Those Bones Are Not My Child (67 page)

“I don’t tell tales out of school, Bingham.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Shows how much you know. Some days I drop the muffin pan just for the noise. That’s how interesting things get around here.

“But they’re all right. He’s a good egg. And she’s nice, in a wiggy sort of way. Here, have another piece—then we’ll go and see the movies. They’ve got the butcher-block cart out there.”

“So you think they’re on the up-and-up? They’re investigating the killings?”

“Man, who ain’t trying to get that reward? Maybe I’ll hit on something myself watching them movies. Grab that pot holder and get the pots off the stove. Coffee’s in the drip pot. Spiced tea’s in the spatter ware. We’ll dispense with fresh lemon. It eats right through the Styrofoam.”

“I don’t think it’s the reward so much.”

She looked him up and down for a minute, then tossed him the pot holder. “I guess anybody who’d move from Philly to Hoboken is subject to mental fits of all sorts,” she said, loading the trays. “So, what did you do in real life, Bingham? Before you decided to become a pack mule?”

“This and that. Played some ball. Got a break just before the war—the forties, I’m talking about. Spent a season in Cuba and Peru. By the time I came back, the Negro leagues had about played out. So I went into the restaurant business.”

“Peru? How’d you do that?”

“The scouts used to come up from South America and raid the Negro leagues. They’d lure a lot of the players away. We’d be glad to go. Barnstorming was great, but it had its low side. Like being all-stars.”

“That was bad?”

“White teams wouldn’t play you unless you let them advertise that your team was made up of the Negro stars. They’d only play the best. But you better not win. They got a helluva complex. You win and you’d never see your take of the gate. I was glad to leave.”

“Only scouts I remember were the talent kind that never showed
anywhere I was booked. And the only raids I remember were them other kind. Whole congregations would pull up stakes and go north, things were so awful.”

She banged the fridge door open and removed two tall glasses from the freezer, then unplugged the box. Bingham watched silently as she bruised fresh mint in a saucer of sugar and plopped the leaves into the two frosted glasses. He had memories too of ministers bringing whole towns from South Carolina to Philly.

“When vaudeville played out,” Miss Hazel said, measuring the liquor, “I missed my chance to go to Europe.” She put the bottle in a tote bag, then put the finishing touches on the juleps. “Just as well. Ida Cox got caught in a roundup in Denmark. Whole lot of the entertainers did. Many a troupe had to abandon their costume trunks and everything else to get out of Europe. Nazis were all over the place—Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, everywhere. Funny, we never hear about all those colored people they threw in the concentration camps.”

“Yup.” He waited for her to turn around so they could go. But she kept her back to him for a long while, holding on to the sides of the tray and not moving.

Suddenly she wheeled around and motioned him to hurry. “I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

“What is?”

“What you were saying before about leaders and them people in the carriage house. Till something big comes along like in the sixties, I’m just going try to swing my way from gig to gig and be satisfied with a little get-along money. Something’ll turn up by and by. Won’t take long for this new generation to wake up.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Whatever it takes. Long as things don’t get too complicated.”

He was starting to explain that it was the elegant simplicity of Father Divine’s philosophy that had attracted so many people from so many walks of life to the co-op movement, a lot of white people too. But then he found Old Man Webber looking right down his throat.

The judge was in the chairlift on the back staircase, the lift mechanism ticking noisily as he went up. The old lady was on the midway landing in a yellow quilted housecoat, seated on a hassock, talking on the phone. She wagged a finger at Miss Hazel, then continued nodding
and scribbling on a pad Bingham could see through the Lucite table.

Miss Hazel called up to them cheerily. “I’ll read them the riot act out back if you want me to. In the meantime, the pause that refreshes.”

“Wait, wait!” Mrs. Webber was flapping the phone message she’d written and was coming down, beaming. Hiking up her housecoat, she took the stairs with a jauntiness Bingham had not thought her capable of.

“There’s a message,” Mrs. Webber said, smiling breathlessly. “For them.” She motioned toward the patio.

“I’ll deliver it.” In swift, deft moves, Miss Hazel had taken the message in hand, given Mrs. Webber the two juleps, and was heading for the patio door, jerking her head at Bingham to get the lead out.

Embarrassed for Old Lady Webber, her disappointment and bewilderment as naked as her joyful excitement had been a moment ago, he had the impulse to turn and look before stepping out. But the sight of her with maybe two perfectly good drinks spilling out onto the Oriental runner would have derailed his train of thought.

Catching up with the ex-hoofer, he said, “You could sum up Father Divine’s philosophy in one word—restitution.”

“Restitution, you say.”

“Sure enough. Quit lying, backbiting, pay your debts, and clear the decks to get right with God. Ask each other’s forgiveness for wrongdoing in the past. Balance the books.”

“In my book, there’re two columns, debits and credits. What about my forty acres and my mule?”

“That’s what my uncle Connie used to say,” he laughed. “Restitution without retribution ain’t hitting on a dime.”

“To tell the truth, I was thinking more of ‘reparations,’ but I say, right on to your uncle Connie. One lesson we could take from the Mafia—ain’t no justice without some vengeance.”

Bingham laughed and the kettle of spiced tea sloshed in the tray. It was all he could do to keep up with Hazel and not waste another drop.

She ducked under the trellis, though her head cleared the trumpet vines by two feet. “Come on now, Big Boy, and let’s see about this research.”

“Here go the spook,” Gaston said with a husky laugh and got up. He and the rest of Team 2 were leaving, throwing their shadows on the screen, blotting out the Blood who was seated at a desk with neat stacks of papers and books, a plastic cup and a brown-and-black water jug on a tray. Clear again, he was folding his arms on the desk and leaned forward slightly. He spoke directly into the camera with a steady, confident gaze.

“This was shot last January, good people. Atlanta is mentioned at some point, according to the notes.”

“I was recruited from Boalt Hall,” the brother on screen was saying. “That’s the lefty law school at Berkeley. There were twenty-three in my unit in the beginning, thirteen after the first phase of training. But four Black men didn’t make it past that. The one Jewish guy, a lawyer from New York, was bumped. Two of the six white women were dismissed. And an Hispanic from Albuquerque and two Black women. After phase two, there was one other Black person besides myself, a woman from Bismarck, South Dakota. One Latino, a guy from New Hampshire. And three white women, whom I felt it was best not to be chummy with. One of them was definitely a plant, there to encourage bickering and complaints. The Black woman hipped me to her.

“We were trained to shoot on the firing range and from a sniper tower, shoot to kill. Most of phase two was learning how to handle urban disruptions. You had to be gung-ho but not overdo it to play on the varsity. We had to shine, for as you know Hoover had complained to Bobby Kennedy that the minority requirement was weakening the Bureau. But of course Hoover knew how to get around the Justice Department to deal directly with Lyndon Johnson, which he did. So there was six of us before the last loyalty forms.”

He placed his palms flat on the desk as though he intended to push his swivel chair away and rise. Instead, he motioned toward the certificates on the wall behind him.

“I made the varsity, so did the Black woman, the Hispanic, and one of the white women, the plant—she was assigned, I learned later, to room with the one person, a Black woman, who’d made it past the prelims with a new unit, thirty-three out of thirty-four bumped by the gunnery instructor. I don’t know what detail the others drew. As for me, I collected the plastic bags of confidential debris. In other words, this spook was a garbage man.”

“I heard that.”

“In my eleven years with the Bureau, I put the trash can down three times for field assignments. Once during the Chicago Days, I helped process some of the lefties I’d gone to school with.” He looked off in the direction of the window. When he turned back, he unbuttoned one of his cuffs and started to roll up his sleeve, stopped, then composed his face and continued.

“The Democratic Convention in Chicago,” he mused, eyes moving slightly away from the center of the lens. “They brought in a few squadrons from Fort Carson, Colorado. The local riot divisions had a lot of Blacks too, but the army troops were predominantly Black. My sister’s oldest boy was there. A draft evader, he’d been given a choice—informant, the service, or jail. Eighteen months he spent on the front line in ’Nam. He thought he’d finish out his tour at a desk job in Colorado. But there he was on the streets of Chicago. He and I and a whole lot of other Black men, Black women, and youngsters were there, but the TV cameras worked around to blot us out. We saw each other. My sister and I haven’t seen eye to eye since college, so it was the first time I’d seen my nephew grown. I’d been … offered, shall we say, an opportunity to shift from international relations to national security specialization my last year at Berkeley. That was the last decent conversation my sister and I had. It was war after that.”

While he poured himself a cup of water, someone behind camera whose voice did not pick up on the track asked a few questions. But the brother gestured for silence and pulled his notepad closer.

“The second time I got to put the garbage can down was in connection with an operation that resulted in the Panther trial, particularly in relation to the government’s case against Ericka Huggins. I’m not proud of the role I played. I discuss it fully in the manuscript I’m preparing. Quite frankly, by 1973 I was coming apart, There’s no way to maintain civilian friendships or those from the past when you play on the varsity. And there were few colleagues in the Bureau that I cared to … On the one hand, it’s a fraternity, a microcosm with a definite culture of its own, and many are content to let that be the whole of their life, but—I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what it would cost a person like myself to fit into that world.

“As I said, my role in the Panther 11 and Panther 21 operation was
beginning to tell. Or maybe it started in Chicago. But after Wounded Knee, I knew it was over. I don’t mean to play the virgin. I’d be glad to discuss that later.

“I was flown to South Dakota to keep tabs on Angela Davis, me and the sister I mentioned before. We were both assigned to Davis and to keep an eye on other Black radicals who’d come in support of the American Indian movement. Our job was to make the most of any links we could observe—and if necessary, orchestrate them, if not invent them—between those we were assigned to watch and others who were on the wanted list: members of the BLA, the Symbionese Liberation Front, the Weather Underground, not to mention freelance KGB informers. The Wounded Knee trial was the beginning of the end for me, I would say.”

He played with the lid of the brown-and-black plastic water jug, glanced quickly at his notes, and resumed talking, his eyes fixed on some point below camera range, possibly at the person who was trying to feed him questions as he spoke.

“You will recall that during cross-examination by Attorney Kunstler, a lot of Bureau misdeeds surfaced, especially once they got Agent Douglas Durham on the stand. He’d not only successfully infiltrated the AIM, he’d worked himself into a position as their security chief. That success was second only to the agent who became keeper of the books at SCLC for a time, a maneuver you’ll be reading about in another book in progress by an old classmate of mine, a researcher who’s covering the government’s campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. I doubt if SCLC to date is aware that they had an agent on staff for more than four years who was passing information to the Bureau with such regularity. I wonder how he could have done his work for the organization.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? My naiveté, I mean. Thorough brainwashing. Black militants had been pulling the cover off of COINTELPRO and other intelligence operations of the FBI, the CIA, and the military for years. But I didn’t come to my senses until Durham took the stand. Call it ego, call it pride, or an investment of time … I don’t know why it took so long. And I don’t know why Durham’s cockiness should’ve been the turning point. Or maybe it was my particular assignment. The sister and I were both afraid to come clean with each other. The truth was, we very much admired Angela Davis. She’s one hell of a person.

“Then I saw the movie
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
. It made me feel
shitty, really shitty. It’s taken me several years to try to get back … to my family, old friends … roots. My sister has washed her hands—”

He took another swallow, then leaned forward, grateful now that someone below the lens was asking questions.

“The FBI develops the cases that the federal government will prosecute, if that’s what you’re asking. In other words, that the U.S. attorneys will act upon.… Atlanta? No question about it. The Bureau was involved sporadically as early as the LaTonya Wilson kidnapping. Their involvement has been consistent since the autumn of 1980 when the nursery school was bombed.”

“You’ll notice he said ‘bombed,’ y’all.”

“Noted.”

“You can be sure there are reams of information on file. The STOP organization would be wise to go directly to the U.S. attorney general. It’s unlikely that they’d get any cooperation from the Atlanta field office.”

“He’d better talk fast, we’re running out of film.”

“Shush.”