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Amy already had a job lined up for the summer. At the post-funeral lunch in his grandparents’ apartment, she had spent several hours talking to Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry. Henry the historian and Amy the history student had hit it off particularly well, and when Ferguson’s uncle told her about the project he was planning to begin in June (a study of the American labor movement), Amy had jumped in with so many interesting questions (according to Henry) that she suddenly found herself being offered a summer job as a research assistant. The job was in Berkeley, of course, and now that Amy would be going there at the end of the spring semester, it naturally followed that Ferguson would go with her. All through the winter and early spring, they talked about it as their next big foreign adventure—another France, but this time traveling abroad in their own country. Train, plane, or bus, chancing it in the old Impala, hitchhiking, or one of those drive-away jobs to transport someone’s car to another city: those were the options before them, and the trick was to figure out which one would cost the least. Still, it was essential that he find a job in Berkeley before he went out there, the whole project was contingent on his having work, and he couldn’t afford to waste time looking for something after he arrived. Aunt Mildred promised to help, she assured him that jobs were plentiful and there would be no problem, but when he wrote to her at the end of March and again in the middle of April, her replies were so obscure, so devoid of details that he was almost certain she had forgotten to look for him, or hadn’t yet started to look, or had no intention of looking until he was on his way to California. Then an opportunity presented itself to him in New York, a good opportunity, and in spite of the disappointment it caused him, he felt he couldn’t turn it down without risking a summer with no job at all. Strangely enough, it was a job almost identical to Amy’s, which somehow made the situation even worse, as if he had been turned into the butt of someone’s warped idea of how to tell a bad joke. Ferguson’s CC professor for the spring term had been commissioned to write a history of Columbia from its founding to the celebration of its two hundredth anniversary (1754 to 1954), and he was looking for a research assistant to help him get the book off the ground. Ferguson didn’t have to apply for the post. Andrew Fleming offered it to him because he was impressed by the twenty-year-old’s work in class and by his ability to write—not just his academic papers but his news articles and poetry translations as well. Ferguson was flattered by those generous remarks, but it was the salary that clinched it, two hundred dollars a week (funded by a grant from the university), which meant he would accumulate over two thousand dollars by the time the fall semester began, and just like that he wasn’t going to California anymore. Little matter that the tubby fifty-two-year-old Fleming was a life-long bachelor who took a serious interest in young men. Ferguson never doubted that the professor had a crush on him—but it was nothing he couldn’t handle, and nothing to prevent him from accepting the job.
He wrote to Aunt Mildred one last time in early May, hoping that something had finally turned up in Berkeley that would allow him to back out of his handshake agreement with Fleming before he started the job, but two weeks went by without an answer, and when he finally splurged on the cost of a long-distance call to California, his aunt claimed she hadn’t received the letter. Ferguson suspected she was lying, but he couldn’t voice his suspicions without proof, and what difference did it make anyway? Mildred hadn’t set out to sabotage his plan, she was lazy, that was all, she had let the matter slide, and now it was too late to do anything about it, and his once doting aunt of the one and only Archie had let him down.
Amy was miserable. Ferguson was in despair. The thought of being separated from each other for two and a half months was too horrible even to talk about, and yet neither one of them could see a way around the problem. Amy said she admired him for acting like a grown-up (even if he sensed that she was a little angry at him as well), and while Ferguson was tempted to ask her to cancel the trip and stay behind in New York, he knew it would have been presumptuous and wrong of him to do that, so he never asked. The Six-Day War broke out on June fifth, and one day after it ended Amy took off for Berkeley on her own. Her parents had given her the money for a plane ticket, and Ferguson rode out to the airport with them on the morning she left. An awkward, unhappy farewell. No tears or grand gestures, but a long, solemn hug followed by a promise to write to each other as often as possible. Back in his room on West 111th Street, Ferguson sat down on the bed and looked at the wall in front of him. He heard an infant crying in the next apartment, he heard a man shouting Fuck at someone down on the sidewalk five stories below, and all at once he realized that he had made the worst mistake of his life. Job or no job—he should have gone with her and played out whatever hand he was dealt. That was how you were supposed to live, that was the leaping sort of life he wanted for himself, a life that danced, but he had chosen duty over adventure, responsibility to his parents over his love for Amy, and he hated himself for his cautiousness, for his stick-in-the-mud plodder’s heart. Money. Always money. Always not enough money. For the first time in his life, he began to wonder how it would feel to have been born stinking rich.
Another summer in hot New York with the crazy people and the radios, listening to the snoring and farting of the subtenant in Amy’s room next door as he lay in his bed at night, sweating, sweating through his shirts and socks every day by noon and walking down the streets with his fists clenched, a knifepoint mugging every other hour in the neighborhood now, four women raped in the elevators of their buildings, be prepared, keep your eyes open, and try not to breathe when you walked past a garbage can. Long days in the million-book Parthenon replica called Butler Library, taking notes on prerevolutionary Columbia, then known as King’s College, and the living conditions of mid-eighteenth-century New York (pigs running through the streets, horse shit everywhere), the first college in the state, the fifth college anywhere in the country, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Livingston, first chief justice of the Supreme Court, first secretary of the Treasury, author of the final draft of the U.S. Constitution, member of the five-man committee that composed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers as young men, as boys, as toddlers running through the streets with the pigs and horses, and then home after five or six hours in musty Butler to type up his notes for Fleming, whom he met with twice a week in the air-conditioned West End, always there and never in Fleming’s office or apartment, for even if the kind, decorous, deeply intelligent historian never laid a hand on Ferguson, his eyes were on him continually, searching for a sign of encouragement or some glance of reciprocal longing, and that was enough to contend with, Ferguson felt, since he liked Fleming and couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
Meanwhile, Amy was in hippie-land three thousand miles to the west, Amy was in the Garden of Eden, Amy was roaming down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley during the Summer of Love, and Ferguson read and reread her letters as often as he could in order to go on hearing her voice, carrying them to the library with him every morning to use as anti-boredom pills whenever his work threatened to put him into a coma, and the letters he wrote back to her were light and fast and as funny as he could make them, with no talk about the war or the rancid smells in the streets or the women raped in elevators or the gloom that had settled in his heart. You seem to be having the time of your life, he wrote in one of the forty-two letters he sent to her that summer. Back here in New York, I’m having the life of my times.
* * *
JULY 1967. IN Ferguson’s opinion, the saddest part of the sad Newark riots was that nothing could have stopped them from happening. Unlike most large events that occurred in the world, which also might not have occurred if people had been thinking more clearly (Vietnam, for example), Newark was unavoidable. Not to the extent of twenty-six people killed, perhaps, or seven hundred people injured, or fifteen hundred people arrested, or nine hundred businesses destroyed, or ten million dollars in property damage, but Newark was
a place where everything had been going wrong for years, and the six days of violence that began on July twelfth were the logical outcome of a situation that could be addressed only through violence of one sort or another. That the war broke out when a black cab driver named John Smith was arrested for illegally passing a police patrol car and then bludgeoned by two white cops was not a cause so much as an effect. If it hadn’t been Smith, it would have been Jones. And if it hadn’t been Jones, it would have been Brown or White or Gray. In the event, it happened to be Smith, and when he was dragged into the Fourth Precinct station house by arresting officers John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, a rumor quickly spread among the residents of the large public housing project across the street that Smith had been murdered. Not true, as it turned out, but the deeper truth was that Newark’s population was more than fifty percent black now, and most of those two hundred and twenty thousand people were poor. Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing in the country, the second-highest crime rate, the second-highest infant mortality rate, and an unemployment rate double the national average. The municipal government was all white, the police department was ninety percent white, and nearly every construction contract was awarded to companies controlled by the Mob, which thanked the city officials who helped them with generous kickbacks and refused to hire black workers because they didn’t belong to the all-white unions. The system was so corrupt that City Hall was commonly referred to as the Steal Works.
Once upon a time, Newark had been a town where people made things, a town of factories and blue-collar jobs, and every object on earth had been manufactured there, from wristwatches to vacuum cleaners to lead pipes, from bottles to bottle brushes to buttons, from packaged bread to cupcakes to foot-long Italian salamis. Now the wood-stick houses were falling apart, the factories had shut down, and the white middle class was moving to the suburbs. Ferguson’s parents had done that as long ago as 1950, and as far as he could tell, they were the only ones who had ever come back, but Weequahic wasn’t really Newark, it was a Jewish town at the southwestern edge of an imaginary Newark, and everything had been tranquil there since the beginning of time. Seventy thousand Jews in one place, a splendid three-hundred-and-eleven-acre park designed by Olmsted, and a high school that produced more Ph.D.s than any other high school in the country.
Ferguson had been drinking beer at the West End on the evening of the twelfth, and when he returned to his apartment a few minutes after one o’clock, the telephone was ringing. He picked up and heard his father shouting into the receiver: Where the hell have you been, Archie? Newark is burning! They’ve smashed in the windows and looted the stores! The cops are blasting their guns, and your mother is out there on Springfield Avenue taking pictures for her goddamn paper! They’ve cordoned off the street, and I can’t get in there! Come home, Archie! I need you here, and don’t forget to bring your press card!
It was too late to think about going downtown to catch a bus from the Port Authority terminal, so Ferguson flagged a taxi on Broadway and told the driver to step on it, a phrase he had heard dozens of times in movies but had never once uttered himself, and while the trip cost him all but two of the thirty-four dollars in his wallet, he made it to the apartment house on Van Velsor Place in under an hour. Thankfully, the streets of the neighborhood were calm. The rioting had begun in the Central Ward and had later spread to parts of downtown, but the South Ward was still untouched. Even more reassuring, his mother had just come home, and his overwrought, semi-unhinged father was beginning to find his hinges again.
I’ve never seen anything like it, his mother said. Molotov cocktails, gutted stores, cops with their guns out, fires, frenzied people running all over the place—pure chaos.
Sam’s store is gone, his father said. He called an hour ago and told me there’s nothing left. Crazy, wild animals, that’s what they are. Imagine burning down your own neighborhood. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.
I’m going to bed, his mother announced. I’m all done in, and I have to be at the Ledger first thing tomorrow.
No more of this, Rose, his father said.
No more of what, Stanley?
No more war photography.
It’s my job. I have to do it. One person in this family is already out of work because of tonight, and there’s no way I’m not going to do it.
You’ll get yourself killed.
No, I won’t. I think it’s nearly done now. Everyone was going home when I left. The party’s over.
Or so she thought, and so thought many others as well, even the mayor, Hugh Addonizio, who shrugged off the disturbance as nothing more than a few broken bottles, but when rioting started up again the following night, she was back in the streets with her camera, and this time Ferguson was with her, carrying his press cards from both the Montclair Times and the Columbia Spectator in case he was stopped by the police and asked to identify himself. His father had spent the day with Sam Brownstein at his wrecked sporting goods establishment, assessing the damage, boarding up what had once been the front window with sheets of plywood, salvaging the few things that had been left behind, and he was still with Sam when Ferguson and his mother headed for Springfield Avenue after sundown. In his father’s mind, Ferguson was there to protect his mother, but in Ferguson’s mind he was there because he wanted to be there, since his mother didn’t need to be protected as she went about her job of taking pictures, which she did with remarkable calm and discipline, he felt, so poised and concentrated on her work that it wasn’t long before he realized that she in fact was the one who was protecting him. A large contingent of journalists and photographers had gathered in the Central Ward that night, people from the Newark papers, the New York papers, Life magazine, Time and Newsweek, the A.P., Reuters, the underground press, the black press, radio and television crews, and they mostly stuck together as they watched the tumult unfurl along Springfield Avenue. It was a disturbing thing to witness, and Ferguson openly admitted to himself that he was on edge, at times even frightened, but he was also stirred up and amazed, utterly unprepared for the explosiveness of the energy rippling through the street, the mixture of high emotion and reckless movement that seemed to fuse anger and joy into a feeling he had never encountered anywhere else, a new feeling that had yet to be given a name, and not only was it not crazy, as his father had said it was, it wasn’t stupid either, for the black mob was systematically going after businesses owned by white people, many of them Jewish white people, and at the same time sparing businesses owned by black people, the storefronts with the words SOUL BRO written across them, and in that way they were telling the white man he was looked upon as an enemy invader and it was time for him to leave their country. It wasn’t that Ferguson thought this was a good idea, but at least it made sense.
Again, the rioting eventually petered out, and again everyone went home, and this time it seemed to have ended for good, the second night of a two-night binge of destruction and anarchic release, but what no one in the departing crowd could have known then was that at twenty past two in the morning Mayor Addonizio had called Governor Richard Hughes and asked him to send in the National Guard and the New Jersey State Police. By daybreak, three thousand Guardsmen were rolling through the city in tanks, five hundred heavily armed state troopers were taking up their positions in the streets of the Central Ward, and for the next three days the Vietnam War came home to Newark, for if no Vietcong had ever called Muhammad Ali nigger, now the black people of Newark had been turned into the Vietcong.
Governor Hughes: “This is a criminal insurrection by people who say they hate the white man but who really hate America.”
Barbed-wire checkpoints. A ten P.M. curfew for cars, everyone off the streets by eleven. The looting had stopped, and the exaltation of the first two nights had devolved into urban warfare, an all-out battle in which the weapons were rifles, machine guns, and fires. A white fire department captain named Michael Moran, thirty-eight years old, the father of six children, was shot
and killed while standing on a ladder investigating an alarm on Central Avenue, and from that point on the Guard and the state police acted on the assumption that the city was infested with black snipers perched on rooftops aiming to gun down any whites they saw. That twenty-four of the twenty-six people killed during those days turned out to be black would seem to have disproved that assumption, but it allowed the Guard and the troopers to fire off thirteen thousand rounds of ammunition, shooting directly into the second-floor apartment of a woman named Rebecca Brown, for example, and killing her in what the Star-Ledger described as a “fusillade of bullets,” or to blast twenty-three other bullets into the body of Jimmy Rutledge, or to shoot down twenty-four-year-old Billy Furr for the crime of taking a cold soda out of an already ransacked convenience store and handing it to a thirsty photographer from Life magazine.
Through it all, Ferguson’s mother did what she could to go on taking her pictures, but she necessarily had to work by day, photographing the tanks and soldiers and the now demolished black businesses throughout the Central Ward, hundreds of pictures documenting whatever aspects of the conflagration she considered relevant, and because Ferguson’s father had whipped himself into a panic about Rose’s safety, he insisted on accompanying her wherever she went, which for those three days entailed sitting with her in the backseat of the old Impala as Ferguson drove his parents around the city, and then, as the curfew approached, dropping off the rolls of undeveloped film at the Star-Ledger building before returning to the apartment on quiet Van Velsor Place. Ferguson’s admiration for his mother continued to grow throughout the horror of those days. That a forty-five-year-old woman who had spent her life as a studio portrait photographer and had started in journalism by shooting pictures of suburban garden parties could go out and do what she was doing now struck him as one of the most improbable human transformations he had ever seen. That was his one consolation, for everything else about that time made him sick, sick at heart, sick to his stomach, sick about the world he lived in, and it didn’t help that his father ranted every night about them, the goddamned schvartzes and how much they hated us, the Jews, and this was the end, he declared, he would hate them back everlastingly from this moment forward, hate them furiously every minute until the day he died, and during one of those rants Ferguson became so disgusted that he lost his temper and told his father to shut up, which he had never done before in his life.