Voices in Our Blood (60 page)

“I just want to tell you, Mr. Carmichael, I saw you on TV and I really agreed with you on, uh, Vietnam and—”

Stokely cuts him off. “Thank you.” Stokely gives him the white man's handshake.

“Attention, attention,” cries the hostess, a short chubby woman in a knit dress. “Our guests are all here and our program is beginning.”

The young Negroes appear startled. “What program?” Stokely frowns.

“I just want to say a few words,” the woman goes on. “We have always been an integrated community. . . .” The Negroes begin shifting uncomfortably. “And we've never cared at all here about money or status, whatever that means.”

“Shit,” says Stokely in a loud whisper. “She don't know about status? Look at that swimming pool.”

As soon as Frost begins speaking, Stokely leaves the backyard and walks toward the front of the house with his date. He leans against an elm, his left hand gentle on the young woman's shoulder. They chat in a whisper. A Negro girl, slightly drunk, and a white man come out of the house and Stokely glares at the girl. She walks over. “I like what you said about being proud of our blackness,” she says.

“That means everyone,” says Stokely in an angry whisper.

“Let's get out of here,” says Stokely's date.

The girl looks at the white man and says, “Be proud of my blackness, my black womanness.” She starts laughing and they walk away to a car.

Stokely watches them drive off.

“Let's leave,” says Stokely's date.

They return to the backyard and within minutes Stokely—who had been scheduled to speak—and most of the young Negroes are gone; the whites and middle-aged Negroes are left alone.

Stokely is scheduled to take an eight o'clock flight the next morning to Glens Falls, New York, and then be driven to Benson, Vermont, for a speech at a camp—he's not quite sure what type of camp or who will be there. At two minutes after eight Stokely's cab pulls up to the Mohawk Airlines terminal at LaGuardia Airport and Stokely leaps out and runs toward the ticket desk.

“I'm sorry,” the ticket agent behind the desk says with a smile. “The flight just left.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh
no.
” Stokely pounds his fist on the desk.

“There
is
a flight leaving from Kennedy at eight-forty-five with a stop-off at Albany. And there's another at ten-thirty.” The ticket agent smiles again.

Stokely walks away and shakes his head. “I took a cab from the Bronx [his mother's house]. It should have taken twenty minutes to get here. I kept saying, ‘Use the bridge, use the bridge, man.' But that son of a bitch kept saying that Bruckner Boulevard was faster. Faster! It took an hour. Oh . . . oh that son of a bitch.”

Stokely wears dark glasses, a black shirt with small-flowered print, dungarees and black shoes. He hails a cab for Kennedy Airport and once the cab starts Stokely lifts up the glasses and rubs his eyes—he had gone to bed at five that morning.

“They always do that in Atlanta,” he says. “They always give us a hard time with flights down there.”

He shakes his head again. The cab glides out of LaGuardia toward the Van Wyck Expressway. The traffic toward Manhattan is heavy; toward Kennedy Airport there are few cars. When Stokely is in New York, he generally spends the night in his mother's South Bronx home (the only Negro family on the block). He had not seen her on this trip, though, since she is working as a maid on a maritime line.

“She's a hard worker and a sharp gal,” says Stokely, staring at the cars crawling toward New York. He turns. “She knew, she knows, that if you want to make it you got to hustle, and she hustled from the word go. She took no shit from no one. I got that from my mother. She used to tell me, ‘You take nothing from no one, no matter who they are.' She knows the realities of life and she demanded, made sure, that I knew them too.”

He smiles. “My old man was just the opposite.” Stokely shakes his head and sighs. “He believed genuinely in the great American dream. And because he believed in it he was just squashed. Squashed! He worked himself to death in this country and he died the same way he started: poor and black.”

“We came here in '52 from Port-of-Spain. That was a place that was mostly black. It was run by black people and everyone—the cops, the teachers, the civil servants—was black. We came here thinking that this was the promised land. Ha. We went up to the Bronx—I was eleven years old—and I saw this big apartment house we were going to and I said, ‘Wow, Daddy, you own that whole thing?' And then eight of us climbed up to a three-room apartment.

“My old man . . .” Stokely takes off his glasses . . . “my old man would Tom. He was such a good old Joe, but he would
Tom.
And he was a very religious cat too—he was head deacon of the church and he was so honest, so very, very honest. He never realized people lied or cheated or were bad. He couldn't conceive of it. He just prayed and worked. Man, did he work. He worked as a cabdriver at night and went to school to study electricity and during the day he worked as a carpenter. He just thought that if you worked hard and prayed hard this country would take care of you. Well, I remember he tried to get into the carpenter's union—and this is a very racist thing. And the only way for him to get into the union was to bribe the business representative. Well, he would have none of that. So one day when my father is out, my mother calls up the business representative and tells him to come to the house and she gives him $50 and a bottle of perfume and my father gets into the union. And when my father comes home and finds out that he's in the union he says, ‘You see. You work hard and pray hard and this country takes care.' And my mother and I . . . laughed. Wow. My old man was like the Man with the Hoe. He just felt that there were millions to be made in this country and he died at forty-two—just a poor black man.”

The cab pulls up at the Eastern Airlines terminal in Kennedy Airport. Stokely walks in and within seconds a porter walks up and smiles broadly. “I usually hang out with the porters at the airports,” he says, walking quickly through the terminal. “A lot of times I don't have money and they just pass the hat. They're good people. In Memphis last week they bought me a steak dinner.”

He walks to Gate 2 where a Mohawk flight is taking off at eight-forty-five. He waits ten minutes on standby but the flight is filled. He trudges back to the ticket desk and makes a reservation for the ten-thirty flight and then phones S.N.C.C. to tell them to notify the camp. By now Stokely is hungry and he walks into the cocktail lounge and restaurant in the heart of the terminal. The alcoholics, the hangers-on, the bored travelers, the women catching the nine o'clock flight to Mexico City line the bar, sipping Bloody Marys and beer and Scotch, straight. A waiter hustles over and says, no, the restaurant is not open at this hour, but there's another restaurant at the end of the corridor. A woman at the bar, blonde, tall, tanned, in her late forties, carrying a large white pillbox, turns and stares through dark glasses at Stokely—this hulking, dungareed figure in dark glasses too. Their eyes meet. The woman smiles, just slightly, and Stokely stares at her for a moment and then turns away and walks out.

“Man, this place says something. You can get a drink at nine o'clock, but you can't get food.”

At a table in the restaurant Stokely calls the waitress “M'am” and orders orange juice, bacon and eggs, English muffins and two glasses of milk.

“I used to drink,” he says with a smile. “I used to like wine. I used to know a hell of a lot of guys who drank wine all day.”

The waitress brings his orange juice and he sips it. “In Harlem I used to know a lot of guys like that. I used to know a lot of guys who were addicts and they were some beautiful cats. I'm not kidding. They had this ability, this profound ability to understand life.”

While Stokely's father struggled and his mother worked as a maid to help support the family—Stokely has four sisters—he often spent days and weeks with his aunts on Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street in Harlem. “I like Harlem,” says Stokely. “It's a very exciting place. It represents life, real life. On one block you have a church and right next door is a bar and they're both packed. On Saturday night people are always in constant motion. You get all of life's contradictions right there in one community: all the wild violence and all the love can be found in Harlem. You get the smells of human sweat and all sorts of bright colors and bright clothes and people in motion. You get preachers on one side of a street and nationalists on the other.”

The waitress brings the rest of the order.

Stokely Carmichael grew up in the Bronx and Harlem, a bright, wild, aggressive boy. He attended P.S. 39, P.S. 34, and P.S. 83 and was involved, almost as soon as the family moved to New York, in fistfights and gang intrigues. In the Bronx, he was the only Negro member of the Morris Park Avenue Dukes and was, he admits, a specialist in stealing hubcaps and car radios.

In 1956 quite suddenly Stokely broke with the past. He was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, a school for some of the brightest children in New York. “My freshman year I wanted to leave,” Stokely recalls. “I couldn't intellectually compete with those cats. They were doctors' sons and lawyers' sons and read everything from Einstein to
The Grapes of Wrath.
The only book I knew was
Huckleberry Finn.
It was clear to me I couldn't compete. My mother wouldn't accept it though. She wanted me to go to Science and she would have it no other way. No questions asked. ‘Remember one thing,' she would say, ‘they're white, they'll make it. You won't unless you're on the top.' ”

Stokely began reading—Marx, Darwin, Camus, anything he was given. “I began to read as quickly as I could; anything that anybody mentioned. It was naïve at the time, but it was sincere.” For the first time, his friends were upper middle-class whites, wealthy kids who would go on to Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis. He began going out with white girls and making the Greenwich Village scene. He was invited to parties on Park Avenue.

Even as he persisted in friendships with white men and women, however, Stokely realized that the white and black worlds he knew were not linking; in fact they were splitting, irrevocably, apart. “I learned at Science that white people, liberal white people, could be intellectually committed but emotionally racist. They couldn't see
through.
I was everybody's best friend. They would say to me, ‘Oh, you're so different.' And they didn't know any other black people. What they meant was I didn't meet their image of black people. And their image, their responses, are governed by the thought that Negroes
are
inferior. I was an exception. I was the accepted Negro. But other Negroes weren't like me. They were bums, lazy, unambitious, inhuman, and that attitude was extended to me. They would say to me, ‘Oh, you dance so well,' when I couldn't dance so well. Or they would say to me, ‘Oh, you're so sensitive.' Well the only thing I was sensitive to was the fact that they all had maids and they saw no inconsistency between being my friend and exploiting a black maid—paying her $30 a week while they went off and made a damned good living. I went to parties on Park Avenue and they called their maids by their first name and the maids were smiling and serving and I knew full well what was going on in their minds and I knew they didn't want to take all that shit. All these kids—these filthy rich kids—they all had maids and my mother was a maid.”

When Stokely was a high-school senior, he began reading about the first sit-ins in the South. His first reaction was negative. “What I said was, ‘Niggers always looking to get themselves in the paper, no matter how they did it.' My opinion was that they didn't know what they were doing.”

Within months, though, he met several students involved in the sit-ins. As the civil-rights movement spread quickly across the South, Stokely's commitment—and fascination—grew. First, he picketed Woolworth's in New York and then sat-in in Virginia and North Carolina. He turned down scholarships to several white schools and enrolled at Howard University, mostly because he could keep working in the movement while at a Negro school. At Howard, he met other civil-rights activists and immediately engaged in sit-ins and the early freedom rides through Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. The first ride and the first arrest was in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961. . . .

By now Stokely had finished breakfast at the airport and walked to Gate 2 to board the plane. Almost as soon as he took his seat he began shivering—he is always cold—and he grabbed a blanket off the rack. The plane started and Stokely peered through the window at the rows of A-frame houses below, the cars, the Manhattan skyline. “I went down South when I was nineteen. I was a kid who took nothing from no one. And, man, I took it.” He smiled. “In Mississippi, the beatings are by the cops, not by mobs. The mobs, they throw wild punches and if you're cool you can miss them. But the cops are out to get your ass and you get three cops in a back room who are out to get your ass and. . . .” He shook his head. “In Jackson, before they put me in jail, the cops rode me up and down in an elevator; they kept kicking and using billy clubs and pressing the buttons using their fist. I wanted . . . I just wanted to get my hands on one of them. But like you had to cover your head and . . . and . . . you keep thinking why don't you leave me alone. Why don't you beat your wives instead and just leave me alone?”

Stokely then spent time in jail. “Fifty-three days. Oh, lord, fifty-three days in a six-by-nine cell. Twice a week to shower. No books, nothing to do. They would isolate us. Maximum security. And those guards were out of sight. They did not play,
they did not play.
The sheriff acted like he was scared of black folks and he came up with some beautiful things. One night he opened up all the windows, put on ten big fans and an air conditioner and dropped the temperature to 38 degrees. All we had on was T-shirts and shorts. And it was so cold, so
cold,
all you could do was walk around for two nights and three days, your teeth chattering, going out of your mind, and it getting so cold that when you touch the bedspring you feel your skin is gonna come right off.