‘He left a note. It’s on the table.’
‘This early?’
‘A Mr. Evans. He came all the way from Cleveland. Had a beauty of a car. He was a real gentleman. I made him some coffee.’
Ahmed Evans had left behind a note in elegant, old-fashioned handwriting. Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m. Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Let me know if you can be there. Black Arts Festival. You’re in charge. Peace, Ahmed.
Fred Ahmed Evans was a black nationalist. Omar had met him at a club in Cleveland about a year back. Evans drank orange juice and water. He wore a black suit with a white dress shirt. He was a small, slightly built man with a suspicious, self-assured look in his eye. Evans had the aura of an intellectual but his hands were large and strong and calloused. He had been a welder in a Cleveland steel factory before deciding to devote himself to the cause.
‘Where’d you get that fancy shirt?’ Evans had asked him. ‘Looks like it’s made out of gold.’
‘From a neighbor of mine who died. His wife gave it to me. She said it suited me. Why do you ask?’
‘Sad.’
‘He was sick.’
‘I hear you. Sad.’
‘What are you doing here? You look lost. That suit and all. You from the Nation or something?’
‘I haven’t come all this way to be put down again,’ Evans snapped.
‘Whoa, didn’t mean to rile you. Let me buy you a drink.’
Evans made a dismissive gesture. Then extended his hand. ‘Evans. I’ve seen you here before. I hoped we’d get the chance to talk.’
‘You’re from the cops.’
For the first time Ahmed Evans’s stern face broke into a smile. ‘You could be doing other things,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘For your own people, your own kind … the way I see it, you’re nothin’ but a big, stupid, motherfuckin’ nigga.’
‘Say what?’ Omar was surprised that he wasn’t even angry at this slender man with his strange sense of humor.
‘All that time you spend on women and hustling. You’d feel better if you did something for your own people. I guarantee it.’
‘I feel fine.’
‘Really?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because you do exactly what white people expect you to.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Why don’t you come to one of our meetings.’ Evans scribbled an address on the back of a silver foil lining from a pack of Marlboros. ‘Tuesday at eight.’ Shook his hand, as though to confirm the appointment.
But Omar misplaced the slip of paper with the address of the nationalists.
A few months later he bumped into the man again, at the same club.
‘We’re looking for someone to handle security,’ Evans said. That was after the Cleveland riots.
‘Sooner or later the police are going to arrest us, Omar. We’ve got to be prepared. Protect our wives and children if it comes to that. I don’t want to go through that hell again. What do you say?’
Evans rattled on about the right to self-determination and about niggers and Hough and education and the need for discipline, while all Omar thought about was that shiny .38 he’d hidden at the back of the closet in his room after the incident outside the Circle Ballroom. He hadn’t touched the weapon again, in an attempt to erase his memories of that cold winter night in Cleveland.
‘What do you think, Omar? Can you handle the responsibility?’
It was as though Evans was looking straight through him, giving him a second chance. Omar didn’t know if he liked it or not. Evans’s tone was self-assured and authoritative, almost arrogant, but at the same time Omar had the feeling that this black activist was actually looking out for him, actually putting his faith in him.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Can you change your life?’
He laughed.
Evans wrote down his address again, this time directly onto the inside of Omar’s left arm, so he couldn’t lose it.
In the kitchen he took a few bites of the catfish his grandmother had fried the night before. He passed over the vegetables and sticky rice. He’d filled up on beer with Reggie. He shook the wet coat off his shoulders, kicked off his boots, and climbed the stairs. He had stuck Evans’s note in his back pocket.
Saturday. Antioch College. You’re in charge.
That was two days away. He wondered why Evans didn’t just phone him. You’re in charge. He was proud and nervous at the same time. Evans was his mentor. For the past couple of months Omar drove to Hough every Tuesday evening and sat in a stuffy elementary-school classroom listening to the small black man tell about the history of his people, about Marcus Garvey, who long ago had campaigned for the emancipation of the blacks, who believed that blacks could only be free once they had returned to Africa, about Malcolm X and black identity, about black Americans’ right to self-defense. But Evans had never put him in charge of security before.
He would take his .38 with him, but that wasn’t enough, not for someone in charge.
‘What was that about?’ His grandmother was waiting at the head of the stairs.
‘Nothing.’
‘That gentleman drove all the way here from Cleveland for nothing?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Don’t mess with me, Jerome. I don’t want your mother to worry.’
‘You just said that Evans was a gentleman, those were your words.’ He put his arm around his grandmother’s shoulders. She was a large, powerful woman. Rose Fuller had helped Mama get a job in the hospital’s linen room. She had raised the younger children, and for every little scrape or ache she prepared a salve or special tea from the herbs in her garden. She was proud to be a southerner by birth, even though she’d only lived down there as a child. Every day she said how much she missed the wide open space, the heat. The humidity, which was like a second skin. That if it had been up to her she’d never have moved to Akron, Ohio, where it was cold for half the year and where it rained and snowed. ‘But your great-grandfather had big plans when he brought us here. He wasn’t scared of anything.’ She told them about the witches in the swampland. And about her Indian mother, who got medicine and herbs from the witches, which was the only reason, she said, that she and a couple of her siblings survived fever and diarrhea. ‘I only realized she was Indian when I went to school and the other kids said so. Until then, as far as I was concerned, she was just black, despite her skin being so light. She talked differently too. Words sounded softer out of her mouth.’ The stories were like make believe,
