Underground Airlines(3)
When dinner was done, Barton took out his wallet, and I put out my hand and laid it over his.
“Hold on, now.” A little tremor rolled through my voice. “I’m gonna get this.”
“Oh, no.” Father Barton shook his head and didn’t pull away his hand, and we held that pose like an artwork: white hand on a brown wallet, black hand on the white hand. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Come on, now.” I peered at him through my spectacles. “I wanna thank you for taking the time, that’s all. It was good of you to take the time.”
The priest exhaled, nodded slightly, slowly removing his hand from our little pileup. Here’s what he was thinking right then: he was thinking, Go on and let the man pick up the check—it’s a gift to him, to let him feel he’s done something. I do not want to sound crazy or something, but I do believe that I have this strange power in certain situations. To read minds, I mean. Not to read thoughts, not exactly, but to read feelings. To read people. To know how people feel.
I dug a few crumpled bills from my coat pocket and smoothed them out on top of the check. Then I pushed a piece of paper across the table, a smudged scrap of napkin. “Here, though. That’s my cell phone number right there. Just in case you change your mind.”
Father Barton stared at the napkin.
“Please, Father,” I said. “Would you please just take it?”
He took it, and he rose and adjusted his collar, and for a split second, I hated this man, this confident boy. And I believe in the Cause…as a matter of policy and faith…Go to hell, son, I was thinking, just for a moment, just a bare half of a moment. With your pity for me and your stiff collar and your alabaster cheeks. You go to hell. I didn’t say it, though. Nothing of the sort. I did not raise my voice or bang a closed fist on the table. Anger wouldn’t help. All it would do, maybe, is draw the attention of those two cops, the white one with the thick neck and his laughing black partner, maybe cause them to amble over here in that slow cop way and ask Father Barton if everything was okay. Ask me if I wouldn’t mind providing my paperwork for them to have a peek at, if it wasn’t too much trouble.
I excused myself to use the bathroom and hurried away, just barely keeping it together.
Once, I saw a businessman on TV, the owner of a midwestern football franchise, and this very wealthy man was proclaiming his personal abolitionist sentiment while defending his use of the infamous “temporary suspension of status” rule to add PB muscle to his defensive line. “Do I like the system?” the man had said, shaking his head, in his thousand-dollar suit, his hundred-dollar haircut. “Well, of course I don’t. But I’ll tell you what: this is an opportunity for these boys. And I love ’em. It’s a bad system, but I love my boys.”
I hated that man so much, watching him talk, and I hated Father Barton the same way there in the diner. Slavery was a game to this child, as it was for that slick team owner, as it is for all the football fans who tsk-tsk about the black-hand teams but watch every Sunday in the privacy of their living rooms. Declaring hatred for slavery was easy for a man like Father Barton; not only easy but useful, gratifying—satisfying. And of course its cold and terrible grip could never fall on him directly.
My anger swelled, then it drained, as anger does. By the time he hugged me consolingly at the door of the diner, by the time the priest was on his way to his car, by the time he stopped to cast a troubled glance back toward me—as I had predicted he would, as I had known he would—that glance found me standing perfectly still in the doorway, a humble man, broken by pain. I had taken off my glasses, and there were tears slipping slowly, one at a time, down my weathered cheeks. The waitress poked her head out, reminded me that she had the rest of my supper for me all boxed up, and I could barely hear her, so busy was I composing this face of grief.
2.
I’ve been free since I was fourteen years old, and on this particular evening, as my dashboard GPS navigated me through the unfamiliar streets of Indianapolis, I was approaching my fortieth birthday.
The great bulk of my life, then, had passed outside the Hard Four, in the free part of the land of the free. But even after all these years, I still found myself astonished daily by the small miracles of liberty. Just walking out of a restaurant with a clear head and a full stomach, holding a Styrofoam box with leftover food inside it. Just lingering in the parking lot a minute before getting in the car, smelling the wet asphalt, feeling a light drizzle as it condensed on my forehead. Just knowing I could take a walk around the block if I wanted to, go to a park and sit on a bench and read a newspaper. Just getting in that car and feeling the vinyl give under my ass, feeling the cough and purr of the engine. All these things were small astonishments. Miracles of freedom.
I was in a modest Nissan Altima with a serviceable 175-horsepower engine and a dull tan interior, but I enjoyed driving it a whole lot. For most of my driving years you couldn’t get a Japanese car because the Japanese were signatories to the European Consensus, blocked from most trade with the United States. Luckily for me, a new prime minister had been elected in 2012 and switched them over to a policy of “stakeholder influence,” a phrase borrowed from the Israelis. Hate the sin, love the sinner. Open borders mean open dialogue, that whole line.
I don’t give much of a shit about international diplomacy, but I f*cking loved that Altima. It started up with no trouble, the heater worked and the wipers worked, and the brakes and the windows and the tape deck worked, too.