14

In the first days after the lynching, plenty of theories were rolled out. The victim was a drunk, a derelict, a pervert. It was a drug hit. The killing was done by a violent wing of the Nation of Islam. It was group of white militia who thought the hanging man had been a black-lover and so they left him out next to a black mannequin to teach him an eternal lesson. It was some radical black group that was setting itself up as a new inverted KKK; now the targets were white people. This last theory was the one that lingered.

“Any leads on the Pompan story?” I asked Bob Esah a few days after the lynching. I thought he would have inside information from working on the Rutgers Daily.

“Police there don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” Bob said. “This murder was way over their heads. They’re just a bunch of half-educated hometown guys looking to have a quiet life and then retire. Of course they all want to figure it out. Be a hero. But here’s the problem. They’re all white. And the lynching was done by blacks.”

“That’s the word?”

“That’s what a lot of people, including me, think.”

“No proving that though?”

He ignored me. “You probably know some of those cops. Boys from your school days.”

“Probably.”

“It hasn’t been that long since you’ve been gone.”

Bob didn’t know that as a boy I worked at all varieties of trouble around Pompan. Even then, Pompan was expanding into the Meadowlands, gas stations and Burger Kings rising on landfill. The southern part of town became directly connected to the Garden State Parkway so drugs entered easily. I stayed away from crack but high on marijuana I once stole animals from their classroom cages and let them go into the onion grass of Toca Loca Park. I snapped off the side mirrors of cars. Petty stuff, and there was never an eyewitness. Even then, I knew you could get addicted to trouble if you weren’t careful, that sooner or later you’d get caught.

“You’ve had a photograph of that hanging man up since the night it happened. Everyone’s a little worried about you,” Bob said.

“Good picture, huh?”

The photo of the hanging man (taped below one of Clarise and one of my mother on the refrigerator) had become a dominant presence in my life in those days. There’d been no capture or explanation. The Mayor of Pompan hinted in print about the FBI’s arrogance and ineptitude.

In the picture, the man was hanging in a square marked off by police tape like he was an animal in a zoo exhibit. I imagined him helpless and disoriented and beaten just before he died. I imagined his death to be like what happened to Mrs. Bing during her seizures. Then all he was was an empty stare at the ground and a hopeless weight. Bugs finding their way into his body.

I thought of the rope like a leash on an animal. He was heavy with flesh, gravity pulling at him.

If I looked for too long at the picture, it made me feel sick.

Some days I looked at the picture and thought, If I don’t go home something awful will happen again there.

People who came by the house my best friend Cedric and I shared at school glanced quickly at that photo. It must have had them worried, two black men with a picture of a lynched white man in the middle of the kitchen. I felt some eyes stay on me longer than they used to, eyes that turned away when I stared back. I felt I had to maintain my composure in the face of outrage; how could they just look at that man and say nothing? Why didn’t everyone have this picture up?

Maybe they were just thinking: why does that photo get at Gambell so bad? To this day, I don’t know exactly, although I know it only reinforced my desire to go back to Pompan. It wasn’t that I had a fascination with horrors in general, only with that lynched man. The more I think about it now, the more I realize that my interest in returning to Pompan came from the feeling that my memory had betrayed me. When I thought of my life in Pompan not so long before, I recalled a pretty good childhood, not one broken by fears, but one that included some foolish things, some romance, some crazy nights out with the boys. Nothing hopeless or hateful. No lynching.

And now this hanging was Pompan.

Had I missed something?

From the beginning, I had the feeling that the lynchers weren’t going to get caught. I had the feeling that this would be a mystery in Pompan for the next twenty years, one that would drive people away, or keep children inside, or cause sudden fistfights in supermarket aisles.