It was still drizzling, and the day itself was cold and handmaiden to misery. You had to walk slanting forward into the wind to make any progress. People were huddled like indeterminate clots of mucus in the doorways, and only occasionally would a hardy soul burst from under an awning to streak for other refuges. It was a nasty, unhappy day, and I was going to jail.
I hoped my agent would be in court with the bail money.
The desperation I had known at odd moments through the night, the desperation at being totally confined, had passed with my entering the wagon and its scene of freedom just beyond the grilled enclosure. But I knew that when I was hustled into 100 Centre Street it would begin again, only much worse, for then I would be in the stomach of the great inhuman processing machine of the government, not isolated (where humanity and freedom from total cynicism still existed) in one of its far-flung outposts.
We pulled up in front of 100 Centre after spiralling down through Wall Street and the heart, guts, liver & lights of the insurance, legal, bonding and stock-broking sections. I had ridden alone the whole trip, but now, as I jumped down from the truck into the waiting hands of my arresting officer, I joined a stream of sodden humanity that poured through the back-basement door into the Criminal Courts Building, the outer layer of the Tombs.
I was first remanded to the custody of a bench in a large waiting-room. There were fifteen other men, dotted back through the rows, also waiting. I tried to look at them, to study them, without seeming surreptitious. The predominance of Negroes was striking, perhaps because of the infrequency of a white face. But all of the men in the room had one thing in common: shabbiness.
These were the epidermis of society, scraped off the sidewalks and bar rails and tenement stairways and gutters of the late night and early morning. They slouched or leaned in their seats, eyes sticky with black dirt and wasted hours, merely waiting to be nudged, chivvied, harried and pushed through this seemingly too-familiar routine. I shuddered just a little to think anyone could allow himself to lose all dignity in this way. And then I caught myself, chiding myself on such naïve, provincial thinking. Men do what they can do, and when the culture asks them to be what they cannot be, they fall. These were the fallen ones, on whom pity would be not only wasted, but vilified.
My name was called from beyond a floor-to-ceiling grilled door, and my detective appeared in the shadows on the other side. “C’mon, Harlan,” he urged, and I rose.
They opened the grilled gate for me, and I was immediately surrounded by camera equipment. Great hanging booms and pedestaled shutter-boxes, coils of boa-thick rubber cable and batteries of Kleig lights. I was about to be mugged, having already been printed. My picture was about to go on file in the endless drawers of the Law. How wonderful! I felt like doing a little native dance of pleasure that now I was in the same scrapbook with “Legs” Diamond, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone and all the other folk-heroes I had watched James Cagney and Paul Muni and George Raft impersonate on the silver screen, Saturday afternoon in Painesville, Ohio. How wonderful to come twenty-six years and have reached such a pinnacle of success. You’re just bitter, I heard myself thinking, and replied very honestly: What gave you your first clue, Dick Tracy?
They sat me down on a stool. I was too low.
“Spin the seat for the dwarf,” the comedian on the other side of the camera said.
Somebody else nudged me to move, so hard I almost went sprawling. “Take it easy on him,” said my detective from the darkness. (Already I had identified him with Good and Daddy and Safety and Kindness.)
“Oh,” the cameraman drawled the word out with meaning, “is that The Author?” The detective laughed lightly, and behind me, the schmuck who was spinning the black-enameled-top stool was simpering like a fag.
So that was my stir-name. The Author.
Sound of audience reaction, mildly upheaving.
“Awright,” said the yo-yo behind me, “siddown.”
I saddown and the man with the daguerreotypes said much too loudly, “Ah, hold your chin up there, Author, were takin’ this for the next book you write…ya gonna send us a copy?”
“Why the hell don’t you stop making like Mickey Mouse and just take your little pictures, hero?” I said it and got a crack across the nape of my neck for my trouble. I started to spin on the stool, but my detective yelled, “Okay, just sit there, Ellison, and don’t give anyone any trouble.”
I saw my images of Daddy shatter. It didn’t matter who was right or wrong; Negroes hang with Negroes, Jews hang with Jews, Catholics hang with Catholics, and cops hang with cops. If blood is thicker than water, how much thicker is tin than blood?
He snapped the photos (I neglected to mention they had hung a board with numbers around my neck, suspended from a chain. It wasn’t heavy, but there is something so inhuman about being reduced to numbers that defies description. But I digress…) and my detective came over to remove the numbered slate. He needn’t have bothered. I had it off a second after the last photo was snapped.
I followed him, still clutching my little bag of almost gone goodies, and books, and we went into another room, and up a slight incline. There were twenty or twenty-five men waiting, accompanied by one or more arresting officers. They clotted in a mass near a heavy door leading to the street. The door was open, and I could see steps leading up, a black banister, the sidewalk, and a score of meat wagons. This was the transportation to the Court House building just down the street.
My officer began talking to another detective, and they discussed inconsequentialities for a time, until some invisible signal was given (I suspect it was the reaching of a group total, as other prisoners had been added to our group from the photographic section every few minutes) and we started to move out to the wagons.
It was then that my detective took out his handcuffs and snapped one of the bracelets around my left wrist. He pulled over his friend’s prisoner and hooked us together. I stared down at my manacled wrist, and suddenly felt myself trapped worse than I had at any point in the events of the past day. I tried to shake loose, but both detectives shoved me forward with my arm-partner, and we joined the regimented line of men going to court.
It was still raining, and much harder now, with a sad granite look to the sky, hard and dappled gray and infinitely oppressive. The wind caught at my face and at my coat, and it was cold, terribly cold, and not all of it was from outside. My insides were cold, as well; chilled through to the marrow, as the men ahead of us clambered into the wagon, and my chain-buddy made to follow.
He jumped slightly and gained the back of the wagon, pulling me up roughly with him. The manacle bit into my wrist. “Hey, take it easy,” I howled. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a look of such utter contempt that I was forced into silence.
I was the last one in the truck, the door was closed, and a uniformed cop climbed onto the back step, clinging to the rails on either side. He stared in at us. Most of the men paid no attention. I looked at them, trying to decide whether they were good men gone wrong, victims of circumstance like myself, or hardened criminals.
Aside from the derelicts, with their shabby clothes and fetid breath, we all looked pretty much the same. If they had been mass murderers, I would not have been able to tell them from offenders with too many parking tickets. Abruptly, the wagon lurched forward, and we moved out of the little alley behind 100 Centre.
I could not see where we were going, for the cop on the back step blocked the view, but it didn’t matter, for as we were shifting and moving on our benches, trying to get some small measure of ease for gluteus muscles doomed to hard cots and metal slabs, my cuff-buddy turned to me and asked: “What’d they get ‘choo for?”
I studied his face for a moment, seeing little more than lank hair and a wide elfish mouth, cold and empty gray eyes and ears that stood out a trifle too much from his head. I was about to answer, when I realized that his white shirt was not merely ripped and dirty, as I had at first supposed—there is a tendency not to look at y
our companions too closely, when in jail—but was torn down across his left arm, exposing it to the shoulder, and the dark brown stains all across the face of the shirt were most certainly blood. Great clots of blood. Hardened spittle strings of blood. Spatters and patches and gouts of blood. He was dappled in blood, from neck to waist. I swallowed heavily.
“I, uh, I had a gun,” I said simply.
There was no desire in me to engage this man in conversation. I had the most terrible feeling that he was one of the true animals, not merely a schmuck like me, who had about as much right being in a paddy wagon as Porky Pig. I did not want to say anything to him. And that was why I heard myself asking, “Why’d they arrest you?”
He sneered down at me, and his nostrils flared, giving him an oddly Semitic appearance for a moment.
“I done somethin’ worsen you with that gun,” he said. And then he clucked like a chicken. “Heh, you betcha I did…” He clucked again several times, and I supposed he was laughing.
I felt a nudge in my side, and a whiskery derelict on my right leaned in to pass his foul breath over my face as he confided, “He used a hammer onna little girl; he’s a mean sonofabitch, don’t get too close to him, or he might go nuts again.”
I turned back to my companion, staring at him like some new species of life. My curiosity got the better of me, and I asked him, “Is it true you killed a girl with a hammer?”
His head snapped around and his nostrils flared wide again. “Whadjoo say? Whadjoo say t’ me?” He looked like he wanted to club me down. I asked him again, very quietly, trying to soothe him, because I was scared witless, but didn’t see how I could ignore his red-rimmed eyes, staring at me accusingly.
“Yeah, I used a hammer onner, yeah I did, sure! All I wanted was a little piece of trim, just a little pieceah ass, at’sall. Little bitch, fourteen anna bitch, it’s her fault I’m here, an’ they gonna slap me away, frigging buncha scuts…” and he lurched forward, not at me, but across the aisle at two men I had assumed were also prisoners, though they were better-dressed than the rest of us.
The two men across the way moved as one, grabbing the hammer-murderer by a shoulder with their free hands, dragging their bracelet-partners partway with them.
They shoved the maniac back in his seat, and I realized they were plainclothes detectives.
I sat there, chained to a hammer-murderer who had killed a fourteen-year-old girl because she wouldn’t “give out with a little trim,” and felt my composure slipping…
My agent had to be there with the bail money, he just had to be. The night in the cell, the black smudges on my hands, the pushing and shoving and moving like cattle in a pen, it had to end at the court, or I might not be able to write about it.
I might go as mad as the poor sonofabitch chained to me. And right then I knew what James Baldwin meant when he said we are all brothers. There was much of that killer in me, and much of my innocence in him.
We were brothers, chained together by more than steel links.
Suddenly, I did not want to know my fellow man any better.
TWELVE
From then on, reality was someone else’s word. What buildings I was trundled through, what men I saw passing before me and what others with whom I was cuffed, all of them and all of it were a mottled, technicolored panorama. None of it was really happening. It had been a lark, to a great degree, this being arrested, going to court, spending the night in a clean cell in the Village.
And the half dozen cliché remarks: “Well, this’ll be a good way to get experience for a book, Author.” That had been part of it, too. I had had stature. But what stature is there in being chained to a mad-eyed animal who had used a hammer on a fourteen-year-old girl? What kind of importance is there in seeing another human being so gone in his own sickness and depravity that even pity is wasted on him?
I tried to consider what it might be like for a young teen-ager, perhaps one of the kids from the Barons, pinched for rumbling or breaking and entering. What would it be like for him to be chained to a man such as my murderer? Would he feel the same sophisticated revulsion or would his be merely a naïve sidewise-shine at a glamorous figure, a real honest-to-God murderer? I could see the fallacy of a system where the relatively innocent and the monstrously guilty are thrown together. My concern was not for myself, nor even my delicate sensibilities—more often bruised than I care to admit—but simply for the thought of all the ones gone before, and all the ones yet to come, who would ride in my seat in this paddy wagon, with the darkness closing in around them.
My thoughts ceased as we arrived at the Criminal Courts Building, Borough of Manhattan. (To this day I am unsure whether we were taken to another part of the same building, or into another structure entirely. Part of the eeriness and feeling of entrapment results from the sameness of the surroundings. You begin to feel you have been “inside” this great beast for a very long while, time ceases, all walls are the same wall, all eyes dead, and all hope lost. You are in the belly of the creature, and it treats you like any other morsel of food. Hope does not run in the beast’s bloodstream.)
We were chivvied out of the wagon, and my arresting officer took a position to the rear of the men herding us. They began pushing and shoving us into a doorway, using phrases like, “Awright, c’mon, heyyy-up! Move on there, c’mon, tchip-tchip, move, g’wan…” almost as though we were cattle or pigs, moving down a running-trough. I expected at any moment one of them would stop us with a simple, “Whoahh!”
Then came a series of twisting corridors, white walls, large barred rooms, through which we moved, till we came into a hallway, and I saw a freight elevator.
The operator was waiting, and the entire group of us herded together. We went upstairs smoothly, the operator talking to one of the harness bulls about some minor official and his new demands on the Force. We reached our destination. (There was no way for me to identify what floor we were on: we’d been so tightly crowded that I was facing the back of the elevator.)
I managed to elbow around, and we moved out, each of us chained together, and myself being dragged slightly by the man with the hammer.
As we passed down a very narrow neck-corridor, I saw a beefy and florid, bored and disgruntled-looking guard in uniform, at the end of the passage. He stood by a lectern-like wooden desk, with a huge ledger open on its top. I had an insane vision of myself signing in as a guest, or registering to vote, or making an appearance on “What’s My Line?”
Q: ARE YOU SELF-EMPLOYED?
A: Yes, I’m a gun-runner and narcotics addict.
Q: ARE YOU BIGGER THAN A BREAD-BOX?
A: Here in prison, I’m smaller than a maggot.
Q: DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY?
A: Why should I; no one makes me happy!
I didn’t go on with that train of thought. In that direction lies madness, I suspect. But as we came abreast of the guard, my detective took me aside, and unlocked the cuffs. He took the metal bracelets off the maniac, too, and nudged him back into the stream of prisoners passing the desk, rounding a corner, and disappearing.
“This is my Author,” said the plainclothesman who had arrested me the day before. “He’s a good kid, so take care of him.”
“So…” said the, guard, his little brown eyes coming alive for the first time, “this is The Author I’ve been hearing about on the radio…”
For a moment it didn’t sink in.
Radio? What radio? The police wave-length?
“What radio?” I asked him. My detective passed me smoothly into the guard’s custody.
“Oh, there was something on the early morning news about your being picked up,” my detective said. He didn’t elaborate, and I moved off with the guard in something of a trance.
It was the first suspicion I’d had that my arrest was not strictly confined to the police and the few chosen friends Linda would tell. It was the first suspicion I’d had that someone had spilled the news to the papers.
I wasn’t to learn till much
later who it had been.
Around the corner was a cell, a minor bullpen, a waiting station for the accused before they were taken to the courtroom for arraignment. It was now eight-thirty, and as yet I’d had nothing to eat, save what I’d been able to gorge down from my bag of goodies. I had emptied the paper bag into the pockets of my trench coat, and they bulged with toothbrush, paste, and books, I still felt scuffy, and unclean, and as the turnkey opened the cell door, I asked him, “Is there any place I can wash up?” He didn’t even bother to answer. His keys on their chain were massive, and in his massive hand they seemed to fit. I walked into the cell, and got the once-over from my teammates. The cell was packed, with tired men, unhappy men, spade cats and ofay, handsome men and warped-looking creatures, sick guys lying on their sides on the cement floor, and jaunty swinging hipsters with knees pulled up on the bench, chewing gum and laughing to themselves. It was an early morning roust, a gathering of all the flotsam from Manhattan’s streets of the night before. This was the weekend wastebasket dumpings, the guys who had had too much to drink, and the ones who had not had enough to spend, and the ones who came up short, one way or another. Like me. I walked around the big cell, stepping over some of the inmates who were catching up on their sleep, busy stacking Z’s in preparation for the scenes later in the day.
It was bigger than it seemed, perhaps thirty-five feet long by ten feet wide, with a little heavy metal dividing partition at one end that screened the urinal from the sight of the others. A sink was fastened to that partition, and if you pushed the button hard enough, water came.
There were already twenty-five or thirty men in the cell, and they had taken all the space on the metal bench. So I stood. And walked. I paced, and hung my hands outside the bars (Why outside, why always outside?) and studied my fellow inmates. I saw all the faces, and I wondered which were the guilty and which the schmucks who had stepped over the line just enough to incur some cop’s wrath. They certainly seemed a rabid lot…but then, how did I look to them?