Cuts above both eyes, the outer edge of his right eyebrow gone for good, an aching jaw, blood trickling down his checks, but nothing broken, whereas the man who had attacked him, a thirty-two-year-old plumber named Chet Johnson, emerged from the combat with a fractured nose and spent the night at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. At the arraignment on Monday morning, he and Ferguson were both charged with assault, disorderly conduct, and destruction of private property (a chair and some glasses had been broken in the scuffle), and the trial date was set for Tuesday, July twenty-fifth.
Before the Monday arraignment, the grim Sunday at the farm with Noah’s play forgotten and everyone sitting around the living room discussing what had happened the night before. Howard blamed himself. He never should have dragged them off to Tom’s, he said, and Mona backed him by asserting her own guilt in the affair: I should have known better than to let you walk into that redneck crazy house. Celia talked at length about what she called Ferguson’s incredible bravery—but also about how scared she had been when the fight started, the horrific violence of that first punch. Amy ranted for a while, cursing herself for not having stood up to that ugly, bigoted slob, galled by the panic she had felt when he thrust out his finger and pointed it at her, and then, unlike the Amy Ferguson had known for so many years, she put her hands over her face and started to cry. Luther was the angriest among them, the most bitter, the one most incensed by the confrontation, and he excoriated himself for having let Archie bear the brunt of it instead of pushing him out of the way and using his own black fist to slug the bastard in the mouth. Howard’s aunt and uncle, already thinking about the next step, talked about finding a good lawyer to handle Ferguson’s case. By the middle of the afternoon, Amy the Bold had regained enough clarity of mind to call the house on Woodhall Crescent and tell her father about the mess Archie was in. She passed the receiver to Ferguson, and when his confused and anxious mother came on, he told her not to worry, the situation was under control and there was no need for them to drive up to Vermont. But how could he be sure of anything, he asked himself as he spoke those words, and what on earth was going to happen to him?
Days passed. A supposedly good young lawyer from Brattleboro named Dennis McBride would be defending him. Celia would be coming back to the farm every weekend because Ferguson wasn’t allowed to leave the state of Vermont until the trial was over, assuming it didn’t end with the court putting him in prison for a month or three months or a year when the gavel of judgment came down on him. All sorts of money would have to be shelled out in order to stop that from happening, more dollars from the dwindling pile of ten thousand dollars his now dead grandfather had given him the year before, but at least he had the money and didn’t have to ask his mother and Dan for help. Then it was July twelfth, and as he listened to his mother tell him the news over the phone, he found it difficult to imagine what she was talking about. In the midst of his small private struggles, a big public nightmare was spreading through the streets of Newark, and the city where he had spent the first years of his life was burning to the ground.
Race war. Not race riots, as the newspapers were telling everyone, but a war between the races. National Guardsmen and New Jersey state troopers firing their guns to kill, twenty-six dead in those days of havoc and bloodshed, twenty-four of one color and two of the other, not to speak of the hundreds if not thousands who were beaten and injured, among them the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, citizen of Newark and former close friend of the late Frank O’Hara, dragged from his car as he drove around to examine the wreckage in the Central Ward, taken to a local precinct house, locked in a room, and beaten so badly by a white cop that Jones thought he was going to die. The cop who did the beating had once been his friend in high school.
According to Amy, no one in the Bond family had been touched. Luther had sat out the war in Somerville, sixteen-year-old Seppy was traveling around Europe with the Waxmans, and Mr. and Mrs. Bond had managed to avoid the bullets and billy clubs and fists. One hallelujah among a thousand wails of grief and horror and disgust. Ferguson’s hometown had become the capital of ruins, but all four Bonds were alive.
Living through all that as he prepared to defend his own life in court. Eight days until his trial when the war in Newark ended, a second six-day war to accompany the Six-Day War in Dana’s Israel, and whether the combatants understood it or not, both sides in both wars had lost, and as Ferguson made his daily trips into Brattleboro to consult with his lawyer and prepare their case, he wondered if he wasn’t about to lose everything as well, wondered and worried to such a point that his insides seemed to be unraveling, the coiled tubes of guts and bowels were coming undone, and sooner or later they would burst through his stomach and splatter onto Main Street in Brattleboro, where a hungry dog would come to lap them up and then give thanks to the all-powerful dog-god for the munificence of his blessings.
McBride was steady and calm and cautiously optimistic, knowing that his client had not been the aggressor on the night in question, and with five witnesses to back up his story, five reliable witnesses who were all attending major universities and colleges, their testimony was bound to outweigh the probable false testimony from Chet Johnson’s inebriated friend, Robert Allen Gardiner.
Ferguson was told that the judge who would be presiding over his case was a graduate of Princeton from the class of 1936, which meant that William T. Burdock had been a fellow student and perhaps friend of Ferguson’s scholarship benefactor, Gordon DeWitt. It was impossible to know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Given that the case would not be settled by a jury, that the decision would be entirely in Judge Burdock’s hands, Ferguson hoped it was a good thing.
On the night of the twenty-second, three days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Luther called the farm and asked to speak to Archie. As Howard’s aunt handed the phone to Ferguson, a fresh wave of fear rumbled through his insides. What now? he asked himself. Was Luther calling to tell him he wouldn’t be able to show up in court on Tuesday?
Nothing like that, Luther said. Of course I’m going to testify. I’m your star witness, aren’t I?
Ferguson exhaled into the phone. I’m counting on you, he said.
Luther paused for a moment on the other end of the line. Then it turned into a long moment, much longer than Ferguson had been expecting. Static reverberated through the wires, as if Luther’s silence was not a silence but the clamor of the thoughts thrashing around in his mind. At last he said: Do you remember Plan A and Plan B?
Yes, I remember. Plan A: Play along. Plan B: Don’t play along.
That’s it — in a nutshell. Now I’ve come up with Plan C.
Are you telling me there’s another alternative?
I’m afraid so. The farewell-and-good-luck alternative.
What does that mean?
I’m calling you from my parents’ apartment in Newark. Do you have any idea what Newark looks like these days?
I’ve seen the pictures. Whole blocks destroyed. Burned out, gutted buildings. The end of one part of the world.
They’re trying to kill us, Archie. It’s not just that they want to lock us out, they want us dead.
Not everyone, Luther. Only the worst ones.
The ones in power. The mayors and the governors and the generals. They want to wipe us out.
What does that have to do with Plan C?
Until now, I’ve been willing to play along, but after what happened last week, I don’t think I can do that anymore. Then I look at Plan B and start gasping for breath. The Panthers are a force now, and they’re doing exactly what I thought I would be doing if Plan A failed. Buying guns to defend themselves, taking action. They look strong now, but they’re not. White America won’t stand for what they’re doing, and one by one they’re going to be mowed down and killed. What a stupid way to die, Archie — for nothing. So forget Plan B.