By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
March 1965
Selma, Alabama – United States Highway 80, between Montgomery and Selma, is fifty miles of asphalt with a yellow dividing line and a roadside of deep green grass which runs for long stretches without being cluttered with advertising signs. United States Highway 80 does not run through buying country. It runs through farmland that has been picked clean and through swamps with squirrel-colored moss trees standing dead in the muddy water.
And it runs past black pigs rooting in the grass and white-faced cattle sleeping against wire fences. Past tin-roofed gas stations sitting on red dirt side roads, and a Negro in a leather cap holding a brown mule while it grazes.
It is a lightly traveled, deserted road with cars cutting down it at 70 miles and hour, their blue-and –orange license plates saying, “Heart of Dixie.” United States Highway 80 is a road in the middle of the State of Alabama, and today everybody in the world looks at it.
Today, a march is to start down the highway. It is a march of fat young white girls in sneakers and raincoats, wearing glasses, and Negro boys in windbreakers. Of sloppy white men in beards and needing haircuts, who peer through thick glasses. And also of white ministers, Roman collars loose on their thin necks, and white nuns in flowing robes, and college students and bleak-faced old Negroes. And there will also be people like Ralph Bunche and the Reverend Martin Luther King, and Army troops will be all around them while they walk out and put the civil rights movement in the South onto Highway 80.
The world will be watching it all. But there may be very little to see outside of people walking. For the march is through down country, where a screen door shutting is the only noise of a day, and where excitement runs slowly through people.
“Where you from?”
“New York.”
“Uh-huh,” he grunted. He was about forty and wearing a brown rain jacket. He was looking out the window of Byrd’s Lucky Dollar truck stop. His hands were stuck into his pockets and his mouth was busy chewing gum. He chewed and looked out of the window for a long time without saying anything.
“New Yawk,” he finally said. He chewed the gum some more.
“Hope somebody kills me ‘fore I go to new Yawk again.”
“What’s this thing tomorrow look like to you?” he was asked.
“Circus.”
He walked over to the door, chewing his gum. He looked out the window.
“I give up goin’ to the circus when I was a keed.”
His friend sat on a stool with his back to the counter. This one had on a plaid shirt and dungaree pants and work boots. His scalp showed white through the close crew cut. He had high, tanned cheekbones and narrow eyes and he took cupped-hand drags on his cigarette.
“What I resent is all these taxes bein’ used to pay for this thing tomorrow,” he said. He scraped his boots on the rough cement floor.
Byrd’s Lucky Dollar has a low ceiling of wooden beams, tables and chairs at one end, and this small lunch counter at the other end. On top of the counter were tow napkin-holders, three bottles of catsup, a jar of chili peppers, and two bottles of McIlhenny’s Hot Sauce, New Iberia, La.
Then the man by the window began to talk without turning his head. “Last night over in Lowndesboro, this nigger woman comes over to a white lady and she says, ‘Who’s the boss of the country, Johnson or Governor Wallace?’ That’s just what this nigger woman said. Now they gonna give her a vote.” He chewed his gum again.
“All they got to be is twenty-one, black, and breathing, and they vote same’s any man.”
“Do you figure there’ll be any trouble on this march?”
“Don’t expect so. Ev’time you hit one of them people, you help ‘em.”
“Well, I hope to hell there won’t be – ”
“Mind your tongue,” the crew cut sitting on the stool said. “We civilized people here. We don’t allow anybody talkin’ like that in front of our women.” He looked around. The one waitress was at the stove in the kitchen behind the counter. “You damnyankees come down here and think you can talk the way you please in front of our women. Well, jes’ remember we civilized here.”
He took another cupped-hand drag on his cigarette. The one at the window kept chewing his gum and looking out at the empty road.
“Well, I’ll see you.”
The one on the stool said nothing.
“Be no trouble tomorrow,” the one at the window said. “We got other things to do besides watchin’ niggers with their white girl friends walk ‘long the side of the road.”
Lowndesboro sits a mile off Highway 80. It is a cluster of new red brick ranch houses and old plantation homes with twelve pillars at the front and busted cars and broken yellow school buses in the overgrown back yards. There is also the Lowndesboro Baptist Church and J.C. Green General Merchandise, tin-roofed and whitewashed wood with high wooden steps leading up to it.
Leroy Greene, who is Negro, stood in the doorway of his long wooden shack, which sits in the mud by the side of the road. In the windowless room behind him, five small kids, boys and girls dressed alike in filthy smocks, ran around.
“I tell you,” Greene said, “I don’t know much about the march. See, I work in Montgomery. This here is in Selma and I don’t get over there too much.”
“Well, do you think it will help?”
He stared out at the road – that blank stare Southern Negroes carry like a lunch basket.
“I don’t know he said. “That thing is over in Selma, and I work in Montgomery.”
“Well, don’t you think Martin Luther King is right?”
“Martin Luther King, oh, he right.”
“Do you know that he’s leading the march and that it’s a big thing?”
He stared.
“You mean you don’t know all about the march? It’s only just down the road from you.”
“It in Selma,” he said. “I don’t work in Selma.”
A dull-faced woman came and stood beside him. She had on a flowered blouse, wrinkled black Bermuda shorts, and red bowling shoes that had no laces in them.
“All these kids yours,” she was asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s your wife’s name, Leroy?”
“She’s not my wife,” he said. “I just stays with her.”
The kids came out and crowded behind their legs. On the porch an old black and white spotted dog lifted his head, then dropped it back on his paws and fell asleep again. And Leroy Greene and the woman with the five dirty kids stood in the doorway and looked at the mud in front of the wooden shack, and the march on United States Highway 80, the march for the right of Americans to vote, was a million miles away from them. And what the South, and the North, does to a person who has black skin was set forever on their dull faces.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
Are You John Lennon?
By Jimmy Breslin
New York Daily News
December 1980
That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.
Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.
And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at Eighty-second Street and Columbus Avenue and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, One West Seventy-second Street.”
Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.
Another patrol car was there ahead of them, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.
“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.
“In the back,” one of the cops said.
Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood.
Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car.
Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Avenue, and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.
Now responding to the call, “Man shot, One West Seventy-second,” Jim Moran, a forty-five-year-old policeman, pulled up in front of the Dakota and Tony Palma and Herb Frauenberger put this guy with blood all over him in the backseat.
As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”
Moran was driving with Bill Gamble. As they went through the streets to Roosevelt Hospital, Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in the back nodded and groaned.
Back on Seventy-second Street, somebody told Palma, “Take the woman.” And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the backseat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital. She said nothing to the two cops and they said nothing to her. Homicide is not a talking matter.
Jim Moran, with John Lennon in the backseat, was on the radio as he drove to the hospital. “Have paramedics meet us at the emergency entrance,” he called. When he pulled up to the hospital, they were waiting for him with a cart. As Lennon was being wheeled through the doors into the emergency room, the doctors were on him.
“John Lennon,” somebody said.
“Yes, it is,” Moran said.
Now Tony Palma pulled up to the emergency entrance. He let the woman out and she ran to the doors. Somebody called to Palma, “That’s Yoko Ono.”
“Yeah?” Palma said.
“They just took John Lennon in,” the guy said.
Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.
Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.
[I was home in bed in Forest Hills, Queens, at 11:20 p.m. when the phone and television at once said Lennon was shot. I was dressed and into Manhattan, to Roosevelt Hospital, the Dakota, up to the precinct, grabbed a cop inside, back to the Dakota, grabbed a cop outside, and to the Daily News. I wrote this column and it made a 1:30 a.m. deadline. I don’t there is anybody else who can do this kind of work this quickly.
I particularly like the mistake in it. Moran from Williams Avenue in the Bronx. It is Willis Avenue.
As I can’t use a terminal – the keys don’t make the noise I need and require too light a touch for me to make them work – a desk clerk put my typewritten copy into the terminal. He made the Williams Avenue error. I sure as hell know Willis Avenue, having had a drink in every bar there when it was Irish and having centered a whole novel on the street now that is Puerto Rican. The mistake and the reasons for it are testimony to the speed with which it was done.]
New York Daily News
December 1980
That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.
Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.
And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at Eighty-second Street and Columbus Avenue and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, One West Seventy-second Street.”
Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.
Another patrol car was there ahead of them, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.
“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.
“In the back,” one of the cops said.
Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood.
Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car.
Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Avenue, and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.
Now responding to the call, “Man shot, One West Seventy-second,” Jim Moran, a forty-five-year-old policeman, pulled up in front of the Dakota and Tony Palma and Herb Frauenberger put this guy with blood all over him in the backseat.
As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”
Moran was driving with Bill Gamble. As they went through the streets to Roosevelt Hospital, Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in the back nodded and groaned.
Back on Seventy-second Street, somebody told Palma, “Take the woman.” And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the backseat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital. She said nothing to the two cops and they said nothing to her. Homicide is not a talking matter.
Jim Moran, with John Lennon in the backseat, was on the radio as he drove to the hospital. “Have paramedics meet us at the emergency entrance,” he called. When he pulled up to the hospital, they were waiting for him with a cart. As Lennon was being wheeled through the doors into the emergency room, the doctors were on him.
“John Lennon,” somebody said.
“Yes, it is,” Moran said.
Now Tony Palma pulled up to the emergency entrance. He let the woman out and she ran to the doors. Somebody called to Palma, “That’s Yoko Ono.”
“Yeah?” Palma said.
“They just took John Lennon in,” the guy said.
Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.
Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.
[I was home in bed in Forest Hills, Queens, at 11:20 p.m. when the phone and television at once said Lennon was shot. I was dressed and into Manhattan, to Roosevelt Hospital, the Dakota, up to the precinct, grabbed a cop inside, back to the Dakota, grabbed a cop outside, and to the Daily News. I wrote this column and it made a 1:30 a.m. deadline. I don’t there is anybody else who can do this kind of work this quickly.
I particularly like the mistake in it. Moran from Williams Avenue in the Bronx. It is Willis Avenue.
As I can’t use a terminal – the keys don’t make the noise I need and require too light a touch for me to make them work – a desk clerk put my typewritten copy into the terminal. He made the Williams Avenue error. I sure as hell know Willis Avenue, having had a drink in every bar there when it was Irish and having centered a whole novel on the street now that is Puerto Rican. The mistake and the reasons for it are testimony to the speed with which it was done.]
Friday, January 26, 2007
It's An Honor
By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
November 1963
Washington - Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.
It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. "Polly, could you please be here by eleven o'clock this morning?" Kawalchik asked. "I guess you know what it's for."
Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him.
"Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday," Metzler said.
"Oh, don't say that," Pollard said. "Why, it's an honor for me to be here."
Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging.
Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.
"That's nice soil," Metzler said.
"I'd like to save a little of it," Pollard said. "The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I'd like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I'd like to have everything, you know, nice."
James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it.
"He was a good man," Pollard said.
"Yes, he was," Metzler said.
"Now they're going to come and put him right here in this grave I'm making up," Pollard said. "You know, it's an honor just for me to do this."
Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.
Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacquleline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.
Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.
There was mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground. This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take.
The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking. In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is president and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often.
Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House.
"What time is it?" a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch.
"Twenty minutes past three," he said.
Clifton Pollard wasn't at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn't know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards.
"They'll be used," he said. "We just don't know when.”
“I tried to go over to see the grave," he said. "But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn't get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I'll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it's an honor."
New York Herald Tribune
November 1963
Washington - Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.
It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. "Polly, could you please be here by eleven o'clock this morning?" Kawalchik asked. "I guess you know what it's for."
Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him.
"Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday," Metzler said.
"Oh, don't say that," Pollard said. "Why, it's an honor for me to be here."
Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging.
Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.
"That's nice soil," Metzler said.
"I'd like to save a little of it," Pollard said. "The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I'd like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I'd like to have everything, you know, nice."
James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it.
"He was a good man," Pollard said.
"Yes, he was," Metzler said.
"Now they're going to come and put him right here in this grave I'm making up," Pollard said. "You know, it's an honor just for me to do this."
Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.
Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacquleline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.
Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.
There was mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground. This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take.
The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking. In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is president and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often.
Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House.
"What time is it?" a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch.
"Twenty minutes past three," he said.
Clifton Pollard wasn't at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn't know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards.
"They'll be used," he said. "We just don't know when.”
“I tried to go over to see the grave," he said. "But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn't get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I'll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it's an honor."
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Harlem Notebook - I
By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
Sometime between 1963 and 1967
Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went through the doors and into the hot Sunday-afternoon sun. Outside the church, the Salem Methodist Church on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the people's voices were drowned out by the whir of low-pressure tires on taxicabs which kept passing by. On a weekend, taxicabs are a poor man's game and Harlem is filled with them.
Tyler was in a tuxedo. He was nervous, but he spoke in a quiet voice. He is twenty-four and in the Marines and he has a neat mustache and a strong-looking neck.
"I've got about seven months to go," he was saying. "I'm at Camp Lejeune. That's in North Carolina."
"Where are you going to live when you get out?"
"We have an apartment."
"Is it a neighborhood like this?"
"Well, you know. It's a neighborhood."
"What are you going to do when you get out?"
"I don't know. I'll be a real-estate agent, I suppose. Why are you asking?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was just wondering how you figure out your life or your future or whatever it is on a day like this when you happened to be colored."
"I don't want to know about that now," he said. Then the bride smiled and said thank you and they went out the door and onto the church steps.
There are three small trees, the leaves fresh green, on the sidewalk in front of the church. The well-dressed guests were by the trees and the limousines were parked at the curb behind them. It was pleasant. But the rest of it, the part Tyler didn't want to think about on his wedding day, was there too. Across Seventh Avenue, in the ground floors of the old stone tenements, were the Harlem Swan Fish and Chips, the Dunbar Pawnbrokers, Bea's Hair Styles, and the Vogue Beauty Shop. On the side street, 129th Street, the red sign of the Elks Imperial Bar and Grill showed on a building sitting between two tenements. Across the street from the Elks are the buildings where, the police believe, the young kids who claim they are going to kill white people this summer sit on stoops and stare at police cars.
And from the windows of the stone tenements, the old people leaned out and looked at the young married couple coming out of the church. Tyler did not look up at them while he helped his wife into the limousine, and he did not look at the hock shop of the Elks Club sign, but it was all right in front of him, standing like the couple of hundred years of history and attitudes that this young guy was walking out of church to face.
In Harlem, words like "history" and "attitudes" come down to plain things. To the paycheck mostly. The paychecks Harlem people earn, and their dissatisfaction with being poor and living in slums, produce the speculation that this will be a summer of racial violence in Harlem. But these same paychecks are why general violence almost certainly won't develop at all. The same Harlem people who have the whites frightened about a race riot are too busy working for a paycheck and too tired from years of being poor to start running in the streets.
In Harlem, from 96th Street to 119th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the East River, the average family income is $3797. From 110th Street to 126th Street, between Eighth and Park Avenues, it is a little higher, $4141. In the lower part of Manhattan, where white people live, income in the area from 14th to 30th Streets, between Eighth and Third Avenues is $6892. And, if you want a real contrast, from 63d Street to 96th Street, between Fifth and Third, a
family averages $15,305.
Money makes the way of life, and low money shows everywhere you go in Harlem. In a supermarket on 135th Street, in the middle of a Saturday rush, the totals on the cash registers keep showing $7.30 and $10.58 and $5.97 while, at the same time, in a supermarket in Baldwin, Long Island, the figures were $28.60 and $41.12.
In the neighborhood taverns, the bartender puts three thick-bottomed shot glasses on the wood in front of you when you order a drink. All these local bars sell drinks on a two-for-one or three-for-one policy. In Maxie's Cafe, on 153d Street and Eighth Avenue, rye, gin, vodka, or run shorties are sold for $.50 per single, two for $.90 and three for $1.20. Cognac and better Scotch sell for $.60 a drink. All chasers except water are $.10 extra. Bar etiquette requires the bartender to place the three shot glasses down and the customer names his game, a single or two for $.90 or three for the $1.20.
The low money shows most in the people. There are 450,000 people living in Harlem, and the talk, and the crime-rate figures, have other people afraid of the Harlem people and afraid to go into the area. The crime figures are high, and the brutality of the crimes of late turns your stomach. But 450,000 people do not run around committing crime. Last week, to see Harlem a little better, and to examine this place some have said is just a big time bomb waiting to go off on a hot summer night, we moved into Harlem. James Putnam, a fifty-four-year-old man who is retired from the Pennsylvania Railroad after thirty-eight years as a business car steward for Davis G. Bevans, the railroad's vie-chairman, was kind enough to put us up in his three-room apartment.
For walk-around company we had James Russell, who calls bartenders "say, my man," and who drinks orange slings as a rule, but V.O. in the Pink Angel, where, he explains, he is "in kind of tight with the barkeep." Mr. Russell is a former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer, and, upon being properly urged, he demonstrates a good, short left hook and gives the impression that he once was a stiff puncher. Also with us was a person known, where he comes from, as "the
First Division." He is called this because of the firepower he keeps in his pocket. He was along because of many warnings from outsiders that Harlem is a dangerous place for a white these days. In five days and nights we didn't draw much more than a stare because people in Harlem are too busy living like people any place else.
This does not mean that trouble isn't there. Pick up a paper and you see that. James Putnam points out that Wednesday-evening services at his church, St. Mark's Methodist on 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, have poor attendance because so many women have been mugged right in front of the church. Throughout Saturday night, riding in an unmarked Police Department crime combat car out of the 32d Precinct, Sergeant Frank Weidenburner kept advising us, at each stop, to get into the building in a hurry because the bad trouble comes from the rooftops.
On 129th Street between Seventh and Lenox, which is the area where a small group known as the Blood Brothers stored ammunition for a war on the police, and where the few remaining members still hang out, Weidenburner became insistent. His car was answering a radio call which said somebody in the tenement at 155 West 129th had called police for help.
"Any call on that block can be trouble," he said. When his unmarked car pulled up, two radio cars were there, and two more pulled in later.
"Don't hang around out there," he said when we got out. "Come inside the building with us."
Inside, a man of about twenty-five was stretched unconscious on a second-floor landing. Two women were with him. They said the man had been beaten and stomped on by kids from up the block. Then the women began to fight over who was going to nurse the beaten man.
You see things like this. And then, with bright morning sunlight coming in from the patio, you sit and talk to a woman like Jane Booker. Bright, and almost overly sensitive because of her intelligence, she sits and has a glass of orange juice in her new high-middle-income apartment, and she snaps out the things that bother a woman who is colored in New York.
"Why is it," she says, "that every time I get into a taxicab downtown, the driver turns around and asks me, 'What's the number today?' Just because I'm not white, does that mean I have to know the numbers game? Does he do that with any white woman that gets into a cab?"
And over all of this, over the people and their habits and their misery, runs the layer of arguments. The Negro crime rate is high, the whites claim. The police brutality must stop, or it will provoke violence, the Negro leaders say. A Negro comedian gets on television and says some nonsense about a conspiracy in the white press to suppress the Negro. The words in the arguments are big and important-sounding and in the meantime Harlem sits there, with 450,00 people who have no heritage in life except poverty. And with this long, hot summer coming up that nobody talks about, some of them may step out and do things. But only some of them. And then only maybe.
"Riot?" the bartender was saying in Maxie's. "Who's got time for that? People have to go to work every day. Doesn't anybody know that?"
New York Herald Tribune
Sometime between 1963 and 1967
Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went through the doors and into the hot Sunday-afternoon sun. Outside the church, the Salem Methodist Church on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the people's voices were drowned out by the whir of low-pressure tires on taxicabs which kept passing by. On a weekend, taxicabs are a poor man's game and Harlem is filled with them.
Tyler was in a tuxedo. He was nervous, but he spoke in a quiet voice. He is twenty-four and in the Marines and he has a neat mustache and a strong-looking neck.
"I've got about seven months to go," he was saying. "I'm at Camp Lejeune. That's in North Carolina."
"Where are you going to live when you get out?"
"We have an apartment."
"Is it a neighborhood like this?"
"Well, you know. It's a neighborhood."
"What are you going to do when you get out?"
"I don't know. I'll be a real-estate agent, I suppose. Why are you asking?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was just wondering how you figure out your life or your future or whatever it is on a day like this when you happened to be colored."
"I don't want to know about that now," he said. Then the bride smiled and said thank you and they went out the door and onto the church steps.
There are three small trees, the leaves fresh green, on the sidewalk in front of the church. The well-dressed guests were by the trees and the limousines were parked at the curb behind them. It was pleasant. But the rest of it, the part Tyler didn't want to think about on his wedding day, was there too. Across Seventh Avenue, in the ground floors of the old stone tenements, were the Harlem Swan Fish and Chips, the Dunbar Pawnbrokers, Bea's Hair Styles, and the Vogue Beauty Shop. On the side street, 129th Street, the red sign of the Elks Imperial Bar and Grill showed on a building sitting between two tenements. Across the street from the Elks are the buildings where, the police believe, the young kids who claim they are going to kill white people this summer sit on stoops and stare at police cars.
And from the windows of the stone tenements, the old people leaned out and looked at the young married couple coming out of the church. Tyler did not look up at them while he helped his wife into the limousine, and he did not look at the hock shop of the Elks Club sign, but it was all right in front of him, standing like the couple of hundred years of history and attitudes that this young guy was walking out of church to face.
In Harlem, words like "history" and "attitudes" come down to plain things. To the paycheck mostly. The paychecks Harlem people earn, and their dissatisfaction with being poor and living in slums, produce the speculation that this will be a summer of racial violence in Harlem. But these same paychecks are why general violence almost certainly won't develop at all. The same Harlem people who have the whites frightened about a race riot are too busy working for a paycheck and too tired from years of being poor to start running in the streets.
In Harlem, from 96th Street to 119th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the East River, the average family income is $3797. From 110th Street to 126th Street, between Eighth and Park Avenues, it is a little higher, $4141. In the lower part of Manhattan, where white people live, income in the area from 14th to 30th Streets, between Eighth and Third Avenues is $6892. And, if you want a real contrast, from 63d Street to 96th Street, between Fifth and Third, a
family averages $15,305.
Money makes the way of life, and low money shows everywhere you go in Harlem. In a supermarket on 135th Street, in the middle of a Saturday rush, the totals on the cash registers keep showing $7.30 and $10.58 and $5.97 while, at the same time, in a supermarket in Baldwin, Long Island, the figures were $28.60 and $41.12.
In the neighborhood taverns, the bartender puts three thick-bottomed shot glasses on the wood in front of you when you order a drink. All these local bars sell drinks on a two-for-one or three-for-one policy. In Maxie's Cafe, on 153d Street and Eighth Avenue, rye, gin, vodka, or run shorties are sold for $.50 per single, two for $.90 and three for $1.20. Cognac and better Scotch sell for $.60 a drink. All chasers except water are $.10 extra. Bar etiquette requires the bartender to place the three shot glasses down and the customer names his game, a single or two for $.90 or three for the $1.20.
The low money shows most in the people. There are 450,000 people living in Harlem, and the talk, and the crime-rate figures, have other people afraid of the Harlem people and afraid to go into the area. The crime figures are high, and the brutality of the crimes of late turns your stomach. But 450,000 people do not run around committing crime. Last week, to see Harlem a little better, and to examine this place some have said is just a big time bomb waiting to go off on a hot summer night, we moved into Harlem. James Putnam, a fifty-four-year-old man who is retired from the Pennsylvania Railroad after thirty-eight years as a business car steward for Davis G. Bevans, the railroad's vie-chairman, was kind enough to put us up in his three-room apartment.
For walk-around company we had James Russell, who calls bartenders "say, my man," and who drinks orange slings as a rule, but V.O. in the Pink Angel, where, he explains, he is "in kind of tight with the barkeep." Mr. Russell is a former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer, and, upon being properly urged, he demonstrates a good, short left hook and gives the impression that he once was a stiff puncher. Also with us was a person known, where he comes from, as "the
First Division." He is called this because of the firepower he keeps in his pocket. He was along because of many warnings from outsiders that Harlem is a dangerous place for a white these days. In five days and nights we didn't draw much more than a stare because people in Harlem are too busy living like people any place else.
This does not mean that trouble isn't there. Pick up a paper and you see that. James Putnam points out that Wednesday-evening services at his church, St. Mark's Methodist on 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, have poor attendance because so many women have been mugged right in front of the church. Throughout Saturday night, riding in an unmarked Police Department crime combat car out of the 32d Precinct, Sergeant Frank Weidenburner kept advising us, at each stop, to get into the building in a hurry because the bad trouble comes from the rooftops.
On 129th Street between Seventh and Lenox, which is the area where a small group known as the Blood Brothers stored ammunition for a war on the police, and where the few remaining members still hang out, Weidenburner became insistent. His car was answering a radio call which said somebody in the tenement at 155 West 129th had called police for help.
"Any call on that block can be trouble," he said. When his unmarked car pulled up, two radio cars were there, and two more pulled in later.
"Don't hang around out there," he said when we got out. "Come inside the building with us."
Inside, a man of about twenty-five was stretched unconscious on a second-floor landing. Two women were with him. They said the man had been beaten and stomped on by kids from up the block. Then the women began to fight over who was going to nurse the beaten man.
You see things like this. And then, with bright morning sunlight coming in from the patio, you sit and talk to a woman like Jane Booker. Bright, and almost overly sensitive because of her intelligence, she sits and has a glass of orange juice in her new high-middle-income apartment, and she snaps out the things that bother a woman who is colored in New York.
"Why is it," she says, "that every time I get into a taxicab downtown, the driver turns around and asks me, 'What's the number today?' Just because I'm not white, does that mean I have to know the numbers game? Does he do that with any white woman that gets into a cab?"
And over all of this, over the people and their habits and their misery, runs the layer of arguments. The Negro crime rate is high, the whites claim. The police brutality must stop, or it will provoke violence, the Negro leaders say. A Negro comedian gets on television and says some nonsense about a conspiracy in the white press to suppress the Negro. The words in the arguments are big and important-sounding and in the meantime Harlem sits there, with 450,00 people who have no heritage in life except poverty. And with this long, hot summer coming up that nobody talks about, some of them may step out and do things. But only some of them. And then only maybe.
"Riot?" the bartender was saying in Maxie's. "Who's got time for that? People have to go to work every day. Doesn't anybody know that?"
Friday, January 19, 2007
Dies the Victim, Dies the City
By Jimmy Breslin
New York Daily News
November 1976
They were walking along in the empty gray afternoon, three of them, Allen Burnett, Aaron Freeman, and Bill Mabry, Burnett the eldest at seventeen, walking up Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and singing out Muhammad Ali rhymes into the chill air. As they reached the corner of Kosciusko Street, it was Allen Burnett’s turn to give his Ali rhyme:
“AJB is the latest. And he is the greatest..”
“Who AJB?” one of them said.
“Allen J. Burnett.”
They were laughing at this as they turned the corner onto Kosciusko Street. The three wore coats against the cold. Burnett was in a brown trench coat; Freeman, a three-quarter burgundy leather; and Mabry, a three-quarter beige corduroy with a fox collar. A white paint stain was on the bottom at the back of Mabry’s coat. Mabry, walking on the outside, suddenly was shoved forward.
“Keep on walking straight,” somebody behind him said.
Billy Mabry turned his head. Behind him was this little guy of maybe eighteen, wearing a red sweater, dark pants, and black gun. Aaron Freeman, walking next to Mabry, says he saw two others besides the gunman. The three boys kept walking, although Mabry thought the guy in the red sweater had a play gun.
“Give me the money.”
“I don’t have any money,” Allen Burnett said.
The guy with the gun shot Allen Burnett in the back of the head. Burnett pitched into the wall of an apartment house and went down on his back, dead.
The gunman stood with Allen Burnett’s body at his feet and said that now he wanted coats. Billy Mabry handed back the corduroy with the paint stain. Freeman took off his burgundy leather. The gunman told the two boys to start running. “You don’t look back!” Billy Mabry and Aaron Freeman ran up Kosciusko Street, past charred buildings with tin nailed over the windows, expecting to be shot in the back. People came onto the street and the guy in the red sweater waved his gun at them. The people dived into doorways. He stuffed the gun into his belt and ran up Bedford Avenue, ran away with his new coats. Some saw one other young guy with him. Others saw two.
It was another of last week’s murders that went almost unnoticed. Allen Burnett was young. People in the city were concentrating all week on the murders of elderly people. Next week you can dwell on murders of the young, and then the killing of the old won’t seem as important.
Allen Burnett’s murder went into the hands of the Thirteenth Homicide Squad, situated on the second floor of a new police building on Utica Avenue. The outdoor pay phone in front of the precinct house has been ripped out. The luncheonette across the street is empty and fire-blackened. At first, a detective upstairs thought the interest was in a man who had just beaten his twenty-two-month-old child to death with a riding crop. That was unusual. Allen Burnett was just another homicide. Assured that Burnett was the subject, the detective pointed to Harold Ruger, who sat at a desk going through a new manila folder with Burnett’s name on it. Ruger is a blue-eyed man with wavy dark-brown hair that is white at the temples. The twenty-four years he has spent on the job have left him with a melancholy face and a soft voice underlined with pleasant sarcasm: “They got two coats. Helluva a way to go shopping. Looks like there was three of them. That leaves one guy out there without a coat. I’ll look now for somebody who gets taken off for a coat tonight, tomorrow night, the next few days.”
In a city that seems virtually ungoverned, Harold Ruger forms the only municipal presence with any relationship to what is happening on the streets where people live. Politicians attend dinners at hotels with contractors. Bankers discuss interest rates at lunch. Harold Ruger goes into a manila folder on his desk and takes out a picture of Allen Burnett, a young face covered with blood staring from a morgue table. In Allen Burnett’s hand there is a piece of the veins of the city of New York.
Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice. People run from murder and fire. Those who remain express their fear in words of anger.
“Kill him for nothing, that’s life – that’s what it is today,” his sister Sadie was saying. The large, impressive family had gathered in the neat frame house at 30 Van Buren Street. “He was going into the army in January and they kill him for nothing. That’s the leniency of the law. Without capital punishment they do what they want. There’s no respect for human life.”
Horace Jones, an uncle, said, “The bleeding hearts years ago cut out the electric chair. When the only way to stop all this is by havin’ the electric chair.”
“We look at mug shots all last night,” Sadie said. “None of them was under sixteen. If the boy who shot Allen is under sixteen, there won’t be any picture of him. How do you find him if he’s under sixteen? Minors should be treated the same as everybody else. Equal treatment.”
“Electric chair for anybody who kills, don’t talk to me about ages,” Horace Jones said.
The dead boy’s mother, Lillian Burnett, sat with her head down and her hands folded in her lap.
“Do you think there should be an electric chair,” she was asked.
“I sure do,” she said, eyes closed, head nodding. “Won’t bring back my son, but I sure do want it. They tied up three old women and killed them. If they had the electric chair I believe they would rob the three women, but I don’t believe they would kill them.”
The funeral was held two days later, at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church, on Washington Avenue. A crowd of three hundred of Allen Burnett’s family and friends walked two by two into church. Walked erectly, solemnly, with the special dignity of those to whom suffering is a bitter familiarity. Seeing them, workmen in the street shut off pneumatic drills. Inside the church, the light coming through the doorway gleamed on the dark, polished wood of the benches. The casket was brought in by men walking soundlessly on the carpeted floor. The doors were closed, an organ sounded, and people faced the brutality of a funeral service; a baby cried, a woman rocked and screamed, a boy sobbed, a woman fainted, heads were cradled in arms. The mother screamed though a black veil, “My baby’s gone!”
An aunt, Mabel Mabry, walked out of the church with lips trembling and arms hugging her shaking body. “My little nephew’s dead,” she said loudly. They find the ones who killed him. I’m tellin’ you, they got to kill them too, for my nephew.”
The city government, Harold Ruger, just wants to find the killer. Ruger was not at the funeral. “I got stuck in an eighty-floor elevator,” he said when he came to work yesterday. “I was going around seeing people. We leave the number, maybe they’ll call us. That’s how it happens a lot. They call.” He nodded toward a younger detective at the next desk. “He had one, an old man killed by a kid. Information came on a phone call, isn’t that right, Al?”
“Stabbed eight times, skull fractured,” the younger detective said.
Harold Ruger said, “What does it look like you have? Nothing. And he gets a phone call, see what I mean? The answer is out there and it will come.” His finger tapped the file he was keeping on the murder of Allen Burnett.
New York Daily News
November 1976
They were walking along in the empty gray afternoon, three of them, Allen Burnett, Aaron Freeman, and Bill Mabry, Burnett the eldest at seventeen, walking up Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and singing out Muhammad Ali rhymes into the chill air. As they reached the corner of Kosciusko Street, it was Allen Burnett’s turn to give his Ali rhyme:
“AJB is the latest. And he is the greatest..”
“Who AJB?” one of them said.
“Allen J. Burnett.”
They were laughing at this as they turned the corner onto Kosciusko Street. The three wore coats against the cold. Burnett was in a brown trench coat; Freeman, a three-quarter burgundy leather; and Mabry, a three-quarter beige corduroy with a fox collar. A white paint stain was on the bottom at the back of Mabry’s coat. Mabry, walking on the outside, suddenly was shoved forward.
“Keep on walking straight,” somebody behind him said.
Billy Mabry turned his head. Behind him was this little guy of maybe eighteen, wearing a red sweater, dark pants, and black gun. Aaron Freeman, walking next to Mabry, says he saw two others besides the gunman. The three boys kept walking, although Mabry thought the guy in the red sweater had a play gun.
“Give me the money.”
“I don’t have any money,” Allen Burnett said.
The guy with the gun shot Allen Burnett in the back of the head. Burnett pitched into the wall of an apartment house and went down on his back, dead.
The gunman stood with Allen Burnett’s body at his feet and said that now he wanted coats. Billy Mabry handed back the corduroy with the paint stain. Freeman took off his burgundy leather. The gunman told the two boys to start running. “You don’t look back!” Billy Mabry and Aaron Freeman ran up Kosciusko Street, past charred buildings with tin nailed over the windows, expecting to be shot in the back. People came onto the street and the guy in the red sweater waved his gun at them. The people dived into doorways. He stuffed the gun into his belt and ran up Bedford Avenue, ran away with his new coats. Some saw one other young guy with him. Others saw two.
It was another of last week’s murders that went almost unnoticed. Allen Burnett was young. People in the city were concentrating all week on the murders of elderly people. Next week you can dwell on murders of the young, and then the killing of the old won’t seem as important.
Allen Burnett’s murder went into the hands of the Thirteenth Homicide Squad, situated on the second floor of a new police building on Utica Avenue. The outdoor pay phone in front of the precinct house has been ripped out. The luncheonette across the street is empty and fire-blackened. At first, a detective upstairs thought the interest was in a man who had just beaten his twenty-two-month-old child to death with a riding crop. That was unusual. Allen Burnett was just another homicide. Assured that Burnett was the subject, the detective pointed to Harold Ruger, who sat at a desk going through a new manila folder with Burnett’s name on it. Ruger is a blue-eyed man with wavy dark-brown hair that is white at the temples. The twenty-four years he has spent on the job have left him with a melancholy face and a soft voice underlined with pleasant sarcasm: “They got two coats. Helluva a way to go shopping. Looks like there was three of them. That leaves one guy out there without a coat. I’ll look now for somebody who gets taken off for a coat tonight, tomorrow night, the next few days.”
In a city that seems virtually ungoverned, Harold Ruger forms the only municipal presence with any relationship to what is happening on the streets where people live. Politicians attend dinners at hotels with contractors. Bankers discuss interest rates at lunch. Harold Ruger goes into a manila folder on his desk and takes out a picture of Allen Burnett, a young face covered with blood staring from a morgue table. In Allen Burnett’s hand there is a piece of the veins of the city of New York.
Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice. People run from murder and fire. Those who remain express their fear in words of anger.
“Kill him for nothing, that’s life – that’s what it is today,” his sister Sadie was saying. The large, impressive family had gathered in the neat frame house at 30 Van Buren Street. “He was going into the army in January and they kill him for nothing. That’s the leniency of the law. Without capital punishment they do what they want. There’s no respect for human life.”
Horace Jones, an uncle, said, “The bleeding hearts years ago cut out the electric chair. When the only way to stop all this is by havin’ the electric chair.”
“We look at mug shots all last night,” Sadie said. “None of them was under sixteen. If the boy who shot Allen is under sixteen, there won’t be any picture of him. How do you find him if he’s under sixteen? Minors should be treated the same as everybody else. Equal treatment.”
“Electric chair for anybody who kills, don’t talk to me about ages,” Horace Jones said.
The dead boy’s mother, Lillian Burnett, sat with her head down and her hands folded in her lap.
“Do you think there should be an electric chair,” she was asked.
“I sure do,” she said, eyes closed, head nodding. “Won’t bring back my son, but I sure do want it. They tied up three old women and killed them. If they had the electric chair I believe they would rob the three women, but I don’t believe they would kill them.”
The funeral was held two days later, at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church, on Washington Avenue. A crowd of three hundred of Allen Burnett’s family and friends walked two by two into church. Walked erectly, solemnly, with the special dignity of those to whom suffering is a bitter familiarity. Seeing them, workmen in the street shut off pneumatic drills. Inside the church, the light coming through the doorway gleamed on the dark, polished wood of the benches. The casket was brought in by men walking soundlessly on the carpeted floor. The doors were closed, an organ sounded, and people faced the brutality of a funeral service; a baby cried, a woman rocked and screamed, a boy sobbed, a woman fainted, heads were cradled in arms. The mother screamed though a black veil, “My baby’s gone!”
An aunt, Mabel Mabry, walked out of the church with lips trembling and arms hugging her shaking body. “My little nephew’s dead,” she said loudly. They find the ones who killed him. I’m tellin’ you, they got to kill them too, for my nephew.”
The city government, Harold Ruger, just wants to find the killer. Ruger was not at the funeral. “I got stuck in an eighty-floor elevator,” he said when he came to work yesterday. “I was going around seeing people. We leave the number, maybe they’ll call us. That’s how it happens a lot. They call.” He nodded toward a younger detective at the next desk. “He had one, an old man killed by a kid. Information came on a phone call, isn’t that right, Al?”
“Stabbed eight times, skull fractured,” the younger detective said.
Harold Ruger said, “What does it look like you have? Nothing. And he gets a phone call, see what I mean? The answer is out there and it will come.” His finger tapped the file he was keeping on the murder of Allen Burnett.
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