Ferguson had been drinking beer at the West End on the evening of the twelfth, and when he returned to his apartment a few minutes after one o’clock, the telephone was ringing. He picked up and heard his father shouting into the receiver: Where the hell have you been, Archie? Newark is burning! They’ve smashed in the windows and looted the stores! The cops are blasting their guns, and your mother is out there on Springfield Avenue taking pictures for her goddamn paper! They’ve cordoned off the street, and I can’t get in there! Come home, Archie! I need you here, and don’t forget to bring your press card!
It was too late to think about going downtown to catch a bus from the Port Authority terminal, so Ferguson flagged a taxi on Broadway and told the driver to step on it, a phrase he had heard dozens of times in movies but had never once uttered himself, and while the trip cost him all but two of the thirty-four dollars in his wallet, he made it to the apartment house on Van Velsor Place in under an hour. Thankfully, the streets of the neighborhood were calm. The rioting had begun in the Central Ward and had later spread to parts of downtown, but the South Ward was still untouched. Even more reassuring, his mother had just come home, and his overwrought, semi-unhinged father was beginning to find his hinges again.
I’ve never seen anything like it, his mother said. Molotov cocktails, gutted stores, cops with their guns out, fires, frenzied people running all over the place — pure chaos.
Sam’s store is gone, his father said. He called an hour ago and told me there’s nothing left. Crazy, wild animals, that’s what they are. Imagine burning down your own neighborhood. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.
I’m going to bed, his mother announced. I’m all done in, and I have to be at the Ledger first thing tomorrow.
No more of this, Rose, his father said.
No more of what, Stanley?
No more war photography.
It’s my job. I have to do it. One person in this family is already out of work because of tonight, and there’s no way I’m not going to do it.
You’ll get yourself killed.
No, I won’t. I think it’s nearly done now. Everyone was going home when I left. The party’s over.
Or so she thought, and so thought many others as well, even the mayor, Hugh Addonizio, who shrugged off the disturbance as nothing more than a few broken bottles, but when rioting started up again the following night, she was back in the streets with her camera, and this time Ferguson was with her, carrying his press cards from both the Montclair Times and the Columbia Spectator in case he was stopped by the police and asked to identify himself. His father had spent the day with Sam Brownstein at his wrecked sporting goods establishment, assessing the damage, boarding up what had once been the front window with sheets of plywood, salvaging the few things that had been left behind, and he was still with Sam when Ferguson and his mother headed for Springfield Avenue after sundown. In his father’s mind, Ferguson was there to protect his mother, but in Ferguson’s mind he was there because he wanted to be there, since his mother didn’t need to be protected as she went about her job of taking pictures, which she did with remarkable calm and discipline, he felt, so poised and concentrated on her work that it wasn’t long before he realized that she in fact was the one who was protecting him. A large contingent of journalists and photographers had gathered in the Central Ward that night, people from the Newark papers, the New York papers, Life magazine, Time and Newsweek, the A.P., Reuters, the underground press, the black press, radio and television crews, and they mostly stuck together as they watched the tumult unfurl along Springfield Avenue. It was a disturbing thing to witness, and Ferguson openly admitted to himself that he was on edge, at times even frightened, but he was also stirred up and amazed, utterly unprepared for the explosiveness of the energy rippling through the street, the mixture of high emotion and reckless movement that seemed to fuse anger and joy into a feeling he had never encountered anywhere else, a new feeling that had yet to be given a name, and not only was it not crazy, as his father had said it was, it wasn’t stupid either, for the black mob was systematically going after businesses owned by white people, many of them Jewish white people, and at the same time sparing businesses owned by black people, the storefronts with the words SOUL BRO written across them, and in that way they were telling the white man he was looked upon as an enemy invader and it was time for him to leave their country. It wasn’t that Ferguson thought this was a good idea, but at least it made sense.
Again, the rioting eventually petered out, and again everyone went home, and this time it seemed to have ended for good, the second night of a two-night binge of destruction and anarchic release, but what no one in the departing crowd could have known then was that at twenty past two in the morning Mayor Addonizio had called Governor Richard Hughes and asked him to send in the National Guard and the New Jersey State Police. By daybreak, three thousand Guardsmen were rolling through the city in tanks, five hundred heavily armed state troopers were taking up their positions in the streets of the Central Ward, and for the next three days the Vietnam War came home to Newark, for if no Vietcong had ever called Muhammad Ali nigger, now the black people of Newark had been turned into the Vietcong.
Governor Hughes: “This is a criminal insurrection by people who say they hate the white man but who really hate America.”
Barbed-wire checkpoints. A ten P.M. curfew for cars, everyone off the streets by eleven. The looting had stopped, and the exaltation of the first two nights had devolved into urban warfare, an all-out battle in which the weapons were rifles, machine guns, and fires. A white fire department captain named Michael Moran, thirty-eight years old, the father of six children, was shot and killed while standing on a ladder investigating an alarm on Central Avenue, and from that point on the Guard and the state police acted on the assumption that the city was infested with black snipers perched on rooftops aiming to gun down any whites they saw. That twenty-four of the twenty-six people killed during those days turned out to be black would seem to have disproved that assumption, but it allowed the Guard and the troopers to fire off thirteen thousand rounds of ammunition, shooting directly into the second-floor apartment of a woman named Rebecca Brown, for example, and killing her in what the Star-Ledger described as a “fusillade of bullets,” or to blast twenty-three other bullets into the body of Jimmy Rutledge, or to shoot down twenty-four-year-old Billy Furr for the crime of taking a cold soda out of an already ransacked convenience store and handing it to a thirsty photographer from Life magazine.
Through it all, Ferguson’s mother did what she could to go on taking her pictures, but she necessarily had to work by day, photographing the tanks and soldiers and the now demolished black businesses throughout the Central Ward, hundreds of pictures documenting whatever aspects of the conflagration she considered relevant, and because Ferguson’s father had whipped himself into a panic about Rose’s safety, he insisted on accompanying her wherever she went, which for those three days entailed sitting with her in the backseat of the old Impala as Ferguson drove his parents around the city, and then, as the curfew approached, dropping off the rolls of undeveloped film at the Star-Ledger building before returning to the apartment on quiet Van Velsor Place. Ferguson’s admiration for his mother continued to grow throughout the horror of those days. That a forty-five-year-old woman who had spent her life as a studio portrait photographer and had started in journalism by shooting pictures of suburban garden parties could go out and do what she was doing now struck him as one of the most improbable human transformations he had ever seen. That was his one consolation, for everything else about that time made him sick, sick at heart, sick to his stomach, sick about the world he lived in, and it didn’t help that his father ranted every night about them, the goddamned schvartzes and how much they hated us, the Jews, and this was the end, he declared, he would hate them back everlastingly from this moment forward, hate them furiously every minute until the day he died, and during one of those rants Ferguson became so disgusted that he lost his temper and told his father to shut up, which he had never done before in his life.