The Street Sweeper (40 page)

‘So many children?’

‘So many and not enough,’ the man from the Joint answered.

‘Yes, of course, but … right here it’s –’

‘They are in class. It’s a school. And we’re getting more all the time. We got some more just yesterday.’

‘Where have they been? Why are they coming only now?’ Henry Border asked.

‘The violence flushes them out.’

‘What do you mean “violence”?’

‘What do you mean “what do I mean violence”?’

‘You mean by the Nazis?’

‘No, the Nazis were defeated last May, that’s … fourteen months ago. I’m talking about two weeks ago.’

‘What are you talking about? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘A young boy, a Polish boy …’ The man from the Joint stopped in disbelief at the story he was himself about to tell. He took a deep breath and continued. ‘He’d run away from his parents and by all accounts he’d been gone three days. When he came back home people, his parents, wanted to know where he’d been. They were furious with the boy. So he told them the Jews had kidnapped him and taken him to a cellar where he’d had to watch fifteen other Polish boys, Christians, murdered by them so that they could use their blood to make matzah. The story got around very quickly and a group of men in the uniform of the Polish military herded the rump of the town’s returned Jews into one place and then, egged on by some members of both the local militia and the local clergy and – and I’ve heard there was also a factory director newly installed by the Socialists – these Jewish survivors fresh from Hitler’s camps were thrown to a wild crowd baying for blood said to be about five thousand strong.’

‘A pogrom? Even now?’ Henry Border asked incredulously.

‘Yes.’

‘This was two weeks ago, a pogrom two weeks ago? Where?’

‘In Kielce. Most of the Jews who managed to get away went to Zeilsheim but we have a few here including a couple of orphaned children. In fact, quietly, look. Come here. If you can look without drawing attention to yourself, look into that classroom where the children are sitting. You see that little boy on the end?’

Henry Border looked in through the window where the children were facing side on to him and looking at their teacher. He saw a tiny boy somewhere between three and five holding the hand of a girl who looked about eight.

‘They came here yesterday?’ Border asked. ‘How did they get here? This is just … They’re both from Kielce?’

‘No, only the boy.’

‘So how does he know the girl?’

‘He doesn’t. He can’t have met her before yesterday. But there’s no one alive he’s known longer than her. If you’ll excuse me I have to get back to my children. I wish you luck with your project. Don’t forget to talk to the children.’

The man from the Joint walked away leaving Henry Border quite shaken. He just stood there for a moment and then, drawn by the thought of the little boy, he looked in through the window again. He saw that there was a bandage on the boy’s free hand that stretched all the way up to his elbow.

‘So when she heard that,’ the teacher was saying to the children, ‘she took her son down to the river and placed the baby Moses in a basket amidst the bullrushes and set him to float down the river. And some time later the Egyptian princess discovered him in the basket and took him in. Do you think it would have been hard or easy for Moses’ mother to do this?’

The girl who was holding the hand of the newly arrived little boy from Kielce put up her hand and answered. ‘She was hoping someone would pick him up and save him. I saw mothers throw their children out of a train to save them. Maybe it saved them. It can work.’

‘I was saved that way,’ a boy called out.

‘I saw a mother throw a baby over a fence during an
Aktion,’
another boy called out, instigating a flow of uncontrolled conversation from the children in a myriad tongues.

‘Children! Children! Quiet please. Quiet! Do we think Moses’ mother did the right thing then? Was she a good mother?’

‘Yes,’ all the children answered in unison, all except for the newly arrived little boy from Kielce. Henry Border watched him and saw that
he gripped the little girl’s hand tightly with his unbandaged hand and remained silent.

*

Outside the Mecca Flats two white men looked at each other as if to say, ‘Can this be it?’ The sidewalk in front of them was pockmarked with fissures and at one point the gaps gave way to a tunnel. Under the street light they saw an old black man pushing a cart. ‘You fellas goin’ in there?’ the man called out. One of the white men nodded. ‘Don’t mind me sayin’ but I think you in the wrong neighbourhood,’ and as he was moving on, as if to underscore his point, for the first time they noticed the tunnel. A small boy who had poked his head out of it took one look at them and ran inside the Mecca. They followed him but he had disappeared by the time they had taken a few steps inside the courtyard. There was no longer even a pretence at concrete underfoot any more. Neither were there plants or grass, just cans, broken glass and milk cartons. The white men continued walking undeterred.

Russell Ford slept alone in a room that he had until recently shared with his mother. So when the nightmares came now, and they came almost every night, there was no one in the room to settle him down. This meant it took him longer to realise where he was and that he was no longer in the setting of the nightmare. His mother hadn’t mentioned the nightmares to James Pearson when she had asked Mr Anything-You-Want to look in on Russell while she was working as a live-in housekeeper for Henry Border. But not only had James Pearson heard the boy from the hall, he had also heard him from inside his own room. At first he thought there was someone else in there with him. The sounds hadn’t sounded like Russell. They didn’t last long but they visited him so often at night that James Pearson would hear them despite the perpetual emanation of one kind of noise or another from some part of the Mecca Flats to compete with whatever you wanted to hear.

Pearson had asked Russell about his interrupted sleep but the boy had seemed reluctant to talk about it. Over time he realised that Russell was less shy when he chose the topic of conversation himself. The chosen topic
might be any of a number of things as long as it wasn’t himself. More than once Russell had chosen Pearson’s work at Swift’s as his preferred topic. He had wanted to know about life in the meat-packing house. Gentle but persistent cross-examination from James Pearson revealed that Russell really had nothing to do over the summer. Sometimes he had played with the other kids in the building but their games were too chaotic for his liking. It emerged that he’d spent some time getting in the way of the Icer across State Street and had even tried several times unsuccessfully to get in to the Railroad Men’s Social Club. Occasionally Tommy Parks would throw a ball with him but this never lasted too long and, in any event, Tommy Parks would share his limited attention around at the slightest provocation. No, essentially it seemed that Russell had been spending much of his time alone with nothing to do. On this realisation James Pearson hit upon the idea of asking whether he wanted to come to work with him one day. There was nothing better Russell could have been offered.

Somebody – and James never found out who – told Personnel that someone was bringing in his kid. When they found out it was James Pearson they said that he could stay as long as he didn’t get in the way. By the end of the week they had Russell sweeping up and even salting. It didn’t occur to Russell to ask for money for his work. He was happy just to be there but James Pearson spoke to a few people and got him nine cents an hour, making him promise to give two-thirds to his mother.

‘She gonna be real proud of you when she gets back.’

James Pearson was in the hallway nearing Russell’s bedroom door when he came upon Mrs Sallie with her ear cupped listening at Russell’s door. She saw Pearson approaching but wasn’t at all shamed by being discovered and she continued to listen.

‘He fightin’ them demons again,’ she said turning to James Pearson. He knew what the sounds signified even if he didn’t know where they came from night after night. He opened the door and stood at the entrance to the room where Russell was in bed. He’d never intervened like this before.

‘You all right, son?’

‘What?’ The boy was waking up.

‘I … I heard somethin’ from in there and I thought to check if you all right.’

Russell knew what had happened. He was embarrassed to think that his cries had been heard outside his room and by James Pearson, of all people. Russell knew what the dreams were about because whenever he woke from them they stayed with him more like memories than dreams. They
were
memories. They had their origins in events he had witnessed. It was going to be just another Detroit summer in a boy’s life. He hadn’t known about the unrest at the Packard plant where 25,000 white workers who had been employed producing engines for bombers and for PT boats went on strike upon learning that a handful of black women had started work there. He was young but he would have understood what it meant to hear a white worker outside the plant say that he’d rather let Hitler and Hirohito win than stand beside a
nigger
on the factory floor. He hadn’t heard that said but he knew the city in which he lived with his mother and his father, childhood sweethearts now reconciled who had, with some slips, some gaps and a lot of difficulty, stuck by each other since Mississippi.

He had been with his father that morning. It had been a stinking hot Monday morning towards the end of the school year, June 1943. Because of the events of the previous day, the Police Commissioner had met with the Mayor and the US Army colonel in charge of the Detroit area at four o’clock that morning. Mayor Jefferies had a lot of meetings that day and made a lot of phone calls. He was a very busy man and it wasn’t until seven-thirty that evening that he made his own inspection of the streets of his town only to see what he could have seen eleven hours earlier, which was more or less what Russell Ford had seen.

Russell had walked his father to the stop at which his father normally caught the bus to work at the Ford plant. His father wasn’t the first black man Russell saw pulled off that streetcar by a crowd of white men but he is the man he would see the longest. Night after night he now saw his father being dragged off the streetcar, saw him trying not to let go of the satchel he always took with him to work. Russell doesn’t remember what his father used to put in that satchel but he remembers how his father kept hold of it during the first few blows. A mob of men pulled him on
to the street but there were too many to hit him all at once. In a brutal display of collectivism they took turns, waiting and jeering while one man after another tired himself out on Russell Ford’s father. The first man hit him in the head while someone else held him. Another man kicked him in the abdomen. No sound came from Russell’s mouth though he tried to scream. A fresh man punched his father in the stomach so many times he tired himself out and then, breathing like a wild stallion at the peak of its run, went on to another black man who had also been dragged off the streetcar. By this time no one any longer cared to hold up Russell’s father for his next assailant but this didn’t lead to the end of the assault. It was not nearly over. Lying on the ground, more of the mob could get to him at any one time. He was kicked and jumped on. By the time his skull was crushed he might already have been dead. No one will ever know, not his wife Callie nor his son Russell, who saw the whole thing from start to end and sees it most nights of the week. When he wakes in a sweat his father is still gone and it has all still happened just as he had seen it. It’s not really a dream at all. In the dark he gets his breath back but never does the terror completely go, never does he not feel ashamed that he hadn’t been able to save his father and never does he stop missing him. He still has his father’s satchel. Callie cleaned it out after the funeral, cleaned off the blood, and Russell keeps it.

‘I … I heard somethin’ from in here and I thought to check if you all right,’ James Pearson asked.

‘Yes, sir. I’m all right.’

Mrs Sallie would have liked to have kept listening to what was going on in that room between James Pearson and the boy whose mother had left him but there was a knock at the front door of the apartment that was too insistent to ignore. She went to the door before anyone else could get there and opened it. There stood the two white men. Mrs Sallie looked them up and down slowly in a questioning manner not untouched by anxiety.

‘Good evening, ma’am,’ the older of the two white men said. ‘Sorry to disturb you at this hour. We’re looking for –’

‘Have you met, met my friend?’

‘Well, we’re looking for –’

‘Have you met, met my friend, Jesus?’

Russell’s bedroom door was slightly ajar and James Pearson heard a man say, ‘Ma’am, we’re looking for Mr Pearson, James Pearson. We understand he lives here.’

‘I understand that too,’ Mrs Sallie said without taking one step back.

‘Do you know him? Is he here?’ the other man asked.

‘He a friend ‘o mine. But I … a lot of friends. My best, best friend is Jesus. He bring the bright, bright light you know … bright, bright sun. He bring it ever’day just like today and …’ she said, thinking as she spoke, looking these two white men straight in the eye, first one then the other, before continuing, ‘just like tomorrow. He bring it tomorrow. I tell you ‘bout him then, tomorrow,’ she said, beginning to close the door on the men when the younger one of the two stuck his foot in the doorway. She was unable to close the door.

Elise Border, who normally slept well, was awake. Something was going on outside. She wasn’t sure but she thought she’d heard something. Was it worth troubling Callie? It might have been just the wind knocking over the lid of a garbage can. There it was again. Would Callie be asleep by now?

Tommy Parks was on State Street heading back in the direction of the Mecca. It hadn’t been a bad night at all and if he could just make it up to his room without anyone bothering him he could sleep off the night’s diversions smiling to himself at the entertainment he’d been able to call up at such short notice and at such a reasonable price. He could see the doorway to the State Street entrance by now and that was when he suddenly sobered up a little. He saw two white men walking from the building and with them was what looked to be his neighbour, James Pearson, Mr Anything-You-Want. He decided to hang back and watch the direction they took. But he hung back too long. They were walking fast and by that time of the evening he wasn’t in any position to walk nearly so fast. The two white men and James Pearson were gone.