Wheels

The black policeman, who was several years younger and newer, dropped his hands. "He's okay." Moving back, he inquired softly, "What difference does the color of his ass make?"

The white cop looked startled. In their haste since moving from the cruiser he had forgotten that tonight his usual partner, also white, was off sick, with a black officer substituting.

"Hell!" he said hastily. "Don't get ideas. Even if you are his color, you don't rate down with that crumb."

The black cop said drily, "Thanks." He considered saying more, but didn't. Instead, he told the man against the wall, "You can put your hands down. Turn around."

As the instruction was obeyed, the white cop rasped, "Where you been the last half hour, Knight?" He knew Rollie Knight by name, not only from seeing him around here frequently, but from a police record which included two jail convictions, for one of which the officer had made the arrest himself.

"Where I bin?" The young black man had recovered from his initial shock.

Though his cheeks were hollowed, and he appeared underfed and frail, there was nothing weak about his eyes, which mirrored hatred. "I bin layin' a white piece o' ass. Don't know her name, except she says her old man's a fat white pig who can't get it up. Comes here when she needs it from a man."

The white cop took a step forward, the blood vessels in his face swelling red. His intention was to smash the muzzle of his gun across the contemptuous, taunting face. Afterward, he could claim that Knight struck him first and his own action was in self-defense. His partner would back up the story, in the same way that they always corroborated each other, except - he remembered abruptly - tonight his partner was one of them who might just be ornery enough to make trouble later. So the policeman checked himself, knowing there would be another time and place, as this smart-ass nigger would find out.

The black cop growled at Rollie Knight, "Don't push your luck. Tell us where you were. ."

The young Negro spat on the sidewalk. A cop was an enemy, whatever his color, and a black one was worse because he was a lackey of the Man. But he answered, "In there," motioning to a basement bar across the street.

"How long?"

"An hour. Maybe two. Maybe three." Rollie Knight shrugged. "Who keeps score?"

The black cop asked his partner, "Should I check it out?"

"No, be a waste time. They'd say he'd been there. They're all damn liars."

The black officer pointed out, "To get here in this time from West Grand and Second he'd have needed wings, anyway."

The call had come in minutes earlier on the prowl car radio. An armed robbery near the Fisher Building, eighteen blocks away. It had just happened. Two suspects had fled in a late model sedan.

Seconds later, the patrolling duo had seen Rollie Knight walking alone on Third Avenue. Though the likelihood of a single pedestrian, here, being involved with the uptown robbery was remote, when the white cop had recognized Knight, he shouted to halt the car, then jumped out, leaving his partner no choice but to follow. The black officer knew why they had acted. The robbery call provided an excuse to "stop and frisk," and the other officer enjoyed stopping people and bullying them when he knew he could get away with it, though it was coincidental, of course, that those he picked on were invariably black.

There was a relationship, the black officer believed, between his companion's viciousness and brutality - which were well-known around the force - and fear, which rode him while on duty in the ghetto. Fear had its own stink, and the black policeman had smelled it strongly from the white officer beside him the moment the robbery call came in, and when they had jumped from the car, and even now. Fear could, and did, make a mean man meaner still. When he possessed authority as well, he could become a savage.

Not that fear was out of place in these surroundings. In fact, for a Detroit policeman not to know fear would betray a lack of knowledge, an absence of imagination. In the inner city, with a crime rate probably the nation's highest, police were targets - always of hate, often of bricks and knives and bullets. Where survival depended on alertness, a degree of fear was rational; so were suspicion, caution, swiftness when danger showed, or seemed to. It was like being in a war where police were on the firing line. And as in any war, the niceties of human behavior - politeness, psychology, tolerance, kindness - got brushed aside as nonessential, so that the war intensified while antagonisms - often with cause on both sides - perpetuated themselves and multiplied.

Yet a few policemen, as the black cop knew, learned to live with fear while remaining decent human beings, too. These were ones who understood the nature of the times, the mood of black people, their frustrations, the long history of injustice behind them. This kind of policeman - whether white or black - helped relieve the war a little, though it was hard to know how much because they were not in a majority.

To make moderates a majority, and to raise standards of the Detroit force generally, were declared aims of a recently appointed police chief. But between the chief and his objectives was the physical presence of a contingent of officers, numerically strong, who through fear or rooted prejudice were frankly racist like the white cop here and now.

"Where you working, crumb?" he demanded of Rollie Knight.

"I'm like you. I ain't workin', just passin' time."

The policeman's face bulged again with anger. If he had not been there, the black cop knew, his partner would have smashed his fist into the frail young black face leering at him.

The black cop told Rollie Knight, "Beat it! You flap your mouth too much."

Back in the prowl car the other policeman fumed, "So help me, I'll nail that bastard."

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.