Remembering David Williams:

What's Happening Brother?

by Ted Rhodes

A long distance call from Indiana.  What's happening, friend? I say into the phone. 

My friend, sounding weary, cuts to the chase. They found him shot to death behind the house on Wayne Street.  His mother's old house.  Blast from a shotgun.  No note, but he had set his shoes down carefully beside him on the ground.  Isn't that just like him?  The police have already ruled it a suicide.

My friend's voice trails off.  The "him" is David Williams.

How can this be?  The David Williams we remember would never leave this world without a few words--a bold challenge, a stance, or at the very least one last thought-provoking question to goad us into further action.  David Williams was a man of action, but words always accompanied those actions, didn't they?  Didn't they?  

I hang up the phone a skeptic that David Williams planned this action as his last.

I remember a description I wrote a few years ago of a fictitious character for a book set in Indiana I have yet to finish.  I named the character Milton Booker and first introduced him running in the darkness of a summer's night--running with the swiftness of the wind and the punch of a tornado past rickety porches where others cowered from the lingering heat to exchange the latest scuttlebutt of the neighborhood.

Booker's name naturally was on the lips of many a porch sitter.  The tall figure he already cut in over-alls and combat boots was made all the more imposing by the long, bulky power cable he had stumbled across one evening half buried in the weeds and broken glass out along the tracks.  He had taken to wearing the cable about his neck and shoulders whenever he ran to make him even stronger than he already was.  And there was always some tattered book he was reading poking from a pocket.  Poetry, philosophy, world politics--it didn't much matter.  If he came across something good, he would quote it soon enough--even a popular song if he needed to.  "The revolution will not be televised," he would say, but when the time came--and Booker insisted right from the start that it was coming--he would be ready. 

Each night he would appear like clockwork out of the darkness from behind a row of faded clapboard houses along Berry Street, jumping the bushes in every front yard as if they were hurdles, and then in the next instant he would be gone, heading for the highway that cut its way through the neighborhood eastward along the same lazy path taken by the railroad and the river.  He was a phantom, an apparition of the night, but the little kids and the teenagers in the neighborhood--the
youngbloods--always treated him with great respect, day or night.  It was "Mr. Booker, sir?" when they spoke to him, if they had the courage to speak at all.

Most of the older folks, sadly, just called him Milt and couldn't understand him.  Or wouldn't.  At least not about the cable around his neck.  And what was all this running business about?  A few of their heads would always wag from the shadows of their porches as he ran past them in the night, but always he'd turn.  He wouldn't smile, but he'd tip his head to them as he passed, out of respect.  A whisper of a snicker occasionally would emanate out from a house and lap at his heals, but Milton Booker would push on up the street unflinching, unaffected.  He had crafted his aloofness into a fine mantle, and he wore it like armor even when he ran.

It was there, that mantle, when he needed to calm an angry crowd or lead one in a march.  It was there again when the Tango Units moved in to arrest him on this charge or that one.  The Man was never shortchanged in the charge department.  Disorderly Conduct.  Resisting Arrest.  They always managed to trump something up on him.   Heck, they even arrested him one time for raking leaves in the broad daylight.  Of course making it stick in court was altogether a different matter.  Most of the time Booker could beat them at their own game.

Fact was, Milton Booker spoke his mind and heart and soul, and The Man wasn't used to that back then.  Quite a few other people around town weren't used to it either.  Not in the Sixties.  People who heard about his goings-on said he was nothing but a crazy fool.  Others who had seen or heard him first hand said otherwise.  Those who had been to the barricades knew.  Those who had seen him work a crowd knew.  So did those who had ever heard his deep voice boom out from the back of a meeting hall to ask that one lone question no one else had thought to ask.  They knew it too from their front stoops, the porch sitters who saw him night after night circling back effortlessly from the highway to leap the hedges again along the home stretch.  When Booker ran, the long strides and the slow cadence of his boots beating against the dirt--the pavement--masked the true speed he travelled.  It was a wonderful illusion that fooled many an unwary child and more than a few over zealous cops--not to mention the half dozen mangy neighborhood mutts--who tried to tag along...

I realize, of course too late, who it was I was writing about: a man who tried his best to carry us through some tough times; a man who wasn't afraid to stand up for what he believed in--what he thought was right; a man who wasn't afraid of being laughed at when he ran, boots pounding, through the neighborhood or in later years when he commuted out of it again on roller skates; a man who wasn't afraid to make us laugh either, as he did the time he came across a load of trash that the city had dumped in the neighborhood.  What did he do about it?  Why, he borrowed a contractor's old truck of course, loaded it up with all the spilled trash and drove promptly downtown to dump it all on the sidewalk outside the City-County Building, where it rightfully belonged.  That was David for you.

David Williams was ahead of his time, and some people still think of him as Fort Wayne's own Malcolm X, but I don't know.  To me he was David Williams.  There was nobody else like him. 

When I think of David Williams, I think of pride and respect and courage in a man.  I think of a singular intensity that sometimes can overtake such a man and consume him fiercely in the pursuit of justice.  At the same time, I think of a mother's gentle love and of a sister's.  And I think of a father most of us never knew who was Fort Wayne's first African-American peace officer.  I think of a wife's love too, somewhere along the line, though I never knew her.  I think of the vegetable garden behind a mother's house that a man so carefully used to till and cultivate.  I think of the fresh bread a man used to bake and share with any visitor who might come by.  I think of the kids who used to seek that man out.  I think of the respect that man used to get.  I think of granite and thunder and of a man who could stand in front of you as straight as steel and burn holes in your clothes with looks of fire.  When he finally spoke to you, it was usually worth repeating. 

Whenever any of us were swept off course, buried beneath some avalanche of social injustice, there he always would be, ahead of us, kicking out for the solid earth underfoot that he might clear a path. 

Where are we headed, David Williams?  Couldn't you at least have told us that?  And what about all the street gangs now in the old neighborhood?  Where have you gone, David Williams, in such a hurry?  Gone in a flash.  Crazy David.  The man we never could catch, never overtake--ahead of us once more in the night.  Running alone.  What's happening, brother?  

[Ted Rhodes, a writer and motion picture technician, once worked for the local poverty program and was one of the founding editors of The Fort Wayne Free Press.  He presently lives in Carpinteria, California.]