“I thought I’d come see Mom,” Tiny said.
“Since I would not be here, you mean?”
“Pop, every time I see you, you jump all over me.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Just now,” Tiny said. “The implication that I’m screwing off being here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you meant.”
“You are driving a departmental vehicle, presumably on duty, visiting your family.”
“I’m doing what I’m ordered to do. Pop, I’m a pretty good cop! Inspector Wohl expects me to be available if he needs me. I don’t think he expected me to just sit in the car and wait for the radio to go off.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
“Believe what?”
“That you’re a pretty good cop.”
“I’m not as good a cop as you are, but yeah, I’m a pretty good cop.”
“I’m sure you will take offense when I say this, but you don’t know what being a police officer really means.”
“You mean, I never worked in a district?”
“Exactly.”
“Come on, Pop. If Inspector Wohl thought I would learn anything riding around in a car, walking a beat, that’s what he’d have me doing.”
“That sort of thing is beneath you, right?”
“I think we better stop this before either one of us says something we’ll be sorry for,” Tiny said.
Lieutenant Lewis looked at his son for a moment before replying.
“I’m not saying that what you’re doing is not important, or that you don’t do it well.”
“It is important-we’re going to put a dirty captain and a dirty lieutenant away-and I helped. Wohl and Washington wouldn’t have let me get close to that job if they didn’t think I could handle it.”
“All I’m saying, Foster,” Lieutenant Lewis said, “is that I am concerned that you have no experience as a police officer on the street. You don’t even have any friends who are common, ordinary policemen, do you?”
“I guess not,” Tiny said.
“Would you indulge me if I asked you to do something?”
“Within reason.”
It came out more sarcastically, more disrespectfully than Tiny intended, and there was frost for a moment in his father’s eyes. But then apparently he decided to let it pass.
“Did I understand you to say that, so long as you keep yourself available, you’re free to move about the city?”
“That’s right.”
“Go inside, say hello to your mother, tell her you’re coming to dinner tonight, and that we’re going for a ride. Police business.”
“A ride? What police business?”
“We’re going to the Thirty-ninth District. I have a friend there, a common ordinary policeman, who I want you to meet. You might even learn something from him.”
Police Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., badge number 2554 of the Thirty-ninth District, who had twenty-four years on the job, twenty-two of it in the Thirty-ninth District, wanted only one thing from the Philadelphia Police Department. He wanted to make it to retirement, tell them where to mail his retirement checks, and go back home to Hartsville, South Carolina.
Having done that, it was his devout hope that he would never have to put on a uniform, look at a gun, or see Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ever again so long as the Good Lord saw fit to let him live.
He thought of it as going back to Hartsville, although in fact he could never remember living there. He had been brought to Philadelphia from Hartsville at the age of three by his father, who had decided that as bad as things might be up north, with the depression and all, they couldn’t be any worse than being a sharecropper with a wife and child to feed on a hardscrabble farm in South Carolina.
The first memory of a home that Officer Bailey had was of an attic room in a row house on Sydenham in North Philadelphia. There was a table in it, and two beds, one for Mamma Dear and Daddy, and one for him, and then when Charles David came along, for him and Charles David. There was an electric hot plate, and a galvanized bucket for water. The bathroom was one floor down, and shared with the three families who occupied the five rooms on the second floor.
The room was provided to them by the charity of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, to which Officer Bailey and his family still belonged.
He had vague memories of Daddy leaving the apartment in the morning to seek work as a laborer, and much more clear memories of Daddy leaving the room (and later the two-room apartment on the second floor of another row house) carrying his shoe-shine box to walk downtown to station himself at the Market Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad to shine the shoes of the rich white folks who rode the train in from places with funny-sounding names like Bala Cynwyd and Glen Riddle.
And he had memories of Hartsville from those times, too. Of going to see Granny Bailey and Granny Smythe back in Hartsville. Mamma Dear and Daddy had believed with the other members of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church that if it was in the Bible, that was all there was to it, you did what it said, and you spent eternity with the Good Lord, or you didn’t, and you spent eternity in the fiery fires of Hell. It said in the Good Book that you were supposed to Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father, and that meant you went to see your mother and your father at least at Christmas, and more often if you could afford it, and affording it meant saving up to buy the bus tickets, and for a few little presents to take with you, even if that meant you didn’t get to drink Coca-Cola or go to the movies.
Bailey had liked Hartsville even then, even if he now recognized that Granny Smythe’s “farm” was nothing more than a weathered shack without inside plumbing that sat on three acres she had been given in the will of old Mr. Smythe-probably because it wasn’t worth the powder to blow it away-whose father had bought Granny Smythe’s father at a slave auction in Beaufort.
There were chickens on Granny Smythe’s farm, and a couple of dogs, and almost always a couple of pigs, and the whole place had seemed a much nicer place to live than in a row house in North Philadelphia.
He had asked several times why they had to live in Philadelphia, and Daddy had told him that he didn’t expect him to understand, but that Philadelphia was a place where you could better yourself, get a good education, and make something of yourself.
Bailey remembered being dropped off with Charles David at the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church by Mamma Dear, wearing a crisp white maid’s uniform, so he and Charles David could be cared for, and she could work and make some money and realize her and Daddy’s dream of buying a house that would be theirs, instead of paying rent.
He remembered the beating Daddy had given him with a leather belt when he was in the fifth grade at the Dunbar Elementary School and the teacher had come by the house they were then renting and reported that he had not only been cutting school, but giving her talk-back in class, and running around with the wrong crowd.
Charles David, who was now a welder at the Navy Shipyard, still told that story, said that he got through high school because he had been there when Daddy had taken a strap to Woodrow for cutting school and sassing the teacher at Dunbar, and he was smart enough to learn by vicarious experience.
Woodrow had graduated from Dunbar Elementary School and gone on to graduate from William Penn High School. By then, Daddy had gone from shining shoes inside the Market Street Station to shining them in a barbershop on South Ninth Street, and finally to shining them in the gents’ room of the Rittenhouse Club on Rittenhouse Square. He was on salary then, paid to be in the gents’ room from just before lunch until maybe nine o’clock at night, shining anybody who climbed up on the chair’s shoes for free. It was part of what you got being a member of the Rittenhouse Club, getting your shoes shined for free.
The members weren’t supposed to pay the shoe-shine boy, but, Daddy had told him, maybe about one in four would hand him a quarter or fifty cents anyway, and at Christmas, about three or four of the membe
rs whose shoes he had shined all year would wish him “Merry Christmas” and slip him some folding money. Usually it was ten or twenty dollars, but sometimes more. The first one-hundred-dollar bill Woodrow had ever seen in his life one of the Rittenhouse gentlemen had given to his father at Christmas.
That hundred dollars, and just about everything else Daddy and Mamma Dear could scrape together (what was left, in other words, after they’d given the Good Lord’s Tithe to the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, and after they’d put money away to go home to Hartsville at Christmas and maybe to go home for a funeral or a wedding or something like that), had gone into coming up with the money for the down payment on the house, and then paying the house off.
The house was another reason Woodrow really hated Philadelphia. Daddy and Mamma Dear had worked their hearts out, done without, to pay for the thing, and they had just about paid it off when the neighborhood had started to go to hell.
Woodrow did not like to curse, but hell was the only word that fit, and he knew the Good Lord would not think he was being blasphemous.
Trash moved in. Black trash and white trash. Drinkers and adulterers and blasphemers, people who took no pride in the neighborhood or themselves.
It had been bad when Woodrow had finished William Penn High School and was looking for work, it was worse when, at twenty-two, he’d applied for a job on the cops, and it had grown worse ever since. He spent his first two years in the Twenty-second District, learning how to be a cop, and then they had transferred him-they’d asked him first how he would feel about it, to give the devil his due-to the Thirty-ninth District which was then about thirty percent black (they said “Negro” in those days, but it meant the same thing as ‘nigger’ and everybody knew it) and getting blacker.
“You live there, Woodrow,” Lieutenant Grogarty, a red-faced Irishman, had asked him. “How would you feel about working there, with your people?”
At the time, truth to tell, Woodrow had thought it would be a pretty good idea. He had still thought then-he was only two years out of the Academy and didn’t know better-that a police officer could be a force for good, that a good Christian man could help people.
He thought that one of the problems was that most cops were white men, and colored folks naturally resented that. He thought that maybe it would be different if a colored police officer were handling things.
He’d been wrong about that. His being colored hadn’t made a bit of difference. The people he had to deal with didn’t care if he was black or yellow or green. He was The Man. He was the badge. He was the guy who was going to put them in jail. They hated him. Worse, he hadn’t been able to help anyone that he could tell. Unless arresting some punk after he’d hit some old lady in the back of her head, and stolen her groceries and rent money and spent it on loose women, whiskey, or worse could be considered helping.
He had been bitter when he’d finally faced the truth about this, even considered quitting the cops, finding some other job. He didn’t know what other kind of job he could get-all he’d ever done after high school before he came on the cops was work unskilled labor jobs-but he thought there had to be something.
He had had a long talk about it with the Pastor Emeritus of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Joshua Steele-that fine old gentleman and servant of the Good Lord was still alive then, eat up with cancer but not willing to quit-and Dr. Steele had told him that all the Bible said was that if you prayed, the Good Lord would point out a Christian man’s path to him. Nothing was said about that path being easy.
“You ask the Good Lord, Woodrow, if He has other plans for you, and if so, what. If He wants you to do something else, Woodrow, He’ll let you know. You’ll know, boy. In your heart, you’ll know.”
Woodrow, after prayerful consideration, had decided that if the Good Lord wanted him to do something else, he would have let him know. And since he didn’t get a sign or anything, it was logical to conclude that the Lord was perfectly happy having him do what he was doing.
Which wasn’t so strange, he came to decide. While he wasn’t able to change things much, or help a lot of people, every once in a while he was able to do something for somebody.
And maybe locking up punks who were beating up and robbing old people was really helping. If they were in jail, they at least weren’t robbing and beating up on people.
Three months later, Woodrow met Joellen, who had come up from Georgia right after she finished high school. He never told her-she might have laughed at him-but he took meeting her as a sign from the Good Lord that he had done the right thing. Joellen was like a present from the Good Lord. And so was Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Jr., when he come along twenty months later.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Woodrow didn’t know if he could have handled Mamma Dear and Daddy being taken into heaven within four months of each other if it hadn’t been for Joellen, and with her already starting to show what the Good Lord was giving them: Woodrow Wilson, Junior.
That meant two more trips back home to Hartsville. Mamma Dear had told Daddy in the hospital that she had been paying all along for a burial policy, sixty-five cents a week for twenty years and more, that he didn’t know about, and that she wanted him to spend the money to send her back to Hartsville and bury her beside her Mamma, Granny Smythe. She didn’t want to be buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beside strangers.
Four months after they buried Mamma Dear, Woodrow buried Daddy beside her. That was really when Woodrow decided he was going to come home to Hartsville, and when he told Joellen what he had decided, she said that was fine with her, she didn’t like living up north anyhow.
There was no work he could get in Hartsville that paid anything like what he was making on the cops, and they didn’t even know what a pension for colored people was in Hartsville, so that meant he had to stay on the cops, put in his time, and then retire to Hartsville.
That had been a long time ago, and at the time he’d thought he could sell the house that Mamma Dear and Daddy had sacrificed so much for, and maybe buy a little farm in Hartsville. Let somebody else work it on shares, not work it himself.
That hadn’t turned out. With the trash moving into the neighborhood, you couldn’t sell the place at hardly any price today. But he and Joellen had been able to save some money, and with his police pension, it was going to be all right when they went home to Hartsville.
Several times in the last couple of years, he had been offered different jobs in the Thirty-ninth District. Once the Captain had asked him if he wanted to help the Corporal, be what they called a “trainee” (which sounded like some kid, but wasn’t) with the administration, but he told him no thank you, I’d just as soon just work my beat than be inside all day. Another time, another two times, they’d asked him did he want to do something called “Community Relations.”
“We want people to start thinking about the police as being their friends, Woodrow,” a lieutenant had told him, a colored lieutenant. “And with your position in the community, your being a deacon at Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, for example, we think you’re just the man to help us.”
He told the Lieutenant, “Thank you, sir, for thinking about me, but I’m not interested in anything like that, I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”
What Woodrow thought he was good at was what he did, what he wanted to do until he got his time in and could go home to Hartsville, South Carolina. He worked his beat. He protected old people from getting hit in the head and having their grocery money stolen by some punk. He looked for new faces standing around on corners and talked to them, and told them he didn’t like funny cigarettes or worse sold on his beat and that he had a good memory for faces.
The punks on the street corner could call him Old Oreo, or Uncle Tom, or whatever they liked, and it didn’t bother him much, because he knew he was straight with the Good Lord and that was all that mattered. The Bible said all there was to say about bearing false witness against your neighbor. And also because he knew what
else the punks who called him names told the new punks: “Don’t cross that mean old nigger, he’ll catch you alone when there’s nobody around and slap you up aside of the head with his club or his gun and knock you into the middle of next week.”
He liked to walk his beat. You could see much more of what was going on just ambling down the street than you could from inside an RPC. A lot of police officers hated to get out of their cars, but Woodrow was just the opposite. He liked to walk, say hello to people, be seen, see things he wouldn’t have been able to see driving a car.
Officer Bailey was not surprised to get the call telling him to meet the Sergeant, but when he got there, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., standing by the car, talking to the Sergeant.
He and Lewis went back together a long time. He was a good man, in Bailey’s opinion. God-fearing, honest, hardworking. But Bailey was a little worried when he saw him. Lewis was assigned to the Ninth District.
What’s he doing here?
Maybe he’s been sent to talk me into taking one of those special jobs in Community Relations the Lieutenant had talked to me about and I turned down.
When the Sergeant saw Bailey coming, he shook Lieutenant Lewis’s hand, got back in his car, and drove off. Lieutenant Lewis stood in the middle of the street and waited for Bailey to drive up.
“How are you, Woodrow?” Lieutenant Lewis said, offering his hand.
“Pretty good, Lieutenant. How’s yourself?”
“We were riding around-” Lieutenant Lewis said, interrupting himself to point at the new car parked at the curb. Woodrow saw that it was an unmarked car, the kind inspectors and the like got, and that a black man was behind the wheel.
“-and we had some time, and I thought maybe we could have a cup of coffee or something.”
“I can always find time to take a cup of coffee with you,” Woodrow said. “Right over there’s as good a place as any. At least it’s clean.”
“The Sergeant said it would be all right if you put yourself out of service for half an hour.”
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