Death of a City

by Lionel White

  It had been a moon-lit evening, but now that the wind had changed, the cloud formations were spreading across the sky and the streets which had been in half darkness earlier suddenly closed in. This time there was no looting, no yelling and screaming. The hysteria had died down now, the reaction had settled in and what the crowds mostly felt was a sense of mass fear and guilt. So they stood quietly, staring at the flaming horizon and muttering quietly to neighbors, whose presence they could feel better than see.

  The block on which the Youth Center stood was crowded with people, jostling and whispering and speculating. Here and there in the crowd a flashlight momentarily gleamed. Far off they could again hear the wail of fire and police sirens, but the crowd itself was almost unnaturally quiet until, after some twenty minutes, there came that agonizing series of screams from the two-story building in the center of the block. Faces turned then and their eyes went to the Youth Center.

  Someone flashed a light on the door and a moment later it flew open and a huge black man staggered into the street, blood streaming from his face. He half-fell down the three stone steps leading into the building and those standing nearby, instead of going forward to help him, fell back in horror. They had seen the blood coursing down over his face in the light of the flash. He continued on for a half dozen staggering, blind steps and then fell forward on the pavement and lay still.

  From the open door of the building came a series of curses and in the background there was the sound of a high-pitched voice sobbing out unintelligible words. It was the voice of a girl or a young boy.

  Instead of closing in, the crowd moved back making a semicircle in front of the building and, as they stood there, half terrified and half curious, a slender figure ran from the building, leaping down the steps, and was caught for a brief moment in the beam of another flashlight from the crowd. A second later a heavy-set man, in bare feet and stripped to the waist, followed him, waving a naked razor blade and yelling curses. But the boy melted into the dark crowd, which, falling over itself, made a sudden path for the man. In a moment he, too, was gone but the sound of that odd wailingvoice still camefrom inside the building.

  Above the rustle of the still voiceless crowd there was the sudden clang clang of an ambulance gong, the wail of an approaching siren, and the people turned and saw the red flashing light of the vehicle as it swung into the block. Quickly they moved aside to make a path for it.

  The crowd, still stunned by what they had seen, stayed back as the ambulance came to a screeching halt with its headlights facing the front of the Youth Center. They watched silently as a white-coated figure leaped from behind the wheel to the street, a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. A second man got out of the car, also carrying a gun and a flashlight. In a moment they were inside the building.

  Someone in the crowd spoke in a hard, clear voice.

  “Honkie bastids!”

  Somebody else said, “Le’s turn it over. Come on, a couple of you, let’s turn it over.”

  A woman said, “No. It’s an ambulance; you can’t go turnin’ over an ambulance.”

  “They honkies.”

  “Git whitey. C’mon. Git whitey!”

  “I say leave that am’lance alone. They here to help us.”

  “I say turn it over.”

  A dozen voices had joined in now, and then, while they were still arguing, a boy climbed into the driver’s seat and started to reach for the ignition switch and someone else reached in and pulled him out and a bitter, half blind fistfight started in the fringe of the circle of light cast by the vehicle.

  One of the men who had entered the building came out, carrying a girl’s body over his shoulder and he brought her to the ambulance. They could see that she was colored and as he passed through the headlights, they saw the bloody, pulpy mess of her face. He put her in the ambulance and, when he went back into the building, he passed two or three youths coming out through the door. He carried the folding stretchers back inside with him.

  Carlton Asmore looked up as Captain Parker returned. He was on his knees and was holding Caroline’s unconscious body in his arms.

  Captain Parker said, ‘‘Is she alive?”

  Asmore nodded. “Yes. Unconscious. She’s been beaten, but she’s alive. We’ll take her out...”

  “That damned ambulance is filled with sacks. No room,” Parker said. “And we got a couple more here who are still alive. Couple of colored boys.”

  “We'll make room,” Asmore said.

  “You go out,” Captain Parker said. “Shift those sacks around somehow. We’ll need room for four. I can carry her out by myself.” He indicated the prone figure of the girl in Asmore’s arms. “Take one of these boys with you. This one.” He turned his flashlight on Barney, who leaned against the wall, holding closed with both hands the lips of a deep cut down the side of his face.

  “Can you walk, son?”

  Barney half-nodded, his voice frozen with fear as the blood spilled through his fingers.

  “Take him,” Captain Parker said. “That crowd’s ugly, but if they see you with a colored boy, they may let you through.”

  Asmore stood up and putting one arm under Barney Durham’s waist, started for the door, half-carrying him.

  The crowd, which had moved in, fell back as he came to the

  door and started down the steps. Holding his flashlight in one hand, he went to the rear of the ambulance, opened the door and shifted one of the sacks so that he could get the boy inside.

  There was muttering from the crowd and he could feel them moving in.

  He followed the boy into the ambulance and his light played over the six or eight gunnysacks. He leaned down to move one of them, and the string holding it tied together loosened as he moved it and, when he tossed it on top of a second sack, it opened wide, spilling outa flood of green paper bills.

  For a moment he stared, struck dumb with surprise. And then suddenly he knew what that ambulance had been doing in front of the First National Bank.

  Instinctively his hand went toward the money, almost as though he had to verify his eyes. The ambulance suddenly rocked back and forth and he almost fell to his knees.

  The voice of the crowd was rising in a crescendo and the ambulance was beginning to sway wildly back and forth.

  He knew then exactly what he had to do and he did it.

  The double doors in the back of the ambulance flew open as he pushed against them and then, a moment later, he had the opened sack in his arms and he carried it to the back and threw it out into the street.

  He could distinguish individual voices now in the crowd as sudden shocked cries of those nearby were raised in wild yells as the wind picked up the loose bills and they began to fly across the pavement.

  The ambulance settled back on its four wheels and it was easier for him to get to the other sacks. Three minutes later, as he again reentered the Youth Center, he knew that they would have no trouble finding room for all four victims. There were no more gunnysacks to compete for space.

  The street to the left of the ambulance was a solid mass of screaming, yelling human beings as Captain Parker backed the ambulance and turned to drive in the opposite direction a few moments later. He drove directly into the wind and there was no one at all to interfere with his progress.

  It was only when they were turning into the circular driveway of the hospital that Captain Parker turned to him and said, “You are a very brave man, Mr. Asmore. I don’t think I could have done it. No, sir, I don’t think I could have forced myself to do it. How much would you guess it came to?”

  “God only knows,” Carlton Asmore said. “But it must have been millions. Maybe five.”

  For an uneducated guess, he was pretty close. The insurance companies paid off on a total loss to the three banks of five million, three hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars, even.

  3 TODAY, Oakdale is gradually making a comeback. It will take considerable time, of course. Most of the downtown section was a total
loss and naturally that is the first part that is being taken care of. The ghetto, to a great extent, no longer exists. That will come last. But in a sense it is only right that it should. After all, a good many families who at one time lived in Oakdale’s colored section are no longer there.

  It is rather strange, the numbers of people who moved away after that weekend of horror, families that one wouldn’t think had enough money left after the fires wiped out their few possessions to move anywhere. Rumors keep coming back to Oakdale about some of those families—about the fine new modern homes that somehow or other they were able to buy in other places and other cities. Even a good many of the colored people who stayed on in Oakdale seemed unusually fortunate, unusually able to cope with reality after the disaster.

  There is a new Youth Center now in the black district, a fine modern building and, strange as it may seem, most of the funds for its construction were donated by the negro residents themselves. No one, except for those who gave the money, is really quite sure where those funds originally came from.

  Caroline Vargle will not be running the new Youth Center. Fortunately, at twenty-two, wounds to the flesh heal rapidly, if the memory of them tends to linger on. But even time takes care of that. When she recovered, Caroline left Oakdale. She did just what her mother had warned her not to do. She returned to New England with a brand-new husband, a young lawyer who had been a district attorney in the South but had succumbed to his new bride’s wishes and decided to make his home and his life far away from where he had been born and raised.

  And Mr. Carpender?

  Well, Mr. Carpender no longer has an office and a home in that old-fashioned residential hotel on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City. In fact, Mr. Carpender never returned from that appointment he had in Atlanta, Georgia, the appointment which only he showed up to keep.

  The well-known criminal attorney who had been sending the checks to cover Mr. Carpender’s rent canceled the lease a few days after the troubles in Oakdale and a couple of men came and moved out the possessions of the man who had called himself an importer and exporter.

  Mr. Carpender no longer has any need of either the apartment or the furnishings. Mr. Carpender, that man of mystery, has disappeared as completely as though he had never existed.

  There is, however, a sort of monument to Mr. Carpender’s memory. It is in the form of a huge concrete slab which makes up part of the foundation of a new skyscraper being constructed in a north New Jersey city. It is unmarked, but a marking is really unnecessary because Mr. Carpender himself is firmly ensconced in the core of that concrete slab.

  Arrangements were made by “the family."