They were the longest ten seconds of Ferguson’s life, an absurd, high-speed ballet that seemed to be unfurling in slow motion because he was the only player on the court who wasn’t moving, fixed in his position at the top of the far circle to receive a long desperation pass if all else failed, the last option out of several desperate options, and for that reason he could see it all from where he stood, the whole dance sharply etched in space, vivid and indelible, called up again and again over the ensuing months and years, never not remembered at any point in his life, Mike Nadler’s inbounds pass to Mitch Goodman after faking out a leaping, arm-waving Newark defender, Goodman’s no-dribble wheel-around pass to Alan Schaeffer at midcourt, and then Schaeffer’s blind shot-put heave as the clock ticked down to three seconds, two seconds, one second, followed by the astonishment on Schaeffer’s pudgy face as the ball made its improbable journey through the air and went straight through the hoop without touching the rim, the longest buzzer beater in the history of the Essex County Y League, an ending to trump all other endings for the rest of time.
He saw Lenny bounding off in the direction of the side door. As the West Orange player standing farthest from that door, Ferguson started running before anyone else, started running the second he saw the ball go through the basket, not even pausing to congratulate Schaeffer or celebrate the win, for Lenny had been right to suspect trouble, and now that Newark had been robbed of its victory, the people in the gym were incensed. A howl of collective shock to begin with, eighty or ninety brains clobbered by the sight of that cheap, lucky basket, and an instant later half the crowd was surging onto the court, crying out in anger and disbelief, an army of thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old boys, four dozen black boys bent on tearing apart half a dozen white boys for the injustice that had been committed against them, and for a few moments as he sprinted across the court Ferguson felt in real danger, afraid that the mob would catch up to him and knock him to the floor, but he managed to rush through the swarming labyrinth of bodies with just one random punch delivered to his right arm, a punch that hurt and continued to hurt for the next two hours, and then he was out the door and running toward Lenny’s station wagon in the cold air of that bleak January morning.
Thus ended the miniature race riot that almost happened but didn’t. All during the trip home, the other boys in the car whooped it up in a high-octane surge of manic good cheer, again and again reliving the last ten seconds of the game, congratulating themselves for having escaped the wrath of the avenging crowd, conducting pretend interviews with the still incredulous and ceaselessly smiling Schaeffer, laughing, laughing, so much laughter that the very air was thick with jubilation, but Ferguson took no part in it, couldn’t take part in it because he had no desire to laugh, even though Schaeffer’s last-second shot had been one of the funniest, most unlikely things he had ever seen, but the game had been ruined for him by what had happened after the game, and the punch still hurt, and the reason why the punch had been thrown hurt even more than the pain still throbbing in his arm.
Lenny was the only other person in the car who wasn’t laughing, the only other one who seemed to understand the dark implications of what had happened in the gym, and for the first time all season he reprimanded the boys for their sloppy, incompetent play, dismissing Schaeffer’s fifty-footer as an accident and asking them why they hadn’t trounced that mediocre team by twenty points. The others took those words as a sign of anger, but Ferguson realized that he wasn’t angry but upset, or scared, or disheartened, or all three at once, and that the game meant nothing in light of the ugly scene that had followed the game.
It was the first time Ferguson had witnessed a crowd turn into a deranged mob, and hard as it was to take, the irrefutable lesson he had learned that morning was that a crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own, in this case the truth about the resentment and even hatred many black people felt toward white people, which was no less strong than the resentment and even hatred many white people felt toward black people, and Ferguson, who had just spent the last days of the Christmas holiday writing an essay about the courage of Jackie Robinson and the need for total integration in every aspect of American life, couldn’t help feeling upset, scared, and disheartened by what had happened in Newark that morning, fifteen years after Jackie Robinson had played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Two Mondays after the Saturday in Newark, Mrs. Baldwin stood in front of Ferguson’s ninth-grade English class and announced that he had won first prize in the essay contest. The second prize had been awarded to Amy Schneiderman for her impressive encomium on the life of Emma Goldman, and how proud she was of them both, Mrs. Baldwin said, the top two submissions coming from the same class, her class, which was one of thirteen ninth-grade English classes in the school, and not once in all her years of teaching at Maplewood Junior High had she been granted the privilege of having two winners in the annual writing contest.
Good for Mrs. Baldwin, Ferguson thought, as he watched his literary nemesis gloating over the dual triumph at the blackboard, as if she were the one who had written the essays herself, and happy as Ferguson was to be the winner from among the three hundred and fifty students in his grade, he understood that the victory was of no importance, not only because whatever Mrs. Baldwin judged to be good necessarily had to be bad but because he himself had turned against his own essay since the debacle in the Newark gym, knowing that what he had written was too optimistic and naïve to make any sense in the real world, that while Jackie Robinson deserved all the praise Ferguson had given him, desegregating baseball was just a midget step in a much larger struggle that would have to go on for many more years, no doubt for more years than Ferguson himself would ever get to live, perhaps for another century or two, and that next to his hollow, idealistic portrait of a transformed America, Amy’s piece on Emma Goldman had been much better, not just better written and better thought-out but at once more subtle and more passionate, and the only reason why she hadn’t been given the first prize was because the school couldn’t award the blue ribbon to an essay about a revolutionary anarchist, who by definition was to be regarded as a thoroughly un-American American, a person so radical and dangerous to the American way of life that she had been deported from her own country.
Mrs. Baldwin was still droning on in front of the class, explaining that the three winners from each grade would be reading their essays out loud at an all-school assembly scheduled for Friday afternoon, and as Ferguson glanced over at Amy — who sat one row in front of him and two desks to the right — he was amused that when his eyes landed on her back, dead center between her two shoulder blades, she instantly turned around to look at him, as if she had felt his eyes touching her, and, even more amusing, once their eyes met, she scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue at him, as if to say, Pooh on you, Archie Ferguson, I should have won and you know it, and when Ferguson smiled at her and shrugged, as if to say, You’re right, but what can I do about it? Amy’s scrunch turned into a smile, and a moment later, unable to suppress the laugh gathering in her throat, she let out one of her weird snorts, an unexpectedly loud noise that prompted Mrs. Baldwin to interrupt what she was saying and ask, Is everything all right, Amy?