strategist was slowly turning new facts over in his mind. He had been so let down by Calhoun’s disappearance that some aspects of MJUMBE’s move had slipped by unseen. Now, with time to think, new evidence was focusing on his mental screen.
First of all, Earl Thomas was going to be his pawn. He felt very good about the position the SGA president was in. It didn’t matter if the students saw Earl puttering around in connection with MJUMBE demands. They knew who the real leader was. But second and best, Calhoun didn’t know who was in charge. He would identify Earl as the leader of the detested militant faction on campus because Earl would present the demands. Earl couldn’t do anything to stop MJUMBE. The students would construe any negative move as jealousy. The deposed SGA leader would be a Mjumbe for MJUMBE. Pleasure at his own play on words almost capsized the chair in which Baker sat, back-tilted.
Gone was the animosity he had felt the previous April when told that some skinny, ostrich-looking nigger from Georgia had defeated him for the SGA post. Gone was the bitter gall he tasted when told forty minutes before: ‘Mr and Mrs Calhoun returned from Norfolk, but they are attending the theater this evening. They are expected to return about ten o’clock.’ The small, wigged maid who delivered those lines had stood in the Calhoun door-way like a reject from a Steppin’ Fetchit movie wiping her greasy hands on a napkin and trying to sound like a fancy British bitch.
Baker laughed out loud. He could imagine Thomas sitting helplessly in front of him like a jackass with an Afro.
‘Did’joo, did’joo hear that bitch?’ Baker asked when he realized everyone was watching him. ‘Did’joo hear that funky-ass maid callin’ the Sutton moviehouse wit’ wall-to-wall rats a thee-ate-uh?’ He told them that because he knew what Jonesy would say if he told them why he was really laughing.
Evidently everyone had heard because a faint smile choked through their clamped mouths. They smiled because they needed to. No one really thought that it was very funny. The crooked grins bounced off the dimly pulsating light bulb and skipped nervously out through the window. The room then returned to its tomblike silence.
Baker felt grimy. Sweat had stuck his underwear to his crotch.
Jonesy was visibly worried.
Speedy Cotton and Ben King were tired and nervous. They sat directly beneath the bald, waxy wattage that illuminated itself and little else. They tried to convince themselves that the tightness in their groins came from too much beer, too much football, and too little sleep. Their eyes wandered about the room but they saw very little.
Abul Menka remained cool. It was impossible to conclude exactly what was on the man’s mind. Baker called him ‘Captain Cool.’ He sat in the corner, feet propped, smoking a cigarette. In truth, Abul Menka was very seriously thinking about cutting out. He would have been gone had he not known that his motives would be misinterpreted. The MJUMBE men would have thought he was leaving because he was afraid of Calhoun.
‘Fuck Calhoun,’ he thought sullenly. Abul did not care if Sutton’s Head Nigger had eight strokes and ten heart attacks, outdoing all of the other university presidents who were cracking up as a result of student demands. No, Calhoun was no problem. But Abul Menka was not anxious to see Earl Thomas.
There were only three tenants at Mrs Gilliam’s boarding house on Pine Street. The three men lived on the second floor of the white three-story structure. It was not for lack of applicants that the third floor was empty, but because Mrs Gilliam was very particular about her roomers.
Earl had always considered himself highly fortunate when he thought about how quickly Mrs Gilliam had taken him in. At the end of the previous school year he had decided not to leave Sutton, but to take a job as a mechanic at the nearby computer factory. All at once the dormitories were closing for the summer and he was without a place to stay. It was then that he remembered Zeke, the Black handyman, who had often mentioned his room at Mrs Gilliam’s, where he also took his meals. With three days remaining before school closed Earl had gone to see her. The two of them had hit it off immediately.
Mrs Gilliam was sixty years old. A short, gray-haired, thickly built matron of a woman who had lived in Sutton for thirty years. Her husband had been a conductor on the ICC railroad, making runs from Miami to Chicago on the Seminole, when she met him. She was a waitress at a coffee shop in Kankakee, Illinois, and after having seen the big, raw-boned Black man twice a week over a six-month period, they married. The railroad rerouted Charles Gilliam soon after, and his route carried him through Sutton and other parts of southern Appomattox County in Virginia. He bought an impressive three-story frame home on Pine Street and started his family. He had been working for the line nearly twenty-six years when he died of a heart attack.
His wife, Dora, thrived on company. She was a cornerstone at Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church and the head of her sewing circle. Soon after her husband’s death she began to take in tenants, mostly for the companionship it provided.
Earl had made Mrs Gilliam break one of her cardinal rules. She had vowed never to rent rooms to college students. For the most part she considered them to be impolite, disrespectful young men with no idea of the meaning of the word responsibility. Earl was somewhat different. In the first place he was working his way through school and intended to add his summer’s earnings to a partial scholarship. Secondly, he was as polite and mannerly a young man as Mrs Gilliam had ever met. And he had looked so let down when she told him, quite gruffly, that she didn’t rent to college students, that she had had no choice but to invite him in for a cup of coffee to better explain her position. Somehow over coffee the word ‘college’ came to mean more to her than it had meant before. It took on the meaning of her dead husband’s unfulfilled dreams. She found it very easy to overlook the fact that Earl was a student. She even rationalized her decision by pointing out the fact that he wouldn’t be a student during the summer, but when September rolled around there was no mention of Earl moving out.
As Earl combed his head of thick hair his mind ran through the maze of emotions that gripped him, identifying first one and then the other. Jealousy? Fear? Anger? Anger was the most predominant. He felt as though he had been betrayed. Not betrayed by friends, but by that insidious ‘Brother’ term. MJUMBE subjugated the entire campus into one giant malignancy and classified all constituents under the heading of ‘Brother.’ The word seemed to have less meaning every day. Long ago he had decided that he would not be a part of the group that criticized the hypocrisy without an alternative. Who was sure how it felt to be Black? Maybe running your tongue over the word ‘Brother’ a thousand times a day was a step in the right direction.
Earl felt the muscles at the hinges of his mouth tightening to form knots of energy. He looked like a cracker ballplayer on the Baseball Game of the Week with a quarter package of Bull O’ the Woods chewing tobacco poking his mouth out a foot and nowhere to spit.
He knew he must not allow himself the luxury of rage. He knew he could never accomplish anything that way; barging into the MJUMBE meeting room and screaming, ‘Just what the fuck is everybody tryin’ to pull?’ He decided to play it New York-style. Be cool. They had him by the balls. Everybody knew that. But if he acted as though he didn’t know it or didn’t care he might be able to jive them into a mistake. Then what? He didn’t even know if he wanted them to make a mistake. He couldn’t decide which side of the fence he was on.
He thought about the election that had taken place the previous spring. When March rolled around and the first signs about nomination procedures
