Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

The killer plucked the telephone receiver from the wall and said, “’Sup, cuz?”

“Did you get the books I sent you?” Mason asked.

“Yeah. I’m already a hundred pages into the first one. Didn’t realize there was so much stuff I didn’t know about Dr. King.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So what we be talkin’ about today, cuz?”

Not the phony charges that had been brought against him, Mason decided. Their first conversation had convinced him that Diggs didn’t have much light to shed on that. But in his eighteen years of incarceration, Diggs had never been interviewed by a reporter. If Mason could coax him into talking about his life, he could write a kick-ass profile of the killer. Mason envisioned the page-one headline: KWAME DIGGS IN HIS OWN WORDS. It would be a solid scoop-enough to justify the time he’d been putting in, even if his investigation of the bogus charges flamed out.

As it happened, getting Diggs to talk about himself was not difficult. He was his favorite subject.

“How old were you,” Mason asked, “when your family moved to Warwick?”

“I was seven.”

“Before that, you lived in Providence?”

“Yeah. In an apartment on Willard Avenue.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Flynn Elementary.”

“That’s on Blackstone Street, right?”

“Yeah. Right around the corner.”

“Did you like it there?”

“It was cool. Lots of neighborhood shorties to hang with. Stickball games in the street every afternoon. My moms worked the overnight at Miriam Hospital, so she was always there when I got home from school.”

“Who took care of you at night?”

“My dad, when he wasn’t workin’ a double shift.”

“And when he was?”

“My sister,” Diggs said. “She’s two years older than me.”

“When you were seven, she was only nine, Kwame.”

“Yeah, but our nana lived right upstairs.”

“Why did you move?”

“It was a bad neighborhood, cuz. Run-down houses. Gangs. Rats big enough to saddle up and ride. I didn’t realize how shitty it was when we was livin’ there ’cause I didn’t have nothin’ to compare it to. But my moms, she hated it. Always talkin’ about how she wanted her kids to grow up in the ’burbs. Told me later she was scared Amina, Sekou, and me would end up smokin’ crack or hooked on skag if she didn’t get us the hell outta there.” And then he laughed. “I mean, shit. Like there’s no fuckin’ drugs in Warwick.”

“How did you feel about moving?”

“I was happy at first. When I saw that new house, it was like a dream, cuz. Our own flower garden out front. Big backyard to play in. Trees to climb. A swing set with a slide. I even got my own room.”

Diggs fell quiet for a moment, giving Mason time to catch up with his notes. A guard had confiscated the reporter’s tape recorder at the door, informing him that electronic devices were not permitted.

“My papa,” Diggs finally said. “He worked a lot of overtime at the Narragansett bottling plant to save the down payment for that place.”

“He’s gone now?” Mason asked.

“Yeah. Died of a bad heart five years after I hit the bin. Moms still blames it on my conviction. She says Papa never got over it. Bastards wouldn’t even let me out for the funeral.”

“Hit the bin?”

“Went to prison.”

“You said you were happy about the move at first. Did something change after a while?”

“Yeah.”

“What was that?”

“I looked around the neighborhood and saw it was full of nothin’ but white folks.”

“No other black kids?”

“Just me and my brother and sister.”

“What was that like for you?”

“What the fuck do you think it’s like when there ain’t nobody else looks like you?”

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “Tell me.”

Diggs took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. “Lonely. You’re an outsider. You don’t belong there. Everybody be burnin’ you off all the time.”

“Burning you off?”

“Giving you the eye.”

“That’s how your neighbors treated you? Like an outsider?”

“Most of ’em, yeah. Lookin’ down their noses at us. Callin’ us nigger behind our backs. Tellin’ their kids not to play with the porch monkeys.”

“How did that make you feel?”

Diggs focused on the ceiling, as if the answer were written up there.

“Maya Angelou said, ‘Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.’”

“So you were angry.”

“What the fuck do you think?”

“What about school? Any black kids there?”

“Just a handful. We always sat together in the lunchroom. Hung out in a group near the school steps at recess.”

“Why?”

“Self-defense, cuz.”

“Because the white kids picked on you?”

“Hell, yeah, they did. Catch one of us alone and they’d whack us up.”

“That ever happen to you?”

“A couple of times, sure.”

“Tell me about that.”

“One time five or six of ’em caught me walkin’ home from school alone. Snatched the Indiana Jones lunch box my moms had just bought me and threw it down a storm drain. Socked me in the grill, knocked me down in the street, and whupped my natural ass. It was a serious bang-out, cuz. When they got done with me, I limped home cryin’.”

“Were you hurt bad?”

“Split lip. Bloody nose. Black eye. My damn ribs ached for a month.”

“What did your parents do?”

“Told me to turn the other cheek like Jesus said.”

“What did you do?” Mason asked.

“Time’s up,” the guard hollered. “Phones down. Form a line at the door.”

“Didn’t do nothin’ at first,” Diggs said as he rose to leave. “I was just a scared little kid. But then, the next year, I got bigger.”

Chief Angelo Ricci stepped in front of a squadron of uniformed Providence police guarding the doors to the Superior Court building on Benefit Street and spoke calmly into his bullhorn.

“Your attention for a moment, please,” he said. “I want you to know that we’re on your side. We agree with what’s written on your picket signs. We agree with everything you’ve been saying. Just remain orderly, okay? We don’t want to have to arrest anyone today.”

Below him, protesters carrying signs with Kessler’s picture on them swarmed over the wide courthouse steps. Gloria mingled with them, snapping photos with her Nikon. Mulligan stood near the cops on the top step and did a rough count, putting the crowd at just over a hundred.

Attorney General Roberts arrived shortly before ten A.M., trailed by an entourage of assistant prosecutors lugging briefcases. The crowd greeted them with chants and boos but parted so they could climb the stairs and enter the building.

Gloria joined Mulligan on the top step and snapped a few wide-angle shots. Then Mulligan squeezed through the police line, pushed through the doors, and made his way through the metal detectors.

The spectator benches in Judge Needham’s third-floor courtroom were jammed. Gordon Freeman was seated in the first row, just behind the prosecutor’s table. Eric Kessler, Mulligan noted, was absent, his presence apparently not required. Mulligan walked down the center aisle to the jury box, which had been reserved for press, and took a seat just in time for the bailiff’s cry:

“Hear ye, hear ye. The Superior Court of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, County of Providence, is now in session, the Honorable Judge Clifford H. Needham presiding. Please rise.”

The rotund little judge, nicknamed “Taxi” because of his resemblance to the star of a 1980s sitcom, bustled in. He climbed onto the booster seat, which he needed to see and be seen over the top of the judicial bench, and asked everyone to be seated.