Black Water Rising (18 page)

The clerk's office is on the first floor of the building. Unlike the rest of the judicial facility, done up in stately marble and offi
cial-looking mahogany and brass, the clerk's office is a narrow, poorly ventilated room that always smells of paint and copier fluid. It strongly resembles the waiting room of a public clinic, with rows of plastic straight-back chairs and a take-a-number system of operations. There are three Plexiglas windows cut into the wall, behind which sit three women, one of whom—a busty black woman sipping soda out of a Del Taco cup at ten forty-five in the morning—Jay knows to be the office manager. There are only women in this office. They work with the radio on, greeting cards and family pictures tacked up on the walls. They chat breezily while they type and do paperwork, seemingly enjoying themselves, in no real hurry to get through the day. Jay has already been waiting for half an hour, his knee pumping up and down, keeping a nervous beat, one eye always on the door.

When his number is finally called, he walks straight to the middle window. The clerk behind the glass is in her forties, with a tiny face and big black hair fanned out like crow's wings. Her nameplate says
M. RODRIGUEZ
. She has a small fan on her desk, blowing right into her face, whipping up her wings, as if she's in the middle of a photo shoot instead of sitting behind Plexiglas in a government office. Jay hands her his information request form, most of which he left blank. She pulls a pen from an Astros mug on her desk.

“I'm not understanding this, baby,” she says, popping gum.

“I'm looking for any and all cases in which this person was a defendant.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Name?”

“Elise Linsey. It's there.”

She writes the name again, in her own, more legible handwriting.

“Date of birth?” she asks.

“I don't have it.”

“Social Security number?”

“Don't have it.”

“Race?” she asks.

“White.”

She writes the word in big, block letters across the bottom of the page.

“Okay,” she says. “But it's gonna take a while.”

Jay glances in the manager's direction, making sure she can't hear what he's about to ask next. “You have access to arrest records, don't you?” He nods toward the mainframe behind M. Rodriguez, lowering his voice. “Sheriff's department and HPD…you guys have copies of their arrest files, right?”

“Yes.”

“You think I could get a look at those? Arrest records for Elise Linsey?”

“Sure, long as you show me a piece of paper from a judge or a cop or somebody at the DA's office saying you got permission to ‘get a look.' Otherwise, you gotta file a discovery motion.” She gives him an admonishing look because she senses he knows better. Arrest records are absolutely
not
public information. “Look,” she says, growing impatient. “Unless you have another request form for me, I'm going to have to get to the next one in line.”

“Come to think of it,” Jay says quickly. “I do have something else.”

Before he got out of his car, he took a single $100 bill off the roll of $800 in his right-hand pocket. He folded the bill over several times, then, once in the waiting room, he wrapped it inside a blank Harris County criminal courts information request form. He now slides the form beneath the Plexiglas, watching as she
unfolds the paper. The money springs open like a blooming flower. M. Rodriguez looks up at him, then back at the money, staring at it as if she doesn't immediately understand its meaning, its sudden appearance on her desk. She turns slowly, glancing in the direction of her boss, two windows down. Jay imagines she's about to call the manager over, that he has made a grave miscalculation. Then M. Rodriguez covers the money with her small hands, cupping her blossom. “I'll see what I can do,” she says.

 

He's there another hour, eating lunch out of a vending machine in the hall. Funyuns and a can of orange pop. From a pay phone in the hall, he calls home twice to check on Bernie, making a point of asking both times if there've been any visitors, if anyone has stopped by the apartment unexpectedly, thinking specifically about the man from the black Ford and his promise to stay in touch. He checks in at the office next. Eddie Mae is on the other line with her boyfriend when he calls and she puts him on hold for almost ten minutes. She comes back on the line with a la-di-da, ain't-life-funny tone in her voice, announcing that she and Rutherford have made up. Jay asks about his messages.

The building manager called, wanting to know about the rent check.

The hooker called twice. “And she sounds pissed.”

“What about Luckman? He call?”

“No.”

So he's stalling, Jay thinks.

He wonders if the first offer is now completely off the table, if he should have grabbed it while he had the chance. He puts another dime in the machine and calls over to Charlie Luckman's office himself, only to be told that Mr. Luckman is with a new client on urgent business and can't be disturbed.

When Jay returns to the clerk's office, M. Rodriguez calls him to her station. She taps on the glass, pointing him in the direction of an adjacent room. There's a carpeted hallway leading from the waiting area into a smaller reading room, painted the same shade of hospital green, fluorescent bulbs flickering overhead. M. Rodriguez emerges in the doorway a few minutes after Jay sits down. She's holding a stack of thin legal-size folders. They are the only two people in the room. “Return these to the office when you're done,” she says, sliding the folders across the round table in the center of the room. Then, from inside her cropped blazer, M. Rodriguez pulls out a thick clump of papers, stapled together and folded in half down the center. “These you can keep.”

Jay reaches for the arrest records. M. Rodriguez slaps her hand on top. “You didn't get it from me,” she says. She bends over at the waist, making sure to catch his eye. “I've never done nothing like this before,” she says. “It's for my kid, you know. I'm gonna get him something nice for once.”

Jay shrugs. He doesn't give a shit. It's not his money.

 

When he lays it all out, page by page, the picture that develops does not in any way match the image he's been holding in his head. Beneath the story he told himself about the woman from the boat—what he gathered from her creamy complexion, the cut of her fancy clothes and jewelry—is a life laced with problems. With a criminal history going back almost ten years.

There are five trials for Elise Linsey, defendant, in 1976 alone. Two in '77.

According to the trial papers and sentencing orders, Elise Linsey, last known address West Eighth Street, Galena Park, Texas, did two six-month stints in County for writing hot checks; thirty
days for marijuana possession; four months for cocaine possession and intent to sell; and ninety days for stealing headsets from a Radio Shack. The court gave her time served (two weeks) for a misdemeanor assault charge: she punched some guy she claimed was her boyfriend, and he never showed up to testify. Ms. Linsey was also on probation twice during this time period, both to settle charges of solicitation. In other words, prostitution.

The arrest record goes back even further, to 1972.

There are more charges of solicitation, theft, hot checks, plus trespassing and public intoxication. These are poor people's crimes, Jay knows, the stuff you find in the worst neighborhoods, places where people live on the edge of society, their lives frayed and their economic situations completely unstable.

What Jay finds most puzzling about this woman's life and her run-ins with the law is that it all stops—the trials, the arrests—sometime in the fall of 1980. Elise Linsey simply drops out of the system. Only to show up a year later in a town house on the west side, flush with jewelry and expensive clothes and, apparently, money to throw around. Jay hovers over the pages, trying to make sense of what he's reading. There's one question that keeps playing over and over in his mind, hammering away at him, making his head ache: how in the hell did she get from West Eighth Street in Galena Park—a marshy stretch of land a few hundred yards from the Ship Channel that smells of chemical waste and the salt of the Gulf—to Oakwood Estates? According to her birth date, printed on nearly every piece of paper in front of him, Elise Linsey is only twenty-four years old.

That was their M.O. back in the day.

Find a kid with a boatload of problems, most especially problems of a criminal nature. Find a kid who's got nothing to lose. And cut him a deal.

Jay remembers how it was done.

In the late '60s and early '70s, there was a war going on, right here at home. It was initially a war of ideas, going back to the '30s. Civil rights as a commonsense argument: people are people, eat and shit the same, ought to be able to eat and shit in the same places. Then black folks got on voting, wanting something real, and law enforcement ratcheted up the violence, finding more and more creative ways to beat the shit out of people, publicly humiliate them and test their souls. The next
generation coming up—Jay was only a kid when King organized the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama—wanted more than a lunch counter at which to eat, more than the right to vote for one knucklehead over another. They wanted true political power, not crumbs off a moldy piece of bread. They wanted the whole establishment turned on its head.

The federal government's response:

They used tax dollars to build a stealth army to take down these activists and agitators, who were mostly students, mostly kids. The FBI had plenty of young agents working COINTELPRO, their well-financed counterintelligence program, but the feds quickly discovered that academy-trained officers didn't always make the best moles, not for groups like SNCC or SDS, certainly not for infiltrating the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers (whom Hoover called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). These groups were suspicious by nature, not likely to trust
any
outsiders. Given the chance, they probably would have burned the Trojan horse to the ground before they ever got around to seeing what was inside the thing. The FBI couldn't pull off their plan in-house, not convincingly at least. So they outsourced it, pulled in hired help for their elaborate hoax, the sting of all stings.

From Chicago's South Side to Detroit to East Oakland and Watts, to places as desolate as Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, they pulled kids out of lineups and pool halls, pulled them off the streets and offered them a hand up, a way out of whatever legal or economic predicament they might have found themselves in. They paid these kids with promises—to make a felony assault charge go away or to knock a few years off a stay at Angola or San Quentin—paid them to learn the Panthers' ten-point program, to be able to recite Chairman Mao's
On Contradiction
backward and forward, to know their Marx from their Lenin. They paid
them to blend in. And in return these spies provided the feds with precious information: the location of a secret meeting house, the date and time of a rally, phone rosters and floor plans, or where one might find an arsenal of illegal handguns. Sometimes the information provided was as simple as the physical location of a group's leader, the key ingredient to any successful raid.

Everybody knows that's how they got Fred Hampton.

December 4, 1969, 4:00
A.M
. They shot him in his sleep.

The federal government called the raid on the headquarters of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party a success, publicly praising the Chicago Police Department, their partners in crime, citing the officers' bravery in an extremely volatile situation—a house full of sleeping black folks, one of whom was eight months' pregnant. But they failed to mention their secret weapon, their secretest of secret agents—the young felon they had spying on Fred for weeks, the man who made Fred's last meal, lacing a glass of Kool-Aid with secobarbital, and quietly slipping out of the house long before the bullets started flying.

It was all a setup. And policy back then.

The federal government was essentially paying kids to kill kids.

 

Cynthia was the first one to point out Roger. “Something's wrong with that guy,” she said one night, lying on her back in the sand. They had driven Cynthia's truck out to West Beach, in Galveston, where the seawall ended and the colored beach began, a place where heads would turn, surely, but no one was likely to call the police. They could be lovers in public and in peace.

The Dells were playing on a transistor radio resting on top of Jay's jacket, which was laid out like a blanket on the sand. The air was salty and soft, and warm for this time of year. It was March
1970, his senior year at U of H. Jay was propped up on his elbows next to Cynthia, broken conch shells digging into his flesh. The discomfort was nothing, though, compared to the quiet thrill of catching her in this moon-swept light, still and yielding. He held her hand.

The music played.
Stay in my corner…honey, I love you.

The words he couldn't say on his own.

Cynthia sat up, stuffing the bulk of her prairie skirt between her legs, dusting sand off her ankles. She wanted to talk about Roger Holloway.

“He's all right,” Jay offered.

There was another couple on the beach that night, their feet hanging out of the front seat of a baby blue Ford Fairlane that was parked across the sand. Jay could hear the woman laughing, high-pitched squeals that melted into the soft, wet air, sounding like wind chimes. He thought he could stay out here all night. He rested his chin on Cynthia's shoulder. She smelled like cloves.

“He come around Scott Street?” Cynthia asked, still on Roger.

“He wants to get more involved with the Africa thing.”

“You know he was hanging around SDS last semester,” Cynthia said.

She picked up his right hand and held it open like a seashell. She ran her fingers across the inside of his palm. “He asks a lot of questions. You ever notice that?” She looked up, staring at the shoreline, the salty caps doing a languid two-step, back, then forward, then back again. “That's all I'm saying.”

Roger Holloway had indeed been coming around the duplex on Scott Street for months. He was a skinny kid they were always bumming smokes from, who always had extra change in his pocket if somebody was hungry. He said he'd dropped out of Prairie View A&M the year before, but Jay suspected he'd never
spent a day inside a college classroom. Not that Prairie View was Harvard, but still, Roger seemed to lack some basic grasp of American history, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But he knew who Karl Marx was and claimed to read the
Workers World
newspaper. And he was hot on Africa. Which was Jay's baby, where he was finally finding his true political voice.

Years earlier, Jay had stumbled on his first sit-in on the way to class and decided then and there he'd rather be a part of history than study it. After that, there was no turning back for him. Once one dorm was integrated, they all had to be. Once one black professor was hired, there had to be a dozen more. He would settle for nothing less than total equality. Jay rode this initial wave of activism as a rank-and-file member of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which had a strong presence on campus and across the South. SNCC came out of the SCLC tradition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King's group through the '50s and '60s. It was a tradition steeped in the assumption that moralism is a real and potent weapon, or the presumption, rather, that you could shame white people into acting right.

Well…that was one way of doing it.

But it required a kept tongue and an unyielding faith in a higher power, something Jay did not have. Much as he would go on to preach on the limits of a spiritual approach to civil rights, much as he would chide the churchified for taking it lying down, he always, deep down, admired men like King, for whom the ability to love was a gift, like an ear for music. Jay, on the other hand, lived a life of constant struggle against his own cynicism, his well-earned knowledge of the limits of human grace. To tell the truth of it, he was as angry with his stepfather as he was at any white man, and angrier at his own father for leaving him behind.

But it wasn't just Jay. A lot of the young people were getting tired of the we-shall-overcome way of attacking an increasingly complex problem. So in '67, Jay and Bumpy Williams, Lloyd Mackalvy and Marcus Dupri started meeting at Bumpy's mother's place on Scott Street. She was a night nurse at Ben Taub Hospital and rarely home. They named their organization Coalition for Better Race Relations and nicknamed it COBRA. They were still doing stuff with SNCC, but beyond the campus agenda, they worked within the local black community to help find decent housing for folks, get somebody's son a lawyer if he needed one, and they funded ( Jay pointedly never asking Bumpy where the money came from) an after-school program at Yates High School.

Sometime in the late winter of that year, Bumpy got arrested for passing out flyers on Texas Southern University's campus. He was promoting a rally in support of two older gentlemen who'd been picked up for loitering while waiting at a bus stop on Dowling. Bumpy was booked on charges of trespassing and being an all-around public nuisance. It was Jay who came up with the idea for a march to the courthouse downtown. He walked the campus, going dorm to dorm, walked the neighborhood around the college until the soles of his feet bled, until he got nearly five hundred people to agree to march with him. They would meet on campus, cut up Wheeler to Main and walk in unity, storming the courthouse, not leaving until they got justice for Brother Williams and the two other men in lockup. He wrote the press release himself, stayed up typing all night, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes, listening to Otis Redding on his turn-table.

They were at the courthouse almost seventy-two hours, a round-the-clock vigil. Jay didn't have a law degree then, but he knew enough to know the cops couldn't hold people indefinitely,
not without a formal indictment. He got the
Post
and the
Chronicle
there, got his name and face in the paper. He made the mistake of sending the clipping to his mother in Nigton. She mailed it back about a week later with a note saying she'd raised him better and wasn't he due for a haircut. Still, Jay became something of a hero. Bumpy was released, and a few days later, they let the other two men go as well. COBRA was now a force to be reckoned with, getting more attention than the local SNCC chapter.

It was Jay Porter whom Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the national chapter of SNCC, called when he was coming through Texas for the first time. An antiwar rally was happening in Austin that April, and Stokely wanted to speak in Houston while he was visiting the state. All through that winter and spring, he'd been traveling the country, speaking on campuses or wherever he could get a hall, reworking and refining a position paper he was calling “Toward Black Liberation.” The remarks, which Jay and his group had not yet heard (as no Houston paper would print them), were apparently so inflammatory that Carmichael was being blamed for riots all across the country. According to local police, wherever Stokely spoke, there was gon' be trouble.

Texas Southern, just a few minutes from the U of H campus, flat-out wouldn't have him. The University of Houston also said no. Jay simply ignored them. The night Stokely came through town, Cullen Auditorium was free. So that's where they held the rally…just went in and took it over. Word got around campus, and some three hundred people showed up, more than the hall could hold. They were spilling out into the hallway, onto the grass lawn outside. Some of them curious, wanting to be a part of
the
thing that everyone was talking about. But there was also a contingent of rebels—conservative white students who didn't want this loudmouth nigger on their campus—and they raised painted signs and fists to make it known. And just beyond the
doors, in martial formation on the lawn outside the auditorium, were a hundred officers from the police and sheriff's departments, dressed from head to toe in riot gear.

It was after 9:00
P.M.
by the time Stokely took the podium, after Bumpy and Marcus Dupri gave two fiery introductions. Some of the rebels had pushed their way to the front row. The air in the hall was muggy, thick with the breathy heat of anticipation, everyone waiting and wondering…just what was this brother gon' say? Stokely came onstage dressed clean as a whistle, in a pressed suit and thin black tie, not a wrinkle on him, and he was wearing shades, black and wide, like Ray Charles. Dude looked like the bass player for Booker T. and the MG's, like a blues philosopher. He leaned over the podium, into the mike, pushing his shades up on the bridge of his nose as if they were prescription glasses, as if their darkness helped him see things clearly.

Jay can still remember his first words.

Stokely looked directly at the white rebels and said, “One of the most pointed illustrations of the need for ‘black power' in a society that has degenerated into a form of totalitarianism is to be found in the very debate itself.” Then to everyone else, “Welcome, brothers and sisters.”

The crowd went hog wild, black students whooping and cheering.

The white students in the audience, rebels and liberals alike, were struck dumb, silenced by the sheer force of words they didn't understand, their own language turned against them. Backstage, Jay felt his whole world was busting wide open. Here was this brother onstage, achingly hip and capable of intellectually skating over all of their heads. No one had heard a speech like this, a framing of the fight for justice in such fundamentally political and theoretical terms. The term “black power” was relatively new; it had started at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, the
year before, one night after Stokely was arrested for the twenty-seventh time. “The only way we're gonna stop these white men from whuppin' us is to take over,” he'd said. “We been saying ‘freedom' for six years and we ain't got nothing. What we gon' start saying now is…black power.”

The term caught on and contributed to Stokely's militant reputation, but as he began to lay it down that night in Cullen Auditiorium, to lay out his case, it sounded less radical to Jay and more like good old common sense. It was, frankly, gospel. The black students waved their hands in the air, clapping and calling out to Brother Carmichael as if they were in church.