The Specialists

Eleven

The sign above the door said LIGHT OF FREEDOM BOOKS. In the display window there was a variety of hand-lettered signs bearing quotations from the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. Displayed along with a few dozen books were photographs of George Washington, Adolf Hitler, and a southern governor with presidential aspirations. A bumper sticker exhorted the reader to support his local police.

Murdock studied the display with interest, then sauntered inside. A bell rang when he opened the door. Seconds later the proprietor emerged from the back. He wore a plaid cotton shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled past his elbows. A tattoo on one forearm read “My Mother & My Country.” My Gawd, Murdock thought.

He said, “How do. Just passing by and I saw your window, reckoned I might stop in for a spell.”

“Glad for the company,” the man said.

Murdock sized him up. A tough old boy just a little gone to fat he decided, too much beer going down the gullet and making the gut hang out but a hard old boy for all of that.

“Don’t see many places like this up here,” he said. “All them so-called liberals, you walk a long ways to see real folks.”

The man smiled, but his eyes were wary. “Everybody thinks his own way,” he said. “Free country and all.”

Hills, Murdock thought. Probably a down-home boy, but then it was hard to pin a voice too closely nowadays. You’d hear them talk about the same in parts of Ohio, even Indiana.

“There’s free and there’s free,” he said. “Down home they taught us between crime in the streets and thinking as you please.”

“You sure do talk southrun,” the man said.

“Tennessee. Hamblen County.”

“Hell, I know where that’s at.” The hill accent was more pronounced now, the wariness gone from the eyes. “Rutledge? No, that’s a county over, now. Morristown?”

“That’s the county seat, all right. Now who’d ever figure someone this far north ever heard of Morristown, or Hamblen County either? Where I was, closest town was Russellville, and that was eight bad miles from us.”

“Why, my folks aren’t a hundred miles from there. Clay County? In Kentucky, just straight north and a piece west? Town of Gooserock, not that anybody ever heard of it that wasn’t born in it.”

“Don’t know the town, but I sure know Clay County. Damn, I been in Clay County.” He hesitated a polite moment, then extended his hand. “Hooker’s my name. They call me Ben.”

“John Ray Jenkins. Ben, you know Clay County, then you know what Clay County’s rightly famous for. Now you hang on.”

He went into the back room, came out again with a half-pint bottle about two-thirds full of white mule. They each had two drinks. Jenkins dropped the empty bottle into a trash basket.

“Some summer,” Murdock said. “Hot already and hotter coming on, and you just know what’s gone to happen when the heat of the sun gets to working on those nappy heads.”

“Hell, you don’t even want to talk that way in these parts,” Jenkins said. He hawked, spat. “Okay for a nigger to break windows and shoot up the town and all, but a white man ain’t supposed to take no notice of it or he’s discriminating against his colored brethren.”

“Hear you had a bad summer last year.”

“Bad! Yeah, you just might call it that.”

Murdock studied the floor. “Had us a bunch of good old boys down home knew how to stick together. It’s a white man’s country. What am I telling you, hell, Gay County and Hamblen County, you know what I mean.”

“Hell, yes.”

“Here, though. You don’t even know who you can talk to, what with everybody who ain’t a Nee-gro is some kind of Jew foreigner. Wouldn’t of opened up to you without I sort of got the message from the window. You want to know something? Here I’m living not two blocks from them and never knowing when a riot’s fit to bust out, and I can’t go to a store and buy myself a gun. Call that a free country?”

“A free people has got a right to bear arms,” Jenkins said. “You read the Constitution, that’s right in there. Right to bear arms.”

“Those do-gooders in Washington, what do they know about any Constitution?”

Jenkins extended his tongue, worried his upper lip. He said, “Say, do me a favor? Just turn the bolt on that door and tug the shade down. Won’t be any business this hour anyhow. Thanks. You know, Ben, this ain’t Clay County or Hamblen County neither, but there’s still folks up here think this ought to be a free country. You come on back a minute.”

The girl wore a loose-fitting African robe and a pair of leather sandals. Her hair was in a natural, a tight cap of black curls. She set three plates of food on the card table. The men did not speak to her or she to them. She left the room.

The smaller of the two men, whose name was Charles Mbora, forked okra into his mouth, chewed meticulously, swallowed. “Soul food,” he announced. “Honkie got no soul. Honkie eats dead food, has dead white skin and a dead soul inside him. Dead heart and dead soul. You know how he stays on his feet?”

Howard Simmons nodded. “Steals our soul.”

“Sucks it like a vampire. Our blood and our heart and our soul. They trying to kill us now, you believe it, brother, they got the gas ovens built and ready. What the honkie don’t know is kill us and he dies. He lives on us, brother. We die and he starves. No blood left to suck, no heart to suck, no soul to suck, and the honkie, he plainly starves to death.”

The third man, black as coal, fat as Buddha, said nothing. He had not said a word in Simmons’ presence, and Simmons had been with him and Mbora for three hours, first in the coffee shop on Atlantic Boulevard and now on the fifth floor of a rat-infested tenement in the heart of the Newark ghetto. Soul food, he thought. The day they closed the deal on the house, he gave Esther an order: no black-eyed peas, no okra, no chitlings, no mountain oysters, and for the love of God no collard greens. Colored greens, that’s what they ought to be called. “No nigger food,” he told her, watching her wince at the word. “And I say that because that’s what it is. Three hundred years our people ate that garbage because it was what was left. Everybody knew it was only fit for niggers. Mountain oysters — those are pig’s testicles, and it says something about a man if he’ll eat that kind of thing. Nigger food. You know what I want? I want my children to grow up not knowing what nigger food tastes like.”

Now, he thought, it was soul food. It was black people’s food and you were supposed to be proud you were black. He knew they needed it, needed this pride, and walking these murderous streets and seeing the homes and smelling the stench of the hallways — God, the stench of the hallways — well, they were welcome to whatever pride they could find.

Not for him. He had all the pride he needed in being Howard Simmons. He had such a soulful pride in his own self that he didn’t need to be proud of being black or eating collard greens or listening to soul music. He listened to Ray Charles and Otis Redding because they were good, damn it, and he listened to Vladimir Horowitz and the Budapest String Quartet for the same reason, and he thought Mahalia Jackson was talented but boring and that Moms Mabley was a dirty old lady, which perhaps made him a prude and a square, but that was the way he was. He had his pride in his home and his yard and his wife and his children and himself and the money he made with his hands and his brains. That was pride enough for him.

He finished the food on his plate, though. He didn’t like it and never would, but now he ate it and pretended to like it.

Mbora was saying, “And something else. Two men, and one is sucking the other’s blood, and what has you got? The one is evil and the other is a fool, and the fool deserves the evil that is visited down upon him. The willing victim is as bad as the villain. Those Jews marching off to the gas chamber like sheep to slaughter, and there is niggers who will do the same. They do it now and they’ll do it when it’s not just the sucking of soul and blood but when it’s death. Sheep to slaughter.”

“Not this sheep,” Simmons said.

“Everybody says. Everybody.” Mbora stood up, clasped his hands together behind his back, lowered his head, paced like a caged jungle cat. He had protruding eyes that were even more prominent behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike the girl and the silent man, he wore western clothes — a three-button black worsted suit, a button-down shirt, a black knit tie. He was thin and knobby, and he reminded Simmons of someone, but he couldn’t think who.

“You want to know something? You wonder why I waste my time on you?” A finger quivered under Simmons’ nose. “Because two minutes of talking to you and I know you got a head on you. You got a brain in that head. You walk these streets and so many is so ignorant. From the day they’re born they get told how niggers is dumb, and you tell a child this from the cradle on and they grow up dumb, they grow up with a head they don’t know how to use. So when I meet a soul brother with a mind, I stay with him, I talk to him, I make my words drive that honkie poison out of his pure and beautiful black soul. You understand me, brother?”

“I understand you.”

Mbora marched to the window, waved out at the street. “Down there they don’t think. You start with men that think, that think right, that use their heads to think black, then you get them down there to follow. They’d follow like sheep to slaughter or they’d follow like an avenging wave, just so it’s following with no thinking called for.”

Who the hell was it he reminded Simmons of? He wished he could remember. It was hard to concentrate on the conversation without knowing.

“We shook this city up, brother. We’ll shake this city up again. And other cities. This whole honkie state, and other states...”

The burnings made sense to Simmons. It was the same way in Detroit. There were buildings no one could save and no one would tear down, and the people who had to live in them were better off burning them, because empty lots were better than those rat-traps.

But the killing and the looting — no. No, he couldn’t buy it. All it did was leave black bodies bleeding on the ground. All it did was tell the bigots that they were right and black men were animals. Simmons knew what war was and how war worked, and he couldn’t see the point in being in a war unless you stood a chance to win it. Vietnam or Newark, if you weren’t going to win it, you ought to go home.

“You got a brain, brother.” The finger in his face again. “But a brain by itself is not enough. You need something to go with that fine black brain. You know what you need? The man has said it. You need to go and get yourself some guns.”

Simmons nodded enthusiastically. Son of a bitch, he thought he didn’t even have to drag the subject into the conversation. Mbora got there all by himself. And in the next instant he knew who it was that Mbora reminded him of. He was, yes, no question, he was a black Woody Allen.