"Oates, Joyce Carol - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

and he's wearing dark sunglasses. And it's John Elmore Ritchie's bad luck he resembles this Negro, or anyway it seems so: the size of him, and the glasses, and the "suspicious behavior" the white cops are alerted to, just spying him there on the street walking along dragging his leg like he didn't want to call any attention to himself.

So they stop him. Ask him what's his name where's his identification where's he going where's he coming from is he drunk?

high on weed? what're you doing, boy, with that knife? "concealed weapon" on your person?

Not that John Ritchie has got any knife, concealed or other wise, nor ever did, not being that kind. It's just cops' jive talk and shit like that.

So John Ritchie's too scared to answer, or too frozen.

frozen-faced. Like already he'd been slammed over the head, stunned like a steer going to slaughter.

They said, the Ritchies, when he came back from wherever he'd been, in the Pacific, from the army hospital there, he wasn't the same man who'd been shipped out... didn't even look the same, entirely. And he'd be fearful of doing injury to his children by touching them or even looking too direct at them, looking anybody too direct in the eye out of terror a wicked thought could leap from one mind to another; and sometimes too, when he was sleeping, or singing in the chorus, his hands would move and wriggle on their own like something out of the deep sea you d expect to have claws, capable of quick darting movements and lethal attacks. So these hands he kept down at his sides when he was conscious of the need to do so, and when the white cops yelled at him he went stony still in the street like at attention in the army and seemed almost not to hear them, the things they said to him, nor even, at first, to feel their billy clubs prodding and poking and tapping.

.

. until finally his glasses flew off and they had him spreadeagled leaning against a wall using their billy clubs some more, for maybe it seemed in their eyes this weird nigger was stubborn or sullen or "resisting" police officers in some special sly fashion of his own, judging from the scrunched-up look of his ugly black face, that look like something hacked in stone, a terror so deep it has turned into something else, too subtle and elusive to be named.

Now John Elmore Ritchie is bleeding from the nose and mouth and some neighborhood people have stopped to watch.

from across the street. This is the unpaved end of East Avenue, Lowertown as it shifts into Niggertown; neighborhood folks know not to get too close, in such circumstances, and to keep their mouths shut.

The cops are striking John Ritchie, asking him questions the man can't or won't answer... never says a word except grunting when he's hit.

.. then suddenly he covers his face with his hands and turns and butts with his head lowered like some maddened bull or something, hits one of the cops in the chest and sends him six feet backward and now there's sure hell to pay.

A second patrol car pulls up. A police van pulls up. There's sirens, walkie-talkies, men with pistols. And they have John Ritchie on the ground in the dirt and the man is fighting, he's fighting like some crazy old bull, so they wallop him over the head and kick him till he stops... drag him into the rear of the van.

the cops yelling to the black people watching, "You want trouble?

Which one of you wants trouble?" with their pistols leveled and primed to use, and John Ritchie they claimed died in the Hammond City jail early in the morning of the following day banged his head against the bars of his cell they said and this was corroborated by police witnesses and two or three inmates and after John Ritchie's funeral at Zion Church and for two nights following black people gather in the street on East Avenue and Pitt, and word goes through Hammond there's going to be trouble... going to be a black uprising... and there's a small army of city cops and New York State troopers...

police barricades set up in the street and traffic rerouted and a 9

P.M. curfew in effect all weekend... young black men mainly are the disturbers-of-the-peace the cops are alert to, and disperse. And they disperse them, and others. And there are no arrests. And that's how John Elmore Ritchie dies and gets buried in Peach Tree Cemetery.

This episode they talk about, the adults. For a while.

The Peter B. Porter Elementary School on Chautauqua Street to which Iris Courtney transfers eight weeks into the school term the tearful consequence of a weekend move, Curry Street to the fourth-floor flat on Holland is an aging brown-brick building with an asphalt playground crumbling at its edges, fenced off at the rear from hillocks of ashy chemical-stinking landfill. You are not to play there. You are not to scale the fence andplay there. You are to play only on the playground.

At recess the younger children surge shouting and screaming amid the swings, the rusted teeter-totters, the wicked monkey bars-where the nastiest accidents happen, or are caused to happen. They are white and Negro... but mainly white. The older children, fifth- and sixth-graders, stand about in good weather, eat their lunches out of paper bags on gouged picnic tables bolted to the asphalt paving, whites and Negroes at separate tables; and there one day is Iris Courtney the new sixth-grader, pale, freckled, shy, watchful, in the pretty red plaid jumper Momma bought her as compensation for the pain, as if there could be any compensation for such pain, of the sudden humiliating change of address, the new and utterly friendless terrain.

Daddy has said you must learn to roll with the punches.

everyone must learn. And better young than old.

Iris learns. Iris is shy but Iris learns.

Fairly quickly she makes friends with one or two girls who are accessible... then with a few more... and even a boy or two, the less pushy, less aggressive, less dirty-mouthed boys... none of them are Negro, of course, or, as it's said here, "colored"; the two groups keep to themselves most of the time, eating lunch in separate groups, playing together, talking, wisecracking, scuffling, fighting.