Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

J. had noticed no change in the paper over the last few years. He was a diligent reader of the News; he rushed out to buy the paper every Wednesday, turning first to the music reviews in the early days of his education, then to the movie reviews, and then after a time finding himself with a flashlight in the subterrain of the front of the book, discovering in bits and pieces the covert scheme of democracy and how it kept the people in check, in ignorance, in obeisance, etc. This was stuff he didn’t find in the papers his parents read: puppet governments below the equator, kickbacks to the mayor’s pals, lead paint potato chips for the kids in the projects. Stuff in the drinking water, a chemical whose name J. always forgot, the News reporter had discovered secret documents. Journalists were getting assassinated in Central America and the intellectuals of Pan-Africanism died in plane “accidents.” His parents were in on it, J. had come to realize, by their deep middle-class sin. They were complacent and a fascist government needed people to be complacent, to turn a blind eye. So he read.

He listened. He was on the inside now. Word around the office, murmured along the labyrinthine cubicles, held that Reagan was sure to be re-elected next week; the paper had done all they could for Mondale, but it was a lost cause, the country overflowed with simpletons who refused to see. But that wasn’t going to stop J.; he was turning eighteen on the very day of the election, and he was going to vote for the first time. J. had read with deep anger the statistics of voter turnout among young adults and minorities in an article published by the organization he was now a part of, he clucked at the sorry numbers, recognizing that apathy was a major tool of the oppressors down in Washington, he said amen to the condemnatory tone of the article, he shook his head solemnly when the writer pointed out that the numbers were caused, surely and sadly, by the effects of disenfranchisement, institutional racism, the sheer failure of the country’s education system. Amen.

The writer’s name was Andy Halloran and J. hoped to meet him in the coming months. There was no telling who he might be. No one in the office looked like what he thought they would. Winslow Kramer, for example, did not wear the black leather jacket and dirty jeans in which J. had attired him after reading the man’s music reviews for years. J. had clipped the article Kramer wrote about a crazy night in CBGBs with the Ramones, when Dee Dee was too fucked up to play, passed out in the middle of a song, and Kramer climbed on up, grabbed the man’s bass from the tacky stage, and filled in for the rest of the set. The News had the best music section of any mag he’d read, and Kramer had a byline J. always searched for on the contents page. Or used to. He hadn’t written for a while. When Kramer called to tell him he got the internship, he was surprised that the rocker was covering the Metro desk, the post J. had requested, where the real battles lay. More surprised when Kramer asked him not to wear aftershave or cologne; since his overdose a year and a half before he was sensitive to chemicals, he explained, the bouquet of modern life left him faint and panting and grasping for his inhaler. In person that first day, Kramer sported the bowl haircut of a penitent, and wore new dark blue jeans and a faded green T-shirt without a slogan or a band’s name. Brown freckles dotted his sunken cheeks, a swarm of bugs eating their way out from within. On the desk there was a picture of Kramer and a bleary Patti Smith, taken in some downtown alley, but nothing else to link the man with J.’s notions.

The first day J. said, “I liked that piece you did about the Gang of Four show a while back. I thought you really got it. The atmosphere.”

Kramer looked at J. distantly, a bit fearfully. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“I was there, at Danceteria that night.” The age limit was eighteen, but J. and Freddie followed in the wake of some beautiful older girls in platinum Warhol wigs and got through the front door. They weaseled up to the front of the stage, in the front of the jaded crowd, and rescued the song list taped to the microphone stand when the band finished playing. J. and Freddie fought over who deserved the night’s distilled essence more, who was the bigger fan, but J. walked home with it.

Kramer said, “Yeah?” and took some papers to the Xerox room.

Still, the place was pretty fucking cool. There was a little chair next to Kramer’s desk, and they sat close together in the tiny cubicle. Kramer talked in low, mellow tones, and had an appointment outside the office every afternoon, with the acupuncturist, with his analyst, with Narcotics Anonymous, which left J. alone with the daily papers to mine for promising stories, or to find holes in the mainstream version of events that they might excavate. He answered the phones and told writers and sources that Kramer had stepped out but would be back soon. People stopped by the cubicle to look for Kramer and J. wondered, was that Lynn Fields, was that Ron K. C. Speath, was that skinny guy Billy Pagels, who had written the excellent piece about Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. J. was a lucky man, so he believed, and so his friends seconded, telling him as much from their college dormitories between keg parties. The Downtown News was the only paper that covered rap music in any way, reviewed Whodini and Run DMC singles. James Baldwin had editorialized in these pages, Lorraine Hansberry had essayed a few words about the direction of black theater. J.’s parents were glad he was doing something beyond working at that electronics store; they wanted him to become a lawyer and didn’t like the fact that he had deferred from college for a year. They thought he would never go and get a degree, follow the plan, that he’d lay around their house and watch television until he was thirty, never get beyond working the record counter at Crazy Eddie’s. The internship showed them that he wasn’t just fucking around, even though he did go out every night with friends; sometimes forgot his keys and woke his parents up at two in the morning with Budweiser on his breath. Or he hoped it would show them.

He put on a song and dance for them Tuesday night at dinner. “Have you heard about Eleanor Bumpurs?” he challenged his parents, in between mouthfuls of Lake Tung-Ting Shrimp, which had been delivered to their door just minutes earlier from their local favorite. Free fortune cookies and an orange.

“Of course,” his father said, “it was in the Times today.”

“It’s another example of a larger pattern of police attacks against the black community,” J. said.

“I thought she was mentally ill,” J.’s mother said, tearing the corner of a plastic packet of soy sauce.

J. had discovered the article when Kramer disappeared early in the morning to go to the allergist. Eleanor Bumpurs was a sixty-nine-year-old Afro-American woman who had been killed by the Emergency Services Unit as they tried to evict her from her city-owned apartment. The piece was a few pages into the Metro section of the Times, a small and terse square of type. Six cops had gone in, warned in advance that the woman had mental problems. According to the police, after they broke down the door, the three-hundred-pound Mrs. Bumpurs came at them with a knife, and the men who had received certificates from a program that taught them how to deal with the mentally ill killed her. Officer Sullivan shot her twice with a shotgun.

“Yeah, she was sick, but the cops knew that when they went in,” J. pointed out. “They were Emergency Services, that’s their job to handle this stuff.”

“That’s terrible,” J.’s mother said, as a ball of gray meat rolled out of dumpling sheath. “Can you pass the salt, Andrew?” J.’s mother said, gesturing toward her husband.