Evan Hunter - Sons

It was therefore disheartening to wake up to a ninety-one degree heat that Sunday, and the promise of another suffocating Chicago day. We packed a picnic lunch, much as we might have done back in Eau Fraiche, took two streetcars to Twenty-ninth Street, walked the three blocks to the beach, and tried to enjoy ourselves despite the rising temperature and the throngs of people.

I was exhausted when the trouble started.

Nancy was lying beside me on the blanket, her blond hair curled into a bun at the back of her head, her black bathing costume striped horizontally at the skirt-hem and on the mid-thigh pants showing below, wearing black stockings that must have been unbearable in this heat, a fine sheen of sweat on her face and on her naked arms. A ukulele started someplace, and a man with a high whiny voice began singing all the old war songs, “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!” and “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand,” and finally got around to some of the newer stuff to which he didn’t know the words, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” Nancy trying to hum along with him, but the heat defeating everything, a stultifying crushing heat that made movement and even conversation too fatiguing to contemplate.

With considerable effort, I had raised myself up on one elbow in an attempt to locate the ukulele player with the nasal voice, scanning the beach and only chancing to look out over the water where I saw first a small raft, and then noticed that the person on the raft, paddling it toward the beach, was colored. New to Chicago, I did not know at the time that the Twenty-ninth Street Beach was considered “white” territory, an improvised adjunct to the Twenty-fifth Street Beach which bordered the black belt, the section of Chicago known as Douglas. I only learned that later. What I realized now, signaled by the sudden cessation of the ukulele and a hush so tangible it sent an almost welcome shiver up my back, was that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. A man was running down toward the lakefront. Another man was shouting, “What’s that nigger doing here?”

“Get back where you belong!” someone yelled.

“Get him out of here!” a woman screamed.

I rose to my feet and with my back to the sun (this was close to five o’clock, I suppose, but the sun was still strong behind me), I looked out over the lake and saw that the intruder was just a boy, fourteen? fifteen? it was difficult to tell from this distance, but a boy certainly enough, judging from the slenderness of his body and the quick eager way he lifted his head and broke into a grin that flashed white across his black face. Perhaps he had not understood the consternation he was causing here on this white beach, perhaps he had assumed the men and women running down toward the shore were there to greet him after his exceptional and extraordinary navigational feat, the brave sailor who had come halfway around the world, or at least the several hundred yards separating the white beach from the black beach beside it, he had surely misunderstood because he was still grinning when the first stone struck him.

“Get the little bastard!” someone yelled (they knew he was little then, they knew he was only a boy) and another stone struck the raft, and the grin vanished from the boy’s face, he knew now that the people on this discovered shore were unfriendly, were perhaps even hostile, a volley of rocks and stones falling upon the raft and upon his shoulders now as he frantically paddled in an effort to get out of range, “What is it, Bert?” Nancy said, and I moved off the blanket and began running toward the shore as a rock struck the boy full in the face and he fell into the water.

And now, now a hush fell over the beach again, deeper than that initial shocked silence that had marked the boy’s approach, expectant now with an almost theatrical suspense. Would the boy surface, had the rock stunned him, would his grinning black face pop suddenly out of the water to the cheers of the onlookers and the applause of a crowd mollified by his moxie, would he climb once more onto his flimsy raft and paddle his way back to those African shores from whence he had come? The question hung suspended in stifling heat and tempers stilled but only for a moment. There were colored men on the beach now, “Let us through,” they were saying, three or four brave scouts probing this humid white no man’s land, “let us through, goddamn it! The boy’s drowning!” and I thought, Let us through! but we were not being let through, the boy had not yet surfaced, the raft rotated in aimless circles on the lake as still as death. A policeman appeared, I heard a Negro say, “Officer Logan, there’s the man there who threw the rock,” and a white man whispered, “Logan, the Cottage Grove Station,” and I thought, The boy is drowning, let’s get to him.

But the motion of history moves away from minor events toward those of succeeding importance, the minor event here being an adolescent Negro who had paddled in too close, who had invaded too deeply, drowning now perhaps as some other Negroes still tried to get past the barricade of white men who prevented them from entering the water, while behind them and slightly removed, the voices continued in rising argument, the colored men insisting that Officer Logan of the Cottage Grove Avenue Station arrest the man who had thrown the rock which had knocked the boy from the raft into the water where he was now perhaps drowning as the voices continued their tedious assault, Arrest him, arrest him, and the white men complained that the boy had merely slipped off the raft, and the debate went on, it being the major issue now, and the boy did not surface, and Officer Logan did not take action. The white man who had thrown the possibly fatal rock stood apart from the angry bubble of dissent, wearing upon his face the proud look of an acknowledged marksman, knowing he was the center of a debate of magnitude, the eye of the storm, basking in his newly earned celebrity until suddenly the colored men whirled upon him in fury (He’s drowning out there, I thought, O lord Jesus, he is drowned) and began to hit him.

If one can say when any war begins, it was then that this war began, this was the firing of the first shot, so to speak. Forget the ancient festering ills, discount them as a possible cause — the 50,000 Negroes who had been coming from the South over the past two years, moving into previously white neighborhoods, crowding into already crowded sections of the city where the rents were lowest and the anti-black feelings were highest, taking jobs that white men felt were rightfully their own, often working for lower wages, many of them bringing back from the war a new sense of maleness — had they not slept with the same French girls, had they not drunk the same French wines, had they not faced the same German bullets? — forget all this, discount whatever real reasons existed for this war, discount even the minor incident of a stray rock causing a boy to drown out there on the lake, and mark the true starting time of this war as seven minutes past five o’clock on the afternoon of July 27, 1919, when a crowd of angry indignant Negroes attacked a white man.

There were slats on the beach, pieces of weathered wood, rocks, empty bottles, all sorts of weapons for a ragtag army suddenly called into front-line action, whites and Negroes, all of them sweltering in the same Chicago blast furnace. Reinforcements were coming now from the Twenty-fifth Street Beach, black men running over the blistering sand to join the fray, driving the white men into the water where the drowned boy was all but forgotten now and the raft still drifted in idle circles, and then turning on Officer Logan himself to chase him off the beach and onto Twenty-ninth Street.