by John Hersey
In his testimony in the conspiracy hearing, Michael tried to say that Ronald August was there that morning; but Michael’s testimony on that occasion, as we shall see, was pretty wild. None of the others supported that testimony. “Some of them say,” Lee told me, “that was the same men as came that night, but I wasn’t sure. I seen that private guard that morning.” Melvin Dismukes told me later that he had been present at one search, whether at this one or a later one I could not be sure; he said that one of the boys—he thought it was one of those who were killed that night—“was calling me names. Tom. Black motherfucker.” Sortor said there were two girls there that morning, “girl named Virginia and this girl named Ann; they were staying there.”
“When they lined us up against the wall,” Sortor went on, “they searched us down, going through our pockets and stuff. Everybody had money on them; I had about a hundred dollars. They wanted to take it, they said we didn’t need this money. The police said we didn’t need it. They just went in our pockets, you know, took it out, said, you know, ‘We should keep this.’ Then they gave it back to us. They said they were going to take us to jail. Inside they found two knives, that’s all, and they found this tape recorder in there in this other room, in room A-1; they took that. It had been there all the time, before the riot even started, and they took that on out. I knew the fellow had it when I seen him, but I didn’t know him by name.”
——
In the conspiracy hearing, Lee Forsythe was cross-examined by Attorney Kohl as follows:
Q. You were there then. Do you know that some weapons were seized?
A. I do. . . . I saw the officers and the National Guardsmen come in and take them out.
Q. And what did they take out, if you know?
A. They didn’t take any weapons out of our annex, but I seen them take something out of the Motel part.
Q. What weapons did you see them take?
A. Rifles and shotguns.
Q. Rifles, shotguns? How about pistols?
A. I didn’t—I didn’t see anything.
Q. Would you tell us, please, how many rifles and how many shotguns you saw them remove?
A. I didn’t count them.
Q. Granted perhaps you didn’t count them, but do you have any idea?
A. No, I don’t.
——
“They jumped Auburey that morning,” Sortor told me. “They asked him Auburey’s name. And Auburey say he was working at Ford’s. And they just jumped on him. Just told him to get on up over there, you know. He got against the wall, guy asked him something, and I guess Auburey hemmed, then he hit him in the back and alongside his head.” (“You see,” Mr. Gill said another time, “Auburey was a real slow talker. They’d ask him something, he wouldn’t look like he’s thinking. I guess that’s what got him killed.”)
“Then they told us to go on back in.”
——
There was more imprudent laughter by the boys. I am not clear about the chronology. At some point, according to Sortor, this happened:
“We was trying to open the front door. You know, the guy said, the door was locked. This here guy telling us through the glass, ‘Don’t move,’ So he said, ‘Stand there.’ So this other guy, he hollering, ‘Open the door! Open the door!’ This first guy here still was telling us, ‘Don’t move,’ and was getting ready to shoot in at us, you know. So the policeman, he says, ‘Don’t shoot any of them. Don’t do that.’ So he didn’t. So he took his gun—he was a little guy, this was a National Guard man—and broke the glass out and cut his hand, you know. We had to laugh.”
7. What Was That About?
“When the small Guardsman cut his hand,” Roderick Davis said to me, “the boys laughed at him. I wonder if that could have been why they came back.
“After it was all over, Larry said, ‘What was that all about? Man, one of them was pointing a gun right at your head!’ ”
8. He Checked Out
“The guy from A-1,” Sortor said to me, “he came back that Tuesday after they had came in that morning, he wasn’t there when they came in. He came back mad, say, ‘Them fucks took my tape recorder.’ He got his clothes and he left. He checked out.”
9. They Checked Out
“Them girls”—Virginia and Ann—“they’d had enough of that. They checked out.”
10. Someone Been Whipping You
After the search, Auburey got dressed and went home, and he took a bath. “He told my other son,” Mrs. Pollard said to me, “and told him not to tell me because I’d get upset, that the police had been in there and raided the hotel and beat him in the back. Cause I wouldn’t have let him stay there if I’d known that. He called me in the bathroom and asked me to wash his back, and that’s unusual. And his back was all whipped up. I do know he was beat in the back because I washed his back, and I said, ‘Ow! Oooh!’ I said, ‘Auburey, you been beat in the back!’ And he said, ‘Aw, no, Momma, ain’t nothing happened to my back.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, son, someone been whipping your back, because you got great whips all in your back.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Momma, the police whipped me because they couldn’t find nothing, so they whipped me.’
“He went back over there. I never would have went back to that hotel if it had been me. I never saw him after that.”
11. A Routine Day
“Tuesday I worked in the Thirteenth Precinct again,” David Senak told me, “and that was just a—could I say a routine day, as there were riots? Patrolling and, you know, arresting a few people here and there for looting.
“That third day I used a rifle during the day and a shotgun at night. I used my cousin’s gun, he had a gun with a scope on it, I guess it was a seven- or eight-millimeter German gun, and I used that during the day, because we were having a lot of sniper fire during the day, and a shotgun was ineffective. So I used his gun during the day with a sniper scope. I call it a sniper scope because I’m in the Air National Guard, but it’s just a regular scope that’s mounted on a pretty heavy gun. Seven- or eight-millimeter Mauser. Turned out not to be too accurate.”
12. To Be on Your Own
“It was quiet all day the rest of Tuesday,” Roderick Davis said to me. “The stores opened up, and we went across to the Lucky Strike Market, corner of Woodward and Euclid, and we bought some rolls, apple turnovers, milk, pop. Three or four TV dinners. The other three went home Tuesday. The youngest one, Ronald Banks, his parents came and got him, and he came back to get Larry Demps and Michael Calhoun—only lives five or six blocks from there, and he just walked back up and the three left together. Fred and Larry and me, we just stayed on and watched TV.”
I asked why they had decided to stay.
“It was a kind of a two-way thing,” Roderick said. “We had the money to pay up to Wednesday morning, and we decided to see what it would be like to be on your own.”
13. The Whole Day
Michael Clark, under cross-examination by Attorney Lippitt in the murder hearing:
Q. What had you done that day?
A. What did I do the whole day?
Q. Uh-huh.
A. Do I have to answer that? I went over to my sister’s, came back, slept, ate, watched television, listened to the radio. Walked, went swimming, and that’s about all.
14. I’ll Be Back
During the day Carl and Lee and Sortor stopped awhile at Carl’s house. “When we came out to Carl’s,” Sortor told me, “Miss Margaret told us to go on and check out, you know, come on home. So we were going to get our stuff together and come on home.”
Mrs. Gill—or Miss Margaret, as the boys called her—told me, “Carl was going with a girl named Patty. In fact, she was in jail during the time. She was in there for, you know, looting. There, too, he was trying to stick around the Algiers for her to call, because she didn’t know my number. He knew that she’d probably try to catch him at Michael’s. Before he left here to go back he called over and asked Michael had she called.
“They left here for the hotel—wheneve
r he left home I knowed where I could reach him. They took tapes and they was going to play around. And I was cooking a turkey dinner, and I said, ‘You going to come back and eat?’ And he said, ‘I’ll be back and have a piece of meat,’ you know.”
As he set out for the Algiers Motel on a riotous afternoon, Carl Cooper made a natty sight; he was wearing brown loafers and brown socks, orange trousers, a brown sports coat over a white dress shirt, and a white straw hat.
15. What’s Happened to These People?
“Frank came over there,” Sortor told me, “a guy named Frank Parker, so we went back over to his house. I went around to Auburey’s house on the way. I said, ‘Well, Frank told me, “Come on over to my pad, man.” I’m going to pick up my coat.’ Which this coat was mine already, before the looting started, see, this coat was mine, so I said, ‘I’m going over there and get it.’ So we went on over there, went to Frank’s house, stayed over there for a little while. So it was some friends, six of us, you know, in the car, so we were riding, going back over to the hotel. We wouldn’t have got stopped, see, but this here guy, I guess he started shooting at the police over there, and they told everybody to turn around and go back down Fourteenth, so we turned around, and we had to go all the way down to the Boulevard, and the police, they pulled us over down there, I guess it was because there was six of us. A police car told us to pull over. Then a jeep ran alongside and bumped into us, forced us up on the curb. They got us out and pushed us around down there and lined us up around this big tree. They took my coat. They said whose coat was it. I said it was mine, it was in my hand. It was a cashmere coat, cost about seventy-nine dollars. ‘Where did you loot this out of?’ I said, ‘I didn’t loot it.’ So the guy hit me up the side of my face. So I said, ‘I ain’t loot that coat. I had this coat last winter and I just left it over at Frank’s house over there, because I had another one, another that was a lighter coat, like a pinstripe coat, I had that, so I wore that.’ They was searching us down. Auburey got hit then, back of the head. Auburey was just telling them he was working at Ford’s. Guy told him to shut up and hit him. So they told us to get back in the car and go ahead on. So I said to Auburey, ‘Man, what’s happened to these people? They gone crazy.’ ”
16. You Could Have Won a Lot
By about seven o’clock, Lee, Carl, Auburey, Sortor, and Michael had all gathered in Lee’s room, A-5; they had brought two friends with them, Melvin Pratt and Heywood Lester; and Michael’s sister and brother-in-law, Brenda and Rodney Norman, also joined them there—and perhaps one or two others.
“We just got tired of watching television,” Lee told me. “Started to gambling. This guy Melvin Pratt was winning; he picked up maybe two hundred dollars.”
“We was shooting craps,” Sortor told me. “We was shooting twenty dollars, something like, twenty-five. You could have won a lot.”
“They said when they were shooting crap,” Mrs. Gill told me, “Auburey was saying, ‘When I die, cremate me.’ Sometimes you can sense things.”
17. I’m Not Going out There
The curfew hour came and went; they were still rolling dice. Finally, at nearly eleven, all but Carl, Michael, Auburey, Lee, and Sortor decided to leave—or, at least, all but one of those others surely did. I believe that one, who was wearing a yellow shirt, may have lingered after the rest.
“When the other boys left the motel,” Mrs. Gill told me, “the other boy, he told Carl to come on with him. Carl wanted to come, but Carl was really scared to come out. He said, ‘Man, I ain’t going out there, be shot up in cars and things,’ said, ‘I’m not going out there, I’m going to stay right on in here. You ought to stay, too.’ He tried to get them to stay, but it was eleven o’clock. Carl kept saying he should have went home. Auburey sitting there and saying, ‘When I die, cremate me.’ So I don’t know if the boys had a feeling, or what.”
18. A Whole Bunch of Shooting
Michael had called his mother before his sister left. “I called my mother,” he testified in the conspiracy hearing, “and told her my sister was over there. And then my mother told me that she heard it was, they was doing a whole bunch of shooting over on the Expressway, and to tell my sister and them to go back the opposite way, go towards, go towards, go north—yeah, go north and then go down to Davison and come.”
19. Something Was Fixing to Happen
Earlier in the evening, Mrs. Gill had visited a friend. “I was out there,” she told me, “and I don’t know, I never had that feeling before, just felt like you was out there by yourself, and something was fixing to happen any minute. I was over at a girl friend’s house, and I just said, ‘Take me home.’ It was before the curfew, and the streets was empty. Actually that was the first time I’d been out riding since the riots, and I think that maybe I didn’t realize how bad it really was. Just by hearing it over the news and all. But to be out there!”
Carl called her after the friends left, Mrs. Gill told me. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s after curfew, and the cabs won’t come now,’ he says, ‘the cabs has stopped, you know,’ he said, ‘so I’ll come home the first thing in the morning.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but in the meantime you call me back, you call me back when you get ready to go to bed, let me know what room you’re going to be in.’ So he said, ‘Okay.’ And that was the first time he ever came out and said he was scared. He said, ‘I’m really scared.’ ”
20. We Decided We Were Hungry
Under cross-examination in the conspiracy hearing by Attorney Kohl, Juli Hysell testified as follows:
Q. Then do we understand that on Tuesday evening, the 25th of July, you were in room 2?
A. That’s correct.
Q. And who was in room 2 with you?
A. Karen Malloy.
Q. Just the two of you?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you leave that room?
A. Yes, we did.
Q. When did you leave?
A. I imagine it was around midnight. I am not sure about the time.
Q. There was shooting in that area, wasn’t there?
A. I never heard any shooting.
Q. And so what caused you to leave room 2 at approximately midnight?
A. Bubbles came to the room and asked us if we wanted to go to his room and play cards and listen to the radio.
Q. And what is Bubbles’ name?
A. Bubbles.
Q. No, I say what is his name, not his nickname.
A. Eli Carter.
Q. Was Eli Carter staying at the Motel?
A. Yes, he was. . . .
Q. Did you at any time date Bubbles?
A. No, I didn’t.
Q. But Bubbles was paying your way at the Motel, wasn’t he?
A. No; he was giving me money if I needed it.
Q. But you didn’t need it because you could always get it from your parents, we are led to believe.
A. I didn’t send home every day for money. . . .
Q. So, midnight on the 25th you are invited to leave room 2 by Bubbles?
A. No, Bubbles—yeah, oh, that’s right, yeah. He asked us did we want to go play cards, and we said no. . . .
Q. Well, what else happened?
A. We got up, and we had been watching television, and we got up, and we decided we were hungry, but we knew we couldn’t go out on the street because, you know, of the curfew and that, so we started walking around the pool, because there was some people there that, you know, they had food at the Motel.
Q. They had what?
A. Food at the Motel. And some of the people that were living there had some food. And Carl Cooper was standing by the pool, so we started talking to Carl. . . .
Q. And what happened?
A. We just started talking to him.
Q. Did you know him?
A. Yes, we knew him. We had met him a couple of days before.
Q. Yes.
A. And, you know, we told him we were looking for some, you know, food and that. . . .
Q. Some f
ood?
A. Because we were hungry. And he said that Lee had some food over in his apartment, and we were welcome to go over there if there was anything we liked.
Q. And where was Bubbles at this time?
A. He was in his room, playing cards. . . .
Q. Then what did you do, Miss Hysell?
A. We went over to Lee’s and fixed hot dogs. . . .
Q. Did you know Lee?
A. No, I just met him then.
21. A Puzzle
“I called back over there about twelve,” Mrs. Gill told me, “and talked to the girl on the switchboard, and she said she couldn’t accept any calls, and I said, ‘well, why?’—you know. And she said, ‘I just can’t accept any calls right now. Soon as I get a line clear.’ And I said, ‘Well, what’s going on?’ And she said, ‘Nothing. It’s quiet over here.’ So that was a puzzle to me, you know. Like I say, I was nervous for some reason, you know. You hear all those bullet shots around, you know, shooting around, you don’t know what to think. What made me really nervous was when he told me he was really scared.”
9
“QUIET AND RESPECTABLE”
1. B or C Average
“I was born in Royal Oak,” Ronald August began. “Well, my birth certificate states it’s Royal Oak Township, which I believe now is called Madison Heights. March 27, 1939.