Diesel Heart

by Melvin Carter Jr

  Dumping the mealymouthed mush act, I closed in on him. His inner voice screamed and shouted, echoing inside his head. I heard it louder than he did. “That’s right!” I whispered and paused. “Listen to it!” I whispered, now at point-blank range; his body now a silhouetted target, his heart a bull’s-eye.

  Glancing down, he realized I had a gun in my right hand, hidden behind my knee.

  His eyes suddenly focused. “HEY? You’re gonna kill me! You some kinda cop?”

  I didn’t answer, still poised like a cobra, ready to strike. He saw eternity through my eyes. “You are the police!” he concluded.

  “I ain’t hidin’ behind no badge! This is just between me and you, so make your move!” Confirming in his mind that I was indeed a cop, realizing he needed a way out, he threatened to file a formal complaint.

  Returning to my mushy-mouth Mr. Rogers voice, I smiled and handed him my internal affairs business card. “Son, you are in luck. It just so happens that I’m Inspector Carter, Internal Affairs Investigator. Please call me at this number. I’ll be happy to take a complaint against myself.”

  He snarled, went on down the street mumbling obscenities, not realizing that he had just been resurrected from the dead. “Call me!” I shouted, waving. “I’ll be happy to take a complaint against me! … Bye now!” (Mr. Nins, is this the weapon that cannot be taken from me or used against me?)

  Out of a dozen or so such showdowns, this was about the closest I came to taking a life. I had many other close calls, but this was the only time that I had actually gone checkpoint by checkpoint. When it came to my house, home, and family, it was personal. I never hid behind my badge, because if I had, they could play me.

  This time it really was the night before Christmas, and all through my house, all things were quiet—until my telephone rang. “Bobby escaped from jail and is on the run!” Brenda Morgan’s voice trembled with fear. Having spent lots of time with Bobby over the years—I took him on field trips and fed him a few times—I was well aware of the situation.

  “Melvin, they consider my Bobby armed and dangerous. You know how they are! They’ll shoot him on sight!” She cried so hard that tears seemed to pour out of the telephone.

  I calmed her down and listened. Bobby was staying at her home and she expected him to be home that night, so we made a plan. If the outdoor Christmas lights were on, it would mean he was home and the side door was open. “Don’t knock. Just come in, go down the stairs. He’ll be there.”

  Sure enough, at about eleven that night, her house was lit up like St. Nick was sure to be there. Per routine police procedure, I had squads surround the house, instructing officers not to come in until I called them. Cautiously I entered the door, crept slowly down the stairway. I could see him across the smoke-filled basement.

  “Bobby!” I whispered, startling him. He turned frantically, seeking an escape route, but I was standing in the only exit. Gradually I closed in, trapping him in a corner with my arms wide open, giving him nowhere to run, nowhere to hide as he turned every which-a-way. In my boldest police voice, I commanded, “Bobby, put the joint down! Step away from the gun and give me a hug!”

  He stopped, kind of slumped over, and surrendered. He put down the joint and fell into my arms, allowing me to hold him tight enough to keep him from falling. I gently slid on the handcuffs. We stopped for a hug with his mother, who baptized us with maternal tears. She sniffled temporary sighs of relief, knowing that her precious son was in my care and especially under my protection. He was alive and would not be beaten or abused. It was my favorite arrest.

  Somewhere along the line, I was among the few who passed the promotional exam to be a lieutenant. This was the same me who flunked second grade and failed third grade as well, a “problem child” tested for retardation, finally reading Charlotte’s Web in eleventh grade, the same me who barely passed high school, who beat out multitudes of other highly qualified sergeants holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

  For me, sheer determination had turned out to be the special gift that overcame my learning disability: the refusal to go down at the impact of a heavyweight blow, even the ability to postpone pain, the commitment to last the round. My inabilities transcended into abilities and became my greatest resources. Devotion, dedication, and grit were my sources, my key to my innermost power. The fact that I actually passed the exam outweighed the fact that I didn’t pass high enough to get the promotion.

  And then there was my big scandal.

  I was on duty, in plain clothes, in an unmarked car, stopped at a red light. Some rich white guy, mistaking me for the one who was honking at him, got out of his very nice car and walked to my car yelling. Not wanting to be trapped, I exited my car. He rushed me, towering over me, yelling in my face, nudging me backward, generous with incoming slobber. The palm of my hand greeted his face with great impact. His body rocked, rolled, and double dipped. As he struggled to retain his balance, his hand reached into his pocket. Thinking he was reaching for a good-ol’-fashioned gun, razor, or knife, I readied myself to escalate accordingly. But before even recovering his balance, he produced the worst, most terrifying horrifying weapon imaginable: a cell phone with a high-powered lawyer on the other end. I arrested him and called for backup.

  The backup squads summoned a high-ranking white supremacist taking the other guy’s side. Before too long, we were joined by certain officers and supervisors who had plotted and conspired against Chief Corky, destroying the careers of those other Black police officers. Now it was my turn. The career lynch mob took the chief aside. Circling around him there were murmurings, flashing eyeballs, and whispering. The problem was worse than I imagined.

  The next thing I knew I was in the interrogation room, being read my rights, charged with assault. And I was being sued by the suspect, now the complainant.

  Weeks later, my daughter called, telling me to turn on the TV to Channel 4 and watch the breaking news. “St. Paul police officer abuses authority, assaults citizen without provocation—other officers agree!” The rich guy was being interviewed and was claiming to have been attacked for no reason, without provocation. He wanted to make sure that this never happened to anyone else. A photo of my face appeared as he spoke. The female news reporter claimed to have called me and said that I refused to return calls, which was simply not true.

  Early the next morning my telephone rang. The voice of a young white male demanded to speak to me, and me alone. He had seen the news story the night before. He said that he and his uncle witnessed the altercation, and it just didn’t happen the way she had reported it. The news story on TV stated that I had attacked the so-called victim without provocation. But he and his uncle saw him pushing and shoving me, and they heard him shouting obscenities at me. They saw his aggression toward me but did not see any shove to his face. In fact, they even said that I never struck him at all, that I was polite the entire time.

  Prior to this point, I had been at an extreme disadvantage because it was everybody’s word against mine. But the very tool they had used against me yielded evidence on my behalf. The news story had flushed out witnesses willing to testify for me.

  After being exonerated, I called the news station to speak to the reporter who had slandered my name. When asked why I was calling, I said I wanted to thank her for a story that she did.

  She picked up the phone. I identified myself. “Hello, this is Inspector Melvin Carter.” I proceeded to say these words, inflecting my nicest nastiest tone of voice: “I just want to thank you for the story you did on me. Thanks to you, your hard work, your extreme efforts gained me two eyewitnesses that I would not have had, which cleared me of all allegations and exonerated me from all charges!”

  She choked audibly over the phone, trying to justify her venomous media attack. “I just do my job. I try to be fair and unbiased … blah blah blah.”

  I interrupted her, inflicting an even nastier condescending tone: “No! No! Thank you! I could have lost my job, gotten sued, and been
in jail had it not been for the story that you aired.” She was embarrassed and ashamed.

  “Thanks again, I can’t thank you enough! Bye now!” Click! She was still explaining and justifying as I concluded the conversation.

  I hung up laughing, grinning, savoring victory.

  Then I filed complaints against the career lynch mob. Their contrived complaints against me had failed, then backfired. My complaints against them were sustained by the internal affairs review board. Further outside investigation revealed that these guys had falsified reports and actually went to the courthouse and altered official files. Coming after me turned out differently than when they lynched the other Black officers’ careers. I had captured them in their own trap. I handed them over to Corky, who held them accountable.

  Momma had a series of strokes and was living in a nursing home. She’d call me every day at precisely eight AM. We’d talk and visit for hours. When her insurance denied her therapy, I became Sergeant Carter the Drill Instructor on my daily visit to her. To my surprise, Mom let me push her. “Come on, Billie!” She’d stop and tell me to watch my mouth, then do the exercises. Over several months we restored her functionality well beyond what the doctors and health care mobs had predicted. It was almost a good thing that they rejected her in the first place.

  In a way, just as I had hidden from my problems in Muppets and nursery rhymes with my children, I never stopped being the little boy wanting his mommy. In fact, I’d boldly burst into the nursing home every day announcing, “I wantz my mommy!” She’d smile and respond, “Hush, boy!” We’d laugh.

  Spring was always lilac time. Mom and I had a cosmic connection, a special wavelength of communication. She could almost read my mind. When I presented her with a bouquet of lilacs, she knew I had done it for myself as well, that I needed to have a project like that. She smiled, examined the bouquet, and ordered, “Go get me some more!” I scampered off and returned with more.

  After two strokes and a seizure, she began a series of deep sleeps. She lay in the hospital bed attached to dripping tubes and heart monitors. I just sat there talking to her as though it were a conversation. In fact, the conversation was more like me whining to Mommy about my problems. “Mom, I ain’t gettin’ along with nobody. My kids and wife are ganging up against me.” (Raising teenagers in the inner city was not without its drama and challenges. I was giving them my best as a husband and father, but we didn’t always agree on everything, and my best was often insufficient.) “The media and fellow cops are out to get me. And I just got into an argument with some lady at a track meet.” I went on, feeling sorry for myself. “Why, Mom? Why can’t I get along with anybody at all?”

  Just then she mumbled something indecipherable.

  “What, Mom? What’s that? What did you say?”

  Suddenly, awake and alert, she blurted, “Because you are an ass!” We laughed so hard she almost fell out of bed. And I felt much much better because she’d explained everything.

  Another time she went into a deep, almost comatose sleep. “Mom, I’m going down to the cafeteria for an hour. Be wide awake when I get back.” An hour later she’d be sitting up waiting for me.

  In 2000 I got an urgent call from the hospital to get there quick. She waited for me to arrive. In my own way, I gave her permission to die. At her funeral, my siblings and I gathered too close to her casket. Dad, ever her caretaker, still protecting her, commanded us all to stand back. Fatso and all his sons were the pallbearers.

  I always lived in a state of survival shock, amazed at having survived so many situations. Especially surviving my own stupidity. Saving other children is the debt I owe, my rent for occupying space on the planet. I experience post-traumatic stress every time any phone rings, expecting the worst phone call of my life. My quest is to spare others from that phone call.

  At Save Our Sons, we became an informal emergency resource for mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. We pushed for racial justice and reform at a time when America considered racial justice to be reverse discrimination. Building strong Black statesmen and keeping them out of the prison system was our way of revolution. Locally, we were the very first whistle-blowers on what came to be known as mass incarceration.

  They rebutted us by saying that my perception of racial injustice was not supported by facts. My evidence was considered an anecdotal perspective, while their denial was empirical data.

  Most astonishing were those who never lifted a finger and even opposed us. Some clergy were too heavenly bound to be any earthly good. Some reminded me of ol’ Corporal Boguson, who had the demeanor down to a social art form but always managed to be absent when the time came to stand up.

  Eventually other programs sprang up in competition, duplicating and building on the road we paved. But SOS, a grassroots movement, was never a “program” in the first place. In fact, we thought more in terms of “deprogramming” and redirecting youth from prison, glorification and miseducation, drug dealing and gang violence. Like Momma said, “Always do the best with what you have.” So with little to almost no funding, we kept on keeping on, mightily achieving the improbable, snatching young men from the insatiable jaws of (in)justice. Our graduates went on to get master’s degrees, became educators, businessmen, and athletic coaches. In many cases, young men became cooks, truck drivers, bus drivers, construction workers—gainfully employed, great fathers.

  Having done 98 percent of this work out of our own pockets is our investment in the future. It is my extra extra-special “receipt” when I see my mentees in turn become mentors in their own right. One young man, released after five years in prison, upon finishing college went straight to law school, got his law degree, and is practicing law without restriction. Another followed me into law enforcement and asked me to be the one to pin his badge when he graduated the police academy.

  As an experienced old-timer, I had valuable skills. One day I was sitting at my desk typing out a report when I heard loud screaming, crying, and name-calling coming from the jail garage. I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter. Two sparkling young white rookies had brought in a Black woman who was insane with rage, gurgling obscenities, spewing readiness to die. Complaining how she had been dissed and was totally pissed, she had had it! “I’m not taking any more! You gonna hafta kill me!”

  My guess was that the two rookies had been abusive up to this point, but now in front of cameras and witnesses, they didn’t know what to do. The woman was as absolutely livid as anyone I’d ever seen. I got in her face, saying loudly, “Ma’am! You are going to be treated with dignity and respect!”

  She shouted over me.

  I got closer to her face, increasing my volume. “Ma’am. You are worthy of dignity and respect, and that’s how you will be treated!” I inflicted the statement almost as if it were retaliation in an argument.

  She was poised not to hear me, so we went back and forth repeatedly until it dawned on her what I was saying. Suddenly she snapped out of it. “Huh!”

  I said it again.

  “Well, okay!” And the rest of the situation was without incident.

  At the same time, various acts of violence and racism were repeating in the police department workplace. My life, my career was affected by most of them. I had become a master at de-escalation, seasoned, tried, and true; I got better at enduring the onslaught of racism enough to pull a reversal, upon necessity. Sometimes new young racists put me in a position to have to take advantage of them. I almost felt guilty. But they’d make me have to do it.

  The Officer Sackett assassination in 1970 is an example of the ongoing issues. The investigation was reopened in 2002, and a special cold-case unit went to work on it. The man eventually arrested was Ronnie Reed, my close childhood friend. He ended up with a life sentence. The investigator interrogated me as if I had been living in St. Paul at the time of the murder; his report reads as though I was hiding something I knew about the case, because my recollection thirty years later got the dates wrong: I mistakenly s
aid it happened in April 1970, when it actually happened in May 1970. It seemed a good thing that I have my discharge papers from active duty and a passport backing up my testimony that I was somewhere between Bouknadel and Chicago at the time of the assassination. Ronnie was convicted thirty years later with little to no evidence, no witnesses, no weapon, no fingerprints. He denies having done it to this day. I have no way of knowing who did it, or if he did. I have chosen to presume that he did not do it. Many inner-city community folks believe him to be innocent. My fullest sympathies are with Officer Sackett and his family. Having spent much of twenty-eight years in and out of a police uniform, not getting struck down by a bullet was one of my favorite things, as a father, husband, and son.

  Shortly thereafter, on a beautiful spring day when I was on foot in a police uniform, two shots rang out. Some gangsta guy had got shot in the butt. The screaming crowd panicked and fled in all directions, some running directly toward me as I approached the scene. With extreme caution, I stalked in the direction from which the crowd had fled, my gun drawn. Melvin? A nagging voice echoed inside my head, tapping me on my shoulder. My superman reflexes, vision, and powers of observation were no longer razor sharp, in fact long gone, giving me a new sense of vulnerability.

  We arrested the bad guy. The poor slob with bullets in the ass lived. I had gone twenty-six years without shooting anyone or getting shot myself. Now wasn’t the time to start.

  Around that time, a police officer from a nearby township took a bullet just a week before retirement. Fortunately, we arrested the bad guys. Mike became a paraplegic, but survived.