Chapter Eleven

The cell overnight. A cell, whose dimensions, with handles attached, would have made a fine coffin. Gun-metal grey, faceless grey, cadaverous grey, emptily grey, without even the humanity of a chipped place on the wall. Solid, unbroken grey, with privy obscenities inscribed. (How? No pencils in perdition.) Durance vile with a lidless toilet that cannot be flushed. Coventry with a flat hardwood bedslab and a light that never goes out.

That light. All night in my eyes. Was this a modern American jail or a stopover on the Brainwash Express? I expected the Cominform representatives at any moment, with subtle thumbscrew tortures unless I revealed the plans for the Yankee spaceship. Jeezus, that goddam bulb…no wonder they encased it in a hard-glass shield, and a wire mesh, so no one could break it. They may have been afraid of some pistolero smashing it to obtain a sharp shard of glass to aid an escape, but in my case all I wanted to do was get some sleep, and that sonofabitch was burning out my eye-sockets.

I spent the night for the most part awake; there was no sleeping with the light in my eyes. That isn't entirely correct. A lesson well-learned in the Army was: When they yellfall out , shuck out of your pack, use it for a pillow and drop where you are.

I could sleep in a rock field, within a matter of seconds be completely out of it. But I couldn't sleep that night. It wasn't the bulb, entirely. It was where I was sleeping.

Part of the time I read. Enchanted as generations of tots and elders have been by Frank Baum's Dorothy and Tin Woodman and Scarecrow and Wizard, none of them could have blessed the kindly old characters as much as I did that night. They took me out of myself, and I recognized for the first time the full value of fantasy. But eventually I had to think about it. I had to put one of the smoking cigarettes on the edge of the toilet bowl in my mouth, close the book, and sit on the edge of that hardwood slab, and think about it:

Was I guilty? I didn't for a moment consider myself guilty in the accepted cultural sense of the word. I had committed no crime, and had in fact come by the weapons as a result of trying to do good, of trying to mirror a true state of our times. But in the deeper, moral sense, was I responsible for my actions, was I in prison rightfully? I had to know. I had to reason it out as a human being; I had to analyze my own ethics and morality, and decide if being behind bars was proper in this instance.

And so I considered it, silently, for a long time. I had, indeed, run with a gang, for purposes which I chose to consider altruistic and lofty. But had my own personal needs for recognition and stature dictated my course? Was I really adilettante , who took his chances when he thought he could get away without being punished…or was I completely honest about my motives? I discounted the word "completely." No one is ever completely anything.

Finally, I decided that it was neither all black nor all white. I was partially guilty, of selling out my responsibility to the kids I had seen in the streets, by writing cheap blood-and-guts yarns about them, rather than going the longer, harder haul and doing it sociologically. But though I was guilty of moral turpitude in varying degrees, I was not guilty of selling out my society. I had prostituted my talent to make money—for many reasons; most of which (wife, home, three squares a day, a few primary pleasures, a little class) would not be considered improper by the majority—but the crime was in my soul, not in my dossier.

Guilty? Yes, of selling out, of obfuscating, of cheapening my message, of dawdling and playing theposeur .

But guilty of owning a lethal weapon with intent to perform a crime … of indulging in illegal activity…of corruption in the greater sense…no, never.

I went back to the Land of Oz with a pastel heart, with an ease and peace. I hadn't turned to obsidian as yet. Soon, perhaps, here in hell, but not just at the moment. At the moment I was a flawed human being, a man with imperfections, a little guy who wanted desperately to be a big guy. But I wasn't a criminal. Not yet. Not just yet.

Still, I didn't read about Eichmann that night.


Sometime after three-thirty I fell asleep. I might have liked to report that it was a night filled with dark phantasmagoric shapes, threatening, but nonesuch was the case. The Army had taught me well. I slept like a baby. When I came back from wherever it was I had gone, the morning had come through the window across the corridor, the light had gone out, and I was stiff as a bitch. My right shoulder felt as though someone had gone at it with a piton. Several vertebrae were ratcheted sidewise, and I had that next-day feeling of mugginess, with my nose and eyes and ears filled with moist, unpleasant, viscous matter. I could not wash, not just then, and I felt like hell. Eyes grainy and chin stubbly, suit wrinkled from having used the jacket as a pillow and the pants as sheets, hair mussed and lank from the high temperature, I looked the part of a seedy street-bum, brought to bay.

I heard noises and the fire door opened down the line. The guard came in, followed by one of the detectives who had arrested me the late afternoon before. They came up to the cage and we went through the unlocking procedure. The guard told me I'd have time to wash up later, but right now I should get my can in gear.

I followed the detective downstairs, and as we walked, he said, "Look, I'm supposed to put the cuffs on you, but I don't think they're necessary, so when we get downstairs, I'll be going in my car, following you."

"What am I going in?" I asked.

"The wagon," he said.

"Where?"

He jerked a thumb downtown. "One hundred Centre Street," he replied. I believe I must have said something, because he took me under the elbow and steered me down the stairs, saying, "Listen, take it easy. The judge'll be very easy on you. The Old Man didn't let us down, and he agreed on not mentioning this junk charge. So you won't have any real problems."

I hoped not. I had asked Linda to get in touch with my agent, Theron Raines of the Ann Elmo Literary Agency, in order to prepare bail if it was needed, though the general consensus had been that all I'd need was remanding into my own custody. The books I'd written had apparently given me some small stature as a reputable member of the community.

Charles Street station had been quiet the night before. I was the only passenger in the meat wagon. They hustled me into the back, and locked the grilled door. I sat there, finger-combing my hair and clutching my little bag of goodies to me. As the wagon started, I fished out a chicken leg and began chewing on it.

We went careening through downtown New York, with the city going away from me in a grilled panorama, the people staring in when the wagon stopped for lights, seeing what I'm sure they considered The True Face of Evil.

I tried to look young and innocent.

It was still drizzling, and the day itself was cold and handmaiden to misery. You had to walk slanting forward into the wind to make any progress. People were huddled like indeterminate clots of mucus in the doorways, and only occasionally would a hardy soul burst from under an awning to streak for other refuges. It was a nasty, unhappy day, and I was going to jail.

I hoped my agent would be in court with the bail money.

The desperation I had known at odd moments through the night, the desperation at being totally confined, had passed with my entering the wagon and its scene of freedom just beyond the grilled enclosure. But I knew that when I was hustled into 100 Centre Street it would begin again, only much worse, for then I would be in the stomach of the great inhuman processing machine of the government, not isolated (where humanity and freedom from total cynicism still existed) in one of its far-flung outposts.

We pulled up in front of 100 Centre after spiralling down through Wall Street and the heart, guts, liver & lights of the insurance, legal, bonding and stock-broking sections. I had ridden alone the whole trip, but now, as I jumped down from the truck into the waiting hands of my arresting officer, I joined a stream of sodden humanity that poured through the back-basement door into the Criminal Courts Building, the outer layer of the Tombs.

I was first remanded to the custody of a bench in a large waiting-room. There were fifteen other men, dotted back through the rows, also waiting. I tried to look at them, to study them, without seeming surreptitious. The predominance of Negroes was striking, perhaps because of the infrequency of a white face. But all of the men in the room had one thing in common: shabbiness.

These were the epidermis of society, scraped off the sidewalks and bar rails and tenement stairways and gutters of the late night and early morning. They slouched or leaned in their seats, eyes sticky with black dirt and wasted hours, merely waiting to be nudged, chivvied, harried and pushed through this seemingly too-familiar routine. I shuddered just a little to think anyone could allow himself to lose all dignity in this way. And then I caught myself, chiding myself on such naive, provincial thinking. Men do what they can do, and when the culture asks them to be what they cannot be, they fall. These were the fallen ones, on whom pity would be not only wasted, but vilified.

My name was called from beyond a floor-to-ceiling grilled door, and my detective appeared in the shadows on the other side. "C'mon, Harlan," he urged, and I rose.

They opened the grilled gate for me, and I was immediately surrounded by camera equipment. Great hanging booms and pedestaled shutter-boxes, coils of boa-thick rubber cable and batteries of Kleig lights. I was about to be mugged, having already been printed. My picture was about to go on file in the endless drawers of the Law. How wonderful! I felt like doing a little native dance of pleasure that now I was in the same scrapbook with "Legs" Diamond, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone and all the other folk-heroes I had watched James Cagney and Paul Muni and George Raft impersonate on the silver screen, Saturday afternoon in Painesville, Ohio. How wonderful to come twenty-six years and have reached such a pinnacle of success.You're just bitter , I heard myself thinking, and replied very honestly:What gave you your first clue, Dick Tracy?

They sat me down on a stool. I was too low.

"Spin the seat for the dwarf," the comedian on the other side of the camera said.

Somebody else nudged me to move, so hard I almost went sprawling. "Take it easy on him," said my detective from the darkness. (Already I had identified him with Good and Daddy and Safety and Kindness.)

"Oh," the cameraman drawled the word out with meaning, "isthat The Author?" The detective laughed lightly, and behind me, the schmuck who was spinning the black-enameled-top stool was simpering like a fag.

So that was my stir-name. The Author.

Sound of audience reaction, mildly upheaving.

"Awright," said the yo-yo behind me, "siddown."

I saddown and the man with the daguerreotypes said much too loudly, "Ah, hold your chin up there, Author, were takin' this for the next book you write…ya gonna send us a copy?"

"Why the hell don't you stop making like Mickey Mouse and just take your little pictures, hero?" I said it and got a crack across the nape of my neck for my trouble. I started to spin on the stool, but my detective yelled, "Okay, just sit there, Ellison, and don't give anyone any trouble."

I saw my images of Daddy shatter. It didn't matter who was right or wrong; Negroes hang with Negroes, Jews hang with Jews, Catholics hang with Catholics, and cops hang with cops. If blood is thicker than water, how much thicker is tin than blood?

He snapped the photos (I neglected to mention they had hung a board with numbers around my neck, suspended from a chain. It wasn't heavy, but there is something so inhuman about being reduced to numbers that defies description. But I digress…) and my detective came over to remove the numbered slate. He needn't have bothered. I had it off a second after the last photo was snapped.

I followed him, still clutching my little bag of almost gone goodies, and books, and we went into another room, and up a slight incline. There were twenty or twenty-five men waiting, accompanied by one or more arresting officers. They clotted in a mass near a heavy door leading to the street. The door was open, and I could see steps leading up, a black banister, the sidewalk, and a score of meat wagons. This was the transportation to the Court House building just down the street.

My officer began talking to another detective, and they discussed inconsequentialities for a time, until some invisible signal was given (I suspect it was the reaching of a group total, as other prisoners had been added to our group from the photographic section every few minutes) and we started to move out to the wagons.

It was then that my detective took out his handcuffs and snapped one of the bracelets around my left wrist. He pulled over his friend's prisoner, and hooked us together. I stared down at my manacled wrist, and suddenly felt myself trapped worse than I had at any point in the events of the past day. I tried to shake loose, but both detectives shoved me forward with my arm-partner, and we joined the regimented line of men going to court.

It was still raining, and much harder now, with a sad granite look to the sky, hard and dappled grey and infinitely oppressive. The wind caught at my face and at my coat, and it was cold, terribly cold, and not all of it was from outside. My insides were cold, as well; chilled through to the marrow, as the men ahead of us clambered into the wagon, and my chain-buddy made to follow.

He jumped slightly and gained the back of the wagon, pulling me up roughly with him. The manacle bit into my wrist. "Hey, take it easy," I howled. He didn't say anything, just gave me a look of such utter contempt that I was forced into silence.

I was the last one in the truck, the door was closed, and a uniformed cop climbed onto the back step, clinging to the rails on either side. He stared in at us. Most of the men paid no attention. I looked at them, trying to decide whether they were good men gone wrong, victims of circumstance like myself, or hardened criminals.

Aside from the derelicts, with their shabby clothes and fetid breath, we all looked pretty much the same. If they had been mass murderers, I would not have been able to tell them from offenders with too many parking tickets. Abruptly, the wagon lurched forward, and we moved out of the little alley behind 100 Centre.

I could not see where we were going, for the cop on the back step blocked the view, but it didn't matter, for as we were shifting and moving on our benches, trying to get some small measure of ease for gluteus muscles doomed to hard cots and metal slabs, my cuff-buddy turned to me and asked: "What'd they get 'choo for?"

I studied his face for a moment, seeing little more than lank hair and a wide elfish mouth, cold and empty grey eyes and ears that stood out a trifle too much from his head. I was about to answer, when I realized that his white shirt was not merely ripped and dirty, as I had at first supposed—there is a tendency not to look at your companions too closely, when in jail—but was torn down across his left arm, exposing it to the shoulder, and the dark brown stains all across the face of the shirt were most certainly blood. Great clots of blood. Hardened spittle strings of blood. Spatters and patches and gouts of blood. He was dappled in blood, from neck to waist. I swallowed heavily.

"I, uh, I had a gun," I said simply.

There was no desire in me to engage this man in conversation. I had the most terrible feeling that he was one of the true animals, not merely aschmuck like me, who had about as much right being in a paddy wagon as Porky Pig. I did not want to say anything to him. And that was why I heard myself asking, "Why'd they arrestyou ?"

He sneered down at me, and his nostrils flared, giving him an oddly Semitic appearance for a moment.

"I done somethin' worsen you with that gun," he said. And then he clucked like a chicken. "Heh, you betcha I did…" He clucked again several times, and I supposed lie was laughing.

I felt a nudge in my side, and a whiskery derelict on my right leaned in to pass his foul breath over my face as he confided, "He used a hammer onna little girl; he's a mean sonofabitch, don't get too close to him, or he might go nuts again."

I turned back to my companion, staring at him like some new species of life. My curiosity got the better of me, and I asked him, "Is it true you killed a girl with a hammer?"

His head snapped around and his nostrils flared wide again. "Whadjoo say? Whadjoo say t' me?" He looked like he wanted to club me down. I asked him again, very quietly, trying to soothe him, because I was scared witless, but didn't see how I could ignore his red-rimmed eyes, staring at me accusingly.

"Yeah, I used a hammer onner, yeah I did, sure! All I wanted was a little piece of trim, just a little pieceah ass, at'sall. Little bitch, fourteen anna bitch, it's her fault I'm here, an' they gonna slapme away, frigging buncha scuts…" and he lurched forward, not at me, but across the aisle at two men I had assumed were also prisoners, though they were better-dressed than the rest of us.

The two men across the way moved as one, grabbing the hammer-murderer by a shoulder with their free hands, dragging their bracelet-partners partway with them.

They shoved the maniac back in his seat, and I realized they were plainclothes detectives.

I sat there, chained to a hammer-murderer who had killed a fourteen-year-old girl because she wouldn't "give out with a little trim," and felt my composure slipping…

My agenthad to be there with the bail money, he justhad to be. The night in the cell, the black smudges on my hands, the pushing and shoving and moving like cattle in a pen, it had to end at the court, or I might not be able to write about it.

I might go as mad as the poor sonofabitch chained to me. And right then I knew what James Baldwin meant when he said we are all brothers. There was much of that killer in me, and much of my innocence in him.

Wewere brothers, chained together by more than steel links.

Suddenly, I did not want to know my fellow man any better.


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