Page 255 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 243

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 scratch-
ing 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 ques-
tion 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, “Kid, here’s what you got to do and how you got to do it.”
Why 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’s 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 had looked at me, at the real me, in years. My parents
looked and saw a priest, but I had never looked at me. I had never
ever even seen myself. In my small room, high up under the eaves,
I threw myself down on the bed covers and fumbled to turn off the
lamp. The window shade, drawn up, revealed the black city night
bright with light and with the moon. Sirens shrieked down streets,
avenues, boulevards. Sirens shrieked down me. Years of prayer and
examinations of conscience and soul and intellect had plowed me
back into myself. I at least stood on hope’s margin. I might have a
self worth finding.
Heat lightning flashed across the sky.

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