your house down. And I see Malcolm’s spirit his eyes burning Red Black and Green flames and crying tears of thunderbird wine that seem to touch my lips and make me thirsty for a taste of FREEDOM!
Freedom by any means necessary.
It’s necessary to have freedom by any means necessary.
And I begin to hate with love and love with hate.
This is Madness!
This is Madness!
This is Madness!
[ … ]
And during all this time my father was somewhere drowning his mutant plastic-minded self in a bottle of cheap wine letting that spiritual catalyst John Coltrane pay celestial homage to that White God who was riding his main vein.
This is Madness!
This is Madness!
This is Madness!
-
AKRON, OHIO, SEPTEMBER 2001
Reggie Watson
‘One night I’m walking past the athletic field behind our school. Suddenly there’s Jerome’s voice. “Hey Reggie.” I look back. Don’t see anyone. It was pitch-dark. No moonlight. “Hey Reggie,” I hear again. Like the voice came out of nowhere. Really strange. I hear him laugh. He must have hidden himself. Jerk, I think. Then I see his smile light up. He comes up to me. I see the whites of his eyes. His skin was so dark you couldn’t see him from a distance. He dissolved into the night. “You’re just like a ghost,” I said. A haint. “Haint” became “Hank”. So from that day onward he was called Hank. I suppose we were about fourteen. Everybody in South High called him Hank.
“Mr. Giovanni?”
“What, Huling?”
“What part of Sicily are your people from?”
“What do you mean?”
Giovanni was our school principal. He wanted to be whiter than the whitest whites, but he looked like us. Thick lips, broad nose. Hank stood facing him in the hallway. “You’re from Sicily, aren’t you?”
You could see Giovanni getting mad. He held his breath. His cheeks went all purple.
“You got a problem, Huling?”
“No, sir.”
“Then cut it out.”
“I was only asking what part of Sicily your people come from. Just interested, that’s all. Nothing wrong with that?”
I was standing there too. The way Giovanni looked at him, like he could read his mind. This nigger knows I’ve got black blood. He hated us.
“I’m gonna count to three, Huling.”
“Okay, okay,” Hank said, breaking into a laugh.
“Get into my office.”
“What for?”
“Now.”
I’ve forgotten what kind of punishment he got.
‘Hank was a constant in my life. There were times when we didn’t see each other that much but even then I had the feeling he was close by. He was much freer than I was. In a way he was the head of the household. I never knew exactly what all he got up to. I just wanted to be around him. Even when we were little I had the feeling that somehow or other, he had more know-how about life than I did. Why things were the way they were. Like he had some kind of secret knowledge none of us other kids had. He was himself very early on. A personality. And by hanging around with him I had the sense of becoming more of myself too.
‘We had a lot in common. I remember waiting out on the driveway for my father to come pick me up. He’d said he would take me out. It was a Saturday afternoon. Beautiful summer weather. I’d put on my new black sneakers, my jeans, and a tight white dress shirt. My mother said I should come inside, but I sat there stock-still, waiting. I was convinced he would come get me. Only when it got dark did I go inside. This ritual repeated itself four times. My father was an alcoholic, like Hank’s. We felt the same lack of a father, the same pain, the same anger. But Hank wasn’t afraid. I remember once a bunch of us hanging around in front of South High. Just messing around, nothing serious. Up comes the police. They tell us to split up, beat it. Hank steps forward and sticks his fist in the air. “Black power! Black power! I’m Stokely Carmichael’s cousin.” He knew about the Black Panthers. Malcolm X. They arrested him and threw him into the paddy wagon. Only let him free the next day. It was like he was constantly testing himself. How far can I go? And sometimes he tested me too. Once we bought a car together, an old gray Plymouth, for eighty-five dollars. Hank wanted to be the first to drive it. That same night he totaled it. Didn’t say a word about it to me. Of course I was mad.
He recently told me that sometimes he picked on me so much that I’d take hold of him and yell, “Stop fucking with me, Hank.” Or I’d beat him up. But I can’t remember any of that. I must have repressed it. I didn’t want to lose his friendship.
He was a good athlete. Colleges were interested in him, wanted to give him a scholarship. But Hank dismissed it. He said, “The minute I break my leg, they’ll throw me off the campus.” He and Inez Paul were an item. She was his total opposite: popular, well-spoken, nicely dressed, sweet. She came from a good family. Giovanni, the principal, he didn’t like it one bit. He was afraid Hank would be a bad influence on her. But Inez was Homecoming Queen and she wanted Hank to be her date. Leave it to Hank to hook a girl like that. He didn’t even have to try. And none of the other guys were jealous of him. Jealousy wasn’t an issue. We all hated Giovanni. So we got sheets of cardboard and wrote “WE WANT HANK!” in great big letters. We picketed the administration. It was about more than that prom stuff. It was about vindication. And Hank got to be Homecoming King.
I was really tame compared to him. But later, when I was in the service in Germany and Hank had long since left for New York, it was like I assumed his personality. I wasn’t afraid anymore. They favored the white guys in the army. Made you feel like you weren’t worth beans. But I didn’t give a damn. I dealt drugs. Shipped whole packages of hashish to America. Just in the mail. I sucked up to the German dealers and when I had them hooked I’d beat the crap out of them and steal their drugs. I was always high. All that anger came out all at once. Anger at what the whites had done to my parents when they still lived in the South. That they couldn’t sit on the same benches. The lynchings. That’s what I told myself. I felt like a real Black Panther. One day I beat another soldier on his back so hard that the stick I used broke in two. I stole his dope. The guy was a mess. I’d already been in jail three times. If he pressed charges, I’d be a goner. So I had no choice but to apologize and beg him not to report the incident. He promised not to say anything. Something broke in me then. I thought: maybe I shouldn’t hate all whites. I was so bitter.
But that was all later. Did I tell you about the Akron riots? The riots changed everything for us. We’d already graduated from high school. Hank and I both worked at Firestone, the tire factory. Wait. Let’s go outside, I’ll show you where it all started.’
-
AKRON, OHIO, 1967
Omar
