thia said.
She picked up his right hand and held it open like a seashell.
She ran her fingers across the inside of his palm. “He asks a lot
of questions. You ever notice that?” She looked up, staring at the
shoreline, the salty caps doing a languid two-step, back, then
forward, then back again. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Roger Holloway had indeed been coming around the duplex
on Scott Street for months. He was a skinny kid they were
always bumming smokes from, who always had extra change in
his pocket if somebody was hungry. He said he’d dropped out of
Prairie View A&M the year before, but Jay suspected he’d never spent a day inside a college classroom. Not that Prairie View was Harvard, but still, Roger seemed to lack some basic grasp of American history, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But he knew who Karl Marx was and claimed to read the
Jay’s baby, where he was finally finding his true political voice. Years earlier, Jay had stumbled on his first sit-in on the way to
class and decided then and there he’d rather be a part of history
than study it. After that, there was no turning back for him. Once
one dorm was integrated, they all had to be. Once one black pro
fessor was hired, there had to be a dozen more. He would settle
for nothing less than total equality. Jay rode this initial wave of
activism as a rank-and-file member of SNCC, the Student Non
violent Coordinating Committee, which had a strong presence
on campus and across the South. SNCC came out of the SCLC
tradition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr.
King’s group through the ’50s and ’60s. It was a tradition steeped
in the assumption that moralism is a real and potent weapon, or
the presumption, rather, that you could shame white people into
acting right.
Well . . . that was one way of doing it.
But it required a kept tongue and an unyielding faith in a
higher power, something Jay did not have. Much as he would go
on to preach on the limits of a spiritual approach to civil rights,
much as he would chide the churchified for taking it lying down,
he always, deep down, admired men like King, for whom the
ability to love was a gift, like an ear for music. Jay, on the other
hand, lived a life of constant struggle against his own cynicism,
his well-earned knowledge of the limits of human grace. To tell
the truth of it, he was as angry with his stepfather as he was at
any white man, and angrier at his own father for leaving him
behind.
But it wasn’t just Jay. A lot of the young people were getting
tired of the we-shall-overcome way of attacking an increas
ingly complex problem. So in ’67, Jay and Bumpy Williams,
Lloyd Mackalvy and Marcus Dupri started meeting at Bumpy’s
mother’s place on Scott Street. She was a night nurse at Ben
Taub Hospital and rarely home. They named their organization
Coalition for Better Race Relations and nicknamed it COBRA.
They were still doing stuff with SNCC, but beyond the campus
agenda, they worked within the local black community to help
find decent housing for folks, get somebody’s son a lawyer if he
needed one, and they funded ( Jay pointedly never asking Bumpy
