Red Earth White Earth by Will Weaver

Author:Will Weaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2009-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

24

When he left the hotel and the basketball team that cold Sunday morning in March in Minneapolis, Tom walked for two days and nights. Any street, any place. Just walked. Eventually he arrived back on Franklin Avenue at the office of the American Indian Movement. AIM found him a room, mostly heated, and that spring a job with an all-Indian roofing crew. That summer he worked on the rooftops of Minneapolis among air conditioners and pigeon shit, carrying buckets of tar, wearing tennis shoes that weighed ten pounds apiece from hot asphalt hardened on them.

Then the fall. A broken scaffold rope, a drop three stories into a crab tree alongside an apartment building. Two months in St. Mary’s in traction. Plenty of time there to think.

Long talks at night with an old black hospital orderly named Clements. Clements worked the graveyard shift emptying bedpans, dusting. Clements began to bring him books, not the pulp paperbacks that most people read while they were in the hospital, but Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, books by James Baldwin. The books belonged to his son, Clements said. Clements said he himself didn’t enjoy reading all that much; when he handed the books to Tom, Clements squinted and tilted the books as if to focus their titles.

One day Clements brought not books but a visitor. The visitor was a man who was Clements himself, only a lot younger. Younger and taller and straighter and dressed not in a white smock but in a yellow, camel’s-hair overcoat and underneath a gray flannel suit with a striped tie over a light blue shirt. The man was Clements’s son. His name was Frederick Douglass Clements and he was an attorney for the Urban League in Washington, D.C.

When Tom was released from the hospital he went home to convalesce with Clements. Once a week, on Sunday night, Fred called his father from Washington, and once a month Fred came home. Not long before Tom was ready to go back to roofing, Fred invited Tom to come with him to Washington.

“The first time I walked around in the Capitol Building I felt like I was in church,” Tom said. “You know, wanting to whisper. Looking at the detail work of the ceiling, the walls, the floor. I couldn’t stop looking at the details. But then I began to watch the people there, the men with their briefcases and suits and ties. They never looked at the ceilings or the paintings on the walls. They just walked down the halls in little clusters of briefcases. They argued. They went to meetings all the time and to the bars afterwards.

“I couldn’t figure out what it was they did all day,” Tom continued. “So I started to follow them around. Aides, lobbyists, congressmen, senators, I didn’t know who was who except when I recognized some of them from newspaper photos. It didn’t matter to me. I followed anybody that looked like he might know what was going on.” He laughed.

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