Tales of the Out & the Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

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