Yesterday Was A Day

I talked to a man in my office yesterday, a black man.  I was listening to him reminisce about what it meant to be a black man.  He told of his grandparents in a wagon pulled by mules secreting away to West Tennessee from Mississippi, traveling by night, hiding in the trees by day.  He talked and talked spiraling around his tale until it became so tight he spilled over.  He quietly related the day Martin Luther King Jr. died.  He was in the fifth grade.  “He was our Moses, he was going to bring us all forward” he exclaimed.  On that day his teacher cried and cried and then he said, “that was a bad day, a bad, bad day.”  “OH GOD” he said, like a man swept over the falls crying out to the only one he thought just might save him.  He put his head in his hands and began to weep, slowly shaking his head back and forth, crying and crying.  Silently the tears seeped through his fingers and dropped to his trousers, “He was gonna save us all and they killed him”.  I knew in some way I was his “they”.  Yesterday was a day.