Black Water Rising Page 5

  “You got some time tonight, son? Time we can talk?”

  Something in the Rev’s tone makes Jay pause. “What’s go­

  ing on?”

  “I’d rather we talk in person. Can you come by the church tonight, sometime around seven thirty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll see you then.”

  Reverend Boykins hangs up, leaving Jay to wonder who we is. He tries to go back to his work, but finds he can’t focus. It’s more than the cryptic call from his father-in-law. He’s also had trouble putting the newspaper article out of his mind, the one from yesterday’s paper. Before he left the house this morning, he actually tucked the newspaper clipping into his pants pocket because he simply couldn’t bring himself to throw the thing away. He’s had a few halfhearted thoughts of phoning the police. But to say what exactly? He doesn’t know that the gunshots they heard Saturday night have any­

  thing to do with the shooting death in the newspaper. And no matter how hard he tries, he simply can’t picture himself walking into a police station and offering information that ties him to some other shooting . . . certainly not with his felony arrest record. Free advice he gives to any prospective client who walks through the door: don’t volunteer anything to a cop that he didn’t ask for in the first place. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

  He already checked the Post this morning, standing over his kitchen table in his shorts and bare feet. There was no more men­

  tion of a white male, shot twice in Fifth Ward. It’s as if the whole thing was simply forgotten, and Jay tries to convince himself that Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 45

  he can do the same. He puts his mind and body to work, diving into the mound of paperwork on his desk.

  The rest of the day passes in a blur.

  Eddie Mae gets a stomachache around four o’clock, the symp­

  toms of which are very vague. She comes out of the bathroom wearing lipstick and fresh powder, asking if she can go home early. She practically skips out the door when he says yes. At a quarter to seven, Jay grabs his suit jacket and heads for his car. First Love Antioch Baptist Church is located on the northeast side of Fifth Ward, out by the railroad tracks, where the Ewell Line runs east-west three times a day like clockwork, shaking the church’s fake stained glass. The church is small and poor and set in the middle of a residential street lined with one-room shacks. Jay parks right in front. He lights a cigarette and stares at a gray house down the street. She would be nearing eighty, he thinks. The juror at his trial. He used to bring her things, a bag of groceries every now and then or flowers, any little thing just to say thank you. She’s been dead three years, and her people, the ones who stay in the house now, won’t hardly ever open the door. They don’t know Jay or what their grandmother did for him, the life she saved.

  He tosses his cigarette and steps out of his Buick, into the reckless path of a late-model Cadillac thumping by on the street, blasting music on the stereo, so loud the whole car shakes, rat­

  tling gold chains hanging from the rearview mirror. Jay feels the crush of bass in his chest. He stares at the group of young men in the car. They’re no more than nineteen years old, brothers with do-rags mashed against their foreheads. They regard Jay with open suspicion, his pressed clothes and polished shoes. They seem to know he doesn’t belong here, in their neighborhood, in 46 Attic a L o c ke

  their time. As the car continues up the street, Jay can’t help but think of where he was at nineteen. Marching, strategizing, plan­

  ning. Fighting for a hell of a lot more than gold chains hanging from a Coupe de Ville.

  He turns for the church steps, hearing the last ringing chords of “Jesus, Come Walk with Me” on the church’s aging pipe organ. Choir practice is ending, Jay thinks, or just getting started. Inside the sanctuary, he walks down the blue-carpeted center aisle between the pews, where he walked on his wedding day. The man at the organ bench is small and thin, with a cheap, greasy Jheri curl slicked against the sides of his head. He’s scoop­

  ing up sheet music. The woman standing next to him is packing up her hymnal.

  It’s only then that Jay notices the men down front, filling up the first three rows. There’s got to be more than a dozen of them, men dressed in scuffed work boots, grimy jeans, and stained T-shirts, a few of which read brotherhood of longshoremen, local 116 in letters that are cracked and fading. In an instant Jay knows what this is about, what he’s walked into. He can read it on the men’s stern faces, their rough, cal­

  loused hands, the nylon caps clenched in their fists. He can smell it on them. The salt of the Gulf.

  He knows this is some trouble about the strike. Reverend Boykins stands in the center aisle, down in front of the pulpit. He waves a hand for Jay to come forward. “We’ve been waiting on you, son.”

  They have all turned around now. They’re all looking at him. In the crowd, Jay spots a familiar pair of dark brown eyes. Kwame Mackalvy, who dropped “Lloyd,” his given name, sometime during their junior year at the University of Hous­

  ton—“Lloyd” was a banker’s name, he’d said, an “establishment”

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 47

  name—is sitting in the second pew, wearing a union T-shirt over his loud and colorful dashiki. He runs a hand along the fresh, clean T-shirt as if admiring a new costume, getting into char­

  acter. This is Kwame’s scene, Jay thinks, always some fight to be had, a cause to get behind. Kwame runs a community center a few blocks from Jay’s apartment, but the two men haven’t spoken in years. They run in different circles now, Jay with his middleclass aspirations and Kwame still holding notions of a coming revolution.

  “Jay Porter,” Kwame says, drawing out the name, eyeing Jay’s suit and his close-cropped hair. He lets out a slow, catlike grin, his teeth white and unnaturally large. “White man still got you, huh, bro, one way or another.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Lloyd,” Jay says flatly. He’s relieved when Reverend Boykins opens the meeting, if only to move out of Kwame’s political crosshairs. His father-in­

  law speaks to Jay first. “Son, you heard about the trouble we’ve been having down at the Ship Channel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, we got a bigger mess on our hands here.”

  The Rev nods toward an older gentleman in the first pew. He’s wearing a Houston Independent School District janitor’s uniform, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. Awkward and shy in front of the group, the man starts to put his hands in his pockets, forgetting he’s in his uniform, which doesn’t have any pockets. He rests his hands at his sides instead; then, with an elbow, he nudges a young man beside him. The boy, eighteen or nineteen, stands and turns, facing the rest of the men too. He’s wearing a sling on his left arm. His face is beaten something awful, bruised and discolored, his lip busted and swollen. One of his front teeth is chipped. “Mr. Porter,” the janitor says. “This 48 Attic a L o c ke

  here’s my son.” He puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You can see they beat him good. They drug him from his car, coming from one of the meetings, broke his arm in two places.”

  “Who?” Jay asks, though by now he’s already guessed.

  “Some of the ILA boys.”

  The ILA is the International Longshoremen’s Association, the white union down at the docks. The Brotherhood of Longshore­

  men belongs to the blacks. The two labor groups were ordered to integrate a few years back and are still operating under a gov­

  ernment consent decree to do just that. But the process has taken longer than anyone expected, except for maybe the longshore­

  men themselves. “Some of them ain’t too happy about us talking about a walkout,” one of the men says, his ashy elbows propped on the back of the first pew, his hands in two tight fists. “We supposed to all be brothers now, part of the same union. Govern­

  ment say so. If some of us strike, we all got to.”

  “ILA ain’t
having none of that,” one of the dockworkers says. From what Jay has read in the papers, talk of a strike originated in the Brotherhood’s camp. The two unions technically operate under the same voting body, pay into the same pool of funds, but the black workers are routinely paid less than their white brothers, and the Brotherhood is using a new round of negotia­

  tions with the shipping companies to get more pay. They’ve got enough white ILA men promising to join their ranks, enough for a bona fide strike.

  “They got some good white ones down there,” one man says.

  “But the rest of them crackers is up to no good,” another man says, pulling a gnawed toothpick from his mouth. “They trying to scare us out of a strike. And the police ain’t doing a damned thing about it.”

  “He drove himself to the station,” the janitor says. “My boy looking worse than he do now. They wouldn’t do nothing, Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 49

  wouldn’t let him fill out a report, nothing. Even though Darren says he saw the men who did it.”

  “Police making a bigger mess out of this than it is,” somebody chimes in.

  “They’re doing everything they can to make trouble for the mayor,” Reverend Boykins adds. “The police department has made no secret of the fact that they don’t like her.”

  “We gon’ strike either way,” the man with the toothpick says.

  “We talking about walking out as early as this week. Soon as we get the votes.”

  “Place wouldn’t be nothing without us.” An older man speaks, his chest puffed out, gray hairs peeking out of his union T-shirt.

  “All the money they making off our backs, and we ain’t seeing none of it. Folks can’t put food on the table, businesses can’t sell

  ’less we load and unload them ships. It’s time they start paying us what we’re worth, least what the other boys is getting.”

  “I mean, what was all that ‘we shall overcome’ stuff,” Ashy Elbows says, glancing vaguely in Jay’s direction, “if I can’t pay my rent?”

  The men are all staring at Jay, waiting. He doesn’t understand what they want from him, what exactly they think he can do about any of this. Reverend Boykins seems to read his mind.

  “We understand you know the mayor, Jay.”

  Kwame turns to Jay and winks.

  Jay feels a stream of sweat running down the center of his back. Yeah, he knows the mayor.

  Of course, she’s been trying to forget him ever since she ran for office, paying a whole slew of consultants to bury her past. A couple of reporters tracked him down during the mayoral race, asking all kinds of questions about their days together at U of H. But Jay didn’t say a thing, not one word about the fact that she joined SNCC when she was twenty-one, then the more 50 Attic a L o c ke

  radical SDS a year later. He didn’t say anything about the guns she kept in her dorm room or about the marches she organized single-handedly. Cynthia Maddox was just a girl he went to col­

  lege with. Maybe they’d had a class together, maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they’d had a cup of coffee together one time . . . it wasn’t for him to say.

  “We figure,” the Rev says, “maybe you can talk to her.”

  “And say what exactly?”

  “We need to send a message, son. Let the city know these young men are serious about a strike. And if some of the ILA keep acting ugly, our men are going to need police protection. The mayor is going to have to get off the stick, talk to the chief and get some uniforms down there watching these boys.”

  “You been involved in this type of thing before, Mr. Porter,”

  the janitor says. “I followed your other case, the one against the police department a few years back. If the city sees you repre­

  senting my boy in this thing—”

  “Wait a minute. You’re not talking about a lawsuit, are you?”

  Jay asks.

  “A lawsuit is just the thing we need,” Kwame says. “Blow this issue wide open in the courts, drain the city’s resources, make ’em know we mean business.” He stands suddenly, getting pumped by his own rhetoric. “We got to take charge of this opportunity, shut the motherfuckers down if we have to.”

  Kwame has badly miscalculated his audience and forgotten he’s in a house of the Lord. Reverend Boykins shoots him a look of disapproval. Even the sweat-stained dockworkers seem turned off by the sudden outburst. They don’t want a revolution. They want a bigger paycheck. “Well, now, let’s hold on there, Mr. Mackalvy,” the Rev says. “Let Jay talk to the mayor first.”

  “You’ll do that for us, Mr. Porter?” the janitor asks, a hand on his son’s one good shoulder. Jay looks at the boy’s father, then Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 51

  at the Rev, the closest thing to a father he’s ever had. He nods without thinking. “Yeah . . . I’ll do it.”

  The meeting moves on after that to talk about strategies for the strike, getting the word out to black day laborers that they are not to cross the picket line, should it come to that, and decid­

  ing whose wife or mother will make sandwiches or some chicken while they’re on the line. Jay tunes out most of it. He can tell they’ve finished with him, but there isn’t any way to leave with­

  out him seeming rude. A few minutes later, they end the meeting with an awkward prayer, the men fidgeting, uncomfortable hold­

  ing hands. Jay ducks out as soon as he can, nodding once as the Rev asks, “You’ll call on her, won’t you, son?”

  Outside, Kwame stops him on the church steps, his face flushed with the heat and excitement of the meeting. “It’s just like old times, huh, partner?”

  Jay looks at Kwame’s hand on his shoulder. “Don’t touch me, Lloyd.”

  He practically jogs to his car, hot to get out of there. There’s no way out of this thing, he knows. His father-in-law made him promise. And Jay, for the most part, is a man of his word. He has no idea how he’s going to get to the mayor. What’s he supposed to do, call her up after more than a decade? Just show up at city hall? He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes, and the newspaper clipping slides out, fluttering briefly before sinking softly in the humid air, landing at Jay’s feet. He stares at the scrap of paper, the facts of a murder laid out before him in black and white.

  A moment later, he climbs into his car. Clutching the newspa­

  per clipping in the palm of his hand, he kicks the engine in gear. Highway 59 to I-45 is the quickest route home, but Jay drives past the nearest on-ramp. He tells himself he’s taking the long way home. But deep down, he knows. He’s heading for the water.

  C h a p t e r 4

  Jay left home when he was fifteen. He took his summer earn­

  ings from working in his mother’s shop in Nigton, up in Trin­

  ity County, and left. He was headed to Nacogdoches. That was his plan. But at the bus station he met a pretty girl who was headed south, toward the Gulf, and he changed his mind on the spot. He bought a ticket to Houston instead. If he was gon’ do this, he was gon’ do it big. He arrived in the city at dawn. He didn’t know a thing about where he was, didn’t know a soul. He spent half a day talking to a janitor at the bus station, ask­

  ing about a place to stay. He ended up in Fifth Ward because it was black and therefore safe. He found a room on the first floor of Miss Mitchell’s boardinghouse, where it was clean and there was always fresh coffee. His upstairs neighbor was a transves­

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 53

  tite burlesque dancer whose stage name was Effie Dropbottom. They sat up most nights, when Effie wasn’t performing, smoking cigarettes and playing records. Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles and any Motown. Or they listened to the True Confessions show on 1430 AM.

  He found a job at a bakery, cleaning ovens and sweeping up after hours. He scratched out a living and called home when he was ready. It was his sister he wanted to see about. He felt awful for leaving her behind. It was a cowardly thing to do, he knew. But he couldn’t protect her from his mother’s third husband— />
  the nasty, sidelong glances and midnight gropes—and that fact alone had been more painful to a young boy trying to be a man than any guilt about leaving. They talked a couple of times, he and his sister. He sent her a postcard once. It was a picture of the Astrodome, the words “8th Wonder of the World!” scrawled in silver glitter across the top. Sometime after that, he heard she went to stay with her father, his mother’s second husband, up around Dallas.

  Jay never finished high school. But when the University of Houston was making noise about integrating, trying to head off at the pass any radical violence or government injunction, he went down to the admissions office without an appointment. He scored near 100 percent on the entrance exam, and they let him in without a diploma. He moved into a segregated dorm a couple of miles off campus and said good-bye to Fifth Ward for a long, long time.

  Driving through the neighborhood now, Jay stares out of his car window, thinking how much Fifth Ward has changed. Down Lockwood Drive, fine-dining restaurants and clothing shops have been replaced by liquor stores and Laundromats with single women inside, folding clothes alone. There are boardedup buildings on nearly every corner and empty fields thick with 54 Attic a L o c ke

  weeds and flattened soda cans, shards of broken glass, trash and used furniture. Even the sidewalk in front of the Freedman’s National Bank, the first black-owned bank in the state, has dead grass coming up through cracks in the cement. Jay remembers the neighborhood differently, remembers when it was a point of pride for black folks to say they lived near Lockwood Drive or had a little place on Lyons Avenue or went to Phillis Wheatley High School. He knows plenty of doctors and lawyers who came out of Wheatley. Fifth Ward was a place where black people thrived. People made a little bit of money, made a nice life for themselves. The neighborhood wasn’t much, wasn’t fancy or rich, but it was theirs.

  And then, of course, came integration.

  Black people suddenly had a choice, in theory at least, and the ones with any money almost always chose to leave Fifth Ward behind. Just because they could. Because wasn’t that, after all, the very thing they had been fighting for?