Dark Stain
Authors: Benjamin Appel
BENJAMIN APPEL
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For My Daughter Carla
And All Her Generation
“I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1
“T
HE
only good nigger’s — ” The gold-lettered ambulance, swinging around the corner into upper Eighth Avenue was going so fast that the hospital attendant’s voice jerked to a stop for a second. “ — S’a dead one,” the hospital attendant concluded. He was sitting on the side-seat in the rear and he was glaring up front at the cop next to the driver. All he could see of the cop was the back of his head; the cop’s hair was dark brown under the blue of his officer’s hat.
“There he is again,” the cop said.
The attendant’s upper lip curled over his teeth and he shouted. “I been in this God damn black hole too long for to be a nigger lover like some.”
The driver laughed. The cop was silent; he had been on ambulance duty for three days and he hadn’t said “nigger” once. It was enough to mark him here in Harlem. He listened to the attendant muttering behind him and he wondered what he could answer. He might point out that sayings like: The only good nigger is a dead one — had as much truth to them as sayings like: The only good white man is a dead one. But it would be a waste of breath, he decided. The muttering sharpened. “Treatin’ the jigs with kid gloves,” the attendant said disgustedly.
The cop turned around. He was good-looking with the young strength of a man in his middle twenties. His lips were squarely cut above a square chin. His skin stretched tight and firm over his jaws and under his dark brown eyes. He glanced at the attendant silhouetted against the light of the streets, the ending light of a May afternoon, warm, glowing, flooded with sun. Against this light, the attendant seemed almost anonymous, faceless and nameless like someone in a crowd, someone, anyone. The words the cop had wanted to say never reached his lips. How could he explain to this face? In this ambulance racing on call? And what could he say: That a Negro was like anybody else. That being around hospitals should mean something. That a broken arm was treated in Emergency the same way whether the color was black or white. There was nothing to say. He glanced front again. Through the windshield, the gutters were spotted with cars, the sidewalks with the stick-like figures of men and women. He saw the streaking plateglass store fronts of the Bar-B-Q’s, the cut-rate drugstores, the bars, groceries, Father Divine restaurants. The cop’s eyes lifted above the stores, above the highest fire-escapes to where the blue sky cleanly met the tops of the tenements. These tenements, built at the same time in many blocks and the same height, suddenly struck the cop. They looked like immense red-brick warehouses from the speeding ambulance. He felt uneasy. It was that damn Christian Fronter of an attendant, he thought. He could never relax with that damn attendant always sniping at him.
“One Seven Nine West One Three One.” The driver spoke for the first time. “That’s the number, Sam, ain’t it?”
The cop said. “That’s right.”
“Another black bastard,” the attendant shrilled. “Another stabbin’. All them bastards do is go ‘round stickin’ their shivs into one another.”
“Shut up!” the cop said.
“Don’t haffta get sore,” the attendant said cautiously. He appealed still cautiously to the driver. “A nigger’s okay with’m, the collitch highbinder. Gimme the oldtimers any day. Any day at all.”
“Shut up!” By degrees, the face of the cop had changed from the hard efficient front of a thousand cops, a front almost as standardized as the badges or batons approved by the P.D. into the face of an angry young boy. “I’ve heard enough, Lanzetta. Cut it out. I don’t want to hear any more. Cut it out.” Even in this flaring second, he noticed that the attendant was regarding him with a bitter little grin and he knew instantly what the attendant was thinking. He was just a dirty Jew cop to the attendant.
“Don’t haffta get sore. I been ridin’ ambulance a long time in Harlem. And with all kinda cops. Only two cops I hear like you. That cop call Creepin’ Jesus, he was so full religion — they transfer him to Flatbush. And Scarano, he was a wop like me. Scarano was a collitch copper, too. So what happened, a nigger mugger knifed’m one night. Stuck a shiv into his ribs — ”
The ambulance curved off Eighth Avenue down into a sidestreet, scattering a dozen stickball players. Sam watched the kids leaping from under the wheels, their brown faces on their shoulders as they ran. One of them hooted at him but he couldn’t make out what it was. It was his uniform, of course, that the kid hated. He decided for the hundredth time that there was no use being noble about conditions; no use sticking his neck out for the Lanzettas to take a crack at. He remembered what he knew about Lanzetta; the dirty pictures carried in the wallet that he had seen towards the end of his first day of ambulance duty; the jokes about the Negro girls. But Lanzetta had a white skin and that made him a great guy in his own mind in Harlem. Neither was there any use in trying to prove to the little stickball punks that he was a square-cop. To them, no cop could ever be square and every white not in a uniform was a plainclothes bull hunting for a conviction. To hell with Harlem, he thought despondently. It would always be a mess. All the stories he had heard in the precinct stations, in the stores, on his beat now hung heavy in his mind. The white hate was everywhere, curled everywhere like a huge snake, a whiteness pierced with a thousand eyes and ugly with a thousand mouths. The eyes looked and the eyes were blind and the tongues lashed out the jargon of Jim Crow. Against this white hate, the black hate was always poised, always ready to strike back when it could.
“We’re getting close,” the driver said. The ambulance hurled across the next avenue, Seventh, into the next side-street. Sam glanced at the driver. He saw a middle-aged Scotchman with a chin like a baseball bristling with a day’s growth of coppery whiskers. In three days of working together, the driver had mainly kept his ideas to himself; he had never backed Lanzetta and neither had he backed Sam. Sam felt the flow of the ambulance’s speed compress, tighten like water suddenly freezing. The brakes jammed on and he jumped down to the sidewalk. The attendant joined him.
They were standing in front of a brownstone house. One of the stairs in the stoop was lettered one seven nine in faded white paint. Two cast-iron rails were set in cast-iron towers painted pink; the pink towers had broken down with age and the landlord had repaired and filled in the missing sections with concrete. “What’s the name again?” the attendant asked Sam.
“Randolph. A woman by that name called. Said she’d be on the stoop. There she comes now.”
A small woman opened the vestibule door on top of the stoop and walked out. Sam stared at her long-fingered yellowish hands now tightly clutched together. Those hands had told him who she was. He had his own name for hands like those. He called them trouble hands. “Mrs. Randolph,” he called softly to her.
“I’m Mrs. Randolph, Mister Captin.” She was hatless, her grey hair pinned in a bun. Her face was crinkled and worn like old brown tissue paper. She was breathing excitedly, peering at the ambulance on the curb and the three white men who had come with the ambulance. The yellowish knuckles of her hands paled to a light amber and Sam felt sorry for her.
“Mrs. Randolph,” he said. Her eyes moved to him but they didn’t focus on his face. They were full of fear and he had a tingling image of himself as she saw him. He was not a man so much but something more powerful than a man, something like a bolt of blue terrific light. “Don’t be scared, please.” Her eyes met his own fleetingly. She was old and she was in trouble and she didn’t trust him. “Tell me. What’s the matter?”
“Hurry up,” the attendant said. “We ain’t got all day.”
Sam waved his hand at the attendant. “We’re here to help you.”
“I want a doctor, Mister Captin,” she said. “My boy, he come down any minute.”
The attendant jerked his thumb at Sam. “He’s the doc.”
“Doctors don’t ride ambulance,” Sam explained to her. “Not since the war — ”
“Not before the war neither,” the attendant said. “All them muggers callin’ the hospital to rob the doc — ”
“We’re here to help you,” Sam broke in on the attendant.
She examined him for a long minute. “My boy — My boy’s done gone crazy.” Her hands fluttered apart. “Please take my boy to the hospital, suh. He need a doctor bad.”
“What makes you think your boy’s crazy?” Sam asked. “What’s he been doing to make you think he’s crazy?” He was reciting the routine questions. Her lips nipped down at the corners. He watched her look behind her through the glass of the vestibule door and then out again at the ambulance. The whites of her eyes had widened as if she were only now grasping the meaning of what she herself had asked for. She had called the hospital and the white men and the cop had come. “What’s he been doing to make you think he’s crazy?” Sam prodded her.
“He fighten where he works. Fighten all the time.”
“Is he home now?”
“He home. His boss send him home.”
“What did he do? Why?”
“His boss come see me. He go throwen matches. He light them up and throw them on peoples — ”
Behind her the vestibule door opened. She whirled. “Fred,” she gasped. “What for you got your laundry, Fred?”
They all stared at the man coming out of the door. He cat-footed around his mother, never looking at her. His brown eyelids lifted and his eyes sparked at Sam as if on fire. Then the eyelids drooped and he hurried down the stoop, a big man in his thirties in a light greenish suit newly pressed. His shirt was green and he wore no necktie. His neck was thick and strong. It was only now as he reached the sidewalk that Sam noticed the bundle of soiled laundry that he was carrying in one hand. It was a big hand, the stony hand of a laborer.
“Fred,” his mother called. “Fred, what for you bringen your laundry to the Chinaman? Boy, I do your washen. Boy.”
He didn’t bother answering her, walking towards Seventh Avenue. Her lips bunched together. She moaned. “Stop him, please Mister Captin. My poor lil boy.” Sam’s heart rose in his chest; he was sure now that the man with the soiled laundry was a psychopath; handling a pyschopath was like grappling with an uncertain wind.
Already the ambulance and its men in uniform had magnetized a score of kids, men, women. Already, Sam felt ringed in by their eyes. Always it was the same and always never the same. Always the people grew out of the cracks in the sidewalks. Always they looked their judgment. He tried to forget about them — these black juries of adults, of kids in worn-out sneakers, all noting each move he made and would make — and chased after the old woman’s son. Behind him, the attendant retreated towards the ambulance. The crowd, as if someone had yelled: “Go!” tailed after Sam.
Sam caught up with Randolph. “Stop, please,” he said. “I want to talk to you a minute.”
“Okay,” Randolph said. His head sank low on his chest, and lower so that the brim of his light grey felt concealed his eyes. “Lemme be,” he mumbled from under the brim and abruptly continued on his way towards Seventh Avenue.
From the crowd, voices spilled: “Let’m be — ”
“He ain’t doing nothing.”
Sam whipped around. “Please,” he cried and then hurried after Randolph. He tapped the green-clothed elbow. “Please come back to the house. I don’t want the crowd to hear us.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see more men and women crossing from the opposite sidewalk; the windows in the brownstones had changed into faces. “Come on back to the house,” he coaxed Randolph.
“Okay.”
They walked back towards one seven nine side by side, Sam on the outside near the curb. The crowd rolled back before them; a small boy on skates darted by and Sam heard the boy yelp, “Catch me, cop.” He forced himself to concentrate on Randolph. He felt chained to Randolph with the crowd like a big iron ball chaining them together. “We’ll go into the house,” he said to Randolph’s profile in a calm soothing voice, “and talk it over.” His ears were buzzing with the crowd. Snatches of their talk came to him:
“What’s the cop want anyhow — ”
“Man given his laundry out and they — ”
“They never let us be — ”
“White God damn cops — ”
Sam swallowed hard. Intensely, he felt his whiteness. They had made him feel it and across his consciousness a picture floated: His own hand holding his baton, the knuckles and fingers very white. He wasn’t carrying his baton. Both of his hands were empty. His tongue thickened in his mouth and whiteness wrapped him in a cloud. His head throbbed and he took a deep breath as cops do on winter nights when they first leave the station house for the icy streets. Somehow, they had returned to the ambulance and to the house. “We’ll go up and talk,” Sam said.
Randolph dropped the bundle of laundry and swung with his right fist. It smashed against Sam’s jaw. He staggered, his knees bending on their hinges, his brain signaling one emergency message to every stunned nerve: He hit me, the damn loon! He heard the crowd shouting. The crowd had become noise, circular and sweeping noise, bursting on him, directed at him, cyclonic, ear-shattering. Sam shook his head like a wet dog. He sprang back on his caving legs and wrenched his baton out, putting it between himself and Randolph, between himself and that louder-than-a-thousand-subways noise. Frantically, he sought to pull himself together and he saw Randolph charging in on him. He looped the baton down on the grey felt and a second black fist thudded against his forehead. The fist didn’t seem to hurt. He was surprised and then he wasn’t surprised. Randolph’s hat dropped in front of him, the crown crumpled like a flattened tin can. The late afternoon light was shining on Randolph’s sweating cheeks, on his black silky hair. All in light, Randolph was fumbling with his coat pocket. Sam’s heart raced faster. Randolph took a bone-handled clasp knife out of his pocket, opened it. Light burned on the steel blade in Randolph’s right fist. “Who’s crazy now?” Randolph howled, rushing forward.
Screening himself behind his oak baton, Sam listened to himself saying, “Drop that knife.” It wasn’t his own voice he was hearing. It was the voice of the P.D. Regulations mechanically sounding off.
Randolph lunged at him and they danced together on the sidewalk in jerky boxer’s steps, the knife and the baton, the black man and the white cop. Randolph’s springing hand gripped at Sam’s throat and he broke free and saw Randolph’s face close to his own and sensed a glistening path of lightning arc in front of his dazzled eyes. It was the knife and it had sliced through his dress collar but he didn’t know it. He was standing in a sweeping tide of noise. He retreated. Shoot him, his brain commanded. But he didn’t reach for the .38 on his hip. His nerves had been transformed into a mesh of hypersensitive wires upon which the electric impulses generated by the knife and by the crowd sped and conflicted: Shoot him! No! Maybe he could still save Randolph.