One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (13 page)

Later, when Stalin’s Soviet Union invited twenty-two African Americans to travel to Moscow for what turned out to be a comically ill-conceived plan for a movie about black Americans, Hughes turned the project into an often-solitary round-the-world trip. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, he sent dispatches from the front as a correspondent for the Baltimore
Afro-American
newspaper. But, with Hollywood closed to black writers, Hughes has scrambled with hit-and-miss projects.

At one point, in desperation, he conceived of a plan to write about whites under a pseudonym. In the depths, he wrote that he would “withdraw from the business of authoring and try to take up something less reducing to the body and racking to the soul,” adding, “I’ll just let ART be a sideline like it used to be in the days when I was a busboy and was at least sure of my meals.”
¹

From the same wellspring of despair, he wrote “Genius Child,” a poem whose central line was: “Nobody loves a genius child.” And whose concluding line was “
Kill him—
and let his soul run wild.”

Now, owing Battle his labor and out of excuses for avoiding the project, Hughes submits to the confines of the white-clapboard shanty, rising early and working late, letting Battle talk, and questioning him to elicit facts. Tony runs in and out. Florence serves the two men meals. She is more distant than gracious. Her husband is pouring his heart into a book and a movie that will tell his life story, and she worries that the renowned writer at his side will break it.

THE DAY ARRIVED:
June 28, 1911.

Battle dressed in freshly ironed clothing. Florence wanted to be sure he looked his best. She had helped him score well on the exam, and now she stood with Jesse, grown tall at five years old, and sent Battle forth from the apartment with their love.

On the way to the train, he moved among whites who called him an invader and in front of buildings whose owners had covenanted to bar African Americans. Hostility screamed from the
Harlem Home News
: “Heart of Harlem Now to Be Invaded by Negroes.”

When a building a short distance from Battle’s address rented to blacks, the front page blared: “Black Invaders Capture White Flat in 121st St.”
²

Downtown, the police department’s domed headquarters was designed to convey the majesty of the law. Battle strode into a marble-clad reception hall. Forty-four recruits awaited swearing in by Commissioner Waldo. He told the group that “he was glad to have a representative of the black race on the force.”
³
Later, the commissioner spoke to Battle more ominously. “You will have some difficulties but I know you will overcome them,” Waldo said, implicitly acknowledging that, on the streets and in the stationhouses, Battle would be beyond official protection.
⁴

Difficulties
. Daunting though the word was, Battle granted Waldo good faith. Putting pencil to lined paper, he noted that Waldo was a North Carolinian transplanted from Beaufort and wrote with characteristic charity, “He was a high class wealthy man who was of sterling character without racial bias.”
⁵

The department assigned Badge No. 782 to Battle. As he put it, he had become a bluecoat while he was still a redcap. He had a resignation to submit, and he headed uptown. He arrived to find the street in front of Grand Central in full bustle, whites in fine clothing and black men hopping to in hats crowned with red felt. His colleagues of six years had not yet gotten the word. Through all the months of study, he had kept his counsel, and Battle wanted to speak first to Chief Williams, but on this day of all days, the Chief was off on personal business. Battle diverted to give notice to the stationmaster. Uncertain how this first white man to hear the news would respond, Battle was heartened to receive congratulations.

Still, he was compelled to admit that he had no idea how the venture would work out. Rather than quit outright, he asked for a six-month leave, just long enough to cover the probationary period during which the department could wash out any rookie. The stationmaster granted Battle an indefinite leave with an invitation to return at any time.

Word leaped along the platforms, and Battle walked out into a throng. “All the boys, all the Red Caps, stopped carrying the bags,” he remembered. “Things were all tied up for a while, to see this first black policeman in Greater New York.”

Then Battle headed home to Florence. Again, the news traveled faster than he did. “When I reached my apartment that evening a large group of friends had gathered. And every night thereafter for weeks, people, even complete strangers, kept dropping in to offer congratulations. I received more invitations to address clubs and church groups than I could fill in a year.”

Battle and Florence confronted how life had changed. For starters, they would have less money. Battle had earned as much as $300 a month in tips as a redcap; a rookie police officer’s salary was $66 a month. To survive, the Battles would draw on money he had banked for just this purpose. Then, too, a police officer worked long hours for days on end. Florence, at the age of twenty-two, would have to care for Jesse largely on her own.

While the police department’s terms and conditions were onerous, they applied equally to everyone who joined the ranks. Battle was as prepared as a man could be to take them on, along with a burden unknown to anyone else on the force: that of upholding the black man’s honor. Under the benighted standard of the time, he would be judged a credit to his race or he would confirm that African Americans did not have what it took to succeed.

The following morning Battle reported to the police training school. He felt fairly treated among the probationers, but he discovered that the white establishment was hardly approving of his appointment. The
New York Times
captured the sentiment in a condescendingly racist editorial. Conceding that some African Americans “have the requisite size, strength and courage, and some of them have the intelligence necessary” for police service, the paper predicted that “where a white policeman would be resisted once in making arrests, the black policeman would be resisted four or five times.”

Still, the
Times
concluded, “New York has in its population enough Negroes to give them a right to claim this sort of ‘recognition.’”
⁶

The training course extended for thirty days. Battle practiced shooting a gun, drilled on rules and regulations, and met all the physical demands. Along the way, he bought a uniform for twenty-eight dollars at a shop called H. Levy & Son, surprising the proprietor by paying with a fifty-dollar bill rather than on credit, because, Battle told Hughes, “I always tried to pay my way ahead, not behind.”

When schooling was completed, the department scattered the new men among the city’s eighty stationhouses. Battle’s destination was the Twenty-Eighth Precinct on West Sixty-Eighth Street, quarters of the head crackers who patrolled his old neighborhood, San Juan Hill, well known to him as the fortress where cops had forced black men to run a gauntlet of clubs in the siege of 1905. If the higher-ups were out to do Battle in, they chose well. The New York Police Department had no tougher place.

* * *

JESSE SLEPT IN
the shadows of the small apartment while Florence prepared breakfast. The air of a summer of rains and high heat was heavy, even this early. Battle got “tubbed and scrubbed,” and then he put on the uniform that designated authority to enforce the law.

In summer, the department discarded its tailed and high-buttoned coat for a blue blouse cut from light fabric. The year-round constants were trousers seamed with white cord, a belted holster with revolver, and a gray helmet whose shell offered some protection from bricks tossed off tenement roofs, known then as Irish confetti.

Battle kissed his son and his wife, and then he went toward his just due with the confidence that had carried him from childhood, with faith in the goodness of human nature, and undaunted by the
difficulties
that rose with the sun.

From a distance, Battle saw the crowd in front of the stationhouse on the morning when the gawking began. “There’s the nigger,” some shouted as he drew close. He heard white voices say, “Why, he looks just like Jack Johnson,” and, “He’s a burly bastard,” while some African Americans called out, “Ain’t he a fine looking man?”

Battle betrayed no sign that anything unusual was taking place. He needed to appear ordinary so that, in time, he might be accepted as one more cop. The stationhouse door was thickly hewn, as if designed to repulse attack. Inside, an elevated platform—the desk—dominated the central room. From behind its ramparts, a lieutenant oversaw the execution of the laws, as well as compliance with the orders that governed a police officer’s life.

The lieutenant pointed Battle to a room where officers congregated before starting patrol. It was here or in a space nearby that blacks had been made to run the gauntlet. Battle offered a greeting that said he expected inclusion: “Good morning.”

The group responded with coordinated silence. Soon, a sergeant announced assignments. He gave Battle a post in a well-to-do neighborhood along Riverside Drive between West Seventy-Ninth and West Eighty-Sixth Streets. Then Battle joined a march outside. A superior officer inspected uniforms and equipment. Some in the crowd again referred to him as a “nigger.” When the order came to disperse, he set off, trailed by spectators.

The silence of Battle’s fellow cops was more than a statement of racial scorn. It was also a weapon. Every man among them had been schooled in policing by his elders. How to make an arrest, how to wield a nightstick, how to avoid the attention of internal affairs “shoo-flies”—stationhouse and street-corner tutorials were critical to survival.

The black man’s failure deeply wished for, Battle would have no help as he broke in under a scorching sun. His beat followed Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson River and passing beneath elegant manses and apartment buildings. Across eight long hours, without a moment for lunch, Battle showed only toleration to the unbelieving who flocked to see a black police officer. Friends from the Marshall Hotel, the musical comedy team of Dan Avery and Charles Hart, “drove by in a red roadster to see if all was well with me,” as Battle remembered. Finally, hungry, wet with perspiration, and exhausted, he gave his memo book to a sergeant for signature at 4 p.m. and headed home.

“There he is,” a voice cried, as Battle came up out of the subway in Harlem. Fellow blacks swarmed him. He found the apartment filled with friends who wished him well as he ate the dinner he had been waiting for. When finally they were gone, he recounted the day for Florence and Jesse, and, using her nickname of endearment, Florence told her husband, “Jesse, I am proud of you.”

THE NEXT DAY
and the day after that and the day after that, Battle returned to the silence and the staring. His primary duty involved directing horse-drawn vehicles and early automobiles, while standing on display as if he were a circus performer.

“Everybody came by, and when the street cars would pass, the motormen and conductors would clang the bells, and the conductor would say, ‘Look over there at New York’s first colored policeman.’ When the sightseeing buses would come along, they would announce loudly to the people, ‘Here’s New York’s first colored policeman,’” he remembered.

“Then the colored fellows that drove these open barouches for people on sightseeing tours would bring the people down from the cabarets in different parts of the city, particularly from Harlem and Baron Wilkins’ night club, and charge them a dollar each to take them to see this colored policeman.”
⁷

Battle made his first arrest after a white man failed to stop his horse and wagon in front of a school, as Battle had commanded, and then refused to accept a summons from a black officer, questioning even that Battle was truly a cop. He arrested his first black person at about 2 a.m. one Sunday morning in Central Park.

“I saw what appeared to be a beautiful brown-skin girl in furs and a picture hat. Because it was unusual in that section for women to be out alone at that time of night, I approached and asked her destination,” Battle remembered. “A masculine voice answered, ‘Just walking.’ It was a man in female garb, painted and powdered. Although he begged me not to do so, my duty required that I take him to the station.”

Battle felt well treated by the whites he encountered and made interesting friends, among them Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement, and Charles Thorley, proprietor of the House of Flowers, who had given Chief Williams a start as his doorman.

“Many a dawn,” Battle said, he saw Thorley “galloping by on his saddle horses in the park. He used two horses, changing mounts for the second part of his morning ride. After he got to know me, he always spoke and sometimes stopped for a chat.”

Blessed with a sharp eye, Battle took detailed note of his surroundings. And, despite all the
difficulties
, he found much to appreciate. Years later, Hughes would tell the story this way: