The Last of the Savages (2 page)

“Would you say that advocating the violent overthrow of the American government is pretty standard, Mr. Keane? Is that what they teach you here at
Ha’vad?
”

I am pleased to recall that I dropped my mask and looked at him with open disdain, citizen to citizen. Maybe I had been dodgy about Will’s politics, but I thought this was laying it on a bit thick. “Will doesn’t believe in violence,” I insisted. Of course, he’d been known to carry a gun when traveling the chitlin circuit with his soul and blues acts; but it was strictly a capitalist tool, reserved for those occasions when the local promoters were reluctant to share the take.

“We have proof,” said Flattop, “that he’s affiliated with groups that do.”

“Will doesn’t affiliate with groups,” I said, even more confident in this than in my previous assertion.

“Have you ever heard of the Black Power Solidarity Committee?”

At first this sounded merely ludicrous, something the director of the
FBI dreamed up in an apocalyptic fever. On reflection, however, I realized I’d met the entire politburo of the committee in question, in a hotel suite in Miami a few years before. It
was
ludicrous, but that didn’t prevent it from being frightening—like many things that happened then.

I had just finished my freshman year at Yale and was enjoying a brief vacation courtesy of Will, who was attending a convention of radio announcers. He’d taken over a vast suite in a hotel in Miami Beach, at the edge of the then-crumbling deco district. I spent my days on the beach with the codgers and the Cuban muscle boys while Will confined himself to his rooms, receiving visitors, conferring with his entourage, smoking dope and stroking the phones. Returning to the hotel from a day on the sand, grilled to an unflattering shade of pink, I emerged from the elevator to discover three black men in leather jackets loitering in the turquoise hall.

“We s’posed to meet Will Savage.”

I pointed to the door. Trying to be helpful, trying to show that I
knew
there was nothing out of the ordinary about three black men—even three black men who, under slightly different circumstances, might look menacing—visiting Will, I went over and knocked on the door myself.
Hey, man, we’re all cool round here.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Patrick,” I said. As the door yielded, I felt myself pushed from behind, across the threshold into the sentinel bulk of Jack Stubblefield, former football player and Will’s devoted vassal. There was a brief scuffle as I tried to regain my balance and the men behind me surged forward, and finally we were all standing uncomfortably close inside the door, me and Stubblefield facing the intruders—only one of us ready and willing to fight them off.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he said.

A tall, thin man in a red beret glared at him. “We want to talk to Savage.”

“Who’s asking?” None of us had noticed Jessie Petit, a wiry, white-haired black man in his fifties, who was standing in front of the bedroom door. A revolver dangled from his right hand as casually as a cigarette. I wanted to be excused from this class immediately.

When the guy in the beret cut his eyes away from us, I looked over my shoulder and saw Will emerging from the bedroom. Although he was still thin at the time, Will always walked with the stately deliberation of the much bulkier man he would become. He was wearing a black silk robe with Chinese ideograms crawling up the facing like white spiders. Within the nest of dark hair and beard, his face seemed sleepy and slack, but the eyes were a brilliant, supernatural blue, as startling as the sudden flash of the light on top of a police car.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“It’s about your contribution, man,” the spokesman finally said. “We’re here in the name of the Black Power Solidarity Committee.”

“Let them in, Jack,” Will ordered.

Stubblefield backed up a few steps, creating a narrow right-of-way.

“Come in,” Will said, “have a seat.” The invitation seemed more an act of noblesse than a capitulation, and perhaps for this reason the three were reluctant to acknowledge it.

“We don’t need your fucking hospitality, man. What we want right now is your contribution to the committee, on behalf of all the black artists and—”

His speech was interrupted by Taleesha Savage, who slammed the bedroom door and stood beside Jessie. Glancing at the tableau, she hastened to her husband’s side, her manner wary and protective as she put her arm around his waist. She was a striking creature, tall and lithe and feline in her grace—though at this moment her expression conveyed a hint of razory, sheathed claws, which she wouldn’t hesitate to deploy in protecting her mate.

“Gentlemen, my wife.”

The two junior committee members registered their surprise; only the man in the beret seemed stoic about the fact that Will Savage’s wife was as black as himself.

Stubblefield, meanwhile, was moving slowly along the wall into the living room. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the shotgun leaning against the couch.

“On behalf of—”

“I’m afraid I don’t have much cash,” Will said, interrupting the
speech again. He’d probably heard it already; everyone at the convention was talking about the mysterious group of shakedown artists claiming to represent exploited black musicians. The rumor was they’d tried to kidnap Jerry Wexler.

As Will reached into his pocket, the man on the beret’s right thrust his right hand under his jacket.

“There’s no need for that,” Will said.

He pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out. “About a thousand, eleven hundred.”

“You gotta do better than that.”

“Don’t you tell him what he’s gotta be doing,” Taleesha snapped.

“I’ll write you a check,” Will said cheerfully. “Five thousand?”

“Yeah, and then you call your bank to cancel the motherfucker soon’s we out the door.”

“If I write you a check,” Will said quietly, “you can be goddamn sure that it’s good and it will stay good.” Will’s voice, formerly that of the relaxed and gracious host, was now icy with disdain. He sounded exactly like his father—perhaps his great-great-great-grandfather, the slave owner, who’d killed a man in a duel over an obscure point of honor. He was a hippie one moment and a Savage the next, though of course he was both all along. The hippie had been happy to make a contribution of his own volition; the Savage was outraged that his sincerity would be called into question.

This was a strange compound, and one that Stubblefield still didn’t understand. After the committee had sullenly accepted the check and backed out of the room, he expressed his outrage that Will had given them anything. “I could have got to the twelve gauge,” he whined. “And Jessie had the thirty-eight.”

“They have a legitimate grievance,” Will said, his former serenity restored. “Black artists have been getting ripped off in this business since it started.”

“Not by you,” said Taleesha.

“Maybe not.” He shrugged. “By people like me.”

“They’re running a fucking protection racket,” Jack said.

Will lit one of his corona-sized joints and inhaled. “We can all use a little extra protection.” It sounded like a line from a song.

The G-men didn’t believe for a minute that anyone would casually give six thousand dollars to an unknown bunch of black radicals.

“You’re saying they held him up at gunpoint?”

“No, not exactly. He felt like giving it to them.”

The special agent whose head looked like an aircraft carrier shook his head in disgust. “What the hell’s a clean-cut kid like you doing with a dangerous radical like Will Savage?”

This would not be the first or the last time I heard some version of that question.

W
ill Savage and I were thrown together as juniors at prep school, late arrivals to the class of ’67, strangers to a cold New England campus which glows warmly in the memories of a half-dozen generations of American plutocrats. Although our new school was only forty miles from my home and a thousand miles from his, I’d traveled much farther than Will. He was the fifth Savage to matriculate, and the observatory bore the name of his maternal grandfather; I was a scholarship student from a New England mill town down the road, a dying redbrick museum of the Industrial Revolution ringed by fast food and auto dealerships. Will was from Memphis, Tennessee, the first real southerner I’d ever known.

His luggage preceded him. When the housemaster showed me and my parents to the cell that would be my home for the next academic year, two large trunks layered with faded steamer stickers were stacked in the middle of the room, taking up most of the space between the two beds. I unpacked my plaid suitcase while my father made nervous conversation and my mother tried not to cry.

“Your room at home is much nicer,” she said, as if trying to assure herself that this snotty school wasn’t too good for her son even as she was mourning the perceived necessity of my leaving the nest.

“It’s not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” my father agreed. Scared as I was, I wanted to be here, and I wanted to be alone in my new room. I resented this mild criticism. Already, I realize now, I was disowning them in my heart.

My mother is, shall we say, a noticeable woman: nearly six feet tall, she has a bust like the prow of a ship. The fact that she had always been a doting and devoted mother did not prevent me from feeling, somewhere around the dawn of puberty, acutely embarrassed by her sheer physical volume, bright clothing and clarion voice, its broad adenoidal vowels redolent of the tenements of South Boston. She compounded the crime of being the parent of an adolescent by being so damnably conspicuous. My father, as if to compensate, tended to recede; he is, in fact, two inches shorter than my mother, and this, too, was a source of chagrin. Fathers were supposed to be taller and, when visiting their sons’ prep schools, were not supposed to wear checked sports jackets worn shiny at the elbows, nor polyester ties. This much, even I knew. I was, in short, an ungrateful little shit.

As we’d walked across the lawn to the house, I felt the casual reconnaissance of three young men with lacrosse sticks languidly flicking a ball back and forth, and felt myself wanting. My clothes, my hair, my very walk, did not pass muster. For this I blamed my parents. Now, on the verge of leaving home for the first time in my life, and actually forever, I was most worried that my new roommate would arrive before they left. And a taxi did pull up just as my parents were climbing into our Impala, my mother weeping, supported by my father, who was holding the passenger door open for her. A tall boy hopped out of the cab whistling, wearing aviator sunglasses, a transistor radio pressed to his ear. My father, who despite my partial scholarship was straining his resources to send me here, honked the horn as he slowly pulled away. Brimming with impatience and shame, I raised my hand in farewell but didn’t look back. If this show of indifference was performed for the sake of the new arrival, I don’t think he noticed, bopping up the flagstone walk ahead of me.

A head taller than me, with shaggy dark hair, he wore ripped khakis and a much worn button-down shirt, the tail of which flapped behind him; he suffered his clothing the way you might inhabit an old summer
cottage, cheerfully indifferent to the sagging porch and peeling paint. This was in fact the last gasp of his sartorial conformity; within the year my new roommate would shed the inherited uniform of the preppie and start dressing in rainbow hues and, later, after that psychedelic decade of our youth, in black.

I dawdled up the stairs in his wake. When I reached our room, he was deeply occupied in the task of setting up a stereo. After I introduced myself, he stood up and held out his hand. When he focused on me the effect was quite startling; beneath his dark eyebrows his eyes were bright blue verging to violet, like an acetylene flame.

“Will Savage,” he drawled, shaking my hand firmly, almost violently, before turning back to electronics. “Gonna wire us up for some sound here,” he said. “You like the blues?”

“Sure,” I said, not entirely certain who or what the blues might be. I was relieved to find my new roommate friendly, if somewhat distracted. Within minutes we were listening to an eerie, piercing lament. He sat on the bed cross-legged, nodding behind his sunglasses, explaining with evangelical zeal that the singer—the greatest ever American musical genius—had died at the age of twenty, poisoned by a jealous woman.

“This is the purest art this damn country has produced, man. Listen up. It’s like the distilled essence of suffering and the yearning to be free. That’s why it could only have been produced by the descendants of slaves.”

Will’s enthusiasm was initially more convincing to me than the music itself. He listened with rapturous concentration, closing his eyes and tilting his head back, his face contorting in a kind of map of the song’s emotional arc. “We’re all slaves,” he announced suddenly, “but we don’t know it.” He pointed to the record player. “Him,
he
knows it.”

When, after the song ended, I ventured that I liked the Beatles, he sneered. “This is the real thing,” he said. “At least the Stones acknowledge their sources.”

The music unsettled me, as did the fierce, restless blue beam of his attention when he asked me about myself and absorbed my answers. He seemed intensely interested in my story in spite of my own vague sense of shame at its cheap, Sheetrock and Formica stage sets and lack of high
dramatic interest. I simultaneously inflated and disparaged the details of my background. I told him my father worked for General Electric—marginally true: he sold their washers and dryers. I said grandiloquently that my life had been largely lived through books to date, that I liked the novels of Ayn Rand, Salinger and Sir Walter Scott—though I had read only
Waverly
—and the poetry of e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas.

“He’s cool,” said Will of the latter. “Old Bobby Dylan copped his name.”

I nodded sagely, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about. But I could tell he was impressed with the breadth of my reading, and for the first time it occurred to me that all those lunch hours spent in the library in order to avoid getting beaten up on the playground might yield social as well as academic dividends.