Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  My interest in what was happening in the institute amused the three other Negroes with whom I worked. They had no curiosity about “white folks’ things,” while I wanted to know if the dogs being treated for diabetes were getting well; if the rats and mice in which cancer had been induced showed any signs of responding to treatment. I wanted to know the principle that lay behind the Aschheim-Zondek tests that were made with rabbits, the Wassermann tests that were made with guinea pigs. But when I asked a timid question I found that even Jewish doctors had learned to imitate the sadistic method of humbling a Negro that the others had cultivated.

  “If you know too much, boy, your brains might explode,” a doctor said one day.

  Each Saturday morning I assisted a young Jewish doctor in slitting the vocal cords of a fresh batch of dogs from the city pound. The object was to devocalize the dogs so that their howls would not disturb the patients in the other parts of the hospital. I held each dog as the doctor injected Nembutal into its veins to make it unconscious; then I held the dog’s jaws open as the doctor inserted the scalpel and severed the vocal cords. Later, when the dogs came to, they would lift their heads to the ceiling and gape in a soundless wail. The sight became lodged in my imagination as a symbol of silent suffering.

  To me Nembutal was a powerful and mysterious liquid, but when I asked questions about its properties I could not obtain a single intelligent answer. The doctor simply ignored me with: “Come on. Bring me the next dog. I haven’t got all day.”

  One Saturday morning, after I had held the dogs for their vocal cords to be slit, the doctor left the Nembutal on a bench. I picked it up, uncorked it, and smelled it. It was odorless. Suddenly Brand ran to me with a stricken face.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  “I was smelling this stuff to see if it had any odor,” I said.

  “Did you really smell it?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God!” he exclaimed.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You shouldn’t’ve done that!” he shouted.

  “Why?”

  He grabbed my arm and jerked me across the room.

  “Come on!” he yelled, snatching open the door.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I gotta get you to a doctor ’fore it’s too late,” he gasped.

  Had my foolish curiosity made me inhale something dangerous? “But—is it poisonous?”

  “Run, boy!” he said, pulling me. “You’ll fall dead.”

  Filled with fear, with Brand pulling my arm, I rushed out of the room, raced across a rear areaway, into another room, then down a long corridor. I wanted to ask Brand what symptoms I must expect, but we were running too fast. Brand finally stopped, gasping for breath. My heart beat wildly and my blood pounded in my head. Brand then dropped to the concrete floor, stretched out on his back, and yelled with laughter, shaking all over. He beat his fists against the concrete; he moaned, giggled, he kicked.

  I tried to master my outrage, wondering if some of the white doctors had told him to play the joke. He rose and wiped tears from his eyes, still laughing. I walked away from him. He knew that I was angry and he followed me.

  “Don’t get mad,” he gasped through his laughter.

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he giggled. “You looked at me like you’d believe anything I said. Man, you was scared.”

  He leaned against the wall, laughing again, stomping his feet. I was angry, for I felt that he would spread the story. I knew that Bill and Cooke never ventured beyond the safe bounds of Negro living, and they would never blunder into anything like this. And if they heard about this, they would laugh for months.

  “Brand, if you mention this, I’ll kill you,” I swore.

  “You ain’t mad?” he asked, laughing, staring at me through tears.

  Sniffing, Brand walked ahead of me. I followed him back into the room that housed the dogs. All day, while at some task, he would pause and giggle, then smother the giggling with his hand, looking at me out of the corner of his eyes, shaking his head. He laughed at me for a week. I kept my temper and let him amuse himself. I finally found out the properties of Nembutal by consulting medical books; but I never told Brand.

  * * *

  One summer morning, just as I began work, a young Jewish boy came to me with a stop watch in his hand.

  “Dr. ——— wants me to time you when you clean a room,” he said. “We’re trying to make the institute more efficient.”

  “I’m doing my work, and getting through on time,” I said.

  “This is the boss’s order,” he said.

  “Why don’t you work for a change?” I blurted, angry.

  “Now, look,” he said. “This is my work. Now you work.”

  I got a mop and pail, sprayed a room with disinfectant, and scrubbed at coagulated blood and hardened dog, rat, and rabbit feces. The normal temperature of a room was ninety, but, as the sun beat down upon the skylights, the temperature rose above a hundred. Stripped to my waist, I slung the mop, moving steadily like a machine, hearing the boy press the button on the stop watch as I finished cleaning a room.

  “Well, how is it?” I asked.

  “It took you seventeen minutes to clean that last room,” he said. “That ought to be the time for each room.”

  “But that room was not very dirty,” I said.

  “You have seventeen rooms to clean,” he went on as though I had not spoken. “Seventeen times seventeen make four hours and forty-nine minutes.” He wrote upon a little pad. “After lunch, clean the five flights of stone stairs. I timed a boy who scrubbed one step and multiplied that time by the number of steps. You ought to be through by six.”

  “Suppose I want relief?” I asked.

  “You’ll manage,” he said and left.

  Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, and then a white doctor or a nurse would come along and, instead of avoiding the soapy steps, would walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddied the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step. I would be on my knees, scrubbing, sweating, pouring out what limited energy my body could wring from my meager diet, and I would hear feet approaching. I would pause and curse with tense lips: “These sonofabitches are going to dirty these steps again, goddamn their souls to hell!”

  Sometimes a sadistically observant white man would notice that he had tracked dirty water up the steps, and he would look back down at me and smile and say: “Boy, we sure keep you busy, don’t we?”

  And I would not be able to answer.

  The feud that went on between Brand and Cooke continued. Although they were working daily in a building where scientific history was being made, the light of curiosity was never in their eyes. They were conditioned to their racial “place,” had learned to see only a part of the whites and the white world; and the whites, too, had learned to see only a part of the lives of the blacks and their world.

  Perhaps Brand and Cooke, lacking interests that could absorb them, fuming like children over trifles, simply invented their hate of each other in order to have something to feel deeply about. Or perhaps there was in them a vague tension stemming from their chronically frustrating way of life, a pain whose cause they did not know; and, like those devocalized dogs, they would whirl and snap at the air when their old pain struck them. Anyway, they argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew much about the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better
they could argue.

  The tug of war between the two elderly men reached a climax one winter day at noon. It was incredibly cold and an icy gale swept up and down the Chicago streets with blizzard force. The door of the animal-filled room was locked, for we always insisted that we be allowed one hour in which to eat and rest. Bill and I were sitting on wooden boxes, eating our lunches out of paper bags. Brand was washing his hands at the sink. Cooke was sitting on a rickety stool, munching an apple and reading the Chicago Tribune.

  Now and then a devocalized dog lifted his nose to the ceiling and howled soundlessly. The room was filled with many rows of high steel tiers. Perched upon each of these tiers were layers of steel cages containing the dogs, rats, mice, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Each cage was labeled in some indecipherable scientific jargon. Along the walls of the room were long charts with zigzagging red and black lines that traced the success or failure of some experiment. The lonely piping of guinea pigs floated unheeded about us. Hay rustled as a rabbit leaped restlessly about in its pen. A rat scampered around in its steel prison. Cooke tapped the newspaper for attention.

  “It says here,” Cooke mumbled through a mouthful of apple, “that this is the coldest day since 1888.”

  Bill and I sat unconcerned. Brand chuckled softly.

  “What in hell you laughing about?” Cooke demanded of Brand.

  “You can’t believe what that damn Tribune says,” Brand said.

  “How come I can’t?” Cooke demanded. “It’s the world’s greatest newspaper.”

  Brand did not reply; he shook his head pityingly and chuckled again.

  “Stop that damn laughing at me!” Cooke said angrily.

  “I laugh as much as I wanna,” Brand said. “You don’t know what you talking about. The Herald-Examiner says it’s the coldest day since 1873.”

  “But the Trib oughta know,” Cooke countered. “It’s older’n that Examiner.”

  “That damn Trib don’t know nothing!” Brand drowned out Cooke’s voice.

  “How in hell you know?” Cooke asked with rising anger.

  The argument waxed until Cooke shouted that if Brand did not shut up he was going to “cut his black throat.”

  Brand whirled from the sink, his hands dripping soapy water, his eyes blazing.

  “Take that back,” Brand said.

  “I take nothing back! What you wanna do about it?” Cooke taunted.

  The two elderly Negroes glared at each other. I wondered if the quarrel was really serious, or if it would turn out harmlessly as so many others had done.

  Suddenly Cooke dropped the Chicago Tribune and pulled a long knife from his pocket; his thumb pressed a button and a gleaming steel blade leaped out. Brand stepped back quickly and seized an ice pick that was stuck in a wooden board above the sink.

  “Put that knife down,” Brand said.

  “Stay ’way from me, or I’ll cut your throat,” Cooke warned.

  Brand lunged with the ice pick. Cooke dodged out of range. They circled each other like fighters in a prize ring. The cancerous and tubercular rats and mice leaped about in their cages. The guinea pigs whistled in fright. The diabetic dogs bared their teeth and barked soundlessly in our direction. The Aschheim-Zondek rabbits flopped their ears and tried to hide in the corners of their pens. Cooke now crouched and sprang forward with the knife. Bill and I jumped to our feet, speechless with surprise. Brand retreated. The eyes of both men were hard and unblinking; they were breathing deeply.

  “Say, cut it out!” I called in alarm.

  “Them damn fools is really fighting,” Bill said in amazement.

  Slashing at each other, Brand and Cooke surged up and down the aisles of steel tiers. Suddenly Brand uttered a bellow and charged into Cooke and swept him violently backward. Cooke grasped Brand’s hand to keep the ice pick from sinking into his chest. Brand broke free and charged Cooke again, sweeping him into an animal-filled steel tier. The tier balanced itself on its edge for an indecisive moment, then toppled.

  Like kingpins, one steel tier slammed into another, then they all crashed to the floor with a sound as of the roof falling. The whole aspect of the room altered quicker than the eye could follow. Brand and Cooke stood stock-still, their eyes fastened upon each other, their pointed weapons raised; but they were dimly aware of the havoc that churned about them.

  The steel tiers lay jumbled; the doors of the cages swung open. Rats and mice and dogs and rabbits moved over the floor in wild panic. The Wassermann guinea pigs were squealing as though judgment day had come. Here and there an animal had been crushed beneath a cage.

  All four of us looked at one another. We knew what this meant. We might lose our jobs. We were already regarded as black dunces; and if the doctors saw this mess they would take it as final proof. Bill rushed to the door to make sure that it was locked. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was twelve thirty. We had one half-hour of grace.

  “Come on,” Bill said uneasily. “We got to get this place cleaned.”

  Brand and Cooke stared at each other, both doubting.

  “Give me your knife, Cooke,” I said.

  “Naw! Take Brand’s ice pick first,” Cooke said.

  “The hell you say!” Brand said. “Take his knife first!”

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Sssssh,” Bill said.

  We waited. We heard footsteps going away. We’ll all lose our jobs, I thought.

  Persuading the fighters to surrender their weapons was a difficult task, but at last it was done and we could begin to set things right. Slowly Brand stooped and tugged at one end of a steel tier. Cooke stooped to help him. Both men seemed to be acting in a dream. Soon, however, all four of us were working frantically, watching the clock.

  As we labored we conspired to keep the fight a secret; we agreed to tell the doctors—if any should ask—that we had not been in the room during our lunch hour; we felt that that lie would explain why no one had unlocked the door when the knock had come.

  We righted the tiers and replaced the cages; then we were faced with the impossible task of sorting the cancerous rats and mice, the diabetic dogs, the Aschheim-Zondek rabbits, and the Wassermann guinea pigs. Whether we kept our jobs or not depended upon how shrewdly we could cover up all evidence of the fight. It was pure guesswork, but we had to try to put the animals back into the correct cages. We knew that certain rats or mice went into certain cages, but we did not know what rat or mouse went into what cage. We did not know a tubercular mouse from a cancerous mouse—the white doctors had made sure that we would not know. They had never taken time to answer a single question; though we worked in the institute, we were as remote from the meaning of the experiments as if we lived in the moon. The doctors had laughed at what they felt was our childlike interest in the fate of the animals.

  First we sorted the dogs; that was fairly easy, for we could remember the size and color of most of them. But the rats and mice and guinea pigs baffled us completely.

  We put our heads together and pondered, down in the underworld of the great scientific institute. It was a strange scientific conference; the fate of the entire medical research institute rested in our ignorant, black hands.

  We remembered the number of rats, mice, or guinea pigs—we had to handle them several times a day—that went into a given cage, and we supplied the number helter-skelter from those animals that we could catch running loose on the floor. We discovered that many rats, mice, and guinea pigs were missing—they had been killed in the scuffle. We solved that problem by taking healthy stock from other cages and putting them into cages with sick animals. We repeated this process until we were certain that, numerically at least, all the animals with which the doctors were experimenting were accounted for.

  The rabbits came last. We broke the rabbits down into two general groups: those that had fur on their bellies and those that did not. We knew that all those rabbits that had shaven bellies—our scientific knowledge adequately covered this point because it was our job to
shave the rabbits—were undergoing the Aschheim-Zondek tests. But in what pen did a given rabbit belong? We did not know. I solved the problem very simply. I counted the shaven rabbits: they numbered seventeen. I counted the pens labeled Aschheim-Zondek, then proceeded to drop a shaven rabbit into each pen at random. And again we were numerically successful. At least white America had taught us how to count . . .

  Lastly we carefully wrapped all the dead animals in newspapers and hid their bodies in a garbage can.

  At a few minutes to one the room was in order; that is, the kind of order that we four Negroes could figure out. I unlocked the door and we sat waiting, whispering, vowing secrecy, wondering what the reaction of the doctors would be.

  Finally a doctor came, gray-haired, white-coated, spectacled, efficient, serious, taciturn, bearing a tray upon which sat a bottle of mysterious fluid and a hypodermic needle.

  “My rats, please.”

  Cooke shuffled forward to serve him. We held our breath. Cooke got the cage which he knew the doctor always called for at that hour and brought it forward. One by one, Cooke took out the rats and held them as the doctor solemnly injected the mysterious fluid under their skins.

  “Thank you, Cooke,” the doctor murmured.

  “Not at all, sir,” Cooke mumbled with a suppressed gasp.

  When the doctor had gone we looked at one another, hardly daring to believe that our secret would be kept. We were so anxious that we did not know whether to curse or laugh. Another doctor came.

  “Give me A-Z rabbit number 14.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  I brought him the rabbit and he took it upstairs to the operating room. We waited for repercussions. None came.

  All that afternoon the doctors came and went. I would run into the room—stealing a few seconds from my step-scrubbing—and ask what progress was being made and would learn that the doctors had detected nothing. At quitting time we felt triumphant.