My Other Life (60 page)

George got the job, at the First National Bank of Boston, and was the only black person employed there. It was 1962. In his spare time he went to the Boston Public Library—to meet girls—and to jazz clubs. He bought expensive clothes. His job as a credit adjuster paid well enough. Promotions were hinted at. George was clever and personable, and good with numbers. He made plans, one of which was to buy an Austin-Healey 3000 using a bank loan. He saw himself in this very cool car, tooling through Medford, into Boston, with the top down.

In the spring of that year, I helped organize a student protest, picketing in front of the White House. We had a convoy of buses from Amherst to Washington. But although we were aware that civil rights was an issue, the protest was about nuclear disarmament. It was the early antiwar movement, and the next month, back in Amherst, we vandalized a Sherman tank that had been parked in front of the Student Union for the ROTC Military Ball. I alone was arrested, held for six hours and released. It continued to be a great thrill recalling how my group had shouted, "They got Paul!"

George had paid no attention to the antiwar pickets. The notion of race had been on his mind, but it puzzled him rather than vexed him. As a bank clerk in Boston in 1962, earning a good salary, "I couldn't go to some places—certain clubs. They don't let you in. They don't say why."

"Didn't that make you militant?"

"At that time I wasn't thinking. I didn't give a shit about it. All I wanted to do was go in there."

He had a girlfriend by now—she was not black. It annoyed him that he could not follow her into the club.

"I came up with the idea of starting school all over again, so I contacted my friend who had been to Tuskegee. Tom Poole."

And he explained that Tom Poole had been the black boy, the only one on the soccer team at Andover, whom he had chatted with after one of our matches at the school. Unknown to me, they had become friends.

"He was from a respected Tuskegee family. I got hold of him and some other people. It was kind of a rushed thing. I got accepted and went to Tuskegee."

When George wanted something badly he always got it.

"My plane landed in Birmingham. I took a taxi to the bus station. It was segregated, and I went into the wrong waiting room. I saw all the white people and said to myself, 'This is testing, I'm testing them,' but nothing happened. Then I went into the other side, the black waiting room. That side, the black side, was fantastic. It was a party!"

In the black waiting room people were talking and singing and circulating, and they greeted George with warmth. George, from the North, was won over.

"I took the long bus ride to Tuskegee. I arrived in the rain. Going to the cafeteria, I saw a pretty girl walk off the porch with an umbrella. She held it over my head and walked me all the way. She was smiling. I was smiling. That was a great moment. I said to myself, 'I belong here.'"

In that same month, September 1963, newly graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, I was being told that as I had been disruptive and discrepancies had been found in my record, I could not join the Peace Corps. In desperation, I wrote a long letter to the selection board and said in effect: Give me a chance and I will be a model Peace Corps volunteer. When I got word that I was being sent to central Africa, I wanted to tell George, but I'd heard he was in Tuskegee, in Alabama. I thought: George is still in school?

George got into the student movement and immediately became an activist. After a demonstration insisting on freedom of speech, he invited Malcolm X to Tuskegee to speak. By the time Malcolm X arrived, George was in jail in Selma with Martin Luther King. "We called Dr. King the Lord—The Lord says we've got to do this or that." The Tuskegee students brought Malcolm to meet Dr. King in Selma. In the jail George and others formed the Tuskegee Institute of Advancement League.

This was 1964 and 1965. This whole time I was in Malawi, central Africa, teaching English.

George was in Alabama, organizing. "We went out into the country and helped people with reading and writing and voter registration—we were like infiltrating, right? That was my word for it."

I lived in a hut in Kanjedza, an African location outside Limbe, and rode my bike up to Soche Hill every morning at dawn to teach my students. During school vacations I worked in the bush, and for one period at Moyo leprosarium, near the lake shore.

George, in farmer's overalls, was in the Alabama countryside, "blending in." His group was wary of the movement's prominent leaders. "We were against suits. Jesse Jackson was a suit. We always thought he was CIA—we never trusted him. We didn't trust suits."

Tuskegee was still home for him. Built on a hill to protect it from the Klan, it was solitary and safe. George was admitted as a brother in Omega Psi Phi, regarded as the most powerful of the black fraternities in the United States. He was tattooed with the Omega horseshoe. One of the pledge rituals of Omega was learning "The Pearls" (of wisdom). Unfamiliar with the George Davis smile and the deep-throated
heh-heh,
and feeling that George did not take The Pearls seriously, one of the fraternity brothers said to him solemnly, "Someday you will need these Pearls."

At Omega his nickname was "Vulture."

There were more marches, more arrests. George and some others, trying to present a petition to George Wallace, the governor, were arrested in Montgomery for refusing to obey police officers—they had been protesting the beatings of marchers by state troopers. For the next several days the protesters filled the jails. "That meant Wallace couldn't put Dr. King and the marchers in them." Wallace had no choice but to allow Dr. King and the marchers, who had been waiting with him after their trek from Selma, to enter Montgomery, where by then George was locked up, charged with obstruction.

At that time, late in 1965, I agreed to do a favor for an African friend who had been an official of the Malawi government. I passed a message, I drove his car out of the country. I did not know that it was the intention of his group to assassinate the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. I was found out and deported from the country and—after almost two years of bush living—kicked out of the Peace Corps. "Terminated early," "deselected" were the expressions.

Fearful of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, I immediately went back to Africa, as a lecturer in English at Makerere University in Uganda. Makerere was one of the great universities in Africa, and many American blacks paid visits. Several said they had heard of George Davis, but I gathered that George, while being active in the civil rights movement, was also elusive, working behind the scenes, a furious shadow in Alabama.

George told me, "In January 1966, Sammy was killed. That was terrible."

Sammy Young, a charismatic activist, was shot in Tuskegee by white racists, who put a golf club in his hand when he was on the ground, dead, claiming he had attacked them with it. When the killers got off in 1967, "we burned downtown Tuskegee. It wasn't spontaneous, it was carefully planned. We burned down gas stations, we tore down some buildings. Tuskegee was a black town, but all the money was made by white folks."

In Uganda, we had riots and demonstrations—students against Rhodesia, Vietnam, and whites generally. I was caught in a demonstration that turned into a riot. I was beaten and my car demolished, a frightening experience. I realized that for most Africans, even ones I knew well, I had no name, no identity. I was a bwana, a white man. That made me feel deeply insecure in Uganda.

George got married in the town hall in Tuskegee in 1967. So did I, in the registry office in Kampala, Uganda. George's wife, Tunie, was the same age as Alison.

By the time George graduated from Tuskegee in 1967, there was a lot of infighting in the movement. All these civil rights years he had been breaking the law, and was regarded as an outlaw. Prison held no terror for him. He had contempt for the police. He had already been arrested and imprisoned four times in Alabama.

"I got more and more with the renegade crowd," George said. He and what he called his "core group" had some reefer with them at the famous SNCC convention in Atlanta, where Stokely Carmichael became chairman. Whites (and "northern-educated college Negroes"—white-influenced blacks) were disallowed from holding office. "I had mixed feelings about it, but it made a profound impression on me," George said. "I remembered what I had been told by those women from Providence who were in the Nation of Islam, about the lie that our salvation could come from white people and not ourselves."

My African students in Uganda had reached a similar conclusion, and the feeling against whites and Indians, any non-Africans, was strong. Like George, I now had a wife and child. I had published my first novel and had finished another and was writing a third. I applied for a job at the University of Singapore. At first there was a problem. A security check was done on me by the Singapore government. They used FBI files, where my record showed that I had been a student activist and had been arrested in Amherst, that I had initially been refused entry to the Peace Corps for these transgressions, and at last had been kicked out for covert political acts that placed the Peace Corps in jeopardy. All this was relayed to me by my brother in Washington, who had been phoned by a friend at the FBI. My brother assured him that I was not dangerous or a security risk, and I got the Singapore job.

The FBI was also watching George Davis. It was years before he was aware of the thickness of his file, but it dated from his first civil rights arrests in 1964. Three years later at the SNCC convention, George was more consciously an outlaw and identified with the renegades—the reefer smokers—not with the suits.

Even in this rebellious frame of mind George decided to go to law school. He applied to a number of schools. "I was a high black recruit, one of the top recruits in the nation. All the schools accepted me—they all accepted the same blacks." George won a full scholarship to UCLA and became UCLA's adviser to the Black Student Movement. "I got very political. I worked with the Panthers." And with prominent black athletes and student leaders. "I got to practice my smile." He did no studying. "I passed one course, I think."

Then, in 1968, with so much happening, the murders of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, and George hugely successful, "I went utterly wild." Using his considerable mathematical skills, George worked a scam with credit cards and airline tickets. He soon had a stack of both. He now also had a taste for cocaine and a confidence that there was profit in the drug. "At the end of the second semester, 1968, I was living in Frank Zappa's house in Laurel Canyon, and I started doing some business around L.A. One of our runners from Panama got busted."

Although George had never been out of the United States, he decided to go to Panama alone and buy as much cocaine as he could afford. He heard fireworks on his arrival at the Panama City airport. But no planes were taking off and the streets were empty. It was, he was told, a military coup: Omar Torrijos was taking over.

Very soon he met a Panamanian drug dealer, Little Tito.

"He became my teacher. From him I learned the true art of smuggling."

"George, did you smoke dope in high school?"

"Yup. I met a fellow from New York at the Newport Jazz Festival my junior year."

"You were probably the only person in high school doing it."

"I was the first to do a whole lot of things."

I understood George's divided mind. I shared it. There was placid George, intelligent, rational, cool, orderly, and philosophical, considering his options; and there was urgent George, the fastest man in Medford, the dreamer, spinning yarns, trying everything, the risk taker, the vulture. I was similar, but I had devised a use for all my experience and everything in my mind. At the point where George became imaginative, and restless and active, I shut the door and turned to fiction. George left the house and lived his fantasies.

It was some months before I saw George again, but I had become fascinated by our stories, our parallel lives. We were Medford boys. We were exactly the same age. Our family circumstances were comparable, we had gone to the same high school, and had been close friends. Academically we were about equal; George was my superior as an athlete, and he was socially far more gregarious. We had grown up at the edges of the city, he by the Mystic River, I by the woods of the Middlesex Fells. Our earliest memories, we agreed, had been the same—the longing to leave Medford, to experience the world, to take risks.

I picked up George in Medford and we drove towards Boston, to find a place to talk.

"Take a left here," he said.

"That's not the way, George."

"Listen to me. That is a freakin' short cut!"

And it was. George knew every back street, every connecting road. I had grown up here and had never gone this way to Boston, through Somerville, down these side streets. It amazed me that he had his own map of the city, and when I told him, he said that he had always used these back roads. Coming home from downtown Boston late at night, or after a football game in Somerville or Maiden, he had to stay off the beaten track where uproarious white youths might confront him and challenge him to fight. In his mind he had a black map of the city, full of safe zones.

I turned on the radio, having forgotten that my son's tape was in the tape machine. It was "The Chronic" that blared from the speakers, on a Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg rap tape, about "a nigger with a motherfuckin' gun."

"Heh-heh." George made a face. "That's not my thing. I still like Coltrane and Miles and Monk."

He was doing his master's degree in drug counseling, and being counseled himself in Boston. Still living at home, in an almost monastic way—studying, exercising, avoiding risky friends. And confined, and solitary, he began to write. Sometimes he wrote about his past, vivid stories, one about a gunfight, one about a robbery. A long story about two friends whose lives are interlinked he called "Tight Partners." The stories gave some coherence to his past, but there was so much incident in his life that these few episodes did not help much. Looking back, everything was chaos. He had trouble connecting one incident with another, one place to the next. He lost his wife, he found her again, he changed countries, he got money or drugs, and often he lost the money or flushed the drugs down the toilet. He smuggled; sometimes he got caught, more often he succeeded.