South Central Noir

He closed the door and, before I could track him, snuck up beside me. Bent close. “You kill that girl?” he said.

My throat clinched. “Naw, naw,” I finally told him.

“I ain’t got devilment enough to torment a fly. I was hiding near the river with some Oklahoma white boys and some Mexicans we fell in with when we jumped off the train. We was looking for something to eat. Some fellers from the camp tore past us shouting that a white girl been kilt. Colored boys did it, they said, and the cops was coming to kill us all. I took off. Tripped. On a stump I thought. In a slippery place, up from the water. I looked ’round. Seen that poor girl tangled in the weeds. She was a goner. Dent in her head. Blood ’round her neck. Dress pulled up. Her bloomers was gone. I like to died, seeing that.”

“And?” Detective Hanniday said.

“Cops drove up. One stepped out a long black Packard. His lights shined right on me. He was big as a mansion. Two guns on his hips.”

“Chief Hopalong,” Detective Hanniday said, talking to hisself. He walked to a picture on the wall. Pointed to a fat man — the one in the Packard.

“That him?” Detective Hanniday said.

I nodded.

“You’ve met our remarkable chief of police,” Detective Hanniday said. “Shirley ‘Buster’ Hemingway.” He looked back at me. “Then what?”

“The cop doors flew open. Dogs jumped out. The chief blew a whistle. Sicced ’em on us. They tore acrost the riverbank. Two ran up on me. They was biting the little girl too. Some cops pulled ’em off.”

The memory of the dead girl raised the hurt and scaredness I was trying to forget. Detective Hanniday had took off my handcuffs. I was grateful for that. My wrists was still stinging. I tried to mash the hurt down. Didn’t work. I touched my legs where the dead girl touched them. The blood was drying quick and hard.

“Go on,” Detective Hanniday said.

“‘Round up them niggers,’ Chief Hopalong said. And they did too, but not just coloreds. They beat on anybody they fount. That’s when Chief Hopalong came over and started to whup me. Accusing me of killing the white girl. He was whupping me good and proper, till a colored cop came over and stared at the dead girl. ‘This ain’t no white girl, Chief,’ the colored cop said. ‘She just a yella gal.’

“‘A yella gal?’ Chief Hopalong said. ‘We wasting all this time tending to a nigger?’

“He stomped back to his car, getting madder and madder just from saying that. That’s when he called you over. Remember?”

The detective didn’t say nothing. Staring out the window, smoking his cigarette, studying nothin’ but his own thoughts. Then he said, “Yeah, I remember, kid. I’m the resident nigger-lover ’round here. Pride of the LAPD.”

He kept quiet a spell, then looked at my naked feets. “Damn, boy, you got the biggest feet I ever saw on a child. How tall are you?”

“Five something,” I said.

“Five something? What was your name again?” the cop said.

“Theus,” I told him, like before.

“How old are you?”

“’Bout fourteen or fifteen, I ’spect.”

“And you say you came in last night with that gang of Okies camped on the river?”

“Nawsuh, I came in with some new Okies. And I didn’t meet up with them till I left out from home...”

“Home? Where’s home?”

“Jardin,” I told him. “Jardin, Mississippi.”

“Where are your folks?”

“My pa got kilt sassing a white lady back in ’29. Then ma got the nervous sickness. My big sister Paradise caught it too.”

“So, why here? This is a white man’s town. Why not run to Chicago or Detroit? Your people seem to be getting on there.”

“I’m huntin’ my Uncle Balthazar. ’Fore Ma quit talking right, she showed me his picture and said he a big pooh-bah in one of the colored hotels downtown. Figure if I throws in with him, I might can make it.”

“What hotel?”

“Can’t remember. It start with a D or a G.”

“You mean the Dunbar?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Dunbar. Ma said everybody that stays there’s rich. Pullman porters, movie stars. If I throws in with my Uncle Balthazar, I figure I can get somethin’ to eat. Get rich too, by and by. That’s why I had to come here.”

Detective Hanniday thought on that a minute then pressed a buzzer on his desk. A colored cop, Officer Kimbrow, came in. “Unlock the charity bin and find this boy some clothes. Forget shoes, he’ll have to get those clodhoppers shod elsewhere. Once he’s decent, drop him off at the Dunbar.”

2

We drove up from the river through some mean-looking streets. Officer Kimbrow didn’t say nothing. Then he looked at my feets. “Damn, son, those is some gigantic feets!”

Seem like he couldn’t decide when to look at the road and when to stare at my feets. It tickled him and he told me when he was ’round my age he had big feets too. “Nature evens it all out quite nicely as you grow.”

He started talking. Told me colored folks ain’t got a chance in hell to make a life in this mean ol’ town. Said he believed white folk, not colored boys, was killing all them Black girls — it was a warning. Keep out, the warning said.