by Howard Fast
I looked at my watch before I drove down to the hollow, and it was just ten minutes to seven. Parking my car against a clump of trees to the side of the platform, I got out and wandered around rather aimlessly. The platform was ready, the chairs set up, the spotlights in place, and there was a long picnic table piled with song-books and pamphlets. As I came in, a large bus had just discharged its passengers, boys and girls, Negroes for the most part, who had come early to be ushers. The bus lurched around and departed in a cloud of dust; the boys and girls drifted across the meadow, walking slowly and contentedly in the golden light of the evening. About a hundred and twenty other people were already on the scene, most of them women and small children, and they top were making a picnic afternoon of it before the concert began, some of them sprawling comfortably on the grass, some of them at the rustic tables, some sitting on the chairs. A party of boys and girls from Golden’s Bridge, a summer colony, sat on the platform, their legs dangling. None of them were much over fifteen; most of them were much younger. A few of these people had come by car; many had walked to the picnic grounds from summer homes nearby. The children from Golden’s Bridge had come down in a large truck which was parked now next to my car—and which was destined to play an interesting role that night. Just by the good grace of fortune, half a dozen merchant seamen who were vacationing in the neighborhood had decided to come early; I had good reason to be grateful for them and for four other trade unionists who happened to be present.
But none of these, I discovered, knew who was in charge of the concert—and as it turned out those in charge never reached the picnic grounds. I inquired for a while, then I gave it up and perched myself on one of the tables and settled down to wait. k was seven o’clock now, and from where we were in the hollow there was no sign of trouble.
A boy running brought the trouble to us. I watched him as he came in sight around the bend of the road, running frantically, and then we crowded around him and he told us that there was trouble and would some of us come—because the trouble looked bad; and he was frightened too.
We started back with him. There were twenty-five or thirty of us, I suppose; you don’t count at a moment like that, although I did count later. There were men and boys, almost all the men and boys, and a few girls too. We ran at a jog-trot along the dusty road, but still I thought that this would be no more than foul names and fouler insults, since I had never known the kind who were up there on the road to show courage unless they caught someone alone and the odds were twenty to one.
So we ran on up to the entrance, and as we appeared they poured onto us from the road, at least three hundred of them, with billies and brass knucks and rocks in clenched fists, and American Legion caps, and suddenly my disbelief was washed away in a wild melee. Such fights don’t last long; there were three or four minutes of this, and because the road was narrow we were able to beat them back, but the mass of them filled the entranceway, and behind them were hundreds more, and up and down the road hundreds more. If you have never been in a trap with no way out and a thousand people grinning with malice and screaming in hate, you won’t know what it was like. And now I saw why there were no more people coming into the concert. One of the forks in the road was piled high with rocks, a great barricade of rocks, and the other had a Legion truck parked across it. So we were closed in and there was no way out, and the odds were twenty to one, precisely as they required them.
I said that we beat them back and held the road for the moment, panting, hot with sweat and dust, bleeding only a little now; but they would have come at us again had not the three deputy sheriffs appeared. Our thanks to those three miserable men; they shouldered through the crowd, through the wall of alcohol-saturated air, and their gold badges gleamed in the sunset.
They hefted their holstered guns, and they turned and spread their arms benignly at the mob. “Now, boys,” they said, “now, take it easy, because we can do this just as well legal, and it always pays to do it legal.”
“Give us five minutes and we’ll murder the n—— bastards,” the boys answered.
“Just take it easy—just take it slow and easy, boys, because it don’t pay to have trouble when you don’t have to have no trouble.”
And then the three deputy sheriffs turned to us and wanted to know what in hell we were doing there making all this kind of trouble.
I kept glancing at my watch. It was ten minutes after seven then. I also had a chance to look at the “boys” in the Legion caps, and they were by no means boys. They were in their thirties and forties and fifties—many of them in their fifties—and they were not lumpen either, not in the strict sense of the word. Most of them were prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real-estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants, filling station hands and more of the kind. Tip over any gin mill in Peekskill or Shrub Oak, and this is what you would get. Throw in a couple of hundred “decent” citizens, a hundred teen-agers whose heads were filled with anti-Communist sewage; add a hundred pillars of the local Catholic church, half a hundred college students home on vacation, half a hundred workers drawn along, and two or three hundred of the sweepings and filth of that whole Hudson River section, and you have a good idea of what we faced there that night. Liquor them up to a high point of courage, give them odds of twenty to one, put the police on their side—and then you have the rest of the picture; and these were the “boys” whom the deputy sheriffs held up for just enough minutes to enable us to survive.
Not that the deputies wanted that; but it was a beginning and there was no precedent for this kind of thing in Westchester County in New York State, and the three sheriffs with the polished gold-plated badges were uncertain as to how to play their own role. For that reason they held back the “boys” and asked us what the hell we were doing there making this kind of trouble.
I became the spokesman then, and a good many of the things I did afterwards were the result of this—chiefly because I was older than most of our handful and because the merchant seamen and the trade unionists nodded for me to talk. Anyway, I had agreed to be chairman and it seemed that this was the kind of concert we would have, not with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger singing their lovely tunes of America, but with a special music that had played its melody out in Germany and Italy. So I said that we were not looking for any trouble but were here to hold a concert, and why didn’t they clear the roads so that our people could come in and listen to the concert in peace?
“You gimme a pain in the ass with that kind of talk,” said one of the deputies delicately. The others stood there looking at us. Very clearly do I remember them. We cut deputy sheriffs to pattern in America; their bellies slopped over their belts; their faces were loose and full of hate; and they feared only the responsibility for what was happening that night and they desired only that it should happen in spite of themselves. So they said:
“Just cut out the trouble. We don’t want no trouble and we don’t want no troublemakers.”
I explained it again. I explained to them carefully that we were not making trouble, that we had not lured these three hundred innocent patriots to attack us, and that all we desired was for them to clear the road so that people could come to the concert.
“How in the hell can we clear the road? Just look up there,” they told me.
“Tell them to get out and they’ll get out,” I said.
“Don’t tell me what to tell them.”
“Look, mister,” I said. “We hold you responsible—for whatever happens here.”
“Up your ass,” said the guardian of the law.
“We’ll talk to the boys,” another said.
And then they talked to the “boys,” and we had five minutes. I didn’t listen to what they said to the boys. I was beginning to realize that they had no intention of doing anything about them, and when I looked up at the road and saw the roadblocks and the solid mass of the American Legion, I began to realize that not only was it extremely unlikely that anyone else on our side would ge
t in, but quite unlikely that any of us already here would get out. There was the beginning of a shock in that realization, but only the beginning—the full impact would not happen until much later. It was still daylight; the world of the Hudson River Valley was still bathed in a golden glow; we were still people who had come to hear a concert. You do not adjust immediately to the fact of death; death is embarrassingly dramatic, and it does not happen in this fashion in the United States of America. Yes, there would be trouble, but nothing highly dramatic or full of dangerous content.
Let me make the point. Just as the sheriffs turned back to talk to the mob, a man came walking through. Precisely in that manner, almost as an abstraction, this man calmly walked through the mob and up to me, and precisely because he proceeded in that manner and was so much not of this world, they let him through. People do strange things at strange times. This man was in his middle twenties. He was tall; he wore a beard, a beret, and loose, brightly-colored slacks. He had stepped out of the time-worn pages of Leonard Merrick, and what he was doing west of the left bank I don’t know. But there he was, and I asked him who in hell he was and where in hell did he come from?
“I’m a music lover,” he said.
No self-respecting writer dares to invent such things; but they happen. “Can you fight, Music Lover?” I asked him.
“I can’t and I won’t.” There was indignation and disgust in his voice.
“But you can and you will, Music Lover,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, go back up there. This time they’ll tear you to pieces.”
Those with me there on the road will remember the scene and bear witness to it. Later that evening I spoke to the music lover again. I never learned his name; he will always be Music Lover to me, but when I spoke to him again he had lost his beret, his slacks were in shreds, and there was blood all over him—and a wild glint of battle in his eyes.
“By God, I can fight!” he said in triumph. He had learned that, as many of us did that night, as did a Negro lad of sixteen. It was a little later, when we were organizing our squads, that this Negro lad started off the road across the fields. I called him back and he stood there, full of shame and fear and full of all the thoughts and bitter visions of Negroes who had been lynched and tarred and feathered and beaten to death and tortured beyond human belief.
“I can’t fight, Mr. Fast,” he said. “I can’t, and I got to get out of here, I got to!”
“And if they get you out on the fields, do you know what they’ll do to you?”
“I know, but I can’t fight.”
“You can fight,” I said. “Sonny, you can, as good as I can, and that isn’t much good, but we both can. So let’s both stay here and fight.”
I spoke to him later. His scalp was open six inches across the top, and the blood was running over him like a little river. By virtue of what force he still walked, I don’t know, but he said, quite calmly,
“I’m hurt, Mr. Fast, and if you think I’m hurt bad, I’d like to lie down a little, but if you think I’m all right, I can still fight.”
These are only two, of the many things of the sort that happened that night; I make a point with them, that it is hard to adjust quickly to the imminence of death, which is so final and in many ways so obscene a matter.
The sheriffs were talking, and down in the hollow were women and little children, and I began to think of what would happen to them if that mob on the road broke through us and got down there. The men and boys, Negro and white, had clustered around me in the little respite, and I was supposed to do something because I had written many books in which people did things in times like this, so I asked them if they wanted me to do it, and they nodded.
“All right,” I said. “We’re in a very bad place but we’ll keep our heads and in a little while some real cops will come and put an end to all this insanity. Meanwhile, we’ve got to keep that mob here where the road is narrow and high, and it’s a good place to defend in any case. We keep them here because there’s a lot of kids and women down below. That’s our whole tactic. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” they said.
“All right. Just two things. Let me do the talking and let me decide when there’s a quick decision, because there may not be time to talk it over. Is that all right?”
They said yes, and our time was running out. A compression of incident and event began. First I told the girls to run back down the road, get all the women and children onto the platform, keep them there for the time being, and send every able-bodied man and boy up to us. Then I asked for a volunteer.
“I want someone to crawl through those bushes, reach the road, find a telephone, and call the troopers—call the New York Times and the Daily Worker, call Albany and get through to the governor —I want someone who can do that.”
I got him. I don’t know what I can say about him, except that he had great inventiveness and lots of guts. He was small and bright-eyed, and his name, A—K—, will stay in my mind a long time and I have never seen him since that night. But three times he went back and forth through that howling mob, and he did what he was supposed to do.
Now the remaining men from below appeared and I counted what we had. All told, including myself, there were forty-two men and boys. Just about half were Negro, and about half were in their teens. I divided them quickly into seven groups of six, appointing a leader for each group. Three lines of two groups each—in other words, three lines of twelve—formed across the road where the embankment began. Each line anchored on a wooden fence, our flanks protected by the ditch and the water below. The seventh group was held in reserve in our rear.
I looked at my watch again. It was 7:30 p.m. The three deputy sheriffs had disappeared and we never saw them again that night. The mob was rolling toward us for the second attack.
This was, in a way, the worst attack of that night. For one thing, it was still daylight; later, when night fell, our own sense of organization helped us much more, but this was daylight and they poured down the road and into us, swinging broken fence posts, billies, bottles, and wielding knives. Their leaders had been drinking from pocket flasks and bottles right up to the moment of the attack, and now as they beat and clawed at our lines, they poured out a torrent of obscene words and slogans. They were conscious of Adolf Hitler. He was a god in their ranks and they screamed over and over,
“We’re Hitler’s boys-Hitler’s boys!”
“We’ll finish his job!”
“God bless Hitler and f—— you n—— bastards and Jew bastards!”
“Lynch Robeson! Give us Robeson! We’ll string that big n—— up! Give him to us, you bastards!”
I remember hoping and praying that Paul Robeson was nowhere near—that he was far away, not on the road, not anywhere near.
“What Medina started, we’ll finish!” they howled. “We’ll kill every commie bastard in America!” Oh, they were conscious, all right, highly conscious.
I am not certain exactly how long that second fight lasted. It seemed forever, yet it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. But in that time the sun sank below the hills to the west of us and the shadow of twilight came.
We concentrated on holding our lines. The first line took the brunt of the fighting, the brunt of the rocks and clubs. The second line linked arms, as did the third, forming a human wall to the mob. In mat fight four of our first line were badly injured. When they went down we pulled them back, and men in the second line moved into their places. It was a beautiful piece of organization on the part of everyone concerned, in some ways a miracle of organization. Here were forty-two men and boys who had never seen each other before for the most part, and they were fighting like a well-oiled machine, and the full weight of three hundred screaming madmen did not panic them or cause them to break. By sheer weight we were forced back foot by foot, but they never broke the three lines.
And then they drew off. For the moment they had had enough. They drew off, leaving about twenty feet between the front of their mob and our lin
e of defense. There were more of them now, many more of them; the solid mass of their bodies and faces stretched back to the public road and along the road.
On our part, we were hurt, but not so badly that every man couldn’t stand on his feet. We relieved the worst battered of the front line, linked arms and waited.
“Now we’re all right,” I told myself. “We’re alive and this can’t go on much longer. The state troopers will have to get here.”
How many times I told myself that in the course of the evening! But there were no state troopers, no police, but instead a half-hysterical girl from the hollow below who panted,
“They’ve crossed over the hills and we’ve got to have some men down there!”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know. I counted twelve or fifteen.”
I detached our seventh squad on the double, which left us with thirty-six to hold the road. But before they left I told one of them, the driver of the big truck that had brought the children down from Golden’s Bridge, to pull his truck up the road to where the embankment began and to swing it broadside and across the road. I did this because we had been pushed back more than twenty feet in the course of the fighting. A few feet more, and we would no longer have the protection of the embanked road, and then they could simply swarm around us and it would be all over. But with the truck to back us up we could hold that embankment a long time.
As it darkened, a qualitative change came into the ranks of the fascist mob, a sense, organization. Three men appeared as their leaders, one a dapper, slim, well-dressed middle-aged man who was subsequently identified by people on our side as a prosperous Peekskill real-estate broker. A fourth man joined them, and a heated discussion in whispers started. At the same time, cars up on the road were swung around so that their headlights covered us. Though the police and state troopers were remarkably, conspicuously absent, the press was on the scene. Newspaper photographers were everywhere, taking picture after picture, and reporters crouched in the headlights taking notes of all that went on. In particular, my attention was drawn to three quiet, well-dressed, good-looking young men who stood just to one side of the beginning of the embankment; two of them had shorthand notebooks in which they wrote methodically and steadily. When I first saw them I decided that they were newspaper men and dismissed them from my mind. But I saw them again and again, and later talked to them, as you will see. Subsequently, I discovered that they were agents of the Department of Justice. Whether they were assigned to a left-wing concert or an attempted mass murder, I don’t know. They were polite, aloof, neutral, and at one point decently helpful. But they were always neutral—even though what they saw was attempted murder, a strangely brutal, terrible attempt.