Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (5 page)

We watched that through and then the fire died down and darkness came again, and then, suddenly, up in the direction of the road, an army flare arched up into the sky made a balloon of brightlight, hung there, and then swept slowly and gracefully to earth. The screaming died away. The shouting stopped. There was a terrible, wonderful new silence all around us in the darkness, and the silence lasted and lasted.

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten.

And still silence, broken only by the half-hysterical sobbing of women and the whimpering cries of the little children—the children of four and five and six who had been brought early, so that they should miss no chance to hear Paul Robeson sing his warm songs.

And then a voice from the dark cried, “Hello—hello, there!” It was our scout, A—K—, back from his third trip through.

“What happened?” we asked him.

“I don't know. I was watching them for a chance to slip through, and suddenly they pulled out It was whispered among them, and they pulled out—all of them. The meadow is empty.”

“Where's the truck? Did you see it?”

“Yes, it got back to where you had the big fight, across the meadow, and there were two badly hurt fascists there so we put them in the truck along with our people, and the driver's trying to get through the roadblock to the hospital. I told him not to try, but he was afraid some of our kids would die, so he's going to try to get them to take down one of the roadblocks and let him through.” K——added, “He thinks maybe that because there are two of their people in the truck they'll let him through.”

(I discovered afterwards that they would not let him through, whereupon he drove his truck in low gear over the rockpile barricade, made it, and literally smashed his way through them to the road and to a hospital. We did not see the driver or the truck again that night, but I had the story from him a week later.)

“What are those flares?”

“I don't know.”

“And did you call Albany—the governor—the troopers—the police—the newspapers?”

“I've been calling since seven-thirty,” K— said. “I called them all three or four times. They know. They've known all night.”

“You're sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. I spoke to the troopers myself. I gave them all the details—and they promised to come. But from the way they spoke, I'm sure they knew already.”

“All right,” I said, “all right. You've done a job. Take it easy now.”

A few others held a conference then. It was not easy to sit there in the dark. Some of the women began to plead with us to let them go, to let them take their children out of there. The tension was at the breaking point. We had to be firm and sometimes harsh with them, but we decided that no one would leave the platform until some civil or military force from the outside came through to us. We had survived on the basis of discipline and unity, and we were determined not to break that discipline and unity, come what might. There was one woman, I recall, whose husband had gone up the road with us just before the first fight began, and now he was missing, and she pleaded with me to let her go out into the dark and look for him.…

And then we saw a pair of headlights. Slowly, searchingly, the car drove down into the hollow and toward us, stopping only a few feet away. The car was a small coupe. Three men got out. They walked toward us, leaving the headlights of the car on to light their way.

A few feet from me they stopped, nodded at me, and stood there quietly for a moment. I recognized them now; they were the well-dressed men with the notebooks who had watched the fighting on the road up above and taken notes as they watched.

“You did all right,” one of them said suddenly. “You did a damn good piece of work up there. I take my hat off. It was damned fine discipline all the way through.”

“What in hell do you want?” I demanded. I was in no mood to be pleasant to anyone now.

“We thought we might help you out. You got some pretty badly hurt people, so if you want us to, we'll take a few of them to the hospital.”

“Go to hell!” I said, but then one of our men was plucking my sleeve, and he pulled me back and whispered, “I know them. They're government men, justice agents. You can trust them.”

“Why?”

“Because right now they got no stake in this either way. Didn't you see them earlier tonight. They're neutral. This is just a big experiment to them, and they're neutral. Some of the kids are bleeding badly and one may have a fractured skull. If they say they'll take them to a hospital, they will.”

“How do you know them—how do you know who they are?” I pressed him.

“Because I been working in this county long enough to know. I've talked to them before, and I tell you they're Justice Department agents. Anyway, we got to take a chance because the kids are badly hurt.”

I went back to the three agents who were standing calmly and quietly where I had left them. They were the calmest, most unruffled trio I had seen that night, and now they stood there with their hands in their pockets, looking at our circle of battered, weary men.

“How many can you take?” I asked them.

“Three.”

“Can you get through?”

“Don't worry about that. We can get through, and we'll get your men to the hospital.”

So I turned back to our line and said, “Look—we can take three of the worst hurt of you to the hospital. It's all right, and there's nothing to worry about. So if you think you're hurt pretty bad, step forward.”

At first no one of them moved. They stayed where they were, looking silently at these three dapper, composed gentlemen. The first to break it was a young Negro. He let go of the men alongside of him and walked over to me. “What the hell,” he said softly, swaying from side to side. There was blood over his face and the whole front of his shirt was soaked with blood. He bent his head and there were two cuts on the top, one a gash from forehead to ear, the other about two inches long. I nodded, and they helped him into their car.

A second Negro came forward now. He lifted his swollen, bleeding lip to show me the smashed, gaping cavity in his mouth. I nodded again and he joined the first man in the car. The third was a white youngster; there was something wrong with his shoulder. “I think it's broken,” he said.

The three Justice men got back into the car, swung it around and drove off, and once again we were in the quiet darkness. I went back to the line and stood next to the others, wondering how men with broken shoulders and broken heads could go on fighting the way they had and not complain at all.

Now three more of the army flares went off, arching into the sky and filling it with white light, and then settling lazily down to earth. (I learned later from J—— N——, who passed by on the road up above at just about this time, but who did not know that we were down in the hollow, that the state troopers were using the flares to search the underbrush for bodies.)

None of that light reached us. Still in the darkness, we waited the minutes through, one after another; and then suddenly the silent scene in the hollow erupted into action and motion.

First an ambulance which came roaring down into the hollow, siren wide open and red headlights throwing a ghostly glare. Then car after car full of troopers and Westchester County police. All in a moment there were a dozen cars on the meadow in front of us, and the place was swarming with troopers and police.…

Properly, that should have been the end of it. Not that the police had come dashing to the rescue in the traditional “Jack Dalton” fashion; quite the contrary. We learned subsequently—and beyond any shadow of a doubt—that the police and troopers had been aware of the events at the picnic grounds for hours and had been in easy reach, but had been deliberately withheld so that the tragedy might run its course, and only when it became fully evident that the carefully-planned mass lynching would be frustrated, did they decide to enter the picture; yet in spite of this we considered that now there would be some surcease, some letup.

Not yet; one more chapter in that night of horror had to be played through, and it began with an officer of the troopers who stalked up to us and demanded,

“Who in hell is running this show?”

“It's over,” I said to myself. “They talk like that because that's a cop's nature, but it's over.” And then I told him that he could talk to me.

“Who in hell are you?”

“My name's Fast—Howard Fast,” I answered, gritting my teeth. Now the line had broken; our discipline broke for the first time that evening, and the people crowded around the trooper and me —and then they were thrust back by other troopers, and the one who was speaking to me snarled,

“Damn it, keep them in their places, sitting down!”

“Sit down!” another trooper shouted. “All of you, sit down. Nobody moves!”

“What's this all about?” I asked the trooper officer. “Are you going to take us out of here or not?”

“I'll ask the questions.”

“Look—we've had a tough time here.”

“You'll have a tougher time if you don't God damn well do as we say. Who are you anyway?”

I told him I was the chairman of the concert that never took place.

“Who's running it?”

“They never got here.”

“Are you in charge?”

“As much as anyone, I guess.”

“All right,” he said. “You keep these people where they are. If anyone moves, if anyone tries to get away from here, there'll be trouble. Understand?”

“We've got little children here. Don't you understand what we've been through tonight?”

“You're looking for trouble, aren't you?” the trooper said.

“I'm not looking for any trouble, trooper. We've had enough trouble. We want to get out of here.”

“Just do as I say and keep them in their places or there'll be hell to pay.”

So I went through the crowd and along the line and told them that. “A little longer,” I told them. “We stuck it out until now, so we can stick it out a little longer, I guess. Just take it easy.”

In a way that was the hardest part of the evening. Not so much the sitting there with a dozen state troopers stationed in front of us, legs spread, fingering their clubs—but to stay there after I learned what was behind it. And that was soon enough.

They let me walk around, and one of the Westchester police was willing to talk. Briefly, he told me that one of the fascists—William Secor, his name turned out to be—had been knifed and had been taken to the hospital, and a rumor had just come through that he Had died. I often thought that it was only on the basis of this rumor that the police had entered the hollow at all, but I have no proof of that. In any case, if Secor was dead, every one of us who had held the road against the attacks would face a murder charge. That was why we were being kept here this way—so that they could get a report from the hospital and if necessary pull us in on a murder rap.

(There was no knife among our men. Later, it was proved that Secor had been knifed by one of his own gang in the drunken frenzy of their attack.)

I went back to our people. “I don't understand it,” I said. “There were no knives in our group.”

“They had knives, plenty of them.”

“Can they make a murder rap stick?”

“If they want to hard enough—I guess they can frame anything.”

“After what happened tonight, can they try forty of us for murder?”

“They can if they want to, and they can get a conviction if they want to. They set this up, didn't they?”

I didn't want to believe it. Here we were alive. All evening we had fought against the most monstrous and inconceivable mass lynching ever attempted in the northern states of America, not simply a riot or a mob demonstration, but a calculated attack to kill two hundred people, and because we had kept our heads and kept our courage, we had frustrated it; and now we were alive when no. one of us had had any real expectations of emerging alive; and now the police were here and the state troopers and all the fine legal protection that an American citizen comes to expect as his right, his lawful right in a democratic republic—and now we were being held so that a charge of murder could be brought against us, so that we could be framed into a great mass spectacle for the type of animal who had planned and executed the business of the night.

It was hard to believe then, but it is not hard to believe now. The “monstrous” has become the accepted pattern of life, and frameup runs like a thread through the lives of all progressive Americans today, and the gibbering, conscienceless stools sit in the witness chairs all over the land, and their lies drop like spittle from the mouths of idiots; but it was newer then and the blood was not dry on us yet from the fight we had been through, and it was, therefore, the harder to believe and accept.

There were twenty minutes then, and each minute was long and full of hurt, and I stood there waiting and thinking and trying to relate that night to all I had read and heard of Germany, and to tell myself, “This is how it happens, and all over the land people sleep and they don't know and don't particularly care. But it happens this way because decent people cannot learn from watching it happen somewhere else, and because the workers are fed the wormy crust of anti-Communism, and because the sell-out is the new god of the land, and because somewhere a great horror is in the making and it is necessary to instill terror, so that we may accept horror as the pattern of our lives.…

Cars were coming back and forth now, and the hollow was alive with action and with blue uniforms and with gray uniforms, and the fine, jack-booted palace guards of Thomas E. Dewey were strutting all over the place, showing their slim waists and handsome profiles, and there was a conference taking place too among the big brass of the little army which had descended upon us; and then the local Westchester cop, the one with a core of something human left inside of him—a small town cop from a small town nearby—nodded at me, and I went over to him and he whispered,