By ten o’clock the sidewalks were deserted. Every radio in the block was tuned in to New York. Every mind pictured the Brown Bomber, always calm and deliberate, as he stepped through the ropes and raised his hand. We saw him standing before the German, softly pawing the canvas with his toe as the referee droned out the rules. Finally we saw him take off his robe and walk like a bronze god toward the center of the ring to begin his master work.
Well, I don’t have to tell you what happened. That night Joe didn’t have it, and this big German square did just what he said he was going to do to our ace man. He whipped the living daylights out of Joe. I just couldn’t believe it. My eyes got hot and then the tears began to roll. My old man stopped puffing on his White Owl and didn’t say a mumbling word. My kid sister was too young to understand, but she felt it and kept quiet. Mama sighed and said, “Well, you gotta lose sometimes, I guess,” real sad like, and went into the kitchen. I felt just like nothing inside.
Of course, there was no rushing out of doors to snatch up our weapons and fight the white boys. One by one the members of the Duncan Street gang dragged tail out to the side-walk under the lamplight where we usually gathered at night. We sat on the curbstone making figures in the sand. Robert Jackson kept spitting because that was what he did when he was mad or down in the blues. We must have sat there ten or fifteen minutes in complete, mournful silence. The beautiful day with the crazy sun had turned into a miserable night.
Finally, Teeny Mae said, “Boy, you know one thing? That didn’t fight like no Joe Louis.”
“You’re goddamned right it didn’t,” said Austin, and we all agreed, yeah, they were right, that didn’t fight like Joe Louis at all.
Then, as if someone had kicked him, Sammy yelled, “Something was wrong!” That’s right, we chorused, something was damn wrong.
“Do you suppose they doped Joe?”
We turned and stared at Robert Jackson. He was serious. Our mouths opened in astonishment as the thought gripped us. It was such a simple explanation. We knew that Joe could beat Max Schmeling or anybody else any day in the week.
Sammy said, “You know they don’t want no colored guy to be champ, man. My pop says they never did like Jack Johnson.”
Now we were all furious. Imagine doing a nasty thing like that to Joe Louis! Robert Jackson said we ought to go beat some white heads just to make up for what they had done to poor Joe. He reminded us of the bricks and bats we had stored in Austin’s basement. Robert Jackson said that 15th and H streets ought to be our first target because we could probably catch the whole white gang there. We jumped to our feet agreeing loudly that Robert had a damned good idea and we would show those sons of — Crrraaaaaash! A terrible shattering above our heads and pitch blackness. I stopped breathing. Not a soul moved. We were numb with fear as the fragments of the streetlamp showered us. For a moment there was a long, awful silence.
Then, small and hard, the white boy’s voice from the alley. “Oh, you black bastards! We got you now!”
Man, I’m standing there like a dump on a log, and nothing in my hands. Then the bricks and bottles started falling, and the white boys came down on us like white on rice. The first brick hit me and I fell against Teeny Mae. Then we both started running and bumped into one another again. Teeny said, “Man, don’t be holding me up,” and I yelled, “Man, you get out of my way!” We both took flying leaps for a secret hiding place under Sammy’s porch. Once there I huddled close to Teeny. My shoulder was throbbing where the brick had hit me.
Teeny said, “Man, ain’t this something. Those guys done caught us off guard.”
Obviously the 15th and H boys had felt so good about the German beating Joe that they had decided to pay us a surprise visit, something they had never dared before. They were dancing and yelling like Indians in the middle of Duncan Street, and throwing bricks and milk bottles at everything that moved. Then our parents started opening windows to see what all the noise was about, and the light from the houses poured down into the street. The victorious invaders hauled tail for their own territory, disappearing as suddenly as they had come.
We crawled out of our shelters and gathered under the shattered lamplight. You can imagine how we felt. It wasn’t so much my shoulder or Robert Jackson’s bleeding (his hand had been cut) or Austin’s crying (he had lost another tooth). The hurt was deeper than that.
“Ira! Ira!” It was Teeny Mae’s father calling him. “You out there, boy?”
Teeny looked up. “Yes sir, I’m here.”
“What are you boys doing out there? What happened to that lamplight?”
Teeny didn’t know what to say, and the rest of us could not help him. We just stood there with our heads bowed.
“Well, speak up, boys. What happened?”
We didn’t know, not really. After that night we had our victories, especially after Joe became champ and gave Schmeling a good licking. But the spirit was never quite the same on Duncan Street. We were never so sure again.
Washington
by Julian Mazor
(Originally published in 1963)
Shaw
When I ran through Pennsylvania Station on a cloudy November afternoon, I was wearing a clean blue shirt with a soft unbuttoned collar, a brown knit tie, a brown herringbone suit, well-polished brown Spanish shoes, and an English overcoat — a gray herringbone — that I had worn for three years. I had some old letters stuffed into the inside pocket of my jacket, and after I had taken out my wallet to buy my train ticket I had trouble putting it back. I was afraid I would miss my train, so I slipped the wallet into the inside pocket of my overcoat, thinking I would sort things out when I was aboard. I had a hundred and forty-seven dollars in the wallet, a sum left over from my last pay check, and I was on my way to Washington, D.C., to see my family — my mother and father and an older sister who had recently got married. I had just left my job as a salesman-demonstrator-instructor in the tennis department of a famous New York department store, where I, John Lionel, was known as “Wright & Ditson.” One day, for some reason, while demonstrating the proper service technique to a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, I tossed a tennis ball up in the air and hit a powerful cannonball service; the ball whizzed by the floor manager’s — Mr. Palmerston’s — ear, and smashed a glass case. Palmerston said it was nice knowing me and told me to pick up my check. So long, Wright & Ditson. It was my third job since coming back from Europe, where I had served a tour in the Army, and although in a way I was a little concerned because I didn’t seem to be going anywhere and didn’t know where I wanted to go, I thought, Well, I’m only twenty-three and I’ve got time.
Somewhere near North Philadelphia, I ate a tuna-fish sandwich that I bought from a vender on the train, and about twenty minutes south of the Thirtieth Street Station I began to feel warm and a little strange. I thought I’d get some air, so I left my seat and went out to the platform between the cars. I leaned against the steel wall and smoked and looked out at the countryside. The cool air made me feel a lot better. I stayed out between the cars until the train was about a half hour past Wilmington, and then I returned to my seat in the coach.
I thought I’d get a book out of my suitcase and read for a while. When I looked up at the baggage rack, I saw that my overcoat was gone. I had forgotten to take the wallet out of it. I had placed the coat neatly folded over my suitcase, and there was no doubt that it was gone. I walked up and down the coach, looking at all the overcoats in the baggage racks, and then I returned to my seat and tried to be calm and think things out. Then I went up and down the car again. When I returned to my seat for the second time, feeling demoralized and enraged, a man sitting across the aisle asked me what was the matter, and I told him that my overcoat was gone. The man folded his newspaper and looked out the window for a while, and then he asked me to describe the coat. I told him that it was a gray herringbone, and that it had been on the rack above my seat. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then, seeming embarrassed, he told me that he had seen a man pull my coat from the rack as the train got into Wilmington, and that he had, even then, found it a little strange, because this man was already wearing a camel’s-hair coat.