Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (14 page)

THE MILLION MAN MARCH

Anthony Calypso

It was about 10:30 p.m. or a little bit later when I started walking down the hill to the convenience store at the Mobil Station on Broadway. I couldn't figure out what snacks to buy for the trip because I didn't get to take trips very often. I can count on one hand how many times I've left town.

I took the long way down the hill, and ran into a friend of mine from Albany who was already two hours into his journey by the time he'd made it to Nyack.

"You going to the March?" he asked me. This brother had these big eyes and as I peered into his car in the darkness, they looked like floodlights. I felt something beginning to pump in me. I wanted to hop in the car with him and start the road trip right then and there, but I had a ticket for the bus, and about an hour longer to wait before it left. I looked again at his eyes and we started talking the way brothers talk sometimes. It's in the eyes. Like, say the both of us were checking out the same girl. The eyes might say, "Did you catch that?" Or if I was looking at some other cat's girl, the brother might stare me down or UPS me a quick message with his eyes like, "Bro, she's with me. You can stare up and down, but ain't nothin' you can do about it—might hurt your eyes, too." It's all in the eyes sometimes.

Anyway, I told him to watch out—there was going to be a massive police force all over the highways on the route to D.C. I hoped to convey this warning to him with my eyes, "It's October fifteenth, brother. Be careful on the road. Everyone knows about the March." There was way too much electricity in the air between us to even mouth that.

It finally started to click that I, too, was headed to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The March was all over the news. I had caught a clip on CNN of some brothers who were from Seattle; they were already there. When I saw my boy jet off with a carload of folks to D.C, I felt like I was late even though the march hadn't really started yet. There was a current running through my body, pulling me like a chain.
Get to D.C.

The street felt quiet, as if something was going to happen, that this something was so massive that a path would have to be cleared in order to move through it—I left the Mobil with a couple of snacks—some pudding, chips, a Snapple. I had a turkey sandwich at home. On the way back to my house, I ran into this cat who I only knew by sight.

"You know where we were lining up?"

"Corner of Franklin and Depew."

I walked with him around the corner and back to Franklin Street. I lived one block up from Franklin. As we walked up the street together, he started telling me about how he'd said good-bye to his folks. He asked me if I had said good-bye to my folks yet.

"Good-bye?"

"Yeah, man. I told my moms and all my folks that if I don't make it back from D.C.—if something happens to me down there—I told them that I loved them."

"Word?"

"You gotta say good-bye to them."

Until he'd said that, I'd had every intention of making it back from D.C.—I hadn't thought about just how much could go wrong down there.

We were on Franklin talking and I was going to see him again pretty soon on Franklin. And the thing about Franklin—or at least the part of it where the bus was going to pull up—is that it's undeniably black. It's a pretty safe bet that if you walk or drive down Franklin, something in the air will give you the sense that it's a black neighborhood. It may be a couple of cars parked on the street corner playing music. Or a small crew of fellas talking on the corner, shooting dice, or just hanging out next to the laundromat. Or it may just be an unmarked police car circling the block. You might find some older folks sitting on porches, too. There are loud conversations here, and a person passing by might get to hear the way black folks can transform English. It can sound dirty, but crisp and proper too, on Franklin, and whichever way the language comes out, it seems somehow to lurk along the street. When kids play or yell down this way, it feels like their voices stick to the metal bars that surround the projects. In the same way, when the older folks talk, their words drift into the wall and live deep inside the brick and cement. A good chunk of black culture resonates at this intersection of Franklin and Depew. And because of that, this particular intersection makes the rest of the town look lily white.

Franklin is the first street you hit coming from the city, and it stretches from one side of town to just about the end of it—it goes from the rich to the poor sections, and it holds truth, with blood and footsteps smeared all over it. Footsteps can go any direction on Franklin Street. Space is tight here at this intersection. Everything here happens right on top of everything else. The projects form an imaginary border on Franklin Street, and they are surrounded by parking lots. The only vacant piece of land has been fenced off and transformed into a community garden. It's the only lush, green place in the area. At any given moment during the spring and summer, you'll find people in the garden nursing the vegetation. They have come to Franklin to do that.

I lived just off the intersection of Franklin and Cedar Hill when I was little. A couple of Rolls-Royces were always parked across the street in front of a garage. They were a customary part of the view from my living-room window. When I was a kid, I was poor and happy. As I got older, I began to feel poor and desperately hurt somehow by that feeling. I began to see differences, I began to feel what being poor was really about; and there was a constant blur in my vision because of that feeling. It made everything else feel blurry. The feeling gnawed at me, and for a long time being poor was the only detail I could actually focus on. I could almost hear it ringing in my head all day long. "I'm poor." It all looked poor. Everything. Every day I thought about it. I thought about the grime and the roaches and I thought about being called Haitian like that was a bad word. There is a woman who I still see now and then on Franklin Street. When I was little, she used to bang on our windows and scream, "Haitians, go home!"

There is very little distance between Franklin Street and myself. I grew up having to pass along Franklin every day, and however the street felt, it affected me. If it felt Haitian, then I did too. If it felt American, then it became a problem for me because I was an American who felt like a Haitian. If the street was quiet, then somehow I felt a little quiet also. Franklin Street was dead the day the rapper Scott La Rock was shot. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. I remember that much.

But the cat I was talking to right there on Franklin, and myself; any other cat who has crossed through Franklin, laughed on Franklin, fought on Franklin, or cried on Franklin; and anyone who has spent a hot summer night on Franklin trying to keep cool—about being poor or about being—makes up a part of this street. And anyone who has feared Franklin or felt the white on Franklin, or anyone who has felt Haitian on Franklin or anyone who has felt strong because of Franklin has meshed with the voices of this street and become part of it. And for whatever subtle, American reason, the bus to the Million Man March was going to pull up right on the corner where, if you want, you can get a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor or a three-dollar bottle of scented Muslin oil.

The electricity had me rattling off to my aunt when I got home from the Mobil. I had an uncle there too; he was visiting from Haiti and this was his first trip to America. He wanted to go to the March and I had been scrambling to try and find him a ticket for the bus. I even tried to get him a ride with the first brother I met on Broadway who I knew I could trust. My uncle didn't speak any English, so I couldn't send him down with just anyone. So when my boy told me that he wouldn't have room, I felt like that was it, there wasn't any way to get him to D.C. Maybe if there was space on the bus I could buy him a ticket at the lineup. I asked him if he was willing to go to the lineup, but by then the idea of going to the March was over for him.

"Lese sa,"
(Forget it, no big deal) he said to me.

When I got home, I crisscrossed the apartment trying to get everything together. I had maybe a half hour before the lineup. The battery to one of my cameras was still charging when I picked up the phone to call my mother. It was one of those calls I didn't want to make because the woman panics even when I go into the city for the day. She told me to be careful and underneath her voice I could hear her deepest thoughts.
Boy, I wish you wouldn't go. This doesn't
even concern you. Your entire family is Haitian. The March is for Americans.
You're not an American, not entirely. Why do you always have to he the
activist? What are you going to the March for?
I didn't tell her that I loved her because I couldn't bring myself to believe I wouldn't be back and that this phone call was the last time I would speak to her.

But in the far outer left corner of my mind, I pictured a sudden unexplainable gas pipe explosion occurring on October 16, under D.C., in which a million plus black men die—story at eleven. With that idea in my head somewhere, I took my bus ticket out of its envelope. I had bought it the week before the March and every day when I came back from class I'd check the envelope because I'm neurotic. I needed to see that it was where I had left it. The first time I brought it home I snapped a picture of it and then put it in a drawer underneath some folders. My heart would start to race if I didn't see it immediately when I opened the drawer. Every day the envelope slipped underneath more folders. By the end of the week I checked it a couple of times a day. It looked like an invitation that someone might get for a graduation party. The ticket had put an end to about a year and a half of just talk. I said good-byes to my aunt and uncle and walked down the hill.

There were two brothers standing on the corner. The street was still a little quiet. I had the time and the space to try and set up a shot of the two guys, so I stepped out in the street and took the picture. A red jeep pulled up and then all of a sudden a caravan of cars pulled up to the curb. There was a mass of black people standing on Franklin, which is to say that aside from the actual physical bodies on the street there was also in the night a monstrous spiritual presence almost shaking the ground the way the floor shakes during a fraternal step show. It felt that spiritual—like somewhere above us there were slaves floating by and maybe there were some porters in the area with some railroad workers. There had to have been a few souls watching us on Franklin, maybe even the spirits of those who drowned in the sea on the way over here. I would love to believe that there was a whole congregation up there watching us and elbowing themselves in a frenzy, thinking themselves that this was what they waited four hundred years to see.

There were footsteps everywhere, and all sorts of brothers about to board the bus. There were women waiting too. They had come to send off their mates and husbands, their fathers and their sons. The scene was a little chaotic now, but at the same time it was very calm. The hustling and bustling on the corner of Franklin felt great. No one got angry and several fire engines crisscrossed the intersection where the bus was about to pull up—it was odd to see them driving by, particularly since an alarm hadn't gone off at all that night.

I started snapping pictures randomly. I took a shot of a woman looking out into the street; she was clutching her daughter from behind. The little girl smiled for me. Her tiny face and her half-shut eyes spill out from underneath the hat she's wearing. The mother looks pensive, she doesn't even notice the camera. The look on her face reminds me of how worried my own mother must have looked when she spoke to me on the phone.

A large gray bus rumbled over to the corner, and the line moved across the street to where the bus pulled up. A brother with a bow tie, a representative from the Nation of Islam, walked by real quiet and it felt like everyone's eyes were watching him and waiting for his instructions. He was going to ride on the bus with us to D.C.

The noise died down. We were told that we should have our bags opened so they could be searched. The search was about not taking chances. We could get stopped by the police at any point on the road for whatever reason. It was a light search, a happy search— I've been searched by the police before, and it feels much different. I was searched by the police for less than twenty seconds, but as I put my hands on the hood of the car that night, I had this swelling underneath the muscles in my eyes because it was clear there was nothing I could do about the search and about always feeling like I was under suspicion just for being a young black male. That night I was with a couple of friends and the police pulled us over for not having our headlights on. I can't say what I was thinking, but as the white policeman approached the car I had stepped out. It was a silly mistake, because as soon as I stepped out of the car, I became suspicious to him and he frisked me. I must admit, to the officer's credit, he was incredibly professional. I guess I just wanted him to see me as an individual, not as a suspect. Another time, I was walking down Broadway to get a cup of coffee; I watched a police officer follow me in his squad car all the way up the street. Finally he pulled over and asked me for identification. "You look like someone I might be looking for," he said. I have never committed a crime. But I showed the officer my I.D. that American night.