The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman Page B

children … if some of the other children saw it happen then … some of them would have known her name, even if she was shy … and they could have told the soldiers with the bayonets so some grown-ups would know her name.’
    Jake Zignelik, whose thoughts had been elsewhere, realised how much his son had remembered of the story he had told him and he didn’t know whether to be pleased, proud or perhaps alarmed.
    ‘Maybe they did,’ he said to his son in the back of the cab, now running his fingers through Adam’s hair, ‘maybe her name is known and it’s just that … 
I
don’t know her name.
We
don’t know her name. Maybethat’s something you could look into next time you visit me. You could read up about it and tell me her name.’
    William McCray was a better father to his son Charles than Jake Zignelik was to his son Adam. ‘I never see him,’ Jake Zignelik said to William McCray over coffee during an adjournment in the US Supreme Court.
    ‘Well, that’s not
his
fault. What did you talk about with him when he was here? You talked to him about the decision in
Brown versus Board of Education
, didn’t you?’
    William’s son, Charles McCray, was now the Chairman of the History Department at Columbia. One of the youngest people ever to hold the position, he was also the first African American to hold the position. He had married a woman some ten years younger named Michelle. Uncommonly beautiful, Michelle was a social worker. Much as she tried to dress down, she found her looks hampered her work. Charles and Michelle had one child, a daughter, Sonia.
    Adam Zignelik never forgot his father’s account of the events leading up to the New York draft riots and the mob attack on the Colored Orphan Asylum in the summer of 1863. But he never found out the name of the little girl who had been killed by the furniture they had thrown out the window.
    Shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, Adam Zignelik was to awake momentarily uncertain of where he was and experience a shortness of breath sometimes associated with a heart attack or at least with the tart panic of a nightmare. In the minutes before he woke a montage of images in his mind, mostly in monochrome, had induced a series of increasingly violent bodily tremors almost indistinguishable from a convulsion. The images, except for those of his father and of a white television newsreader on Australian television broadcast in black and white, were mainly of black people. They were from another time. He saw Emmett Till and Emmett’s mother, Mamie. He saw Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie May Collins, all aged fourteen, and little Denise McNair, aged eleven, smiling, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, the four little girls who had been killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white segregationists. He sawArthurine Lucy. He saw Elizabeth Eckford and the others of the ‘Little Rock Nine’. And he saw the Colored Orphan Asylum at the corner of 43rd and 5th. But he couldn’t see the little girl from there who had been killed by the falling piece of furniture. He looked but could not find her. There he was, aged eight, alternately looking for her, looking out for falling objects, and looking out for his father, who had been there a moment ago. And whenever he thought he saw her it wasn’t her but little Denise McNair, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, smiling.
    It was impossible to begrudge anyone trying to protect Denise McNair, impossible to begrudge anyone trying to help her people fight unmitigated evil, impossible to begrudge your father. But William McCray, who had fought both Hitler
and
Jim Crow, had managed to be a good father to his son Charles, now head of History at Columbia, and William McCray was someone his son
could
find, someone his son had
always
been able to find. But on the corner of 43rd and 5th Adam Zignelik couldn’t find his father.
    ‘Hold on to your