“You got it?” Jason asked.
“I’ve got it,” Goody replied, and the men eased the barricade down and out of the truck. The barricade had white legs and a black-and-white diagonally striped cross support. The words FLORIDA STATE ROAD DEPARTMENT were painted across the side of the cross support, and as Goody set the barricade across the mouth of S-811 where it rejoined the highway, Jason went into the truck again and came back with one of the wooden signs Clay had painted for them. The sign was a white rectangle upon which were the simple black letters:
Goody took the sign from Jason, and then carried it to the barrier where a spike had been driven into the center of the cross support. He hung the sign on the spike and stepped back to admire it.
“Let’s move,” Jason said.
Goody ran forward to the cab of the truck, climbed in, threw it into gear, and drove east on U.S. 1, heading back in the direction from which they had come, toward Bahia Honda and the Seven Mile Bridge. In the rear of the truck Jason leaned on the second barricade and watched the road through the open tarpaulin flap.
The cop had hit him with his club; that was the final indignity. The barricades had been set up on the sidewalk in front of the theater, as though the New York City police were circumscribing a definite area in which citizens of the United States could peaceably state their views. The barricades had annoyed Jason. He had told Annabelle he would not picket within a narrow defined area; you could not limit freedom of speech to an area designated by fascists in the uniforms of policemen. There were a half-dozen pickets in all, including Jason and Annabelle, and they carried signs on long sticks, crudely lettered to simulate a vaguely Oriental calligraphy, huge black letters on a white field. The police insisted that Jason and the others stay within the corridors defined by the barricades, and Jason, who was younger then, and more hotheaded — this was in the spring of 1950, three months after they had come up to New York from New Orleans — told the cop he was a fascist who was trying to limit the rights of free citizens.
“I’m trying to keep this from becoming a riot, you Communist fink!” the cop shouted.
“Me?” Jason asked incredulously. “Me a Communist? Do you know why we’re here? Do you even know why we’re here?”
“Let’s stay inside the barricades,” Annabelle whispered.
“Why? So he can prove his point? Are we supposed to excuse him the way this play excuses the lousy Japs?”
“Jason, we won’t prove anything if they won’t let us picket.”
The others in the group — a fat and ugly girl who was a Political Science major at C.C.N.Y., a pimply-faced boy who was on Ford-ham’s basketball team, a Long Island matron who was in her second month of pregnancy, and a tall and somber-faced boy from Kentucky — agreed with Annabelle that it was best to stay within the barricades. Jason reluctantly went along with them.
They marched along the sidewalk in front of the theater entreating passersby to stay away from the play. Their signs read LET’S REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR and WHY WHITEWASH THE JAPS? and DID OUR BOYS DIE IN VAIN? and the people walking past the small and solemn group marching in a steady oval within the barricades looked up at the signs with smiles of wry amusement, and then glanced beyond the pickets to the posters outside the theater and then up to the marquee where the name of the play was announced together with the names of the actors. One of the actors was a well-known Hollywood star who was Japanese and who had been playing heavies in war movies as short a time ago as 1948, but who was now starring in a vehicle set in a Japanese command post in the South Pacific. Jason had not seen the play, but the reviews had made it abundantly clear what the play was about. The play attempted to show the Japanese position, attempted to explore “the Japanese as human beings caught, even as we were, in the terrible throes of a horrible conflict,” as one of New York’s major critics had put it. In other words, the play was a whitewash of a people, a race, who had been our enemies only five years ago, which fact the producers of the play and apparently the public too — the play was an enormous hit — had already chosen to forget. Jason Trench did not choose to forget anything that threatened the United States of America. The play was a threat to the nation because it lulled people into a sense of security that was dangerous. It was ridiculous to believe that the Japanese had suddenly been transformed overnight into a sweet and loving people who wanted only to tend their gardens and paint their lovely little pictures. It was foolish to believe that, it was dangerous, it was suicidal. If you forgot who your past enemies were, then you were halfway down the road to forgetting who your present enemies were. If you let them get by with a play that took a sympathetic view of a philosophy that was totalitarian and imperialistic, you were opening the door for an acceptance of any ideology, so long as you presented it in terms of “human beings.”
It began to rain as they marched.
The rain, the idea of the play, the idea that such a play could be pulling in throngs of people who were willing to pay to see what amounted to a propaganda vehicle probably sponsored by the goddamn Japanese government, the idea of the barricades that limited Jason’s right to free speech while the author of an atrocity was grandly allowed a pulpit from which he could reach thousands of people every week — all this rankled in Jason. When the cop said, “Why don’t you all go over to Moscow, you love it so much?” Jason raised his sign and swung it at the cop’s head.
The cop was startled for a moment, and then he reacted the way he was supposed to. He lifted his billy and struck Jason on the arm with it. Jason yelled, “You fat Irish fascist bastard!” and the cop hit him again, and Annabelle reached for his arms and tried to restrain him from attacking the cop, and it was then that the others in the picket line began running. Smelling a riot, wanting no part of it, they ran. The police arrested Jason for disorderly conduct, and the court magnanimously allowed him to go free, albeit with a suspended sentence, since disorderly conduct was only a misdemeanor, and since this was his first offense. The funny part of it, he realized later, was that the cop who had hit him with the club and also the judge who had heard the case both thought he was a Communist — that was the funny part of it. They were allowing a play with a fascist point of view to be presented eight times a week, and they were using the methods of a police state to squelch anyone who opposed the play’s thesis, but they were calling him a Communist; that was what got him.
The truck was coming to a stop at the eastern entrance to S-811, the entrance they had used not more than ten minutes ago. Goody made the turn again, from the opposite direction this time, coming off the macadam highway and hitting the oiled road, and then stopping some ten feet in from the highway. By the time he got out of the cab and walked to the back of the truck, Jason had the second barricade in position and ready to hand down. They set it up much as they had the first one, effectively closing the side road to traffic on both ends. Goody got into the truck again, and they drove to the diner. Jason came out of the rear carrying a small cardboard sign. He hung it on the front door and then waved to the drawn Venetian blinds, behind which he knew were Johnny and Mac, covering the road.
Nothing stirred.
With its CLOSED sign hanging on the front door, with its blinds drawn, the diner seemed sealed tighter than a crypt.