No Name in the Street (Vintage International) (12 page)

I knew a blond girl in the Village a long time ago, and, eventually, we never walked out of the house together. She was far safer walking the streets alone than when walking with me—a brutal and humiliating fact which thoroughly destroyed whatever relationship this girl and I might have been able to achieve. This happens all the time in America, but Americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is, and what
it says about them. When we walked out in the evening, then, she would leave ahead of me, alone. I would give her about five minutes, and then I would walk out alone, taking another route, and meet her on the subway platform. We would not acknowledge each other. We would get into the same subway car, sitting at opposite ends of it, and walk, separately, through the streets of the free and the brave, to wherever we were going—a friend’s house, or the movies. There was only one restaurant, eventually, in which we ever ate together, and it was run by a black woman. We were fighting for our lives, and we were very young. As for the police, our protectors, we would never have dreamed of calling one. Our connection caused us to be menaced by the police in ways indescribable and nearly inconceivable; and the police egged on the populace, stood laughing and talking while we were spit on, and cursed. When with a girl, I never ran, I couldn’t: except once, when a girl I had been sleeping with slapped me in the face in the middle of Washington Square Park. She was pulling rank, she was crying
Rape!
—and then I ran. I still remember the day and the hour, and the sunlight, the faces of the people, and the girl’s face—she had short red hair—and I will never forgive that girl. I am astonished until today that I have both my eyes and most of my teeth and functioning kidneys and my sexual equipment: but small black boys have the advantage of being able to curl themselves into knots, and roll with the kicks and the
punches. Of course, I was a target for the police. I was black and visible and helpless and the word was out to “get” me, and so, soon, I, too, hauled ass. And the prisons of this country are full of boys like the boy I was.

“All right,” cried Tony, with tears in his eyes, “I’m twenty-eight, and I’m a criminal, right? I’ve got a record—now they can do anything they want!”

Tony had been arrested about four years earlier, as a civil rights demonstrator—that stays on the books; then on a narcotics charge; then charged with stealing an overcoat—“I was running a business—who’s going to steal an overcoat out of his own shop!”—and then charged with stealing a car. He was prosecuted only on the car-theft charge, which has since been dropped. Nevertheless, the car-theft charge marked the most important turning point of his life. He was held for something like two months—this was after the murder, and long before he was connected with it—and then released on bail. But a thoroughly shaken Tony, having been assured by the police that they would “get” him, jumped bail and went to Germany. He had been there before and had been happy there. His flight turned out to be his greatest error: but he could not have supposed that he would be arrested in Germany for having been accused of stealing a car—particularly as Tony’s brand of arrogance causes him to act as if his private knowledge of his innocence constitutes
irrefutable public proof. With his lofty
I would never do a thing like that
, he dismisses the accusation and is affronted—and surprised—when others do not take him at what he supposes to be his sacred word. And, in fact, almost the very first thing he did in Germany was to register his presence with the American Embassy and give them his address—unlikely conduct indeed for anyone supposing himself to be suspected of murder.

The murder occurred in April. The alleged car theft took place before the murder, but Tony was indicted on the car-theft charge well after the murder occurred, sometime in May. He was in jail for about two months and then released on bail. He arrived in Hamburg on October 22. On October 25, a Detective Hanst, in New York, swore out a complaint which declared that “as a result of information received and investigation made,” Maynard was guilty of homicide. On October 27, a Judge Weaver, in New York, cabled the Hamburg chief of police demanding Maynard’s arrest. It is not until October 31 that the deposition on which the entire case rests makes its appearance. This is signed by a certain Dennis Morris, whose address is in Brooklyn, and he identifies Tony Maynard by means of a passport-size snapshot. His deposition reads: “That on the morning of April 3, 1967 [but the crime is alleged to have taken place on the morning of the fourth] I was on West 4th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in the city, county, and state of New York, and saw a
man, now known to me as Wm. A. Maynard, Jr., whose photograph on which I have placed my initials appears below and is part hereof, shoot and kill a man now known to me as Michael E. Kroll. I then saw said Wm. A. Maynard, Jr. run away from the scene of the crime.”

This document, to say nothing of the date of its appearance, strikes me as extraordinary. It appears six days after Hanst’s warrant and four days after Judge Weaver’s cable—to say nothing of the fact that this authoritative identification of the murderer, by means of a photograph, occurs seven months after the event. Dennis Morris has made no appearance until this moment, and no one knows anything about him. The logical eyewitness, Crist, who was locked in an eyeball to eyeball confrontation with the murderer, has entirely disappeared. (He is to reappear during Tony’s trial, armed with a most engaging reason for having been away so long.) In any case, Maynard had been under police surveillance for months, during which time the police were presumably investigating the murder, presumably picking up blacks and whites by the scores, and placing them in line-ups, and it seems never to have occurred to them to connect Maynard with the murder. Incidentally, the white assailant disappears completely and forever from this investigation, as though he had never existed.

That, roughly, was the case until that moment, as it could be reconstructed from Germany. Time was to reveal several unnerving details, but this outline never
changed. It was to prove important, later, that during this time Tony had been involved with two white women, one of whom, Giselle Nicole, claiming extreme police harassment, disappeared. The other, Mary Quinn, he married. They did not live happily ever after, and Mary Quinn’s subsequent conduct was scarcely that of a loving wife.

According to the treaty between Germany and America, two classes of prisoners are not subject to extradition: political prisoners, and those facing the death penalty. Tony wanted to fight the extradition proceedings, for he was certain that he would be murdered on the way back home. This fear may strike the ordinary American as preposterous, in spite of what they themselves know concerning the violence which is the heritage and the scourge of their country. I could not, of course, agree with Tony, but I didn’t find his terror, which was exceedingly controlled and therefore very moving, in the least preposterous. But I had no remote motion how to go about fighting his extradition. Ironically, the very greatest obstacle lay in the fact that New York had abolished the death penalty. The plea could be made, then, only on political grounds. I agree with the Black Panther position concerning black prisoners: not one of them has ever had a fair trial, for not one of them has ever been tried by a jury of his peers. White middle-class America is always the jury, and they know absolutely nothing about
the lives of the people on whom they sit in judgment: and this fact is not altered, on the contrary it is rendered more implacable by the presence of one or two black faces in the jury box.

But it would be difficult indeed to convey to a German court the political implications of a black man’s arrest: difficult if not impossible to convey, especially to a nation “friendly” to the United States, to what extent black Americans are political prisoners. Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, is a vivid example of what can happen to a black man who obeys the American injunction,
be true to your faith
, but his press has been so misleading that he is also an unwieldy and intimidating example. Muhammad Ali is one of the best of the “bad niggers” and has been publicly hanged like one, but since I had to avoid the religious issue, which had nothing to do with Tony’s case, I could not cite him as an example. Neither was the Maynard case likely to interest civil rights organizations, or the NAACP; it was, in fact, simply another example of a black hustler being thrown into jail. The complex of reasons dictating such a fate could scarcely be articulated in a letter to the German court. There was also the enormous and delicate problem of publicity. Though I had no choice in the matter, for I certainly couldn’t abandon him, I was terrified that my presence in the case would work strongly to Tony’s disadvantage. I intended to fight the extradition proceedings as hard as I knew how, but I knew how unlikely
it was that we would win. In the event that we lost, Tony would be brought to trial and any publicity prior to that trial could certainly be considered prejudicial. On the other hand, both Tony and my German editor felt that an appeal to the press would work strongly in Tony’s favor. It is really rather awful to find oneself in a position in which any move one makes may result in irreparable harm to another, and I was torn in two by this question for some time. But the question was brutally taken out of my hands.

One dark, Gothic evening, much delayed by the fact that we had spent hours trying to arrive at a strategy—no easy matter if one’s strategy must be dictated by the laws of two different countries, and the psychology of two not so very different peoples—the German lawyer, my German editor, and myself, arrived at the door of the Holstenglacis prison.
We
were rattled because, though we were not exactly late, we knew that we were arriving at just about the time that prisoners were due to be taken upstairs for meals; and, furthermore, again a trick accomplished by my German publishers, by this time Tony and I no longer met in the public waiting room, but in another, smaller and private, where we could smoke, where we could talk. This was an enormous concession, and being late could possibly mean losing it.

Only the lawyer and I had passes to enter. My German editor—Fritz Raddadtz, an anti-Nazi German, who has the scars to prove it—had no right to enter at
all. But the guard who opened the door also seemed rattled and, without examining anybody’s pass, led us all into the room in which he knew I always awaited Tony.

And there we waited, for quite some time. Another rattled functionary appeared, explaining that Tony was not in his cell and could not be seen that night. My German editor, smelling a rat—I didn’t, yet, and the lawyer seemed bewildered—pointed out that Tony, in his cell or not, was, nevertheless, somewhere in the prison, and that we were perfectly prepared to wait in this room until morning, or for weeks, if it came to that: that we would not, in short, leave until we saw Tony. The rattled functionary disappeared again. Then, after quite a long while, they brought in the birthday boy.

Someone had goofed in that prison, very badly; after this visit, heads surely rolled. Tony had been beaten, and beaten very hard; his cheekbones had disappeared and one of his eyes was crooked; he looked swollen above the neck, and he took down his shirt collar, presently, to show us the swelling on his shoulders. And he was weeping, trying not to—I had seen him with tears in his eyes, but I had never seen him weeping.

But when I say that heads surely rolled and that someone had goofed, I do not mean that they goofed because they beat him. They goofed because they let us see him. No one would have taken my word for this
beating, or our lawyer’s word. But Fritz knows what it means to be beaten in prison. And he, therefore, not only alerted the German press, but armed with the weight of one of the most powerful of German publishing houses, sued the German state. So, there it was, after all, anyway, in the newspapers, and I, too, had to meet the press.