Free And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley

boy; Leonid Trotter McGill. He had given both Nikita, my brother, and me Russian names in honor of the Revolution he harbored in his heart.
    “I’m leavin’ your slave name McGill,” he often said, “because it’s slaves that riot and revolt. When you boys come to the end and the slave master has been overthrown, then you can choose names that will usher in the new world.”
    The display had an emerald
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glistening in its blackness.
    “It’s only men with blood on their hands can claim the end of history,” Tolstoy, my father, would say. “That’s because the capitalists and their lackeys have blood from the soles of their feet all the way up to their ankles. They walk on the workers’ blood, stride through it like hyenas after slaughterin’ a whole flock’a sheep.”
    Whenever my father talked about the workers I got a little confused. Of the four of us only my mother had a job. Was it my mother’s blood that the hyenas strode through?
    The display made it to
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and then stopped. I felt like I did when I was a boy waiting for the clock to tell me when my father was coming home.
    “You’re a good boy, Trot,” my father said one afternoon shortly before he went away forever. “But you’re a little soft. You don’t understand that the police and the army and the government are your enemies. The school and the corner store, the tax collector and even the traffic lights are dead set against you. You will have to fight every day of your life against these enemies. They’ll probably kill you but your brothers in arms will walk over your body to take the world. That’s how tough you gotta be.”
    I remember wondering what the difference was between the capitalists walking in my blood and the revolutionaries walking on my body.
    The elevator doors came open and a slender black man in a long black trench coat came out. He was an old man balding on top, and then some, like me. When he saw me he smiled and tilted his shoulders forward to get his feet moving in my direction.
    I honestly wondered who this man was. The father I remembered was a giant with fists the size of cantaloupes and teeth that could bite through iron nails. Tolstoy had wild hair and eyes that often seemed to be electric with their intensity.
    “Trot?” the old man said when he was just a few steps away.
    “Yes?”
    “Don’t you recognize me, son?”
    Even his voice was nothing like the man I had known. When Tolstoy spoke it was almost always in the tone and timbre of a rabble-rousing political speech. This man’s tones were soft and palliative, like a doctor with bad news.
    “Dad?”
    He walked right up and put his arms around me, murmuring, “Trot, Trot.”
    “Dad, is that you?”
    He took a step back and looked into my eyes. His smile was sad but resolved, knowing and somehow wishing he didn’t know.
    I still did not recognize him. He was a good-looking man, pretty far up in his seventies. But he was not the father I remembered—not at all. I tried to think of why someone would want to impersonate my long-dead father. What possible profit could anyone make from such a scam?
    “Leonid,” he said in a solid tone that was somewhat reminiscent of the father I knew.
    He reached in a pocket and came out with a small square piece of stiff paper; this he handed to me. It was a worn Kodak snapshot, from the early days of color. It was a picture of Nikita and me, my mother, and my father posing at a studio on the Lower East Side. The man in the picture was my father and he was also the man standing at my door.
    “Can I come in, son?”
    —
    Ushering the stranger in, I took his coat and hung it on a cherrywood rack in my office. I brought him down to the dining room and poured him a cognac. He wore black slacks and a gray shirt. Taller than I but not nearly the height of the father I remembered, he was thin, his movements fluid for a man his age. There had only been the slightest limp to his gait. His dark skin and slender grace would have