Arthur Hailey - Wheels

The black officer thought: And so you will, probably tomorrow or the next day when you've got your regular sidekick back, and he'll look the other way if there's a beating or an arrest on some trumped-up charge. There had been plenty of other vendettas of the same kind.

On impulse, the black cop, who was behind the wheel, said, "Hold it! I'll be back."

As he got out of the car, Rollie Knight was fifty yards away.

"Hey, you!" When the young black man turned, the officer beckoned, then walked to meet him.

The black cop leaned toward Rollie Knight, his stance threatening. But he said quietly, "My partner's out to get you, and he will. You're a stupid jerk for letting your mouth run off, and I don't owe you favors. All the same, I'm warning you: Stay out of sight, or better - get out of town 'til the man cools."

"A Judas nigger cop! Why'd I take the word from you?"

"No reason." The policeman shrugged. "So let what's coming come. No skin off me."

"How'd I leave? Where'd I get wheels, the bread?" Though spoken with a sneer, the query was a shade less hostile.

"Then don't leave. Keep out of sight, the way I said."

"Ain't easy here, man."

No, it was not easy, as the black cop knew. Not easy to remain unnoticed through each long day and night when someone wanted you and others knew where you were. Information came cheap if you knew the pipelines of the inner city; all it took was the price of a fix, the promise of a favor, even the right kind of threat. Loyalty was not a plant which flourished here. But being somewhere else, absence for part of the time, at least, would help. The policeman asked, "Why aren't you working?"

Rollie Knight grinned. "You hear me tell your pig friend . . ."

"Save the smart talk. You want work?"

"Maybe." But behind the admission was the knowledge that few jobs were open to those with criminal records like Rollie Knight's.

"The car plants axe hiring," the black cop said.

"That's honky land."

"Plenty of the blood work there."

Rollie Knight said grudgingly, "I tried one time. Some whitey fink said no."

"Try again. Here." From a tunic pocket the black cop pulled a card. It had been given him, the day before, by a company employment office man he knew. It had the address of a hiring hall, a name, some hours of opening.

Rollie Knight crumpled the card and thrust it in a pocket. "When I feel like it, baby, I'll piss on it."

"Suit yourself," the black cop said. He walked back to the car.

His white partner looked at him suspiciously. "What was all that?"

He answered shortly, "I cooled him down," but did not elaborate.

The black policeman had no intention of being bullied, but neither did he want an argument - at least, not now. Though Detroit's population was forty percent black, only in most recent years had its police force ceased to be nearly a hundred percent white, and within the police department old influences still predominated. Since the 1967 Detroit riots, under public pressure the number of black policemen had increased, but blacks were not yet strong enough in numbers, rank, or influence to offset the powerful, white oriented Detroit Police Officers Association, or even to be sure of a fair deal, departmentally, in any black-white confrontation.

Thus, the patrol continued in an atmosphere of hostile uncertainty, a mood reflecting the racial tensions of Detroit itself.

Bravado in individuals, black or white, is often only skin shallow, and Rollie Knight, inside his soul, was frightened.

He was frightened of the white cop whom he had unwisely baited, and he realized now that his reckless, burning hatred had briefly got the better of ordinary caution. Even more, he feared a return to prison where one more conviction was likely to send him up for a long time.

Rollie had three convictions behind him, and two prison terms; whatever happened now, all hope of leniency was gone.

Only a black man in America knows the true depths of animal despair and degradation to which the prison system can reduce a human being. It is true that white prisoners are often treated badly, and suffer also, but never as consistently or universally as black.

It is also true that some prisons are better or worse than others, but this is like saying that certain parts of hell are ten degrees hotter or cooler than others. The black man, whichever prison he is in, knows that humiliation and abuse are standard, and that physical brutality - sometimes involving major injury - is as normal as defecating. And when the prisoner is frail - as Rollie Knight was frail, partly from a poor physique which he was born with, and partly from accumulated malnutrition over years - the penalties and anguish can be greater still.

Coupled, at this moment, with these fears was the young Negro's knowledge that a police search of his room would reveal a small supply of marijuana. He smoked a little grass himself, but peddled most, and while rewards were slight, at least it was a means to eat because, since coming out of prison several months ago, he had found no other way. But the marijuana was all the police would need for a conviction, with jail to follow.

For this reason, later the same night while nervously wondering if he was already watched, Rollie Knight dumped the marijuana in a vacant lot.

Now, instead of a tenuous hold on the means to live from day to day, he was aware that he had none.

It was this awareness which, next day, caused him to uncrumple the card which the black cop had given him and go to the auto company hiring center in the inner city. He went without hope because . . . (and this is the great, invisible gap which separates the "have-nots-and-never-hads" of this world, like Rollie Knight, from the "haves," including some who try to understand their less-blessed brothers yet, oh so sadly, fail) . . . he had lived so long without any reason to believe in anything, that hope itself was beyond his mental grasp.

He also went because he had nothing else to do.

The building near 12th Street, like a majority of others in the inner city's grim "black bottom," was decrepit and unkempt, with shattered windows, of which only a few had been boarded over for inside protection from the weather. Until recently the building had been disused and was disintegrating rapidly. Even now, despite patching and rough painting, its decay continued, and those who went to work there daily sometimes wondered if the walls would be standing when they left at night.

But the ancient building, and two others like it, had an urgent function.

It was an outpost for the auto companies' "hard core" hiring programs.

So-called hard core hiring had begun after the Detroit riots and was an attempt to provide work for an indigent nucleus of inner city people - mostly black - who, tragically and callously, had for years been abandoned as unemployable. The lead was taken by the auto companies. Others followed. Naturally, the auto companies claimed altruism as their motive and, from the moment the hiring programs started, public relations staffs proclaimed their employers' public spirit. More cynical observers claimed that the auto world was running scared, fearing the effect of a permanently strife-ridden community on their businesses. Others predicted that when smoke from the riot-torn, burning city touched the General Motors Building in '67 (as it did), and flames came close, some form of public service was assured. The prediction came true, except that Ford moved first.

But whatever the motivations, three things generally were agreed: the hard core hiring program was good. It ought to have happened twenty years before it did. Without the '67 riots, it might never have happened at all.

On the whole, allowing for errors and defeats, the program worked. Auto companies lowered their hiring standards, letting former deadbeats in.