by Studs Terkel
We’re the messengers—we don’t bring good news. When you’re the messenger with bad news, anything can happen. Did you ever see a war movie? You never hear anybody say, “Medic, come here please.” It’s always, “Medic!”—angry, urgent. It conveys a certain feeling, like you did this, you’re responsible for this, do something to fix it! It’s a feeling. You get over that after a while. You start to understand. But your initial response is, “Hey, I didn’t do it. Sorry, but it’s not my fault.”
We have an energy that animates us, that, I think, sometimes reaches beyond our corporal bodies. You know the instant a person dies. You don’t have to be a clinician to see the light leave their body, the instant that that body becomes inert substance. You just know it. Whether that body is comatose, whether it’s a broken, traumatized piece of flesh, if you see the light leave that body, if you see the moment of the loss of animation, you know it. To me, it’s a spiritual experience, like it or not. Aren’t we this force, this life force that animates us? It always puzzled me how one thing will kill an individual and the guy right next to him can suffer the exact same thing and worse and survive it. I’ve had guys with conduit pipes shoved straight out underneath their chin, right out through the top of their head, and never lost consciousness. Another guy would be dead. I’ve had a man cut in half in a motorcycle accident who actually survived. I’ve seen people shoot themselves in the head and survive. And then little things. People die of them. Craziness. A guy bumps into the dining room table and an hour later, he’s bled to death—simple little trauma, never knew he was hurt. Ruptured spleen. He just bled out. Never felt any pain. It truly is a mystery.
I think anybody who says they’re not afraid of death is kidding themselves. I don’t know whether we fear death itself, I don’t know whether we have any understanding about death itself. That’s what we fear about it: it’s something that we can’t possibly understand. What it’s like to go beyond that door. No matter how many times we’ve seen it happen, no matter how many of our loved ones we’ve buried, people that we’re tremendously close to: our parents, our wives . . . Not one of us has any understanding of what it means to go beyond it. We can say: “I’m not afraid of death, it’s just the other side of life. I wasn’t afraid of being born.” In fact, Mark Twain, somewhere along the line, wrote, “The only people who rejoice at births and mourn at funerals are the parties that aren’t involved.” I think anybody who claims that they aren’t afraid of death is either lying or kidding themselves.
Do I believe in a life after? I have no idea. I think of myself as spiritual. I really believe that what I am is not this body. I know how quick this body turns to garbage. You can’t even make pot out of it. I’d like to be cremated and then shot out of a cannon during the “1812 Overture” when they set off the fireworks at Grant Park. That’d be a nice send-off. But really it doesn’t matter to me. Get rid of me as cheap and fast as you can.
While we’re alive, it’s hope that keeps us going. That last laugh, that piece of cherry pie for today.
Law and Order
Robert Soreghan
When he was seventeen years old—six years before he joined the Chicago Police Department—he joined the Marine Corps. It was during the Vietnam War. “I spent eleven months out in the field. We would be flown out by helicopter, and then we would search and destroy our way back in for two weeks. I was young. It was an adventure. Until you’re over there for a while. Then the excitement and the adventure seem to go away. It’s a fear of the unknown. You never ever knew where or when it was coming from. There were no front lines. It was jungle warfare. It was all around you. The most fear I had was of the unknown. It has never gone away.”
I’M A FIFTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Chicago police detective, and I’ve been so for the last thirty years. I deal with basically violent crimes. I’m married, I have two sons and two grandchildren. My oldest son is in the police department now, and my youngest son works for an armored-car company. We are practicing Catholics, but not as dedicated as one might wish. I deal with any crime against a person: shootings, stabbings, homicides, rapes, robberies, batteries—anything that one person perpetrates against another.
I got into a shoot-out, 1972. I was returning from court down at 321 North LaSalle on my way home, in uniform. I was on Milwaukee Avenue, around Evergreen Street, and observed two people chasing each other, down the street. One of them ran into a storefront, Ben’s Shoe Store, 1424 North Milwaukee. He was followed by the other, who produced a gun and shot him twice. I observed this. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, rush-hour traffic, bumper-to-bumper. So I got out of my car, in uniform, and drew my revolver, announced my office, and the individual that did the shooting turned and saw me and pointed the gun at me. I was fortunate enough to be able to shoot first, wounding him. Once I shot him, he dropped the gun and ran. He was about a quarter of a block down before he fell from his wounds. Just wounded—he didn’t expire. I brought him back and he was arrested.
I had to talk very, very long to my wife prior to my interview to get on this job. She was scared to death. She married me before I got on the police department. I filled out applications for both the fire department and the police department. I’m still waiting to hear from the fire department. [Laughs] When I was notified by the police department that they accepted my application, my wife was fearful that something was going to happen—her fear of the unknown. But I talked to her and told her: “I could go any time, anywhere—it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the job.”
You don’t see death all the time, but you hear of it. You monitor the radios and it’s constant. The only thing that changes really is the degree. It could be something as simple as a minor domestic with husband and wife, it could be a simple battery, bar fight, all the way up to a hideous type of a murder. I try not to even think about getting killed. I had two friends of mine . . . [Sighs] Bill and Bruce were both policemen who worked in a Task Force Unit, and in 1973, we were patrolling up here in the twentieth district. They were patrolling up the street. This one individual comes out of a bar carrying a bag. They spotted this individual, he saw them, dropped his bag. They got out, looked in the bag, and there was a sawed-off shotgun. They ran back into the bar to apprehend him and he was hiding behind a portion of the entranceway. And when the first officer ran in, this offender, named Jacob Cohen, was also armed with a handgun. As soon as Bruce ran in, he shot him in the head. He fell down. His partner, Bill, ran in, grabbed him, and Cohen walked over and shot Bill as well. He killed both of them on the spot. We were the first car on the scene. We had just had dinner with them a half an hour before. They were close, close friends of my partner and myself. They were both talking about how they’d just picked up two new matching motorcycles. They were very close friends. And a half an hour later, they’re laying dead on the tavern floor. That was very difficult to deal with. My partner transferred to another unit. It hit me really hard.
When I think of dying, I think vault. I don’t want to be buried; that’s just a personal preference. I’d rather they put me in a vault aboveground. Maybe I’m claustrophobic, but I just don’t like the thought of being six feet underground. I don’t like the idea of being cremated. I have discussed this with the wife, and I think we’re both agreed. You’re still put in a coffin, but you’re sealed in a concrete or marble vault. Or I could move to New Orleans. They’re below sea level there, so all their cemeteries are above ground. My main concern is that I’m not going to leave those people that I love behind with any burden. I want to make sure that I can take care of them the best that I can and provide for them when I’m gone. My wife and I have talked about this: What if this happens now? We’ve laid out who to phone, who to call. I’ve got benefits with several different organizations—such as the army, such as the police department, the Masons, the VFW, the American Legion—all these groups I’m a member of, they all have these insurance packages, and I want to make sure that she knows where all these things are. I think our entire life, from the time
we’re born, is preparing for death. Somebody said and I heard it once, maybe it was in a movie, that from the time you’re born you’re preparing to die. That’s pretty much the truth. It’s a matter of living the best way you can and just preparing for the inevitable.
Delbert Lee Tibbs
He had served two years on death row in the state of Florida. He had been convicted by an all-white jury of rape and murder. Years later, the sentence was overturned by the Florida Supreme Court for lack of evidence.
I AM A MAN of African and other roots: Indian, and no doubt European, as my research would indicate. A father, a citizen of the United States of America, and a man on the planet Earth. I was born in Mississippi, on a sharecropper’s plantation, around sixty years ago. I grew up there until I was about twelve years old, at which time we migrated to Chicago, my mother and I. My mother had twelve children, like the twelve tribes. I was the last. Her baby, she called me. I went to Chicago public schools, from about the fifth grade through high school, and later I went to college for a bit. I went to the Chicago Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1972.
My mother was a black Baptist fundamentalist. I am spiritually orientated. I didn’t go to the seminary actually to be a preacher—I went because I had fiddled around in school. I considered myself uneducated at the time. When I came up from Mississippi at twelve years old, I was practically illiterate. Black children were not expected to be educated—in fact, it was dangerous to be educated in Mississippi if you were black in the fifties. If you came from a black family, let’s say middle-class, they would send you away to school. There you would be in danger just because of the fact that you were pursuing knowledge. That has always been something that has nettled me, the fact that my underpinnings were not good—that I might be an educated man impelled me to become a bookworm. I met a teacher in the fifth grade here and she started me to reading, and I never stopped. It also was an escape for me from the horrors of urban life. Reading became an escape from the squalor, from the gangs, when I was growing up here in Chicago. I started out reading anything and then, as time went on, I began to read “significant” or meaningful works by whomever. I promised my mama that I was going to get an education.
One of the things that really got me going was that I failed English. I could do English basically from my reading, but I had no sense of the mechanics of grammar. I wrote a good paper, I read well, so the teachers would leave me alone. They didn’t know that I didn’t know any grammar. The same way with math, I just somehow got by. But when I went to night school, I flunked English, and that messed with my head.
In the meantime, I’m working a day job in the salt mines down at the old Lakeside Press, making telephone directories, Sears Roebuck and Sports Illustrated, Time, Life, and Look. It was one of the most racist places that ever existed on this earth. I also got a chance to read there all day—it kept me from probably leaping on one of those East Europeans and strangling him. I sometimes tell my son, “Hey man, I don’t know what your mama tell you about but I made a few sacrifices for you, because I wouldn’t have stayed at that damn job for seven years and hated every single day of it”—I mean, with a passion that you can hardly believe. They were sued recently. Class-action suit for all of the years we were kept out of the unions.
I don’t know if they knew I was going to school—it wasn’t something you’d necessarily want them to know. I can remember a time-keeper. I remember him asking me to work overtime one day, and I refused. What he didn’t know was I left there and went to school. If I had been a white boy, I could have told him that and he’d have said, “Don’t worry about it, go ahead.” But I just told him no, and then he said, “Well, maybe eight hours is too much for you.” Of course I had a fit, I called him all kind of expletives. To myself, of course . . . [Laughs] I decided “Fuck them, I ain’t ever going back there.” But it taught me a lot. It taught me that if you have some heart, a little faith, God will take care of you. You might not always like the way He takes care of you, but He’ll take care of you. So I quit my job. After a little hassle, I drew some unemployment, and then I went to school full-time. This was Delbert Superman—because, at that time, we thought education was the Balm in Gilead, education would fix everything. I mean, no more “yassuh, boss.” It wasn’t quite like that . . .
As a youngster, I wanted to be an adventurer, to live life to the fullest, go places that I’d never been. I used to tell people my ambition was to roam the world and make love to the various women of the world, drink the wines of Spain, the sake of Japan, and so forth. I leave Lakeside with nothing and no place to go. I’m twenty-three years old and I have a son who’s four or five, and a wife that I’m separated from. The unemployment runs out before I can get my associate degree, and the rent man is banging on the door—so I have to go and find myself a job. And I did. I never read the Defender* before in my life. I never would look in the Defender for a job because blacks ain’t got no jobs that are going to pay me any money to take care of my family. But I do. And there’s an ad for claims adjusters for the Checker Taxi Company. Hell, I don’t know what a claims adjuster is, but I’m six feet three, I have all of my teeth, and my mind is sharp as a Toledo sword. [Laughs] So I apply for the job. And this Texan hires me. I look like I can take care of myself. At the time, the brothers are raising so much sand it’s dangerous for white adjusters to go into the black community. So for the first time in my life, I got a white-collar job, right? I wear a suit and a tie every day. So I do this for two years, three years, and am very good at it. Damn . . . I speak very well, and my boss said, “Mr. Tibbs, you know why you’re so successful? Because people believe you.” I said, “Well, generally speaking, I don’t lie to them. I tell them what the deal is. I say, ‘Hey, I can give you three grand now, or you get five grand later and a lawyer gets a third of that and a doctor gets the other part.’ ” That’s my prejudice against insurance companies. So I would settle claims like that. And nobody ever came back and said, “Hey, I got cheated.”
But the job was boring as hell. All kinds of other stuff was happening around human rights issues and so forth. I’m making good money, but that’s only for me, it ain’t doing nothing for my people. I’m not furthering my own growth, and so I spent a great deal of time afterwards boozing and carousing. After a couple of years, I met this beautiful young lady, Miss Julie Tyler, who was not at all typical of the young ladies I had met. She was a bourgeois black woman from Hyde Park. Her daddy was upper-middle-class. She had run away when she was sixteen to march with Martin Luther King and became a member of SNCC.* I quit my job and she and I got a place in Old Town, and, as the youngsters say now, we chilled out for the next year or so.
At the time, the black clergymen in Chicago had gone to the white seminaries and said, “Hey, you people graduate two or three hundred seminarians a year, but only one or two of them are black.” I found out about this three-year program where one could get an MAT, Masters in Arts and Theology. So they opened it up to selected black folks, whether or not you had an undergraduate degree. I was saying cynically, “Yeah, they’re looking for somebody to stem the shit that’s jumping off now. And yeah, I’ll do that because I do believe that peace is better than war, that friendship and that kind of stuff is better than enmity. I ain’t going to be somebody’s Uncle Tom, but I will do what I can . . .” And so also I will have fulfilled my promise to my mama: I will have myself a master’s degree. It was really beautiful because I could read all day and didn’t feel guilty for reading because it was course stuff.
And then crazy stuff starts happening. I had about five friends pass away, and these are young guys, in the matter of a year or two. And it scared the piss out of me, if you will pardon the expression. Not to mention the stuff that’s happening in the street. The cops going and shooting [Black Panthers] Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. I dropped out of the seminary.
And then I had an experience. I was at a friend’s house, someone I was in school with, and I was drinking orange juice, and I thin
k this guy put LSD in it. The story really gets crazy. I left his house and I was taking one of our friends home. I looked at the girl and her face had changed. I had this very violent verbal reaction, and I’m not a violent guy. I think I scared her. I dropped her off at home and my body started shaking uncontrollably, which acid will do to you. Something was happening with my body and I didn’t know what it was. I drove my car all night because I knew I couldn’t sleep.
I’d dropped out of the seminary and now I don’t know what to do with myself. There was an agitation within my spirit, so I said, “Well, I’ll take off. I’ve never been anyplace except Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.” I thought, you might not live that long anyway, so I took off and I took off walking. I wanted to go to California.
This was in 1972. I sold my car to my brother. When you’re six-three and you’re black, there are a lot of places you don’t get no rides. So it was mostly walking, and then later on I rode freight trains. I’d get a job working by the day for two or three days, make twenty bucks a day. That would last me a couple of weeks. I smoke bulk tobacco, roll my own, and I sleep under bridges and in cars. I went all over the USA. I’ve been in all the states, except maybe three. So I was all over Florida. And when this crazy stuff jumps off, the murder and the rape thing—people say, “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Philosophically, I can’t accept that. I was supposed to go through the experiences that I was supposed to go through for whatever reasons. I think God wanted me to disabuse myself of my fear of death, I really do. I think that’s why I went to death row. I think God was saying to me, “OK, I’m going to show you there’s nothing to fear out here but me. I’m going to the House of Death”—’cause that’s what they call it, they call it the Death House—“and I’m going to bring you out again.” [Laughs] And that’s what happened.