“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 — ”
MURDERER, the crowd challenged him on the lonely avenue. Sam flinched. His lips moved, addressing silent words to them. Their accusations thundered. The mouths of the Negro witnesses shouted inside of him. “When I saw Mister Randolph his head was just all bloody and bleeding and he was helpless — ” “He was carrying no knife. Those two officers men, they didn’t have to shoot him — ” “They kept hitting him and cursing him — ” “Officer Miller, he pulled out his gun and said: ‘I’ll get that black bastard’ and the other officer said: ‘Why don’t you?’ and Officer Miller — ”
He walked with a host. The crowd tramped behind him in its thousands, the dead man walked, the dead man with eyebrows plastered with blood. “Damn,” Sam breathed. He had done his duty. This God damned Harlem, he cursed and then his rage was gone. God, if only they knew about him. Again, he was offering the facts of his life as evidence in the hearing transpiring inside his conscience. If only they knew that he had given money to help the Scottsboro boys and signed petitions when he had been in college to abolish the poll tax. Wasn’t that proof? What better proofs could there be? But it proved nothing. He had killed a Negro and all the Negro eyewitnesses with no exception believed him a killer. The P.D. would knock holes in their testimony and throw a searchlight on the contradictions but the fact remained that the Negroes would be against him. It wasn’t only the crowd. All Harlem would be against him. All? No, not all. There was his old friend, Johnny Ellis. Sam stopped in the middle of the street as if he had actually bumped into Johnny. He recalled the way Johnny smiled, the lips curving out, the nostrils flaring. He was glad that he had thought of Johnny; Johnny knew him. They had played football together in high school, and had met years afterwards in the shipping room of the Schrang Leather Goods Company where Sam had worked one summer between college sessions. Johnny hadn’t gone on to college but he had, graduating and taking civil service exams for patrolmen. He had become a silver badge. And Johnny?
At the next drugstore, Sam swerved inside. He marched into a phone booth, pulled the folding door shut. It was only then that he realized he didn’t know Johnny’s phone number or even if Johnny had a phone number. “Hell,” he said. Besides, talking it over with Johnny would be a violation of the P.D. regulations. Johnny was an outsider and you weren’t supposed to discuss a case with outsiders. He glared at the mouthpiece, tapping his forefinger and middle finger on his chin. He had forgotten until now about the regulations. He wouldn’t be able to explain to his family or to his girl. This was the first time that day that he had thought of his family or of Suzy. What would they think of him? Especially what would Suzy think? He fished out a nickel, dropped it into the slot, dialed her number. His tight lips softened, relaxed as he waited for her to answer. He could almost see her as if she were standing besides him in the booth, a small girl only as tall as his shoulder, with strongly molded cheekbones and bright grey eyes. Her cheekbones and her eyes always made him feel that she was a stranger in the city as he could never be a stranger, yet she had been born in the city like himself and she spoke with the tart tongue of the city’s girls.
At the other end of the wire a voice said, “Yes?”
“Hello, Mrs. Buckles,” Sam said. “Is Suzy home?”
“No,” Suzy’s mother replied. “I expect her later, Sam. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks. Will you tell Suzy I’ll meet her tomorrow in her lunch hour. Tell her to wait for me in front of her building. Good night.” He hung up, thinking that he had forgotten to ask Suzy’s mother how she was; it was a hell of a thing to forget. Mrs. Buckles was worried about him anyway; besides being a Jew he was also a cop; Mrs. Buckles had her reservations about Jews and cops.
He left the drugstore and took the uptown subway at Seventy-Second Street and Broadway, collapsing into a seat under the blacked-out bulbs. He gaped sleepily at the subway faces. His eyes shuttered, opened at stations that weren’t his, numbers strung on the steel rails, the subway roaring through miles of tunnels. Ten minutes later, he climbed up to the street level. Men and girls were sitting on the benches on the traffic islands, the girls glimmering pale and white and silky. On the sidewalks, people walked home, reading the morning papers, absorbed in the black war headlines. He saw nothing, he felt nothing. The incessant whirring of his thoughts had stopped. Like a sleepwalker he hurried along Broadway, the upper Broadway of Washington Heights, of old-fashioned apartment houses once fashionable whose ground floors had long been converted into store fronts, markets, drugstores, appetizing, stores, kosher butchers, florists.
Sam turned into a sidestreet. Down below at the end of the block, the black land of New Jersey towered over the black river. He entered the lobby of his apartment house with its piece of faded imitation tapestry, marble bench and gilt-framed mirror. He strode to the automatic elevator and his image walked towards him in the mirror, hatless and wide-shouldered. He pushed the elevator button. The signal glass glowed ruby red. The elevator descended. He stepped inside, pressed the number of his floor. He wondered if his family would be waiting up for him. He got out in a marble-tiled corridor, lined with doors; over many of the doors the Jewish tenants had nailed mezzuzahs or miniature scrolls of the Bible; the mezzuzahs were supposed to bring good luck. There was one over Sam’s door. He inserted his key in the lock.
His family, his father, his mother, his older sister Rose, even his kid brother Mike, were waiting up for him. They crowded into the foyer from the living-room as he entered. Their voices, the intense eager voices of people with a hundred questions to ask, clapped against his ears. “Sam, my boy,” his mother cried at him. She clasped Sam in her arms, her brown eyes moist with tears. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right, mom. Don’t worry.”
“Thank God. It must be terrible. Terrible. All the time the telephone’s ringing and all your friends they have to know. In all the papers — read the papers, I tell them. For shame to bother Sam at such a time.” She examined his face, wailed. “Sam, your jaw’s all broken.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a little swollen, mom.” Gently, he pushed her away. She looked strange to him, a heavy woman with flabby arms and a face grey as her hair. “I feel bad, mom. But it’s not the jaw.” He heard his voice and it sounded flat and false. His father was waving a newspaper. Lean and grey as his mother was fat and grey, his father cursed.
“You got nothing to worry about, Sam. Feel bad for what? Such things happen in life, my son. It happens to you, to anybody. Another black lunatic, the lousy nigger. Wanted to kill you. And you feel bad. The lousy nigger choleria. It says so in the paper.”
His mother had again folded Sam to her as if he were a little boy in need of her protection. Enveloped in her arms, Sam didn’t recognize his father’s angry face, the twisted lips, the gold teeth gleaming like fangs.
“That’s what it gets you,” his father yelled. “Sticking up for them like you done, the lousy niggers. Oil and water. That’s how it is, my son. Now you know better. The papers all — How you try not to shoot. So the niggers, you they want to, to lynch. You. Now you know better. You see who is right. Your foolish old father.” He flaunted the newspaper at his son like a white flag.
Sam gazed at his father. Behind the fuming old man, his kid brother was hopping up and down; his sister Rose nodded at him and wiped her eyes. Father, mother, brother, sister, he stared at them. My family, he thought chokingly and resentfully. They didn’t understand how he felt and they never would. Mike squeezed between his father and the foyer wall, scuttling around his mother’s hips over to Sam. “Gee, Sam, you killed’m,” Mike said. “Where’d you hit the boogy? Gee, lemme see your gat. I’d like to hold it a minnit.” The flats of his feet were on the floor but his body was shaking; he was a small boy of twelve with a peanut face and big man-sized ears. “Where’d you hit’m, Sam? Lemme see your gat. Lemme hold it a minnit.”
“You go to bed,” Sam’s father whipped his paper down on Mike’s head.
“Let Mikey alone,” Sam’s mother cried. “Why blame him he’s so excited like all of us — his own big brother — Such a thing to happen to our own son. I can’t belief it, Sam, but all the time the telephone rings. News like that, God protect us, is quicker than light. You didn’t get stabbed, Sam. Not even a lil bit somewheres. What foolishness. Hitler should be stabbed, not you.”
“I’m all right,” Sam said. “I’m all right, all of you.”
“I thank you, God, for bringing our boy home to us,” Mrs. Miller prayed in Yiddish, her face lifting towards the ceiling as if speaking directly to God in the apartment above.
“All will be well yet,” Sam’s father announced piously.
“I’m glad you’re okay.” Rose dabbed at her reddened nose.
“Stop your blubbering, Rose,” Sam said. “Can’t you see I’m okay?” He glanced at her and saw a tall slender girl in a blue dress. She was almost as tall as himself with brown eyes like his own and she wore executive-type rimless glasses.
“I can’t help my feelings,” she said. “That’s how I feel. You should never have been a cop, Sam. I was always against it. Remember? You should’ve been a doctor like you wanted to be.”
“And who pays the doctor school?” Sam’s father bellowed.
“You, my fine lady. You with your Macy job selling ladies drawers — ”
“Let up on Rose, pop,” Sam said. “For God’s sake, let’s all calm down.”
“Sam, you’ll lemme hold the gat,” Mike wheedled.
“One God alone knows,” Mrs. Miller remarked vaguely. “There are those to live and nothing kills them. Even in the war, the bullets don’t know them.”
“I’m calm,” Sam’s father declared in a hurt voice. “Too calm. I always was. But I know that oil and water don’t mix. Who told you but me, Sam? Not your sister, the fine lady. A nigger and a white man is like oil and water — ”
Mike darted close to Sam and touched his brother’s right hand. Sam recoiled as if burned. “Go to sleep, you momser,” Sam’s father snatched at Mike’s arm.
“Let Mikey alone,” Mrs. Miller shrieked. “Such a thing to say to his own son,” she added bitterly. “Are you his father or not.” Her husband dashed into the living room.
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Mike said. “The kids’ll read all about it and what’ll I say. I never even touched the hand that shot off the gat. My own brother — Boy, what a brother.”
Sam felt dizzy. They were all mad, he thought. He followed his father into the living room. The Chinese orange rug and the brocaded couch were littered with the morning newspapers. He recognized the big fat Times and Herald-Tribune, the compact tabloids, The News and The Mirror. His eyes burned and a devouring curiosity to read what they had reported seized him. But he held back. Why, he didn’t know exactly. Those newspapers held tomorrow in their columns. He stood in this living room with its glass bowls of artificial wax fruit and he contemplated the tomorrow that the newspapers had already thrust on him. He paced up and down, passing a photograph of himself in uniform on the coffee table. He would have to make decisions tomorrow. He would have to — He grabbed the nearest paper and read: COP KILLS KNIFE SLASHING NEGRO. NEAR RIOT IN HARLEM. He read the story under the headlines and then flung the paper from him. His family were staring at him in silence. Sam picked up the other papers and read their accounts. He laughed gratingly. “Not one of them has it straight,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Rose asked. “Do you mean they are written differently? I noticed that myself — ”
“I shot Randolph,” he said, impatient with her and all of them. They knew nothing of the world; they were Jews who hated Hitler but that was all. The volcano of fascism, to them, was far away in Europe. It was under their feet; he had come home to them from an eruption but they didn’t recognize it.
“Were you scared, Sam?” Mike said. “I’ve been scared but not my big brother Sam.” Sam’s eyes saddened. Mike was already bragging to the kids on the block. Tomorrow, Mike would boast to the kids in the tradition of cops-and-robbers with Sam as the Lone Ranger; his father would spout of oil and water to his Jewish customers in his grocery; his mother would inform her cronies of how Sam never liked to fight when he was a little boy; his sister would sigh between sales at Macy’s. That was how they would all act tomorrow. The great big broad shining tomorrow would be rendered meaningless and petty and cheap by their small actions.
“The papers say you done right,” Sam’s father said. “You saved that Irisher’s life. In his church he’ll pray to the Catholic priest for the Jewish boy.”
“I wonder what the Negro press’ll say,” Sam said to Rose.
“Also a press,” his father sneered. “Who reads their press but niggers. You’ll have to be careful, my son. Maybe you should go to a station house in the Bronx for a while. The niggers’ll be after you.”
“Pop,” Sam said slowly. “Stop calling them ‘niggers.’ I shouldn’t have come home tonight. I should have stayed at a hotel. But I never dreamed of those damn papers. Isn’t that funny? Cops are newspaper-conscious and I forgot all about them. Maybe I wanted to forget. Who knows?” He lit a cigarette.“Everyone of them says that I shot Randolph with my left hand. They made a southpaw out of me. I can’t do a thing with my left. But that’s not important. There’s something more important that they’ve missed. They’ve missed the meaning of it. Why am I a hero in the papers, a hero to the whites and a killer to the Negroes? That’s the real story. What’s going on in Harlem that makes me a hero to one side and a killer to the other? It’s wonderful. The Klan’ll send me a medal, the silver one. Not the gold one. I’m a Jew after all. The Christian Front’ll feel good, too. All the shirt outfits’ll feel good. But what about the truth? What’s behind the story of a guy like me killing Randolph? God knows, I’m just a little frog, another cop. But Pa, Ma, don’t you see? That crowd — you should’ve heard them. Every last Negro was against me because I was a white man. That’s the truth. That’s the terrible thing about it…. What’s going on that would make hundreds and hundreds of people see something that wasn’t so? The way I feel about those poor Negroes — that hasn’t changed. I tried to save Randolph and I couldn’t. It was his life or mine. His life or O’Riordan’s.”
“Sam,” his mother groaned. “Don’t get so upset — ”
“Can you imagine what Harlem’s going to be like tomorrow? Maybe we ought to drop bombs and kill them so they’ll stop complaining — ” He kicked at one of the newspapers. “The papers are all for me. Hooray. Rose, you understand what’s eating me? Nobody in that crowd tried to help me. They stopped the ambulance driver from helping me. I was just another bloody cop to them. But I’m not or am I? That’s what’s eating me. You said I should’ve been a doctor and if I was a doctor I would’ve been different, wouldn’t I? A man’s made up of what he does — ” Again, he laughed that grating laugh. “You should’ve seen the doctor who treated my jaw at the hospital. He thought I was crazy when I said something about police brutality. What a mess. If — What’s the good of iffing? If I could talk to Robeson, to Councilman Vincent, to some of the Negro leaders. If I could only square myself with them — ”
“Why can’t you?” Rose asked. “That seems to me like a very good idea.” She spoke like a school teacher and a sickening realization of how hard it would be to explain himself to the Negro people after what had happened choked Sam.
“The regulations,” he muttered hopelessly. “I can’t tell my side to anybody. Only the Department can issue a statement for me. But I want the truth. I want the real truth to come out — There’s brutality, there’s a thousand things wrong, that’s the truth. That’s the meaning of what happened today — Jim Crow. As long as there’s Jim Crow, there’ll be shootings and killings — ”
“Sam, God is my judge,” his mother said. “But I’m sorry for that schwartzer’s mother. For her I am sorry. A mother is a mother and for her I’m sorry but not for him. That murderer,” she cried, shaking her grey head violently.
“Mom, I killed him.”
Mrs. Miller shuddered, her lips twitching. “Never mind, never mind. I forgot to tell you. Your friends want you to call them back. Phil called.”
“What does he want?” His eyes strayed to the newspapers. “I came home on the subway,” he said. “Guys were selling papers in the aisle and I never thought — ” Every street corner in the city would be selling Randolph’s death. In every coffee pot they would be reading about the Negro with the knife and the cop with the gun; tens of thousands of people whom he had never seen would say that he had done a good thing; tens of other thousands would condemn him.
“I spoke to Phil,” Rose said. “He said you were no lefthander. He said when he played handball with you two summers ago at Indian Lodge, your left was so bad you had to run over to use your right when the balls came at your left. Oh, I’m tonguetied — ”
“And Bill called,” Mrs. Miller said. “And Charley.”
“Did Johnny Ellis call?” he asked.
“No,” Mrs. Miller replied. “He’s that colored friend of yours, Sam? That young schwartzer? Have you seen him?”
“No. I just figured he might call.”
Sam’s father cleared his throat. “You won’t be mad at me? —
But something I want to ask — ”
“Go ahead and ask, pop.”
“This Johnny’s a nig — I mean a Negro? That’s right, ain’t it?”
“You know he is. What are you getting at?”
“Now, I think he’ll be against you, my son. Blood’s strong, no?”
“Yeh, it’s strong,” Sam said bitterly.
Rose bit on one red painted fingernail and glanced at her brother. “Sam, we’re all with you no matter what some people may say. Don’t forget that. We’re all with you.”
“Did Suzy phone, Sis?” He caught his father and sister exchange a quick look. He guessed what was in their minds; Suzy was the stranger, the outsider, the Gentile to the family. He felt their unity against her. It was a unity as real and as surcharged with traditions as his grandmother’s samovar in the dining room. It was a unity with a long past, a way of life. It included the mezzuzah on the door, the high holy days of the New Year and the Day of Atonement, holy days different from those of Christians; it included the separate language of the old folks and always a separateness from the Christian world. “Did Suzy phone?” he repeated. Mentioning her name in this living room was like opening wide windows on something stuffy and closeted.
“No,” Rose answered. “You won’t mind my saying so, Sam. I wouldn’t say it but as it happens I knew Suzy before you met her. Don’t forget I worked in the same office with her before I went to Macy’s — ”
“Shoot,” Sam said.
“I wouldn’t call Suzy Buckles a Red. But she’s pretty radical in her ideas and I think you should take your family’s advice in this awful emergency, Sam. We know you better than Suzy. After all, I have nothing against Suzy. She’s a very charming girl and quite pretty. After all, if you hadn’t gone to my union dance when I was in the U.O.P.W.A. you would never have met Suzy Buckles. But we in your family have your best interests at heart, Sam.”
He smiled at Rose. “Suzy believes in equality for Negroes, as well as for Jews and other minorities. That makes her pretty radical. Practically a representative of Moscow. Hold on, Sis. Let me finish. A lot of people say they believe in democracy. Pa would say he believes in democracy but there’s some difference between saying it and practising it. I’m seeing Suzy tomorrow in her lunch hour. That’s what I think of Suzy. Good night.”
He hurried to his bedroom. His eyes searched inwards. One question was scrawled across his consciousness. How was he going to square himself with the people of Harlem?
At one o’clock the next day Sam inched along in the middle of the lunch-hour crowds on lower Broadway. Clerks, typists, lawyers, bank tellers, stockbrokers packed the narrow sidewalks between the tall grey buildings. A thousand windows burned with the spring sun, the skyscrapers held the sky far above, it seemed a million miles above the people on the pavements. He saw Suzy standing in front of her office building. Familiar and unfamiliar, she appeared to Sam, pretty and not pretty, loved and not loved. He waved at her and dodged through the hustle. His eyes took her in: the tailored brown suit, spotted with red specks that matched the maroon feather in her brown suede hat. She held a brown suede pocketbook under one arm. Trim and small and neat, her neck was white and fragile-looking above the dazzling white of her secretary’s blouse. Her red lips curved in a wide smile, her teeth showing in an even pale white line. For seconds, he was only aware of her smile; this livingness and joy were for him. Gratefully, he stepped over to her. “Where do you Wall Streeters eat around here? How are you, kid? Is your mother sore at me?”
“What’d you do to her?”
“Last night on the phone, she asked me how I was and I didn’t ask her.”
“Since when are you so polite? Where’s your uniform?”
“I’m on sick leave.”
She clattered back on her high heels and squinted like a child at him. Her big grey eyes narrowed. “You don’t look sick to me. Sam, your jaw — ”
Tight-lipped, he nodded. “You don’t play around with psychopaths just like that. Gee, Suzy, it’s been a hell of a time and it isn’t over yet.”
She squeezed his hand and they walked in silence among the chattering lunch-time throngs. On the corner of Cortlandt and Broadway, a flower wagon was hawking the bright flowers of spring. The big black nag stood in its shaft and contemplated everybody with the indifference of a city horse. Sam had an impulse to buy Suzy some violets but he felt so gloomy he did nothing about it. She began to gossip about her office, her boss, and although he appreciated the succession of brittle little stories, his eyes showed no spark. The problem was his, his alone. Almost, he forgot that she loved him. She belonged to this Wall Street world, one of all these spinning faces who revolved around the corporations and the banks. He belonged where? One self walked with Suzy, the other was lost in a ghostly Harlem that floated across his brain even in the splashing sunlight.
“Sam, there’s nothing wrong with you, is there?” he heard her saying. “You’re not listening to me, honey. Don’t be such a wise guy. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Suzy. The jaw’s nothing. I had it X-rayed this morning. The Police Surgeon says it’s okay. Some morning. I haven’t told you. But I’ve had a second hearing this morning, the Assistant D.A. in charge. I was cleared. Did you see the papers last night?”
“No. If I had, I’d’ve taken a cab over to your house. I read the Times, coming to work this morning. Sam, I don’t know where to begin. There are just about a million things I want to ask you. If you don’t want me to pester you, just say so honey. I’m still your sweetheart and not your wife.” She smiled. “Sam,” she said, her voice thinning. “It was awful, wasn’t it? Sam, if you don’t want me to pester you — ”
He circled his arms about her and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. He released her and grinned. Blushing, she cast little cat-like side glances at the crowd. “What’s the idea?” she said. “Why didn’t you wait until we got to Times Square?”
“That makes me feel better.”
She laughed a full throaty laugh as hearty as his kiss had been. “Now I know for sure.”
“What do you know for sure?”
“You couldn’t help what happened.”
“Suzy, honest, the official police version is the straight dope.”
“Whew.” Suzy sighed. “I couldn’t take dictation or anything, Sam. Mr. Hunter, that piece of sponge cake, noticed it. He asked me if my boy friend was being drafted. I told him you were deferred since they were grooming you for Police Commissioner.” The corners of her eyelids crinkled and her grey eyes asked him what he thought of her joke.
“Yep, Police Commissioner.”
“I’m not hungry. Or to be truthful, I am hungry but I’d rather — Sam, I’ve read all the papers. I had the twelve o’clock sandwich brigade bring me the afternoon sheets. I’ve seen the Post, the Sun, the Telly. Have you seen them? Have you seen PM?”
“No. What do they say?”
“Sam, is it all right with you if we eat later? You haven’t seen PM?”
“No, I said. What have you got on your mind, kid? Out with it.”
“Who do you think you are? Charley Chan? I haven’t a thing on my mind.” And quickly, lightly, she added, “Except your welfare.”
“You don’t have to worry about my feelings — ”
“But I do, darling,” she cried passionately, clutching his arm. He felt the rounded edge of her small breast against his elbow and his heart tumbled and her love whirled his head empty of the hearings. They slanted down into Nassau Street, into a hurdy-gurdy of pineapple drink stands, tobacco stores and bargain emporiums; they walked by the stamp marts; hinged on the insides of the plate-glass windows, the stamps of all the nations rainbowed in Sam’s sight.
“Darling,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Sam, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this morning. I’ve been thinking how close you were to getting — ” she shuddered, pressing her cheek against his sleeve — ”killed. Golly, that’s a funny word when you say it. Killed.”
“They were all against me. They’d lynch me if they could. In all that crowd — What’s the use beefing? But it hurts. Talk of race propaganda. If white prejudice is rotten so is black prejudice.”
“But Sam, you know better than anyone else what a beating the people in Harlem have taken from the bully boys in blue — ”
“Don’t give me that one-sided Red baloney,” he snapped.
“Sam. Oh, Sam. I shouldn’t have pestered you.”
“Forget it.” He wondered where she got her convictions, where did she get the nerve to think that the world could be carried out of the cellar into the light? Who was going to do it? People like her. There were too few of them. Besides, what did she really know of the world? All that she was and had been flickered through his consciousness. She was an only daughter, her father had been dead for eight years. She had been poor and she wasn’t rich now; all that the Buckles had was Suzy’s thirty dollars a week salary. A daughter of churchgoers, this Suzy Buckles; for generations her family had lived near their church, one of those forlorn brownstone Protestant churches to be seen all over the city, surrounded by the roar of the new times with a signboard outside the door addressed to the truckers, errand boys, salesmen, to all the scurrying millions: ALL INVITED TO COME INSIDE AND PRAY.
“You’re the cop in this particular jam,” she was saying. “The shoe’s on your foot but that doesn’t change the situation. The colored people have been taking an awful beating — ”
“Don’t lecture me. That union of yours certainly fills you up with righteousness or maybe it’s that abolitionist granddad you’ve told me about — ”
“You’re foolish, my little boy,” she said in a sarcastic voice that still managed an overtone of affection. “I’ve heard you on the subject of my union. Just because it’s a white collar union, you have a tendency to sneer at it. That’s a typical he-man’s attitude. You’ve got some romantic picture of steel workers, big brawny lugs in a big brawny union. Sammy, when a little kid with red fingernails and a typist’s fanny gets together with other kids like herself that’s as important as those steel workers. Sammy, forgive me. I am lecturing you but every time I hear you echo your family I get so mad — ”
“Like my sister, Rose, for instance.”
“Rose would be all right if she — ” Suzy turned away from him. “Sam, let’s cut the bickering out. They’re distributing leaflets about you all over Harlem. PM reprinted one of them. There are two leaflets.”
He stared.
“Honey, I hated to be the one to break it to you — ”
“PM?”
“Yes.”
He legged to the corner, to the broadside of screaming war headlines. He returned to her with the newspaper, flipping the pages. Frozen, he stood still, reading: “ ‘Five hours after the shooting of Fred Randolph of 179 West 131 Street by Officer Samuel Miller, thousands of leaflets were …’ ” The reproduction of the leaflet leaped at Sam, black, ugly, shocking:
ONE MORE NEGRO
SAVAGELY BEATEN AND
KILLED!
SHOT DOWN LIKE A DOG BY A
HARLEM GESTAPO COP!
ALL OUT HARLEM!
LET’S PACK THE SILVER TRUMPET
(135th Street and Lenox Ave.)
THIS SUNDAY! 4 P.M.
ON I AM A FREE MAN DAY.
FREE ADMISSION. HEAR THE EYE WITNESSES.
ALL-NEGRO HARLEM COMMITTEE,
Councilman Matt Vincent, Chairman.
She took the newspaper from Sam’s fingers. “We might as well get married,” she said, “now that I’m an old hand at breaking bad news to you.” She sighed and rolled the PM up into a paper baton. “Sammy, there’s no sense weeping.”
Silently, he reached for the newspaper.
“You’ve seen it. What’s the sense letting it grind at you.”
He muttered, “Harlem Gestapo Cop. Councilman Vincent. I used to respect him — ”
“There’s a crowd watching us, Sammy. Let’s go.”
He frowned at the staring, smirking faces and his insides quivered. Yesterday’s crowd like a mob of extras filed out of his brain. Yesterday’s faces hemmed him in. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. Let’s scram out of here. You’re right. Did I hear you say there was a second leaflet?”
“Before I show it to you — Sam, Johnny Ellis tried to phone you last night”
“Don’t go so fast. Johnny Ellis?”
“Sam, forgive me. I’m giving you both barrels at once. Oh, Sammy. Ellis phoned twice. Each time he spoke to your father. He told your father to tell you he phoned. He left the number where he works.”
“Pop never told me. I’m beginning to see. So that’s why — ”
She tugged at his elbow. “What, Sammy?”
“That foolish old man of mine. I got home late last night and they told me a lot of people, friends and so on, had called. Everybody but Johnny. That’s my Pop. That’s why he gave me a line about oil and water not mixing. He went great guns, cursing Harlem and Negroes. But what I don’t understand — Rose wouldn’t keep a call from me. Not Rose. And how do you know about Johnny phoning?”
“Rose. Don’t be sore at her. She heard your father brush off Johnny Ellis. She wanted to tell you about it but the family were so upset. She was afraid of making things worse. She phoned me this morning — ”
“She ought to get out of that house.”
“Your dad’s something. Remember in the beginning when he found out I wasn’t Jewish — Remember how he censored my calls to you. Even now when he’s on the wire, you ought to hear him. His voice’s like a meat grinder.”
“You’ve got Johnny’s number?”
“Yes. He’ll be in now. He had told Rose his lunch hour was from twelve to one. It’s after one now.”
“We’ll give him a little more time. This other leaflet?”
She rubbed her fingers across her mouth. “Gee.”
“You’re ruining your lipstick. Don’t worry about my feelings.”
“I guess you better see it.” She opened her pocketbook and took out a green folded leaflet. He unfolded it, winked defiantly at her, and read:
STICK TOGETHER HARLEM
NEGROES MUST STICK TOGETHER AGAINST
THEIR ENEMIES!
OUR ENEMY ISN’T ONLY THE JEW COP MILLER.
HARLEM IS FULL OF OUR ENEMIES
WOP BAR OWNERS WHO WON’T HIRE NEGROES!
JEWBOY LANDLORDS AND BANKERS!
MICK COPS WHO THINK. K. K. THEY’RE THE
OLD MASSA DOWN SOUTH!
WOPS, MICKS, JEWBOYS — ALL ENEMIES!
WITH THEIR RED UNCLE TOM (BOGUS) NEGROES.
WE REAL NEGROES MUST STICK TOGETHER!!
AGAINST THIS
WHITE MAN’S (BOGUS) DEMOCRACY.
He folded the leaflet along its creases and put it inside his coat pocket. His face was pale, his dark brown eyebrows like streaks of coal on his forehead, his lips were squeezed so tight that they too had whitened. Yet this second leaflet hadn’t torn at him like the first one. Maybe, because he had always expected to read such a leaflet, printed on cheap green paper, unsigned, anonymous, blasting at him by name, mocking at his Jewishness. Since his school days, he had heard the yip-ping cry, “Jew”; “kike, mocky, sheeny, Christ-killer,” the mouths had spewed at him over the years; now it was printed on green paper. “I’m getting popular,” he said. “How’d you get this filth?”
“I sent one of the office boys up to Harlem this morning to buy the Negro papers — ”
“Wanted to read their side? God, but you’re a lively little dame when you start moving. I could have told you that The People’s Advocate and the other Negro paper don’t appear until the middle of the week.”
“Anyway, the office boy brought this leaflet back. He said dozens of men and women were passing them out. They didn’t want to give him one at first — ”
“Because he was white, huh? Say, how many people know about me in your office? I don’t like it one bit.”
“You’re in every paper. It’s no secret. The girls in the office know about you and me. What am I to do? Deny it now? Sam, let’s not bicker.”
“Okay. What about the Vincent leaflet? Were the same people passing them out?”
“No. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying a thing like that. The All-Negro Harlem Committee wouldn’t — ”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“I’ve answered you. The Vincent leaflet was a yellow colored one.”
The yellow leaflet and the green leaflet sailed across his brain. Suzy was talking to him, advising him but what she said sounded faraway. The yellow leaflet and the green leaflet danced in his inner eye, flung from a thousand black hands. All the emotions, the hates, the calls to action behind the two leaflets had insulated him from Suzy’s voice. He was alone with the two leaflets. The All-Negro Harlem Committee had branded him gestapo cop and summoned Harlem to a mass meeting. That rankled. The green leaflet didn’t hurt half as much. “I won’t take a raw deal from anybody, not even from Councilman Vincent,” he said.
“I’m not blaming you, honey, but don’t get bitter.”
“I’m not taking a raw deal, not even from Negroes. I’m no little Red angel.”
“Nobody wants you to take a raw deal — ”
“I won’t. This afternoon I’m due at Headquarters. You know for what. I’m going to meet the Deputy Inspector, the Chief Inspector, all the big-shots. You know what they’re going to tell me? That I’m a good cop. And I am a good cop. They’re going to tell me I’ve got guts, that I used my head and saved O’Riordan’s life and my own life. That’s next on the program. The congratulations. It’s a custom. Suzy, what am I raving for? But that’s what’s so wrong. It’s all a custom, a custom for the whites to hate Negroes and for the Negroes to hate us. I’m shooting my mouth off. Suzy, honest to God, deep inside of me I know I did the right thing.”
They neared Printer’s Square. The statue of Benjamin Franklin, tarnished and specked by the grey pigeons, grey as the streets, loomed high and serene above the business crowds. North of the statue, the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge was like a giant jaw out of which ceaseless cars were emerging and entering. Suzy piloted Sam through the traffic on the avenue over to the benches in City Hall Park. Behind them were the green lawns, the court buildings; on the park walks, lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants were having their shoes polished by old men in caps and tousled-haired kids. “Let’s sit down awhile,” Suzy said. “And then you can phone Ellis.”
“I wonder what he’ll think.”
“Sam, how does that Stick Together leaflet strike you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who’s behind it?”
“Some anti-white, anti-Jew outfit. Harlem’s full of crank outfits.”
“So you think it’s a crank outfit?”
“Of course.”
She took the green leaflet out of the suede pocketbook. She read: “ ‘Our enemy isn’t only the Jew cop Miller’.”
“What are you driving at, kid?”
“I’ve read those choice lines a dozen times. That line about Jewish bankers — ”
“You’re over sensitive about the Jews because of me.”
“Maybe?”
“You are. That leaflet’s against the Italians and the Irish. It’s against all the whites that Harlem has any dealings with.”
“It’s a pretty slick job at dividing the races,” she admitted. “Crank outfits from what you’ve told me aren’t so slick. This leaflet has its side dish of red herring, too. ‘Red Uncle Tom Negroes.’ And for the payoff: ‘We real Negroes must stick together against this white man’s (bogus) democracy’.”
“Well?”
“Some fascist organization put that leaflet out, Sam.”
“You’re crazy. The F.B.I.’s shut them all up.”
“If that were so, you wouldn’t be reading of new round-ups and new indictments.”
“That’s the trouble with you, Suzy. You believe all the scarehead literature you read. You read stuff a lot of those half baked intellectuals are always printing in their Nations and New Masses. Where do they get all their information? You’re half baked like all of them. Always seeing ghosts. Things aren’t perfect but — ” He stopped, acutely aware that she was waiting for him to finish blowing off steam. He knew that she could sit like that, her grey eyes level and calm, for another fifteen minutes, for an hour if she had to. He felt silly. “Let’s phone Johnny,” he said.
They crossed over to a stationery store and he went inside one of the phone booths. Dialing Johnny’s number, he smiled at Suzy outside the door. She was looking in at him, her maroon feather jaunty on her hat. Her light brown hair gleamed and a ray of light touched her small ears. Delicately modeled like sea shells, her ears glowed pink and translucent. She lifted her fingers to her lips and threw him a kiss. “Your lipstick’s a gonner,” he said as a man’s voice at the other end of the wire cut in with a gruff hello. “I’d like to speak to Johnny Ellis,” Sam said.
“He’s workin’ now, mister. What do you think this is?”
“It’s very important. He left word for me to call — ”
“He can save his calls for Harlem.”
“Please.”
“Hold on.”
Sam opened the door. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “They’re getting Johnny.”
“I’m excited.”
“No, just hungry. That lunch — ” Johnny’s voice slid through the wire, deep and slow as he had remembered it.
“Hel-lo,” Johnny said.
“Hello. This is Sam. Sam Miller. How are you?”
“Hel-lo, Sam. How’s the boy?”
“Okay, Johnny. I just heard you phoned me or I would’ve called before. Johnny — Hell — Maybe we ought to get together. It’s hard on a phone.”
“Sure. I spoke to Hal Clair. Do you know who he is?”
“No.”
“He’s a Negro. He’s secretary of the Harlem Equality League. I guess you’ve heard of them. Anyway, I told Clair that I knew you and that I didn’t think you were what you were being made out to be. You know. All that Gestapo stuff. Clair was interested. He said he’d like to meet you, to talk to you. But he said there was some kind of a po-lice rule preventing a po-liceman from — ”
“That’s right. It’s a regulation.”
“I don’t know what you can do about it but Harlem’s — I don’t have to tell you Harlem’s cooking. Shucks, if you could get to see Clair before the mass meeting. You’ve heard of the mass meeting?”
“Yes. Go on, Johnny.”
“That’s going to be a big party, Sam. All the big-shot Negro leaders are behind it. Republicans, Democrats, American Labor Party, everybody. They’re making a test case out of what happened. It’s going to be bigger’n you or Randolph. It’s going to be a case of Harlem against the po-lice force and against Jim Crow in general.”
Sam gasped. His head rocked as if a fist had come out of the floor and thudded into his face. “Johnny — I don’t know what I can do — I want to square myself with Harlem. You know the kind of guy I am Johnny — You’ve read the accounts in the papers. What do you think?”
“I don’t get you?”
“I want to know your opinion of what happened, Johnny.”
“Do you want it straight?”
“You bet.”
“This Gestapo stuff — that’s plain cockeyed like I told Clair.
But so many killings in Harlem, people there are awful suspicious, Sam. You know. Most cops could be called Gestapo cops and it’d fit. But that’s getting away from what you asked me. The way I see it — when you were alone with Randolph — You know. Before that cop, O’Riordan popped up, you weren’t beating Randolph. You were trying to get him to drop his knife. Now O’Riordan gets on the scene and he jumps for Randolph and begins beating him. You join in. Is that right, Sam?”
“That’s right.”
“Way I see it, you didn’t want to shoot Randolph or even beat him. But that was before O’Riordan popped up — ”
The operator chimed in that Sam’s five minutes were up. He groped for a nickel, dropped it into the box. “Hello, Johnny,” he said in a stunned lifeless voice. “Go on.”
“Hel-lo. All I’m getting at is that you were swung along by O’Riordan. Suppose O’Riordan had felt about Negroes like you. I don’t know O’Riordan but Sam, don’t you see if he hadn’t jumped in swinging and clubbing, you might have kept Randolph covered until reinforcements came. You might have disarmed him without killing him. He was dangerous and crazy but still you might have saved him, Sam. You hear me?”
“I hear you. Okay. So long, Johnny. I’ll get in touch,” he mumbled hanging up. He staggered out of the booth. Suzy clasped him around his waist with both arms. “Let’s get something to eat,” he mumbled.
“What’d Ellis say to make you — ”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Square myself? I’ll never square myself with them. Not in a million years. Even Johnny — ”
“What’d Johnny say?”
He told her and he was amazed to see how calmly she took it.
“Sam,” she said. “The main thing is that Johnny’s got faith in you. That’s important. You’ve got to see this man Clair before the mass meeting Sunday — ”
“But the regulations forbid — ”
“You can resign.”
“What. Throw away my job? What for?”
“You said you wanted to square yourself with the Negro people. Do you?”
“Of course. But how? Even Johnny — Councilman Vincent’s judged me already. Do you think they’ll call the meeting off?”
“Mistakes have been made before, Sam. That isn’t what matters. What matters is what are you going to do? It’s you, Sam. But it’s more than you.” For the third time that day she pulled out the green leaflet. “The Harlem Equality League tries to track down filth like this. They try to discover who the backers are and where the money comes from.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“Sam, we’re in a war. And now it’s come to us right here in New York City. Councilman Vincent’s wrong about you but he’s not the enemy. The enemy’s right here and we have to fight back until we wipe him out or he’ll wipe us out. Johnny was right. Until O’Riordan showed up, Randolph had a chance for his life. I’m not knocking O’Riordan but that cop didn’t feel about Negroes like you, Sam. He’d been poisoned. It was waste-no-time-on-the-niggers with O’Riordan. This leaflet’s the opening shot, Sam and we have to answer that shot with a shot of our own.” She ripped the green leaflet into pieces. Sam stared at the green slips of paper with their black disjoined letters scattered over the gutter. Brighter than lightning, what Suzy had left unspoken struck him: Why couldn’t he help track down the people behind that leaflet?