Black Hornet (2 page)

The pilot would later distinguish himself in Vietnam and return home, Purple Heart and Medal of Honor prominently displayed behind his desk, to a Ford dealership out in burgeoning Metairie, where mostly he sat in his glassed-in office and steadily poured Scotch into his coffee, himself a kind of exhibit now, as customers and their children ranged through the showroom beyond. One of the officers aloft with him that day, Robert Morones, would go on to become the city’s youngest chief of police and eventually settle into the easy chair of perennial reelection to his seat in the state legislature.

The siege lasted over twelve hours and left in its wake fifteen dead, thirty or more injured, untold damage both from diversionary fires Gully had set and from returned police gunfire.

The siege also left in its wake a badly shaken city. There had always been a silent accommodation here, a gentlemen’s agreement that blacks and whites would go on pursuing their parallel lives. But had the codes now changed? If one black man could carry his rage on his back onto a roof and from there hold hostage an entire city, if a group of black men (like those calling themselves Muslims) could recant their place in white man’s society, if still other groups and individuals (Black Panthers, The Black Hand) openly advocated taking up arms against that society—what remnants obtained of
any
agreement? Or, finally, of society itself.

The man who cut your yard Monday noon and shuffled feet when he came for his pay might come after your possessions and station, your livelihood, your very life, Tuesday night.

Made you think of the city under Spanish rule circa 1794, when Governor Carondelet, perched on the edge of a chair the French Revolution was busily pulling out from under European complacencies, mindful how quickly this sort of thing might spread, encircled the city with walls and forts, not to turn away attackers, but to help contain (he thought) its own French citizens.

Floors and makeshift shelves at Terence Gully’s Camp Street apartment were stacked with literature: pamphlets, flyers, tracts, hand-lettered posters. Over and over on the plasterboard walls Gully had scrawled peace signs, swastikas and slogans.

KILL THEM ALL!

BLACK IS RIGHT

HATE WHITE PEOPLE—BEASTS OF THE EARTH

The King’s Inn shootings were one parochial incident all but lost among a hundred others in those years of mounting violence. The first Kennedy had already gone down. The Watts riots were just around the corner. Memphis was waiting for Martin Luther King, L.A. for Robert Kennedy, a lectern in the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, for Malcolm X. A month or so before, fifteen black men and women in Sunday best had staged a sit-in at City Hall’s basement cafeteria, where blacks weren’t served, and were dragged away by police. Three civil rights workers would be killed up in Mississippi just months later.

Looking back now, 1968 seems pretty much the hub year, a fulcrum. During the summer Olympics in Mexico City two American athletes were suspended for giving a black-power salute. The Tet Offensive also started up that year—along with bloody racial riots on the unreported back lots of Vietnam.

Not that I was much up on current events at the time. I had my hands full just getting to know my new home: how to get around in New Orleans, how to slide through the days here, how to clip off enough to survive, how to get by. When you’re young, history’s not worth much. When you get older, whether you consider it baggage or burden, history’s a large part of what you have. So a lot of this I learned, or relearned, later on.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

So I couldn’t have told you then, even with a knife at my throat (were you, for instance, some singular historical mugger intent upon relieving passersby of their lives’ spare change), what year Vietnam got under way, when either Kennedy went down, what the Watts riots were
really
about.

Now I know.

But even then there were things you couldn’t help knowing. You’d turn on the radio while shaving and between songs hear about men whose faces had been torn off. Drop by Alton’s Barbershop, he’d snap the cloth around in front of you, and just for a minute, as both your eyes went to his big black-and-white set on a shelf above the cash register, the weight of the world would settle on you. The sky would fall. You’d feel your feet sink a little deeper into the ground.

And in New Orleans those days you couldn’t get away from talk of the sniper. Wherever you went, whoever was talking, that was the subject. Like weather, it was everywhere.

Then someone stopped talking about it and started doing something.

Monday morning, mid-November. A young man walking along Poydras on his way between the parking space he rented by the month and his job at Whitney National fell as he started across Baronne and lay dying against the curb. He was wearing a suit, he was white, and he had been shot, once, through the chest. Police sealed off and searched the area to no avail.

Wednesday, again downtown, on Carondelet a block from Canal, another fell, an off-duty bus driver. By-standers this time reported hearing shots spaced perhaps six seconds apart (investigators counted it out for them, to be sure), and said that the shots came from high up. A roof perhaps. Or one of the upper windows in this sole canyonlike stretch of the city. The bus driver had been struck first in the middle of his forehead, then squarely in the chest, through the sternum just above the ziphoid process.

Saturday the action moved uptown, to Claiborne, where a German tourist fell, dead before he hit the buckling sidewalk, as he exited a Chick’n Shack. Police found a single shell casing, already baked halfway into roofing tar, atop a boarded-up Holy Evangelical church nearby.

Police Chief Warren Handy told the public there was no cause for alarm. That the incidents did not appear to be related. And that, at any rate, the department (“I’m going on record here”) anticipated speedy apprehension of whatever parties might prove responsible for this “horrendous outrage.”

The Times-Picayune
recycled Terence Gully stories, with new sidebars, and pointed out that all those shot were white. COPYCAT KILLER, bold headlines announced the first day. GUERILLA LOOSE IN THE CITY? they asked the next. FIRST SHOTS OF A RACE WAR? the weekly newspaper
Streetcar
suggested.

Then on Wednesday, with a Loyola adjunct instructor dead in the street outside an apartment complex undergoing restoration on Jefferson, John LeClerque and Monica Reyna, hosts of WVUE-TV’s six o’clock news (his toupee, her lisp and impossibly red lips in tow) blossomed to life onscreen before a headline in two-inch letters, stark black on white: ROOFTOP KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.

Chapter Two

“’L
O,
L
EW
.”

I returned his cool regard. We were all into cool those days: cool regards, cool threads and music, cool affairs. Hand-slapping, tribal handshakes and high fives hadn’t yet quite caught on.

“You got it,” I told Sloe Eddie. “Sometimes low, other times high.”

One night, ten years ago at least, Eddie had gone sailing on sloe gin fizzes and not hove back into port for almost a week; he’d earned the nickname for life.

“You get high enough you’n see
all
the shit.”

“So they tell me. Like we don’t see enough of it down here.”

“Got
that
right.”

“You coming?”

“Going. Two young ladies and a new bottle of Cutty waitin’ for me. Your man’s hot tonight, though.”

I went on inside, sat at the end of the bar, and ordered a Jax.

The club, like most of them, smelled of mildew, urine, beer, and edgy, cheap alcohol. Twenty or thirty years ago someone had scraped together enough money to buy the place, nailing down his piece of American dream, turning the gleam in his eye momentarily real. He’d hired a crew of workmen. They’d begun fixing it up: excavated studs preparatory to tacking up prefab panels, laid new Formica along part of the bar, soldered temporary patches on bathroom plumbing. But then the money ran out, a lot quicker than Someone had anticipated, and his crew jumped ship.

Most of the club’s patrons had jumped ship too, from the look of it. A scatter of couples at the tables, a teenage hooker dropping shots of Smirnoff’s like clear stones into beer.

The TV over the bar was on, some show about a paraplegic chief of police, the premise of which seemed to be that a cripple, a woman and a young black man, together, made up a single effective human being. The young black guy pushed the chief’s wheelchair around, and the show was set in San Francisco. I kept on waiting for YBM to push the damned thing to the top of one of those famous hills and let go. There’d be this gorgeous minute or so of “Blue Danube” or “Waltzing Matilda” as the wheelchair plunged ever faster down hill after hill into traffic, doom, the bay.

Against the back wall, in the light of a portable spot, Buster was giving it everything he had. He always did. There’d been nights the bartender and I were the only ones around, and even then I couldn’t tell a difference.

Light spurred off the sunburst finish of his Guild as he leaned back in the chair and threw his head up. The steel tube on his finger glinted, too, as it slid along the strings. Both feet struck the floor, levered up on their heels, struck again.

Sun goin’ down, dark night gon’ catch me here.

Said sun goin’ down, mmmmm night gon’ catch me here.

Don’t have no woman, love and feel my care.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm

Those last mmmm’s on the two-bar turnaround: E, E-7th, A-7th, B-7th.

I’d learned a lot about the blues from Buster Robinson.

I’d learned a lot from Buster, period.

He’d cut a couple dozen sides for Bluebird and Vocalion in the early forties when they were called race records and sold at grocery stores for a nickel apiece, and they’d done all right. But then Buster got in a fight over a woman at a rent party he was playing, the other guy got dead, and Buster went up for a stretch at Parch-man. And by the time he got out, musical tastes (he told me) had just plumb left him behind.

For the past thirty-six years Buster had worked as a barbeque cook up in Fort Worth, at a take-out joint off Rosedale near the hospitals there, an old Spur station with pumps still standing out front. Then the folk revival came along. Some enterprising college kid from back East decided he might not be dead after all, as everybody assumed, and somehow had managed to track him down. Buster didn’t even have a guitar, hadn’t played one in over twenty years. So the kid and his friends chipped in and bought him one. Then one Saturday they all came over to Buster’s place, put a bottle of Grandad and a tape recorder on the kitchen table, and let the recorder run for the next hour while Buster played, sang, got mildly drunk (“cause I’s a
Christian
man now, you see”) and talked about old times.

The kids pressed it just the way they recorded it and it sold like Coke.

But orders kept coming in, and Kid and Friends weren’t prepared, financially or by temperament, to tack into this new wind. They wound up selling all rights to BlueStrain. Strain (as everybody called it) had had remarkable success issuing live-recorded jazz on a label previously known for classical recordings. The recovering beats and MBAs who ran BlueStrain were convinced that Buster Robinson was a shoo-in as the next Mississippi John Hurt.

It took them about two months to decide that what money they were going to make off B.R., they’d
already
made. The new pressing didn’t sell. Everyone who wanted it had it. And no one came to the live concerts in Boston, Philly, Gary, Des Moines, Cleveland, Memphis.

So BlueStrain cut Buster loose.

Sometime I live in de city,

Sometimes I live in town.

Sometime I takes a great notion

To jump into de river an’ drown.

“In-to-the” a perfect suspended triplet.

The teenage hooker peered out from the crow’s nest of her solitude, saw land heaving up nowhere in sight, and ordered another boilermaker.
Outer Limits
with its monster-of-the-week, animal, vegetable, mineral, appeared onscreen.

How I met Buster is a story in itself, I guess.

I’d been working collections freelance at a straight percentage. I was big enough and looked mean enough to get most people’s attention, which was all it really took. And after a while I started getting something else: a reputation. I saddled it, rode it, never put it up wet. But a reputation cuts both ways. Recently I’d had to step on a couple of guys feeling their balls and not about to be told what to do by no jive-ass nigger. One of them got hurt kind of bad. I went to see him on a ward at Mercy afterward but he didn’t have much to say to me. Fuck you, as I recall, being pretty much it.