Tales of the Out & the Gone

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

  They made the last stop and went back to the house. Madeline was already there. He picked up his brown tuxedo with the tossed ruffle shirt and neat velvet tie. The schedule indicated to pick up the convoy and arrive at the airport by 5:15. Air Force One would land at exactly 18:00 hours and the motorcade would proceed—after a briefing with the Secret Service men—directly to the hotel. Fifty miles an hour all the way.

  Madeline was dressing. She spoke when he came in and said nothing afterwards.

  He began to take off his clothes. “You about ready?”

  “Yeh.”

  “How long you been home?”

  “Long enough to be almost ready.”

  A slight edge, barely rising. He was quiet, pulling his socks and suspenders out of the drawers. Emptying his pockets on the table. Making sure his cologne was out. And that he had some money in the clip. And all his ID cards. He turned to go into the bathroom and Madeline was standing there with her long skirt on, but her top in her hands, wearing her brassiere.

  She said, simply, “If I catch you with that woman, I’m gonna kill both yo asses.”

  “What?” The radio was playing. WDNL, Soul Radio. Millie Jackson had come on, talking about another woman. That’s what had set her off, the dumb-ass song. “What you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. My girlfriend saw your car down there at that library two or three times. I didn’t know that fat yellow bitch was in there. You just got rid of one fat yellow bitch. I shoulda known why. To pick up another one. But I’m telling you, Tim, I’ll waste both yo asses.” She turned and went out the door.

  “What?” He started saying some other things, but convinced nobody in the apartment since only the two of them were there. They had no children. He’d had some by another marriage, but they were grown. He kept talking.

  Madeline shouted back, “Yellow fat-ass bitch! You like them yellow-ass fat women, why you marry me then?”

  Madeline was a brown-ass fat woman, chocolate-sweet when grooving, burning fire when crossed. It passed through Tim’s mind. Yeh, why? The yellow streak was on him—in him. He was himself a fat yellow person. It was 4:30. He had to rush into the bathroom. They said nothing else until it was time to go out together. He said, “You always hooking me up with somebody. Why pick her?”

  “You picked her, not me.” Madeline went down the front stairs. It was a small white wooden house. A two-family house, the top floor occupied by Madeline’s sister and her husband, again kept up from the old days to maintain the image, though arrangements were already being made for a house in the country. You couldn’t be moving around all these people—the world’s petit bourgeois and the big boys too—without that life producing its own projections. Its notions that had to be fulfilled, its wobbly ideas and grand designs.

  The turbulence of the Civil Rights black power decade was what brought Tim Goodson to this spot, yet the spot was ultimately something which was that decade’s opposite. Goodson had marched in front of Barton High to demand jobs for black contractors, and was in the picket lines around the proposed 200-acre medical school, which was a cold-blooded attempted rip-off of black people from out of the area to stave off the realities of what black power meant at that point. It was a gag to get rid of black voters.

  He was a part of the Civil Rights movement, the thrust that hooked up with Martin Luther King pressing for the black vote all over the South, and the young SNCCers who followed that path, the struggle for democratic rights which boiled most fiercely in the land-base of the Black Nation, the black belt South. The fire of Malcolm had emerged then to raise the struggle to still higher levels with the true voice of the working people—aside from the motion that the black bourgeoisie could direct, the good preachers of SCLC representing the other preachers and teachers and doctors and lawyers. It’s why the student hook-up was exactly cool, the middles and upper-middles of the Black Nation. Yet the motion was a mass motion. The millions with their might opposed the segregation and discrimination, the white-only apartheid that finally even the big boys themselves saw was passé, that if they wanted to get on top of the world market as almighty U.S.A., the Camelot of the world, then they also had to cool out them old relationships. Stuff had to be modernized, Jimmy. Dig? Old Bull Connor’s just out of whack with the times, JFK could have remarked coolly to himself in the oval room, posing for a picture with the big six leaders and Rabbi Prinz and Walter Reuther.

  The motion then—the democratic rights, the voting, equal access—finally to where, when we stood up on the cars in the middle of the street screaming we had won, we had won, and hoisted fat-ass Tim in the air, we had won. Yeh, as if the lost democratic revolution that the KKK counterrevolution squashed after reconstruction had been completed, and we were equal in America, ’cause now we had “power.” It is only the middle class that could think of that, Sloane would yell at the crowd. The people need control of the economy of this country. The land, the factories, the mineral wealth, all the people, together …

  Until it became clear that Tim was them, the owners—a “new way into things.” That nothing had changed but the cover it wore. The new was niggers, or whoever is demanding what. A little special elite of them set up to run the ex-colonies. Yet … blood in the streets, squashed faces under tank treads. A woman thrown against the wall, shot in the throat, her baby slips from her arms. We watch gagging in the jail through bars, while the carbine rings like a sweet bell. Lead fists against the National Guard trucks. They hide like the coward faggots they are.

  Nothing had changed.

  Tim was in the car with Madeline hunched over to one side. There were two police in the car now. Black police members of the Quixotes—a black cop fraternity sworn to protect the mayor, especially from white police. They moved toward the airport. It was just after 5:00. And as they turned to go across the downtown bridge, two other police cars picked them up. In one was Roger Chambers, the Harvard grad who was Tim’s political appointee as Police Director. Roger wore dashikis on Saturdays and was one of the only police directors with a beard. He liked to throw out a Swahili greeting at the militants when they came to bug him. He’d also turn on Herbie Hancock in the background to cool them out. The Cosmic Echoes if they got too far out.

  In another car was the black Superintendent of Schools, with his special wine-aged briar pipe ($750) and black Algerian tobacco. The Chief Judge of the Municipal Court, also black. With black watch, tartan dinner jacket, and long Dunhill cigarettes, looking frantically at his watch because he still had to call his woman Ida to see that she met him at the door exactly at 7:00. His wife would watch the proceedings on television, read her Bible, and go to bed.

  In various cars, they arrived at the airport, and finally coming to the set that night would be the entire crew of Wa-Benzi (Swahili: the tribe that drives the Mercedes Benzes), the Blood Elite. Got over from the black muscle of the ’60s. The sister who was Executive Director of the City Hospital butcher shop, the head of the anti-poverty program (another sister). The business administrator, another Yale Law School graduate in a B.B. suit, natch. S.O. and his orange sideburns running with the Welfare Chief (she was an old head that had survived from the days when whites ran City Hall, and now she gloried in the coming together of survivors of the last epoch and the rulers of this). President of the Board of Education, a dude who wore cultural nationalist talismans over his blue Barney’s suits. He had a red, black, and green pick he did his ’fro with too.

  Along with the whites in the administration, country politicians, big-wigs from the Republican Party, and their niggerfigures as well, including their candidate for mayor: a “black” slumlord who was attacked by Sloane and the R.C. the year before because two black children died of lead poisoning in one of his $175/month dungeons from eating the old paint off the peeling walls.

  The dribble of banter rode around bubbly. Wax words oozed. Lies, conjectures, postures, puny puns. Many had a last drinky-boo at the bar inside the airport before striding out, a
comfortable triumphant little group, the in-it politicos of the state, and the po-lice, troopers, FBI, secret police, and more porters than the airport ever had. They all waited. On television, the head of the NAACP could smile—there were blacks “ever-where,” including Tim, there, in the front line, with Governor Rose, the President of Gratitude (an old-school friend of the vice president’s), the Chairman of the N.Y.–N.J. Port Authority (a public corporation), the Republican State Chairman, the Republican Senator Cod, several county leaders.

  They stood expectant as the door opened and the bigheaded, empty-faced moron who fronted off for the corporate dictatorship that ran America slid down the stairs, out of the plane.

  Roger Chambers and his chief were briefing the Secret Service men as the motorcade began to shape up. The president was reaching the end of the line of people waiting for their hands to be shaken. The television was recording it all for posterity. There were about six or seven college-aged whites on the street outside the airport, but cordoned away from where the president’s motorcade would run, carrying signs, accusing him of being The Chief of Imperialism. They screamed at the cars as they pulled out and drove up the ramp they couldn’t get close to. Some other people waved at the line of vehicles and talked excitedly.

  As planned, the motorcade hit the bridge at fifty miles an hour, and the systematically timed lights blinked green straight ahead. The police sirens raised their customary wail and would have raised heads other places, but just made a slight dent in the consciousness of the black, Puerto Rican, and blue-collar white “Finns,” who assumed it was merely the usual crime-busters action that went on in that town twenty-five hours a day. Though some had read the papers, listened to the radio, and stood at the curb looking at the motorcade. They waved. They called. Some gave it the finger. A few Puerto Rican teenagers at Britton Street said, “Fuck yooooo,” as the motorcade passed.

  The R.C. had reached the downtown area where the demonstration was scheduled about twenty minutes before the president touched down. They were met by the tactical squad, who said they would not be allowed in the area specified in the demonstration permit application. Just as Goodson had said in the newspapers, the police were going to keep them from getting too close to the president. “He won’t see them, and they won’t see him,” is the way he put it.

  Sloane cursed the police, said they were gonna get their asses sued for this violation of the people’s democratic rights. The police said OK, and turned away. The long line of demonstrators, each with a different sign unfurled, walked around the outside of the cordoned-off area, chanting. “President and Rocky eat thousand-dollar dinners/while the people are exploited by the capitalist system.” Over and over again, waving the signs. They also had a big banner they carried with four main slogans: Capitalist Lieutenant Ford Vetoes the People’s Needs! Jobs, Not Imperialist Wars! Victory for the National Liberation Struggle Is a Victory for the Working Class! Support the Peoples of the World Struggle against the Super Powers! Young people got on their line of about 200. They talked about Ford and Rocky, about the Vietnam and Cambodian Wars, about unemployment, lay-offs, budget cuts. Police were heavy in and around the park. Disguised as vendors, drunks, passersby, along with the Secret Service. Unobtrusive, like an alligator in a dinner jacket. There was a new ring of people forming around the cordoned-off area to watch. A couple of smaller groups of demonstrators, some carrying signs saying Rollback the prices! Obviously suburbanites who wanted to buy more stuff with their loot.

  America in the 1970s, in the pit of depression called recession. One out of every four blacks unemployed, Finland Station the gut end of that. Thirteen percent of the whole nation unemployed, and in Finland Station it soared to thirty percent, fifty percent of the youth. And at nights there were more muggers on the streets than regulation folks. Sometimes the muggers mugged each other. Other times, they would mug police decoys, which they scattered all over the bleak slum, disguised as disguised cops.

  The cries about the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner hit home with a lot of the working people walking near the park, just coming from shopping, and even some of the people who were crowded around the outside perimeter hoping to see a glimpse of power. The line went from one chant to another, and circled back and forth on the perimeter where they were permitted to march. It was very late Saturday afternoon, turning to early evening. The shoppers were spreading after coming out of the bargain basements. They stopped to look at the signs and listen to the words being shouted at them.

  Who’s that? What’s that for? That’s Sloane and them. Uh-huh. What they talking about now? President—you know he’s supposed to come in to some kind of reception tonight. A thousand dollars a plate? Is that what it cost? My land, child … A thousand dollars! Sloane and them always on to something or another. Need to spend that on some of these vacant lots we got around here. Ain’t it the truth.

  There were policemen and undercover-types literally everywhere. A couple of the officers would nod at Sloane or say something. Some of the others that had actually grown up in Finland Station nodded at some of the people in the demonstration line. A couple of Sloane’s high school running partners grinned and nodded as they passed, now enrolled in the protection of the pretender. Some would beneath brown skin blush, and beneath the white skin, redder, they too would blush.

  “Hey, Ray! What’s happening?” said one dude who had become a militant cop for a minute, until Tim had him locked up for dumping garbage along with the Lloyd group. He was parked directly in front of the hotel. They’d placed him there to let the R.C. bunch see that there were defections from the revolutionary motive everywhere. Tim’s aides, for instance, and many of the City Hall functionaries, were some of the biggest mouths calling for the destruction of America a few years ago. Ten thousand and up cooled them out a.s.a.p., and now some of them began to flit into the hotel. And the guests began to arrive in their finery, some of which wasn’t fine at all. How come it could be that some sister making $57.50 a week, in blue jeans or cheap skirt, could be more elegant than the shadowy presences strutting their stuff with capes and jeweled bags and the rest of the garbage? A couple of these couples made the actual mistake of thinking they could walk through the park toward the set, not knowing that democracy called for it to be shut off. Some of the demonstrators lit them up at once, asking about the money and the doofus clothes that purported to be expensive.

  More and more people joined the line, and it was well over three hundred when the sirens could be heard, the red eyes swooping around on top of the leading police cars. A cheer began to go up from some of the people braced around the snow fence used to cordon off the park. But this cheer was drowned out instantly by the demonstrators, who blanketed the area with heavy boos. The cheerers turned and gave the evil eye to the booers, but there weren’t enough of them to matter. One provocateur walked back and forth in front of the line of demonstrators, a sick looking young Negro in a blue three-piece suit with a camera, saying, “Y’all gonna get locked up,” but people blanked on him and he trailed off.

  In the car directly behind the president’s was Tim Good-son’s, and directly behind that was Laird Conroy, President of Gratitude. Its white marble tower stood directly across the park from the hotel, and the blue neon had just turned on and beamed its steady announcement of wealth and power. Actually, Conroy almost resented the fact that Tim’s car was in front of his. The governor was riding with the president, and Senator Cod rode with Tim. It was the correct protocol, but not really, if you was being for real. Actually, Conroy should have been in the first car, Jimmy.

  The demonstrators could see the cars as they pulled up the street toward the hotel. The comrades with the banners had hoisted them as high as they could, in hopes that the president would see that some folks thought he was jive. But it was mostly as Goodson had said: They didn’t see the president and he didn’t see them.

  The party got out and swept up the stairs bathed in police. If you wasn’t the president, you got mashed a litt
le bit by the zealous Secret Service and the police. It was obvious that Tim and Roger had done a good job. There was no way nothing untoward could happen.

  Laird Conroy was still a trifle starchy because he trailed the president by so much while Tim and the other blacks were closer, though none of them were anywhere near because of the police ring. With Conroy were his wife, Lydia, and their children, Morgan and Melissa. Melissa was a junior at Vassar, majoring, actually, in walking just slower than a medium gait, with head thrown slightly back and little nose reddening. Her brother was a peacenik potnik, gone straight. He and the governor’s son had gotten busted a year ago for smoking bush, and that was when the governor came out with his humanitarian plea that the marijuana laws were too hard and should be reviewed. They were reviewed and the two boys got off with a stern talking-to by a judge, with Morgan being reenrolled at Princeton, where he’d just about dropped out. He had started to go underground to classes given by the disciples of the Perfect Master Guru Rij, one of whom was a former revolutionary homosexual. The revolutionaries kept being unsympathetic to homosexuality, and that moved him more toward the Perfect Master, who understood homosexuality perfectly, like he understood everything else. But at the same time, Morgan got excited when he read about Patty Hearst. Peace was everywhere, he understood. But Patty Hearst, that excited him. They had the same experience. Trapped in the avalanche of privilege.

  Tim was fine now. He shook the president’s hand again. They were eating the thousand-dollar plate, and he looked over at Madeline, thinking she ought to feel better than this, sitting on the dais with the President of the United States. How many niggers can say that? Why she begrudge me a little loose booty, and I got her sitting up here with these milliondollar folks? A couple of years and a cabinet post, Jim.

  “The security was fabulous, Tim, fabulous. I’ve heard so much about your city. The media, you know how they like to distort things. I didn’t know what to expect. But you’re handling things wonderfully.” The president leaned over and said these things to Tim during the dinner, and he was glad that Madeline was listening and could check out how dynamite the President of the United States thought he was—the most powerful man in the world (Tim believed), what he had to say about Tim Goodson. Shh … I’m the only one that could tame a tough town like this, baby.