Strivers Row (70 page)

A lone bus intervened in their revels just then, somehow not having been warned off. It tried to nudge its way through the crowd, stopping momentarily in the middle of the 125th Street intersection as if it were stalled, or the driver couldn't make up his mind whether to try to continue. A barrage of bricks instantly smashed in its windows, and for a moment Jonah could see the faces of the passengers inside. Almost all of them colored, fearful, and stunned—one woman's face already covered in blood, her mouth gaping open.

The bus accelerated again, plowing determinedly uptown now. The mob scrambled out of its way, but there was a new, more voracious edge to their shouts and screams. Men began to knock over the wooden pushcarts that were parked all along the street, the stands of the hot-dog and fruit and ices vendors, who had already fled. They set them on fire where they lay—more small fires flickering up inside the emptied stores now as well.

Jonah watched, and cursed to himself, hurrying the rest of the way down to the Twenty-eighth. The precinct house was surrounded with patrol cars, civil-defense and army trucks, and fire engines. Lines of MPs and cops ringed the block, their batons and nightsticks in hand. They stared at him stonily when he approached, but a police sergeant spotted his collar and escorted him on into the station. Taking him down into a large, airless basement room where hundreds of people were streaming in and out, most of them cops and MPs—but also dozens of colored men and even women.

Jonah realized that he recognized most of them—could even call them by name. They were his fellow ministers and pastors, church deacons and deaconesses, ushers and air wardens and auxiliary police, volunteers and activists of every stripe.
All the respectable Negroes, come to save the reputation of the race,
he couldn't help thinking—all except the ones who had been caught out of town at some summer resort. They were solemnly accepting armbands and whistles, nightsticks and steel civil-defense helmets—all these kindly, sociable, thinking, meddling, responsible people, transformed by the oversize, faintly ludicrous steel helmets. Blinking at each other as if confused themselves over who they were anymore.

Jonah was nudged along to where the mayor himself stood. The wide little man immersed in sweat, but uncharacteristically composed and civil in the sweltering, chaotic room. Working a bank of phones and police radios with his police commissioner, sending a bevy of cops and assistants scurrying to carry out orders. He wrung Jonah's hand at once when he was presented, pulling him along with him, back out of the room and up the stairs.

“We got a report they're tryna take out the New York Central station, at 125th an' Park. Will you come with me?” he asked him very earnestly.

“Certainly—” Jonah started to say, having no idea what he could possibly do to keep a mob from taking over an elevated train station. But before he could say anything else he was pushed into the backseat of an open car, next to Walter White of the NAACP—La Guardia insisting on riding on the side closest to the sidewalk himself.

“No offense, gentlemen, but they know my face better 'n yours!”

They sped off toward the elevated train tracks—Jonah realizing belatedly it was just the three of them alone, without any accompanying police or MPs. Stopping almost immediately on La Guardia's orders—the mayor rearing up to his full five feet, cupping his hands and yelling at a group of teenage boys pawing through the innards of a butcher's shop.

“Put—that—stuff—down!”

The youths looked up, saw the mayor standing there just above the door of the car—and turned and ran. The car sped on to the rail station, only to find the whole area peaceful, the train and track unmolested, La Guardia swearing under his breath.

“We need better information!” he barked. “Let's get back!”

They wheeled around and headed back toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct house again, the trip long and dizzying, like some funhouse ride. La Guardia ordered his driver to stop half a dozen times more on the way, so that he could yell at looters. But now most of them only stared at him, and at White and Jonah, when they tried to appeal to them to stop. A milk bottle was even hurled in their direction—barely missing the mayor's head, smashing on the street behind them. Others freely cursing and taunting them, once they saw they had no police with them.

“Go back downtown!”

“We don't need
you!
We don't need yo' goddamned white man's war!”

Their faces twisted in bottomless, vindictive anger, beyond anything Jonah could ever remember seeing. Even La Guardia finally ceased ordering the car to stop, all three of them only staring glumly out at the rioters as they passed. The looters indifferent in turn to their presence. Jonah saw an old man, gorging himself directly from a fountain-parlor vat of vanilla ice cream. A group of teenage boys grinned and postured, cavorting about with silk top hats and blond wigs on their heads, necklaces and dress coats hung over their shoulders. A lean, toothless old woman hauled along a teenage boy by the arm—his eyes still half hooded with sleep, her other hand clutching a pair of pillowcases. She found an opening in the broken window of a grocery store and climbed in with surprising agility, pulling the boy in along with her. They filled the pillow-cases with cans, and boxes of cereal, and stepped out again, all in the time it took their car to pass. The boy still looking half asleep, the old woman's toothless mouth smiling sublimely.

Jonah turned away, ashamed to bear witness to such sights in front of a white man—and as he did he noticed that Walter White had had to look away, too. La Guardia tapping White's knee as if trying to console him, his face somber and not unkind.

“It's just some bad apples,” the mayor kept repeating stubbornly. “Just some bad apples, we got 'em in every neighborhood!”

They pulled back to the station house, lit up now like an aircraft carrier, with portable klieg lights and headlights, and the constant, whirring sirens from a dozen vehicles. In the brilliant, flickering yellow-red-and-blue illumination, Jonah could see two long lines of colored people, moving past each other. One was that of the volunteers he had seen before, with their nightsticks and helmets, moving out to the streets. Passing them was an almost equally long line of looters, under arrest—most of them still carrying the merchandise they had been picked up with. Jonah noticed the teenage girls he had seen before at Blumstein's, their bouffant dresses still clutched to their chests, their faces somber and teary-eyed now.

As soon as he was out of the car, Captain Harding, the commander of the Twenty-eighth Precinct rushed up to him, a large bruise and a bandage plastered just over his left eye.

“That wounded soldier is askin' for you. You wanna go see him? He's at Harlem Hospital.”

“He's asking for
me
?” Jonah asked, bewildered.

“He says he don't know nobody else in Harlem! I can send you up there with the sound truck.”

“All right,” Jonah assented, more perplexed than ever.

Minutes later, he was slowly making his way back up Seventh Avenue in a sound truck from WNYC, the city-owned radio station. Roy Wilkins from the NAACP, and the Reverend John Johnston from St. Martin's, and Bishop Jones from Methodist Episcopal beside him in the close, suffocating interior. Taking turns blaring messages to the crowds along the street. Each of them turning back to the rest and looking slightly embarrassed, slightly guilty after they did—confronted with the full extent of both their impotence and their responsibility.

“The rumor that a Negro soldier was killed at the Braddock Hotel tonight is
false
! He is only slightly wounded and is in
no
danger. Go back to your homes!
Don't
form mobs or break the law!
Don't
destroy in one night the reputation as good citizens you have taken a lifetime to build!”

—Jonah cringing at the unintentional suggestions
—Negro soldier killed. . . Don't mob, don't destroy, don't take a lifetime! And what reputation, what law?

Their appeals were greeted with more raucous shouts and obscenities. A steady hail of bricks and bottles began to strike the truck, falling from such a height their impressions dented the roof, making them all duck. Out the back window, Jonah could see more bottles and cans and bricks falling steadily on the patrol cars accompanying them. Even as he watched, a man rushed out to one of Commissioner Valentine's patrolling motorcyclists, breaking a bottle over his wrist. A small gush of blood spurted up, the man running off—the motorized cop wobbling and crashing his cycle up against the curb.

The emergency ward at Harlem Hospital was awash in blood. Thick red rivulets ran freely down the floor, the orderlies swabbing at it continually, until their heavy mops were saturated with it and Jonah was sure that dozens had perished. He was relieved to see no bodies, but the whole room was filled with bleeding people, cops and MPs and passersby cut by bottles, and sometimes knives. More looters under arrest—these, too, still made to carry their loot— slashed by nightsticks, or shards of broken window glass. Everyone holding on to bleeding arms, legs, faces, the blood oozing through their fingers. The surgical gowns and even the masks of the doctors and nurses all tinted pink from it.

Jonah was taken upstairs to a secluded ward. It was guarded by an outer perimeter of cops, and at the door by two big MPs, one white and one colored, both holding their nightsticks out. And inside, on the edge of his bed—sat Robert Bandy. His dark brown, almond-shaped face looking younger and more bewildered than ever. His left arm in a sling, the right one still manacled to the iron bed frame.

“Oh, Robert,” Jonah said, exhaling softly. “Tell me it's not you.”

“I'm sorry, Rev'rend,” the private said, ducking his head involuntarily, as if taking his words as a blow. “I'm so sorry, Rev'rend, I didn't mean to get you into this. I just don' know nobody else, an' I'm worried about Mama.”

“I'm already in this, Robert,” Jonah assured him, pulling a chair up next to him. “You didn't do anything to me. How are you feeling?”

“I'm all right,” Bandy said softly, trying to smile—the effort flickering out just as it passed his lips. “A little nervous, I guess. I don't feel so bad, though. Guess I ain't, if I can sit up here an' shake your hand.”

“How'd you get into all this?”

“Ah, there was this woman in the hotel,” he tried to explain, his eyes looking more and more hurt and desperate as he did.

“A woman?”

“Yeah, just some woman. She didn't have nothin' to do with me, neither, that's the darnedest thing. You warned us 'bout that hotel, Rev'rend. It's just it was so cheap for Mama—”

“What happened, Robert? With the woman?”

“She got in some argument with this cop. Next thing I knowed he was tryna arrest her—beatin' on her with his stick. She yelled out. She said, ‘Somebody save me from this white man!' so I went over with my Mama to see what the trouble was. He try to hit me then, too, so I took the stick away from him an' give him a swat with it. I didn't mean to, Rev'rend—I just got carried away, I guess, when he try to hit me. When I saw him fall down, guess I panicked, tried to run out. That's when he shot me in the shoulder.”

Bandy tried to flex his arm in the sling, grimacing slightly as he did.

“It don't hurt so bad, though. I could go back to my unit tomorrow, forget all this mess—”

“That's all right. What we need to do is to get you a lawyer.”

“Don' worry about me,” he said, glancing nervously toward the window, through which they could clearly hear the sounds of the riot. “I just want 'em to stop this carryin' on over me. I wouldn't agree to it—won't do me no good. I want you to see about Mama, an' let Susan know about it.”

“Where is your Mama now, Robert?”

“They arrested her with me, took her down to the precinct. She helped take that cop's stick away. I don't want nothin' to happen to her.”

“All right, son. I'll do what I can.”

He stood to go, and Private Bandy looked up at him—his desolate eyes belying his lack of concern about himself.

“Whatta you think they gonna do to me, Rev'rend? I'm in some trouble now, ain't I?”

Jonah had a quick talk with the police and the MPs out in the hospital corridor, trying to do what he could. But all he could find out was that Bandy was under military detention, awaiting court-martial charges, and that his mother had been taken downtown to the Women's House of Detention. Concluding there was nothing more he could do before morning, he decided to head back to his church, and went out on the street again.

Outside, the wail of fire engine sirens was almost continuous now. Jonah could see more yellow threads of flame flicking up all along Seventh Avenue, and in the middle of the street a car was tipped over on its back, black smoke billowing up from it. The 135th Street trolley came clanging its way across the intersection, making a mad dash for who knew where—and as it did, a group of youths in gang jackets lunged at it, breaking the windows and trying to strike at any white faces inside.

“Get the hell out! White man kill black soldier! Get the hell out!”

“We won't fight your cracker war!”

Jonah moved past more wild scenes of people dancing and laughing, and just staggering about in the street. The whole City seemingly engulfed in darkness now, with the streetlights smashed and most of the lights in people's windows out, lest they attract some unwanted attention. The street brought to sudden, shimmering life only when a patrol car or a fire engine swept by, and all the broken glass was suddenly illuminated, like a wave receding along the sand at night. The darkness folding quickly over it again, bringing only the sound of feet crunching over the broken shards, the pop of more gunshots somewhere in the distance.