Three Days Before the Shooting ... (144 page)

What a war! And when you consider who turned up playing the part of a Confederate officer, what a mind-boggling joke for history to play on us descendants of slaves!

Yeah, Hickman
, an inner voice answered,
it’s crazy, but as you keep telling the brothers and sisters: Every “yes” has its “no,” and every “no” its “yes.” And just as you keep insisting that mankind’s distress is God’s opportunity, this country’s hard times—like its love of easy living—often work to our advantage. It’s like improvising jazz, but given all its commotion, sour notes, and off-beat rhythms, if you don’t keep the hope-inspiring melody it began with ever in mind, life can be a tough tune to follow
.

So if you want to keep riffing you have to keep thinking and making tough choices, and not only looking ahead, but up, down, around, and behind you! Yes, and watching out for all kinds of discords and accidentals. Talk about blessings coming wrapped up in calamities! Still, that’s how it always was, is now, and shall probably continue, world without end as it was in the beginning
.

Yes
, he thought,
but these skycaps are youngsters, and even if I were to remind them of such complexities theyre probably too busy making money to let it bother them
.

Like me in the old days. When you’re young and not only getting by but enjoying a few of the good things of life, who wants to think about the close connection between good times and bad, the past and the present? It’s too gloomy, too depressing. Satchel Paige said, don’t look back because something might be gaining on us. Yes, but no matter how fast you keep running something is
always
gaining on you, even if it’s nothing but Time
.

Time, now
that’s
the joker in the deck—just look at those fellows racing against the clock as they hustle those tips! Wonder how they think about themselves in terms of ambition and training? Students? Ex-war pilots? Airplane designers—like the fellow working as a porter at that airfield in Dayton? Which reminds you that the difference between a man’s sense of himself and how he’s viewed by others can be as different as the contrast between midnight and morning…
.

Get an education, they tell us
.

And we try
.

Then they say, Now make yourself worthy
.

So we try and sometimes succeed, at least to our own conception
.

But then they tell us that we’re not really ready, and no matter how hard we dispute them we learn that we have to wait for a war or depression to strike the whole country before we can move on to our next slow stage of advancement
.

Still, there’s no question that toting bags is better than chopping cotton—which a lot of folks back home are not only still doing but making the best of it. So where you are still makes a difference. That’s why so many took off for places like Chicago, Denver, and Kansas City—
Sorry, baby, but I can’t take you.
And before that those like Janey’s folks left the South and came out here where the land was less settled and living less contentious. But all too soon they learned that they still had to keep watching their steps. Because when the land got settled and the towns established and more of us kept arriving, doors started slamming and we were pushed off to the side, across the tracks, and down to the bottoms
.

Which was already happening by the time I arrived in this town. First they pushed us out of certain types of jobs, then out of the parks and the movies. And then, after labeling us “animals”—lo and behold!—they denied us the freedom to visit the zoo!

Janey still complains about how wild we musicians were back in the old days, but wildness went with the territory and was part of our freedom. Still, she’s right about that being my reason for hanging around towns like Kansas City so long. In those days they were places where a musician could develop his music and make it sound in ways that gave him fulfillment. Yes, and still make a living. And that was possible because everybody and everything was so wild and woolly that our hard-driving style gave a little more order to what even
white
folks were feeling. Gave form to all that freewheeling optimism and told folks who they were and what they could be…. But then up jumps Time, that ever-waiting joker, yelling, Get back to the beginning and take it from there! Yes, and now here it comes again, leaping at you now in the form of a bus…
.

Once the bus was parked and taking on passengers, he paid his fare, gave the driver his luggage, and climbed soberly aboard. And brooding again over his coming encounter with Janey, he took a seat in the rear next to a window. Where, settling back, he waited impatiently for the bus to be under way. Its first stop would be a famous downtown hotel, and from there he would head for the East Side and find a room somewhere in his old stomping ground before making his way to Janey’s.

And now with his hat tilted over his eyes he watched the entry of two young Negro men whose casual air was belied by the alertness with which their eyes flashed over the seated passengers before selecting seats in the left front row.

Times might have changed, he thought, but as in the old days they’re checking opportunities against custom, and watched the two deliberately taking their time in getting seated while keeping a lively group of young white men and women waiting.

Studying the young whites he thought,
They’re probably college students. Unsophisticated
and having a good time enjoying the freedom of doing what for them comes naturally. About the same age as the two blocking the aisle, having no need to check out the scene before taking a front seat on a bus or anywhere else…
.

But now he was watching two white youngsters wearing cowboy outfits topped by ten-gallon hats who flopped with a stylized nonchalance into seats several rows ahead.

There you go, Hickman
, the blues voice said:
Just when you decide those young brown-skinned bloods were putting on an act, here come two young white dudes about the same age dressed up like cowboys. Yeah! And from their looks they’ve probably never seen the smoke of a red-hot shoe being pressed to the hoof of a horse. And unless I’m wrong they’d probably consider the practice of getting a mule’s attention by busting his head with a whiffle tree a crime against nature!

So with one bunch pretending to be sophisticated citizens of the world and the other pretending to be something out of a cowboy movie, which of the two is being forced to act, and which is giving free rein to their fantasy?

But now his eyes were drawn to the bustling entrance of a young Indian woman wearing a bright blue dress and carrying a plump young baby, a nursery bag, and a fresh bouquet of red roses.

Now
that
appears to be the real thing, he thought, and two generations of it, times and change notwithstanding. And as the young mother moved past, the baby turned and stared into his face out of black, sharp-focusing eyes that seemed to ask questions.

Then seeing the door filled by a tall, narrow-eyed official-looking white man dressed in a Western hat and a corduroy jacket that bulged at his hip. And as the doors closed he watched the man survey the bus from front to rear before taking a seat on the right near the driver. Then the driver shifted gears, and as the bus moved into traffic he rested back with Janey’s letter again troubling his mind.

But now, with the bus on the highway and picking up speed, there came a protesting cry, and looking to the rear he saw the Indian baby squalling on its mother’s shoulder.

So, Reverend
, the blues voice said as he turned and looked ahead,
it seems that whoever said Indian babies never cry was telling a lie. Am I right?

Could be
, came the answer.

Yeah? Well don’t leap to conclusions
.

Why not?

Because it’s probably that little fellow’s way of protesting over having to ride in a bus loaded with all these blackfeet and palefaces…
.

Now you listen…
.

… But on the other hand, Rev, it could be that after staring at you he still can’t decide whether you’re King Kong the Baptist or Peter Wheatstraw. You remember Wheatstraw, the Devil’s son-in-law, who was always challenging you to gamble back in the old days? So if the papoose is right about his being on this bus, are you prepared to shoot him one?

Not when I’m out here strictly to help Janey. If I were at home I’d be preparing a sermon. Besides, being challenged by the Devil goes with my job. So knock it off!

Poor Janey
, he thought,
she’s upset over some stranger showing up in her neighborhood without her permission. What did she call him? Oh, yes—it was “Mister Noname from Nowhere.” Which simply means a mysterious stranger. So let’s hope it’s a case of his giving her nothing more to fear than what F.D.R. called “fear itself.”…

Now that sounds like a promising text, so take it and git while I sit back and listen…
.

… Oh, yes, my friends, but while F.D.R. was speaking of “one world” and raising our expectations, I must remind you that one of our worst problems comes from being forced to live in a world
within
a world. That’s right! And with ours small and familiar and the one in which it finds existence so much bigger that it seems overwhelming…. It has also been said that a house divided against itself cannot stand—but don’t you believe it! Because given enough space, strength, and worldly resources it can. Yes, but only with the injustice and violence with which we ourselves are all too familiar. Therefore we’re stretched between a world in which we know our way around fairly well and another in which we’re constantly at the mercy of those who would keep its ways and motives a mystery. Yes, my friends. And although I don’t actually know this, it appears that those who structured the world around our world have set up ways-and-means committees just for keeping folks like us in the dark!

Oh, yes! As far as we’re concerned their policy has long been one of out of sight, out of mind—just listen to that little baby and ask yourselves who back East or in Washington ever thinks about the Indians these days other than as actors in cowboy movies. And yet out here there are many different tribes of Indians—yes, and some with soggy, uncomfortable diapers!

Therefore the idea of putting the Indians on film and forgetting them hasn’t worked—oh, no, because those diapers keep filling! And what’s more, they keep messing up the claims of Christopher Columbus! And by the way, the Indians say that they had no need to be discovered by the likes of Columbus…
.

So as I say, the powerful are forever trying to keep the connections between their world and ours under cover and in the dark. And so intently that when some person, or force, or sickness from the big world shows up in the smaller—or from the smaller into the larger—it plumb upsets the landscape of the mind and all its crannies and regions. And what’s worse, it charges everything with uncertainty
.

“What’s that smell? Where’s it coming from?” we ask ourselves. “Who’s responsible?”

And pretty soon folks in the big world start wrinkling their noses and pointing at those in the smaller. And those in the smaller start shaking their heads, because after all this time they think they know not only who’s a friend, enemy, or neutral, but exactly who it is that’s so chronically upset in his bowels. Therefore they figure that they know the source of the smell all too well, so in order to keep their sanity they try not to think too much about the goings-on in the bigger world if only because they have only so much God-given time to stay alive. Therefore they try to get their cornmeal made and enjoy a little happiness
.

Yes, my friends, but the stink keeps spreading and fuming, so don’t relax too much and keep a Kleenex handy. Because when the big world rumbles the little world quakes. And when
that happens things get thrown off balance and knocked out of scale. And then, Lord help us, if we don’t hold on tight to the values which our small-world experience has taught us. Otherwise it can leave us helpless. And when the lines between the two worlds blur, everything and anything can become threatening
.

Like shadows, or gifts, kind words, or simple politeness. Even acts that would seem to have nothing directly to do with us in the quarantined, pesthouse world of our semi-isolation. Because as you all well know, very often mistakes of identity or misinterpretation of events make for mistaken intentions and unexpected reactions. Maybe that’s what our sister Janey is up against—not something KNOWN, but something NOT known. And that’s what I’m up against, and of that I feel sure. So we ask ourselves, What’s to fear and what’s NOT to fear?

My friends, it’s like living in a blackout of a big city, where every shadow or movement or sound in the dark can mean danger. Or to bring it closer to home, it’s like being caught at night on the only piece of high ground when a springtime flood sends snake and possum, raccoon and deer up out of the bottoms to join you. That’s when you find yourself slap-dab in the middle of what’s been dreamed of as a “peaceful kingdom,” a situation in which man and beast forgive one another their differences and live in peaceful coexistence—yes, but the truth is that when man and beast come together they are both immobilized by fear. For when the UNEXPECTED becomes the expected, and the ideal threatens to become FACT, all KINDS of nightmares start romping wild in the daylight, and nobody dares drop his guard
.

I am reminded of a time years ago, when our jazz band was traveling by automobile through the flooded countryside of Kansas. Being young and brash we considered ourselves streetwise and worldly, but soon we would find our worldliness tested by reality. For as our slow caravan of cars made its way along a road flooded by a swollen river we saw in the distance a magnificent tree
.