by Lionel White
The man who called himself Floyd Carpender lived alone in the place and he did not take advantage of the regular facilities of the hotel. A Puerto Rican came in for several hours a day, three times a week, and did the cleaning. Mr. Carpender had very few visitors, received no mail at all and left the suite only during those hours when his cleaning man was in the place.
The lease had been arranged for by a rather notorious attorney who specialized in criminal cases and divorces for wealthy clients and the rent was paid promptly at the end of each month by a check which came from the attorney's office.
During the year and a half he’d occupied the premises, neither the agent for the building nor it’s owners had ever spoken with Mr. Carpender, nor, in fact, had any other tenant, except for a casual good morning or good evening when they passed him on the stairs leading to the first floor or in the large, ornate marble lobby of the building.
In a different atmosphere and in almost any other city in America but New York, Mr. Carpender might have been considered something of a man of mystery. As it was, no one paid him any particular attention, no one had any particular curiosity about him.
It is typical of America’s most populous city that only there, amid the teeming millions, can a man live in complete anonymity, can a man become a virtual hermit without attracting undue curiosity.
Mr. Carpender was, of course, a man who at best would hardly be noticed. A man you could pass a hundred times on the street and pay no attention to at all. Whom you might sit opposite in a restaurant or be seated next to at a race track or ball park and you would never give a second glance. He was so average in almost every way that even attempting to describe him offers a challenge.
Normal height, say five ten or eleven, neither thin nor fat, perhaps forty but then again maybe only a bit over thirty or again Perhaps forty-five or fifty. Horn-rimmed glasses which he was as likely as not to have left in his pocket, a colorless, routine face with no outstanding characteristics. Brownish hair. Inclined to
wear either blue or dark brown or gray suits. Properly dressed but * his clothes certainly came off a rack from some place like Macy’s or Gimble’s. Smoked filtered cigarettes, but then most men do. A thoroughly nondescript, average, everyday kind of man. Could have been a lawyer, a clerk in a department store, a barber, an accountant, a small businessman or, in fact, an importer and
exporter.
Mr. Carpender, however, was none of these. Among certain other accomplishments, he was an expert on a small Southern city, a city of a little over a hundred thousand souls, a canning center, a place called Oakdale, a city he had never been in or near.
What is perhaps even more unusual is that until approximately some eight months before this particular late August afternoon, as Mr. Carpender sat poring over a street map of Oakdale behind the locked steel-lined door of his paneled office, he had never even heard of the place. In spite of this, Mr. Carpender probably knew more about Oakdale, its history past and present, its economic, political and social structure, its peculiar mores and customs, than ninety-nine percent of the people who lived there.
Mr. Carpender could tell you the exact population; could let you know that a little more than fifty-five percent of that population was colored. He could even tell you how many persons were employed by the several large canneries which gave the city its industrial support, could inform you of the other small industries of the city, how many people were on regular payrolls and what was their average salary.
He knew how many banks there were in the city, the names of the city’s officials and the leading and most powerful families. He knew the name of the district attorney and the police chief and how many men were on the force. He knew the location of the railway depot, the bus stations—there were two, Trailways and Greyhound—the airport, the radio station, and utility facilities. In fact, there was damned little about Oakdale and its citizens with which he wasn’t completely and thoroughly familiar.
Mr. Carpender was neither a historian, a social anthropologist nor even a scholar. But this information, which he had so carefully gathered over the weeks and months, was by no means trivial. It
meant a great deal to Mr. Carpender. It meant money. A very large amount of money. It meant a large amount of money he had already spent, or rather invested. It also meant a vastly larger sum which he hoped to spend sometime in the future.
Mr. Carpender looked at his desk clock and noticed that it was twenty minutes after seven. He took off his glasses and placed them in the breast pocket of his light summer jacket. He rolled up the map and shoved it into the top desk drawer- He prepared to leave his suite of rooms.
He would just have time to walk the two blocks to the drugstore on Sixth Avenue and stand outside of the telephone booth in order to be there when the bell rang and he could pick up the receiver and take the call which he was sure would be coming. The call from another telephone booth some five hundred miles to the south. The booth in the lobby of the Oakdale Hotel.
Mr. Carpender could expect to hear a piece of shocking and horrifying news over the telephone, but Mr. Carpender would not be surprised. Anything but. He would be shocked and surprised, and Goddamned furious as well, if he didn’t hear it.
2 OAKDALE Police Headquarters is housed in a massive, ancient three-story pseudo-Gothic structure out on South Charter Street, some half dozen blocks from the center of town. The building, until several years back, had been the county courthouse. When they built the new county courthouse, the commissioners considered tearing down the old structure, but when they learned the high cost of demolition, they had offered it gratuitously to the city.
The city fathers, many of whom had been lawyers and had practiced their profession in the rambling, rat-infested old building, had at first been inclined to turn down the offer. On second thought, after briefly reviewing the local budget deficit and with the knowledge that they were long overdue in building a new structure to house the police department, which was occupying a building even more dangerously decrepit than the old courthouse, they decided to accept the gift as a sort of interim measure until they could coerce the taxpayers into supplying sufficient sums for a decent place to house the minions of the law. That had been twenty years back and the police department was still stuck in the crumbling, dismal building which no self-respecting rat any longer would occupy had the rat any option. The building was freezing in the winter as the heating system was constantly breaking down. It was a hot box in the summer. Water pipes were forever breaking, the sewage system frequently backed up, electric wires shorted out and, had the structure not been made of solid granite, it would undoubtedly have gone up in flames long ago. The telephone system usually worked but sometimes even that failed.
There wasn’t a cop on the force who didn’t hate the place and, if it was tough on them, it was even tougher on the clerical personnel who were forced to spend all of their working hours indoors. It was toughest on the prisoners, who were locked up in the steel-barred cells on the third floor.
In an uncharacteristically generous gesture, the town fathers had allocated enough money to supply a weak air-conditioning system for the ground floor, which housed the main information desk, the patrolmen’s dayroom and detective headquarters. As a result, in order to husband as much coolness as possible, doors and windows on this floor were kept scrupulously closed. It was because of this, and the thickness of the granite walls, that the sound of the explosion failed to reach the ears of the couple of dozen officers who were in the building on that hot August evening.
The telephone calls, however, began coming in at seven-forty-five and within minutes the switchboard was lighting up like a berserk pinball machine. In no time at all every incoming circuit was tied up and the only way the men on duty could make an outside call was by going to the courtyard and trying to make contacts over the two-way car system.
The senior officer on duty was Captain Harry Parker of Homicide, but it was a full twenty minutes after the first alarm that Parke
r knew what was going on. He was locked up at the time on the third floor with a white prisoner, suspected of raping a seven-year-old girl, the daughter of his landlady. Parker and a detective, both of whom had stripped down to the waist in the sweltering heat, had the prisoner naked on the cot of the cell, spread-eagled, with his hands tied to the iron rail at the head of the cot and his feet tied to the rail at the bottom. They were systematically twisting the man’s testicles in an effort to get him to confess. It was hot work, especially as the prisoner, a fifty-five-year-old man in rather delicate health, continually fainted and they had to bring him to by tossing water in his face so that they could resume the interrogation.
They would have heard the sound of the explosion had the prisoner not been screaming at the moment the grenade went off.
Sergeant Carl Mallon was in charge in the information room and he was at the switchboard, sitting in for the patrolman on duty, who had temporarily left it to go the bathroom.
The first call was made by a colored grocer named Abernathy whose store was on the opposite side of the street from the church and several doors down. Abernathy, unfortunately, was afflicted with a speech defect and, when he became excited, he stuttered so badly that it was almost impossible to understand him. Mallon was still trying to make out what it was all about when a second officer received a second call and then, of course, all hell began to break loose.
It was several minutes before anyone could figure out anything and then it was only that there had been some kind of an explosion over at the church on Division Street and that bodies were lying all over and that what was needed was ambulances and firemen and police.
Because of the foulup on the police-department switchboard, the notice the Oakdale General Hospital had of the disaster came not from the department, but from a phone call by a woman who had been driving past a minute or so after the disaster and had the presence of mind to get to the nearest public phone and try to get an ambulance.
Once Sergeant Mallon had some glimmering of what had taken Place, he sensed that the matter was far beyond his meager capacities and all he could think of was getting in touch with his chief, Del “Whip” Partridge. Mallon didn’t completely panic, but he violated all the rules of the force and deserted the desk to run out and climb into a radio prowl car sitting in the courtyard.
He had to get Whip Partridge and get him at once. Fortunately he knew exactly where he would be able to find the Chief of Police. Goldie Jackson’s whorehouse was less than a dozen blocks away, in the heart of the colored district.
3 THE regularly scheduled monthly meeting was still two weeks off, but Carol Lou Jackson, secretary and leading spirit behind the local chapter, had been hearing the rumors all week now and felt that special events called for special measures. So she had telephoned several of the other key people in the NAACP and suggested a sort of informal get-together in her home for early that Saturday evening. She had to make it fairly early as she had to pick up her daughter, who was attending choir practice at the church, around eight o’clock and knew that two or three other mothers were also due to pick up their children at the same time.
There were only a little more than a dozen people at the informal meeting and most of them were women. The Reverend Malcolm, president of the NAACP, would have been there, but he was over at the church as he was the one who had organized the children’s chorus and was the only person capable of leading the group.
Mrs. Jackson acted as chairman and she came right to the point as soon as everyone was settled.
“I don’t have to tell any of you, I don’t think,” she said, “why I called this impromptu meeting. You’ve all been hearing the rumors and stories going around these past few weeks. You all know that there have been several ‘incidents.’ You also know there have been a number of strangers around, folks, from up North, who have been talking a lot and getting people aroused. Agitators who have come into our midst and are trying to stir up trouble.
“Just who these people are, I don’t know. Some say they are connected with militant student groups from out of state, others say they may be members of the Black Panthers, or CORE or what have you. All I know is that there is suddenly a state of unrest, that a lot of our younger people have suddenly become very secretive and are acting mighty mysterious, sort of hinting around that we can be expecting trouble.”
‘‘Now, Mrs. Jackson,” the Reverend Battle said, ‘‘Oakdale is hardly Watts or Harlem or Detroit. I don’t think we really have to worry too much.”
“Cambridge, Maryland, wasn’t Watts or Detroit or New York either,” Mrs. Jackson said acidly, “but they still had .. .”
Shirley Candle, who was in the back of the room, stood up, waving her hand for attention.
Shirley wasn't a member of the NAACP, but she had been invited to the meeting by Mrs. Jackson because the older woman knew that she had been in close contact with the younger people in the community, particularly the more intelligent and the more aware. Shirley was home from college for the summer and it was known that she had been very active in several widely publicized student strikes and peace protest demonstrations in the North.
“Maybe it would be a lot better if Oakdale were Watts or Detroit or New York,” Shirley said. “Maybe that’s what this town needs. A little more of the spirit of...”
The Reverend Battle turned and stared at the girl with distaste and his deep baritone voice drowned out the rest of her words.
“You young hotheads are all alike,” he said. “Just don’t know what you are talking about. What you want us to do? Start burning down our own houses like those fools did? Burn down our own churches and the stores which supply us with our daily needs? You think that’s the way you win points?”
“We don’t win points sitting on our fat asses,” Shirley said. “Didn’t Selma mean anything to you? Dr. King didn’t just sit back. It’s time ...’’
Mrs. Jackson banged her gavel on the table in front of her and stood up.
“Please,” she said. “Please, this meeting will come to order. There is room for everyone’s point of view if you will only just observe parliamentary procedure and wait to be recognized by the chair. I have not called you together to discuss whether Oakdale is Watts or should be Watts. The question at the moment isn’t what methods the black people of this town should take to obtain their just rights. The question at the moment is what is going on in this town, what is the source of the rumors which have been going around and what is taking place, what is causing the sudden peculiar feeling of unrest. Now, Miss Candle, the reason I asked you to come here is because I know that you are deeply involved and committed and that you have been personally active in liberal movements for the advancement of the causes of black people. And I know that you are close to the youth of this city. We, the leaders of the black community, feel that we have the right to know what is going on. After all, whether we are of the older or the younger generation, we all have the same goals and the same dreams. Our methods may differ...”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Shirley Candle said belligerently. “It’s about time someone told you people down here what’s going on. Oakdale is living fifty years in the past. And it isn’t just the white honkies who are keeping it in the past. It’s the black people who let the white people keep it there. That’s what’s going on.”
“No one knows better than I do that there are many evils to be cured,” Mrs. Jackson said. “No one knows better than I do that...”
“Did you know that a colored girl, a sixteen-year-old colored girl, was raped a week ago in the parking lot in back of the high school? By four white boys. Did you know that, when she went to the police and reported it, she was told she would be arrested and charged with prostitution if she didn't go home and forget about it? Did you know that?”
Morris Cartwell, the attorney, held up his hand to gain the attention of the chair and Mrs. Jackson nodded to him.
“I handled the case myself, Miss Candle,” he said. “I wa
s called in by the authorities themselves to represent the girl in the matter. Unfortunately, it turned out that, although the girl is only sixteen, she is a prostitute. Has been one for three years even though she is married. You all know who she is, Melody Jones. Melody Madison before she got married. She admitted to me that she was sent out to the school by a man who has been pimping for her and she received money from the boys. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”
“If what you say is true,” Shirley Candle asked, “why did she go to the police in the first case? Answer me that. Why?”
Cartwell shook his head.
“That’s something I don’t quite understand myself. She told me, but only after I had convinced her she might be in serious trouble, that the man himself, the pimp she was working for, had ordered her to go to the police and make the charge.”
“That’s all beside the point,” Shirley Candle said. “Maybe the girl is a prostitute. But still she is only sixteen. And who made her a prostitute? You can bet it was the honkies who use her body. The trouble with you Uncle Toms, you apologists...”
Cartwell stood up and his voice rose in anger as he interrupted.
“Don’t you go callin’ me an Uncle Tom,” he said. “You’re like all the rest of the troublemakers. Anyone you disagree with is an Uncle Tom. Just let me remind you, that girl’s husband is a black man. The guy who was pimping for her is black. If black girls are going to sell themselves—let themselves be sold—to white men, they got nobody to blame but themselves.”
“If black girls had an equal opportunity for jobs and education, they wouldn’t have to sell themselves,” Shirley said. “Anyway, this isn’t the only case. There isn’t a woman in this room but hasn’t had experience with the honkies, been insulted and propositioned and ...”
She stopped suddenly as the distant sound of an explosion half-drowned out her voice. A split second later the house shook and the windows rattled and everyone looked up startled.
