by Jeff McMahon
Southbound on the Jeffery, holding in my hands "Twelve Million Black Voices," reading the terrible inescapable history on this bus among so many upon whom that
history is equally writ, I feel as if it is a bomb I hold rather than a book, a shell loaded with four centuries of anguish, many more than 12 million lifetimes of anguish; Wright
focuses them like sunlight through a looking glass, they come to a point here, sizzling in my palms, and I draw my eyes away, watch 47th Street flash past the window. I
am awakened to a reality I had sensed dumbly, and it is my reality, the reality of this bus.
The Jeffery has always had its politics.
I like to sit in the back of the bus, but occasionally I have gotten the impression that I am not entirely welcome there. No one says anything; it is never like that, but there
is something in the glance or lack of glance, something in the turning of heads toward the window as I pass, that says it just as plain. Politeness precludes politics in the
front of the bus, but not back here. This is where militants and poets sit, and here no one numbs the truth with niceties. Not too much. This is a here in motion, a here
rushing south across the city, a here that is nowhere, but I am no more welcome here than I would be at 37th and Indiana.
In some quarter of myself I am defiant of these circumstances. I did nothing to create them, I have told myself. My people were torn from their land by Cromwell and they
narrowly escaped his noose, have drifted ever since, have had to fight with pikes against rifles, have been penniless with the memory of lost land, have watched their
babies die. I'm not talking about race so much, but about family, about men whose names I carry and women whose poetry lingers in my heart. We weren't even in
America when all this happened. That's what I tell myself, but it makes no matter on this bus. On this bus I am Cromwell. I have no choice in it. I bear the emperor's mark,
and I have enjoyed his privileges. On this bus I am my enemy.
"Two streams of life run through the South," Richard Wright says, "a black stream and a white stream, and from day to day we live in the atmosphere of a war that never
ends."
But that was in the South, Mr. Wright, and this is the Jeffery, that was yesterday, and this is today.
"When there are days of peace, it is a peace born of a victory over us..."
Our sides are chosen for us, and even my efforts to betray the emperor will fail, because for the others on this bus I remain a defining other. Frantz Fanon floods my
head: "For not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man."
"... On the train I was given not one, but two, three places."
What kind of a white man can I be to erase this? I cannot be the invisible man. Shall I be extra nice like Bigger's Daltons?
"It was a code of casual cruelty," Wright says, "of brutal kindness, of genial despotism, a code which has survived, grown, spread, and congealed into a national tradition
that dominates, in small or large measure, all black and white relations throughout this nation until this day."
I have already marched with Jesse, like Bigger's Jan. In those marches, in those campaigns, I was still the emperor's sergeant.
"...each poor white face begins to look like the face of an enemy soldier."
On this bus, Mr. Fanon, wherever I turn to regain myself I find negation. I have two empty choices. I can return to the front of the bus where I will bother no one, but isn't
that an acceptance, a segregation, an equal offense? I can remain here, a pale alien like Jan Erlone or Mary Dalton at Ernie's Chicken Shack, a white invader.
I sit down.
I sit down, but I am no Rosa Parks. When I sit in the back of the bus, it is not a civil rights movement. It is an invasion or it is an opportunity. Some around me see the
invasion, clearly, but I, by sitting, declare the opportunity. An opportunity for what? A solution? It seems unlikely, but I sit anyway, hoping that one white dot in this black
corner of the pointillism of Chicago will, through its graying presence, erode the error, deplete the terror, keep hope alive.
But Mr. Wright and Mr. Fanon will give me no peace: So you've made your stand, they say, but why are you on the Jeffery instead of the Indiana or the Cottage Grove?
Here in the back of the bus, with Wright in the hands, Fanon in the head, all is futility.
In this sizzling atmosphere our humanity is robbed from all of us, whether we were enslaved or slavers or neither, for we are all reduced to the mark we carry, the
distinction upon which the terrible history fell like an axe cleaving wood: pigment to one side, its absence to the other. We are all that history's symbols at the cost of our
selves. We are all its inheritors, regardless of personal claims to other oppressions, regardless of personal efforts to erase or evade. We are all conscripted against our
highest hopes into a subtle war with no prospect of peace. Some of us enjoy comfort while others endure pain, some revel in pleasure while others toil in service or wither
in neglect -- there is no doubt who has prospered most, who has suffered most, who was borne the heaviest burden -- but we are none of us free.
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