Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (4 page)

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
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It was night time now. And now, for the first time, I understood clearly the temper of that gang out there, and for the first time I realized that it was very likely that all of us would die there that evening. Our lines leaned against the truck, half of us bleeding, all of us sobbing, our clothes torn, our scalps open, our faces scarred —and already it seemed that the nightmarish battle had gone on forever.

“How much more?” someone asked.

They were screaming at us in a full frenzy now, a frenzy of sick hate and bitter frustration. They were full of the taste of death. “You never go out!” they screamed. “Every n—— bastard dies here tonight! Every Jew bastard dies here tonight!”

And the reporters watched calmly and took notes, as did the justice agents.

I looked at my watch because it seemed that forever had gone by. It was only a little after eight o'clock, not much more than an hour and a half since I had kissed my daughter and told her that I would listen to Paul's songs and tell her all about them. She had asked, “Would he sing the one for me”? She meant “Water boy—water boy—,” the song he had once sung to her, swinging her back and forth in his great arms. And now they were screaming for the killing of him or of ourselves. It does not seem real now that the knowledge and certainty of death should have been in each one of the thirty-six of us, but it was. There was no way out, and we were bloodied and soon we would not be able to fight anymore. I know I faced that. It appeared a curious way to die, there in that little corner of Westchester, but it was reasonable and there was a logic within it, and I know that when I spoke to the others afterwards, they felt that same logic.…

Three Negro girls came running up from the hollow. It was all right, they said, it was all right because our six down below had beaten off the attack and scattered the hoodlums into the night. But their eyes widened and their bodies grew stiff at what was up there on the road, the screaming noise of it. The attack was starting again.

“Lie down in the truck,” I told them. “It's all right, all right, all right here and down below, but you can't go back now. Lie down in the truck.” I had seen shadowy figures moving over the hills on our left.

Then we were fighting again, and again they were clawing at the huge Negro worker in our front row. They came with their rocks and their fence posts and their knives, and again we beat them off. They had such weight and so little courage that we beat them off and drove them back and back, until there was a good thirty feet clear before us, and once again we fell back to lean panting and bleeding against the truck. But now there were three who could no longer stand, and we helped them into the truck where they lay quietly. We had no means of first aid, no medicine nor bandages and no time for such.

Now there was a sudden brilliant glare and the hills to our left stood sharp and black against a yellow background. There was a moment of silent cessation, and one of our men leaped up on the truck and cried,

“A cross is burning!”

We could only see the glare, but the symbolic meaning was not lost upon us. In this sweet land the movement had been rounded out; the burning cross, the symbol of all that is rotten and mean and evil in our land had blessed us. Our night was complete, and we would do well to kneel before the new patriots.

We didn't kneel. We locked arms, the better to support each other, and as that whole great mob rolled down upon us, well over a thousand of them now, we began to sing,

“We shall not—we shall not be moved!

We shall not—we shall not be moved!

Just like a tree that's standing by the water,

We shall not be moved!”

Consider the scene: there are only thirty-two of us now, with our backs against the truck, and we and the road across the embankment in front of us are bathed in the glare of headlights and spotlights that have been rigged from the road. All the rest is in darkness, and now into the light come the “new Americans,” brandishing the fence rails they have stripped from along the road, swinging their knives and billies, a solid mass of them back to the public highway, rolling down to turn in for the kill and the great lynching, which is their peculiar privilege in a land which provides freedom for all except those who do not wholly agree with the gentlemen in Washington. It is a full hour and a half now since the fighting began, and there has been time enough for the news of what is happening at Peekskill to be wired to every corner of the nation. The press is here to see the great lynching, every New York newspaper, their crack writers and photographers, but not one policeman and not one state trooper—not one.

So they came in for the kill, and the singing stopped them. You would have had to be there to understand that; those of us who were there understood it when it happened; it was no miracle to us, but logical and reasonable—for I think that at that point all of us stopped being afraid and stopped praying for a way to get out of that hellish valley. We simply stood there in our three lines, arms locked, singing that fine old song which, more than any other, has become the anthem of the democratic forces of America.

Many, many times, for as long back as I can remember, I have heard people singing that old hymn, but I never heard it sung as it was sung that night, swelling out over the lunatic mob, over the road and over the hills, full of the deep rich voices of men who had fought so well. It was a moral enigma to the Legion heroes. They saw a line of Negroes and whites, arms locked, ragged and bloody, standing calmly and singing—and the singing stopped them. They halted a dozen feet from us, and their screaming stopped. They stood there in silence, watching us and listening to our song and trying to understand what sort of people we were—that has always been a difficult thing for them to understand. And then one of them threw the first rock.

They didn't want to touch us now, or they couldn't, so they turned to the rocks. They moved back and gave themselves more space for throwing. First a rock here and there, then more, and then there was the heavy music of them as they beat a tattoo against the metal side of the truck. We continued to sing. A rock as big as a grapefruit thudded into the belly of the Negro next to me, the one who had fought so well when they clawed onto him. He doubled up and rolled over—and we helped him back to the truck. A Negro lad of seventeen or so received a rock the size of a baseball full in his face; one moment his face, and then a bleeding mass of broken teeth and smashed nose. The white man on my left was struck in the temple and collapsed without a sound. You didn't have to look; when you heard the fleshy thud, the sound of bone and skin breaking, you knew that someone was hit and that there was one fewer to stand on his feet and face the mob, and it was happening very quickly. The volley of rocks had become a rain, and it was just a miracle that so many missed us and crashed against the truck behind us. First I counted how many of us were hit, and then I stopped counting and dropped back to the truck and put my head together with one of the seamen.

“Five minutes more of this,” he said, “and we'll be finished.” A rock had caught him in the groin and he stood bent over, his face wracked with pain.

I had a notion, something I remembered from the war, and I told him about it quickly. What mattered were the women and children down in the hollow. We would do them no good if we became a heroic pile of corpses up here on the road. As long as we could hold this section of embanked road, it was quite proper for us to stay here. But it was now evident that we could no longer hold the road, and therefore it was incumbent upon those of us still standing to get down to the hollow, where perhaps we could hold the mob off a while more. Minutes mattered, for we still believed that at any moment the state troopers would turn up. Yet if we broke our formation they would be on us and we wouldn't have a chance. Now suppose, I suggested, that we use the truck as a moving shield, a reverse tank tactic, that we make a group in front of it, running slowly, while the driver takes it down to the hollow in low gear.

“Let's try it,” he agreed. “We can't stay here.”

While I explained it to the truck driver the seaman whispered our plan along the line. Suddenly the motor roared.

“All right—let's go!”

There were about twenty or twenty-two of us still on our feet. We dashed around the truck as it lurched forward, backed onto the embankment, and then swung onto the road. And then, because the driver had forgotten to switch on his lights—an understandable error, considering that night—he drove off the road, missed it completely, and sent his truck lurching and careening across the meadow into the night. It was the one bit of insanity needed to complete the nightmare that evening had become. One moment the truck was with us; the next, we were standing exposed on the road with the howling mob flowing down on us.

We ran down into the hollow, and as long as I live I will remember watching, as I ran, the careening truck, going off across the meadow, in and out of ditches, over humps, for all the world like a heavy tank. How the driver kept it upright, how he avoided breaking every spring, I don't know—but later he was able to drive the truck and the wounded men in it, as well as two badly beaten fascists he picked up, to the local hospital.

Now we ran, and we held together as we ran. As we swung around the curve of the road below I saw the amphitheatre for the first time since I had driven in earlier that evening, the platform with the women and children on it and huddled close to it, the two thousand chairs standing empty and unaware of the audience which had never arrived and never would, the table of songbooks and pamphlets—and all of it bright as day in the brilliant glare of floodlights. These floodlights lit the whole of the meadow, and as we swung around at the bottom we saw the mob of screaming, hate-maddened fascists break over the hillside and pour down into the light.

For just a moment we stood there trying to gain our breath, shoulder to shoulder for the warmth and comfort of each other, watching the front of that mob break onto the flat. I don't know what the others thought, but it is most likely that we all thought something of the same nature. To me it was the end, which had been inevitable through the night, and I didn't care much anymore. I knew only hate and loathing for the unreasonable facsimiles of human beings who were bent, with such sick intentness, upon our death, and who had sought us out here to pursue the filthy legend that was drummed into them by radio, press and church. Didn't they have families, homes, ways of decency, any good, any warmth —that they sould dedicate themselves to this kind of horror? What else did I think? I thought that as long as we were able we should keep them away from our women and children, and it must have been that the others of the handful of us who were left thought the same thing—for we knew what we were going to do and we did it without any consultation or deliberation.

We drove into them. Close together, like a wedge, we charged into that mob and fought our way, half-insanely, deep into their heart. This was our moment, our one moment. Until then we had defended and held and taken what they had to offer, but now we were as full of hate as they, and our hate took hold of us, and if the odds were one thousand to twenty-one, then you can take good cheer; for this was a measure of the courage of this kind of swine when they have no guns in their hands and when they are not backed by the police. For after two or three minutes the mob broke and ran; they didn't like the taste of it in reverse, and the odds were large but not large enough, and they broke and ran—and all of us who were there saw it and will attest to it.

For my own part, I saw it narrowly. A man, screaming filth, swung a fence post at me; the same Negro who had stood in our front line until a rock in his stomach doubled him up, caught the fence post and tore it aside, and then I closed with the man and we went down with others on top, and it was very close quarters for striking, but I crawled out somehow, hearing a voice yelling,

“They're killing Fast, God damn it!”

They weren't killing me, but I lost my glasses there. I came out with my shirt in shreds and blood all over me, but already they were running and we had a brief taste of how good the offensive feels, even in our microcosmic nightmare of a war. And a few of us had enough presence of mind to shout,

“Hold back! Hold back! Get to the platform!”

We ran to the platform and linked arms once again—very tired now, very hurt—not one among us unhurt—and stood there, swaying a little, bleeding, but making a tight semi-circle with the women and children behind us. And the women and the girls, thinking that we were dealing with human kind cut out of the mold of human kind, began to sing the
Star Spangled Banner
, but the patriots of the burning cross had no respect for this particular song, and while the girls sang they picked up their courage and rushed us again, and again we beat them off.

At that point the lights went out. Someone had broken the line from the generator, and the sudden change accentuated the blackness of the night. While we fought, the lights went out, and then, when we had beaten them off, they seemed to go crazy in an utterly pointless frustration. They attacked the chairs. We couldn't see them, but through the blackness we heard them raging among the folding chairs, hurling them about, splintering and smashing them. It was not only senseless, it was sick—horrible and pathological and sick, as so much of their behavior was that night.

Then one of them lit a fire about thirty yards from our semicircle around the platform. A chair went on the fire, then another and another, then a whole pile of chairs—chairs which did not belong to us but to the Peekskill businessman who owned the picnic grounds. Then they discovered our table of books and pamphlets, and then it was, that to crown our evening, there was re-enacted the monstrous performance of the Nuremberg book burning which had become a world symbol of fascism. Perhaps the nature of fascism is so precise, perhaps its results on human beings are so consistently diseased, that the same symbols must of necessity arise; for standing there, arms linked, we watched the Nuremberg memory come alive again. The fire roared up and the defenders of the “American” way of life seized piles of our books and danced around the blaze, flinging the books into the fire as they danced. We were half in the darkness but they were lit by the fire in such a manner as to suggest a well-set stage, where this dance, so symbolic of the death of civilization, was performed after careful rehearsal.

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
6.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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