by John Hersey
6. Snipers!
At about midnight, the men by the jeep and the men on the roof heard shots near at hand.
Immediately after the sounds of the shots came—“about three shots . . . I believe they were small caliber . . . sounded like a pistol,” Thomas testified—Dismukes saw one of his fellow private guards fall prone in the street, he told me, and he thought the man had been wounded or killed; it turned out he had simply hit the deck to protect himself.
Warrant Officer Thomas was not sure, in court, what happened next—whether he rushed first to a telephone inside the building to call for help, or whether he went first to the corner of Euclid “to see if I could see where the shots were coming from.” “That,” he testified, “is a little confusing.”
From the corner, whenever it was that he took a look, he would have seen, directly across Euclid to the south, a Standard garage, with a car wash at the far side of it from his point of view, and, above them, a large billboard saying, “Nobody Undersells WOODY PONTIAC and don’t forget it”; beyond them, the Algiers Motel; and to the right, beyond the car wash and a parking lot, a big brick building which Thomas thought to be a private house—the motel annex.
Sooner or later Thomas got on the phone inside the Great Lakes Building and called the high-command emergency number he had been given.
“I called the high commander,” Thomas testified in the conspiracy hearing, “and that was all I had to do, was tell them our location and I was having trouble.”
“What did you tell them the problem was?” asked Judge Frank Schemanske. “I mean, that’s what I want to know.”
“I said there was shooting, I was stationed at Woodward and Euclid, and we were being fired upon.”
III
AUBUREY AND HIS CIRCLE
11
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
1. The Fork in the Road
This is the hardest part of this book to write. I want to bring out before your eyes and ears some aspects of the life of a young black man in a city, in the circle of his family and his friends. My own being has been at a distance from being black, and I want, if I can, to narrow that distance here, at least, by a careful looking and listening. This will be but a substitute for the reality that a black writer could give you at this point; I am what I am.
I have chosen Auburey Pollard as the one for us to try to get to know. Of the three young men who were killed at the Algiers, Auburey was somehow in the middle. White society confronts every black youth in this country with a fork in the road when he is about ten or eleven or twelve; one path takes him on through some schooling, to some jobs, to living more or less “straight,” to a never easy accommodation, or to a running conflict, with the rule and demands of the white world; the other path takes him apart, into fighting the system without perhaps even knowing, at first, that he is doing so, into scraps and scrapes, into trouble with the police, into jail, into a hustling life, and at last into a constantly harassed alienation from which no turning back had been devised in Auburey’s time, though Malcolm X seemed just before his death on the verge of such an invention. Carl Cooper had a police record; Fred Temple had none. Auburey, very late indeed, was still teetering. He had been in trouble with the authorities once, for hitting a teacher in school, but he was struggling against both the bitterness of his existence and his own combative nature; struggling, at the same time, to have a little fun, and to be as safe as Fred, and to be as bold, as open, and as attractive as Carl. He might have gone either way.
Blood brothers could go divergent ways. One of Auburey’s brothers, Chaney, the Marine, was clearly on the “straight” path; another, Robert, who was in prison when Auburey died, was on the path of estrangement. Auburey, as his father said, had yet to find himself.
2. He Helped Me
When I first asked Mrs. Pollard to tell me about Auburey, her reflex response had to do with health. “Really what bothered me when he was real little,” she said, “he was so sick till I had to take him to Ford Hospital. And when he was thirteen I had to have him operated on at Harper Hospital; he had a hernia. When he was real small, he couldn’t keep nothing on his stomach, he didn’t have too much of a stomach. But they used some chemical drugs, built him up a lining, and after his operation he was pretty strong, a pretty well boy, he helped me around a lot.”
3. I Been Making It
Concisely Mrs. Pollard told me the story of her life. “I been living in Detroit since ’43”—the year of the Belle Isle race riot.
“Before that I lived in Tennessee, Knoxville. I left home after my mother died, I didn’t want to stay home, so I run off. So I been making it on my own. I worked from one job to another job, but I was figuring someday I could marry and have my family here, which I did, you see I wanted to have my own home, which I did, and I said I wanted to have a nice car for them, which I did. That’s just it. Me and my husband was together, over twenty-two years we been together—till this happened.
“I go out and do daywork. I work from one family to another. I worked for one family for ten years, and their kids feel just like a part of me, you know. I been there since they was real small. They treat me very nice. I’m a laundress for them. I keep all their clothes done up. Recently they gave me two days, usually I had just one day. They knew when this happened; I called them, you know, let them know I couldn’t come, you know, my boy getting killed like that. I don’t much feel like working now. I just can’t run away from it. I feel if I could just go on, leave, and go this place and that place, maybe I could forget about things. If I could feel that I could go, you know, from one town to another town, I think I could feel much better. Just see something different and be around different things, you know; I think I’d feel better. I’m not going in my house over there, it makes me sick. I don’t want no part of that house. I lived there ever since ’55.”
The Pollards had five children: Chaney Clay, who was twenty-one when his brother died; Auburey Dows, who was nineteen; Tanner Lorenzo, eighteen; Robert Jewel, seventeen; and Thelma Florence, sixteen.
4. An Artist
“Auburey went to McMichael,” his mother told me, “and he was good on art. He went to Pattengill first. Then he went to a school where they could learn him how to read and write good, because he was sort of hard to learn. Then after he learned that they put him in McMichael; then from McMichael he went to Northwestern.
“He loved to do art, which he was a very good drawer. He was a very good artist, he had papers to go to Woodward Avenue somewhere to a school there, where he could do professional art work. He won two certificates. He made a book of all American ships, I have a certificate to show for it, which it went to New York City and then they brought it back to Wayne State University and put it on exhibit down there.
“My husband was in the Navy, he used to take Auburey to see the ships and show him the different ships he was on, like out to Belle Isle when they had them parked, you know, he’d take him down and let him see the ships he was on. My husband was all over in the war; he was overseas for three years, three years and four months I think he stayed overseas. And he always wanted his boys to go in the Navy, and Auburey said, ‘Dad, I’m going into the Navy, I want to be a Navy man.’ And Chaney said, ‘I’m not going in the Navy because I want to be in the toughest outfit they got, the U.S. Marines.’ ”
5. Do for Yourself
“We were just a common family,” Mr. Pollard told me. “We laughed, we talked. Sometimes I was liable to go out and buy some shrimp, barbecue them all in the shells, stew them down with butter and pour a barbecue sauce over them, and we sit in the middle of the floor and put newspapers there, and nobody but the four boys and myself, and we’d sit there and jolly-bo gig, because my daughter, she wouldn’t eat them; we’d sit there and jolly-bo gig, floor show, get up and go swimming—I swim as hard as each one of them! Get out in the back yard and shoot marbles—I shoot marbles as hard as any one of them! I shoot for keeps, I don’t be playing; but you know, after I’m through wi
th them, I’d give them back to them. And we’d play ball, I taught them how to play football, I begged them to play football, I had only one would play football, and he only played in one game; that was my baby boy. But now far as sports, boxing, or being rough, I’d tell them you cannot grow up in this world depending on the other fellow. Know how to do for yourself. Don’t take advantage of nobody, but know how to do for yourself. Regardless if it’s to make up your bed, fix a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, or clean up your room, shine your shoes, or wash your underwear, know how to do it for yourself. See what I mean? Because you’ll go a long ways like that. There’s nothing dishonest about that. The good book says, ‘God bless the child that has its own.’ They don’t have to be nothing big, nothing like Rockefeller, now, or Henry Ford. There’s an old saying, see, that’s like this:
“I cannot do the big things that I should like to do,
To make the world forever fair, or the skies forever blue,
But I can do the smaller ones that help to make it sweet,
Through tempests that rise and clouds that pass.
Now, I got it portionally wrong, but it’s really a true fact: Everybody cannot do the big things, but you can do some of the small things that help to make it sweet.”
6. Lifeguard
“He loved to swim,” his mother said. “He was a lifeguard one while—YMCA was one of the places, and at Kronk Recreation Center, he was a lifeguard there. He had a card, he was very good, he was a lifeguard.”
7. Right in a Circle
“Auburey, Tanner, Robert, Chaney, and myself, we all used to go swimming,” Mr. Pollard said. “We used to go swimming at Northwestern there, and the guys used to say, ‘Is that your daddy?’ ‘Yeah, that’s my daddy!’ ‘He don’t look like your daddy.’ ‘Well, that’s Daddy over there.’ We were right in a circle. We’d all go swimming, then we’d go home.
“Fishing, the same way. Sometimes we used to go up to Canada, we’d leave like on a Friday, we’d stay Friday, Saturday, up till Sunday sometimes. We used to fish up around Tilbury, all the way up. We used to even take their mother with us, sometimes. But she didn’t want to go because she had to cook—coffee all the time. ‘That’s all I do, is cook.’ And she’s scared of bugs. We went fishing I don’t know how many times. We used to love fishing. You know how boys like to roam, you know, and get out. And I used to take a neighbor’s kid, if I liked the neighbor’s kid, if he was an adjustable kid, a mannerable kid, an understandable kid, I’d take him, too, with mine. I’d take him right along, and we’d have a beautiful time!”
8. Looked Like They Had Some Money
Robert Pollard, whom I visited in prison, told me about one time, while he and Auburey were small, when he had drawn his older brother into trouble. “We were just walking around,” he said, “and we saw a house, looked like they had some money in it, because it was real big, and they had a lot of stuff in there, so we just went on in. First we knocked on the door. If somebody come to the door, we was going to ask for somebody, a name or something, ‘George,’ or something like that. ‘Oh,’ we’d say, ‘we got the wrong number.’ Like that. ‘Excuse us. Sorry.’ Walk on away. Wasn’t nobody there. The door wasn’t open, we had to go through the back. We had two more guys with us, and they took a lot of junk home to their mother and gave it to her. The mother asked where he got that stuff, where all this junk come from, you know, perfume and checkers and stuff like that. His mother smacked him and made him tell. At first he wouldn’t tell her, but she smacked him and made him tell. He told her about me and my brother Auburey and his brother, that we went and broke into a house. She called the police and brought the police over to my house. Said I had been a bad influence—I was, not my brother—said I was a bad influence on her son.”
9. It’s Who You Know
“When he was small,” Mr. Pollard said, speaking of Auburey, “he always wanted to box. Well, I used to box a little bit—never was a professional, but I was what you call every-guy-says-he’s-good, and I had a hell of a left, I thought, which I did, pretty good for a hundred and forty-five pounds. I was supposed to be a professional after I came out of the service, but you know how guys are, they meet those big-leg girls, and that’s all; you’re through with boxing. No more boxing. You’re boxing, but not like that no more. So this kid, he always wanted to box, so I shaped him up, I got him sweat pants, sweat shirt, gloves, all that; I used to run him, sometimes we used to go to Northwestern, polices seen us many a day, running. Lot of times, police would say, ‘What you doing?’ And I’d say, ‘Training my son.’ He was supposed to fight Golden Gloves, I went to see about him fighting Golden Gloves, but the guy wanted to tell me I had to go back over here somewhere, I don’t know where it is, off Genesee, so I never could find it, I’d find it when I wasn’t looking for it. But I knew boxing was a dirty racket. I used to tell him, ‘It’s the dirtiest racket in the world.’ It’s not what you know in boxing, it’s who you know, which”—and Mr. Pollard added this with great emphasis—“is in everyday living. It’s not what you know. You can know too much, and then you’re through. You can know just enough, and you won’t make it. You don’t have to know nothing, and if the right guy likes you, well, then they say, ‘You’ve won the game!’ So this boy, he was a good kid, so I used to train him. He started out, I guess, about fourteen or fifteen. I used to train him all the time. I used to have speed bags, I used to keep two speed bags, I built him a punching rack down in the basement. Then we all lifted weights; I used to have weights for them, too. We’d run maybe, sometimes at night maybe fifteen, twenty, twenty-five laps at a time. And my baby boy, he used to run along with us and laugh all the time. And the fellow, Auburey, it was kind of hard for him at first, because you got to run on your toes, see what I mean, flat-footed is no good for a boxer, and it builds up his calf of his leg, that’s what it’s for, so he can move at all times. When he loses his legs, he’s lost everything. And when he’s past twenty-eight, he’s through; a lot of people don’t know that. So I always told him, you got to keep your legs in good shape. And which he worked for, which he became where he could stand up and defend himself and take care of himself. I didn’t have to worry about him taking care of himself, because I knew he had the moves and the stamina to do it.”
10. He Would Help the Others
In time the self-sufficiency in the springy calves of Auburey’s legs and in the good left he learned to deliver came to represent his main validity as a person. His friends admired it, feared it, and prized it. It was his pride, and it became his curse, as he began to wonder whether people kept him around because they liked him or because they liked having a bodyguard. “Do for yourself!” His father’s ferocious drive for Auburey’s independence of spirit and force of fist may have been—saddest irony of a short life—what brought him to the Algiers and to death.
“He was a nice person,” Sortor said, as his total characterization to me of Auburey, “but he had a quick temper, you know. If somebody would push him around, he’d fight them.” “He wouldn’t start fights,” Lee said, “but he wouldn’t refuse a fight if it came to it. He would help the others in fights.” “When something happened to me,” his brother Robert said, “like be fighting or something, I’d go get him and he always helped me out. He just could box real good.”
11. Sortor
“Him and Sortor was old best friends,” Mrs. Pollard said to me. There were, in fact, starting when they were all eight or nine, two pairs of friends, Auburey and Sortor, and Lee and Carl. The boys all called everyone by first names except James Sortor. He was plain Sortor, or sometimes Brother Sortor. “He don’t sound like calling him James,” Lee explained to me once. Of course, I did not meet Sortor until after Auburey was dead and Carl was dead—two of his oldest friends—and what had happened had “made Sortor kind of cold,” as Carl’s mother had told me. He sat, head covered—I never saw him in the house without a hat or head rag on—with a steady stare, almost a glare, his humor coming out in pushes of vocal ene
rgy which did not seem to touch his lips in passing but briefly fanned up the embers in his eyes. I came to admire his courage, as he broke himself of the dangerously serious drinking he had fallen into, in his mourning and numbness after the Algiers incident. He had two tones of articulation as he told a story, one straight-out and monotonic, the other, coming whenever he quoted dialogue, suddenly deep-throated, man-to-manly, and exaggeratedly animated; it was as if his words were expressed through two entirely different media. When I knew him, his father, laid off from Chrysler, was drawing unemployment compensation; his mother worked in a laundry; three of his four sisters lived at home.
12. Fifteen Days in Dehoco
“This teacher,” Mrs. Pollard said to me, “his name was Mr. Sunday—I went to school to see about Auburey. He accused Auburey of things he wasn’t doing. . . .”
——
“They said Mr. Sunday was a football coach, or something like that,” Tanner, Auburey’s younger brother, said to me, giving me what would have to be called hearsay. “He was big and fat, too. He wasn’t a bad teacher, he was a nice teacher, but he always made jokes on people in school. And he’d smack people on the side of the head, you know, people who’d been complaining. And some of the students would get mad at him.”
——
Richard Sunday, who was thirty-seven years old when this incident took place in February 1965, had for eight years been teaching “special education,” a program for slow students, at Northwestern High School. He recently told Ladd Neuman that in his time at Northwestern he has had three serious discipline cases, and that Auburey Pollard was the first of these.
