Not far from home he passed a Packer Food Store, still being looted. Women were using shopping carts and taking their time. It was still Sunday. Sunday night. And tomorrow, would a long work week begin in Detroit? Jules paused to watch the ladies shopping, stomping back and forth through the big broken windows. One boy was carrying a gum-ball machine under his arm. The metal base kept bumping into people, who reached around to give the boy a shove.
Jules was standing there when a boy came running at him. He had a peculiar lurching, hopping run; he held a rifle in his arms.
The air jangled with cries and laughter. Sirens in the distance, distant. The horizon was livid with light. Electricity popped. A car lay overturned, burning in the street; the smell of burning rubber was suffocating. Too close. The boy with the gun was approaching him, lurching. Was Jules going to be shot? He had felt the unbelievable impact of bullets and he had known that sickened, immediate denial: This didn’t happen! So he watched the boy with respect. The boy’s face was no longer the face of a boy. His hair had been shaved from his head. He was barefoot. The rifle in his arms was shiny and new and his eyes caught some of the luster from the barrel.
He ran right into Jules’s arms and seemed to be handing the rifle to him. He clutched at Jules’s waist and thighs, falling, and only now did Jules see that he was bleeding from a wound in the back. He fell. Jules lifted the gun clear. The boy clawed at Jules’s ankles and Jules cried, “Where did they get you? Somebody call an ambulance!” The boy lay still. Jules stepped aside, looking down at him. Women ran over. “How’d he get himself shot in the back, this little boy?” a woman cried. Jules inched away from them. The boy did not move. Jules liked the feel of this gun, this gift.
“Somebody call an ambulance, an ambulance!” the women cried, taking up Jules’s cry, pushing him aside.
Jules escaped. He had been hearing rifle fire for some time without knowing exactly what it was, and now he heard it everywhere. It was getting dark. Someone had shot out the street lights. A car approached him with its headlights on and Jules ducked into a doorway, clutching the gun. Not a police cruiser, an ordinary car. The headlights jerked over him and someone yelled, “It’s a white man! Hey! You want a lift!”
“I could use a lift, great,” Jules said.
“Then get in! Get in!”
It was a carload of Kentucky boys, drunk and very friendly. They all had rifles like Jules’s. A girl was in the back, complaining about something. “Take the John Lodge, you bastards! I want to go to Saks Fifth Avenue!” she cried. Jules squeezed into the back seat. They made room for him. He sat beside a boy of about nineteen with a fair, hollow face. The boy smelled of whisky. “How do you get there?” the driver cried.
“Take the next street to the right,” said Jules, glad to be helpful, using this to wedge himself in.
Everyone was pleased. They passed him a bottle. “First we stop at Saks, then we go right down to Hudson’s!” cried the girl.
“The hell, we’re going out to Metro. Gonna hijack ourselves a-plane!”
“You hijackin’ what? You never flew no plane!”
“You get the pilots to fly them, stupid! Hijackin’ a plane means takin’ the whole load, pilots and passengers and all that.”
“What the hell you gonna do with all them?”
“I got my plans.”
Rushing out toward the expressway…the streets were dark, street lights shot out…broken glass on the streets. The boys fired at random into houses. Block after block of houses were darkened. The lights of one house were still on, and three boys shot the windows out. “That’ll show that smart-aleck!” they cried.
There was a police barricade by the hospital, so they made a wild U-turn in the street, heading somewhere else now, just as fast. Jules heard machine-gun fire. He had only heard it before in movies and it did not seem to him very real or dangerous. The girl slapped the neck of the driver, screaming at him. She was very young, with a streaked, puffy face and no lipstick; her lipstick had been smeared off onto her face. She was very drunk. Something struck one of the car windows and a sliver of glass flew into Jules’s cheek. Surprised, he took it out at once, drawing it out. He tossed it out the window. The boy beside him laughed. Jules sucked at his cheek as if trying to suck the rushing blood back in, to stop it.
The car was going too fast. It began to shake. One of their lights was out, shot out or smashed. Jules raised his rifle and sighted it on windows along the street. What if his gun failed him? Where would he get another gun for the night? If it failed he would fall back into his lethargy of many months, of a lifetime. The boys in the car were very noisy and excited. Jules felt drawn to them; the swerving and jostling of the car actually threw him against them.
The girl shrieked. “Look at that! Look! Some soldiers!” she cried.
“What the hell!”
A troop carrier was crossing an intersection up ahead, its lights off. Jules could see soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles standing on the carrier, looking right down the street toward this car. “You better turn off your light,” Jules said.
The driver switched off his light.
“Jesus, they got the Army out! I’m goin’ in the Army myself!” one of the boys cried.
The driver did not slow down. Curious and wild, he bore on toward the intersection, and Jules, dazed with their jokes, did not even think to duck. But the carrier continued up the street.
Now they were approaching some fires—sirens and gunfire and small muffled explosions. “The Fourth of July!” said the girl. One of the boys fired at a burning building. Farther up the block, police and soldiers were standing in a ring around a firetruck.
“Noel, you hadn’t better take them all on!” someone said.
The driver turned off. “I’m just tryin’ to find that goddam expressway in the dark, that’s all I’m tryin’ to do, with every goddam light in the city shot out,” he said. A series of bullets struck the car, like rain.
No serious damage.
“Is that niggers or police shooting?” someone asked.
The boys fired out into the street, at burning buildings or at buildings not burning but clearly deserted. A Negro ducked into an alleyway. They all fired. “Got that one!” they cried. But it was too late to be sure, the car was going too fast. It ran over something in the street and the jolting knocked most of the window out, next to Jules. A jagged strip of glass remained. Jules kept getting thrown against it, his elbow going into it. He felt a sharp stinging pain that disappeared and came back again, again and again. The bouncing of the car restored his good humor. The boys were talking now about a friend who was in jail at Dehoco. They were talking about breaking him out, their voices explosive, ringing, intoxicated.
Jules felt blood running down his face. Blood. He thought of blood. He thought of two girls in his childhood, twins, who had been stabbed to death along a city block, one of them struck down in front of her house and the other chased and stabbed, so that blood ran in thin streams along the sidewalk, and the next morning everyone had come out to look at the blood…the Hecht twins…blood. Jules’s own blood, pounding in his ears. In the frenzied pounding of his blood he felt something heavy emerging, a solid, violent certainty. He felt obliterated by it. The car rushed along in a hot, smoky darkness, heading toward more darkness, and Jules felt now only a stonelike certainty in its rocking motions and the shouts of the boys and his own ripeness.
“Jesus, look out!”
They swerved to avoid something in the street—a man lying on his back, a body. A bass fiddle lay beside him.
They swerved onto another street: ahead a knot of firefighters and police…a barricade set up in the street….“Jesus, I ain’t turnin’ off any more times! I had it for the night!” the driver said.
They shouted at him, “Noel! You dumb bastard! You turn off here!”
But he did not turn off, he shook his head angrily and headed right
for the barricade, limping on one flattening tire. Jules saw a policeman raise a rifle. He ducked. Someone in the car shot…a series of shots….Jules was blinded by flying glass.
“Noel, you bastard! Now look!” someone cried.
The car jumped sideways. Brakes screeched. They were on the sidewalk now—now they had crashed into something. A tremendous thud. Jules’s hands flat over his head, his body out of control. He was knocked against the front seat. His chest seemed to cave in. Then, breathing again, he fell against a car door and it opened—Jules outside now, safe on the sidewalk?—the rifle fell out with him. A rifle. Still falling he got himself right, he made his legs work, he grabbed the rifle and ran like hell. He heard gunshots.
The wild ride had given him strength. He ran nearly doubled over, his hands raised, the gun raised in front of him. He was in an alley…down a street somewhere, an unknown street…lights from fires glowed against the walls….Running, he could not stop running! Was this Jules after all, running like this, sprung out of a smashed car and on his own, like a soldier with his rifle? A bullet whined past him. He jumped to the side, then smashed out what remained of a store window and climbed inside, stumbling. “My God!” he cried aloud.
A florist’s shop. Skidding on broken glass, Jules with a gun. Smashed flowers, a smashed refrigerating unit, stinking up the flowers, everything broken and ground underfoot. The cash register had been knocked over. Jules ducked and behind him, through the broken window, came the man who had shot at him. He was a policeman, a stranger, yelling at Jules. Why did he yell? Why that strange hopping anger to him, his big face twisted with an emotion Jules could not understand?—he was a man of middle-age, ordinary, a stranger yelling so personally at Jules, raising the butt of his rifle to smash Jules on the head. Jules jumped sideways. He brought his own rifle around and hit the man on the shoulder, a glancing blow, and then managed to hit him again, in the face. Yelling, the policeman seemed to fall upon him, clinging to him, and Jules scrambled backward in the broken glass, panting, crying out, “My God, give me a chance— Let me get out the back door, will you?” The policeman’s rifle was tangled in Jules’s legs. Jules kicked it aside. With a sudden explosion of strength he grabbed the man’s neck and wrenched him around; the man slid on the glass and fell heavily. Jules snatched up his own gun again. The man would not stop yelling. Now he was lunging for Jules’s legs, and Jules had no choice but to smash him in the face…and this time he felt the gristle of the man’s nose breaking….
Having done this he had done everything. It was over. His blood ran wild, he was not to blame for anything, why should he stop? He aimed the rifle into the man’s face and pulled the trigger.
8
On the second day of the looting, after watching television with a friend—her own set had broken down long ago—Loretta dared everything and went out. She had watched television until she could stand it no longer. The Mayor’s report, the Governor’s report, the President’s report, the newsreels, the constant, excited pulsebeat of news, pictures, words—were too much for her. She could stand it no longer. She went a few blocks to a smashed store and looked around, and in the rubble at the back she found a portable television set. A few Negroes were milling around. A Negro man asked her politely if she wanted help carrying the television set to her car, but she told him she hadn’t any car. She lived right nearby.
As soon as she got the set home she began to worry. It did not work. She read a small shiny piece of cardboard, shaped in a sunburst pattern, that said GUARANTEE on it but it did not say how to get rid of the violent zigzagging lines on the screen. So she sat staring at the useless screen, feeling sick. That night her own building caught fire. Someone threw a firebomb into it, into the front hall. In the commotion Loretta was knocked down and her leg bruised, but she managed to get out. The television set and everything she owned were burned up.
With a weak, sobbing crowd of people she was herded up to the Fisher YMCA. They fed her, they gave her a blanket. She sat in silence for a while, thinking of the television set and of how she had been punished for stealing it, then the memory faded as her interest in this place grew. She fell into conversation with a fat Negro woman, both of them anxious to be friendly, to prove something. The woman wept and moaned over her seven kids. Where were those kids in all this mess? Those brats—always running around, always getting into trouble! “And what we need with a blanket, with this weather? Jesus God, but it near to ninety again, ninety-five!” The woman wept.
Loretta fell into conversation with a kindly, bald, amazed man who said he worked in the Post Office, sorting mail. His name was Harold. His house had been burned down on the first day, the first house in his block. Why had they singled him out? Was it on purpose? “I was always nice to colored. Lots of colored boys work at the Post Office, I was always real nice to them,” he told Loretta earnestly. He had owned that house clear but about three years, he told Loretta; he’d been paying a mortgage on it for fifteen years. His wife had died in that house. In the back bedroom. Loretta asked him gently if he had any children. “Yes, four children, gone in all directions,” he said mournfully. This touched her oddly.
“What about you, do you have any children?” he said.
“They’re gone in all directions too,” she said. She hadn’t any idea where Ran was even. He could take care of himself.
Loretta sat back and watched. She observed keenly that certain people did not break down but appeared, instead, as if they were only waiting somewhere. They might have been in a train station, certain of their destination. Some whites, some Negroes, had this dignity. She decided that she would have dignity: she was fed up with her life. She talked to the man from the Post Office, Harold, with cheerful dignity. “The important thing is you weren’t killed or hurt. I look at it that way,” she told him. He considered her words, as if they were profound. As time went on Loretta began to feel restored, curious. She was sorry she hadn’t been wearing a better dress when the bomb had been thrown in the front hall.
This place had the air of a carnival that had gotten stuck. Too long in one place. What were so many strangers doing together, so patiently together? Loretta helped a young white girl with a baby, changing its filthy clothes. She followed one of the nurses around and helped. Maybe she should become a nurse herself—go to school somewhere, get training, and become a nurse herself? Nurses were respected, they had dignity and value. She helped with some of the smaller children, though their bawling annoyed her. The children were very jumpy here; some of them were hysterical; they couldn’t be quieted but had to cry themselves limp. Then they slept, limp. Loretta was reminded of her own babies. She thought with a rush of warmth of Jules and Maureen and Betty and Ran, as babies, helpless infants. She had loved them most at that time in their lives. It had been possible to love them deeply then. Now, run off in all directions, stubborn and lost, they did not seem to be her children really. It was a peculiar thing to have children, almost a riddle. Maybe her mistake had been that she had failed to have the right children. Maybe, between Jules and Maureen, there was to have been a wonderful son, Jules’s brains and Maureen’s sweetness, but she had failed, it hadn’t come off. Or the long wait between Betty and Ran, maybe that was a mistake, maybe the right child had been meant for that time, and she hadn’t had it, she had failed, the time was past and she would never have another child again in her life.
“Children are hell but it makes you sad to think you can’t have any more,” she told Harold.
He nodded painfully.
“It makes me feel more alone to think I had kids, and they went off,” she said. She spoke with dignity, slowly, choosing her words. All the television broadcasts had made her conscious of words; she might have been speaking on television. “But I think, what the hell, everybody is alone. That’s the secret, everybody is alone and can’t help it, like right here and now, in this place, everybody is alone and they’d all get up and walk out if they could and never see each
other again. We’re all like that.”
“Is that really true?” the man asked in anguish.
He raised his head to stare at her. Behind his glasses his eyes were watery and perplexed, without dignity. There were creases of dirt on his neck.
They were both sent to the same house, on the far northwest side of the city. A family had opened its home to five “riot victims.” Loretta was shy and gracious, feeling herself singled out, a guest. She helped to serve food and to clean up afterward. She talked with everyone, remembering to talk slowly. Nobody believed she was almost a grandmother—but it was true, it was true, she was almost a grandmother. “It won’t be long for my daughter now,” she said. Then, anticipating their questions, she said, “No, she’s real safe in Dearborn. Lucky for her.” So she couldn’t complain about losing her apartment and things, it was all she wanted to stay alive and see that grandchild; she thanked God she had been allowed to live for that.
The house in which they stayed for three days was a large brick home with a front hallway and two fireplaces. Loretta admired it covertly. She thought the lady of the house—an angular, thin, nervous woman involved in church work—was very elegant even when she wore slacks, always a lady, never condescending. She wore a large diamond on her finger. In fact, the lady seemed shy and hopeful when she talked with her “guests,” especially her colored guests, as if opening herself to judgment by them. She spoke repeatedly of the “spirit of the times.” She spoke of the tragedy of the ghetto, of the crime of the slumlords; she wore her hair cut short, she shook her head often, agreeing or disagreeing, making herself heard. Her husband wore glasses and was said to be a dental surgeon. Loretta had never heard this term before. She thought the two of them were a wonderful couple, living in so wonderful a home, eager to whip up batter for thirty pancakes at a minute’s notice, and very generous with towels.