The Drifters (21 page)

Next day our business meeting was interminable, with Reverend Jackson contending that the failure of our commercial projects proved that we must direct our funds to the churches. The sore on my lip was becoming painful, which made his refrain doubly tedious, and I am afraid I was brusque. He smiled benevolently and said, ‘In the end you’ll find I’m right. We must build the church so that it is a beacon.’ This irritated me so much that I was tempted to say, ‘Why not light a fire under the damned thing and make it a real beacon,’ but instead I pressed my lip to relieve the pain and assured him we would consider all proposals. I left the meeting in disgust and walked over to Fifth Street to see if Dr. Goldstein had my Austrian salve, but I could not get into the store.

It was surrounded by gaping people, most of them black, who watched as two police cars picked their way through the crowd, lights flashing but with no sirens, for this was a section of Philadelphia in which sirens should be avoided; even a flashing light could attract a crowd too big to handle. The policemen, more than half Negroes, hurried from their cars into what seemed an apartment building, but when I finally edged my way through the crowd I saw they had entered the pharmacy.

They were too late. Dr. Goldstein lay on the bloody sidewalk,
gunned down by assailants whose mission had not yet been determined. Before I could ask any questions, an elderly Jew ran down from a nearby building, crying at the top of his voice, ‘I told him a dozen times, “Morris, get out!” We were going to sell the store next month.’ He identified himself as Julius Goldstein, registered pharmacist, brother and partner of the dead man.

A white policeman tried to intercept him before he could enter the drugstore, but Goldstein forced his way in, saw the bloodied body of his brother, and began screaming charges against Negroes and the doomed neighborhood. It was a hideous moment, with the Jew accomplishing nothing by his blanket accusations.

‘Get him out of here,’ the white policeman ordered. Then, seeing me, he cried, ‘You, too, out!’ A black policeman grabbed me and started shoving, when a young man moved out of the shadows, interposed himself between me and the policeman, and said, ‘Cool it, man. He’s one of us.’ The policeman looked at the young man, nodded in recognition, dropped his hand from my shoulder, and said, ‘How you like what happened back there, Cato?’

The young man turned to survey the drugstore and asked, ‘You surprised?’ The policeman shrugged his shoulders and returned to the store. Now the young man said, ‘We met at my father’s church. I’m Cato Jackson.’

That night was a revelation. Cato Jackson, more deeply troubled by the murder than he had allowed me to see at the drugstore, walked with me for six hours through the dark neighborhoods of his youth, sharing his confusions and apprehensions. He was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, a year ahead of grade; at the age of fourteen he had been identified by a committee from the university faculty as a brilliant boy and had been given a preparatory scholarship. He was now in the process of fulfilling course requirements leading to specialization in urban affairs, and his grades, if I could believe what he said, were excellent. In one hour he made more sense than his father had made in two months. I shall not try to reproduce our conversation, but here are the major points he made during that long, dark night:

‘My father came from South Carolina as an ordained
minister, though what that means intellectually, I wouldn’t care to say. Here in Philly he opened a storefront church, and as you’ve seen for yourself he can preach pretty well, so he prospered. By that I mean he gathered about himself a group of loyal followers, and from them he made not only a living for himself but also enough to move his congregation out of the storefront and into a small brick building on South Grimsby—about twenty-two blocks down from where he is now.

‘He’s always been adroit at collecting money, so before long he had the brick building paid for. Now here comes the bite. Blacks were moving into the neighborhood and whites were moving out. So that big Gothic church you were in the other Sunday was standing mostly idle. No whites, while the little brick building overflowed with blacks. The white congregation, which was very rich, moved out to Llanfair on the Main Line, built a fine new church, then looked around for some way to dispose of the old one.

‘Philadelphia Episcopalians are a canny lot. I suppose all Christians are. Anyway, they came up with a deal whereby my old man would pay them two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their old church. That was the price. It never occurred to them that they’d had a hundred good years in that church … that they’d all made good incomes from this neighborhood … that they were way ahead of the game and ought to give the church to those who were following. No, they took their profits out to the Main Line, and their businesses, and their taxes, and then, by God, they sold their old church to my father.

‘He had twenty thousand dollars he’d saved from collections taken at the brick church. And he was able to sell that property for thirty thousand, and with this he made his down payment. He got a two-hundred-thousand mortgage from the very Christians who had sold him their used-up church, and now he and his flock work twelve months a year to pay the rich people on the Main Line.’

When he said this we were walking over a bridge across the Schuylkill River, and from it we could see the lovely silhouette of Alexander Hamilton Square, named for that noble immigrant from the West Indies whom Cato, suspected to have been part Negro, like his countrywoman Joséphine de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon married. Hamilton had labored intelligently and well in Philadelphia
and it was appropriate that one of the finest residential squares, overlooking the western river, should honor him.

‘When I look at the skyline of this square,’ Cato said, ‘what do you suppose I see? First, you tell me what you see.’

‘I see some very fine old buildings,’ I said. ‘They’re worth preserving … if that’s what you mean.’

‘I don’t mean that at all. I mean those highly polished brass nameplates.’ He led me around the square so that I could read the names of the organizations that used these distinguished buildings as their Pennsylvania headquarters: women’s clubs, youth groups, church societies, foundations, art leagues, and all those voluntary groups which are so essential to the well-being of a society.

‘Every group tax-exempt,’ Cato said. ‘Every group collects funds from the city and spends them in the suburbs. This square is the spiritual capital of surburbia. There’s not one goddamned committee headquartering here that does a shred of good for the city. And it’s all exempt from city taxes.’

He led me to other squares where the same condition prevailed: ‘In this square sixty per cent of the buildings are tax-exempt, and every one of them operates solely for the benefit of the suburbs. In this square fifty-one per cent tax-exempt. Over here factories shut down, paying no taxes. Wherever you look, the guts torn out of the city and either moved to the suburbs or thrown into tax-exempt status.’

‘I take it you’re studying this problem at Penn?’

‘No! Penn is worst of all. That huge operation in the heart of the city, paying no taxes for the services we blacks have to pay for.’

‘But they’re giving you an education.’

‘Grudgingly.’

We proceeded through the city, and for the first time I saw a major American metropolis through the eyes of an embittered young Negro: ‘Even though the rich white Protestants have fled with their wealth, and even though they’ve sold their used-up churches to people like my father, they won’t relinquish control. They use tax exemptions to cripple us. They use the state legislature to prevent us from governing ourselves. They emasculate the city, rob it blind, then throw it at us and say, “Now it’s your problem.” But they give us no money and no control.’

Two policemen in a prowl car moved slowly past us, properly curious as to why a white man would be walking in that part of the city after midnight. When the occupants—one black, one white—saw my age and Cato’s, they assumed we were homosexuals. ‘You keep your noses clean,’ they warned us.

‘One thing Whitey does keep control of when he leaves the city,’ Cato said as the car slowly disappeared. ‘The police department. They sure as hell keep control of that. You know why?’

When I said no, he did a strange thing. He dropped his university accent and lapsed into an ancient dialect his family had acquired during their stay in the coastal swamps of South Carolina. Geechee, Cato called it, and I found it practically indecipherable, composed as it was of African words, grunts and mocking pronunciations. Fortunately, it was intermixed with what Cato termed ‘high middle-period Stepin Fetchit,’ and it was this mélange that Cato and his friends used when engaging in put-ons, the art of kidding white folks by expounding in exaggerated form the race phobias they nurtured. Cato was a master of the put-on, and although I cannot reproduce the African words he used and the full fantasy of his illiterate grammar, what he told me that first night came out something like this: ‘Yassuh, Mistuh Charley, me’n mah boys, we gonna ass-emble one night ’n we gonna march wid clubs and knives and ropes right out to Chestnut Hill ’n Llanfair ’n Ardmore ’n all them fancy places ’n we gon’ to dem fine’—he pronounced it
fahn
—‘residential areas like Jenkintown and Doylestown ’n we gon’ murder ’n rape ’n burn all dem people in de suburbs. Yassuh, Mistuh Charley, dat’s what we got in mind to do.’

‘You murdered one of them a couple of hours ago,’ I said, impatient with the put-on,

‘Have you seen the district where I live?’ he asked soberly.

‘I have.’

‘Aren’t you surprised there haven’t been more murders?’

‘I shrink from even one.’

The finality of my reply caused him to drop the subject. Abruptly he said, ‘You asked me if I got my ideas at Penn. I said no. Would you be interested in seeing where I do get them?’ When I nodded, he looked at his watch, a rather good one, and said, ‘Let’s go.’

He led me far uptown to an extremely dirty street in North Philadelphia, where he looked up and down to be sure no police had trailed us. Satisfied that we were alone, he ducked into an alleyway, then doubled back to the side door of an incredibly filthy apartment house. ‘Just for the record,’ he said, ‘this building is owned by one of the gang that unloaded the church on my father.’

We climbed stairs that no sane man should have trusted and kicked open a door whose latch had not worked for years. The room was dark, but in one corner I could vaguely discern a bed with at least one sleeping form. Cato made a clatter, knocking over a chair and a kitchen utensil of some kind. Finally he found a light, which disclosed an unkempt room with scarred furniture, including a chipped iron bed on which two men were lying.

One was well bearded, naked to the waist and surly. The other, a very tall thin man with a scraggly beard, made no impression on me. When the first climbed out of bed I saw that he was wearing green basketball shorts emblazoned with the most honorable name in the business: Boston Celtics. ‘This is Akbar Muhammad,’ Cato said. ‘He’s the professor who taught me.’

Akbar reached for a towel, dipped one end in a pitcher of water, washed his hairy face, and asked, ‘Why you come here?’

‘This Whitey you ought to know,’ Cato said. ‘He’s the cat from Geneva.’

‘With the millions?’ Akbar asked.

‘The man,’ Cato said.

Akbar dropped the towel on the floor, kicked it aside and strode over to greet me. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he said, grasping my hand firmly. ‘You made a lot of sense.’ He pushed a chair my way and sat down on the end of his bed. ‘You find anything worth investing in?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I didn’t think you would.’

‘There was another murder tonight,’ I said. ‘Right near the church where we were meeting.

‘There’ll be more.’ He reached back and rapped the thin man on the forehead. ‘Go get Vilma,’ he commanded, and the thin man dressed quickly and left the room.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘You know my name. You’re probably asking what it used to be. Eddie Frakus. Detroit. Parents from Mississippi.
I graduated Michigan State. Mr. Fairbanks, you might just as well go back to Geneva. It’ll be ten years before the blacks of Philadelphia will be able to comprehend your offer.’ He paused, stroked his beard with his right hand, then pointed at me with a long finger. ‘And by then well have changed so much that even men of good faith like you won’t offer us the help you offer tonight. No, believe me! The things we’ll have to do will alienate you … totally. But that won’t matter, because then we won’t need your help.’

He spoke so forcefully, with such clear comprehension of what he was saying, that I had to like him. I asked, ‘Why are you so sure you’ll lose me?’ and he pointed to a mimeographing machine in the corner. ‘Go ahead. Find the message yourself. It’ll give you a sense of discovery.’ He watched as I walked to the corner and picked up one of the first copies of a document that was to become famous, Akbar Muhammad’s bill of charges against the Christian churches of Pennsylvania.

It was a document so inflammatory that I had to wonder if the same man who had just shown himself to be so reasonable had composed it. The preamble was a call to revolution, the first paragraphs a program for black control of the city. The mayor’s office, the chief of police, the president of the Board of Education and the director of welfare were all to be black, and the funds to ensure this takeover were to come from contributions made voluntarily by the white churches not only in the city but also in the suburbs to a distance of twenty-five miles. When I was finished with the document, which was well reasoned and persuasive, I realized that it had been calculated to enrage the white reader as no other statement could, for it insulted his prejudices and parodied his most precious beliefs.

Jesus Christ was portrayed as a cheap sentimentalist whose contradictory mouthings had been used by whites to subdue blacks and by blacks as a narcotic to make their perpetual servitude tolerable. Church leaders were depicted as gangsters who had systematically robbed the Negro and kept him in a position from which he could not extricate himself. Church members were proved to be damned fools who sanctimoniously approved what was happening and capitalized upon it. The general taxpaying public was depicted as being in collusion with the churches, to their
detriment. The final paragraphs had about them the icy coldness of the November nights before a revolution: ‘We therefore demand, in the name of Akbar Muhammad and black humanity, as reparations from the white churches of Philadelphia, an immediate sum of $10,000,000 in cash, to be provided as follows …’ and the names of forty denominations were listed with specific amounts due from each. ‘We likewise demand from the white churches of suburban Philadelphia an immediate sum of $20,000,000 in cash, to be provided as follows …’ and now came the addresses of about ninety wealthy churches from Paoli on the west to Doylestown on the north. The manifesto was signed ‘Akbar Muhammad.’