"Yes, I was there," I said. "If you're referring to the killing."
"There, you see," Brother Jack said. "He was on the scene."
Brother Tobitt pushed the table edge with his palms. "And still you organized that side show of a funeral!"
My nose twitched. I turned toward him deliberately, forcing a grin.
"How could there be a side show without you as the star attraction, who'd draw the two bits admission, Brother Twobits? What was wrong with the funeral?"
"Now we're making progress," Brother Jack said, straddling his chair. "The strategist has raised a very interesting question. What's wrong, he asks. All right, I'll answer. Under your leadership, a traitorous merchant of vile instruments of anti-Negro, anti-minority racist bigotry has received the funeral of a hero. Do you still ask what's wrong?"
"But nothing was done about a traitor," I said.
He half-stood, gripping the back of his chair. "We all heard you admit it."
"We dramatized the shooting down of an unarmed black man."
He threw up his hands. To hell with you, I thought. To hell with you. He was a man!
"That black man, as you call him, was a traitor," Brother Jack said. "A traitor!"
"What is a traitor, Brother?" I asked, feeling an angry amusement as I counted on my fingers. "He was a man and a Negro; a man and a brother; a man and a traitor, as you say; then he was a dead man, and alive or dead he was jam-full of contradictions. So full that he attracted half of Harlem to come out and stand in the sun in answer to our call. So what is a traitor?"
"So now he retreats," Brother Jack said. "Observe him, Brothers. After putting the movement in the position of forcing a traitor down the throats of the Negroes he asks what a traitor is."
"Yes," I said. "Yes, and, as you say, it's a fair question, Brother. Some folks call me traitor because I've been working downtown; some would call me a traitor if I was in Civil Service and others if I simply sat in my corner and kept quiet. Sure, I considered what Clifton did --"
"And you defend him!"
"Not for that. I was as disgusted as you. But hell, isn't the shooting of an unarmed man of more importance politically than the fact that he sold obscene dolls?"
"So you exercised your personal responsibility," Jack said.
"That's all I had to go on. I wasn't called to the strategy meeting, remember."
"Didn't you see what you were playing with?" Tobitt said. "Have you no respect for your people?"
"It was a dangerous mistake to give you the opportunity," one of the others said.
I looked across at him. "The committee can take it away, if it wishes. But meantime, why is everyone so upset? If even one-tenth of the people looked at the dolls as we do, our work would be a lot easier. The dolls are nothing."
"Nothing," Jack said. "That nothing that might explode in our face."
I sighed. "Your faces are safe, Brother," I said. "Can't you see that they don't think in such abstract terms? If they did, perhaps the new program wouldn't have flopped. The Brotherhood isn't the Negro people; no organization is. All you see in Clifton's death is that it might harm the prestige of the Brotherhood. You see him only as a traitor. But Harlem doesn't react that way."
"Now he's lecturing us on the conditioned reflexes of the Negro people," Tobitt said.
I looked at him. I was very tired. "And what is the source of your great contributions to the movement, Brother? A career in burlesque? And of your profound knowledge of Negroes? Are you from an old plantation-owning family? Does your black mammy shuffle nightly through your dreams?"
He opened his mouth and closed it like a fish. "I'll have you know that I'm married to a fine, intelligent Negro girl," he said.
So that's what makes you so cocky, I thought, seeing now how the light struck him at an angle and made a wedge-shaped shadow beneath his nose. So that's it . . . and how did I guess there was a woman in it?
"Brother, I apologize," I said. "I misjudged you. You have our number. In fact, you must be practically a Negro yourself. Was it by immersion or injection?"
"Now see here," he said, pushing back his chair.
Come on, I thought, just make a move. Just another little move.
"Brothers," Jack said, his eyes on me. "Let's stick to the discussion. I'm intrigued. You were saying?"
I watched Tobitt. He glared. I grinned.
"I was saying that up here we know that the policemen didn't care about Clifton's ideas. He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black."
Brother Jack frowned. "You're riding 'race' again. But how do they feel about the dolls?"
"I'm riding the race I'm forced to ride," I said. "And as for the dolls, they know that as far as the cops were concerned Clifton could have been selling song sheets. Bibles, matzos. If he'd been white, he'd be alive. Or if he'd accepted being pushed around . . ."
"Black and white, white and black," Tobitt said. "Must we listen to this racist nonsense?"
"You don't, Brother Negro," I said. "You get your own information straight from the source. Is it a mulatto source, Brother? Don't answer -- the only thing wrong is that your source is too narrow. You don't really think that crowd turned out today because Clifton was a member of the Brotherhood?"
"And why did they turn out?" Jack said, getting set as if to pounce forward.
"Because we gave them the opportunity to express their feelings, to affirm themselves."
Brother Jack rubbed his eye. "Do you know that you have become quite a theoretician?" he said. "You astound me."
"I doubt that, Brother, but there's nothing like isolating a man to make him think," I said.
"Yes, that's true; some of our best ideas have been thought in prison. Only you haven't been in prison, Brother, and you were not hired to think. Had you forgotten that? If so, listen to me: You were not hired to think." He was speaking very deliberately and I thought, So . . . So here it is, naked and old and rotten. So now it's out in the open . . .
"So now I know where I am," I said, "and with whom --"
"Don't twist my meaning. For all of us, the committee does the thinking. For all of us. And you were hired to talk."
"That's right, I was hired. Things have been so brotherly I had forgotten my place. But what if I wish to express an idea?"
"We furnish all ideas. We have some acute ones. Ideas are part of our apparatus. Only the correct ideas for the correct occasion."
"And suppose you misjudge the occasion?"
"Should that ever happen, you keep quiet."
"Even though I am correct?"