Chester Himes - If he hollers let him go

I didn't ask about my badges and identifications; I was through, I wouldn't need them any more anyway. The crystal of my watch was broken and it had stopped. I checked my keys; they were all there. I thought of my brass tool checks but didn't ask about them. I'd get all that straightened out in the morning. Then I looked to see if anything had been taken from my billfold. My driver's licence, draft classification, a small snapshot of Alice, and the other papers were there, but my money, two tens and four ones, was gone. I didn't ask about it either. I'd make the whole goddamned bunch sorry for everything that had happened, I resolved, stuffing all of it into my pocket.

'That's a pretty gal's picture you got there,' the guard observed. 'Is she white?'

I didn't reply.

'Better get your medicine too,' he said.

I looked on the bedside stand, saw a bottle of brown pills and a paper cup of water that had been sitting there until bubbles had formed in it. I picked up the bottle, dropped it into my other pocket.

The guard stood up. In his uniform, the regular olive drab with the Sam Browne belt and the auxiliary police insignia on his sleeve, he looked impressive, six feet four or more, and a good two-fifty pounds. 'Wanna go 'long with me now?' he said, opening the door into minor surgery.

I took a deep breath and went out ahead of him, weak and wobbly. There were two white-clad doctors, a nurse, and several patients in minor surgery. They stopped in the middle of what they were doing to stare at me. I looked straight ahead, stepped out into the yard.

It was dark; I had an idea it was pretty late. On the ground hundreds of lights made a sort of sketchy daylight, but overhead it was night. Here and there the arcs of welders were bluewhite flashes. The shipways were to my back, big dark eerie shapes with a million lights; but I didn't look about. Workers scurried about, trucks moved by, the noise was still there; the work went on. I had an idea it was the graveyard shift.

'We'll go over to the truck gate,' the guard said.

I headed in that direction; he fell in beside me. When we came to the glass-enclosed guards' room he held open the door. I went inside. There was a slanting draftsman's desk against the window toward the entrance, littered with pads, papers, temporary badges, and the usual forms gatekeepers have to make out before permitting vehicles to enter.

Two heavy-set gatekeepers in blue uniforms with holstered pistols sat on high stools, their feet hooked in the rungs and their elbows propped on the desk, listening to a short, pudgy, grey-haired man in the uniform of a guard captain who stood before them. He had a round rosy face and twinkling grey eyes, but at sight of me his eyes got hard.

'That the boy?' he asked the guard.

'This is him,' the guard said.

For a moment all of them looked at me curiously. Then one of the gatekeepers chuckled. 'Damn if they didn't beat hell out of you,' he said.

The guard captain said, 'You're lucky you're in California. In my home state we'd have hung you.'

I didn't say anything; I expected that out of the guards. Most of them were Southerners anyway. I was just waiting for him to get my time card so I could sign out and go home.

Instead he picked up the phone from the end of the desk and dialled. When he got an answer he said, 'Send somebody out here to Atlas to pick up that coloured boy on that rape charge.' He listened a moment, then said, 'Yeah, you got a warrant for him… Okay, I'll expect you.' He hung up and turned to look at me again. 'You'll get thirty years in this state, boy.'

I was slow getting it. My first reaction was surprise. 'What the hell?' I lisped. 'You having me arrested?' I kind of half thought maybe they were joking.

Everyone in the room gave me a quick, startled look. Then the big guard said, 'That's right, boy. The lady swore out a warrant.'

No one else said anything; they just looked at me.

I didn't get scared right away; I'd been thinking so hard about what was going to happen to her when the people knew the truth. I was even kind of amused to think she was simple enough to think she could get away with that in California. But my mind began going over the evidence. I still wasn't alarmed.

Then it smacked me, shook me to the core. I don't know what set it off; it must have been deep inside of me-always inside of me. I knew in one great flash she really could send me to the pen for thirty years. My word against hers, and all the evidence on her side. I knew there was no way in the world I could prove I hadn't tried to rape her.

Before, up in the room with her, with the mob beating at the door, I'd been instinctively scared of being caught with a white woman screaming, 'Rape.' Scared of the mob; scared of the violence; just scared because I was black and she was white; a trapped, cornered, physical fear.

But now I was scared in a different way. Not of the violence. Not of the mob. Not of physical hurt. But of America, of American justice. The jury and the judge. The people themselves. Of the inexorability of one conclusion-that I was guilty. In that one brief flash I could see myself trying to prove my innocence and nobody believing it. A white woman yelling, 'Rape,' and a Negro caught locked in the room. The whole structure of American thought was against me; American tradition had convicted me a hundred years before. And standing there in an American courtroom, through all the phoney formality of an American trial, having to take it, knowing that I was innocent and that I didn't have a chance.

I was scared more than I've ever been scared in all my life: a rational, reasonable, irrefutable, cold-headed scare. But I wasn't panicky. My mind got sharp, cunning; I thought of only one thing- escape.

A truck drove up, stopped to be inspected. One of the gatekeepers started out the front door; the other one reached for a form to copy the licence number. I swung a long left hook into the big guard's belly with everything I had, went out on the shoulders of the gatekeeper, roughing him to the ground. I stumbled over him, beyond, caught on my hands and one knee, felt the gravel bite into my palms, the pain rack me from the knee; heard the guard captain shout, 'Don't shoot! Catch him!' The instinct of self-preservation got me up and moving; I'd lost a boot and shook the other one off; heard the sudden clutter of action behind me, dug steps with a high-kneed, churning motion, trying to get some speed. It took a flat twelve hundred years to get to the back of the truck, around it, on the other side; and another dozen centuries to get across the lighted stretch of driveway before I reached the darkness of the parking lot.

I didn't think; my mind was following the blind line of action, concentrating on the problem of getting greater motion out of my body, nothing else.

I figured my car was way down to the left, ducked sharp between two cars, skinned my shin against a bumper, stumbled over something in the dark, fell flat, and got up again. I ran past my car and didn't see it, wheeled and sent a stabbing gaze along the row, rigid, tense, desperate, but not terrified. I spotted it three cars back, heard the guards looking for me two rows over, squatted on my hands and knees and walked back to it bear-fashion, hid below the fenders of the cars.

I thought I never would get the door unlocked; to get the key in the ignition took even longer. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw the guards coming toward me. I was parked in a double row with the cars heading in, V-shaped and tight together. A double line of six-by-sixes separated the two rows, served as barriers. There was a vacant space in front of me, at a sixtydegree angle. I cut sharp and headed into it without a thought of whether I could make it; took the double line of six-by-sixes on the starter before the motor caught; heard the back bumper hook into an adjoining fender and the motor roar at the same instant. Noise shattered the night as I yanked the fender off, sideswiped the car in the other line, straightened down the driveway.