“That isn’t true,” Karen said.
“My dear Karen,” Max said, “I’m sorry to tell you, I can hardly make myself tell you, but it is true—it is true.”
“No,” said Karen. She shook her wet, heavy hair. “It wasn’t an accident.”
They looked at her. She stood swaying in the doorway, the bathroom behind her choked with steam. Her face was wet and distorted, as if she were tightening a muscle somewhere inside her cheek. “And he wasn’t a child! A child!” she cried. “He was a man!”
“Yes, he was a man,” Max said, nodding anxiously. “Of course he was a man—But we must get out of here, we have to leave. This town is headed for trouble. Karen? Why do you look at me like that? Are you in pain?”
“He was a man!” Karen cried senselessly.
“Yes, yes,” said Max. Then he said oddly, “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, you have misjudged him,” she said. “You never knew him. You never knew him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never knew him!” She pushed past Max and went to the bureau. She left damp footprints on the floor. “You can’t even understand what he did! His life was an accident, without plan—I know that, I am part of it—I know it—look at that, there,” she said in a shrill, angry voice, pointing accusingly at herself in the mirror, “an accident! My face is an accident! Shar was trapped by it, by an accident—his life was an accident but his death wasn’t—he made his death for himself! He was a man!”
Max stared at her. He saw that she wore a man’s wristwatch. His expression remained rigid as his mind raced. “Karen—” he said.
“I mean it, yes, yes, I mean it,” she cried.
“We better get out of here,” Jerry said. “We better—”
“Shut up,” said Max viciously. He turned back to Karen. “What are you trying to say?”
“You know what I’m saying,” said Karen.
They faced each other. Karen stared at him with her fists clenched at her sides, her expression nearing hysteria. Her face was feverish and part of her robe had fallen open to show her reddened, raw-looking body. Max, as if by magic, turned calmer, heavier, breathing deeply through his mouth: he might have been strengthened by Karen’s loss of control. Outside, down on the street, automobile horns began to blare suddenly and shouts erupted, and there was a sound of men running on the sidewalk below. When Max finally spoke, his voice was cold and incredulous. “You are telling me that you knew about this? That you knew what would happen to Shar?”
Jerry looked away from the window to blink at Karen, impatient and perplexed. If he had ever had any desire for her it was gone now, not because of whatever she and Max were saying—Jerry, accustomed to ignoring Max, did not understand it—but because of Karen’s feverish eyes, her strained, reddened face, and the ugly, smelling blood in the bed. The doctor, licking his lips, watched in a nervous alcoholic stupor.
“Is that what you are saying?” Max demanded. “That you knew about this?”
Karen angrily brushed a wet strand of hair back from her face.
Max said slowly, “Murderer.” He pointed his fat finger at her as if it were a weapon. “There is the murderer.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jerry said. He looked frightened. “Do you want to take her or not?”
“I’m not going with you!” Karen screamed.
“There is the murderer!” Max said. “No accident! No mistake! There she is!”
“Goddam it, let’s get out of here!” Jerry said.
“Shar is better gone out of such a world!” Max went on, staring at Karen. “Why, he loved you—he loved you more than he ever did me, all those years, he thought of you more often than he ever did me!—in spite of all I did for him, giving my life to him, anything he wanted!” He turned to draw in Jerry and the doctor, spreading his arms wide. “And no one believed Shar when he said he didn’t know you were pregnant. We all thought he was lying—of course. But he wasn’t lying; he never knew about it. You never told him. All done on purpose—done on purpose!”
“I couldn’t help it!” Karen cried.
“All a trap—yes, I see, very slowly, finally—a trap, an elaborate trap—an insane trap—For what reason? Surely you are insane! And look at you there, look at what it’s done to you! Your insides drained out on a dirty bed, a mattress soaked with blood! Two people dead! Murderer!”
Karen put her hands to her face. “I couldn’t help it,” she said.
“What? What are you saying? Only look at yourself! What could be worth this? How could you do it? And to yourself too and to that child—that you said you wanted! Insanity! Do you think you’ll survive this? You’ll live past this? You’ll ever be the same again? Do you? Impossible! I can see that you’re going to die. I can smell it in this room.” And he took a great passionate breath, his nostrils widening and flattening. “Can’t you smell it here? Smell it from here? I don’t know what to think—I am sick to death. My God, what a thing! What a thing! The fruit of your love is blood, the fruit of your womb—blood! all that blood! all you want of it! a mattress soaked with blood, your own blood, and Shar out alone on the track—his skull smashed, everything black, burned, all that blood—”
“Leave me alone!” Karen screamed. “Leave me alone!”
“Insane!” Max stared at her with righteous, passionate anger. The taint of deformity that usually qualified his talk was now replaced by a swelling, confident force; he seemed, in the last several minutes, to have become younger. “Insane! You were insane when he left you—I thought so—or you have been all along, to throw yourself at him so! To crawl after him! What have I done to let him go to you? What have I done to him? And he swore at me sometimes when he was drunk, saying that I was ruining him, that I was pushing him too far, asking too much from him, wanting him too much—that I loved him too much—And now he is dead! My good God—”
He backed away. His face was taut with rage and a queer, satisfied disgust. “Leave me alone!” Karen cried.
He followed Jerry and the doctor out of the room and closed the door on Karen’s mad, hopeless screaming. “Now let’s get the hell out of here!” Jerry said, already halfway down the stairs.
BEFORE THE RACE WAS OFFICIALLY over fist fights had already begun to break out in scattered parts of the grandstand, beneath it, in front of the stadium, and in the parking lot. Cars raced up and down the street, horns honking, the young people inside wild with elated rage. As the crowd left the stadium, milling around in the street, police drove up in two cars, sirens wailing. The sirens seemed to excite the crowd. No one wanted to leave in spite of the policemen’s shouting, and some men shouted back, hidden in the crowd. The sun was burning. Suddenly the crowd began moving, swaying, in one direction; they stampeded out into the street, then stopped. Then something had happened in the parking lot: some automobiles overturned and set on fire. The sirens on the police cars continued to whine.
A fire was discovered down in the row of Negro tenement buildings and it took some time for fire trucks, inching through the crowded streets, to get to it. A great mob of people watched the fire, which was disappointingly small, and shouted encouragement to firemen who struggled with hoses, smashing in windows and doors with great columns of water. High school students in parked cars cleverly turned their radios to the same station so that the firemen were accompanied by shrill enthusiastic music, turned on as loud as possible.
A while later, down at the boardwalk, a group of Negro youths marching to the beach entrance were stopped by some white men, but were apparently prepared for the occasion, since they took out of their beach bags and rolled towels such weapons as bicycle chains, greasy and flecked with dust, and jackknives and hammers and ice picks. People on either side of the fight drew back, some of them fleeing beneath the boardwalk railing and leaping down to the street. Automobiles drove up, horns blaring, radios set loud, and out of them more boys jumped and scrambled up onto the boardwalk. Everyone cried, Fight! Fight! F
ight! Blocks away, the message was heard, as if communicated through the blood, and everyone ran to watch. In newspaper articles this particular fight, in front of the big gingerbread archway—like that of a castle—leading to the beach, was named as the beginning of the Cherry River race riot; but the riot had really begun before this, some insisted, as soon as that white auto driver was forced off the track by that Negro. More philosophical observers claimed the riot had begun even before this, with the assault and murder of a woman earlier that week—and perhaps before this, even; but such observations became abstract and lost the flavor of particularity, and so were not worth much.
By the time Jerry had driven Max and the doctor around to the back of Max’s motel the riot was well under way. The plate-glass windows of the motel, stained green, had been cracked and even smashed in some places by rocks. Women ran about screaming, tables in the lounge were upset, and Max screamed: “But I am not Negro! I am not Negro! What is the meaning of this?”
Before the motel the crowd converged in the street, spilling off the boardwalk. At first most were white, but then the number of Negroes, counting women and children, began to increase mysteriously, as if they were coming out of the ground. At one corner a few policemen stood watching. To the aid of the white race a horde of men stampeded down the street, running with their knees lifting proudly and their arms swinging: some carried weapons of an improvised sort, chair legs or broken bottles, and one young boy brandished a fishing spear. With a great medley of roars and screams, the groups came together.
The railing between the boardwalk and the street was smashed in. Windows in the big hotel were smashed, people appeared on the roof and threw things down—hotel chairs and lamps and wastebaskets. The crowd rushed up onto the grass of the new motel and kept going, the people at the outside pushed screaming into the plate-glass window and on through. A great section of glass shattered—the air seemed to rock with the violence. Max, standing at the back entrance, stared up the spacious carpeted hallway to the lobby and cried out in a rage: “We are not Negro here! We are not Negro here!” The people who had been pushed through the window lay screaming in the bloody glass, and others appeared, surging through the broken window. Some teenaged boys, no more than dazed by the accident, slowly got to their feet, began to move, their eyes falling hungrily upon the luxury of waxen rubber plants and golden chandeliers and long, narrow, stark black and white paintings. Max saw several of them seize a fleeing woman and begin tearing off her clothes, and he turned suddenly to go. “What if this is an act of God?” he cried to Jerry as he scrambled to the car. “What if the insurance company calls it an act of God? What will I do? I will be ruined! I will be ruined!”
“Close that goddam door!” Jerry said. He backed the car around, pressing angrily on the horn. A man with a shocked, paralyzed expression had tried to inch in front of Jerry, driving a fin-tailed red convertible filled with children and two other adults. “Out of the way! Out of the way!” Jerry said. “Let me get through!” The man tried not to hear and was about to drive out to the street when Jerry took out his long-barreled revolver and shot over the man’s balding head. “Get out of the way!” he yelled, and the red car screeched, rocking, to a stop. Jerry eased past its fender and out to the street. “A hell of a thing to happen,” he said. He honked angrily and inched out into the crowd, driving with a black revolver in his hand. Beside him Max sat in a sweating daze, clutching his wrinkled shirt, and the doctor, in the back seat, lay down as if he were trying to hide.
Firemen were trying to calm the mob by shooting water from hoses into the street, but as Jerry watched, some men took the hoses away from the firemen. At first the furious water rushed up straight in the air, then it was under control and redirected back at the mob. The air was filled with screams and shouts of exultation. Jerry, his mouth dry, kept inching the car out into the mob—mostly women at this end, though there were some younger boys who might make trouble. The women jumped up and down in their summer dresses and summer playclothes, bright-colored, with shining hair and jewelry. One woman of about thirty, in a red sun dress that revealed much of her ruddy chest, pounded with her fists, hand over hand, on the hood of the black car. In a rage Jerry pressed down on the accelerator and drove out into the street. There were shouts and a vicious thudding at the back of the car. “My God, my God,” Max moaned, clutching his heart, “what is happening? Is the world gone mad?” Jerry, twisting around, turning back and forth in the seat, now exhibited the skill he was reputed to have by driving with one hand and threatening with the other, waving the revolver at the surging crowd and shouting at them in a high, steady, unrelenting rage.
The mob was thinner at this end; it had begun to surge down the street. There a young boy had crawled up onto a first-floor window ledge of the big hotel and, to the great satisfaction of those who watched, grabbed hold of the bottom of the gigantic American flag and, kicking his feet out into space, fell straight down to probable injury and brought the whole flag, stripes first and then stars, sailing down on top of him. Jerry was nearly in the open—there were only a few children milling around, but they seemed to sense no danger from the big car or from Jerry’s gun, which they probably thought to be a toy. He waved and shouted at them, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” A little boy stood picking his nose thoughtfully, staring over at the crowd; he glanced up at Jerry and, as if he had just thought of it, got out of the way. “What if it is called an act of God?” Max demanded. He turned around to appeal to the doctor, who lay on his stomach, his head cradled in his arms. “What will I do?” Max cried. “Who will make this up to me? An act of God!”
Jerry looked around to see Mitch, the young Negro who was Shar’s second, racing straight at them. He was about to drive off when Mitch grabbed hold of the door and yelled into his face: “Let me in! Let me in! There’s some bastards after me!”
“Get away!” Jerry said, slashing at Mitch’s face with the gun. “Let go! Get out of here!”
“They’re coming! There they are!” Mitch cried. He tried to reach in the window and grab Jerry. He thrust his sweating face at him. “There’s too many of them for me—Mr. Max! Mr. Max! You let me in with you!”
“You f——g nigger!” Jerry screamed. He struck Mitch on the side of the face and, while Mitch stumbled back, Jerry stepped on the accelerator and drove away. “Goddam him! Goddam them! Goddam them all!” Jerry shouted out the window.
He drove skidding through the traffic-crowded town, pressing on the horn with the grip of the revolver. At a traffic signal he eased around a line of cars and went through the red light, blaring on his horn as if he were on a special mission. Beside him Max gasped for air, rolling his window halfway down and then, thinking better of it, rolling it back up. His huge bulk heaved and pulsed with the indignation of his fury. “What of the insurance company! What lawyers they have! With Shar it is all right—who could guess that was a suicide today? But with our motel—They will call it an act of God!” he wept bitterly. “There is no escape from injustice!”
IN THE BACK OF A restaurant near the boardwalk, squatting on his plump thighs in the grimy women’s rest room, the ex-college student Ponzi was trying to hush a little girl’s screaming by putting his fingers to his lips and blowing out his cheeks. “No, no!” he cried. “Do you want them to hear you? Do you want them to break in here?” The girl’s mother, a well-dressed, trim, impersonal woman of about thirty-five, held the screaming girl against her stomach. “Stop her! Please stop her!” Ponzi begged.
There were screams in the street. The windows in the restaurant had been smashed long ago, but occasionally sounds of destruction—tables being tipped over, china broken—tripped Ponzi’s heart and set him sweating twice as much as usual. He had his back to the door, which began to open slowly, pushing him forward. He cried, “Who is it? Keep out of here! Keep out!”
He put his feet against a sink and pushed back, but the door, after a momentary relapse, continued coming in. Someone was pleading on the other sid
e. Ponzi stood suddenly and opened the door. “Who is it? Get in here, then, and keep quiet! Keep quiet!” He looked down to see a man crawling in. The man was thin and nervous, wearing a bright plaid sport shirt and sunglasses. “They’re killing someone,” he said. “I saw them. I can’t get out. They’re killing someone out there.”
The little girl began to scream convulsively. Her mouth opened until Ponzi thought it would envelop her whole face, draining all her features into it, swallowing them. “No, no!” Ponzi cried. He leaped forward and put his hand over the girl’s mouth. “Don’t let her do that—make her be quiet!” The little girl kicked him viciously in the leg, whipped her face aside, and began a series of short, breathless screams that rose higher and higher. Ponzi, white-faced, staggered back to the wall and sat down heavily.
He had run into the restaurant to hide from the crowd, which had formed out of nowhere in only a few minutes. One minute the boardwalk had been filled with people as usual, perhaps not so many as usual, and the next minute something had happened and people were coming from all directions, running, riding bicycles, screeching to stops in cars. Ponzi, gaping, had been shoved from place to place. Someone had struck him in the stomach and he had nearly been sick, doubled over with pain and astonishment. Then, when he had straightened, when he could breathe again, he found himself looking at a group of young men his own age who were methodically beating to a pulp the face of a Negro man—the Negro’s screams, like the little girl’s, had risen higher and higher until Ponzi joined them, screaming himself, and staggering backward. A woman with sunglasses pushed him on the chest and laughed, showing bright, even teeth. Ponzi had fled into the nearest doorway.