Emancipation Day (15 page)

“They’re going to kill him!” Jack shouted, and felt Peter’s hand clamp over his mouth.

There was a tremendous outcry as a large crowd of coloureds, brandishing baseball bats and hammers, a few with hunting rifles and handguns, rushed the upturned car, releasing the man from the vehicle and pushing the white rioters back into the alleys and side streets. Some of the whites fought back, but most ran off, looking for battles with better odds. When the street was clear, Jack and Peter ran down Woodward, away from the fighting. Peter was the first to spot Della’s car in the next block, also flipped onto its side. There was no sign of Della.

“We should split up,” Peter said. “I’ll stay on Woodward, you
go over to East Adams. Try the Horse Shoe first.”

“Why?”

“Just a hunch. I’ll go along Hastings.”

Jack turned to go but Peter grabbed his arm. “If you find her, don’t come looking for me,” he said. “Get her to the truck and take her home.”

Jack nodded and watched Peter run off up Woodward.

Before Jack could move, a coloured man came up to him and grabbed him by the shirt, a big man with a thick B of flesh at the back of his neck. His eyes were wide open and unfocused, as though he were staring at smoke, and he smelled of booze. Jack tried to push him away, but the man held on like he was drowning and started yelling into Jack’s face.

“Get your truck down there, man!” He pointed down a darkened alley. Then he laughed. “We got us a liquor store to unload.”

“What?” Jack shouted back at him.

“The truck, friend. Drive it down that alley behind the liquor store.”

“No, I’ve got to find someone.”

“Hey, boy, whassa matter wif you?” He shook Jack, but gently. “You can’t hear what I’m sayin’ or somethin’?”

Jack cursed and broke away from the man. He continued running down Woodward towards East Adams. He heard the man yelling after him: “Hey! Hey, boy! Come back here! Where’s your head at?”

Jack turned down a side street, ran a hundred feet from
Woodward and stopped to catch his breath. He was in front of a shop with the word “Spirits” scrawled above its window in white paint. Most of the window was in shards on the sidewalk, and the door hung open, half off its hinges. A mob of maybe thirty white people brandishing sticks and baseball bats stood watching the shop and shouting. He tried to cross the street to avoid them but skidded on the broken glass and went down. The crowd surrounded him, and he curled into a ball, thinking they were going to beat him senseless, but instead they helped him up. A woman looked at his hands and a blond man brushed shards of glass from the front of his clothing.

“You okay?”

“Goddamn niggers’re emptying the place out,” another white man said. “Run and find us a cop!”

“I can’t.” Jack tried to pull away.

“We’ll stay and keep them inside. You go now.”

Jack started backing away, then someone in the crowd yelled, “Hey! They’re gettin’ out the back!” and the surge dragged Jack around the side of the building into the alley. In the dim light, he saw two men run from the back door of the liquor store, chased by the posse of whites down the alley to the next street. When the fugitives saw Jack’s truck they veered towards it, and Jack realized with a jolt that the two men were Benny and his father. What the hell were they doing here? People crashed into him from behind, and he started running towards the truck. His brother and father reached the truck just before the mob got to them. Benny tried to open the doors but they were locked. Jack
felt the weight of the keys in his pants pocket. He watched as the mob grabbed Benny and his father and shoved them against the side of the truck.

“Goddamn niggers!”

“Get ’em, boys!”

Jack’s mind flew between the mob and his father, but his body was frozen on the spot. He shouted, “No!” but the sound was lost in the uproar. Three men started beating Benny and his father with their fists. The rest of the mob closed in around them, shouting encouragement and obscenities, poking bats and rake handles blindly through the press of bodies. One woman was so excited she began beating on the back of a white man in front of her. Jack lost sight of his brother and father. Then, as though an electric shock had been applied to his limbs, he rushed into the mob, trying to pull people out of his way. Others clawed him from behind. From where he was now he could see Benny again, his arms up around his head, his eyes wide with terror, but the mob was too tightly packed for Jack to reach him.

He saw Benny go down, big as he was, and then the old man, still on his feet, arms flailing, fending off blows. Jack tried to get closer, but could make no headway. He saw his father search through the sea of white faces, saw his eyes find his own, light up momentarily and then turn away. Jack watched as his father went slack, dropping his arms and letting himself be pummelled by the crowd.

He searched for an opening. When he couldn’t find one, he grabbed the shirt of the man in front of him and yelled, “Stop them!”

“Don’t you worry, son,” the man said gleefully. “We’re stoppin’ ’em all right. They’ll be lucky we don’t string ’em up on that telephone pole!”

Just then two policemen came charging down the street on horseback, the sound of their police whistles rising above the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the pavement. The crowd turned and wavered, then broke. Jack caught sight of his father on his hands and knees, Benny lying flat on his face under the truck. A river of fire was flowing along the curb from Woodward, heading directly for the truck and Benny. He saw the old man’s body fall in front of it, engulfed by water and flames. Then his view was blocked by one of the horses, the policemen’s truncheons rose and fell in the moonlight, and he heard the crowd’s blood cries turn to shouts of pain and panic. Gunfire, like a drum roll of firecrackers, reached him from a distance, and then the keening of a siren. He turned from the horror and ran.

He didn’t stop until he reached East Adams, where he collapsed in the alcove at the door of the Horse Shoe Club, curled in the corner like a frightened animal, his eyes squeezed shut. Had he done what he could? Hadn’t there been something in the old man’s look that said, Get the hell out of here, son? Sure there was. What else could he have done, alone against so many?

After a while he straightened and entered the Horse Shoe, half expecting to hear a blast of trumpet music, a lick of jazz, as though what had happened behind him belonged to someone
else’s history, a realm of chaos he could simply step out of. Della. He would find her and bring her home. If she wasn’t here, in the familiar headiness of beer and cigarettes and people drinking and talking as if news of the riot hadn’t reached them, then she’d be in the next bar or the one after that. He would search them all until he found her.

Drinkers glanced up at him with incurious faces before going back to their sullen conversations. On the nickelodeon, Billie Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit.” He staggered and gripped the bar, leaving a smear of blood on the polished wood. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

When he saw Della sitting at a table in the back, he almost wept with relief.

“Della,” he said. She looked up and he hurried to her. She was with a group of men and a young woman, all of them coloured. The woman had been injured in the riot. Her eyes were closed and she was sobbing. Della was dabbing with a towel at a cut on the girl’s forehead. Her own dress was torn and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. A large glass of gin sat on the table in front of her; he could smell it. It had a reddish tinge because Della was dipping the towel in it. Jack recognized one of the men as the trumpet player whose hand Della had held that night. When he saw Jack, the man started to get up, and Jack clenched his fists and braced himself, but Della put her hand on the man’s arm and said, “He’s one of us,” and the man sat down, eyeing Jack uncertainly.

“There’s a war going on out there,” Jack said, sitting down beside Della.

“Haven’t you heard?” she said. “There’s a war going on everywhere.”

He started to tell her what he had seen, what he had been through, but he had no words. There was too much he had to leave out, and nothing he could invent. The look on the face of the coloured man in the burning car. The drunk who had called him boy. The telephone pole rising like a cross in the darkness above the alley. His father and Benny as the flames floated towards them. When he told her about falling in front of the liquor store, she took his hands and swabbed them with gin.

“Where’s Peter?” she asked quietly.

Jack looked down at his bleeding hands in hers. “I don’t know.”

She handed the towel to the trumpet player, stood up and walked behind the bar, where there was a phone. She dialled a number and Jack heard her voice, low and soothing, like the sound of a cat purring. They all listened. It seemed incredible to Jack that anything out there was still working.

Jack looked at the others around him. The trumpet player was now holding the towel against the girl’s forehead. One of the other men said that no white woman had been thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge. “That’s a lie started by whites.” He said a black woman had been raped and killed on the island the day before by a group of U.S. Navy men. “Crackers from the South—Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They go round lookin’ for heads to crack.”

“Peter’s home,” Della said, returning to the table. “He was
frantic, poor thing. I told him you were here and that you’ll bring me back safe and sound. You will, won’t you, Jack?”

“Yes,” he said, almost starting to cry. He had failed his father and his brother, but he would not fail her. “Of course I will.”

She turned to the trumpet player. “I’m going now,” she said. “Will you look after Dee-Dee?”

The man nodded. Della walked towards the front of the club. Jack took a last look at the trumpet player, then followed Della out.

Woodward Avenue was in ruins, smouldering and deserted. Jack hurried Della along, but she insisted on stopping to help another woman who was lying on the ground outside a burned-out clothing store. The woman’s coat was still smoking, and she clasped a rolled-up ball of cloth in her arms. Her hands were charred black.

“We’ve got to get a move on,” Jack said, looking around nervously.

“She’s dead.”

Della stood and backed away from the body. She slipped her arm through his and together they hurried on, stepping over lead pipes, shovels and other makeshift weapons abandoned on the sidewalk. The truck was where he’d left it. His father and Benny were nowhere to be seen. Jack bent to examine dark spots on the pavement where they had lain, spots that may have been anything, brake fluid or spilled liquor.

“What is it, Jack?”

“Nothing,” he said. Straightening, he took the keys from his pocket, unlocked her side and helped her in, then turned to see a riderless police horse cantering past the smoking hulks of cars, stirrups flapping, eyes widened with terror. When he climbed in the cab, he let Della wrap his right hand in a handkerchief, but when she reached for the left he pulled it away.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

For once, the truck started on the first try. He put it in gear and decided against the tunnel. “If we can get over a few blocks west, we can take the Ambassador Bridge. It’ll be safer the farther we get from downtown.”

Della didn’t answer. She was leaning back on the seat, her knees pulled up, staring ahead through the windshield. He shifted gears carefully. “That poor woman,” she said. “All she wanted was a nice dress.”

He drove up Woodward, weaving around wrecked cars and broken glass and patches of burning oil. Firemen directed him past a parked ambulance, its panel doors open and its roof light flashing, but he saw few people, and no one told him to stop so he kept going. At Vernor he turned left, taking a longer route to the bridge but one that would keep them above where the worst of the rioting had been. But even here there were smashed windows and downed power lines, shadows moving between houses. At West Grand the streets were almost normal, and he began working his way towards the river and the bridge. He looked at his watch. One o’clock in the morning.

Just as they turned onto Fort Street, still a few blocks from
the bridge, the truck’s engine coughed twice and then stopped. “Shit,” he said softly. He should have bought gas when the old man told him to. “Shit, shit, shit.” They coasted for another half a block until they came to a gas station. Closed, of course, but he managed to pull the truck into the lot before it came to a final stop. Della brought her knees down and looked around.

“Well, this is a fine how-do-ye-do,” she said.

After the ruckus downtown, the night was disconcertingly quiet. He lowered his window and heard crickets and the hum of traffic on the bridge.

“Out of gas,” he said.

“Out of booze,” she replied.

He looked at her and smiled. “This truck is never out of booze.” He fished behind the seat for the bottle he’d heard rolling around earlier. Rye, mostly full. He opened it, handed it to her, and she took a sip.

“Is your hand still bleeding?”

“Probably.” The steering wheel had felt sticky but he hadn’t thought about what was causing it.

She exhaled and reached for his left hand. This time he let her. “You need to clean it and I need to pee,” she said. She looked about the truck. They were half a mile from the bridge, miles from home, too far to walk. “What’s that?”

“What?”

“Down the road a bit.”

The Ambassador Motel, the sign unlit but legible in the moonlight. He thought they would spend the night in the truck,
but she opened her door and got out. Her light-coloured hair and white skin glowed angelically in the dark. He watched as she walked down the road. He thought about joining the Navy. He imagined his uniformed arm around Della’s waist, their picture on the table beside the radio, wouldn’t that be something? After a time he saw movement down at the motel, and in a few minutes she was standing next to his window, holding up a key attached to a miniature replica of the Ambassador Bridge.

“Cranky old bugger,” she said, “but I explained the circumstances and he gave us a room. I called Peter again and told him to go to bed.”