by John Hersey
“This one big fat guy, he bashed my leg and my spine. And knots all over my head, broke my tooth off, and all that. I had a couple of cuts from the sticks.
“And so they asked, ‘Anybody got to go to the hospital?’ Took Auburey downstairs, too, they was beating him up, too. They put a big flash, like, a mark across his face. They let Auburey go. But I was beat up so bad they had to take me to the hospital, X-rayed my leg and my spine. They said it was just all bruised up, that’s all. And they X-rayed my head.
“And so anyway, that morning that they let me go from the hospital, I went to court and asked the judge, ‘Could you send me to a lawyer?’ He said, ‘No, if you got a lawyer, you’d have to have your lawyer right here.’ So he said, ‘Do you want to go to court or not? If you don’t want to go to court, we’ll just take you back to jail.’ And so I told him, ‘Yeah, I want to go to court.’ Because it was my first time that I’d ever been in a courtroom, I didn’t know nothing about courts, too much. So the judge, he asked me, ‘What happened?’ I told him that the polices jumped on me. So anyway the judge gave me a year’s probation and a hundred-dollar fine. It was Schemanske”—the Honorable Frank G. Schemanske, who will appear again here.
——
Tanner’s date that night was a little blond white go-go girl named Lucy. In her version of the fight at the Twenty Grand, Tanner’s mother told me, “Lucy ran out of there, and the police was after her. They tried to rape her, but she got in a cab and got away.”
——
Following up on this accusation of attempted rape, I got this story from Lucy:
“When me and Tanner went in, we went there to have fun, you know. I paid my admission and Tanner paid his. And we went to dancing, and Auburey was there, and I danced once with Auburey, and then all of a sudden about an hour later there was some scandaling going on, you know, and I noticed there was two guys, you know, and it seemed like it looked like Auburey, but I wasn’t sure. As far as I seen it, Tanner wasn’t in it. What I did hear but I didn’t see was that when Tanner tapped the guy on the shoulder to tell him something, you know, the policeman just turned around and whammed him. When the policeman did this, and there was a couple of policemen on Tanner, and I guess Tanner had to try to defend himself.
“And so after the fight was over with, a policeman came over to me, you know, after everything was quieted down, and he says, ‘Where’s the guy?’ I says, ‘What guy?’ ‘They says the guy that you came with.’ I says, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘He was fighting and he got away.’ I says, ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know they was fighting. I didn’t see him fighting. I thought it was somebody else.’ I was just a little disgusted, you know, so I went around and talked for a while, you know, some other guy I danced with, I says, ‘You know that guy I came in with?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did he leave, or what?’ He said he didn’t know. So I went around looking for Tanner. So I didn’t see him, so I thought I might as well go. So I went, and some guy started following me, talking to me; it was an elderly guy around in his thirties, you know. I was going to catch the Grand River bus, it was about two blocks’ distance, you know. So I walked across Fourteenth, just right across the street, and I started walking towards the first building, you know, and the guy kept begging me, you know, like if I would take a ride with him, saying all kinds of junk, you know, and I began to get jumpy-like, seems like he gave me the impression he would go urph! and pull me somewhere, you know. And so I started to walk back, so I crossed back to Warren, over back to the Twenty Grand parking lot, saying, you know, ‘Okay, I’ll take your ride,’ because he did say his car was in the parking lot, you know. I thought I would just say that because I thought he would grab me. I was scared about that, you know. He’s still walking. He started walking ahead of me, you know, and then he started talking to a couple policemen, and so I went into a telephone booth, and I was going to call a cab, but I seen a cab coming, so I jumped in the cab and went over to Tanner’s house.”
22. They Thought He Was Big
“If anybody wanted to borrow some money from Auburey, you know,” Tanner told me, “he’d loan it to them. When he was working, he’d loan me about twenty dollars, and my sister some money and my mother some money and my father some money, boy across the street some money, his friends some money.”
“When Auburey used to have money,” Thelma said to me, “when Auburey use to work at Ford’s, he used to give one of his friends money to buy things, he used to give him money to get his hair did and get his clothes cleaned—and when the friend had money he wouldn’t give Auburey a quarter. When Auburey used to get his whole pay, he used to make just about a hundred and twenty dollars a week, and him and his friends would split it up, and then when his friends would get paid, they would get long gone with their money, wouldn’t give him a penny. I told him to stop hanging around with them.”
“Auburey used to think the boys was plotting against him,” Lee said to me once when I visited him in jail, speaking to me through the visitors’ glass, “because sometimes we wanted him along and sometimes we wouldn’t take him. A lot of people were scared of him, because when he drank he could really fight.”
“All that crowd is heading for is trouble,” Thelma said to me, in a fiercely maternal mood. “They think they’re slick. I think, one thing, if Auburey never would have been with them, he’d have never been where he is now. What did he like about going with that crowd? They thought he was big, because he beat up everybody for them. He could fight real good, that’s probably why they liked him. He’d do all the fighting, while they’d stand back and watch.”
23. Carl and Lee
One trouble was that the pairs of friends were diverging. Carl Cooper and Lee Forsythe were very close and daring; Auburey and Sortor were more on the cool side. Sortor, having shared the experience of a corrective institution with Carl and Lee, was fraternal with them in a way Auburey could not be.
——
Carl Cooper, whom, of course, I never met, because he was killed along with Auburey at the Algiers, was seventeen years old when he died. Like Lee, he was small of stature: five feet five inches tall, 122 pounds in weight. He apparently dressed with a fierce and iridescent bravado; as we have seen, he loved clothes so much that he wanted to take up the trade of tailoring. He was the brightest spirit, the craftiest, the funniest, the most charming of the friends. “I had to whip him one time,” his stepfather, Omar Gill, said to me. “One time. Once Carl got whipped. I told him then, I said, ‘You act like a man, I’ll treat you like a man. If you act like a child, I’ll treat you like a child.’ And I never had to bother him. He was a guy, just a good, good guy. He was a good guy, always had a pretty smile. I mean, you can’t imagine until if you’d seen him, you would have just liked the guy. You know how you see people and you just like them right off? That’s the way everybody was with him. On Sundays, you couldn’t get into this house, with the young guys waiting to take him to the Twenty Grand. Just everybody came right here to see Carl. Boys, ladies, girls came to see Carl. That’s what kind of guy he was.”
“Me and Carl,” Lee told me, “knew each other about ten years—from we was seven, eight years old. We was just everyday friends, sort of like brothers. We first got together over on Airport Road, used to stay over there, by the side of Grand River. After that we just sort of come up together. We was just like brothers. Like if I got in the House of Correction, Carl told me he slept to keep my time away faster. If one of us got in a little trouble, the other one was there to help. During the winter I guess I was getting in the most trouble—driving without a license, tickets, stuff like that. No serious trouble. Thirty dollars’ fine to pay my ticket off, and eight days. . . .”
The outside world treated Carl, to a large extent, not as a man but as a bothersome child, and he responded in kind. He managed to keep fairly steadily in trouble. He was arrested twice in the autumn of 1966 for driving without a license: thirty dollars, five days the first time; seventy-five dollars, ten days the second. A week b
efore Christmas he was arrested for violation of the state narcotics laws—possession of marijuana; he was not tried for this until the following May. In February he was arrested in Highland Park for “Investigation of Disorderly Person”; nothing came of it. Toward the end of April he was arrested for driving without a license again; he failed to appear in court. On May 2, he was sentenced to sixty days in Dehoco on the drugs charge, and he was released just three weeks before the riots. Three days before them he was arrested in an alley south of Outer Drive and east of Kentucky on suspicion of Breaking and Entering; he fitted a complainant’s description of a prowler in the back yard of 18300 Indiana, and he had on him a gold ring with three stones and a Benrus watch, which may have been his and may not have been.
“Once,” Mrs. Gill said, “a colored police talked to Carl, and he said, ‘The boy dresses nice and all,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand it.’ He said, ‘Carl,’ he said, ‘why do you go out in the white neighborhoods?’ Carl said, ‘I go out there because they have everything,’ he said, ‘we have nothing.’ And they made him see a psychiatrist, and he said there wasn’t anything wrong with Carl, but he said if Carl got caught, and if he had a friend, said he never was going to involve a friend. Just may as well get used to that, you know. So a lot of things he got in trouble about, he just took the blame for it, you know. In fact, he had just been home a month on the day he got killed. He did sixty days in the House of Correction for narcotics, which was he had come from the barber shop, you see, and this other fellow had left the stuff in the car. He was trying to make a U-turn, trying to give the stuff back to the fellow soon as he realized it was there. The police stopped him, you know, for making an improper U-turn, and so when they got him to the station and told him to put everything out, he did, he put the bag up there, and it had marijuana in it. So he wouldn’t tell on the other fellow. I tried to get him to tell, I said, ‘This is really going to go hard on you now,’ and had to get him out on bond and lawyer’s fee and everything, you know, but still he wouldn’t tell.”
——
Lee Forsythe, who was two years older than Carl and almost exactly his size, walked, when he was “going around,” with a bantam straightness in fine wild clothes, under a high and slick pompadour, his eyes wise, his speech understated and soft, an ironic smile of detachment and fearlessness covering every speech that might be understood as earnest. Friendship was the highest prize of life to Lee, and Carl, above all others, was the giver of the prize. Riding around, picking up girls—that was his higher education.
“We three, Carl and Sortor and me”—and so in the mind of at least one of the friends, Auburey was an outsider—“we didn’t ever fight. Tell the truth, we never did fight. Carl was the youngest, but he was sort of like the big brother. He’d tell me and Sortor when we do wrong—he didn’t do wrong, if you listen to him. After he come from Lansing, we used to rastle a lot, and we even got some girls to rastle”—the ironic smile. “Once we was rastling, and he went in the door the wrong way, and we had to take him to the hospital for that. Other than that, he was just an old happy guy.” Even with the punishments of life, there was a great deal of laughing; if not pure freedom, at least intermittent wholehearted carefreedom.
“The House of Correction,” Lee said to me, “that really make you want to drive without a license. You don’t get the right amount of sleep; shoveling coal, you just don’t like that. Since I was little, I couldn’t shovel coal up into the burners. I had to go outside and throw it to fill up the cars. I worked midnights. They had all kinds of work—cow barnyard, dairy, kitchen.”
Lee, who reached the tenth grade in high school—all three who had been to the Training School dropped out of public school after their release—had a job briefly with Ford and worked for a year pumping gas at a Standard station at Petoskey and Richton. He lived with his mother. At the conspiracy hearing he gave some extended testimony—during a passage when the defense lawyers were probing at the boys’ sources of income, in an attempt to discredit them as pimps and criminals—that he supported himself as an artist, selling paintings to friends and “to the people in the neighborhood.” I got to know Lee fairly well; he never mentioned art and never showed me a painting, and I honestly don’t know whether this was truth or an elegant put-on, which might have occurred to Lee because of Auburey’s unfulfilled talent.
24. Michael
Michael Clark came late into the lives of the friends, and his was a disturbing influence—and, in the balance, most unsettling of all to Auburey. His presence broke the symmetry of the pairs.
Michael was a handsome and, by Thelma Pollard’s standard, “slick” young man who said in court that he was twenty—though he lied so much under oath that I cannot assert that even that was true; an arrest report two weeks before the riot gave his age as eighteen. His style was bold, cocky, and elusive. When Michael dressed up in a dark suit, with a brightly striped cravat held in place by a tie pin, wearing at a calculated angle a white straw hat with a brim only an inch wide, he looked like many, many dollars; his eyes, the whites tinged with some of his hot blood, had a glint of scorn in them, and the left side of his mouth was slightly lifted, not quite in a sneer, for he was too charming to sneer, but in a dandy assertion of his worth.
Carl’s mother told me once, “Michael, he was not actually one of the crowd. I think maybe Carl had been knowing Michael, but Michael had just started coming around.” In court Michael claimed longer relationship with the boys than they said they had had with him. Carl and Lee were more attracted to Michael’s daring ways than Auburey and Sortor were; all three of the others were somewhat jealous of Michael’s hold on the man they considered their own stone champ, Carl; and Sortor’s having shared the Training School time with Carl and Lee drew him more than Auburey into Michael’s orbit.
A dropout from the eleventh grade of Chadsey High School, Michael had been working off and on for three years for an uncle, Robert Harris, “a painter and designer,” as Michael testified. Early in 1967 he worked for two and a half months—earning, he testified, $225 a week—at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal, where he said his mother also worked (“I was putting a motor in the tanks . . . I was a tool man, rather”); he quit. Then he worked two months for Jones and Laughlin Steel Company (“I drove a high-low, and I used to clean out furnaces”); he was laid off. Two convictions were òn his record, both in 1967: Carrying Concealed Weapon and Larceny from Building.
25. Googy-Googy and Go-Go
Tanner Pollard married Lucy, the little white go-go girl, not long after the fight at the Twenty Grand.
Tanner was eighteen, Lucy was nineteen. Lucy’s mother had died in childbirth with her third baby when Lucy was about six; her father had brought her up. She and Tanner had met at a bus stop. “I was coming from downtown, you know,” she told me, “and I always had to catch the bus like usually, so I catched the bus to Plymouth Road. At the bus stop where you catch the bus for Plymouth, Tanner asked me for my telephone number. And Tanner, he went to Plymouth Road with me, and he started calling me.” Lucy had already then mothered a baby girl by a black man; at the time when she and Tanner met, the child was not living with her. When she married Tanner, she was able to have the child again; and not long afterward she gave birth to a daughter by Tanner, for whom Tanner made up a name, Palarena.
Tanner and Lucy rented a small house in a mixed (for they were mixed) neighborhood, and they lived there, in almost unimaginable slovenliness, with Lucy’s two babies and her two teen-age brothers. A supermarket shopping cart sat parked eternally on their front path, and the yard was strewn with folded newspapers thrown by a newsboy and left to rot in rain and snow. Once in a while Tanner’s mother, outraged beyond speech by the mess in the house, went in like a storm with powders and detergents; but it took only a few days for the litter on the floors to get deep again.
For a time both of them worked, Tanner as a waiter and busboy at a place called the Black Knight Supper Club, where he told them he was twenty-two; he looked
it—tall, brown-skinned, with a narrow and mischievous face. As his father had told me, “he’s always googy-googy,” full of pranks and teasing. Once I sat down with him, his wife, and his mother, in a small eatery, and when a prim, elderly white waitress came to take our order, Tanner looked up with big eyes and asked, “Hey, got any fried rat today?” The woman almost fainted. At the end of our meal, Tanner picked up everyone’s plates and licked them. “Awful hungry,” he said, deadpan. His education left something to be desired. Once he asked me, “Where do you stay?” I said, “The Statler.” “No,” he said, “I mean home.” “In Connecticut,” I said. “Where’s that at?” he asked me. “Is that in Indiana?”
Lucy worked from place to place, nights, as a go-go girl, earning five or ten dollars a job, in small night spots in the northwest part of town. “I have a lot of guys following me, see,” she told me. “You know, they think that since I’m white that I’m supposed to be doing something for Tanner, because he’s colored, and they’re jealous, you know. So they telling Tanner, ‘Here you got a white girl, why don’t you put her out there.’ Stuff like that. They’re always following me.”
Between their two jobs, Tanner and Lucy saved up enough money to buy a car—“an old Cadillac,” Tanner told me. “It was filthy, been setting out there, you know, had mud all in the seats, real dirty all over. But I cleaned it up and shined it up till it didn’t look too bad, you know.” It cost $595, plus another $150 for a new (secondhand) engine.
26. Big Brother
“Chaney was Auburey’s hero,” Mrs. Pollard told me. “He was all wrapped up in Chaney, called him Big Brother. When Chaney left, Auburey adopted Chaney’s best friend, Bobby Harris, as his new brother; when Ford laid Auburey off, Bobby helped him get his compensation. He was closer to Sortor after Chaney left, too. Chaney used to make every one of the other kids do chores around the house; he assigned the work, and they done the work. When Chaney left, Auburey, he took over. He cleaned my whatnots in the picture window on the glass shelves, washed the woodwork, painted around. He kind of did it for Chaney.”
