Mugger Blood td-30 Read online

  Inside the auditorium, elderly white people sat listening to the reverend. Box lunches of fried chicken and rich dripping ribs, with crusty white bread, had been passed out and they drank milk and coffee and soft drinks.

  "I prefer tea and toast," said one woman with a twang that crackled with age. She wore a delicate sapphire ring with small diamond baguettes set in white gold, the sort of tiny delicacy of a world even older than hers. She smiled and said please, because all her life she had always said please. She could not remember not saying it.

  Nor would she ever fail to say thank you. It was a just and proper thing. People should treat each other with respect, which was why she was here today from Troy, Ohio.

  There were good and bad in all races and if whites were needed so that all men could be equal, then, like her great-grandfather who fought to end slavery, so would she volunteer herself. And the government was being very generous. They would pay half her rent for a year. It was called Affirmative Housing II, and Rebecca Buell Hotchkiss of Troy, Ohio looked forward to what she had told her friends was a new challenge.

  She was going to meet a whole new world of friends of different-colored skin. If they were half as nice as Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, her close black friends in Troy, why then she had just stumbled into a windfall. When she thought of New York City she thought of all the shows she could see. All the museums she could visit.

  Why, they had television in New York City on almost all the channels. And the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo were within just a few miles of where she would be living. Her furniture was outside in one of the vans and here were other nice people from all over America, going to show that America believed in brotherhood. What could go wrong? Josiah Wadson was a reverend and he was directing this lovely people program.

  So she asked, with a very big please, for tea and toast. She did not like ribs and chicken. It was too harsh for her queasy stomach.

  She asked this of one of the nice young men. She thought all the people she had met were nice. And she refused to believe there was anything evil about the reverend wearing a pistol. After all, there were many racists around and as a little girl she knew how hard it could be on Negro men at that time. Whooops. Black. She would have to learn that was the nice thing to call them now. Whooops. You did not refer to blacks as "them." She was learning.

  She was surprised when she was refused tea and toast.

  "You don' like ribs and chicken 'cause 'you a racist," said the young man. He looked at her hand the way other young men used to look at her bosom. It was the hand with the ring her grandmother had given her.

  "I used to love southern food," said Miss Hotchkiss, "but now I have a queasy stomach."

  This small commotion was heard on the stage of the auditorium by Reverend Wadson. He had his pistol buttoned under his black jacket. He wanted to know what the trouble was down there. The young man told him.

  "Well, let her have tea and toast. If she wants to deny the rich black heritage being offered her for her pale white tea and toast, let her. We on to an enrichment program for whites."

  Wadson grinned a big licorice happiness as the auditorium returned him polite applause.

  "De white man, he need to complicate thing. It 'bout time, we moralize him. We fight complication wif clarity. Evil wif morality. We give de white oppressor a moral standard he never know."

  The whites applauded with alacrity but not with enthusiasm. The applause came and went like a dutiful blast from a pistol shot. Loud and short.

  "Affirmative Housing Two, it simple. No need to muggy up wif high-falutiness. It simple as grits. Housin', it segregated. Segregation, it against de law. All of you be criminals. Till now. Now, you be paid to follow de law of de land. Law, it say you gotta live wif nigg… with blacks," and on this note, Reverend Wadson bellowed into glorious resonance.

  "How looong, Oh Lawd, de black man gotta do de integrating? How long, oh Lawd, de black man he gotta go integrating? No longer, Lawd. Lawd, ah gots good news for you now. At long last, ah gots good news for yo' bleedin' heart. Black consciousness and black pride bring de oppressor 'round to do what legal and right. Whites, dey gonna do de integrating."

  And with a cautionary note to the ruler of the universe that the whites had to be offered moving money to move into black neighborhoods, the Reverend Wadson concluded by asking a blessing on getting whites to do what they should have done from the beginning.

  Affirmative Housing II was quite simply integration of neighborhoods using whites instead of blacks as the integrators, and black neighborhoods instead of white ones as the areas to be integrated. It was an experimental pilot project of Rev. Wadson's Black Ministry Council, funded by the federal government. There was six million dollars for the project. Urban economists call the grant "so little they don't want it to work."

  Of the six million dollars, two million went for consulting fees, one million for the moving, two million for exploratory research and nine hundred thousand dollars for "outreach, input, and counterface groupings." The remaining one hundred thousand dollars went to buy two buildings, the owner of which gave Reverend Wadson an envelope with forty thousand dollars in it as a sales commission, sometimes referred to, when indulged in by whites, as a kickback.

  The strategy sessions called workshops were conducted at resorts in Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cannes, and Paris. There were floods of consultants and consulting firms at one hundred dollars per hour. Many of the finest New York City courtesans found themselves giving advice on interrace counterfaces.

  This auditorium was costing American taxpayers forty thousand dollars in consulting fees. Besides Reverend Wadson, there were black authorities and consultants sensitizing the white audience. There was talk on Heritage, which showed blacks were good and whites were bad and how ignoble whites had ruined noble black men. The black speaker had written a review of this book and for five thousand dollars he read his review.

  It said he didn't know why the author bothered to give unworthy whites such a worthy book. He blamed whites for not bringing up blacks as Muslims. He said he didn't know why he even bothered to talk to the whites, because nobody else cared for whites. Not in the whole world.

  The author carried a pocketbook and looked like a popeyed toad. He smoked with a vengeance. Reverend Wadson thanked him and made the audience thank him.

  The program was named Affirmative Housing II because there had been an Affirmative Housing I. The two million dollars for consulting fees in this program had shown that Affirmative Housing I had failed because the whites were inadequately sensitized to black culture. Now they were being sensitized.

  They all watched a film on how bad whites were to blacks in the South before civil rights.

  They watched a dance troupe perform "Revolutionary Black Vanguard." It showed black revolutionaries killing white oppressors like priests and nuns.

  Miss Hotchkiss saw all this and told herself that perhaps she had negative feelings because she wasn't sensitive enough.

  A poet read about burning white venom wombs with black righteousness. Burning houses down around whites. Revolution. No more Jesus. Gimme Marx.

  A comedian now calling himself a "conscience activist" explained how the FBI had acted peculiarly during the assassination of Martin Luther King. The FBI, said the comedian, had leaked out a story that the good reverend didn't stay in black hotels. And out of the goodness of the reverend's heart, when he heard this story, he moved to a black hotel where he was assassinated. Therefore the FBI was to blame. The comedian was paid three thousand dollars for this lecture.

  There was a picture of Field Marshal Doctor Idi Amin Dada, President for Life, on stage and a recording of his voice telling the audience that he really liked whites and that they shouldn't be fooled by propaganda from whites.

  Then there was the Interview for Afro News television, called "Like It Really Is," and there was Reverend Wadson's serious face and sonorous voice.

  "We trying, Lawd, we trying, to counteract i
n this brief afternoon years of racist propaganda." The female announcer said to the camera whirring away that everyone agreed it was an uphill fight to counteract racist propaganda. She said that if Reverend Wadson were successful in his struggle, then there would be no need for busing because then America would be integrated. "We all know the reverend for his good fight against police barbarousness and atrocities," she said.

  Then the whites were ushered out of the auditorium and told to smile at the cameras. But since Swedish television was late arriving, the elderly whites were herded again back into the auditorium. Then they were guided out again, but since there weren't enough smiles, they were pushed back in and told to come out again, smiling. A few fainted. Miss Hotchkiss kept going by holding on to the man in front of her.

  Someone yelled for them to smile. She tried to. Young black men in black leather jackets stood in rows. The tired old people were marched up to the rows of men and got threats that those who did not smile would suffer.

  Miss Hotchkiss heard words she had never heard before. She tried smiling. If one were pleasant, if others knew you meant only pleasantness, then certainly basic human dignity would prevail. An old man from Des Moines began sobbing.

  "It will be all right," said Miss Hotchkiss. "It will be all right. Remember, all men are brothers. Didn't you hear how moral blacks are? What do we have to fear from people who are morally superior? Don't worry," she said but she did not like the way the young black men eyed her sapphire ring. She would have taken it off if she could. But it had not been able to slip off since she was seventeen. She told herself it was such a small ring, scarcely a few points of a carat. It had come over from England with an ancestor, who had brought it west through the Erie Canal and down into the Miami, Ohio valley, where good people had made good land bountiful.

  Her great-grandfather had gone to war and lost a leg to free blacks from slavery. And the ring was his mother's, given to Miss Hotchkiss over the passage of time. It was important, because it tied her to her past. Yet now the woman, rich in years but poor in the youthful sap that made climbing into a bus a simple procedure, would very much have wanted to have left that ring with her sister's child. She felt the ring endangered her life.

  She was relieved to see a man with a collar get on the bus. He had a round jovial face. He said he wanted everyone to hear his version of the Good Samaritan.

  "A man was walking along the road when another man jumped on him and robbed him of everything and then demanded to know why he was poor," said the man with the collar. Miss Hotchkiss was confused. She remembered the Good Samaritan as helping someone. She didn't understand.

  "I see you're confused. You are the robbers. And the Third World has been robbed by you. Whites have made the Third World oppressed, poor by robbing them."

  A man with silver hair raised a hand. He was an economics teacher, he said. He had been teaching thirty years and was retired. He said that while there were faults with colonization, it was a fact that it did raise the life expectancy of the native population.

  "Poverty and starvation in the Third World is really just slightly better than it's always been. They are living the life of preindustrialized man. Nobody stole anything from them. They never had it. Wealth is an invention of the industrial society."

  "What about natural resources?" yelled the man with the collar. "That's stealing on a massive scale. Robbing the inalienable right to a resource."

  "Actually, no," said the white-haired economics teacher, patiently, as if explaining dry underwear to a bedwetter. "What you're talking about are colored stones and things in the ground that preindustrialized man has no use for anyhow. Industrialized man not only pays him for it, but pays him to use his labor in mining it or drilling for it. The problem is that preindustrialized man has been exposed to the richer life of industrialized man and naturally he wants it. But he's got to work at it. The fact is nobody stole anything from anybody."

  "Racist," screamed the man in the collar. "You're not allowed to believe things like that. Out of the program."

  "Fine. I just don't want this anyway. I found out I don't like you people. I don't trust you people and I don't want anything to do with you people," said the white-haired man, his voice quivering.

  "Get out," screamed the man with the collar and since the television cameras had gone and would not record the moment, the man was allowed to get off the bus, with veiled hints about his never being able to recover his furniture again. Miss Hotchkiss wanted to go with him. But there was the cherrywood cabinet that Aunt Mary had given her and that table that had come up with the family along the Erie Canal. It would be all right. She knew so many nice Negro people in Troy, Ohio.

  Had she given up the family furniture, Miss Hotchkiss might have spared herself a death of horror. She was going to lose the furniture anyway. The world was going to lose that furniture. The economics teacher, with a wisdom people often get in the valley of death, realized that there was a chance to get new furniture only if he were alive.

  In a program where it was mandatory to blame all whites for everything and forbidden to blame any black for anything, he knew the whites were becoming the new Jews for the new black Nazis.

  He willingly gave up his entire wallet and emptied his pockets at the door of the bus to a young black man. Did the young man want his buttons? He could have them too.

  Later, the New York City police would blame the disaster of Affirmative Housing II on the late start of the buses toward the multiracial living environments, which meant the two slum buildings the program owned.

  The buses and the vans got there at dark. The drivers of the vans, later to be blamed by the mayor for cowardice, fled in a group as night descended. The bus drivers hailed gypsy cabs.

  And the white settlers were left in the buses parked in front of the vans. A young black boy found he could jimmy open the side of one of the buses. Gangs of black youths swarmed aboard and dragged the elderly whites out of the buses. Some had to regrab because old people's hair came out so easily. Miss Hotchkiss clung to one of the metal legs of the seats welded to the floor.

  But she could not hold when the boot stamped down on her wrist, crushing old and fragile bone. The pain was young and new and she shrieked, but hardly anyone heard her screams for mercy because everyone was screaming.

  She felt her right hand with the ring being lifted up and felt herself thrown around as several young black men fought for her.

  Someone had gotten into the vans and was throwing the furniture onto a giant bonfire of flame that roared almost as high as the tenements around her. She felt a sharp tearing at her ring finger and knew the finger was no longer there. She felt herself being lifted up and the flames enveloped her, very yellow and burning hot, so that there was a sudden blasting pain, and then, surprisingly, nothing.

  One black woman in a third-story apartment dialed 911, Police Emergency.

  "Get down here. Get down here. They're burning people. They're burning people at Walton and 173rd."

  "How many people are being burned?" asked the policeman.

  "I don' know. A dozen. Two dozen. Oh, God. It terrible."

  "Lady, we'll get down as soon as we can. We're understaffed. We've got bigger disasters ahead of you."

  "Dey burning' whites. Now will you get somebody down heah? Dey got de Saxon Lawds, de Stone Shieks of Allah, all de gangs. It horrible. Dey burning people."

  "Thank you for reporting," came the voice and the phone clicked off. The black women drew the curtains and cried. There were times as a child in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when she couldn't go out in the street safely because she was black. And that was bad. There was no great joy in coming north, but there had been hope.

  Now, just when the greatest hopes were being achieved, she couldn't walk out in the streets except in the early morning. And she did not relish the screams of whites any more than of blacks.

  She just thought that people ought to be left alone with a bit of dignity, and if not dignity, at least
a little safety. But she didn't even have that. She opened an old family bible and she read and she prayed for everyone. Someone had said there was a lot of money spent fighting poverty. Well, she was poor and she didn't see any of it. Someone said there was a lot of money spent fighting racism. Well, if she were white and she were bused into some of the trash that made her life miserable, she certainly wasn't going to hate blacks less.

  Now, if someone wanted to fight racism, they ought to have decent whites meet decent, God-fearing black people. There was nothing like decent people meeting decent people. When the screams penetrated her room, she went into the bathroom. And when she could still hear the screams of people being burned alive, she shut the bathroom door and let the water run. And there she prayed.

  Reverend Wadson prayed too. He prayed for a softening of white hearts. He did this from a podium in a ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, rented by Affirmative Housing II, as an antiracism workshop. To help fight racism, there was a ten-piece band, three rock singers, and an open bar.

  Television cameras focused on Reverend Wadson's massive perspiring rutty face over the white collar. The eyes rolled and the lips glistened under the ballroom lights. His nostrils flared wide enough and round enough to hide a pair of giant immies in his nose. Reverend Wadson was like a freight train, at first punching out single thoughts at a slow steady pace and then rising in pitch and speed. And what he said was that America was abandoning its fight against oppression. But there was a way the fight could be continued. How? Quite logically. By funding Affirmative Housing III, with meaningful amounts of money.

  "When de man, he lay down six million to solve three hundred year of oppression, he sayin' ah doan wan' innegration to succeed. No, suh. He sayin' in his six million ways, niggah, you go starve. But de Third World, it know de man. It know he immoral. It'know de rich black contribution to de world ain' gonna be ripped off by de white man."