Death of a City

by Lionel White

  “You so satisfied,” Shirley went on. "How about that! Probably a sonic boom from one of those jet planes and this old house, this typical old house we all live in, just about falls apart. You can bet those fine white friends of yours sitting down, being served their evening cocktail by their colored help, ain’t worrying about their nice new houses going to fall apart everytime a plane crashes the sound barrier.”

  Mrs. Jackson again rapped sharply with her gavel.

  “Aren’t we really getting away from the purpose of this meeting?” she asked. “We are not here to discuss sonic booms or houses, although I agree that we do live in ramshackle ghettos and pay exhorbitant rents for the privilege. But do let us try and get back to the reason we are here. Most of us have heard of the case you mentioned, Miss Candle, but whether the girl is in the right or wrong doesn’t matter. That only happened a few days ago. Trouble has been brewing in this town a lot longer than that. You been away to school and maybe you don’t know...”

  Mrs. Jackson’s voice droned on, but Shirley Candle was no longer listening to her. She was thinking, Yes, I’ve been away. And I wish to God I’d never gone.

  But did she? Was that what she really wished? Or did she wish she had never come back? Did she wish she'd never told Max off and come home again?

  God, it was the same old thing, over and over again. One minute she thought one thing and the next she thought the exact opposite. One minute she thought black was beautiful and then a minute later she believed that black was ugly as sin. What in the name of God was the matter with her anyway? Why couldn’t she make a decision and stick with it? That was the way it had been with Max. She’d been sure, absolutely certain, even before she’d slept with him, that she loved him. And then she hated him. Was it because he was white? Did she feel the way she did about herself because she was the color of cafe au lait? Because she had a mother who was coal black and she suspected that her father had been a white man? Is that why one minute she hated anything that was white and the next she was taking a secret pride in the fact that she was mortally certain that she was almost white herself?

  Had she, in fact, fallen in love with Max because he was white? Was that the reason? Or was it because Max was Max, bright, kind, decent and good? Max was white, but Max thought black was beautiful. God knows he’d told her often enough. He loved her and he wanted to marry her and, when she was with him, she loved him in return.

  So why had she walked out? Why had she left him and come back home to Oakdale and deliberately taken up with Buddy? There was no doubt about Buddy. Buddy was just as black as her own mother. Buddy was neither proud nor ashamed of being black.

  Buddy was too stupid to care one way or the other. The only thing Buddy cared about was a good piece of ass, a Bull Durham sack full of weed and a pint of booze. He’d become a Black Panther in the last year and that’s how she’d happened to meet him. But she knew Buddy didn’t really give a damn one way or another. The Panthers made him feel like a man and gave him some sort of a cause, although she knew in her heart he didn’t believe in the cause one way or the other. She knew he really didn’t care about her either, except as an available piece of ass which didn’t cost him anything.

  So why had she left Max, who was good and kind and intelligent, who’d got a broken head marching in Chicago and who’d spent his summer vacations working with the poor children in the ghetto up in New York? Was it only because he was white and she felt she had to hate anything white, love anything black? Or was it because at bottom she was just another Goddamned hypocrite who was secretly ashamed of being black herself and had to take it out on someone—take it out on Max and break him all up by leaving him to come back to this miserable town and pick up with the first stud who came along.

  She wanted to be honest with herself, but the trouble was she didn’t really know how. She tried, but it always ended up in circles.

  Itwas like that thingabout passing.

  She’d known, even before she had left Oakdale to go to New York University on a scholarship, that she’d be able to pass for white if she wanted to. She had none of the Negroid features and her skin was as light as that of hundreds of Italians and Puerto Ricans. She didn’t even have the usual Southern accent, although God alone knows how she’d managed to get rid of it. And she was beautiful and she knew it and had known it since she was a little girl.

  It would have been easy enough. Damned easy.

  The first time she had seriously thought about it, she ended up being deeply ashamed. Ashamed and, yes, almost horrified at the thought. The temptation had still been there in the back of her mind. Maybe that’s why she had taken up with Max. As a sort of compromise or perhaps even with some vague thought in the back of her mind that eventually they would get married and then she would pass, pretend that she was white. It would certainly have been easy enough. Mrs. Max Goldman. It wouldn’t be difficult for her to pass as Max’s Jewish wife. But she’d never really seriously considered it, of course, even if she had started sleeping with Max and had actually fallen in love with him. Max would have been the first one to put his foot down on that idea. Max would have been too honest ever to stand for that. Anyway, she was colored and she was proud of her black heritage. So was that why she’d ditched Max and come back to Oakdale to take up with Buddy, who ..

  She suddenly became aware of where she was and she also became aware of the fact that the room was still and quiet and that no one was any longer speaking.

  She looked up and saw that everyone was looking over at the corner of the room and her eyes followed the other eyes and saw that Mrs. Jackson, Carol Lou Jackson, who was running this meeting, had gone over and picked up the telephone and that she was listening intently to some voice at the other end of the wire.

  In that split second as she watched the older woman at the telephone, she seemed to sense what the others in the room had already sensed through some weird telepathy, that peculiar feeling of impending tragedy, even before Carol Lou Jackson slowly stood up, dropping first the receiver and then the phone itself to the floor as she slowly turned and faced them.

  For a brief moment the woman's heavy face seemed to melt and dissolve as her mouth widened and the cry swelled up from her throat to explode in a burst of words.

  “God—oh, my God! My baby. They killed my baby. They blowed up the church and they killed the babies!"

  4 IT had been, all in all, a really excellent afternoon. He’d made a birdie on the fourth and tenth holes, completed the eighteen in only three over par for the course. He had collected forty-seven dollars from Knocky Higgins, twenty-eight from Miles Overstreet and seventeen dollars and fifty cents from Billy Matthews. Knocky was buying the drinks and the thought that he was having his usual three ounces of Chivas Regal while Knocky and the others were taking their usual bourbon and branch water, gave him a peculiar added sense of pleasure.

  Cass Asmore, Carlton Asmore’s uncle, liked to win and he also liked to get the best of a deal. He liked the odds in his favor and they usually were. In another ten minutes, after they’d had a short breather, they would play their usual rubber of bridge, and Cass was quite certain that he and Knocky would take the rubber. They almost always did.

  The bridge game, assuming, of course, that he and Knocky won, would give him an additional twenty-five dollars. He didn’t need the money certainly, but the idea of getting it pleased him. It would reaffirm his position as the superior man.

  Certainly Cass Asmore needed no additional assurance so far as his position in relationship to these other men was concerned, any more than the few additional dollars he had picked up that afternoon really meant anything in relation to the several million dollars in assets which he had and which was represented by his majority interest in Southern Canning, the Oakdale Banner and a good deal of the real estate in downtown Oakdale as well as a fair percentage of the land and buildings in the colored section of the city.

  If there is such a thing as a natural-born loser, there are probably a
lso natural-born winners, and Cass had no doubts at all as to which group he belonged. It was probably the reason that he was able to get away with the things he did. Right from the very beginning he had been an odd ball and, although the people in Oakdale had become used to thinking of him as something of an eccentric, no one ever questioned either his social position or his status as a civic leader and outstanding businessman in the community.

  When the other boys in his social stratum had picked either Duke or VMI, Cass had elected to go up North to Princeton. Instead of returning to Oakdale after he graduated and going into the family business, he’d gone to Paris for a couple of years and, when he came back, he brought a wife with him and he made no bones about her being a Polish Jewess he had met in a London nightclub where she was dancing. No one else in Oakdale could have gotten away with that.

  No one could have gotten away with a good many things which

  he did. When his wife had divorced him after two years of marriage, he had imported a showgirl from New York and lived openly with her for several years. At the end of her tenure, he had had a number of affairs with various women in the town and it was rumored that his sexual tastes ran not only to young girls but to boys as well.

  He ran his businesses as he ran his life. He boasted that he had been in the offices of the Banner but once in his life, but there was no doubt about his control of the daily newspaper. The paper itself was Democratic in politics and ultra-conservative in policy, but Cass himself was an outspoken liberal and when his nephew, Carlton, ran for district attorney on the Republican ticket, both the Banner and Cass backed his candidacy. He owned more rundown, outdated, rat-infested slum buildings in the colored section of the city than any other landlord, but he was also the largest single white contributor to the NAACP. When the unions tried to move in and organize his mills, he fought them to a standstill, but his name was listed time and again as a contributor to liberal organizations which were listed by the FBI as Communist fronts.

  Cass Asmore ran his business enterprises from the bar of the Cosmos Club or the golf course of the country club and almost never showed up at his downtown offices and a good many people thought of him as merely another rich dilettante. But the men with whom he did business knew very well that he was shrewd and tough to the point of unscrupulousness and had complete respect for him as a hardheaded and stubborn operator.

  It may be true that no one really liked him, with the possible exception of his nephew, whom he had raised after Carlton As-more’s own parents had been killed in an airplane crash when the boy was ten years old, but most people respected him and a good many others feared him. No one who knew him or had dealings with him, ever discounted him.

  If Boyd Morris Millard, the mayor, considered Oakdale “his city,” it is equally true that in a good many ways it was also Cass Asmore’s city. For Cass Asmore, eccentricities aside, was truly representative of the “Establishment” which really controlled Oakdale, socially, economically and culturally. He was certainly an anachronism in this day and age, but he was an anachronism who wielded power, locally and statewide.

  Billy Matthews cut the deck and handed it back to Knocky Higgins.

  “You know,” he said, “I wish someone would tell me why.”

  Knocky, about to deal, hesitated.

  “Why? Why what, Miles?”

  “Why I bother,” Miles said. “I might just as well hand the money over now and save myself some time and trouble. Billy here and I haven’t taken a rubber from you two thieves in the memory of man.”

  Billy Matthews looked up at his partner and grinned. “You got a point there, Miles,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know why either. So let’s just give them twenty-five bucks apiece and leave while we are ahead, or rather while we are behind.”

  Knocky laid the deck on the table.

  “Billy," he said, “that sounds like the best idea you have come up with in a long time. Why don’t you boys just do that? The fact is, I could stand to get away early tonight myself. I told my wife I would try and get home early.”

  “Deal the cards, Knocky,” Miles Overstreet said. “You may have told someone’s wife you’d try and get there early, but you sure as hell didn’t tell it to your wife.”

  Knocky Higgins, again about to pick up the cards, froze for a moment and then slowly turned in his seat and stared at the other man.

  “Now, just what the hell do you mean by that, Miles?” he asked. “Did you have some other wife in particular in mind? Perhaps Beth?”

  Cass Asmore pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Oh, for Christ sake,” he said. “What is this, a card game or a Goddamned discussion group?”

  Knocky Higgins, he thought, is really a horse’s ass. Doesn’t he have enough sense not to bait Miles? It was certainly no secret that Knocky had been playing around with Beth Overstreet. Everybody in town knew and everybody certainly included Miles himself. Knocky should have the sense to realize that he was just asking for trouble. Trouble was one thing that Cass Asmore made it a point to avoid at all costs. Even other people’s troubles. It probably would be a good idea to break it up and skip the card game.

  “I think, boys,” Cass said, “maybe we better pass up the bridge today. Fact is,” he stood up and half-turned his eyes, sweeping the long, curving driveway leading up to the clubhouse, “Fact is, if I am seeing correctly, the young woman behind the wheel of that convertible which just turned in is my nephew’s girl friend. I think I will take advantage of his absence and invite her for a drink with me before dinner.”

  Billy Matthews pushed away from the table and took Miles Overstreet’s arm.

  “Come on boy,” he said. “We just saved ourselves some money. Let’s go into the bar and spend it.”

  Asmore waited a moment until the two men were out of hearing and then turned to Knocky, who was still seated at the card table.

  “Knocky,” he said, “you are even more stupid than I thought you were. It is bad enough taste to cuckold a' friend, and it is worse taste to let everybody know about it. But it could be fatal to start rubbing it in.”

  “Really, Cass,” Knocky Higgins said, his face flushing, “I can’t see where this exactly concerns you. After all, my private business ...”

  “You don’t have any private business,” Cass Asmore said coldly. “And it does concern me. It concerns me a great deal. I’ll be only too happy to spell it out for you. I happen to hold the mortgage on your home. I also happen to own lock, stock and barrel that automobile agency which people who don’t know any better think belongs to you because it is called the Higgins Chevrolet Corporation. I happen to be holding your personal notes for something over a hundred thousand dollars. If you screw things up for yourself in this town, I will also happen to be holding the bag for a hell of a lot more than you have the assets to cover. So until you can bail yourself out, I simply can’t afford to let you make more of a Goddamned fool out of yourself than you naturally are.”

  He hesitated and looked over for a moment to watch Caroline

  Vargle as she parked the car in the asphalt lot between the clubhouse and the first tee.

  “I don’t give a damn about your morals or lack of them,” he said, “and I don’t particularly give a damn if Miles Overstreet is unable to keep his bitch from rolling over on her back for anyone who waves at her, but I do care about my investments and my bank’s investments. So from now on you stay away from Beth Overstreet and confine your screwing to your own home or go to a whorehouse, preferably in some other town. Have I made myself quite clear?”

  For several seconds the car dealer stared at Cass and then, without a word, turned and stalked away, heading for the barroom at the rear of the clubhouse. Passing Caroline Vargle as she crossed the veranda, he stared blindly past her as she smiled and spoke.

  “How was the bridge game?” she asked.

  A moment later she walked up to Cass Asmore, giving him a puzzled look as he smiled and pulled out a deck chair for h
er.

  “My goodness,” she said, “what in the world is the matter with that little man? He looked at me as though I were Typhoid Mary."

  “Don’t think he even saw you,” Cass Asmore said. “Fact is, he just had a little bad news from home and I guess he was sort of preoccupied. Anyway, let’s not worry about him. I assume you have come here to meet that nephew of mine and, as it seems he will be late as usual, let me order a drink for you.”

  He smiled and looked around for a waiter and for the first time became aware that the veranda, usually crowded at this time on Saturday evening, was completely deserted but for the two of them.

  “Odd,” he said. “I wonder where everyone is.”

  He lifted his glass and rapped it sharply with the heavy signet ring on his right middle finger-

  “Service in this place has become atrocious,” he said, his voice petulant. “Now where the hell is . . .”

  He stopped speaking suddenly and his heavy eyebrows raised in surprise as he looked down towards the parking lot.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Isn’t that George, our waiter, taking off in that station wagon?”

  Caroline followed his glance and then quickly looked back at him, an expression of perplexity on her face.

  “It was George all right,” she said, “and he seems in rather a hurry. Also he seemed to have about half of the rest of the colored staff in the car with him. I wonder . .

  She ceased speaking as Tony Meriot, the club steward, slammed the door leading onto the veranda from the clubhouse and hurried directly to their table. Tony looked at her curiously for a moment and then leaned down and whispered something to Cass Asmore.

  For a moment Asmore merely looked shocked and then slowly he stood up.

  “Been some trouble over in town,” he said. “It just came over the radio. An explosion, somewhere on Division Street. I understand several people have been killed and a number injured.”

  The sound of several car engines starting simultaneously in the lot below drowned out his next sentence and, as Caroline started to get to her feet, he laid his hand on her shoulder, pushing her gently back.