by John Ridley
I got real concerned.
Real concerned, but I remained still. My mind active—lickety-splitting through a dozen things I should maybe do instead of standing around—but my body able to accomplish nothing.
It was just a car. It was just…
The car—a cream-colored thing. Make and model hidden beneath dents and rust—came parallel to me. Inside: three men. In the dark I couldn't well make them out except they were three white men. Two up front, one in back.
The one behind the wheel drawled at me: “Boy, watcha doin'?”
“Going home.” I had to work the words out, and when they came they came nervous.
“Say he goin' home.” That didn't sit too well with the guy next to the driver, who repeated my words for the others.
The driver stated: “Ain't no niggrahs live roun' heyah.”
“I don't live—”
“What that, boy?”
“I don't live here. I'm from out of town.”
“Say he ain't from roun' heyah.” That was the guy next to the driver again doing a cracker translation of what I'd just said. The third one, the one in back, kept quiet, did nothing more than slouch where the seat met the door and chew at something that seemed to be permanently lodged in his mouth.
“Nahh, he ain't no local niggrah.” They talked past me to each other. They talked like I didn't exist. “Ain't no local niggrah stupid 'nough tah be walkin' roun' at night when he ain't supposedta.”
I started to show them my police card, tell them how it was “okay” for me to be out after dark.
“Ah don't give uh damn 'bout no card.” The driver shut me down.
The one next to the driver darted an arm out the window, snatched the card from my hand.
I offered no resistance. Fear stupefied my reactions.
Looking over the card casually, without regard: “Say he can stay out past curfew.”
“Why yew sucha special niggrah? Yew tha Jesus niggrah?”
Nigger came out of their mouths with as much ease as anger. And just as that word was easy for them, there was a word that, in that moment, was becoming untroublesome for me: “Sir? No, sir. Nothing special about me, sir. I work at one of the—”
“Get in tha car.”
Miles and miles away a train sounded. I remember that. I remember very clearly the sound of that train.
“I… I think I can just walk back to—”
“Boy, git yer ass in tha car. We all take yew where yew need tah go.”
The third one, the one in the back, pushed open the door. It stood gaping, waiting to swallow me whole.
I was not stupid.
I was not so stupid as to think there was any good to come from getting into that car.
I was not stupid.
I was not so stupid as to think running was any better an idea. To run was to be chased. To be chased was to be caught. To be caught was to be … Three of them. I was alone.
I was not stupid.
I got in the car.
And as I did, for lack of anything better, I held out a little hope these three might actually take me where I needed to go—to Miami, to the Madison, to a room with vermin that dodged leaking pipes of cold water that would be the most beautiful room I'd ever been in.
Sure. Maybe they'd take me there.
“Close it, boy. Close tha door.”
I closed the car door. I closed in the smell of alcohol and sweat. The alcohol came from them; their every breath exhaled the stink of cheap beer downed in large amounts that got the drinker good and high. The sweat came courtesy of all of us. The rednecks sweaty with anticipation. Me, fear.
For a while we drove. Didn't know where we were going, except I knew we weren't going toward the city or the beach. Beyond the car was darkness, peeled some by the headlights to reveal only desolation ahead, and some by the occasional flash from a rural street post. In those flashes I caught glimpses of my companions. All had buzzed hair, the driver's blondish. On the back of his neck, acne scars that disappeared down under the collar of his shirt. And there was something wrong with his ear; a hunk of it had been chewed and torn off same as a mutt that's lost a dogfight.
The passenger was red. Red in hair. Red in flesh.
Man number three, the one in back with me, was thin. Nearly rail-thin. Except for a pot of a stomach that sloshed itself out from under a plaid shirt he wore unbuttoned for better viewing of the miracle of his thin/fat self.
This one, the thin/fat one, eyed my threads, guzzled from a Schlitz can, then got around to asking: “Whuh yew all fined up for?”
“I told you.”
“Yew ain't said shit, niggrah.”
It was coming to seem like nigger was the standard close to every sentence.
The car rode rough. There was a sound coming from the engine. An unhealthy one. I had never owned a car, but I figured, probably, the oil had gone unchanged for longer than it should have and whatever it was that oil lubricated was going dry and grinding. I let out a little hysterical laugh that was disguised as a hiccup. I was thinking about the redneck's car. That was quite funny to me. I hiccupped again.
I said: “I work in town.”
More beer. “What tha hell yew do with that git-up?”
“… I'm an entertainer.”
Laughs and cat calls in redneck stereophonics.
“Entahtainah? Yew some big stah, boy?” one of them asked. Couldn't tell which. Their mumbled ignorances stretched out in a slow drawl were selfsame.
“Like that niggrah Jew, ain't yew, boy?” The thin/fat redneck sucked more beer. Got a little higher on the booze. Got a little higher on his hate. “Bet yew jus like that niggrah Jew. Think yer sumthin' special. Think yer so goddamn …” He drowned the last of that beneath a swallow of beer and gave me instead an angry stare.
From the front of the car: “Maybe he oughtta entahtain us.”
“… I could try to get you tickets to the show.…”
“Yeauh. He oughtta entahtain us,” the thin/fat one said. He said it quiet, said it soft. Said it like a guy who was saving his energy for things besides talking. He said it again: “Yeauh, he wanna entahtain us, don't yew, boy?”
The car tire hit soft shoulder.
Gravel pinged off the fender.
I jumped.
The redneck next to me smiled.
The driver was angling for a gas station. Closed, dark. The car stopped. Rednecks one, two, and three got out. I stayed, a death-house inmate who didn't want to leave his cell, the cell being better than what was waiting.
One of the rednecks, I think the driver: “Well, le's go, boy.” He clapped his hands the way a master calls his dog. “Le's get tah entahtainin'.”
I inched along the seat. I inched out of the car. That was all I did.
“Gowon over in tha spotlight.” The red redneck pointed to where the car's headlights bounced off the wall of the garage. “Gowon.”
Reluctant steps took me into the light. It filled my eyes, made the rednecks silhouettes.
One of the outlines: “Le's see yew dance, boy.”
Their shadow arms bobbed up to their mouths and back down. More beer to fuel their fire.
“I don't … I'm a comedian. I don't dance, I tell—”
“Ah ain't tryin' tah heyah no niggrah joke-talkin' shit. Now, Ie's see yew dance.”
I danced.
There was no pause, no inactive moment that I tried to pass off as defiance. I lifted a leg, then the other. Did a little shuffle step. Small motions. Tiny movements. My father's belt, whipping me to the floor, never delivered such total degradation. I didn't care. I didn't care if the three rednecks stood and laughed and pointed all the while I was humiliating myself. The only thing I cared about was ending the night alive. So I danced.
But all my halfhearted self-shaming did was stoke them. Where's the sport in beating down something that is so willing to be beaten?
“What is that shit?” one of the outlines demanded. “What tha hell kinduh coon
shit is that suppostuh—”
“Niggrah's too goddamn good tah dance,” from another of them.
“No, sir, I'm … I'm not too goo—”
“Thank's he's so goddamn good. All these niggrah Jews gettin' tah thank they so goddamn …”
Their rants, if ever, no longer even bordered on a kind of logic. They were just an excuse to hate out loud, dirty talk and foreplay before an orgasm of violence.
A beer can got tossed away. There was business to be gotten to.
One of the rednecks stepped from the dark to the light. The thin/fat one. He stood there. He looked at me, barely able to stand my sight, his face twitching with little jolts of scorn. A hand into his pant pocket. It came out, fingers shiny, kicking brass moonlight. Brass and slightly reddish. Rust. Rust or dried blood.
Terror racked the whole of me with a fierce nausea, made every part of me fail simultaneously. My heart labored. My muscles went loose and weak. My stomach and bowels demanded to empty themselves.
Thought useless, instinct stepped in and drove me back. I stumbled—toolbox among my feet—fell against the wall of the garage.
The redneck sneered at that: Look at the nigger, too stupid to even run away good.
The other two rednecks stayed back. The other two were going to let the thin/fat one have his fun.
Me, against the wall, crouching tighter, trying to will myself through it. Trying to wish myself out of backwoods Florida, north to New York, to the arms of my Tommy.
“Tommy,” I screamed, my mind and voice spasming along with my physical self. “Tommy!” Hands frenzied, flailing, clawing at the wood I was pressed against. Pain. Hot, sharp pain. Palms warm, wet. Blood from splinters. Kept clawing. I kept—
Cold. In my hand: something smooth and cold and heavy.
The redneck: standing over me. Like my father, liquor-sick, standing over me. Racist bile drooled at me, broiling and incoherent. Didn't matter. Words didn't matter. Words had become non-satisfying. Hate is what mattered. The hate was real and ready to go to work. Thin/fat redneck's arm jerked back, the brass knuckles bouncing car light, flashing a warning: Here we come.
He swung down.
I swung up. The cold and heavy thing I gripped moved by terror, not courage. I swung. It whistled, chopped air. I swung. I swung until something interrupted my arch, the connection vibrating up my arm from hand to shoulder. Simultaneously there was a squooshy crunch—a soft melon getting hammered. The follow-up sound: dead weight hitting ground.
No sound after that. Nothing from the redneck I'd just pounded. Nothing from the other two.
From me, movement. My weapon tossed aside, used, now useless. A delirious scramble forward, eventually up to my feet, my body drove itself for the road, away from the gas station and the remaining rednecks.
The remaining rednecks right behind, not smart enough to chase me down with the car but closing just the same. As quick as fear moved me, rage moved them. Them. Two of them. One to hold me while the other strung me up—the minimum number required to perform a lynching.
My brain, useless up to that point, a slave to my instincts, got off the bench and back into the game. My brain told me sticking to the road, keeping with a straight-ahead run, was only good for getting me caught and killed. My brain told me to veer for the brush, to lose my hunters in a thicket of trees.
My brain fucked me up.
Just off the shoulder—a fence, the wire barbed. I hit it, hit it at speed and got thrown back and down, the fence keeping a good slice of my cheek.
From the ground I opened my eyes. Looking straight up, I saw dark sky and stars. I turned my head. I saw angry, huffing rednecks.
One of them, the one who'd been driving the car: in his hand a board. In the board nails. Dull, dirty, and bent. Useless nails. Good for nothing. Nothing but killing.
The sight of it—the redneck, the board he held, the seething drunken fury that held him—the sight of it all made my body thrash, marking my grave with a dirt angel. It made me want to puke, piss, and cry.
I started in on all three as the redneck started for me.
I just didn't want it to hurt. That's what I prayed for. Painless-ness. Other than that, on the ground, basting in my own filth, I was resigned to things ending. Please be quick. Please be painless.
The redneck stepped close to answer my prayers.
From up the road, sound: the low whine of an engine, the dull hum of tires over dirt. The combination of noises snatched the attention of the rednecks from me.
Whiteness broke the horizon. A car came up over a rise, came toward us … kept coming … then slowed to a stop, its headlights a pair of big eyes staring at the situation. A beat. A couple of beats. The headlights went from regular to bright, those big eyes giving some serious consideration to what was what. When it was done figuring things, the car's door groaned open. Someone stepped out.
My eyes, the eyes of the rednecks, were too washed out to see much more than it was a man, fair in size.
He said to us in a normal tone of voice that carried in the dark and isolation as a shout: “What are you all doing?”
“This heyah niggrah took uh pipe tah Earl,” the redneck with the board with the nails said, using the board—his judgment stick— to point at me even though I was the only “nigger” in the vicinity. “We fixin' tah learn him how we handle thangs with niggrahs down heyah.”
The redneck raised the board. The demonstration was about to begin.
But it didn't. The redneck's arm got caught, got stopped mid-swing by the stranger's voice.
“Leave him be.”
The redneck looked back at the man, hearing but not believing what he'd heard. “You heyah what Ah said? Tha niggrah beat our friend with uh pipe.”
He left out the part about his friend wanting to bash my head with brass knuckles.
“Ain't no niggrah gonna git away with beatin' uh white.”
The stranger didn't seem to care about any of that. The stranger just said again: “Leave him be.”
The two rednecks swapped looks, making sure they equally understood as little of what was happening: Someone was keeping a colored who'd had the nerve to instinctively fight off a lynching from getting the back-road justice he deserved?
That just wouldn't do.
The redneck double-clutched the board in his hand, his thoughts obvious: Maybe two men were in for getting beat down.
There was a standoff brewing over me, over my life, and I was nothing more than an audience to it all.
The redneck took a step for the man. One step.
Then we heard the click.
Blind from the light, me and the rednecks couldn't see it, but there was no mistaking the very distinctive sound of the hammer getting cocked on a gun.
The thing of it is, when there's a disagreement and one guy's got a lousy board with nails and the other's got a gun, the pulling of the gun will end all manner of conversations and keep an equal number from ever getting started.
The redneck's grip on the board slackened along with his will to use it.
The figure, the outlined man to me: “Let's go, boy.”
Despite the fact my life was being saved, for a moment I lay where I was.
The outlined man again: “Come on. Get up. Get in the car.”
For a black man whose troubles had started because he couldn't catch a cab, suddenly everyone wanted to give me a ride.
I got up. I walked wide past the rednecks, mouths shut but their eyes delivering sermons on hate, for the savior car. Stepping from the glare of the lights, my head snapped Stepin Fetchit-style like I'd just been mule-kicked.
The stranger: “You keep quiet, boy, and get yourself in the car.”
For both our sakes I did as told.
The stranger got back behind the wheel. Keeping the lights keyed on the rednecks, keeping them blind, he backed … backed … then pulled the car into a tight U-turn and sped off the way he'd come.
The stranger: “What were you doing?”
I didn't answer that. Couldn't answer. I was no good for talking. I was no good for anything but sitting and shaking.
The stranger, again: “What the hell were you doing?”
I turned and looked, focused on the man who'd just saved my life. But staring at him did little to calm the cuckooness of the scene. This man who'd just stood down a couple of blood-crazy whites was black. Same as me, darker even.
My senses, which had deserted me, started to return. I felt chilled and I felt my fear. I looked like hell, and the stink of my own foul matter started to choke me. The shame of my circumstances made me cry. The shame of me crying made me cry all the more.
The stranger: “Are you listening to me?” His voice a hand slapping me steady. “What the hell were you doing?”
“Noth … I wasn't … walking.”
“At night? In the middle of nowhere?”
“I wasn't nowhere when I started.” Calming down some. Just some. “Got lost. I was at the Fontainebleau, and I was walking back to my hotel in the—”
“You were at the Fontainebleau?” His tone told me he had the same hard time believing me the rednecks had.
“I work … I'm an entertainer and I was … Couldn't get a cab, so I—”
“So you thought you'd walk from the beach back to Miami.” The stranger did some blank-filling.
“Then those three … there were three of them …”
“Stupid.”
“They were going to kill me.” I used a quiet voice to distance myself from the near-certain reality.
“Stupid.”
“Worse. Animals. Dumb, ignorant—”
“Yeah. They're ignorant animals, but you … you're just plain stupid.”
That got me. That brought me all the way back. “What?”
“Walking alone at night in these parts. Might as well just wear a lynch-me sign.”
“I got lost. I told you, I got lost. Sure as hell wasn't looking to get picked up by a bunch of …” I felt a hurting. The hurt became a specific pain. Fingers to my cheek. There was a warm and continual ooze of blood. “Oh, God …” My almost-death came vivid again.
The stranger handed me a handkerchief. His contempt didn't cancel out his compassion, but his compassion didn't keep him from giving me a good verbal smacking. “Must be a Northern black. You from up North?”
