One side of Roderick Davis’s head remained numb for months. “They knocked all the hurt out of my head,” he said to me.
“They’ve stood up well,” Eddie Temple said of his brother’s friends, “but I understand that Davis particularly was having terrible headaches, and I saw him one day—it had to be at least a month later—I just ran across him in a store, a department store. He wasn’t looking well, and I talked to him, and he told me that his head had been bothering him tremendously, where he had been hit on the head. I tried to get him to let me take him to a doctor, but he insisted he didn’t want one. I tried to get him to go see a doctor about this. Financially I don’t think he had the money.”
“There is a difference in him,” Roderick’s mother told me. “I took him to a neurologist, but he wouldn’t go on with the treatment. The doctor wanted him to have a head X-ray, but he said he didn’t want to do it unless there was something really bad wrong, and if something really bad was wrong, he didn’t want to know what it was. He doesn’t seem to reason properly. For a time he would get these headaches and suddenly run a temperature, and his limbs would give way under him, and he would go partially blind. He was quite edgy. He was quick to think my daughter and me were talking about him. He’d accuse my daughter and me of laughing at him. He was quite shaken up. He couldn’t seem to reason; he was so much more childish. I took him twice to a neurologist, and he gave him an encephalogram. He said it showed a slowness of brain activity on the side that received the injury. He didn’t feel it was permanent; it might last quite awhile, but it would probably clear up.”