Black to the Past

Chapter 46

 Wilson stopped reading right there. He finally looked around the room and noticed the other kids had stopped where they were and sat on the floor right along with him as he read.

"What do you mean, Malcolm X is still alive?" Jalen asked.

"That's what the article says," Wilson said, putting the phone down in the middle of them all.

"That's impossible," Meredith said incredulously.

"No, it actually isn't," Michael said, doing the math in his head. "He'd be really old, but it's not impossible."

"He'd be like, 150 years old," Meredith responded back in disbelief.

"Are you cracking up," Halle asked her. "Malcolm X was born in the 1920's. So he'd be, like, almost 100."

"That's old," Meredith said as if proving her point.

"People live a long time, especially with modern medicine," Michael explained profoundly.

"I know that, Michael, I'm not dumb," Meredith retorted back.

"If it walks like a duck..." Brooke said, shaking her head.

Meredith rolled her eyes.

"So Malcolm X was never assassinated," Jalen acknowledged out loud.

"And neither was Dr. King," Wilson said.

They all let that information sink in. Dr. King was never murdered. But that also meant, he stopped the work he was doing on the civil rights movement. Halle hopped up and got on one of the computers. She put Dr. King's name in the Google search engine. His last speaking address had been that one day they'd gone back in time to, in May of 1963. No one had seen or heard from him since. He refused any and all interviews not even interviewing with Dan Rathers when he was called upon in the 1980's for an interview. He'd raised his four children in a quiet town up north in Pennsylvania and he'd died at the ripe old age of 89.

"That's wild," Halle said after reading the information out loud to her friends.

"So we actually changed history," Meredith stated more than asked.

"We sure did," Michael told her.

"I wonder if we have to finish our project?" Meredith wanted to know.

They all looked at her. It was so fitting that her hair had blonde streaks, she certainly had a lot of blonde hair moments.

"Meredith, how could we do a project on the assassination of someone who wasn't assassinated," Jalen couldn't believe this was the girl that he was crushing on. Her I.Q. seemed like it was 10 right about now.

"I don't know! I'm hungry," Meredith whined. She gripped her stomach. They were all tired and hungry and wanted to get home to their warm beds and families.

"Why don't we go eat," Wilson suggested.

It was very overwhelming to learn that you had taken an hour out of your life and changed decades of millions of other people's lives.

"Uh, hello! Guys, are you forgetting what I just said," Brooke wanted to know.

"Oh, right! The current owners are looking for you," Wilson remembered.

"What do we do now," Jalen asked him.

"I'm gonna go back out and take a look. Brooke, were our cars still in the driveway?"

"I didn't notice. I think so, though," Brooke told him.

"Maybe I should go with you," Michael suggested.

"Why?" Halle asked him.

"I don't know. Something feels familiar about this place," Michael told her as he looked around.

"Michael we've been here for hours now! Of course, it seems familiar," Meredith joked with him.

"Naw, it's something else," Michael told her reassuringly. "Come on, follow me!"

Wilson shrugged his shoulders at the others and followed Michael out. Michael was very comfortable walking around the basement. He recognized the furniture that was there and the pictures on the walls. He stopped at one of the photos and pointed to it.

"That's my grandmother," Michael said almost reverently.

"It is?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Wait, do you think she lives here," Wilson asked him as he started to look around at other pictures. "Here you are."

Michael looked at the picture of himself entering kindergarten. His father gave his grandmother a picture every year. He was very close to his grandmother, spending summers at her home and now he realized this was that home he'd spent summers at.

"This is my nana's house. I think I spend a lot of time here. I'm sure of it. Come on," Michael said as he raced towards the stairs. He heard a man's voice yelling out. Michael was cautious because he'd never heard his father's voice so stricken and worried.

"I don't think we should come out without everyone. Let's go back and get them and then I'll make an excuse up that we were just hanging out downstairs. I don't know what my dad does or doesn't know about the time machine room," Michael warned.

"Good idea. I'll get the gang you wait here in case he heads downstairs," Wilson suggested.

Michael sat on the stairs thinking. He was trying to pull from his memory to try understanding why he all of a sudden remembered a new house and had such vivid memories of a grandmother he hadn't had before. Before this trip through time, Michael had his father and mother and not much of anyone else. Now he remembered an aunt, a grandmother and a much older man that resembled Professor Harold, in his life.

"Professor Harold is my grandfather," Michael said in a whisper.