Warren Murphy: Slave Safari

Just as he had known as a child that he had speed within him, he knew now what would happen in this still-hostile land of America.

He tried to explain to one militant he met on a plane.

"Look, if you're going to have a damned revolution, it might help not to announce your plans in The New York Times," he had said.

"Revolution is communication with the masses," the militant had said. "They must first be conscious that power comes from the barrel of a gun."

"Did it ever occur to you that the whites have most of the guns?"

"Whitey soft. He through. He dead, man."

"God help you if you ever back him into a corner," Butler told the youth, who responded that Butler was an Uncle Tom of a dead generation. Butler saw the name of the militant again one month later when the newspapers reported the youth had been arrested for holding up a drugstore.

Some of Butler's friends said this was a sign that the youth was really arrested for his political beliefs.

"Bullshit," said Butler. "If you know anything about how anything operates, that kid is just what you want for an enemy. He wasn't doing any harm to the government. He was really helping it."

"He was raising the consciousness of his people," said Butler's sister.

"Every time that kid opened his mouth, ten thousand whites moved to the right."

"That's a twisted way of thinking," said his sister. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of tomming."

"And I'm tired of losing. We're cutting off all our support in the north, and in the south, forget it."

"We got the Third World. We outnumber Whitey."

"Numbers don't count any more," Butler had said. "An army is made up of people who can work together and, most important, be in the right place at the right time. If I were running a black revolution in this country, I'd give the kids watches, not rifles."

"They really got to your head, didn't they, Mister not-allowed-to-carry-the-ball cornerback. And don't give me Whitey's talk about being wiped out. We been wiped out every century. And here we are."

"No," said Butler sadly, "I don't think we're going to be wiped out, because I don't think we can get up a good enough revolution right now to get wiped out. We're gonna be smothered in our own stupidity."

His sister's response was that Butler was too impressed with Whitey. Butler's answer was that Whitey wasn't all that good and pretty stupid himself, but that his sister made even the worst white cracker look like an intellectual giant.

Butler's despair deepened with almost every daily newspaper story about non-negotiable demands, the unity of the Third World and the talk of bullets. When departments of African studies were introduced across the land, William Forsythe Butler was at the point of tears. "The engineering schools, you dumb bastards," he would yell in the privacy of his apartment. "The engineering schools. That's survival."

Few of his friends spoke to him anymore, naturally, since he was an Uncle Tom without courage. Butler took it out on the gridiron. He was a cornerback with a vengeance, and he had a plan. One day, it all worked and Butler had a new team, the New York Giants, and a promise that he would be given a real shot at running back.

Opening day, he started the season at cornerback. He ended the season there.

It was then that William Forsythe Butler began to wonder if just maybe his sister weren't right.

The black consciousness movement was taking hold now in football and Butler became its spokesman. He did a statistical survey of the league that showed that more blacks than whites were jolted out of positions and put onto defensive teams.

He demanded to know why blacks got paid less for playing the same position as whites. Twentieth century slavery, he called it. He said that racism was the reason there wasn't a black quarterback, and announced that he would try out for that position the next year with his team.

These were the things Willie Butler talked about, but no answers came from organized football. Soon the sports pages froze him out of space, not wanting to do anything to damage the all-American spirit of the game.

And then one day, the back page of the New York Daily News bannered a headline that triggered in Butler a violent response and made him vow never to forget the slavery that had brought his forebears to the country. The headline read:

WILLIE BUTLER SOLD

Butler first heard of it reading the paper, and rather than be sold anywhere by anyone, he retired from football.

He was still a young man, so he drifted into the Peace Corps, where he was shipped to Busati to try to develop an irrigation project that might raise a small parcel of the nation's land to its fertility level of two thousand years before. While working there, happy to be away from America, he was approached by the CIA man assigned to the Busati Peace Corps. The CIA man was going home; he had seen Butler at work and realized he was a true American; how would he like to work for the CIA?

For the extra money, Butler said sure, determined to screw up the intelligence apparatus by sending in ridiculous reports of non-occurring events and by predictions that bordered on the sublime.

In Busati's heat, the predictions all seemed to come true. Butler was put on full $36,000 salary by the CIA, assigned to help then-Colonel Obode, who was pro-West at the time, seize power.

About that time, William Forsythe Butler made a journey to the mountains of the Lord. As soon as he stepped into the first village, he knew he was home.

And he was ashamed of his home. The Loni were divided into small bands who hid in the hills; the men were timid little root-grubbers who spent their lives looking over their shoulders for the approach of the Hausa, or for oncoming elephants, or for anything larger than a lizard. The Loni Empire, probably because of the cowardice of its men, had turned into a matriarchy, the three major packs being led by three princess sisters. Butler met one sister and told her he knew he was a Loni.

How do we know you are not making up a story, he was asked.

And in his frustration, Butler made a hissing clicking sound in the back of his mouth as he had always done since childhood. The princess suddenly embraced Butler and welcomed him home.

Butler was confused.

The Princess explained that Loni men, when angered, always had made that hissing sound in their throats. She had not heard it in a long time.

Butler forgot about Obode and about his CIA assignment. He spent two weeks in the village where, for the first time, he heard the Loni legend. He had been brought up in a society which did not believe in legends, but even he thought there was enough in the legend that pertained to him.

The Loni children coming home. Well, wasn't he a Loni child who had come home?

And the man of the West, who was dead, killing the man who would enslave the Loni. Well, wasn't Butler from the West? And couldn't you call him dead, in a sense, because he had given up his former life to come live with the Loni? And the man who would enslave the Loni? Who else but Obode?

He did not understand anything about the Oriental who would redeem the Loni in the ritual flames, but who said legends had to be letter-perfect?

It was close enough to him to count. And to show his brotherhood in blackness to the Loni people by repaying those who had taken them in slavery, and also to indulge himself a little bit, Butler decided to add something to the legend… the man who collected payment for a centuries-old sin.

He opened the briefcase on the seat next to him in the 707 jet and stared at the brown-cornered parchment, a ship's manifest, a load of slaves from East Africa. Another old parchment was a bill of sale. There was a yellowed fragment of paper from a plantation. Another fragment showed a family tree. And woven through all the documents were the names of the Lippincotts, the Butlers, the Forsythes: the three American families whose fortunes had been made in the slave trade.