Add Armstead is the product of an America that should have died a century ago. The elderly midwife present at his birth in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on June 14, 1922, had been raised in slavery. The eighth of nineteen children, he dropped out of school in second grade and can neither read nor write. Armstead grew up in the American South before the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, and freedom riders. It was an era when most blacks were forbidden to vote and it was a crime punishable by ten years in prison for a black and white to intermarry. His formative years were spent under the heels of political and economic barons who had a vested interest in keeping his people ignorant, uneducated, and superstitious. At age twenty-one, he moved north to New York, where he has worked as a laborer for more than thirty years.
Armstead is five feet six inches tall, of wiry build, with skin the color of bitter chocolate. His face is thin with high cheekbones and a pencil mustache. The majority of his teeth are missing, leaving gaping holes on each side of his mouth. His eyes are dull, and his hair is cropped close where it has not receded. A gold crucifix dangles from a chain around Armstead’s neck just to the left of an ugly three-inch scar. His hands are the hands of a laborer. Extremely large for someone his size, scarred from an endless series of metal slices, dirt perpetually under the nails. He is an unremarkable man who, as the result of a single horrifying moment in the dreary predawn hours of April 28, 1973, was ripped from obscurity and brutally exhibited before the American public until the same public wearied of him.
His voice is deep. He speaks in rushes.
“Shea! Yeah, I know that name. He made a pact with the devil. You see, God and Satan be sittin’ in heaven with suitcases full of souls, and they trade them back and forth. And the devil, he’s got another suitcase with every kind of temptation you can imagine. Shea made a pact with the devil. The devil took his soul, and now Shea does his bidding. I know because I was there the morning Shea shot my boy. If I’d been drunk or causing trouble, it might have been different, but there weren’t none of that. Me and Clifford was just walking along when Shea killed him dead. Some nights, I still wake up and hear the bullets whistling over me.
“After Shea killed my boy, there was a time when any man with a uniform and badge was my enemy. Every cop, I hated. Then God called me. I was sitting in church, cursing God for everything that had gone wrong, when I felt my breath growing short. My throat closed up and I couldn’t breathe. Right then I heard the voice of God. He said, ‘Add, the devil could have killed you that Saturday morning, but I saved you to preach the Gospel.’ I heard God’s voice, and I begged for forgiveness. I said, ‘Lord, I surrender everything. Lord, I’ll give you everything. Lord, I’m in your hands.’
“That’s the way it’s been now for five years. All the trouble I went through was for God. Without God, you don’t got nothing. You can give me a Rolls-Royce, and I’ll say that’s mine but it ain’t. That’s God’s car because, if God takes the breath out of me, if God takes my life right then, that car ain’t worth nothing. I’d rather do what God tells me than live in a palace because what I got now, money can’t buy. God came in and put peace and love in my heart.
“Peace and love. That’s the message of the Lord. If all of us were united, not just here in America but in the whole world, if we could sit down and talk out our problems, then we’d have peace. But we can’t get the world united. We got countries fighting with countries. We got rich fighting with poor, black fighting with white. It don’t make sense. Everybody should get on the train and ride together with Christ. He’s the conductor. And when you got Christ, you have everything.
“Hate tears up a man’s insides. When Jesus was on the cross, He said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ That’s why I forgive Shea. God says that Shea’s my brother. If Shea walked in this door right now and said, ‘I’m hungry,’ I’d give him something to eat. There’s no way a man can love God if he hates his own brother. That’s what matters to me now. Loving God. But there’s more you came to ask me, so I’ll tell you more.
“I was born in nineteen hundred and twenty-two on a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia. There were nineteen children in the family. I got five brothers and four sisters still living. Nine of them are dead. I’m the oldest living son.
“My mother’s name was Sarah. She was a big woman, weighed a little more than two hundred pounds. At hog-killing time, she worked in the yard. But the rest of the time, she stayed at home. I guess raising nineteen of us was work enough. She was born a Baptist, lived like a Baptist, and died a Baptist. Always told us to go to church, and I never gave her no trouble except once. One Sunday, instead of praying like I was supposed to, I went fishing with George Young. The canoe turned over and I couldn’t swim, nearly drowned before George saved me. Right then, I figured the Lord was trying to tell me something. That’s the last time I ever went fishing on Sunday.
“My father hauled wood for a living. His name was Add, and I look a lot like he used to. He and my mother ran out of names by the time they got to me, so they named me Add, Junior. My father was a hard man, but he taught us the best he knew how. He gave us what he could and we didn’t have no palace, but what we had was all right. I was never ashamed.
“My father worked us hard when we was children. I didn’t get much book learning because he made me quit school in second grade so I could help him out at work. Every day except Sunday, him and me would chop down a load of trees. Then we’d saw them into eight-foot sections and bring them back by horse and wagon to the yard, where my brothers cut them down some more. Finally, we’d load the wood back on the cart and take it to people’s houses for their stoves. It was hard work but honest money. We got five dollars a load, three or four loads a day.
“Plenty of times I got tired of working, but my father made me keep going. If he told me to do something, I did it. That’s how it was with all of his children. Once he came home at midnight and I hadn’t chopped up some logs, so he woke me up and made me to go outside in the snow to do it. Another time, we was repairing a piece of machinery and he told me to lift something heavy. I just looked like I wasn’t going to do it, and he hit me on the head with a hammer. I still got the scar to prove it. My mother told him, ‘You’re going to kill that boy.’ But it was for my own good. My father said, ‘You have it hard now and it will be easier later on.’
“He was right. Sixteen years I’ve been able to hold onto the same job because of what he taught me. Children today don’t have that. Everything comes too easy to them. That’s why there’s so much juvenilism. There are more young junkies in jail today than ever before because they don’t have good fathers that keep on them. I laugh at some of those kids, the way they misbehave. But deep down inside, it breaks my heart. All I had to do was just look like I wasn’t going to do what I was told and I got the belt. But I’ll say this about my daddy and mama. None of their children ever went wrong. Nineteen of us, and none of us ever went bad.
“There was some hard times back when I was young. We never had money for nineteen pairs of shoes, and once I got frostbite walking through the snow. Sometimes we only had cornpone and boiled potatoes for dinner, but I usually made out okay. If I was hungry, I walked along the road and looked for empty soda bottles to turn in at the store for bread and cheese.
“Most folks was good to us. Most folks left us alone. There wasn’t much problem with color. Up here in New York, people throw rocks and hide their hand. They talk like they’re your friend, but they treat you like a nigger. Down south, if a man don’t like you because of your color, he says so. Down south, if a colored man is working for a white and lands in jail, his boss calls the sheriff and says, ‘Let my nigger go.’ I got nothing against the civil rights movement. Things are better now because of it. But at the time it was going on, it never crossed my mind.
“About the time I was seventeen, I left home and went to work for a man named Mr. Cupid. He put a cot and stove in his hen house, and I got along there just fine. Then, maybe three years later, my brother Joe moved up north. After a while, he come home to visit and told us how good things were, so I decided to see for myself. It was cold when I got to New York. I almost went back home, but after a while I decided to stay. The first job I had in the city was driving a cab. Then I cleaned cesspools for a couple of years and carted coal. After that, I worked as a longshoreman. Partway through World War II, I went to work for a man named Jack Reynolds at a wrecking yard on Springfield Boulevard in Queens.
“I worked with Mr. Reynolds for fourteen years. About the time we got started, I met Lola. Her father owned a grocery store near where I lived, and sometimes I’d go over and give a big red apple to her mother. Christmas Eve of 1945, I went by to give Lola her present. We stayed up late talking and fell in love; got married the first Tuesday in 1946.
“We had a lot of nice years together, me and Lola. We had, I’m not sure, but I think it was eight children. Three boys and five girls. The first boy died from asthma when he was two months old. My daughter Margie was shot to death by her husband. The other children are still alive.
“I loved Lola, but I did some running around that maybe I shouldn’t have. She told me once, ‘I’ll forgive you, but I won’t forget.’ Then, in 1959, I had a bad accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. I was in the hospital for almost a year. And when I got out, Lola was gone. She’d fallen in love with someone else and lived with him until Easter Sunday 1971, when she died. Heart trouble. I was the one they called to the morgue to identify her body. I loved that woman.
“After Lola left me, I went near crazy from being alone. I lived with my brother for a while, but that didn’t work out, so I lived alone again. Then my mother died, and after that my father passed away. I went home for his funeral and gave the undertaker the only suit I had so my daddy could be buried proper. Right after that, I met Mrs. Glover.
“Mrs. Glover was a nice woman, very good with children. We met in a little restaurant on South Road and New York Boulevard in Queens. One day, she came in when I was having lunch, and I bought her something to eat. Then a friend of mine told me, ‘Don’t mess with her because she’s married.’ After that I was perfectly proper. I didn’t do anything, but we stayed friends. I bought her lunch almost every day. And once, someone broke into her home, so I helped fix the lock on the door. Another time, something in the bathroom broke, so I fixed it. Then her husband ran out and left her with two children; Clifford and Henry, both of them babies. I started seeing her more, and she had two more children—Patricia and Darlene. Both of them are mine. Finally, about 1971, she asked me to move in.
“I liked all of Mrs. Glover’s children, but me and Clifford got along the best. He was eight years old when I moved in, and he took to me real good. Mr. Reynolds had died by then, and I’d gotten another job at a junkyard right by our home. Most of the time, I cut up old cars with a torch. It was the best job I ever had. The boss sold all the radiators, batteries, and motors, but I could keep anything else I wanted. One day, I made sixty-seven dollars selling copper wire and a heater I found in a car.
“Working in a junkyard gets in your blood. I figured that Clifford could learn it real good. So when he turned ten, I started bringing him along. Every day after school he’d come down to the yard and stay until I got off. Then, if I went for a beer, he’d come keep me company. He was a nice boy, very intelligent. He’d have been a good mechanic someday. Saturdays, he’d come to work the whole day. That’s where we was going when Shea killed him.
“I suppose I’m lucky. If I’d died that morning, hell would have been my home. I was a sinner. But Clifford had no sin on him. He was pure. Right now he’s by the side of the Lord. That’s all I want. That’s all any man needs. To die and be by the side of the Lord.
“You see, someday, you and me gonna pass away. The houses we live in and this city gonna pass away. But the Word of God will live forever. Remember that, my friend. The Word of God will live forever. There might not be no justice in this world, but don’t you worry none. They got plenty of it in the next. I’m getting on in years, and someday me and Clifford gonna meet up again. Lord, that’ll be the day.”