The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed third world peoples as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order. Just as the fascist marines and army occupy Vietnam in the name of democracy and murder Vietnamese people in the name of American imperialism, and are confronted with the guns of the Vietnamese liberation army, the domestic armed forces of racism and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the black liberation army, who will mete out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. We are revolutionary justice.
All Power to the People
Justice
The syntax dizzied but he got the gist. “Militant,” Carney said.
“Somebody has to say it,” May said. “Vietnam. The ghetto. It’s the same.”
“The Man sure keeps busy.”
“It’s not funny.” She snatched the paper back.
“I’m not laughing.”
“Did you get the tickets?”
Carney winced. “I told you they’re sold out, honey.”
“You said you’d get them.”
John dragged a pencil through a maze on the back of the box of Honeycomb cereal.
The next night there was another attack, successful this time. Saturday morning Carney was going over the accounts with 1010 WINS on for company. All News. All the Time. The newscaster mentioned the Colonial Park Houses on 159th. Carney had customers who lived there, he had arranged deliveries. A little after ten on Friday night, Officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini had been returning to their patrol car when they were ambushed from behind. Jones was black; he was shot twice. Piagentini, the white cop, was shot eight times. Aunt Millie was on duty at Harlem Hospital when they wheeled them in. “It was a damned mess.” Mayor Lindsay attended their funerals, all choked up on the telecasts.
The NYPD described their response as a show of force. “A motherfucking siege” is how a man in line at Chock Full o’Nuts described it, paying for his bag of doughnuts ahead of Carney. “I was in the war.” Patrolmen staked out corners, a new magnitude of prowl cars hit the streets, with unmarked units shadowing them for extra protection. Midnight raids on suspects. Activists and movement figures on downtown lists were rounded up. It reminded Carney of the ’64 riots, or ’68 after they shot King. There was a special hotline to call if you knew anything.
At 240 Centre Street they downplayed the BLA link at first. Now they embraced it, Carney noticed. Three more attacks on policemen followed in the coming days, nonlethal—the same party, or copycats? Edward Kiernan, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, held up Piagentini’s bullet-perforated shirt on TV and implored every cop on duty to carry a shotgun. “With a pistol, the odds are one in five that you will miss,” he said, “but with a shotgun the odds are ninety-nine to one of a hit.”
That was lynching talk. Percy Sutton told him to quit it. Sutton—Tuskegee Airman, lawyer to Malcolm X, and currently Manhattan borough president—would have set Big Mike’s eyes rolling. “This is New York City, not Alabama,” he said. “We don’t do ‘shotgun justice.’？”
The days passed. The manhunt continued. The sirens continued.
* * *
***
First week of June. Start of another wilting New York summer. The air-conditioning unit over the front door wheezed and coughed like a crosstown bus, but it got the job done.
It was cool beneath the machine. Carney, Larry, and Mr. Foster huddled there. Carney supposed the crowd across the street contained various uptown factions: movement sympathizers, young people drunk on the counterculture, revolution-minded folks who frowned on shooting cops in the back, and those who just wanted to go about their business without getting fucking involved. Like Mr. Charlie Foster, whose expression soured at the display.
A dark brown Plymouth rounded Morningside and honked, sending bystanders scrambling. It pulled up on the curb and disgorged two white plainclothes. The detained man shook his head as they hollered at him.
“Pigs,” Larry said.
“When I was coming up, they hear you say that, make you a cripple,” Foster said.
“Constables,” Larry amended.
The patrolmen handcuffed the man. One of the plainclothes gripped his neck with one hand and steered him forward with the other. When Carney was little, his father worked at Miracle Garage in between jobs. The owner, Pat Dodds, had this gray mutt out back and when the dog made a mess somewhere, he grabbed the dog’s neck and rammed its face into it. That’s how the cop grabbed this young brother’s neck.
For a moment it appeared that the young man stared into Carney’s eyes, but with the sun where it was the man would only see his own face reflected in the store window. Such was the character of light on 125th Street at that time of day, making everything into a mirror. The plainclothes shoved him into the backseat. The sedan lurched and retreated from the sidewalk. The radio car followed suit.
This tall brother in a floppy suede hat started a “Power to the People” chant, but it didn’t catch. With the cops’ departure, there was nothing to bind them. They moved their feet, as if the WALK/DONT WALK sign had switched. Carney thought: GAWK/DONT GAWK.
Charlie Foster cleared his throat and donned his beret. Something had put him off the sale, it was written in his posture. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.
Larry protested. Carney slunk back to his office. It was a bust.
Mr. Foster hit the street a minute later. Sometimes Carney wanted to say, “Buy it, for Chrissakes. Do something for yourself!” Some black men of that generation trained themselves to not have permission, all those Charlie Fosters denying themselves since before Carney was born. He conjured the lonely scene awaiting Foster at home—then checked himself. Maybe the man was happy and satisfied, hoisting squealing grandchildren all day like barbells. He didn’t know anything about these men, their choices and consequences. Just that they were looking for a comfortable chair. Occasionally Carney wove a private dread into a universal condition.
He took the stack of Memorial Day Sale signs off his desk and dropped them in the trash can. The sale had gone gangbusters, he’d make it an annual thing. When Carney heard they were renaming Decoration Day and moving it from May 30th to the last Monday in May, he hadn’t seen the point. He sure did like the receipts, though. Three-day weekend, time on your hands, sometimes the mind starts thinking about home goods. It was the first time since he could remember that he approved of something the government had done.
Above Carney’s desk, left of the window onto the showroom, hung the Polaroid that Rusty had taken of him and Elizabeth and the kids in front of the store in 1961. May was four, John maybe two. No matter when a picture was taken, Elizabeth looked the same: lovely and imperturbable. It had been a nice Saturday, the four of them enjoying one another and the weather. May’s mouth curved the way it did when she suppressed a smile.
He didn’t want to disappoint her, but he’d run out of leads. He called Larry over.
“What’s up, baby?”
Carney told him the Jackson 5 were playing Madison Square Garden next month.
“That’s a hot one,” Larry said, in a weary, insider tone. He had “friends in the industry” from a former incarnation and occasionally doled out improbable gossip to him and Rusty and Marie during slumps. A tidbit about the harmonica player on War’s third album, or scout’s-honor intelligence from Aretha Franklin’s dentist.