A Conversation with the Mann (22 page)

The redneck stepped close to answer my prayers.

From up the road, sound: the low whine of an engine, the dull hum of tires over dirt. The combination of noises snatched the
attention of the rednecks from me.

Whiteness broke the horizon. A car came up over a rise, came toward us … kept coming … then slowed to a stop, its headlights
a pair of big eyes staring at the situation. A beat. A couple of beats. The headlights went from regular to bright, those
big eyes giving some serious consideration to what was what. When it was done figuring things, the car's door groaned open.
Someone stepped out.

My eyes, the eyes of the rednecks, were too washed out to see much more than it was a man, fair in size.

He said to us in a normal tone of voice that carried in the dark and isolation as a shout: “What are you all doing?”

“This heyah niggrah took uh pipe tah Earl,” the redneck with the board with the nails said, using the board—his judgment stick—
to point at me even though I was the only “nigger” in the vicinity. “We fixin' tah learn him how we handle thangs with niggrahs
down heyah.”

The redneck raised the board. The demonstration was about to begin.

But it didn't. The redneck's arm got caught, got stopped mid-swing by the stranger's voice.

“Leave him be.”

The redneck looked back at the man, hearing but not believing what he'd heard. “You heyah what Ah said? Tha niggrah beat our
friend with uh pipe.”

He left out the part about his friend wanting to bash my head with brass knuckles.

“Ain't no niggrah gonna git away with beatin' uh white.”

The stranger didn't seem to care about any of that. The stranger just said again: “Leave him be.”

The two rednecks swapped looks, making sure they equally understood as little of what was happening: Someone was keeping a
colored who'd had the nerve to instinctively fight off a lynching from getting the back-road justice he deserved?

That just wouldn't do.

The redneck double-clutched the board in his hand, his thoughts obvious: Maybe two men were in for getting beat down.

There was a standoff brewing over me, over my life, and I was nothing more than an audience to it all.

The redneck took a step for the man. One step.

Then we heard the click.

Blind from the light, me and the rednecks couldn't see it, but there was no mistaking the very distinctive sound of the hammer
getting cocked on a gun.

The thing of it is, when there's a disagreement and one guy's got a lousy board with nails and the other's got a gun, the
pulling of the gun will end all manner of conversations and keep an equal number from ever getting started.

The redneck's grip on the board slackened along with his will to use it.

The figure, the outlined man to me: “Let's go, boy.”

Despite the fact my life was being saved, for a moment I lay where I was.

The outlined man again: “Come on. Get up. Get in the car.”

For a black man whose troubles had started because he couldn't catch a cab, suddenly everyone wanted to give me a ride.

I got up. I walked wide past the rednecks, mouths shut but their eyes delivering sermons on hate, for the savior car. Stepping
from the glare of the lights, my head snapped Stepin Fetchit-style like I'd just been mule-kicked.

The stranger: “You keep quiet, boy, and get yourself in the car.”

For both our sakes I did as told.

The stranger got back behind the wheel. Keeping the lights keyed on the rednecks, keeping them blind, he backed … backed …
then pulled the car into a tight U-turn and sped off the way he'd come.

The stranger: “What were you doing?”

I didn't answer that. Couldn't answer. I was no good for talking. I was no good for anything but sitting and shaking.

The stranger, again: “What the hell were you doing?”

I turned and looked, focused on the man who'd just saved my life. But staring at him did little to calm the cuckooness of
the scene. This man who'd just stood down a couple of blood-crazy whites was black. Same as me, darker even.

My senses, which had deserted me, started to return. I felt chilled and I
felt
my fear. I looked like hell, and the stink of my own foul matter started to choke me. The shame of my circumstances made
me cry. The shame of me crying made me cry all the more.

The stranger: “Are you listening to me?” His voice a hand slapping me steady. “What the hell were you doing?”

“Noth … I wasn't … walking.”

“At night? In the middle of nowhere?”

“I wasn't nowhere when I started.” Calming down some. Just some. “Got lost. I was at the Fontainebleau, and I was walking
back to my hotel in the—”

“You were at the Fontainebleau?” His tone told me he had the same hard time believing me the rednecks had.

“I work … I'm an entertainer and I was … Couldn't get a cab, so I—”

“So you thought you'd walk from the beach back to Miami.” The stranger did some blank-filling.

“Then those three … there were three of them …”

“Stupid.”

“They were going to kill me.” I used a quiet voice to distance myself from the near-certain reality.

“Stupid.”

“Worse. Animals. Dumb, ignorant—”

“Yeah. They're ignorant animals, but you … you're just plain stupid.”

That got me. That brought me all the way back. “What?”

“Walking alone at night in these parts. Might as well just wear a lynch-me sign.”

“I got lost. I told you, I got lost. Sure as hell wasn't looking to get picked up by a bunch of …” I felt a hurting. The hurt
became a specific pain. Fingers to my cheek. There was a warm and continual ooze of blood. “Oh, God …” My almost-death came
vivid again.

The stranger handed me a handkerchief. His contempt didn't cancel out his compassion, but his compassion didn't keep him from
giving me a good verbal smacking. “Must be a Northern black. You from up North?”

“New York.”

Shaking his head, talking as if we were some species just beyond his level of understanding: “All you Northern blacks …”

“It's my fault? This is my—”

“You don't think. None of y'all up there ever—”

“Think about what? Think about getting strung up? No, we don't. But ‘us all’ up there don't have crazy yokel-billies running
around with nothing to do but drink and lynch.”

“Yes, sir. In the North you have everything nice and quiet and polite.
You
don't get uppity, and
they
don't change anything.”

I sat for a moment looking at, but not really seeing, the lights of Miami as they finally drew nearer.

A thought got with me. “You were driving alone. You're getting on me, and you were out driving by yourself.”

“I'm not by myself.” He patted the gun that lay between us.

“If you weren't out by yourself, you wouldn't need a gun.”

“There isn't a time in his life a black in the South doesn't need protection. And I've got a long drive. Heading back to Mississippi
from a regional conference.”

“You a salesman?”

He laughed a little at that. Then thought. Then reconsidered my question as not being so funny after all. “In a way. We're
not really selling anything. We're offering. Offering blacks—”

“Blacks. You keep saying—”

“
They
called us colored and Negro. Black is what we're starting to call ourselves. Same as they're white, we're black. It's who
we are, what we are. And what we're offering blacks is dignity, equality, and the chance … the
right
, the right to be treated just the same as white folks.”

“Who's ‘we’? Who's doing the offering?”

“The N-double A-C-P.”

My turn to do the laughing.

“Don't think much of us,” the stranger said.

“I think you think you're doing some good, but if you figure issuing some proclamations and giving after-lunch speeches is
going to do anything—”

“Demonstrations, boycotts, voter registrations—”

“Do anything more than get a bunch of peckerwoods riled up …”

“You don't think it will?”

“I've had a taste of this bunch firsthand.”

The stranger nodded at my cheek. “They do that to you?”

“Didn't do it shaving.” Not ten minutes fresh from almost getting killed and here I was doing bits.

“They cut you?”

“They chased me into a fence.”

The laughing swung back to the stranger.

“Doesn't matter how I got cut, it hurts!”

“Yeah. It hurts. You know what I've seen?”

“What have you seen?”

“I've seen old black women thrown to the street just because they refused to ride in the back of the bus, and I've seen men
hauled from buses and killed for the same thing. I've seen schoolchildren, boys and girls, beat for demonstrating for better
books and better classrooms. I've seen men who are so afraid of being strung up for looking wrongly at a white woman, they
step out into the street rather than brush past them on the sidewalk, while the same time white men practice back-door integration
on our women.

“I've seen Emmett Till.”

Emmett Till. They beat him because he wouldn't cower, and when he wouldn't grovel they killed him. Emmett Till. Fourteen years
old.

I danced.

I turned my head, looked out the window as if there were something in the dark that needed to be looked at. All I saw was
my own face reflected back at me, guilt and disgrace its strongest features.

“And with all that,” I said to the image and to the stranger, “with all you've seen you really think you're going to get these
people to give you anything.”

“No. They're not going to give it to us. We've got to earn it: sitting in at lunch counters where they say we can't. Staying
on the sidewalk when they think we should be walking in the street. We earn it by holding up our heads and looking white people
in the eye. We earn it by standing up for ourselves.”

“Like that Martin King in Alabama? All he ever earns is a free beating and some jail time.”

“If you know another way …”

“I know another way.” Looking back to the stranger now, selling him some of my religion. “You make it. You make it so big
and so good that white people can't stand in your way if they wanted to, and they don't want to. What they want is to see
you, be near you. They want to line up and pay their hard-earned money just to spend a couple of hours in your presence.”

“And that's what you're doing, making it big.”

“Better than taking a billy club to the head.”

“Then how come you were walking back to Miami instead of staying at a beach hotel?”

The sting of that made me forget about my cheek. I sat there, not answering.

The stranger drove.

There was a stillness to the rest of the ride. The road a little rough, but the car found a pace and rolled in a smooth rhythm
that almost forced you to ease yourself. Around us there was only dark and quiet, and it all seemed wrong somehow. I felt
as if the whole world should be going crazy in the wake of my trauma, people out screaming how and why could such indignities
happen to Jackie Mann? But there was just the dark and the quiet. I was a victim alone. The world couldn't care less and did
just that.

Eventually we got to Miami, the Madison.

“You going to be okay?”

I nodded. I think. I don't remember. My mind, rattled beyond functioning, was completely focused on the suddenly monumental
job of opening the car door. “Thank you.”

He shrugged. “Sure you would've done the same for me.”

Not knowing any other way to conclude things with the man who saved my life: “Good luck.”

“Same to you. Who knows, you doing it your way and me mine, maybe we'll meet in the middle.”

I got out of the car and the driver drove off. I had no doubt he'd make it back to Mississippi all right.

I went into the Madison. Sid was in the lobby looking as anxious as a guy could. The second he laid eyes on me he started
in with his panicky bits.

“Jackie, what the hell …” Seeing my blood: “Are you hurt?”

Was I hurt? I had gotten it in my head I had joked my way to being somebody, only to be reminded in the harshed manner I was
still just a little black nothing. Was I hurt? I hurt like hell.

“Where were you? I've got half the Miami Police Department out looking for you. I called every hotel on the beach, in the
city. I've been driving all—”

“I just want to get some rest.”

Sid didn't ask any more questions, didn't say anything beyond that. He bought me a drink, bought me an entire bottle, then
sent me off to my room.

I drank.

I threw up.

I drank.

I got in the shower. In the cold, rust-brown water I stood crying. After ten minutes I slid down the chipped tile wall and
sat in the tub, crying. After forty I turned off the water and just cried. When I was done with that I told myself, told myself
several times, that what had happened was a good thing. It was good because I had learned; I had gotten some real-world, near-death
educating. The lesson was I still had a lot of getting big to do. I had to grow so large that I would never be near the backwoods
of Florida, any backwoods anywhere, ever again. I rededicated myself. On the floor of a tub in a pool of gritty liquid I swore
to myself that Jackie Mann would be the biggest thing going. Whatever it took, he would be the biggest thing.

I threw up again.

I drank some more.

I went to bed. I could have slept just about forever.

Sid woke me the next morning, having made arrangements—by instinct—to get us an earlier train out. I was very glad for it.

As I packed up I realized I still had the stranger's handkerchief and no way to get it back to him, as I didn't know who he
was. I tossed it.

Sid and I made the train.

We got out of Florida.

All I thought as I rode was that every mile traveled carried me a mile closer to home, closer to Tommy. I knew that when I
was with her, without her saying a word, without an action, she would have a way of making every single thing in the world
good again.