Response

by Paul Volponi

  “Who beat you, son? What did they look like? Why do you think they jumped you?” the cops were asking.

  More than anything, I wanted to nail the fat fuck swinging that bat, and see those bastards do the perpwalk in cuffs. But I’d been through shit with police before and arrested twice—once for a stupid fight and another time for beating the fare on a city bus. And my whole family was just starting to trust me again.

  I knew some of those white cops in Hillsboro weren’t any better than the kids who’d beat me. They’d kick your ass, too. Only the cops had badges to make it legal, and could turn anything you said against them into an automatic lie.

  “Bat! Bat!” I kept yelling. “Hurts too much to think!”

  I was scared to death the cops would arrest us for trying to boost that car. I was the one who’d fucked up and tripped, and maybe that was going to land the three of us in central booking.

  Then a cop asked, “You want to explain about this screwdriver in your pocket?”

  After that, I wouldn’t say another word, and kept my mouth and eyes shut. Bonds and Asa clammed up tight, too. I remember EMS lifting me into the ambulance on a stretcher, and the sound of that siren pounded inside my skull all the way to the hospital.

  That’s when it hit me for real. The fat kid could have killed me with that damn bat. I’d have never held Destiny Love in my arms again or been there the first time she said “Daddy” for real. He almost stole everything from me, just because my skin was a different color than his.

  Bonds told me later how some black cop pulled him and Asa off to the side.

  “You going to let these white punks draw a line with a bat, sayin’ where you can’t be? Let them shit all over you like that?” the black cop railed on them. “And that’s your friend—the young brother on the stretcher? Why don’t you boys just crawl home from here if you ain’t got the bellies to stand up for him or yourselves?”

  Maybe it was seeing me leave with my skull split open, or maybe it was that speech, but Bonds and Asa agreed to ride in the back of a squad car, searching for those bastards who busted me up. They spotted that black Land Rover parked on the same block as Mario’s Pizza. But as soon as the cops pulled up behind it, those three white dudes got out cool as ice, pointing at Asa and Bonds in the police car.

  “That’s them, officers!” the fat kid shouted, clapping his hands. “The ones that tried to rob my friends! Lock ’em up!”

  Then Asa said half of the 14th Precinct showed up. He said one of the white cops must have tipped them dudes off about the screwdriver, because that’s what they started saying—that we tried to rob them for a gold chain using a screwdriver like a knife.

  But not every cop had their backs. And after a search, other officers found the bat and my sneakers inside the Land Rover, and my diamond stud in the tall kid’s pocket.

  Bonds and Asa had to come clean to explain about that screwdriver, and told the cops how we went into Hillsboro to heist a car. To prove it, they took the cops back to the spot where they’d ditched the Slim Jim, wire cutters, and flashlight—inside some Dumpster on the street, after Bonds had called 911.

  Finally, the three of those racist bastards got arrested. That was probably about the same time the doctors were bringing me into surgery for my skull. The same time Dad, Mom, and Grandma were praying to God with every breath they took that I’d be all right. The same time that Destiny Love was sound asleep in her crib at Deshawna’s house.

  The cops let Bonds and Asa skate that night, but everything was about to blow up huge. The next day, the mayor and police commissioner came to Hillsboro and a special squad of detectives got called in to investigate, to see if what happened was just a regular robbery and beat-down by those dudes, or something much bigger—a hate crime.

  EMS brought me to the closest hospital—St. Luke’s in Hillsboro. When I woke up from my operation the next morning, the first thing I saw was the white ceiling of that room. Then my eyes started to focus, and I saw Mom’s face lean in. For a second, I dreamed I was at home and had overslept for school. So I tried to jerk myself up fast. That’s when the pain in my head hit hard.

  “Ooow!” I cried out as that nightmare with the bat ripped through my brain in fast-forward.

  “Thank you, Jesus!” boomed Grandma’s voice. “Thank you!”

  Mom broke down bawling on my chest, and Dad put his arms around us both.

  “Noah, whatever your mother and me done wrong in our lives couldn’t have been so bad,” my father said, with his face looking older and more tired than I’d ever seen it. “’Cause when you just opened your eyes, God answered all our prayers.”

  The surgeon who’d operated on me was from India, and his skin was nearly as dark as mine.

  “The fracture was serious enough that I couldn’t take a conservative approach and let it heal on its own. I put some fragments of loose skull back into place and secured them with a small titanium plate and screws,” he told us. “We’ll keep monitoring Noah for any signs of infection or intracranial hemorrhaging—bleeding on the brain. But other than some potential headaches and bruising around the eyes, which I see has begun already, he should be all right to go home in about a week or so.”

  Mom looked like she was about to drown that doctor in hugs. But Dad stepped to him first and shook his hand. So that’s what Mom and Grandma did, too, clasping both of their hands around his.

  I wanted to argue about having to stay in the hospital so long, but what came out instead was, “Thanks for what you did, Doc.”

  Then he reached down and touched me on the left shoulder, I guess before I messed up any of the tubes in my arms, trying to reach across to shake his hand.

  There were three nurses at the station outside my door—one was black and the other two were white. And any time one of those whites nurses came at me with a needle to take blood, every muscle in my body would pull tight till the veins in my arms popped out on their own.

  That night, Mom apologized to those two white nurses after they heard her call the bastards who’d beat me “no good crackers” and “white trash.”

  “Nobody needs to say they’re sorry for the truth!” Grandma exploded after those nurses left the room.

  “I feel they’re the ones caring for my boy,” Mom argued back. “So I don’t want to insult them.”

  “They’ve heard it before—seen it, too,” said Dad. “Noah ain’t the first one to catch a beating on those streets.”

  “Pray he’s the last,” said Grandma. “Pray Noah’s the last! ”

  Then my father said, “I remember how that man—Sheffield—they killed, got brought to this same hospital before he died.”

  That happened almost twenty years ago. I wasn’t even born yet. But people around my way still talked about it plenty, and I knew every word of that story by heart.

  These four black dudes from Centreville, just one neighborhood over from East Franklin, had their car break down on the highway at the far edge of Hillsboro. Back then, everybody didn’t have cell phones like now, so they started walking. Only they picked the wrong direction to go in. Those brothers wound up over by Spaghetti Park. It was on a weekend night in the summer, and the park was really popping. Just for showing up there, a pack of white thugs chased them down Decatur. One of the black dudes, Michael Sheffield, got run off into traffic and was clipped and killed by a car. Something like fifty people saw it, but nobody from Hillsboro would be a witness at the trial. That’s why just three thugs out of that whole mob got convicted.

  The only reason Sheffield was dead was because he was black. So it got called a “hate crime” and made headlines all over the country. People in Hillsboro were still pissed over that kind of attention, because now whenever somebody said the name “Hillsboro,” all anybody thought about was a place full of racist, murdering fucks.

  “There’s a street named after him in Centreville—Sheffield Street,” I said, struggling to sit up in my bed. “I was even standing on it one time.”


  “They shoulda renamed Decatur Avenue for him,” Dad said. “Then everybody around here who shut their eyes to that killing would have had to see that sign every damn day.”

  Deshawna’s dad wouldn’t let her go into Hillsboro alone after dark. So they both came to visit me that first night, bringing along my six-month-old baby daughter. Destiny Love didn’t stop crying from the second she got into that hospital room. My head was pounding from the noise, but that didn’t matter. I wanted her right there in my arms.

  Nobody in my family had pressed me yet on what I was doing in Hillsboro.

  Then Deshawna asked, “Noah, did they jump you before you got to the car lot to do that construction job, or after?”

  I swallowed hard and answered over my daughter’s wailing, “There was no construction job. We went there for the wrong reason—to boost a car.”

  I could see the shame creep into my father’s and Grandma’s faces, especially in front of Deshawna’s dad.

  And by then the purple bruising around my eyes looked like a thief’s mask, like the Hamburglar character at Mickey D’s wore.

  “But you didn’t take nobody’s car, right?” Mom asked, defiant. “Then why did they beat you with that bat? It was because you’re black. That’s why! And nobody’s gonna twist it around!”

  After the shame left my father’s face, he began to stare darts at me.

  I wanted to hide. But there was nowhere to go, except under the sheets.

  The next morning, the doctor said it was all right for the detectives to ask me questions. They showed me a bunch of mug shots, too, and I picked out all three of those kids who’d beat me.

  “That’s the one swinging the bat,” I said, stamping my finger down into the middle of the fat kid’s face. “He was at Carver High with me for a hot minute.”

  “That’s Charles Scaturro—known on the streets as Charlie Scat,” said the black detective. “He’s got a history of assaults on nonwhites.”

  The kid with the goatee was named Joseph Spenelli.

  “Scaturro and Spenelli are being held without bail. The third suspect you identified, Thomas Rao, is also in custody. He’s cooperating with the investigation,” added his white partner.

  “Good. Let them turn on each other now,” Grandma said.

  “But this Rao won’t get a free pass for talking?” Dad asked, concerned.

  “Nobody will,” the white detective answered like he meant it. “We don’t play those kind of games.”

  “We’ve determined that none of the suspects knew you were there to steal a car before the beating. So they weren’t acting as vigilantes, trying to take the law into their own hands,” said his partner. “And because racial epithets were used during the attack, this is going to be prosecuted as a hate crime.”

  Mom stood there applauding over that.

  “Amen,” she said between claps. “Amen.”

  But those words—“hate crime”—echoed in my ears.

  I went to sleep that night with the worst headache I’d ever had.

  And the next morning, I woke up the same way.

  CHARLES SCATURRO INTERVIEW

  The two detectives and Charlie Scat are seated in a small interrogation room (one wall is a mirrored panel) at the police precinct, with just a thin wooden table and a tape recorder between them.

  WHITE DETECTIVE: Tell us again, Charlie.

  CHARLIE SCAT: I was walkin’ with my boys and—

  BLACK DETECTIVE: Where were you headed?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Over by Spaghetti, just to chill. Then these three guys we don’t know—

  WHITE DETECTIVE: Three black guys?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Yeah. You know, African Americans.

  BLACK DETECTIVE: It was pretty dark out. Did you see their faces or just their smiles?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Look. It’s not like that. I swear.

  WHITE DETECTIVE: Go on, Charlie.

  CHARLIE SCAT: So these guys see Joey’s gold chain—it’s a real nice one, thick. I even told him, “Joey, you gotta be careful the places you wear that.” I mean, but this is our (Taps his chest.) neighborhood for Christ’s sake. Then one of them says loud, “Look at the white nigger—thinks he can hold down that chain!” They pulled a screwdriver on us. But we just fought ’em off, and they ran. Then we got into my car and tried to find them.

  BLACK DETECTIVE: You didn’t call 911?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Honestly, we were so pissed, we weren’t thinkin’ straight.

  WHITE DETECTIVE: And the bat? Where’d that come from?

  CHARLIE SCAT: That’s always in the car. For protection. You need it these days. Sometimes I drive my mother to get her hair done just on the other side of Decatur.

  BLACK DETECTIVE: So you found them and fractured Noah Jackson’s skull with that bat?

  CHARLIE SCAT:No. No. He musta did that when he tripped. He probably hit his head on the sidewalk or something.

  WHITE DETECTIVE: How’d he lose his sneakers and earring?

  CHARLIE SCAT: I think they just came off while we was tryin’ to hold him down. Then we kept them to give to the cops, while we chased those other two.

  BLACK DETECTIVE: Did you use any epithets?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Any what?

  WHITE DETECTIVE: Did you call them names?

  CHARLIE SCAT: Just “nigger.” There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what they call each other all the time. You ever hear their music? It’s all “nigger” this, and “nigger” that.

  BLACK DETECTIVE: So how come you don’t call me a nigger, Charlie?

  CHARLIE SCAT: You know. (Fights back a grin.) ’Cause I want to get outta here and go home.

  Chapter THREE

  THAT SATURDAY, WHILE I WAS STILL IN THE hospital, there was a big march through Hillsboro. Black leaders showed up from all over the city, and there were even two busloads of brothers from out of town. The TV news said there were over six hundred protesters, with more than a hundred white folks mixed in. They started out on Decatur Avenue where Michael Sheffield died. Then they marched past the spot where I got beat down, and all the way to Spaghetti Park.

  Dad and Mom were at the head of the line, walking hand in hand with those leaders. People had done the same thing when Sheffield got killed. Thousands of marchers showed up back then. Only Michael Sheffield wasn’t there to steal a car, and I knew there wouldn’t be any petition to name a street after me.

  “The last time we were here, nearly two decades ago, they lined up to throw watermelon rinds at us. Now some of the store owners are offering us bottled water to drink as we march,” a gray-haired black city councilman told the TV reporter. “I guess that’s progress for this community. But that hasn’t solved the tensions and intolerable crime of racial violence.”

  I watched the screen with Grandma. We were both hyped to see that many black people rolling through Hillsboro, and with a police escort, too. The news showed how Spaghetti Park was packed with white people protesting right back. Somebody even took a bedsheet and painted the words BATS AND CAR THIEVES inside a big circle with a strike mark through it.

  “We don’t want to be known for this kind of thing anymore,” said a lady being interviewed. “Good people live here. Can’t we be left alone in our own neighborhoods? We just want this to all go away.”

  The white nurse who was taking my temperature stopped cold while that lady was talking. Her eyes were glued to the TV screen and she was nodding her head, when Grandma said in a sharp tone, “That woman’s wrong. You can’t ignore a cancer. But she don’t know nothing about healing like you do.”

  “Why, th-ank you,” the nurse answered through half a stutter.

  All together, I stayed at St. Luke’s for nine days. My last two days there, I was feeling almost back to normal and itching to get out, with a rep from Dad’s insurance company pushing for me to leave, too. When the doctors finally said I could go home, they made me ride downstairs in a wheelchair, because that was their insurance rule. But as soon as those sliding-glass doors opened, and
I took my first hit of outside air without that sterilized hospital smell to it, I jumped up to my feet fast.

  There were a few reporters waiting outside the hospital, and one asked how I felt about the kids who beat me. That’s when Mom wrapped both her arms around me, and I didn’t fight her on it.

  “I don’t feel anything for them, like they didn’t feel anything for me,” I answered.

  “Do you hate them, Noah?” another one asked.

  “I don’t have love for nobody like that,” I said, with my hand balling up into a fist at my side.

  “How about the one with the bat, Charles Scaturro? Is there something you’d like to say to him?”

  “How do you feel about white people, Noah? Can you trust them?”

  The questions started flying.

  “I just, just—” I said, shaking my head, without any more words coming.

  There were only curses in my brain, and I knew enough not to say them.

  Then my father told those reporters it was time for us to go home, and they backed off.

  The first cab driver in line outside the hospital was white.

  “We’re going to East Franklin—Twelfth and Dupont,” Dad told him.

  But the driver said, smug, “I don’t go over by there. That’s off my assigned route.”

  It took a second for what he’d said to sink in.