The Last Western (28 page)

The fire trucks could not get into the area; the black people had sealed it off.

Any minute now the mayor and governor were expected to give the order to invade the district, firing on those who tried to obstruct their efforts to bring peace.

“What’s the priest supposed to do?” the mayor asked Cardinal Powers as they surveyed the scene from the top of the Entirely New Life Insurance Company building.

“He has some way with them, Frank,” the cardinal replied, fondling his shamrock-shaped pectoral cross. “He sings, I believe, or performs in some way.”

“Sings?” said the governor. “The
South Side
is about to blow.”

The Kerry blue eyes of Cardinal Powers twinkled behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “Now, now, Governor. We must have faith. This humble black man speaks their language—has these little ways they understand.”

“Jesus,” the mayor whispered to no one in particular.

Willie was shown into the office.

The cardinal, his rich red silk robes rustling, started, almost jumped at the sight of him.

“Who’s this?” the governor asked.

Willie went to the window.

“
This
is the priest?” the mayor asked dumfounded.

The cardinal, whose episcopal motto was
Dignitas in Omnibus
, asked for a glass of water.

“Wait a minute, wait,” the governor said, snapping his fingers. “You’re the ball player. The
pitcher
.”

“Father?” said the cardinal. “You
are
a priest?”

Willie looked down at the fires, which were sending a continuous cloud of black smoke into the dusky orange sky.

“You have a plan, Father?” the mayor asked.

“Maybe you could go on TV,” the governor said. “Why, with your name… .”

Willie could see people in the streets running between the burning buildings.

“You could pitch!” the governor said. “That pitch you had!”

Willie said, “If you had a truck—with a loudspeaker—maybe we could go in.”

The cardinal held his water glass with shaking hand.

“You’re going to sing, Father? In clothes of that type?”

Willie started for the door.

“We have good singers here,” the mayor said. “Right here in Chicago—lots of them. All due respect, Father.”

“This is that pitcher,” the governor said once more to the cardinal.

Suddenly, just as Willie got to the door, the cardinal cried out. “Keep them away from the Lady!”

Willie stopped.

“Old parish—first mass—Lady of Angels,” the cardinal said, suddenly a small, old altar boy.

Willie plunged down the tall building in a fast elevator and climbed into the back of an open truck that had been commandeered by the police.

The truck belonged to the Jerry Cherry Fruit Company. There was a huge cat’s face on the door of the truck, and under the cat’s face, the slogan, JERRY’S CHERRIES ARE THE BERRIES.

“Go right into the middle of it,” Willie told the driver.

“Your circuits are blown,” said the driver, and he got out of the cab.

A crowd had gathered around the truck.

Willie, taking the microphone, said, “I need a driver to help me go and try to stop the riot. Will someone volunteer?”

The crowd fell silent. People turned away.

“Please,” said Willie, “just one man.”

A young girl edged through the crowd, a black girl of about twenty, whose face with its high cheekbones stopped Willie, froze him and held him as if something had hit him, driving a shaft through his body.

To the glossy hair, the liquid brown eyes, the sad mouth turning away, she was identical to Carolyn.

“I can’t—I can’t let you go,” he said, his lips scarcely moving.

He was bending down to her from the panel of the truck.

Where, out of so much death
?

“I can make it,” the girl said.

Even the voice—out of death, long ago
.

He stared at her, trying to make words.

“I can’t let you take the chance,” he said at last.

The girl said, “I know the neighborhood. I grew up there.”

She turned then and got into the cab. They were pulling away.

He could see only the back of her head now.

Why do you always put yourself on the bottom rung
?

The fires came up to them, the shouts were closer, they were going into the storm.

They came to a police barricade.

The mayor had radioed ahead to let the truck pass and the barricades were opened by the sullen guardsmen. A police captain waved them through with a
Good Luck
! that was just a noise.

Put all that back
, he told himself.
It is gone. Now only this, since all the rest is—all right then.

The girl pulled over to a curb at the edge of the riot area.

“There’s a public library about three blocks in. There’s a sort of park next to it. If we could get there, you could probably get them together.”

He put it back once more.

“Okay,” he said, “but why not let me take it from here?”

Without answering, she shifted the gears of the truck with a little difficulty, and then they were within the smoke and roar of the hurricane.

Something hit the roof of the cab—a thrown brick or something falling from a building.

Confused shouts rose on every side.

People were running, carrying things, looting the stores.

The truck swung into a narrow street and headed toward a knot of black youngsters who were blocking the way.

“Go home children!” Willie called into the microphone. “If your homes are burning, then go to the edge of South Shore Drive.”

Astonished at the fact of the moving vehicle, the children fell back and the truck went on.

At the corner a gasoline station blazed away, its skeleton alone still standing. It seemed to scream.

The truck turned, crawling through the smoke toward the library building.

There were many people in the street. It looked like moving day for the entire neighborhood, with some people carrying things out of tenements and others carrying things in.

The girl tapped on the window and made a rectangular motion with her hand. Willie understood.

Standing at his full height, he began to talk into the mike.

“Please, please come to the other side of the library. We will have a meeting in the park. Please come to the park. Please… .”

The faces swirled past, showing only occasional, slight surprise.

The truck reached the end of the block and turned again. No one paid any attention to it.

“Please,” Willie called, “please come to the library.” His voice carried up and down the streets. People turned momentarily to trace it, then went back to the business at hand.

When the truck had completed its rectangular route, the girl drove it into the middle of the playground and parked it near a sliding board which had rusted and worn through years ago.

Willie said
Please come to the library
a few more times, but no one took notice.

“It’s no use,” Willie called to the girl.

She pointed now to some red bulk on the other side of the library. Through the smoke Willie could see the outline of a fire truck. It had been summoned into the tenement area when the riot began and had then been abandoned.

Taking the microphone and sound equipment, Willie and the girl advanced to the truck. There were children playing on it.

“Come down,” Willie called.

The girl entered the cab of the truck and began pushing buttons on the dashboard.

Suddenly, as the last child scampered off, a ladder, making a great creaking noise, began to unfold on top of the truck.

Willie grabbed it, holding onto the mike with his free hand.

“Keep off!” he shouted to the children.

Stunned at first, they began to clap and shout as the ladder rose.

As he went up, rising above the blackened library, above the smoke, above the clustered children, the people going in and out of the tenements caught sight of him.

Arms reached out. There were cries of surprise. Jeers. Laughter.

Willie could see the girl’s brown face, upturned, getting smaller as he ascended.

Now she seemed to.wave.

“What?” he called—just as the ladder, reaching its fullest extension, snapped and shuddered, causing the whole truck to tremble.

He slipped.

A gasp came from the people as he struggled on the tip of the ladder, trying to hold on.

For the first time, the people in the library area stood still and looked.

Hanging on with one hand, holding the microphone in the other, he strained to pull himself up.

His groaning could be heard over the treetops. Windows opened. People began to move toward the truck.

As he struggled to swing his body back to the ladder, his breathing, powered by the microphone, came like a wind through the district of the riot.

For a moment he was going to fall.

An old woman screamed.

Then, delicately, he swung his body forward, then back. His foot caught a ladder rung, and held.

He hung there for a moment, his red hair flaming in the light. He looked like a hobo trapeze artist.

Someone started clapping; others took it up.

His breathing came in short gasps.

As he finally righted himself on the ladder, the crowd cheered. But then a sort of moan came from his lips. Its sound froze them.

Suddenly, between pants, his words came like slow summer thunder over the multitudes.

“… how you feel.”

He held the mike farther away and looked down and saw them coming together, looking up, and he began talking in words he had never used before and that later he would not remember saying.

“I have seen all this before—I tell you—brothers and sisters—there is no way—to come out of this—on the good side. Violence and burning never succeed.”

The crowd, swelling to a thousand or more, simply looked at him as if he had come from a star.

His voice, as he spoke, was calm, slow, patient, earnest. Some of the people said afterwards that at first they could not connect the voice with the man on the ladder.

As he spoke, he began to descend the ladder, rung by rung.

“What do you see around you?” he asked. “The destruction of evil? The end of injustice and cruelty and uncaring? No. Only the end of your homes, your neighborhood, the place where you make your community.”

“Who sent you?” someone shouted, a man of thirty at the edge of the crowd.

“What difference does that make, my brother?” Willie replied. “If I speak the truth, does it matter where I come from?”

He stood four or five steps up the ladder now.

“You’re not from the neighborhood,” cried a woman. “You don’t know what things are like down here!”

“My own neighborhood is the same,” said Willie. “And where I used to live, it was worse. So the people one day couldn’t stand it any longer. They decided to be done with injustice. But they did it violently—fighting injustice with murder and fire. So they perished, all. They died, my family, and everyone I loved.”

“We known nothing but violence since the day we was born,” a one-eyed man said in a firm voice. “The violence of the police, the violence of the landlords, the violence of the cold winters. We replyin’ to that violence now. The violent bear it away!”

The crowd shouted and cheered in encouragement of what the one-eyed man had said.

“The violent bear
what
away?” Willie shouted back. “I will tell you: the dead, their own dead among them. It is a dying people who practice violence—the violence is their death rattle!”

“They dyin’?” the same man said, pointing toward the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago.

“They are the walking dead,” said Willie. “Gray men, sepulchers full of decay, who walk in death.”

“They have the
power
—’they have the
bread!
” the one-eyed man cried.

“And you shall take these from them by burning your homes? My black brother, you have life. You have not yet wedded their death, entered the arrangements and the pacts they have formed. Your poverty is a sin upon the others, but it is not your sin. No!

“You have life yet, you have community, you have the blessed and holy freedom which cannot enter those cagelike suburbs I saw from the plane, cannot enter those great cylinder apartments I saw by the lake.

“You are together in your need, depending one upon another. You can unite as the brothers and sisters you are.

“They do not have this chance, the others. They are still in combat with each other, struggling against themselves in unseen war, which goes on continually and which kills them even as they seem to live.”

“They killed that boy for no reason,” said a youth near the truck.

“And that was a terrible wrong,” said Willie. “That calls for true justice. But don’t you see, my brother, that what you are now doing—this burning and rioting—will only bring more evil about? Soon they will move in with guns. What chance of justice do you have when that happens?”

“What chance we have anyway?” the one-eyed man shouted. “Nothin’ gonna change here.”

“And why is that?” said Willie. “Because you still think of yourselves as powerless victims, because you will not put your unity to work, because you go on telling yourselves another generation will have to do the job.”

“We are doin’ the job now! We are demandin’ justice at this moment!” a woman called.

“My sister, you are doing nothing but destroying. You are not demanding anything but tear gas, guns, tanks and death.”

The crowd had swelled now, the roaring and the shouting were dying away.

The people pressed in close to the truck, looking with curious eyes at the strange man who spoke to them.

“What are we supposed to do?” someone called.

Willie knew that he had to break things down into simple steps, though he really wanted to speak of a wild, unknown dream that flashed in his mind.

He saw the whole neighborhood as a great green place full of children. There were animals walking about. There was music. Men and women were carrying brilliant banners, singing.

“First, we must let the fire trucks in and we must see to it ourselves that there is peace throughout the area.