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.
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.
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.
By now it was a liquid black night and if the ticket could talk it would have said that my fingers felt like bricks against its skin because I clutched onto it until the time came to fork it over. I got on the bus and moved toward the middle. Years ago I thought the back of the bus was the only place I could sit. It was where the cool people sat. It was from these folks that I learned a thing or two about having dark skin and about having nappy hair. These were all the things that belonged somewhere in the back. They were supposed to be underneath, hidden away in a trunk in some closet. They felt connected somehow, and they never left my mind even when I was trying to be cool-and being cool was the most important thing for me back then. Being cool meant that I was accepted. Among these people, all of whom were pretty much marginalized by poverty, I had another layer of blackness. I was one of these Haitians-those boat people, those funny-clothes-wearing people, those cats with AIDS, those people who speak funny. My uncle, not the one who asked to go to the March with me, had to fight his way back and forth to school when he first came to America from Haiti. Once, another uncle told me that I was from Africa. I didn't buy it for a second. When I was about nine, I developed an answer if someone asked if I was Haitian: I would say that I was West Indian. I was born here, and had never stepped out of this country, but no one accepted me as an American.
My favorite subject in grade school was history-I loved Washington, I loved Jefferson, I loved the war cards that Time/Life used to sell because they had stories on the back of them. I loved the American Revolution. I didn't love Crispus Attucks, a black hero of the American revolution, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre. I didn't know who he was. I loved the War of 1812. And in a school chock full of Haitian-American kids, we didn't learn a thing about the Haitian trinity of revolutionaries Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, and Henri Christophe. It was only after getting out of the school system that I learned about American blacks and about myself. I was angry then, because when I finally began to get a sense of who I was and what I wanted to become, I regretted all the time I had wasted believing what other histories and other institutions said about me.
The bus got quiet for a couple of minutes before we rolled off. The elder cat on the bus led a prayer-we asked God for a safe trip. A couple of seats away there was a father sitting with his son, and I studied them hard. A part of me always studies a father sitting with his son. It's an involuntary act. As I watched them talking back and forth, my mind slipped back to another time when I was on the phone with a friend of mine. I made a joke and he started laughing and in the background his father started laughing too. The sound of the two of them laughing in clumsy union kept playing in my head. It became like music to me, listening to them laugh. Those notes of a father and son's laughter blended with the voices of the father and son next to me on the bus. The sound conveys a certain feeling to me. It's a certain sound that I have never had with my own father. When I heard my friend on the phone with his dad laughing, I realized there was a key sound that was missing whenever I shared a laugh with my father.
