Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots Read Online Free

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 get 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?
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI can’t and I won’t.” There was indignation and disgust in his voice.
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œBy 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.
    â€œI can’t fight, Mr. Fast,” he said. “I can’t, and I got to get out of here, I got to!”
    â€œAnd if they get you out on the fields, do you know what they’ll do to you?”
    â€œI know, but I can’t fight.”
    â€œYou 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,
    â€œI’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