We laughed and ate potato chips and then we got down to a serious appraisal of Shaka Bop.
Shaka, of course, was still going by his real name when David Delarosa was murdered. One night at Jericho’s, during his last set of the night, he announced his plans to leave town. It came just two weeks after the police tried to pin David’s murder on him. He hooked the neck of his saxophone over his shoulder and pulled the microphone to his lips. “If Hannawa don’t love Sidney Spikes no more,” he said in an affected sharecropper’s voice, “then ol’ Sidney’s through with Hannawa.” It was an angry good-bye. We begged him to stay but we understood when he didn’t.
I remember Effie and Chick being especially upset that the city’s racist police had driven Sidney away from the people he loved. But to tell you the truth, I had the feeling that he was ready to move on anyway. He was a very talented musician. His reputation was spreading. It was time for him to move on to a bigger city and a bigger life.
The bigger city Sidney chose was San Francisco. As the years went by, word got to us that he was playing up and down the west coast, from Vancouver to L.A., that he was making occasional forays into New York to record. Sidney seemed to be on the cusp of fame. But the 1960s were not good to jazz musicians. Clubs closed by the bucketful. Record labels switched to rock and roll and soul. I remember Gordon reading us a letter from Sidney at one of our parties. It was a sad letter. Sidney said he’d been forced to “hang up my horn for a while” and take a job as a mechanic at a garage in Oakland.
In 1968 we learned that Sidney had joined the Black Panther Party. We also learned that he’d changed his name-legally changed it-to Shaka Bop. I was divorced from Lawrence by then. And I’d pretty much stopped running with the old Hemphill College crowd. But I do remember Gordon and Effie dragging me to Hannawa’s first McDonald’s about that time, to see what all the fuss was about. I remember Gordon explaining to us over those miserable little hamburgers that Shaka was the name of a great Zulu king during the early nineteenth century, famous both for his brilliance and his brutality.
Anyway, Shaka moved back to Hannawa in 1973. He formed a band and played at weddings and block parties. He helped organize a food bank for the poor. He ran for City Council and lost. He opened a small auto repair shop in Thistle Hill, a gritty inner city neighborhood just south of downtown.
A few days after Gordon’s funeral, I’d gone to my files in the basement and dug up a feature we’d run on Shaka back in 1978. It was one of the last stories Cynthia Buckland wrote for The Herald-Union before moving up to The Columbus Dispatch:
HANNAWA -Shaka Bop says he isn’t just fixing cars, he’s fixing lives.
Since moving back to Hannawa five years ago, the popular jazz musician and one-time member of the radical Black Panther Party has been making sure that the city’s working poor can get to their jobs.
“Being poor isn’t easy,” said Bop, who was born on the city’s south side as Sidney Thomas Spikes in 1933. “You get a job that doesn’t pay anything and it’s nowhere near where they let you live. Maybe you can get there by bus but maybe you need a car.”
And those cars, he pointed out, are hardly brand new.
“You scrape together a few hundred bucks and buy an old beater,” he said. “You pray every morning it’s going to get you to work and you pray all day long it’ll get you home at night.”
That’s where Shaka Bop’s Auto Run Right shop in Thistle Hill comes in. Bop and his team of talented young mechanics work with missionary zeal to keep the city’s old cars on the road, whether customers can afford to pay for the repair work or not.
“Half the time we charge only half of what other garages would charge,” Bop said. “And half the time we charge nothing but a smile.”
“You’re not saying Shaka Bop had something to do with that professor’s murder, are you?” Ike asked. His voice was uncharacteristically defensive.
I pawed the air. “No more than I’m saying he had anything to do with David Delarosa’s murder. But he was a part of the crowd Gordon ran with. On the periphery of it anyway. Back then and now. Maybe he has some helpful impressions.”
Ike squinted at me. “And that’s why you came to see me today, is it, Maddy? To see if Ike the Black Man had some helpful impressions of him? Before you ask him for helpful impressions of others?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Ike softened. Pretended to pout. “And I thought it was my chicken salad.”
“I’ve offended you.”
He didn’t move in his chair. But I could feel his soul reach across the little table and give me an enormous hug. “Oh, Maddy,” he whispered, “why does this world have to be the way it is? Everybody categorized by this and that? What was God thinking?” He took the last potato chip from the bag and broke it in half. He didn’t hand my half to me. He slipped it straight into my mouth. “We black people have a very high opinion of Shaka Bop. Including this black man. It pissed us off when they hauled him in fifty years ago and it would piss us off again if he got unnecessarily dragged into this.”
I sucked on the chip like it was a communion wafer. My knees were quivering from the intimacy Ike had allowed to flower between us, as innocent as it was. “I hope I haven’t unnecessarily pissed you off, Ike.”
“You know, Maddy,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet the great Mr. Bop in person. When you gonna go see him, anyway?”
I walked back up the hill to the paper. My bluebird brooch felt like it weighed five hundred pounds. Which was a good thing. After that half hour with Ike both my brain and my heart felt like they were pumped full of helium.
Anyway, the second the elevator door opened I knew a big story was breaking. People in the newsroom were talking louder. Walking faster. Huddling for impromptu meetings. Using other people’s phones. Mindlessly gulping from other people’s coffee mugs. “What gives?” I asked Margaret Newman, who was wiggling into her raincoat as she ran by.
“They got the other brother,” she said.
I raced to Dale Marabout’s desk. His phone was cradled under his chin. His feet were propped on the corner of his desk. From the way he was rhythmically tapping his toes together I gathered he was on hold, listening to some peppy tune. “Randy Depew?” I asked him.
He Grouchoed his eyebrows. “They got him in Las Vegas. Some hot sheets motel. Pizza delivery guy recognized him from America’s Most Wanted.”
Before I could ask another question, Dale twisted toward his computer screen and started spitting questions into his phone. I headed for my desk.
I just love it when a big story breaks like that. Oh yes, big stories are usually tragic stories. But just the way the newsroom comes alive to cover them, it’s better than-well it’s better than almost anything.
And so I settled in at my desk and watched everybody else work. Dale had the lead story to write, about how Randy Depew was apprehended and what was likely to happen to him when police got him back to Hannawa. Bob Beyer and Nan Ritchey put a sidebar together chronicling events from Paul Zuduski’s murder to the shootout in Hannawa Falls. Margaret was pulled off her feature on the county’s disappearing frog population and sent to police headquarters to catch any crumbs that came out of there. Burl Chancellor was given the politics sidebar, how a future trial would affect Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s re-election. Our TV writer, Roxanne Kindig, was assigned the America’s Most Wanted angle, how that show was making it impossible for criminals to evade justice. Other reporters were pulled in to the coverage as needed. All afternoon Managing Editor Alec Tinker trotted from desk to desk, like one of those damn plate spinners you used to see on The Ed Sullivan Show, to make sure it all came together by deadline.
There was one angle of the story that we weren’t covering. The angle that affected me. With Richard Depew safely locked away, Scotty Grant just might find a little more time for Sweet Gordon’s murder. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure if I liked that prospect or not.
