Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But listen, I was hoping maybe you wouldn’t mind—”

  Bob cut her off. “I’m headed out,” he said. His tone was curt, just this side of rude, and he immediately felt guilty about it. Amy didn’t deserve his attitude; she was only doing her job. “Lunch date with an old friend,” he added, appending the explanation in a belated attempt to soften the discourtesy.

  Amy took this in, appeared to think about it. “Maybe after?” she asked. Her voice lifted girlishly and Bob knew he was being worked. She really was a good young reporter.

  Still, he shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Bob, I understand how you feel.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Okay,” she conceded, “I don’t. But I can imagine. And one thing I imagine is, if I was you, I’d want my side of this told. How will it look in the paper tomorrow if they blame all of it on you and the only thing we have from you is a no comment?”

  Bob pondered this. Part of him—the greater part, truth be told—simply didn’t care if they blamed it on him. But he was self-aware enough to realize he was still in shock over everything that had happened. He might change his mind, might care a great deal, once the numbness passed.

  What finally decided him, though, was the fact that, at the end of the day, Bob Carson was a newsman. He believed stories should be told as fully as possible so that people could understand how a given thing had happened and why. Was he really going to impede the telling of this one story out of pique?

  Bob’s surrender came in a sigh. “I can’t talk now,” he said. “Like I told you: I’ve got a lunch date.”

  “Later, then?” Her voice lifted again. She knew she had him.

  He looked at his watch. “2:00,” he said. “I’ll meet you back here.”

  “2:00,” she said. “Great.”

  He stepped out the door and pulled it shut. “What about your stuff?” asked Amy. “I wasn’t kidding. I do have it.”

  “It’ll keep,” he told her. “Bring it back with you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you then.” She turned to go.

  He stepped off his porch behind her, glanced again at his watch, had a thought. “You know what?” he said. “Make it three. I almost forgot: Toussaint hasn’t been taking my calls. I intend to go to his place and have it out with him. I’ll bet I feel a whole lot better once I’ve wrapped my fingers around his throat.” A bitter laugh gurgled up out of him like brown water from a rusted tap. “Who knows? Maybe the interview will be a murder confession.”

  He winced as he heard himself, wondering how Amy would react to an attempt at humor that was in such flagrantly bad taste. But then he realized, somewhat to his own surprise, that he wasn’t sure he didn’t mean it. That scared him. Bob had never been as angry as he was now.

  Amy turned back toward him, but he saw immediately that he need not have worried; she had barely registered what he said. She was frowning. “Oh,” she said, “I guess that’s right. There’s no way you could’ve known yet. Malcolm is missing.”

  “Yeah, I do know,” said Bob, stopping short. “He’s been ducking my calls all morning. Not that I blame the jerk. I’d my turn my cellphone off, too, if I’d done what he did.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, “he’s not ducking phone calls. He’s missing, as in nobody knows where he is. Police found his car abandoned this morning at Randolph and LaSalle. It had been in an accident. Totaled.”

  “So? He probably went to the hospital.”

  “They checked the hospitals,” she said. “They even went to his house. It was empty.”

  “So what, then? Somebody took him?”

  Amy shrugged.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Was it because of the thing in the paper this morning? Somebody got angry at him?”

  “Maybe,” said Amy, “but it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? The accident happened maybe an hour after the paper hit the streets. The timeline doesn’t work.”

  “Maybe somebody saw it online.”

  “Could be,” said Amy, not bothering to hide her skepticism. “Still far-fetched.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, “it is.”

  There was a moment. Then Amy looked at her watch. “So, 2:00, then?”

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “I guess I’ll see you at two.”

  With a nod, she went to her car. Bob went to his, but he didn’t start it. Instead, he sat behind the wheel for a long moment, index finger pressed to his lip. After a moment Amy pulled past him, giving a good-natured tap on the horn. He automatically beeped in return, but he barely saw or heard her. There was so much to think about, Bob didn’t even know where to start.

  Suddenly, the thing that had consumed him for the last few hours seemed of secondary importance. His fury, his sense of having been done wrong, his need for an accounting felt…dulled.

  What had happened to Malcolm? He could think of no explanation that seemed logical, no story that satisfied every question. It simply made no sense. How could you just total your car and then disappear? Was this some crazy attempt by Malcolm to fake his own death? No. That was stupid.

  But then…what?

  Bob started the Camry. He waited until a red Ford pick-up truck had lumbered past him, then pulled out.

  And Lord, what about Janeka? There was that to think about, too. What with Amy showing up at his door like that, he had almost forgotten. What would he say to her in—Bob glanced at his watch—45 minutes, when he saw her for the first time since 1968?

  I thought I was your people, too.

  Once again, the last thing he said to her—somewhat pathetically, he had always thought—came back to him. So how do you pick up the conversation after that, plus four decades? For perhaps the tenth time since he had impulsively responded to her email this morning, Bob found himself wishing he had just ignored it instead.

  He had Googled her once, a few years ago, found that she was running a small public relations firm in San Francisco. There had been no picture and he had only read a little bit of her company profile. Looking her up that way had felt creepy and stalkerish. It had felt—and here was that word again—pathetic.

  Bob had closed the web browser and admonished himself sternly never to go looking for her again. And because he was a man of great personal discipline, he never had, though he was periodically tempted to. But even with all that discipline, he had been unable to prevent her from drifting to the top of his mind more often than he would have liked—more often, he thought, than was probably healthy for him. And now, steering toward Michigan Avenue for the second time in five hours, his thoughts were simply dominated by her.

  Her, and that moment in time they had once shared.

  As Bob saw it, there had been two 1960s. The first was the early ’60s, the hopeful ’60s. That optimism had been tested, to be sure. Bombs had exploded in churches, police dogs had been loosed on children, and there had been growing unease about what US troops were doing in Southeast Asia. And then had come that bleak and rainy Friday in November, when Bob was sitting in fifth-period English and Principal Buddiger came over the P.A. sounding like he’d been crying and made the announcement that the president had been killed in Dallas. In the awful silence that followed, Bob Carson had looked to Tommy Zelnecker, who had looked to Freddie Logan, who had looked to Cynthia Sheridan, who had looked back to Bob, because who knew a president could be killed like some gas station pump jockey in a holdup? And once you had this terrible and irrevocable new knowledge, what were you supposed to do with it? His friends’ eyes had been as empty of answers, he supposed, as his own.

  But hope had marked that era. At least, that was how that part of the 1960s had always felt to Bob. He was conscious that maybe, as it receded into time and became history, as he himself became a man with more life behind him than before him, he was guilty of idealizing those years.

  Maybe.

  But he couldn’t help what he felt. And what he felt was tha
t the early 1960s, that hopeful 1960s, had always managed to overcome grief, maybe because it had little time for grief. That 1960s—that “New Frontier,” as the murdered young president had called it—had been about progress, about marching through status quo, hateful stares, and unequal laws, marching forward and keep on pushin’ and people get ready and answers, my friend, blowing in the wind, yeah yeah yeah.

  Then the ’60s had gotten angry. Those other ’60s, the later ’60s, were not about marching forward, but fighting back. Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to the nation, they had exploded in a ball of confusion, riot, and rage that burned halfway through the next decade. And the band played on.

  The entirety of Bob’s relationship with Janeka Lattimore had unfolded in the crease between those two ’60s, in that pregnant moment as the one was yielding to the other. They had known each other from the late summer of 1967 to the first week of spring in 1968, a time before hope was fully lost and fury truly won the day, yet you could still see fury coming, like lightning in black clouds massed on a far horizon. “There’s something happening here,” the singer sang, one eye on that horizon, “what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

  Of course, this was all visible to Bob only in hindsight. Viewing it through that prism, he thought, recalling it through the lyrics of once-troubling songs that had since become something called “classic” rock, imposed upon those sprawling times a clarity and order that had not been there back when he was living them. It framed it all as neatly as a picture on a wall, and thus robbed it of fear, bafflement, immediacy, the smell of smoke. He surely hadn’t been considering the niceties of musical and historical context back then. Indeed, in the moment, when then was now, the only thing visible to him, the only thing knowable or even worth knowing, was her, Janeka.

  The memory gave him a private smile, sitting at a traffic light in Chicago on Election Day 2008, waiting to make a left turn. Does anyone ever love as completely, as ferociously, as they do when it’s the first time, and they are young?

  No, he told himself, they do not.

  With three other volunteers—two black guys and a white girl—he had followed her out of that first meeting and into an intense burst of planning and strategizing, making up pamphlets, researching voting laws, testing and retesting their arguments. They spent hours role-playing how they would remain nonviolent in the face of white intimidation and provocation. Janeka always played the part of the white Southern sheriff, and despite having been born and raised in San Diego, she acted the role with gusto, leaning in close, invading your space, yelling and cursing at you.

  Janeka

  (smacking Bob upside the head)

  What’s a nice white boy like you doing hanging around with trash like this? What are you, some kind of goddamn nigger lover?

  Bob

  I try to love all people, sir, as Christ commanded. Even you.

  Janeka

  (smacking Bob again, harder this time)

  Are you getting smart with me, goddamn nigger lover?

  Bob loved every second of it. He probably loved it too much. His grades suffered. Alarmed professors pulled him aside to warn him of the catastrophe he faced if he didn’t pull himself together. Bob hardly heard them. Bob hardly cared. He was immersed in this. In her. As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between the two.

  It had occurred to him more than once in later years that, had he and Janeka stayed together, he might never have graduated college.

  But of course, they had not stayed together.

  He’d had no idea that moment was coming, that it would broadside him like an 18-wheeler. To this day, he couldn’t say if knowing would have changed anything he did.

  “I was thinking, we’ve been working really hard and maybe, I don’t know, you’d like to go into town, maybe catch a movie Sunday after chapel? Maybe get something to eat?”

  This was Bob, the same day she slapped his head and called him “nigger lover,” trying to keep an odd, fluty sound out of his voice as he asked her the question he had rehearsed til three that morning in his dorm room mirror. He had lingered in the student union basement while the others filed out of the meeting, hoping to catch her alone.

  “A movie?” she said, and the tone of her voice was as if something so frivolous were beneath the dignity of the serious work they were doing. But Bob had been ready for this.

  “Yeah,” he said. “In the Heat of the Night is playing over in Buford.”

  She looked up at him with interest. The new drama starred Sidney Poitier as a Northern cop who ends up tangled in a murder investigation in some backwater Mississippi town. It was said to be a dangerously provocative film and that Mississippi didn’t come off well in it. There was even rumored to be a scene in the film where Poitier’s cop knocked the heck out of some white man.

  “I’m surprised they’re letting that show anywhere in the state,” she said. “Especially in some little town out in the boonies.”

  “So am I,” said Bob. “Probably won’t be there for long.”

  “Are you sure you can get tickets?”

  Bob nodded. “I’m friends with the assistant manager,” he said. “He owes me a favor. I helped him pass his English exam.”

  “But what about…” She left the question unvoiced, her index finger flicking from her chest to his.

  It took him a moment to get it and he was embarrassed when he did. “The race thing?” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Bob, that’s easy for you to say. You’re white.”

  His embarrassment deepened and he felt the flush rising in his cheeks. She was right He was naïve. He hadn’t thought about it. This was the state where they had killed those voting rights workers just a couple years ago. This was where they had lynched Emmett Till. Bob was white, and wary as he was of Mississippi, he hadn’t learned to think about that kind of stuff all the time, to take it into account in deciding what he could or could not do. So now, Bob improvised.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. But hey, the theater is in a Negro neighborhood. We’ll probably be okay.”

  “Probably,” she said. It wasn’t quite agreement, wasn’t quite a question.

  Bob pushed on, committed now. “I don’t think they’ll care,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. Black people aren’t like that.”

  She arched an eyebrow at that and he saw, to his horror, the ghost of a smile on her face. “They’re not?” she said.

  “No,” he assured her, with far less confidence than he’d felt just seconds before. “And if we see any white people—”

  She cut him off. “If we see any white people, they’ll think you’re just some rich white boy sowing his wild oats with a colored gal the way rich white boys always have.”

  He had intended to say they wouldn’t try to start something in a Negro neighborhood. But Janeka, he realized, was probably right. “Yeah,” he said, his voice edged with resignation and chagrin. “Yeah, they probably will.”

  A silence intervened. Bob sighed. “Look, Janeka,” he began.

  She looked at him. That look almost dared him to go on. But he did.

  “I like you, okay? I’d like to get to know you better. As for the black-white thing, well…you’re right. I didn’t think it through. But I have to tell you: what is it we’re fighting for here, why are we doing all the planning and strategizing, why am I letting you hit me upside the head and call me a you-know-what lover if it’s not to create a world where a white guy can invite a black girl to the movies and it’s no big deal? And besides that, the Supreme Court just said it’s okay, so who are any of these…these…honkies to say it isn’t?”

  She gave him an amused look, but didn’t speak. Bob plowed a hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, I know it’s frightening. I get that. Maybe it’s even a risk. But maybe we’ve got to step out on faith, you know? Maybe we’ve got to live in it before it’s real in order to make i
t real. Anyway, that’s what I think.”

  He fell silent then, acutely aware of having blabbered too long and said too much. What had come over him? Where, he wondered, had this sudden and uncharacteristic boldness come from?

  I like you? I’d like to get to know you better? Jesus, give me strength.

  Then he realized she was smiling at him and he felt the awesome and exquisite pain of ice cracking in his chest.

  “I like you too, Bob,” she said. “And you’re right. Let’s go to the movies.”

  They went to the movies. They drove the ’65 Corvair his father had given him. The movie was as riveting and provocative as advertised, down to the scene where Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs slapped Endicott, the powerful white businessman, after Endicott had slapped him first. Though he knew the scene was coming, it still made Bob gasp in shock, though all the Negroes in the audience, including Janeka, sitting next to him, chuckled at it.

  The theater was in a Negro neighborhood, as he had been told, but there were still whites in the audience—more than Bob would have imagined. They had to see it, he supposed, for the same reason an Army general seeks intelligence on enemy troop movements. Or maybe he was being unfair. Maybe they were simply curious. Maybe they had simply gone to this movie for the same reason anyone ever does—to be entertained.

  That thought died when the film ended, the lights came up, and he and Janeka walked out together. White people stared after them. Negroes did, too. They didn’t bother to hide it. A matronly woman with dark skin and a purse held protectively at her bosom watched them with eyes that held their judgments secret. A white man, his hair piled in satiny white drifts, ran his eyes up and down Janeka, a knowing smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. Some young white guy with a brush cut, holding hands with a stringy-looking blonde, turned his head after them, his whole face stony with some unspoken rebuke. A young black woman smiled a friendly smile.

  Bob felt the touch of all those eyes on him as they passed. Janeka must have felt it, too. “Got to live in it to make it real,” she reminded him in a whisper.