Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  “Michael, if Bishop’s wrong and they kill you—”

  “It’s not like I want to be a hero full time now. I’m just mad. If you believe in violence and I don’t, does that mean you get to do whatever you want? How is that fair?”

  She took one hand off the wheel to ruffle his hair. “All right. Let’s consider your future heroism open for discussion, and in the meantime you can tell me about being a hero today.”

  “If you exit here,” he said, “we can eat at Torero’s.”

  Over dinner he finished the story. As much as it hurt to talk, he needed to put it into words, to make a narrative of it, as Roger would have said, so that he could begin to live with it. When he was done, Denise reached across the table and took both his hands. “Thank you for getting out of there alive.”

  “It seemed important for some reason.”

  “I think I would have let them kill Vaughan,” Denise said.

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “No,” she said, a moment later, “I suppose not.” She pushed aside her plate and finished her tea. “When do you suppose you might be able to have sex again?”

  Michael smiled, his first in longer than he could remember. It was remarkably painful. “Any day now,” he said.

  *

  They got to the hotel at 10 p.m. Michael insisted on showering, and climbed into bed at ten-thirty. He was asleep in seconds.

  He slept for twelve hours, and when he woke up, Denise had the Sunday News and Observer spread across the king size bed. The headline read, BOMB THREAT FOILED, 2 DEAD IN RIOTS. True to his word, Bishop had protected Michael’s identity. The story said the bomb “failed to go off” and was “later dismantled by specialists from the Durham Police.” Michael felt strange reading it, as if what he’d gone through had not quite been real. History had detoured around him.

  One of the fatalities was a Night Rider who had been stabbed by an “unknown assailant.” I saw that, Michael thought. I saw a man killed in front of my eyes. The thought lacked the emotional impact it should have had.

  The other victim was an 11-year-old girl, trampled when the police fired the teargas. She smiled from a school photo as if she didn’t care. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of others, had been injured in the fighting.

  Michael spent a long time working the balance sheet in his head. Was there an outcome where the bomb got defused and Vaughan got caught, but without the rest of it: the riot, the stabbing, the teargas, the trampling? It had not, that Michael could see, been in his power.

  A spokesperson for the Black Star Corporation expressed “deep regret” over the “unfortunate occurrences,” as if it had all simply been a matter of bad luck. He hoped that one day soon the American Tobacco Historical District would be seen as “a symbol of justice finally done for the memory of Hayti.”

  A suspect was in custody for the attempted bombing, possibly linked to the Night Riders of the Confederacy.

  “So the police get the credit,” Denise said.

  “I’m already famous,” Michael said. “I don’t need to be famous again.”

  “They could have said, ‘Unknown hero saves the day.’ ”

  “And the newspapers and the TV stations would never have rested until they found out who I was.”

  Denise moved the papers and lay with her head on his chest. “How are you feeling?”

  “Scared,” Michael said. “I’m scared.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Everything.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here.”

  Later that afternoon Michael went through the messages on his cell phone from the previous afternoon. He hadn’t felt the phone vibrating in the chaos of the riot. Three were from Harriman, two from Bishop. He cleared them out, and then stopped. “Roger never called back,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “For all he knows, the phone went dead because the bomb went off.”

  “Well, I don’t know Roger as well as you do, but if the bomb went off, wouldn’t that have meant he was wrong about what he told you to do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And since that’s not possible, then obviously you must be okay.”

  He was not, in fact, okay. Beyond the exhaustion and the physical pain, his emotions bounced from elation to despair, love to restlessness, relief to fear, all within the same quarter hour. Finally, around dusk, Denise said, “If we’re not giving in to fear, does that mean I can go back to my apartment now?”

  “It has to be your call,” Michael said. “It could be dangerous.” He assumed she needed some time alone with Rachid. The thought of being without her brought him low, but he was too proud to ask her to stay.

  “Then let’s go,” she said. “Are you strong enough to pack?”

  *

  That night Michael had his first nightmare. He was struggling with someone he couldn’t see. His footing gave way, and suddenly he was plummeting through the air. He woke thrashing, with a strangled yell in his throat. Denise, only half-awake, held him and stroked his hair. She fell back to sleep before he did.

  Tuesday, November 9

  On the local news Monday night the District Attorney for Durham County had announced charges against Gregory Allen Vaughan for a long list of crimes, including the murder of activist Barrett Howard in the fall of 1970, the arson of Service Printing and the Carolina Times, and attempted homicide in connection with the bomb in the American Tobacco smokestack.

  Sgt. Bishop had airtime as well, showing a cobbler’s awl in a baggie, and then talking behind file footage of Barrett’s body coming out of the overpass in its concrete casing. The hate crimes division was investigating a link between Vaughan and the Night Riders of the Confederacy that he hoped would result in a City Council ban on NRC activities within city limits.

  Late Tuesday morning, Harriman called. After the expected inquiries about Michael’s health, he asked if Michael might be up for taking a ride. “The destination would be a surprise. We’d be gone all afternoon.”

  Denise had left for work, after making Michael promise to call if he needed her. “Okay,” he said. “Assuming you’re driving.”

  He gave Harriman directions, then called Denise to tell her. “Don’t overdo,” she said. “Take your phone.”

  When Harriman arrived at the door, he seemed cheerful, mischievous. It was cool and partly cloudy, and Michael wore a flannel shirt under a sport coat. He’d been unable to find a way to get into a sweater without pain. The soreness had peaked the day before and was still intense enough to leave him feeling frail and vulnerable.

  “A beautiful day for a drive in the country,” Harriman said.

  They walked down to his maroon BMW and Michael settled into the passenger seat. “You’re still not telling me where we’re going?” Michael asked as they got on the Durham Freeway.

  “Correct,” Harriman said.

  There was a CD playing softly, music Michael had never heard before. It had overtones of reggae, only more linear, with electric guitar and driving hand percussion. “What is this?” he asked.

  “Boukman Eksperyans. They’re from Haiti. You like it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Michael said. “Have you heard anything from Charles?”

  “No, and I don’t expect I will. He was never happy with the direction I wanted to follow.”

  “What’s New Rising Sun?”

  “I think it’s the name of a Jimi Hendrix song. Why?”

  “I think it’s also the name of your group. The one that you told me didn’t have a name?”

  “It’s one of the names we use for legal purposes. It’s not the name in the sense you’re suggesting. Names give others power over you.”

  “Well, the Durham Police know that name, and they know you’re in charge.”

  “Not surprising. Every activist group in the country is full of informants and FBI plants. It was the same way in the sixties. I still think it was federal agents who pushed Barrett into becoming more and
more radical, trying to lure him into something spectacular they could arrest him for.”

  “The little girl who died in the riots Saturday. She was one of yours?”

  That, finally, dampened Harriman’s mood, though Michael didn’t know why he was so determined to do so. “Yes.” Harriman sighed. “We took a chance. She was a volunteer, and she believed in what she was doing. As much as you can understand at that age, though they’re fighting and dying younger than that every day in the Middle East.” He looked at Michael. “None of that excuses it. Ultimately it was my responsibility, and I have to live with it.”

  A not uncomfortable silence fell and stayed with them as they followed I-40 through Raleigh and east into Johnston County. It was the way to the Bynum farm, and Michael had to silently repeat his new mantra: We are not afraid.

  When Boukman Eksperyans finished, Harriman put on a CD of African pop by two men named Pape and Cheikh. Then he began to talk about African-American visual artists, and Michael was quickly caught up in the conversation, so much so that he barely registered it when they passed the exits for Smithfield. Only after they finally turned off and Michael saw the first signs for Bentonville did he make the connection. “This is where Mercy’s mother lived.” He looked at Harriman. “Did you lie to me? Is she still alive?”

  “No. She’s been dead fiftteen years now.”

  They passed through the decaying center of Bentonville and out the other side. As in so many small towns, time had stopped in the 1970s, the last era when there had been enough loose cash around to find its way out of the cities.

  Back in the countryside, the bare oaks and dead grasses muted the perpetual green of the pines. Michael recognized the route from his father’s descriptions and a felt a mixture of hope, dread, and longing rise through him.

  So he was not surprised when they pulled up in front of a decaying shingled house, alone at the side of the road. “You’re expected,” Harriman said. “Knock and go on in.”

  As he walked up the gravel path, Michael’s body felt like an uncomfortable suit of clothes. He hardly knew how to move it around. He knocked twice on the thick plank of the door and pushed it open.

  “Is that you?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Yes, Mother,” Michael said. “It’s me.”

  *

  She was still beautiful. She looked ten years younger than her actual mid-sixties, her hair falling in curls past her shoulders and only lightly streaked with gray, her breasts riding not much lower than a young woman’s, her waist trim and hips gently curved. She wore faded blue jeans and a white cabled sweater. Her eyes were dark and well-worn, showing him caution and reserve. He could not picture them laughing, the way he’d seen them when his father described them.

  He had to walk around the couch to get to her. He opened his arms and she stepped into them, resting her head on his chest. He closed his eyes and held on tight.

  “You look so much like him,” she said. “So very much like him.”

  He’d dreamed of this moment. The thing he’d most vividly imagined was a sense of rightness, of recognition on a cellular level, that he’d never felt with Ruth. It didn’t happen. The woman in his arms was a stranger, though strangely familiar.

  Eventually she stepped away and held him by his upper arms. “Donald tells me you’re a hero.”

  Michael shrugged. He wanted to be happy in this moment, but happiness was eluding him. “Is that why you finally wanted to see me?”

  “You know that’s not the reason.”

  “How could I know that? I don’t know you at all.”

  “No, no, of course you don’t.” She perched on the edge of the low shelves behind her, looking down. “Let me start again. I’m sorry for hiding from you. I’m sorry I left you to grow up without me. You have no idea how sorry I am. I guess once you make a decision, even if it’s the wrong one, it’s hard to turn around and go back the other way. It gets harder every year. You get this momentum…”

  “My father died believing you killed yourself. He died less than two weeks ago, less than two hours from here. I put his ashes on your empty grave.”

  “His ashes?”

  “On your grave in Beechwood Cemetery.”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “He was eaten up with guilt and regrets. He described you to me, lying in a bathtub full of blood.”

  She took a long, audible breath. “Yes. Yes, I made that for him to see.”

  “He said you were cold, with no pulse. He said the ambulance crew pronounced you dead at the scene.”

  “Come over here, sit with me.”

  She walked around the room, turning on lights. Michael saw the place was nothing like the one his father had described. The floors were salvaged and refinished, still showing the scars and history of the wood. The walls had been sheetrocked and painted a tasteful cream, the ceilings textured. She’d squeezed in bookshelves everywhere they would fit, the books neatly shelved in categorical order. A massive antique desk held a laptop with a port replicator, keyboard, and flat screen monitor.

  Mercy sat Michael next to her on an elegant natural fiber couch. He found himself unable to fully grasp the miracle of her presence because of his own feelings of bitterness and betrayal. And, he realized, a vague sense of disappointment.

  “My mama was what they used to call a root worker,” Mercy said, “and she schooled me in it from the time I was a little girl. I still had powder left from my trip to Haiti, the zombie powder, tetrodotoxin made from blowfish. Use it right, you can make somebody seem stone dead for 72 hours.”

  The blood, she told him, was from a chicken she’d killed as part of the ritual. One of Barrett’s friends worked at the morgue and arranged to get her out before there could be an autopsy.

  From there she hid out with her mother for several months, then ended up in New Orleans and got on a boat to Haiti. She stayed there and worked through the death of Papa Doc and the coming of Baby Doc, until she ended up on a tontons macoutes death list and had to escape again, this time to Cuba.

  She arrived at the end of the golden age of black revolutionary exiles. Rob Williams and Eldridge Cleaver had already moved on. Mercy caught Fidel’s attention and persuaded him to send her to medical school. After she got her MD, she worked in the countryside around Matanzas for more than ten years, practicing a mixture of modern medicine, Santeria, and vodou.

  The Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, taking the Cuban economy with it. Mercy flew to the Yucatan, where Donald had arranged for her to pick up a complete new identity. From Mexico she crossed the border into California, where she taught briefly in the UC Berkeley folklore program under the name Mary Santos. Her fears of being recognized drove her into the safety of the emerging Internet. She published a few papers in medical journals in her Santos identity, then parlayed that into a career designing research programs in folk medicine and pharmacology.

  The more she talked, the more distant Michael felt. She was like a celebrity on PBS telling of danger and exotic locales and humanitarian service that didn’t touch Michael’s life at all.

  “If you were so afraid of being recognized, why did you come back here?” he asked.

  “This is different. I got people here watching out for me. Once Wilmer Bynum was dead, wasn’t anybody left that really cared. Donald said you know about him. That he was my father, I mean.”

  “Yes. Did you always know?”

  She shook her head. “My mother and I wrote long letters while I was in Cuba. There was like a whole underground railroad thing to get letters back and forth to the States. When she got sick and knew she was dying she changed her mind and told me. Some of the people she did cures for kept the place up after she died, kept it for me in case I ever came home.”

  Michael couldn’t sit. He walked around the bookshelves, looking at titles and not seeing them.

  “Where are my manners,” Mercy said. “Can I fix you something to drink? Or eat?”

  “I don’t think so,” Michael
said.

  “You want to know why,” she said. “Why I did it.”

  “You left my father to a woman he didn’t love, you left me without a real mother, you gave up the future you would have had in Dallas, and for what?”

  “I was suicidal,” she said. “It was winter. The black freedom struggle, everything we fought so hard for, was over before it had hardly started. Your father couldn’t seem to leave Ruth, I was physically miserable and had been for months, I was terrified of being a white man’s wife in Texas, terrified I wasn’t fit to be a mother. Then, on top of everything else, I got this letter.”

  Michael watched as she got up and took an envelope out of the desk drawer. “After I asked Donald to bring you out here, I went through all my old boxes and found it. I wasn’t sure until now that I wanted to show it to you. I’ve never let anybody see it before, not even Donald.” She held it in both hands, close to her chest. “Maybe it’s time.”

  Michael walked over and took the envelope. The address read, “Miss Mercedes Richards, 109 Beamon Street, City.” Michael recognized Ruth’s handwriting. There was no return address.

  “I sent Robert home on a Wednesday,” Mercy said. “On Sunday this came by messenger.”

  The top of the envelope was cut. Michael took out a single sheet of his father’s blue-lined graph paper.

  Dear Miss Richárd, or Richards, or whatever your name really is:

  My husband will not be returning to you. We have resumed our marriage, and with considerable warmth, if I may be permitted the indiscretion. He has begged me to forgive him, and I have done so, not because he deserves it, but because of the pure, strong and abiding love I bear him.

  When he does not arrive tomorrow, you may take that as confirmation that what I’ve said is true. As to what you choose to do with the remainder of your life, that is no concern of mine, as long as you make no attempt to contact my husband again.

  Sincerely,

  Ruth Cooper