  ‘Nobody was touched. But I suppose the police will arrest us all.’

  ‘I should hope so. It was a most stupid gesture and you’ve most probably ruined your career … for the time being.’

  Cato was impressed by the way this man, projected into an affair that distressed him, was so easily able to slow down the tempo and to look at facts as they were. He was particularly free from cant, offered no lectures, simply looked at alternatives.

  ‘What you must do is lie low until the excitement subsides. If anyone had been hurt, I would not say what I’m about to say, but the fact is that you were right in asking the church for reparations. They charged your father a disgraceful sum for the old church. They ought to dismiss at least two thirds of the purchase price. As for the other wrongs done in the past, no amount of reparation would compensate for them, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea for our churches to make a gesture of conciliation.’

  ‘You think we were right?’ Cato asked.

  ‘Assuredly,’ Mister Wister said, and he started making plans to smuggle Cato out of the region, much as his great-grandfather had connived to smuggle Negro slaves through Philadelphia in the late 1850s. He kept Cato in the garage that night, then drove him to New York under the guise of a business trip and gave him the address of a Professor Hartford at Yale University, who could be trusted. From there Cato could easily get to Boston, where they would instruct him on how to slip into Canada. When he bade Cato goodbye at Washington Square, on the edge of Greenwich Village, he said, ‘You’ve pretty well ruined yourself at Penn, so that’s finished. If I were you I’d enroll in one of the universities in Canada.’

  ‘How about Europe?’ Cato asked. ‘Lots of blacks find themselves in Europe.’

  As was his custom, Mister Wister stopped, considered this new problem, studied various ramifications, and said, ‘That might be a good idea, Cato. You might come home an intelligent man. And God knows we need them!’ He shook Cato’s hand and asked, as a proper Quaker would do, ‘What will you be using for money?’ When Cato fumbled with his answer, Wister said, ‘I earmarked a certain sum for your education. I wouldn’t be averse to having you spend it in Europe. Send me your address,’ and with that, he got into his car and drove back to Llanfair, where citizens were convincing themselves that the entire congregation had barely escaped death.

  The airport bus deposited Cato at the central newspaper kiosk in Torremolinos, and like thousands of other tourists each year, he wandered naturally down into the sunken bar and found a table at which he could catch his breath and from which he could review the enticing world of which he had so unexpectedly become a part. He was struck by two things: the handsomeness of the young people he saw, and the fact that none was black. ‘If this is the capital of the world for young people,’ he said to himself, they sure ain’t got many black constituents in the electorate.’ He thought this especially strange since Africa lay only a few miles to the south.

  He had not yet ordered anything when a clean-cut young man, apparently French, sat down at his table as if they were old friends and asked, ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘The scene.’

  ‘Best in Europe. You got a hotel yet?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I get ten per cent if you stay at the Felipe Segundo.’ He handed Cato one of the hotel cards and said, ‘Near the beach. Heated swimming pool.’

  ‘What’s the general pitch. Any jobs?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Any way to make a buck?’

  ‘You broke?’

  ‘I got some bread … but I’m gonna need more.’ The free and easy manner in which the two men, having known each other for less than three minutes, discussed finances and opportunities appealed to Cato, so that he became more relaxed with this Frenchman than he could have been with a white man of similar age from America. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jean-Victor.’

  ‘Were you in the student rebellion at Paris?’

  ‘Not French,’ the young man said. ‘But about the extra money. Anybody on the way down mention the Wilted Swan?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s quite a spot. If you’re an athletic-looking young blond from Sweden or Germany, you can drift in there and get yourself pretty well fixed up … for spending money, that is.’

  ‘I’m not famous for being blond,’ Cato said.

  ‘That might make you especially attractive.’

  ‘Are the ground rules rough?’

  ‘Each man looks out for himself.’

  Cato slumped in his chair, studied Jean-Victor, and asked, ‘That how you make it?’

  ‘Me? I got a girl … we live down by the sea.’

  ‘You pushing for the … what’s its name?’

  ‘The Wilted Swan? No, it’s like my deal with the hotel.’ He tapped the card which lay on the table before Cato. ‘I earn my bread through lots of different commissions. You like to give the Swan a try?’

  Cato kicked his suitcase and said, ‘Remember? I don’t have a place to stay.’

  ‘Park it.’ He called the waiter and
told him to stash the bag behind the bar. ‘Because with the Swan, you can never tell what might happen. Chances are, you won’t need a hotel.’

  Later, when Cato told me about his meeting with Jean-Victor, I was astonished at Cato’s behavior, as if a wholly new young man had emerged in the brief crossing from Philadelphia to Torremolinos, but he justified himself in this manner: Vilma’s death—you ever see a sixteen-year-old girl with her face kicked in?—and the business at the Llanfair church … the commitment involved in each instance. ‘I was torn loose from every mooring and I truly didn’t give a goddamn what happened to me. If the white world wanted me to make my bread at the Wilted Swan, that was okay by me.’

  So Jean-Victor led Cato down the main drag and after a short while they spotted the notorious swan, so wilted that it seemed about to fall in a heap on the sidewalk. ‘Whoever painted that sign, they ought to pay him double,’ Cato said.

  He was nervous as Jean-Victor led him through the Renaissance doors and into the darkened bar. He stood awkwardly by the door as Jean-Victor scanned the place, then turned back to him, showing disappointment: ‘No one I know. Let’s have a lemonade.’

  They sat at one of the tables in the center of the bar, and gradually Cato became aware that from the surrounding booths a good many faces that he could not fully see were staring at him, and Jean-Victor whispered, ‘This is the best table. Everyone can see who you are.’ To Cato’s surprise, someone rose in one of the booths and walked across the floor to where he sat. It was a woman, in a tweedy suit, and she spoke in rough, manly accents.

  ‘You from the States?’ she asked, leaning down on the table.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Give ’em hell. Tear ’em apart. If I were young and black I’d dynamite the subway. I’m in your corner, kid.’ She clapped him on the shoulder and went back to her table.

  After a moment a waiter came up to them and said, ‘The ladies in that booth wish to buy you drinks.’

  ‘Chivas Regal,’ Jean-Victor ordered promptly. ‘Two.’ When the waiter left, he whispered, ‘Those dames are loaded. Order the most expensive drinks there are.’