Page 221 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 209I got what I wanted. An element of blank. I became some blackdressed Jesus-blur, a two-hundred-pound old lady, nice old lady, regarded maybe more kindly than the older priests in residence, because I was a young seminarian, help me, she begged, a terribly serious white boy, my son done gone, a jokey transient peckerwood novelty, cleaning her up from excrement, of the long hot summer that peaked in the heat of August, changing the sheets. The priests in the house, remembering Dempsey pretending he was cleaning up Jesus, were kind that I was not up to their speed in civil rights experience, a future time exists, she said, when you are already dead, even though I had marched with them and The Woodland Organization, learning on foot in the streets the words and rhythms and meaning of %u201cWe Shall Overcome,%u201d and sat in at Mayor Daley%u2019s office, where the marble floor was cool, cooler than the humid air, she was the old religion of conjure voodoo, until the police dragged us out, women and children and men, back to the street and dropped us on the curb and called us niggers and nigger lovers, and we bussed back to 63rd and Cottage Grove, laughing and clapping and dancing, discussing the kind of folks who sat on the front porch, and why black women never much cared for the foundation garments that girdled into shape the figures of white women, and all of us tuned listening to WVON, the Voice of the Negro, spinning the records and screaming and scratching and knocking out the blues on the radio in the night.The group of young priests invited the labor organizer Saul Alinsky to a supper at the rectory, and when we asked him a question about President Kennedy, whose newborn son had died the week before, and about Martin Luther King, who the day before had marched on Washington, I have a dream, Saul Alinsky for some reason looked straight at me, as if I had asked him a question, and he told me, %u201cKid, here%u2019s what you got to do and how you got to do it.%u201dWhy he looked at me, like I was there, really there, present, when no one else could even see invisible me seated like a dummy in the front row, shocked me with stage fright that I might somehow have to perform, or actually do something, because he was somebody important and famous in the world, and I was the new kid in town, new in the world, and ready to be used. I knew what the young are for. He made me gasp. I ran from the dining room.Escaping up the rectory stairs, climbing up, shoes thumping up wooden steps, I heard from outside an El train%u2019s metal wheels pitch a long, whining squeal against the hard tracks. Suddenly, deep in that hot August night, in that rectory, in that attic, I really fully knew no one