Walter Cronkite’s voice could be heard through the open window next to Sassafrass’ bed. She was sitting there in a long blue and red cotton skirt, crocheting another hat for Mitch. The long walls of the fallen-down, almost Victorian house were totally covered with murals of African exploits. Every time the landlady came to repair the falling plaster on the ceiling she’d look so uncomfortable; her redneck lips would get littler than a needle and her cheeks would get all stiff. Sassafrass loved watching that old peckerwood get nervous from total blackness all through the house. The old peckerwood got $100.00 a month for the whole flat, which Sassafrass and Mitch had worked on to be a permanent monument to the indelibility of black creative innovation. She glanced up from her sixty-sixth stitch to see if there was anything else to do to the house to make it the most perfect place for her and Mitch to stay in until the black revolution, or until they moved to the black artists’ and craftsmen’s commune starting up just outside New Orleans, and pretty near a black nationalist settlement. Sassafrass believed it was absolutely necessary to take black arts out of the white man’s hands; to take black people out of the white man’s hands. But here she was in Highland Park, Los Angeles, with rednecks and Chicanos, because Mitch’s parole officer refused to grant permission for them to live in any black area—and because they could only afford $100.00 a month—and because they didn’t have the money to buy into the artists’ commune near New Orleans anyhow: almost one thousand dollars, cash. So Sassafrass looked around to see if there was something else she could make to make them feel more like loving each other and hitting sunrise with hope, instead of the groans and crabbiness that ate through them toward the end of every poor month.

There were the exasperating patchwork curtains she had managed to get done, and macrame hangings in every doorway—one named for each of their heroes. There was the long and knotted purple jute, hanging for Malcolm, who was a king. It had bullets woven through the ends of it, and dried sand covered twigs passing in and out of the center. “Bullets and land of our own,” Sassafrass had said, standing on Mitch’s shoulders to hang it. Then there were the ones for Fidel, Garvey, Archie Shepp, and Coltrane. In her study, Sassafrass had sequestered a sequin-and-feather hanging shaped like a vagina, for Josephine Baker, but Mitch had made her hide it because it wasn’t proper for a new Afrikan woman to make things of such a sexual nature. Just as she was remembering Mitch’s tirade against her feather-work, Sassafrass felt the doors open and there he was—the cosmic lover and wonder of wonders to her: Mitch.