Everyone made it to Vermont at the appointed hour, and because Howard’s aunt and uncle were visiting friends in Burlington that evening, and because no one was in the mood for cooking, the three couples decided to go out for dinner at a place called Tom’s Bar and Grill, a run-down watering hole on Route 30 about three-quarters of a mile from the center of Brattleboro. The six of them crammed into Howard’s station wagon after a couple of rounds of beer at the farm, a small guzzle in the kitchen because the Vermont drinking age was twenty-one and they wouldn’t be allowed to have any beer at Tom’s, and because one round had not been enough, they didn’t leave until close to nine o’clock, and by nine o’clock on a Saturday night Tom’s was generally in a state of near chaos, with loud country music thumping on the jukebox and the slosh-heads at the bar well into their umpteenth round of liquid refreshments.
It was a rough working-class and farmer crowd, no doubt a predominantly right-wing, pro-war crowd, and when Ferguson walked in with his little band of left-wing college friends, he immediately understood that they had come to the wrong place. There was something about the men and women sitting at the bar, he felt, something about them that seemed to want trouble, and the pity was that he and his friends had to sit within eyeshot of that bar because there were no free tables in the back room. What was it, he kept asking himself, as a friendly waitress showed up to take their orders (Hi, kids. What’ll it be?), wondering if the sour looks aimed in their direction had anything to do with his longish hair and Howard’s somewhat longer hair, or with Luther’s modest Afro, or with Luther himself because he was the only black person anywhere in sight, or with the elegant, upper-crust prettiness of the three girls, even though Amy was working in a factory that summer and Mona’s parents could have been at one of the tables in the other room that night, and then, as Ferguson studied the people at the bar more closely, some of whom had their backs turned to them, he realized that most of the looks were coming from two guys at the end, the ones sitting along the right plank of the three-sided bar, the ones with the unobstructed view of their table, two guys in their late twenties or early thirties who could have been woodcutters or auto mechanics or professors of philosophy from all Ferguson could tell, which was just about nothing beyond the obvious fact that they looked displeased, and then Amy did something she must have done several hundred times in the past year, she snuggled up against Luther and kissed him on the cheek, and suddenly Ferguson understood what was making the philosophers angry, not that a black person had entered their all-white domain but that a young white woman was touching a young black man in public, snuggling up against his body and kissing him, and when you factored in all the other aggravations they had been dealt that night, the college boys with the long hair, the fresh-faced college girls with their long legs and beautiful teeth, the flag burners and draft-card burners and the whole brigade of anti-war hippie snots, and then added in the number of beers they had consumed in the hours they had been sitting there, no fewer than six apiece and perhaps as many as ten, it wasn’t strange or even remotely surprising that the larger of the two philosophy professors should have lifted himself off his barstool, walked over to their table, and said to Ferguson’s stepsister:
Cut that out, girl. Stuff like that ain’t allowed in here.
Before Amy could collect her thoughts and answer him, Luther said: Butt out, mister. Get lost.
I’m not talking to you, Charlie, the philosopher replied. I’m talking to her.
To emphasize his point, he pointed his finger at Amy.
Charlie! Luther said, with a loud, theatrical guffaw. That’s a good one. You’re the Charlie, mister, not me. Mister Charlie himself.
Ferguson, whose chair was closest to the standing philosopher, decided to stand up and give him a lesson in geography.
I think you’re a little confused, he said. We’re not in Mississippi, we’re in Vermont.
We’re in America, the philosopher rejoined, turning his attention to Ferguson now. Land of the free and home of the brave!
Free for you but not for them, is that it? Ferguson asked.
That’s it, Charlie, the philosopher said. Not for them if they’re going to carry on like that in public.
Like what? Ferguson said, with a sarcastic edge in his voice, which turned the words like what into something that resembled fuck off.
Like this, asshole, the philosopher said.
And then he punched Ferguson in the face and the fight began.
* * *
IT WAS ALL so idiotic. A barroom brawl with a drunken racist itching for a fight, but after the first punch had been thrown, what else could Ferguson do but punch back? Fortunately, the philosopher’s friend did not jump in on the action, and while Howard and Luther both tried to break it up, they didn’t succeed quickly enough to prevent Tom from calling the cops, and for the first time in his life Ferguson was arrested, handcuffed, and driven off to a police station to be booked, fingerprinted, and photographed from three different angles. The night-court judge fixed bail at one thousand dollars (one hundred dollars in cash), which Ferguson posted with help from Howard, Celia, Luther, and Amy.
Cuts above both eyes, the outer edge of his right eyebrow gone for good, an aching jaw, blood trickling down his checks, but nothing broken, whereas the man who had attacked him, a thirty-two-year-old plumber named Chet Johnson, emerged from the combat with a fractured nose and spent the night at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. At the arraignment on Monday morning, he and Ferguson were both charged with assault, disorderly conduct, and destruction of private property (a chair and some glasses had been broken in the scuffle), and the trial date was set for Tuesday, July twenty-fifth.
Before the Monday arraignment, the grim Sunday at the farm with Noah’s play forgotten and everyone sitting around the living room discussing what had happened the night before. Howard blamed himself. He never should have dragged them off to Tom’s, he said, and Mona backed him by asserting her own guilt in the affair: I should have known better than to let you walk into that redneck crazy house. Celia talked at length about what she called Ferguson’s incredible bravery—but also about how scared she had been when the fight started, the horrific violence of that first punch. Amy ranted for a while, cursing herself for not having stood up to that ugly, bigoted slob, galled by the panic she had felt when he thrust out his finger and pointed it at her, and then, unlike the Amy Ferguson had known for so many years, she put her hands over her face and started to cry. Luther was the angriest among them, the most bitter, the one most incensed by the confrontation, and he excoriated himself for having let Archie bear the brunt of it instead of pushing him out of the way and using his own black fist to slug the bastard in the mouth. Howard’s aunt and uncle, already thinking about the next step, talked about finding a good lawyer to handle Ferguson’s case. By the middle of the afternoon, Amy the Bold had regained enough clarity of mind to call the house on Woodhall Crescent and tell her father about the mess Archie was in. She passed the receiver to Ferguson, and when his confused and anxious mother came on, he told her not to worry, the situation was under control and there was no need for them to drive up to Vermont. But how could he be sure of anything, he asked himself as he spoke those words, and what on earth was going to happen to him?
Days passed. A supposedly good young lawyer from Brattleboro named Dennis McBride would be defending him. Celia would be coming back to the farm every weekend because Ferguson wasn’t allowed to leave the state of Vermont until the trial was over, assuming it didn’t end with the court putting him in prison for a month or three months or a year when the gavel of judgment came down on him. All sorts of money would have to be shelled out in order to stop that from happening, more dollars from the dwindling pile of ten thousand dollars his now dead grandfather had given him the year before, but at least he had the money and didn’t have to ask his mother and Dan for help. Then it was July twelfth, and as he listened to his mother tell him the news over the phone, he found it difficult to im
agine what she was talking about. In the midst of his small private struggles, a big public nightmare was spreading through the streets of Newark, and the city where he had spent the first years of his life was burning to the ground.
Race war. Not race riots, as the newspapers were telling everyone, but a war between the races. National Guardsmen and New Jersey state troopers firing their guns to kill, twenty-six dead in those days of havoc and bloodshed, twenty-four of one color and two of the other, not to speak of the hundreds if not thousands who were beaten and injured, among them the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, citizen of Newark and former close friend of the late Frank O’Hara, dragged from his car as he drove around to examine the wreckage in the Central Ward, taken to a local precinct house, locked in a room, and beaten so badly by a white cop that Jones thought he was going to die. The cop who did the beating had once been his friend in high school.
According to Amy, no one in the Bond family had been touched. Luther had sat out the war in Somerville, sixteen-year-old Seppy was traveling around Europe with the Waxmans, and Mr. and Mrs. Bond had managed to avoid the bullets and billy clubs and fists. One hallelujah among a thousand wails of grief and horror and disgust. Ferguson’s hometown had become the capital of ruins, but all four Bonds were alive.
Living through all that as he prepared to defend his own life in court. Eight days until his trial when the war in Newark ended, a second six-day war to accompany the Six-Day War in Dana’s Israel, and whether the combatants understood it or not, both sides in both wars had lost, and as Ferguson made his daily trips into Brattleboro to consult with his lawyer and prepare their case, he wondered if he wasn’t about to lose everything as well, wondered and worried to such a point that his insides seemed to be unraveling, the coiled tubes of guts and bowels were coming undone, and sooner or later they would burst through his stomach and splatter onto Main Street in Brattleboro, where a hungry dog would come to lap them up and then give thanks to the all-powerful dog-god for the munificence of his blessings.
McBride was steady and calm and cautiously optimistic, knowing that his client had not been the aggressor on the night in question, and with five witnesses to back up his story, five reliable witnesses who were all attending major universities and colleges, their testimony was bound to outweigh the probable false testimony from Chet Johnson’s inebriated friend, Robert Allen Gardiner.
Ferguson was told that the judge who would be presiding over his case was a graduate of Princeton from the class of 1936, which meant that William T. Burdock had been a fellow student and perhaps friend of Ferguson’s scholarship benefactor, Gordon DeWitt. It was impossible to know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Given that the case would not be settled by a jury, that the decision would be entirely in Judge Burdock’s hands, Ferguson hoped it was a good thing.
On the night of the twenty-second, three days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Luther called the farm and asked to speak to Archie. As Howard’s aunt handed the phone to Ferguson, a fresh wave of fear rumbled through his insides. What now? he asked himself. Was Luther calling to tell him he wouldn’t be able to show up in court on Tuesday?
Nothing like that, Luther said. Of course I’m going to testify. I’m your star witness, aren’t I?
Ferguson exhaled into the phone. I’m counting on you, he said.
Luther paused for a moment on the other end of the line. Then it turned into a long moment, much longer than Ferguson had been expecting. Static reverberated through the wires, as if Luther’s silence was not a silence but the clamor of the thoughts thrashing around in his mind. At last he said: Do you remember Plan A and Plan B?
Yes, I remember. Plan A: Play along. Plan B: Don’t play along.
That’s it—in a nutshell. Now I’ve come up with Plan C.
Are you telling me there’s another alternative?
I’m afraid so. The farewell-and-good-luck alternative.
What does that mean?
I’m calling you from my parents’ apartment in Newark. Do you have any idea what Newark looks like these days?
I’ve seen the pictures. Whole blocks destroyed. Burned out, gutted buildings. The end of one part of the world.
They’re trying to kill us, Archie. It’s not just that they want to lock us out, they want us dead.
Not everyone, Luther. Only the worst ones.
The ones in power. The mayors and the governors and the generals. They want to wipe us out.
What does that have to do with Plan C?
Until now, I’ve been willing to play along, but after what happened last week, I don’t think I can do that anymore. Then I look at Plan B and start gasping for breath. The Panthers are a force now, and they’re doing exactly what I thought I would be doing if Plan A failed. Buying guns to defend themselves, taking action. They look strong now, but they’re not. White America won’t stand for what they’re doing, and one by one they’re going to be mowed down and killed. What a stupid way to die, Archie—for nothing. So forget Plan B.
And Plan C?
I’m getting out. Pulling up stakes, as they used to say in the old cowboy movies. I’ll be driving up to Vermont for your trial on Tuesday, and when the trial is finished, I won’t be going south to Massachusetts, I’ll be heading north to Canada.
Canada. Why Canada?
First, because it isn’t the United States. Second, because I have a bunch of relatives in Montreal. Third, because I can finish college at McGill. I was accepted there out of high school, you know. I’m sure they’ll want me again.
I’m sure they will, but it takes time to transfer, and if you drop out of school for the fall term, you’ll be drafted.
Maybe so, but what difference does it make if I’m never coming back?
Never?
Never.
And what about Amy?
I asked her to come with me, but she said no.
You understand why, don’t you? It has nothing to do with you.
Probably not. But just because she stays down here, that doesn’t mean she can’t come up and visit me. It’s not the end of the world, after all.
No, but it probably means the end of you and Amy.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. We weren’t going to last in the long run. In the short run, I think we’ve been trying to prove a point. If not to ourselves, then to everyone else. And then that schmuck walked over to our table the other night and threatened us. We’ve made our point, but who wants to live in a world that forces you to stare down the haters who spend their lives staring at you? Life is hard enough as it is, and I’m exhausted, Archie, just about at the end of my rope.
* * *
THERE WERE TWO parts to what happened next, the good first part and the less than good second part. The first part was the trial, which went more or less as McBride had predicted it would. Not that Ferguson wasn’t scared throughout most of the proceedings, not that his intestines weren’t threatening to unravel again during the two and a half hours he spent in the courtroom, but it helped that his mother and stepfather were there along with Noah, Aunt Mildred, and Uncle Don, and it helped that his friends were such precise, articulate witnesses, first Howard, then Mona, then Celia, then Luther, and finally Amy, who gave a vivid account of how frightened she had been by Johnson’s menacing words and gestures before the first punch was thrown, and it also helped that when Johnson took the stand he openly confessed to being drunk on the night of July first and couldn’t remember what he had or hadn’t done. Nevertheless, Ferguson felt McBride committed a tactical error by making him talk so much about college during his testimony, not only asking him what he did for a living (student) but where he attended school (Princeton) and under what conditions (as a Walt Whitman Scholar) and what his grade point average was (three point seven), for even if those answers made a noticeable impression on Judge Burdock, they were irrelevant to the matter at hand and could have been seen as putting unfair pressure on him. In the event, Burdock found Johnson guilty of instigating th
e brawl and ordered him to pay a heavy fine of one thousand dollars, whereas Ferguson, the first-time offender, was acquitted of the assault charge and ordered to pay fifty dollars in damages to Thomas Griswold, the owner of Tom’s Bar and Grill, to cover the costs of a new chair and six new drinking glasses. It was the best possible outcome, the utter and permanent removal of the weight he had been carrying around on his back, and as Ferguson’s friends and family gathered around him to celebrate the victory, he thanked McBride for his good work. Perhaps the man had known what he was doing, after all. The Princeton brotherhood. If the myth was true, then every Princeton man was bound together with every other Princeton man across the generations, in death as well as in life, and if Ferguson was indeed a Princeton man, as he supposed he was by now, then what man could argue that the Tiger hadn’t saved his skin?
Not long after they left the courthouse, as all eleven of them strolled out into the parking lot to search for their cars, Luther came up from behind Ferguson, put his arm around his shoulder and said, Take good care of yourself, Archie. I’m off.
Before Ferguson could answer him, Luther abruptly turned around and began heading in the opposite direction, walking quickly toward his green Buick, which was parked near the exit at the front of the lot. Ferguson said to himself: So that’s how you do it. No tears, no grand gestures, no tender hugs of farewell. Just sit your ass down in your car and drive away, hoping for a better life in the next country. Admirable. But then again, how could you say good-bye to a country that didn’t exist for you anymore? It would have been like trying to shake hands with a dead man.
As Ferguson watched the grown-up version of the fourteen-year-old punching boy climb into the car, Amy suddenly sprinted into view. The engine kicked over, and at the last second, just as Luther was putting the Skylark into drive, she yanked open the passenger door and hopped in with him.
They drove off together.
That didn’t mean she was intending to stay with him in Canada. It only meant that letting go was hard, too hard for now.