Night of Power, page 13
And for the last couple of days he had been talking vaguely of the necessity of armed struggle, in the near future…
Dena had tried to argue with him, but it was hopeless. Jerome had always been able to argue circles around her. And he had devoted a good deal of time and study to this argument, while she—
—had put it out of her mind years ago.
“Jerome,” she had said this afternoon, “every black person in America has thought about armed struggle at some time. The only ones that keep thinking about it are the ones that can’t do arithmetic. To try it would be suicide for all of us.”
“Not to try it is sure suicide.”
“We’ve come a long way since slavery. Not far enough by a damn sight, agreed—but a long way. It’s gotten better just since I was born, in ’59—we’re getting there, slowly but surely. It’d be stupid to throw it all away now.”
“You’re wrong, Dena-mite. We’ve gone as far as they’re going to let us go, and they take a little more back every year. We’ll never be any stronger: it’s now or never.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake—how far did the Panthers or the Black Liberation Army get? The Mau Mau fiasco was only a few years ago; have you forgotten it already?” The Mau Mau, essentially a re-run of the Black Panther Party, had first appeared in 1990. By 1991 they were involved in pitched battles with police in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. By 1992 the last of them were dead, in prison, or fled overseas.
“The Panthers were visible. The B.L.A. thought small, and the Mau Mau were a special case.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I mean real revolutionary leaders don’t wear uniforms and get their pictures in the paper.”
So there it was, an open hint. There was some kind of black revolutionary underground. Was Jerome a member, or just an admirer? One more conversation that there didn’t seem to be any sense in having.
Dena sighed, threw her roach deep into the garden, and tugged the sheet closer around her in spite of the heat. God damn it, how were black people ever supposed to get anywhere—when every black who did succeed at all, who got as much as one foot out of the trap, was immediately belaboured with guilt for all those still in chains? She wanted to live in a sane world, in which skin color meant nothing, and had managed to build herself such a world. Was it her fault that it was not yet big enough for everybody? Jerome tried to make her feel that every oppressed black person in the world was her problem, just because she had a similar complexion, that for her to have anything somehow hurt them, that to throw away everything she had would somehow help them. He made her feel guilty about everything of which she was most proud.
Was he getting to her? Was all his talk reaching her, was she communicating confusion and doubt to Russell in small unconscious ways and subliminal hints? Had Jerome seduced her mind, and was that why Russell had brought her home that damned magazine?
And was that why it had upset her as badly as it had?
With rigid self-honesty Dena admitted to herself that the magazine would not have produced such a violent reaction two weeks ago. Given to her then, by a husband with whom she had a secure relationship, it might have been enjoyable in a raunchy sort of way. The adultery theme would have seemed—as fantasy—pleasantly titillating, and she would have told herself that the skin colour of the participants was irrelevant. But now she was hypersensitized to race, and uncomfortable with it, and no longer absolutely certain that her husband trusted her, and no longer absolutely certain that she trusted herself…
Behind her in the apartment, the phone rang.
It was awkward running in a sheet; it got snarled in the sliding-track of the security-gate, so she left it in the doorway and kept going. Jennifer was at the concert, it wouldn’t be Lisa, it had to be Russell. She got it on the start of the fourth ring and said, “Russell?” Silence. “Russell, I’m sorry.” More silence. “Come on home, baby, we’ve got to talk.” Silence. “Russell, is that you?” Click.
Shit. Was that him, or wasn’t it? Wrong number, heavy breather who chickened out, spurious signal from New York’s overloaded phone system? Or was her husband about to come home? Or—oh God—could he have gotten mugged, and just made it to a phone booth before losing consciousness?
Stop that, she told herself. Even if that were true, there was no advantage to anticipating it, nothing she could do about it except go mad. She had to assume that he simply didn’t feel like talking on the phone, that he was on his way home right now. There was a prospect that needed preparing for. When he did come in that door, what was she going to say?
Dena girl, it is time to take stock. Time to identify your priorities and cut your losses. What have you got?
Item: you’ve got one hell of a husband. Even from a totally cold-blooded and selfish perspective, he’s a dancer’s dream. He is retired, wealthy, mature, undemanding, intelligent, sexually sophisticated, and he’s your biggest fan. He doesn’t begrudge the time your career takes away from him, and he’s free to travel wherever your career takes you, he doesn’t care that your career makes beans, he supports you in a style to which you’ve always wanted to become accustomed, he already has a child so he doesn’t mind that you don’t want to have any now…and he’s the best friend you ever had.
Item: you’ve got a hell of a daughter. Not only do you love her, you like her—and the feeling is mutual. You even have high hopes that the two of you might live through her adolescence without becoming mortal enemies. You’ve got all the good side of motherhood, without the pregnancy and dirty diapers and day-care and chicken pox.
No question about it, girl. Tell that man as soon as he comes in the door. You’re going to quit Lisa’s gig and pack your family and get your black ass out of New York just as fast as is humanly possible. It’s survival time, honey—don’t wait another day, and pray to God you haven’t waited too long already. It’s a shame to lose what is probably your last big Swan Song performance at the Joyce, and Lisa will be madder than a wet cat, but fuck her. She has five weeks to replace you, and she’ll either understand or she won’t, but don’t you dare screw up a good marriage for the ego-thrill of showing your stuff on the stage of the Joyce Theatre. End up all alone again, with a great last line on your resumé? Hell, no—get back home to Halifax, where there’ll be all the time in the world to figure out just what went wrong here in New York and what has to be done about it. Step one: Remove hand from flame.
Now why is he buzzing? Oh, of course, he was upset when he left, he forgot his keys. That was quick; he must have phoned from just around the corner.
She buzzed back to unlock the foyer door, immensely relieved that he was all right, and glad that she had used her time to reach a decision instead of wasting it on worrying. She wished this building were modern enough to have security cameras—it would have been useful to study Russell’s expression as he approached. She opened all the locks, and strained to see him coming in the fisheye viewer.
It was Jerome.
Dena had a dancer’s atrophied sense of body modesty, but all at once she was acutely aware that she was naked. In a panic she snapped one of the locks shut again.
He knocked. “Dena? I know you’re in there. We’ve got to talk.”
“Shit.” The clothes she had worn this evening were filthy and complicated to get into. She sprang across the room to the garden door and retrieved the sheet, tearing it slightly as she yanked it free. She slid the security-gate shut and locked it, closed the door, turned on a lamp, and arrayed the sheet so that she was totally covered. Then she returned to the hall door and said loudly, “Jerome you can’t come in. Go away.”
“We’ve got to talk now.”
“My husband is not home. I cannot let you in.”
“I know he’s not home, I’m the one that just called. I bet I even know why he’s not home.”
“Go away.”
“It can’t wait. You were supposed to come back to the studio for late rehearsal after you got your head shaved, I was going to tell you then. But you didn’t come back.”
“I called Lisa and told her I was cutting.”
“Dena, I have something of life or death importance to tell you, and I’m not leaving until I do, and I am not going to yell it through a door!” He was shouting by now.
“Tell me tomorrow,” she shouted back.
“I expect to be dead by this time tomorrow.” He stopped, and went on in a quieter voice. “And if we don’t talk, right now, you might be too. Your husband and his child too, maybe.”
The words were preposterously melodramatic, but Dena knew what Jerome sounded like when he was bullshitting and this wasn’t it. With a premonitory thrill of fear, she opened the door—and stood blocking the way. “Is that some kind of threat?”
He was genuinely wound up about something, but still he smiled when he saw her. “God damn, you look fine. You look like an African princess. No wonder your husband got upset—”
“Say what you’ve got to say and go.”
“I mean, with that shiny head and that African robe, there’s no way in the world he can keep telling himself you’re a white woman with a deep tan—”
She started to close the door.
She expected him to try and stop her, was braced to repel him. Instead he stepped back and said quickly, “I am very sorry.” He glanced toward the foyer. “Please let me in.”
She stopped with the door half-closed. “No way in hell. You can talk from there, I hear you fine.”
He glanced to the foyer again. “I am trying to save your life,” he said in a low voice, “and I’m a target standing out here. Let me in. Five minutes and I’m gone, I swear by whatever we used to have.”
She hesitated, furious at the situation; turned and walked away from the door. When he had closed it behind him, she whirled and snapped, “Jerome, look at me. Watch my lips. Russell could get back any minute. If you are still here when he gets back, I will personally kick your crotch up into your lungs. Subject to that, you have two minutes. Go.”
So he sat down and was silent for a while, eyes closed. Just as she was about to throw something at him, he opened his eyes and started talking.
“I’ve been rehearsing this for a week, and I still don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how much to say. I have to tell you enough to convince you that I’m serious and sane—but I can’t trust you not to drop a dime on me, now you’ve married white. I shouldn’t say anything at all—but once upon a time you cared for me and did me good and I owe you.”
“Jerome, will you just—”
“It’s the Night of Power, Dena. Not that Muslim crap I told you about: the real Night of Power.”
“Oh, for—”
“Listen to me. I am a member of a revolutionary underground—”
“I know that, you’ve been hinting for a week. I must admit I’m surprised. I thought you had more brains than—”
“You may be surprised again if you don’t listen!”
She was beginning to be more afraid of what he was saying than she was afraid of Russell coming home while he was saying it. “Go on.”
“An operation is going to take place tonight. I can’t tell you how big, I don’t have the whole picture myself, but the specific task I’m involved in is big. There will be a shitstorm. Riots, backlash. A black person in a white neighbourhood will be at extreme risk. If you were smart you’d get on the A Train right now, and be north of 96th Street by midnight, but you’re not smart so the next best thing is to fortify this place and hole up for a siege. At least a week, maybe longer…”
There are black people who have no hope at all, and there are black people who have some hope. In North America since well before the Civil War, many of the latter group have lived in more or less constant fear that the former will one day rise up as one in rage and despair and precipitate the pogrom that will exterminate them all. Nat Turner’s doomed fiasco was only one of hundreds of slave revolts, and each brought savage and indiscriminate retribution. The fear is often admixed with guilt, especially in those who have achieved any measure of success in the existing society. An enemy could say, now that you’ve got yours, you don’t want anybody rocking the boat. Dena was terrified—Jerome was not talking about a garden-variety riot, blacks tearing up black neighbourhoods, he was hinting at military insurrection in white territory. But she was reluctant not only to show her fear, but to feel it in the first place. She remembered the wretched people she had seen in Harlem, and knew she had no right to tell those people not to despair.
Oh God, it’s finally come!
“I couldn’t tell you before, Dena, can you see that? For the last week I walked around it, trying to decide whether I could get you to leave town altogether, whether I should try. But I couldn’t take the chance. This is bigger than you and me.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said weakly. “So the revolution is at hand, huh? What’s the name of your organization?”
“We don’t have a name.”
“Come on,” she said, hearing her voice get louder with each word, “you can tell me. AfroAmerican People’s Front? Sons of the Panthers? The New Mau Mau? What do you call yourselves?”
“We don’t. No need to. I told you once, a real revolution doesn’t issue press releases. It doesn’t have any image at all.”
“How about The Detonators? You know, the little tiny part down at the end of the dynamite that destroys the whole—
“In my mind I think of us as Michael’s Brothers.”
“—Michael?”
“Yeah, you know, I told you about him, big cat lives up in Harlem, The Man With No Spot—”
“I know Michael. I met him.”
“You did? I didn’t know that, why didn’t you—”
“Never mind. He’s behind this revolution?”
“Let’s say it won’t come as a shock to him.”
Dena was stunned. In her mind “revolutionary” was defined as someone whose common sense had been exceeded by either his anger or his ego. There had been no anger in Michael. Even when he had suggested the breaking of the heroin merchant’s elbows he had not been angry, he had been…sad, sad and resigned. Dena had once seen a policeman who liked dogs shoot a rabid dog; his face had held that same grim acceptance. Was Michael an ego-freak, then, one of those who yearned so badly for a place in history that he had forgotten blood is the ink of history? He had seemed to her to be as egoless as a man could be and still be strong. To be so universally respected in Harlem, he had to genuinely care about people: those people had seen every kind of con there was. And he was not a bigot—he had gone to considerable trouble to protect Russell and Jennifer. There was no way Dena could reconcile her vivid memories of Michael with the news that he was a revolutionary leader.
“Michael knows about this?”
“He has counted the cost. We all have.”
“What time tonight?”
“I can’t give you the exact hour. You won’t be in danger here before sun-up—but long before that, you won’t be able to leave Manhattan.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said—it won’t be possible to leave the island.”
“You mean physically possible? When? How soon?”
“I can’t nail it down, I shouldn’t have said that much.”
“I see.” Dena got up. “Stay there.” She took great care to keep her face impassive and move slowly, but as she entered the bedroom her mind was on computer time, running dozens of alternate solutions for a problem with too many variables.
How long have I got?
Say we have three hours and Russell gets back in a half hour and Jennifer and José get back in an hour, say we just leave everything and go. Can we get clear of New York City in two hours by train? Not dependably at this time of night. By bus? Ditto. Cab? Not without more cash than we’ve got on hand. Steal a cab, maybe with José’s help—but which way do we go? Two hours east is halfway to Russell’s father’s place, two hours west is deep Jersey, two hours north is Kingston or Bridgeport, which is better? Or can we try for the airport and hope for a red-eye flight to anywhere? Suppose José doesn’t get Jennifer back for several hours—can Russell and I steal a car and get it ready? And suppose Russell decides to stay out there all night and sulk? Are he and Jennifer safe if just I leave? We’ve been out together a few times, some people in the neighbourhood—in the building—know he’s married to a black woman. But if I leave him a note and just cut and run now, could he and Jennifer maybe check into a hotel and follow me whenever it becomes “physically possible” to leave Manhattan again? How much time have I got, and how far away is safe, and for that matter where is safe?
This whole thought train took her only the time needed to close the bedroom door behind her and walk to Russell’s side of the bed. She had to have more data, and she could see only one faint hope of getting them from Jerome; it probably wouldn’t work, but it had to be tried. Planning how, she felt under the mattress, and by the time she had a plan she liked it seemed that she had been fumbling around under the mattress for a long time, so she got a grip and lifted and the gun just wasn’t there, she could see the imprint of where it had been on the mattress-pad, and in the busily humming computer that was her mind the system crashed, the cursor vanished, the screen went dark. She stood there, holding the corner of the mattress in the air, for a full ten seconds.
And then she heard the apartment door open.
“Dena—” Russell’s voice began, and cut off.
She danced across the bed and burst out of the bedroom. Russell and Jerome were staring at each other. Russell was spattered with dried blood; for a heart-stopping second she thought it was his own. Both men turned to look at her, both absolutely expressionless. She realized suddenly that one of her breasts was exposed and yanked the torn sheet closed over it.
Tableau.
Her husband’s eyes had the wild glitter of a wounded man in shock. But there were no holes visible in his clothing, and he simply could not have lost that much blood and lived. Had he killed someone? Had the God damned revolution started early?
