Ghost Dance (20 page)

In the middle of his blue dream of bones, my father suddenly woke up and nudged me. “It’s almost time, Vanessa,” he whispered. He looked feverish and pink, and when I put my small hand to his forehead in what I had seen as adult behavior, it was burning.

“Just wait, just wait,” he said to me quickly in a rasping voice.

I looked back and noticed my grandfather, too, was now awake. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Italy did not interest my grandfather any more, not even Michelangelo and his
Pietà;
America was everything now, but he had never seen my father so consumed. “Dad,” my father said, “just wait.”

We were nearly the first ones into the fair, and there was no line when we got to the Vatican Pavilion. “This is important,” I kept thinking to myself as Father handed us our tickets. My mother took a deep breath, Grandma grimaced, and Grandpa stared straight ahead. “This is important,” I thought, “this means something,” but I could not for the life of me figure out what about this large sculpture, behind glass, lit in blue, moved my father to tears that day, standing between his parents, hugging them to his side on the moving conveyor belt we all stood on. My father was not, as far as I knew, a religious man. He had hardly ever stepped into a church. But this was important to him, and for no real reason I felt Father’s tears in my eyes. My father whispered when we got outside that he would like to view the
Pietà
“a few more times” and then we could head back home.

“But, Dad!” Fletcher said, pointing to things so new he had no names for them yet: spheres, domes, disks, cubes, pylons.

“Oh, we’re just going for a short walk, Michael,” my grandfather said, running off with Fletcher.

“Meet us back at the Vatican Pavilion,” my father yelled to them. “Don’t forget!”

“We won’t,” they said, disappearing. “We won’t forget.”

My father and I spent the whole rainy morning in front of that sad sculpture. My mother, after two viewings, drifted through the fair alone. I would have joined her had she asked me, but she didn’t. She had been quiet the whole trip and, though I sat most of the ride with my head on her pink shoulder or my arm around her arm, she was miles away; it was like holding onto outer space.

I wonder what became of Grandma in those hours. I would like to think that she enjoyed the fair, that she bought a sombrero, that she ate moussaka, that she went to the Clairol Pavilion and saw herself as a blonde or a redhead, but I suppose it’s quite unlikely.

I know, though, exactly what my grandfather and Fletcher did after leaving Father and me. Sometimes I think my brother told that story too many times. Sometimes I feel it is too big to live next to. This is how it goes. In the rain, Fletcher and Grandpa watched the opening day parade go by: governors and beauty queens passed them; a steel band, African drummers, Spaniards with guitars; hula dancers shivering on the Hawaiian float; Miss Louisiana in a soaked sequined gown; Montana cowboys and the University of Pennsylvania band, the governor’s daughter bravely holding the U. They saw Miss America, Miss USA, Miss Alaska, Joan of Arc on a white horse, one hundred Japanese girls in silk kimonos, and marching red umbrellas. The Watusi royal dancers danced by, and the Lippizaner stallions.

When the parade ended they walked down the Avenue of Research where GE was putting on a illusion display. They passed Indira Gandhi who was presiding over the opening of her country’s modern two-story rectangular stone building. They stopped every few feet and witnessed some other miracle, each seemingly greater than the one before: they saw water screens and shadow boxes, undulating roofs, floating cement carpets—until something broke that dream. All of a sudden they saw in Iront of them a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man being lifted by two police officers into a van. The man spoke as he was being carried away. That man was James Farmer, the man whose voice had come from the center of the car and had followed my grandfather into sleep as he waited for the fair gates to open.

“Be gentle with him,” my grandfather said out loud, and Fletcher looked up.

“What did he do?” Fletcher asked my grandfather, and my grandfather, who always had an answer to everything, even if it was made up, held my brother’s hand tighter and whispered back, not taking his eyes from the scene, “I don’t know, Fletcher.” And he knelt down so as to look into my little brother’s eves and said again, “I don’t know what that man did.”

They continued on. They passed pavilions shaped like butterfly wings, like hats, like eggs. They saw the Santa Maria, they saw a gigantic electric map put up by the Equitable Life Insurance Company that lit up every time someone was born or died in the United States. They saw Burundi drummers who had never seen stairs before, let alone stairs that moved, travel them, lying down. They tasted English teas and sushi.

But they could not entirely forget the sight of that enormous black man being lifted into the police wagon. The unlikely image had attached itself to the back of their brains; the sound of that deep, passionate voice clung to their hearts and would not let go.

“Freedom now” was the call through the fair, as my grandfather and Fletcher watched demonstrators dragged through the mud by the legs or the arms or the hair. They were lying in front of buildings and blocking stairways.

“It is a symbolic act,” my grandfather explained. “They are blocking the doors in the same way Negroes are being blocked from jobs and houses and schools.” And Fletcher nodded.

It must have seemed to my grandfather that he had conjured, through his musings, Abraham Lincoln when he suddenly saw him standing on a stage, large as life. He must have seemed like some hallucination brought about by thinking too long and hard about the Negro man. My grandfather pointed speechless at the tall, brave president from Illinois. “Look,” he said finally, hoping that at least Fletcher saw him, too.

At that very moment, a voice over a loudspeaker said that this was a mechanical effigy of Abraham Lincoln, “an audio animatronic” made by Walt Disney, and that when the electronics were working Mr. Lincoln would walk and talk, would deliver the Gettysburg Address, and even give a flesh-warm handshake. But that day the great emancipator refused to move or talk. Mechanical types were fidgeting with him and with an electronic control board. But Lincoln just stood there, still as a statue, with a look of grave disappointment on his face.

“Come along, Fletcher,” Grandpa said hurriedly, walking very quickly now as if he knew exactly where he was going. Nearing the Ford Pavilion he saw-that it had been closed by a sit-in. My grandfather watched the small crowd of people who sat on the floor in front of the two escalators that led to Ford’s Progressland.

“We want freedom,” they shouted.

“When?”

“Now!”

“We want to see the show,” the visitors shouted back.

“When?”

“Now!”

“You struggle all you want, you sons of bitches,” a fat man in a cowboy hat with two children said.

“Ship ‘em back to Africa,” a woman sucking on a cigarette shouted.

“It’s horrible,” another woman about my grandfather’s age said, “that something the whole world is looking at today has to be spoiled like this.”

And then the cry that propelled my grandfather forward rose high above the crowd. “Get the gas ovens ready!” it shouted. And the whole group cheered. My grandfather felt a wave of sickness pass through him. “No,” he said, shaking his head back and forth in disbelief and looking at the ground in shame. “No,” he said, holding my brother’s tiny hand, and he suddenly felt the need to disassociate himself from the people he stood with and, still holding my brother’s hand, he crossed the line and lay down with the demonstrators.

“Freedom now,” he shouted.

Freedom now.

It must have been a curious sight. Even the demonstrators must have been suspicious of this unlikely pair: a bow-tied grandfather and his little accomplice.

A young woman and her child came forward, trying to pass the demonstrators. “When I say step on them, I mean step on them,” she said, scolding the child. And the little girl gingerly put her patent-leather shoe on my grandfather’s chest. Fletcher began to cry. “Don’t cry, Fletcher, it doesn’t hurt,” my grandfather whispered. “Please don’t cry.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said to my grandfather. “And involving that little boy in this, too! You should be locked up!”

“We are not ashamed,” my grandfather said.

“What are you? Nigger-lovers, is that what you are?”

“Nigger-lovers,” the visitors shouted to my grandfather and Fletcher. “Those two are nigger-lovers,” and they laughed.

The newspapers would read, “The oldest and the youngest to be arrested at the civil rights demonstration on the opening day of the New York World’s Fair were from the same family. Pictured here, Angelo Turin, 67, and his grandson Fletcher, j, being taken away by police.”

“Careful with the kid and the old man,” one policeman said, shaking his head as he put them into the paddy wagon, as my grandfather called it. “You feel OK, Pop? You know what you’re doing?”

“Yes, we know exactly what we’re doing, thank you. Don’t we, Fletcher?” And Fletcher nodded.

They were thoroughly drenched. The rain had not let up much all day. A whole truckload of black men and women, young white people, and my grandfather and Fletcher were taken to some invisible part of the fair grounds.

At the makeshift jail they were an immediate attraction. “Are you for real?” a man said, coming up to my grandfather and seeing that he was quite real indeed, shaking now uncontrollably from the cold.

A few beatniks immediately befriended my brother. “You’re lucky,” a girl in sunglasses said to him. “You should see
my
grandfather.”

When we finally realized that Fletcher and Grandpa w ere not going to come back, my father grew panicky. “We never should have come,” Grandma said. “Opening day in the rain!”

“Perhaps they’ve gone back to the car,” my father said, his voice so nervous that it seemed to divide into two voices.

But it was my mother who finally spoke up. “Come with me,” she said. “I know w here they are.”

We watched as my mother walked in the rainy half-light up to a policeman who began pointing this way and that, but who finally volunteered to take us there in the police car.

She was right, of course.

As we got nearer we could hear a large group of human voices, chanting. The chant grew louder and louder. “Jim Crow must go, Jim Crow must go” was the message rising from the soaked earth.

“Hey, there’s Mom!” Fletcher screamed, high and sweet, and he broke away from the group and ran into her arms. He was muddy and drenched, and Father took off his jacket and put it around him.

“Where’s Grandpa?” we asked Fletcher and at that moment we heard Grandma’s long, low “oh, Angelo!” She had spied him standing in a semicircle of people, dripping wet. They were looking at photographs.

“These two are ours,” my father said. “This one and that one over there in the bow tie.”

“Not so fast, Mister,” a red-faced officer replied. And he took him into a glass office in a green building where I could see Father signing things. My grandfather waved at us but continued talking to the men, and Fletcher began telling the day’s story. He was so excited and spoke so quickly that his sentences ran together.

“OK,” my father said, coming out after a while, “everything’s taken care of,” and he went over to get my grandfather, who introduced him to his new friends.

“Grandpa,” Fletcher said, “tell them about the paddy wagon!”

“Oh, I will,” my grandfather said. He looked very tired, and, moving away from the makeshift jail, he grew quiet, withdrawn almost, as if with one moment of reflection he could see clearly what had happened. Having seen injustice, smelled it, and been touched by it, he felt alone with it. He spoke only once on the long walk back to the car, and it was in a whisper to my father.

“Michael,” he said, “they showed me pictures—of ghosts, a secret society of ghosts. Well, they looked like ghosts, but their heads were pointed and they carried earthly weapons, torches and lead pipes.”

“I know,” my father nodded. “It’s the Klan,” he said very quietly. “You’re wet, Dad. You’re going to be sick.” But my grandfather was not listening.

“Criminals,” my grandmother hissed as my grandfather and brother got into the car. “I won’t sit with criminals,” she said, getting into the front seat, and so I sat in the back with them.

As Father started the car, we were not aware that back at the fairgrounds Grandfather and Fletcher had joined that part of the population whose names have been permanently on a list.

Turning around in the parking lot toward home, we noticed that the lights had come up. There were a multitude of colors: reds and blues, greens, glowing whites, domes illuminated by yellow, turquoise, and magenta beams. On the gigantic Unisphere, continents and oceans and islands were lit in purple and white. Dots of white marked the world’s great cities.

It seemed impossible to me that, in this awesome, shining world of light, evil could exist at all.

In front of us, atop the Kodak Building, a luminous Kodachrome Emmet Kelley gestured for us to come forward. To our left rose the Federal Pavilion glowing yellow and red and blue. Far off we could see the green egg of the International Business Machines Corporation, casting its pale hue. And, most magnificent of all, across the Grand Central Parkway stood the two largest buildings of the fair, drenched in white light—the pavilions of the General Motors Corporation and the Ford Motor Company.

My grandfather thought, looking at this exquisite show, that we had traded something important for all of this. Primitive man was better, he thought. He could not help but think that, along with the beautiful lights and the sports cars and the stairs that moved and the fusion display, we had invented a system of hatred and fear so elaborate and so subtle and efficient—in short, so perfect—that it would be nearly impossible to crack. Everything he saw suggested it.

The Pool of Industry exploded with fireworks and fountains of color and light as we watched.