Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (6 page)

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
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“It's all right now. This guy isn't going to kick in. In fact, he just got a little bit of a cut in the belly and they don't know who cut him, so you can stop worrying.”

I went back and spread the news around and we began to smile a little. There was a sudden change in the attitude of the state troopers; they became courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, just as the book says they are, those fine gray guardians of the law and the people of the sovereign state of New York, and the big brass of them came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder, nice and warm and friendly, and said,

“Look, Fast, what we want now is to get your people out of here, and we're going to get them out so that not a hair on anyone's head is harmed, and I guess you've had a tough night of it, but it's over now and you can just stop worrying. Now I want you to separate them into groups according to the town or place or resort they came from, and my troopers will drive them home in our own cars.”

(I wonder what order had come through then? From the murder rap to this, but perhaps Albany began to realize the quantity of the lousy smell arising from that hollow near Peekskill.)

I did as he said. Our people were tired and worn, but their spirits were not broken. The women were very good and very patient, and the little children began to doze now in the arms of their mothers. The first part of the nightmare of Peekskill was approaching its finish.

Things moved quickly after that, and we were shown how efficient the state police could be when they had orders to be cooperative and efficient. Car after car was loaded and driven away. In less than an hour the hollow was cleared and the men and women and children who had lived through that first horror of Peekskill were either at home or on their way home.

At the end a handful of troopers remained, myself, a Negro woman, the wife of an old friend of mine, and two white women. Since they were all three bound for Croton, they had waited for me; and I asked the troopers to stand by until I discovered whether my car was all right.

It was—and incidentally one of the few cars there that night which was not smashed beyond any hope of repair. We got into the car and drove out. I had to drive slowly since my glasses were gone, but I managed all right, and in a little while the women were home.

(It is worth noting that as we drove out of the picnic grounds, troopers were beating the underbrush for bodies; for reports of missing people had come in from all over Westchester—missing people on our side. Also, as we drove out, I saw for the first time the crazy wreckage of smashed cars along the road, and realized that those who had come to the concert and been turned away had not escaped unscathed.)

It was past midnight when I reached home and put my car in the garage and went into the house. Mrs. M——was still awake; the phone had been ringing all night, with constant inquiries about me—where I was, whether I was alive or dead. Mrs. M—— didn't say much, only,

“Thank God, you're alive.”

She didn't ask me what had happened; through the night the telephone had given her a good idea of what had happened, and the only inquiry she made was about Paul Robeson.

“I think he's all right,” I said. “I don't know yet.”

(It turned out that his car had not been able to come within a mile of the picnic grounds, and that he was safe.)

Mrs. M——looked at me, at my blood-caked shirt, at the blood on my face and hands. Then she said good-night suddenly and went up to bed. It was not pleasant to be a Negro in the Hudson River Valley that night.

I poured a drink of whisky but I couldn't touch it. I sat for a while at the kitchen table, looking at the drink, tried to taste it again but couldn't. The phone rang.

It was J—— N——, and I was a little surprised at the relief in his voice when he heard mine. He told me of his own adventures that evening, how he had been with my friend, the Negro whose wife had left the picnic grounds in my car, and how they had gone out to see if they could find the bodies at least, how they had called the hospitals nearby and located eight of our people in hospitals but were unable to get the names of all of them, how they drove past the picnic grounds when the fascists were pouring out—by some prearranged agreement, I suppose, with the authorities —and how since all was dark below, they concluded that we were gone, and how they had gone back once again, after we were out.

I was still wrapped in the awful isolation of our fight on the road and in the hollow, our separation from the world of reasonable, civilized human beings. I asked him whether people knew of what had happened in Peekskill.

“The whole world knows,” he answered.

But still it didn't seem possible. I went upstairs and looked at the children. The night light was on in my daughter's room, and she opened her eyes when I came in and smiled at me and said, “Hullo, Daddy,” and then went back to sleep.

I took my clothes off and got into a steaming hot shower.

“Well, it's done,” I said to myself, “tonight is over. Whatever else happens, tonight is over, and I'm through with Peekskill. Let them build a bridge over it.”

I was very tired, and all I wanted was to get to sleep.

Part Three

Reaction on Sunday

THE PHONE RANG AT
about eight o'clock the following morning, and I listened sleepily while one of the Mohegan Colony survivors of the night before told me that there would be a meeting on the lawn of his home at ten o'clock, and would I be there?

“I'll be there,” I said.

Rachel and Johnny were having their breakfast; the sun was shining; all was all right with the world, and what had happened the evening before was a bad dream. Bad dreams fade and become vague and unrecognizable; it was utterly and completely impossible that in this sunny, placid world of pretty houses and pleasant people and gentle summertime such a thing as I had witnessed could have been. It could have been elsewhere; it could have been in Hitler's Germany; it could not have been here. This was the America I had known and loved and written of with reverence and affection, and even the cuts and a swollen wrist were impossible contradictions in a sunny world of normalcy.

Mrs. M——said little; this was an old trouble for her people, and deep inside of her, and even though she knew so little of the night before—only confused, fragmentary bits—it was perhaps more real to her than it was to me.

When I said that I was taking Rachel with me, she asked, “Will there be more trouble?”

“Not today. Would I take her with me if there was going to be more trouble?”

“You wanted to take her last night.”

“Nobody could have anticipated last night,” I protested. “Last night was something that doesn't happen and can't happen.”

“But it happened.”

What had happened, and when and how? Rachel and I drove up to Mohegan Colony. She was wearing a pink sunsuit as a little girl should in the pleasant summertime, and I kept thinking, what had happened? And why? We drove over the same roads I had taken the night before, through the same little valleys, and Rachel chattered in her most charming and disconnected manner of a dozen different things. Had Paul sung well? And what had Paul sung? Did he pick little girls up in his arms when he sang? Her talk was full of Peekskill, her own Peekskill. Peekskill meant that Paul Robeson, who was so tall and grand, was singing his songs somewhere.

We came to Mohegan and already there were twenty-five or thirty people present, sitting on the lawn and talking of what had happened a few hours ago—but seemingly a thousand years ago. Here was a representative group of summer and year-round residents of Mohegan, Shrub Oak, Peekskill, Croton, Yorktown and many other villages in the vicinity, professionals and small business men. Here were also some of the workers who had been with me the night before, some of the young people whose lives were being threaded with fascism from the very beginning, and here were some of the women and some of the children too of last night. They sat on this lovely lawn with banks of flowers behind them, and I joined them and listened to them talk. Rachel had taken off her shoes and was racing over the lawn, trying to catch a kitten.

Their talk was uneasy and troubled. They were trying to understand what had happened, what had changed, what was the meaning of the evening before. A pervading difference had come to the place; they had to know what that difference was. Also, they were frightened; and that was most understandable, for fear came in direct proportion to recollection of the details at the picnic grounds. I guess I listened for almost an hour, trying to comprehend how it must have felt to them. Here were their homes, not mine. They were people in very modest circumstances, yet all I had to do was look around me to see what love and care and patience had been put into these places where they lived. Yet I think they sensed, all of them, that something had started which would never stop if they retreated. Mingled with all the other horror of the evening before was a stink of burning flesh, a smell of gas chambers and abattoirs, a memory of horror thrust aside, another world not ours. Small memories intruded. There had been in the ACA galleries in New York City some months before, an exhibition of undistinguished, greenish cakes of soap. They happened to have been made in Germany of human fat and ashes, otherwise they were soap. The pervadingly normal was off balance. The newspapers would write considered editorials warning that such excesses as those at Peekskill, while commendable in purpose and understandable in the light of communist actions, etcetera and ad nauseum, were nevertheless not the “American way” to handle such matters, better left to J. Edgar Hoover and Company; but not sufficiently would such editorials erase. It is hard to convince decent and good and moral people that they are indecent and bad and immoral; the world of normalcy and reason was wobbling off balance, ready to tip. But when you are underneath you have to be brave. The men and women knew that, but heroic action simply does not arise as
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayex
would have you believe.

They asked me what I thought. I was very close to a number of them, in that peculiar closeness which is the result of a struggle in common against death. “I think we have to hold a meeting today,” I said. “We can't give in to this thing. Even if on a small scale, we have to do it again today and maybe tomorrow and maybe the next day, otherwise we'll have to creep away somewhere and find a deep and dark hole for ourselves.”

Many of them had been thinking that too, but it was hard to say and harder to perform. The workers there agreed with me, but like me, they had less to lose than the folk who were rooted here with home and children. Person after person took the floor. Every objection was raised and eventually disposed of. We had no means of organizing a meeting of consequence in a few hours. Where would it be? Who would give us space? Who would take a chance on a repeat performance?

I went into the house and phoned a friend of mine, a resident of Mt. Kisco, a very brave and principled woman who has a beautiful summer place there, a small house, but with a great stretch of green lawn all around it, room enough for ten thousand people if necessary. She was home, and she knew about the night before.

“How much do you know about it?”

“I know that it was unspeakable,” she said.

“It was. It was pretty terrible. I want you to know exactly how awful it was, because a group of us are having a meeting up at Mohegan right now. We've decided to hold a protest meeting today and we need a place, and—well, I'm asking for your place.”

There was a long silence. Then she said, “How many people do you think?”

“I have no idea. Maybe a hundred—maybe five hundred. We haven't time to do anything except make phone calls and let it get around that way.”

“At what time?”

“At three o'clock,” I said.

“It's eleven now. Can you do it in four hours?”

“I don't know. But if you let us have your place we can try.”

“Let me talk to my husband,” she said. I held the phone for a minute or two, and then she was back and told me, “All right.” She wasn't happy about it. “Don't think we're not scared,” she said. “It's just the inconvenience of having to live with ourselves.”

I went back and told them that we had a place. A local trade union organizer was already laying plans for spreading word of the meeting. Westchester was broken down, village by village, area by area, with one volunteer after another taking the responsibility for a town or an area. Two of the performers from People's Artists were there, and they said they would sing. We would get some of the local Labor Party leadership to speak. We would have some kind of meeting in any case.

The trade union man turned to me and said, “Fast—would it be all right if we asked you to organize the defense?”

Would it be all right? After a decade of writing speeches, delivering them; after more than a bellyful of the literary life, it was not only all right but a singular honor. “It will be a pleasure,” I said.

“What do you need?”

“I need thirty of the toughest, hardest workers you can find in Westchester, and I want them at my house in Croton at two o'clock.”

“They'll be there.” he said.

A few minutes later we broke up and drove away. I took Rachel home and we had lunch, and an hour later the first two carloads of workers drove up. When the bulk of them had arrived, we drove to Mt. Kisco and I set up the security system, first on the main road, then on the side road to the place, and then on the entrance to the place itself. Now a dozen state troopers were on hand; but we had no assurance of which side they were on, and we made adequate preparations of our own. As it happened, the meeting went off smoothly, and the single attempt at attack by a dozen young hoodlums from Peekskill was easily driven off.

(Apparently I was not the only one who realized about then that fascist attacks upon the progressive movement, unless backed by the armed force of the state apparatus, could be easily repulsed or contained. The fact that this was realized and accepted, not only by progressives but by the Westchester County and New York State Government, accounts for the subsequent blood-bath which is better known to the world as the
Peekskill Affair
than our first isolated defense of the hollow at the picnic grounds. I will deal with that later; and I mention it now only to explain the ease with which our small but organized defense drove off the single attack at Mt. Kisco.)

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
13.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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