Randolph switched the knife from his right to his left hand, pressing the blade down against his thigh. He shook his head at Sam and started off for Seventh Avenue. Sam followed along the curb. He couldn’t see the knife now. It could only be seen by the people on the stoops.
Once, Sam yelled at the crowd to keep back but it was like yelling at something without ears, something elemental, hundred-footed and hundred-mouthed. They would never listen to him, he knew. His eyes glued on Randolph. He wouldn’t be caught flatfooted a second time. Together, they neared the east side of Seventh Avenue. Randolph, in the lead, crossed against the one-way uptown traffic. “Drop that knife,” Sam said. He didn’t see the drivers deserting their cars. He didn’t hear the separate imploring cursing voices.
“Don’t shoot ‘m, Officer — ”
“Hey, you black boy, drop that knife like the cop — ”
“For Jesus sake — ”
“God damn Irish bastard — ”
“Don’t — ”
He didn’t hear the voices threatening the whites who had run out of their cars. He trailed Randolph past the traffic island in the middle of Seventh Avenue and plunged with him into the roaring downtown traffic on the west side of the avenue. The crowd followed. Now and then, Sam’s eyes flicked away from Randolph. Where were all the radio cars, the plainsclothes men, the mounted cops? Where were they all, he wondered. Where was the ambulance, the driver, the attendant? (A gang of boys had grabbed hold of the driver to stop him from going for help. The attendant, sniveling and terrified, had hopped into the ambulance like a mouse into its hole. The crowd hadn’t bothered with him. They had only released the driver when Randolph had marched off towards Seventh Avenue the second time.) “Stop!” Sam ordered Randolph. But already the Negro had stepped from the gutter to the pavement, hurrying down the long sidestreet between the avenues. Sam gritted his teeth. Ahead of him, narrowing in the distance as railroad tracks narrow, the sidewalks and the gutter of the street were like shafts sinking into a bottomless hole. “Drop that knife.” No answer. His finger was on the trigger of the .38. A four pound pull would eject a bullet. “Drop that knife.”
The crowd had become an army. Sucked out of the bars, out of the pool parlors, whisked from off the street corners, dragged out of the fish stores and the butchers, out of the furnished rooms and flats, the newcomers were continuously asking. “What’s up?” They were told:
“Cop’s gonna kill that colored man — ”
“See that gun — ”
“Man was going home, minding his business — ”
“Them white bastards run us into a hole all the time — ”
Each sinew in Sam’s body had stretched to the breaking point. With each breath, his chest heaved. He, himself, was a walking breaking point, caught between the walls of this street. In another time, in another life, in another day, these walls had been rows of furnished rooming houses, their stoops painted grey and pink and yellow. “Drop that knife,” he said. But the knife never dropped, the walls never ended, the crowd never stopped shouting.
At Eighth Avenue, an old model roadster rattled around the corner, a middle-aged policeman on the running board. The policeman, baton in fist, leaped from the moving car and sprinted over towards them. “Look out,” Sam warned. “He’s got a knife in his left hand.” Randolph froze. Sam pivoted. He could see that Randolph was appraising this new development. He watched Randolph’s eyes glaze and sicken like the eyes of an animal about to die; Randolph shoved the open knife into his left hand pocket and his eyes stayed sick. The middle-aged policeman calmly sized them all up and then he charged. Randolph didn’t budge. The policeman grabbed him just above the left wrist and smacked his baton down on the hand buried in the pocket. Randolph groaned. Sam stood there like a spectator, dazed by the speed and resolution of the policeman who had come to help him. And what was he waiting for, he asked himself. He had his duty. He had to help the man who had come to help him.
Underneath the cloth of his green jacket, Randolph’s muscles bunched and he jerked away from the policeman’s hold. Again the policeman’s fingers hooked into Randolph’s left arm. The baton flailed down. Twisting, lurching, Randolph wrestled backwards, his lips opened wide. He was sucking in great drafts of air, his white teeth glimmering, his pink tongue flapping with pain. Sam switched the .38 to his left hand, seized his baton and swung it down on Randolph’s shoulder.
“They’re killing him — ” the crowd bellowed.
“Those white sons-bitches — ”
“He wasn’t doing nothing — ”
Sam had stopped thinking. Randolph wasn’t a man to him any more but a maniac. At the maniac’s head, he aimed his baton. The oak of his stick walloped against the brown temple. The blood poured. Under the two clubs, the face was changed in a few seconds. Blood painted the shattered nose. The gashed cheekbones looked pulpy; the whole face was like a red-splotched rag. In a triple-tied knot, the two policemen and the Negro staggered across the gutter to the sidewalk, the crowd flowing over where they had been. Still, Randolph’s legs held him. Still, he struggled to break free. They reeled past a cut-rate drugstore with a window full of rubbing alcohol, smelling salts and patent medicines. The batons rained on bone and flesh. Randolph’s eyebrows had reddened. Blood outlined his eyes like a warpaint. He looked even more terrible than a maniac, his face smeared in the strange patterns his own blood had made. To Sam, Randolph was a shape holding a super-human fury.
The three men fought from the drugstore over to a combined fruit and vegetable market. Randolph tugged the knife out of his pocket with his right hand. “Look out!” Sam cried. The middle-aged policeman’s face twitched upwards to see the knife coming at him like a pitched speedball. His mouth formed an “O” and he leaped backwards, the blade slicing through the spot where he had been standing a breath ago, missing his entrails by a hair. Desperately backwards he went as if hauled by a rope and pulley and then as if the rope had snapped, he suddenly became clumsy, a heavy man in blue floundering among baskets of spinach. He flopped over on his back into the market baskets, Randolph over him. Sam pulled his trigger. He saw the shape’s bleeding head point in his direction. He thought that he had shot the cop who had come to help him. He aimed a second time, fired. The shape dropped to the sidewalk. He stared down at the man he had shot, at the bloody red face, the face of death and disaster itself. He stared at Randolph, the old woman’s son. The crowd’s tumult, the policeman scrambling up out of the spinach leaves (he hadn’t been hit, Sam realized) faded before the red face at his feet.
A woman scurried out of the crowd, her breasts shaking inside a yellow summer dress. She swung her bag at Sam, hit him on the chin. “You white murderer,” she cried.
He felt then that he had heard what she had called him for a long time that endless afternoon; that was what the crowd had been trying to make him understand for a long time. He trembled. The shakes crept into his bones. He trembled more violently. The ambulance showed up. The sirens of the radio cars wailed. Mounted cops on patient brown horses cleared the sidewalks. Sam stooped to take the knife out of the dead man’s hand. He helped place the dead man on a stretcher that had appeared out of nowhere. He took one end of the stretcher, the driver took the other and they put the dead man into the ambulance. Sam got in and still he heard what the woman had called him.
Slowly, the ambulance rolled out onto Eighth Avenue. Sitting next to the driver, Sam listened to hundreds of feet chasing after them. It was the crowd. They would never leave him alone any more. They would always be with him. They were screaming from a thousand throats.
“We want the cop.”
The shakes overmastered him. His teeth chattered and the darkness of that afternoon closed in on him. He heard the driver saying “Buck up, kid. You saved that potbelly’s life. You’ll get a citation. Buck up. That jig was crazy.” From somewheres, he heard the attendant saying: “Looka them bastards after us. Should’ve shot ten more of them black bastards. What’d I tell you
— ” Deeper than their voices, he heard what the woman had called him. He felt that he had to answer her or he would never be able to face himself again.
CHAPTER 2
“WILL you please take your coat off,” the doctor said to Sam at the hospital. “Put it on that chair. And you sit down on the stool. Under the light, please. What happened?”
“A psycho with a knife. I had to shoot him.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“Negro?”
“Yes. I tried my best not to — He was stronger than anybody I’ve ever seen — The beating he took — ” In this white room where he was sitting, he still heard what the woman had called him. He shook his head at that cry.
“What’s the matter?” the doctor asked. “Am I hurting you? Mm. Your jaw’s not broken.” His fingers probed into the swollen flesh. “So you killed him?”
“I acted in self-defense. God Almighty, you’d think they’d see that — ” That crowd would never leave him. They had pursued him into this room, ranged themselves about the stool under the overhead light.
“I suggest you have the Police Surgeon take an X-ray tomorrow just to be positive. So you killed him?”
“There was nothing to do but shoot. I didn’t want to. But he was dangerous — A reasoning psycho. Black or white, I’d have had to shoot.” As he spoke, the apparition of the crowd mocked him. To hell with them, he thought. There was no sense torturing himself. To them, he was guilty. They were black and he was white. Yet, they had witnessed what had happened. No! Never. They had only seen a white man in a blue uniform kill a black man.
The doctor said, “What are you making all those grimaces for, Officer?”
“Am I?” Sam looked up. In the overhead glare, he noticed the hairs protruding out of the doctor’s nose.
“You certainly are. You’re not worried about your hearing? When does it come off?”
“In about an hour.” Sam thought of the hearing slated for the precinct station; would the truth come out and what was the truth? Would Mrs. Randolph speak the truth? Of course she would. She must. She would testify that he had been decent. He wasn’t a Ku Kluxer cop. The hearing would prove it. “I tried to save him,” he muttered wearily. “This is no case of police brutality.”
The doctor stared as if he hadn’t seen him until now. “Police brutality? Mm. You must be one of the college cops. Of course. How long have you been on the force?”
“Two years.”
“How long have you been in Harlem?”
“About a year.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s not long. I’ve been here fifteen years. That’s a long time, you’ll agree. You can get into your coat, Officer. A long time. If not for the police force, we would have continuous bloodshed in Harlem. A white girl wouldn’t be safe on the streets. That’s my considered opinion.” He shook a yellow finger at Sam. “I’m not prejudiced either, young man. Dr. Willows of this hospital is a good friend of mine and Dr. Willows is a Negro. I have nothing against the Negroes but facts are very stubborn things to deny. There are too many bad niggers. There’s more crime in Harlem than anywheres else.”
“There’s more poverty here than anywhere else.” He stood up and put on his blue coat. The doctor approached him and ran his forefinger across the knife ripped collar.
“If you had been wearing your summer uniform,” he said, “you would have been killed. The thickness of that collar saved you. How long have you been in Harlem?”
“I told you. About a year.”
“Ever have to shoot anybody before?”
“No.”
“Mm. I hope I’m wrong but there’s going to be a race riot one of these fine days that will make the ‘35 riots seem like a bridge party. I hope I’m wrong. Good evening. Don’t lose any sleep, young man. My advice is a movie after you finish up with your hearing.”
As Sam entered between the green lights of the precinct station, he felt as he had back in the hospital. This was another institution and nobody would care about his inner feelings. Institutions weren’t interested in a man’s inner heart; these hospitals and precinct stations had preceded him in time and would roll on after he was dead. Inside this station house, generations of cops had cursed Negroes ten thousand times and created a lurid myth. Forgotten old-timers had sworn to rookies, who in turn had become old-timers, that you couldn’t dent a nigger’s head even with the old-style lead-filled batons. They had recited tales of syphilitic muggers who purposely carried a scissors or a razor blade on their persons; when apprehended the mugger would slash his own skin and then slash the arresting officer; so-and-so had been given a dose in just this way. They had declared that the reason the niggers hated white men was because niggers weren’t white themselves; that was why every nigger used bleaching cream. The nigger wasn’t a man anyway. Animal, yes. Brute, yes. Liar, yes. Rapist, yes. Thief, yes. They had declared that there wasn’t a nigger kid alive who wouldn’t steal for a nickel; that every nigger girl would lay for any white man; that every nigger woman would run away from her family if a good dancer asked her to, that even the Jesus-shouting nigger wives were always looking for two meal tickets. What was the use talking; every nigger was hard as lard and twice as greasy; that anybody who wanted to treat a nigger like a human being was either a nut hopped up with religion or a Red or some kind of a Jew or a screwball. Sam had heard a lot of this talk himself.
The chill light of the hearing room, pouring down on the eyewitnesses in front of the Sergeant’s desk now seemed to him colder than ever. He felt a tap on his elbow. It was the cop whose life he had saved. “Mrs. O’Riordan wants me to thank you,” the cop said.
“Who’s she?” Sam asked.
“My wife.” O’Riordan beamed. He patted Sam’s arm and lowered his voice. “A lil more and that guy would’ve sunk that lousy Charlestown pistol of his into my gut. Would’ve spilled out the three glasses of beer I’d put into me belly not the hour before.” O’Riordan laughed heartily.
Sam wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. His sunken eyes gleamed fitfully as he glanced away from O’Riordan over to the witnesses, the ambulance driver, the attendant, the radio cops, the mounted policemen. He breathed in the muggy station house air and searched for Randolph’s mother. She was among the black faces. He sensed something impersonal, terrible because it was impersonal, in this station house; the same emotion he had experienced watching the clinic patients waiting for their next at the hospital; it was like being in a place where there were no men, only regulations, customs and laws that had turned into ice.
O’Riordan whistled. “That boog almost got you. Jesus, look what he done to your collar.”
Standing there next to O’Riordan, Sam tried to understand what had happened that afternoon. That afternoon, he had been down in the living world. In fever, in hate, in blood, in fear, all of them, the ambulance, the crowd, Randolph, O’Riordan, himself had been churned together and then blasted up out of the depths into the precinct station. What they had done was over now. The hearing would soon begin, the post-mortem into events vanished forever. The phantoms of the afternoon would be summoned, all but Randolph; their voices clamored in Sam’s head, meaningful, prophetic, the attendant’s, the crowd’s. Always, the crowd. Barred from the station house, the crowd nevertheless was present. Water below the ice.
“Don’t you hear me?” O’Riordan said. “It’ll begin soon.”
Sam’s fists clenched at his sides. That crowd had already passed judgment, the woman who had hit him with her bag, their mouthpiece, their sergeant. He was breathing faster, his eyes on Mrs. Randolph. He saw her in profile as if cut out of sheet metal, one brown shining eye under her grey brow. He wanted to plead with her, to say: “I tried my best to save your son. Please believe me.” His throat was full of a rasping ache. Abruptly, he walked away from O’Riordan over to Mrs. Randolph. A voiceless pity agitated him. She had lost her son.
“Mrs. Randolph — ” he said.
She looked up
at him.
He said quickly. “Believe me — I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to — Believe me. I couldn’t do anything else.”
“You — You murderer.”
Later, much later, after the hearing, Sam wandered aimlessly through the night-time city. He had changed into a grey tweed suit, a white shirt, a blue necktie. He had hung his uniform with the exception of the slashed coat (this was evidence held for the second hearing scheduled for the D.A.’s office in the morning) in his locker. He had walked south out of Harlem onto Columbus Avenue. In the night, the avenue was a broad open cut between the four and five story buildings. It was a neighborhod of tenements, of Irish subway conductors and German carpenters, dotted with furnished rooming houses full of dishwashers, soda jerks, laborers, a vast city of little men closeted behind the lit-up and darkened windows and adjacent to the black city to the north.
Over and over again, Sam rehearsed what had occurred at the hearing. Numb and despairing, he remembered the division between the black and the white witnesses. “Self-defense,” said the whites. “Murder,” said the blacks. Self-defense, murder, self-defense, murder, no, yes, no, yes, NO, YES. He lit a cigarette and observed his trembling fingers as if they belonged to somebody else. He had to clear his head, he had to think straight. But what was there to think about? He had been cleared. Tomorrow morning, the D.A. would clear him again. But who would clear him with Mrs. Randolph, with the Negroes? The hell with them, he cursed. They were prejudiced, blind, emotional. Why kill himself with worry as to what they thought? He wasn’t a wild-eyed fanatic to break his heart over them. The hell with them. They hated him. He didn’t hate them but they would never believe him. Unseeingly, he glanced up the avenue. The red, blue and green neons were darkened; it was the time of the dim-out, of war in the land. He passed corner taverns; inside, men, soldiers and sailors among them, leaned on the bars and drank beer and whiskey. He wondered if he ought to get drunk. To get good and soused and so stinking drunk that he would forget Mrs. Randolph. Candy stores glowed yellow; the stone churches showed no light. All about him the city ticked through the night, its people like a multitude of clock hands marking the minutes to some midnight hours. Two girls and two sailors laughed together on a corner; a skinny man paraded a big solemn police dog; a boy studied the black window of a rummage shop. And by tomorrow noon, the second hearing would be finished business. Cynically he told himself that he would be cleared even if he had shot down Randolph in cold blood. “If I could only forget,” he said to himself. Forget? How? One by one, the white witnesses stepped forward inside his brain. One by one, they testified for the dozenth time … “They held me,” the ambulance driver said. “I wanted to go help Miller but a gang held me back. They let me go when Randolph started for Seventh Avenue. I ran for help. I picked up a car and we picked up O’Riordan — ” The ambulance driver vanished and the white face speaking in Sam’s brain now was O’Riordan’s. “I hit his left hand. I kept on hitting his left hand — ” The white face was his own face. “I didn’t want to shoot him. I kept telling him to drop his knife but he wouldn’t. I tried my best to save — ”
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