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Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 1

 

 
   

    “They know so little about you that they make big assumptions.”—Raejean Corliss
 

 
Chapter Two
 
 

    Bakman and I have been running buddies for four years. We became fast friends following the infamous Pullman State University Black student protest. We met when he dropped by the PSU Information Agency, the public relations department at the college, where I was the first part-time student employee. Bakman was assigned to shoot a special report about drugs on campus. PSU was chosen because it was in the heartland, a little more than a three-hour drive from Chicago. The university was conservative, depending on your political bent, to a fault.  I had just gotten the job a month earlier and was still naïve enough to think it was okay to let it be known that there was a wild undercurrent at PSU. So when this young Black cameraman asked me where the real partying was going on, I was the campus crier. “By that, I take it you mean the grass, acid, ludes and other mind-altering treats?”

 
I began describing dealers and pinpointing places.
 
“Hold up. Let me tell you something, my brother. I’m righteous but you don’t know that. Just who are you sourcing out? The white boys or the brothers? Or are you riding a Zebra?” Bakman asked.
 
“I was hipping you to the happening,” I answered.
 
“You mean you were just giving it up, just like that?” he said, snapping his fingers. “Not knowing nothing about me and what I’m about?”
 
I replied I knew he was a brother. That he seemed cool to me.
 
“You know, that and a dime will get you your one phone call,” Bakman replied. “I could be The Man. I could be The Man’s boy. And you and all your little college cohorts could be in the joint just on what you’ve told me.  But the reality is even worse. I am a media man. And what you’ve told me could be reported this way or that. Think about it. We are in an image war. Information can be confused, abused or misused.”
 
As it turned out, Bakman had just started as a cameraman for WATZ, the USBC-owned and operated television station in Chicago.  At the time, I was living a double life. Besides being a part-time student-employee of the PSUIA’s News Center and a campus stringer for the Weekly News, the liberal international newsmagazine, I was a Black student activist. A Black Nationalist. A rebel with the cause. An angry young man ready to forge change or to die trying. 
 
In the fall of ‘69, the Pullman State University administration announced its decision to cap the student population at 30,000 on the main campus.  In an age of extremes, of black and white, that 10 percent planned reduction instantaneously provoked the leadership of PSU’s Black Student Union.  The announced move was interpreted as a blatant attempt to limit the number of Black students on the idyllic downstate campus. Six months earlier, Black students at Cornell University showed up armed and dangerous at a campus protest. The students and their rifles were plastered on front pages and covers of newspapers and magazine all over the world and some of their demands were met.
 
Sam Williams, Pullman State’s BBMOC (Big Black Man on Campus), made the point. “Those brothers at Cornell weren’t playing. You know, they got down. They took care of business.  Like, what we gone do? Be a bunch of mad-at-the-man crybabies or be for real. Take action. Make notice.”
 
“Right on, Sam the Jam,” several of the brothers cheered, referring to Williams’ a.k.a.
 
Sam was Pullman State’s starting center until it was discovered he was not only scoring on the opposing teams but with the coach’s 17-year-old daughter. Although Sam’s extra-curricular activity never advanced beyond the whisper stage, his star faded in a flash. He began spending as much time cooling his heels on hardwood benches as he did taking easy lay-ups on hardwood courts. Then it got worse. Sam was on his way to Coach Fort’s office, ready to deny that he had diddled the daughter, when he overheard the coach telling one of his assistants “if that dumb nigger so much as looks at my Krystal again, I’m having his black ass put under the jail.”
 
It was an open secret that Coach Fort wasn’t exactly wild about having Black players on his team to begin with. He was one of the last holdouts; preferring whites who might not be as talented but who were, by his reckoning, better team players. He was commonly quoted as believing that whites played better-organized ball. That Blacks suffered from the star syndrome--they wanted to solo and showboat. “I’m two seconds away from grabbing my Bowie knife and slicing that big, ugly, black ape’s balls off and stuffing them in his mealy mouth,” Coach Fort ranted.
 

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter One, part 3

 

    “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Stan Bakman. That’s Bakman. It’s pronounced liked the name of the composer Bach, with a man backing it up. Bach wrote badass music. Bach-man shoots kickass film. I got to do it. If I didn’t shoot films, you know, I’d probably be shooting a bunch of white—‘scuse my French, y’all—motherfuckers,” he said. “But they pay me beaucoup bucks to shoot for the United States Broadcasting Corporation, the Cadillac of the television networks, so I take pictures instead of taking out crackers.

“You know what I mean. Two years ago. Two years ago, this silly little white boy who was an assignment editor, sent me out to shoot some drug addicts in a shooting gallery,” Bakman said.

He was in his element, telling war stories and preaching at the same time.  Allison, who also had heard this particular Bakman story one too many times, slipped into the kitchenette to get more refreshments.  I kept my eyes on the fox. Every one else focused on Bakman, amused by his theatrics, curious about where he was going with his tale.

“So I headed straight up Lake Shore Drive to Uptown where I knew there’s a shooting gallery busier than the VC during the Tet Offensive; busier than a one-armed paperhanger. I shot the junkies coming and going. I shot them nodding out. Then I slipped a couple of them a sawbuck so they’d let me shoot them shooting shit. I got some monster shots. Some ‘I'm too busy to come to the Emmys so send the statue back to the station with my producer’ shots. One looked like a true-to-life version of Frank Sinatra popping a vein in Man with the Golden Arm,” Bakman said.

“Anyway, I bring the film back and this punk white boy editor reviews it. ‘What’s this?’ he sneers. I wanted to kick his stuck-up ass. I say, ‘You wanted junkies, I got you junkies.’ He screams, I mean screams, ‘That’s not what I wanted. You know what I wanted.’ Yeah, I knew what he wanted. You see I shot a bunch of white junkies, because I,” Bakman’s voice dropped dramatically to a whisper, “wanted to be accurate. There are more white people in this country than there are Black. It stands to reason that there are more of them shooting up dope than there are us. I shot the facts. I shot the truth. I shot poor white trash bitches with scraggly, matted hair and tattoos and missing front teeth coming out the shooting gallery. I shot gawky, greasy headed, alabaster teens. These were some dirty-clothes wearing hillbillies. Skinny-butt itching, cigarette dangling from their mouths, little dudes who were creeping into this burnt out abandoned building where small rays of sunshine cut through the flamed-out roof. I shot this one junkie...might have been a little more than 30...who had collapsed all his blood vessels. Tracks everywhere. Couldn’t pop a vein to save his life. Couldn’t shoot up his arms. Couldn’t even shoot up the soles of his feet. I shot him trying. He was in bad shape. Real bad shape. The only good vein he had left was in his little, shriveled-up jones.” All the men in the room cringed, many of them reflexively reaching for their loins, as they imagined the pain. “So he shot up there,” Bakman shrugged, as if to say, ‘that’s that life.’

“I got it all on film. But it didn’t matter how good the shots were, how nitty-gritty they were. This white boy editor starts yelling at me, ‘That’s not what I wanted. You know what I wanted. You go out to the West Side and get me shoot some junkies.’ I answered, ‘What in the fuck are you talking about? You asked for junkies, I gave you junkies.’”

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter One, part 1

 
 

“Don’t be true to me and I’ll be blue to you.”--Allison Raines

Chapter One

 

 

 ...11 years earlier

            “Pssst. Bakman,” I whispered, motioning toward the kitchenette of my apartment.

“Yeah,” Bakman answered, too loud to be cool. Considering.

I signaled slightly with both hands for him to keep it down as I backed towards the kitchen sink with him drifting my way.

“What?” he asked irritated. His head pivoted between the discussion in the living room and me.

“Who’s the fox?” It was a question I mouthed silently. Allison was in earshot.

“Which one?” whispered Bakman, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Constance Pitts and the beauty that was piquing my interest at the moment. Bakman strained to read my lips. “I know who that one is,” I pantomimed, motioning towards Connie, who was definitely worth the hunt. She was tiny, shapely and gorgeous. She carried herself like a Nubian princess. She was our neighbor.

Allison and I lived in a modern high-rise complex called Prairie Towers. About a year before we took up residence, Connie moved into the complex seeking refuge. She was the former Chicago Chronicle-Observer reporter who broke the story about Toni Tolliver, the up-and-coming mulatto television series actress, and her secret, out-of-wedlock childbirth.  Tolliver had managed to hide her pregnancy from close friends, relatives and gossip columnists. About the time she would have begun to show, she vanished from public view. Constance’s front-page story reported that Tolliver was holed up in Lake Point Tower, the new luxury high-rise building at the footprint of Navy Pier. That she had given birth to a seven-pound, six-ounce baby boy. And that the infant’s alleged father was none other than the cosmos preacher, Rev. Billy Crowe.

A fanatical bunch of the righteous reverend’s flock from Mission JAB--Justice Advocating Blacks--became indignant and vengeful. They picketed, morning, noon and night, in front of the Hyde Park two-flat where Constance lived. Both Tolliver and Crowe denied the minister was the father of the child. But Tolliver never got around to naming who was and no one stepped forward to claim the honor.

For three months, Constance suffered through the angry pickets and unrelenting charges that she was a lying, shameful sell-out. She steadfastly refused to “dignify with a response” the rumor that but for-the-grace-of-God someone could have reported a similar story about her. She dismissed as “character assassination” the gossip that she had been a secret lover to the reverend, duly noting that she and Mrs. Crowe knew each other on a social as well as professional basis. In the end, her suffering paid off. Constance was offered a reporting job by one of the local network television stations.

“Not her, Jerk-off.  You and I both know who she is,” I lip spoke and motioned. “The other fox.”

“Later, Mr. Pierce,” Bakman grinned, turning back to the meeting.

That was good enough for me since I had no business allowing myself the diversion. After all, this was a meeting I had called. Well, Allison and I had called. Allison stood with her back to the view from our living room. The city skyline, glowing a deep golden orange from the sunset, served as her backdrop. “For the past few months, some of y’all have been talking about forming an organization of Black journalists. So Pierce and I figured that maybe we all should stop talking about it and do something about it,” Allison said, pausing to underscore her point.

“You know, we all have our personal ambitions. We all want to get ahead. Most of us want a cushy crib, a long ride and a fat bankroll. That’s cool,” Allison said, swatting away any flickering notions of disagreement that may have been polluting the air. “I’m not going to knock that. But, I think we need to face facts: that probably ain’t gone happen for most of us unless all of us come up with a plan for The Man. We’ve got to put pressure on these white bosses at these major media companies to hire more of us.”

The heads of the dozen journalists in the room bobbed off beat. The fox sat wide-eyed and open.  She was all legs. I nudged Bakman. Gave him the old “can you imagine those babies wrapped around your waist” look. He gave me the nod. Her skin tone was a deep rich dark chocolate. That was where her blackness started and seemed to end. Her features were European. Her eyes were a curious hazel color. She wore an Afro that wasn’t; her dark auburn hair too fine to work as a ‘fro but she was styling it anyway. It was a huge delicate ball, threatening to collapse under its own weight. Overall, the fox looked like a well-built white girl dipped in creamy hot fudge.

Roy Reed Wright, a brother I’d seen around town from time to time, had his eyes on her too.  He gave her a wink as he whipped out his Berkshire pipe. I watched him as his eyes shifted from Allison to the fox then back to Allison. I knew the look.

Rudolph Lomax rose to speak. “For those of you who don’t know me,” he started with disingenuous modesty. Everybody at the meeting read the Chicago Chronicle-Observer, which ran a photograph of him atop his column and watched, Back to Black, his weekly public affairs TV talk show. We knew who he was.