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.
Predictably, some fell by the way, but a surprising number proved that all a deadbeat needed was a chance. By the time Rollie Knight arrived, much had been learned by employers and employed.
He sat in a waiting room with about forty others, men and women, ranged on rows of chairs. The chairs, like the applicants for jobs, were of assorted shapes and sizes, except that the applicants had a uniformity: all were black. There was little conversation. For Rollie Knight the waiting took an hour. During part of it he dozed off, a habit he had acquired and which helped him, normally, to get through empty days.
When, eventually, he was ushered into an interview cubicle - one of a half dozen lining the waiting area - he was still sleepy and yawned at the interviewer, facing him across a desk.
The interviewer, a middle-aged, chubby black man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a sports jacket and dark shirt, but no tie, said amiably, "Gets tiring waiting. My daddy used to say, 'A man grows wearier sitting on his backside than chopping wood.' He had me chop a lot of wood that way."
Rollie Knight looked at the other's hands. "You ain't chopped much lately."
"Well, now," the interviewer said, "you're right. And we've established something else: You're a man who looks at things and thinks. But are you interested in chopping wood, or doing work that's just as hard?"
"I dunno." Rollie was wondering why he had come here at all. Soon they would get to his prison record, and that would be the end of it.
"But you're here because you want a job?" The interviewer glanced at a yellow card which a secretary outside had filled in. "That's correct, isn't it, Mr. Knight?"
Rollie nodded. The "Mr." surprised him. He could not remember when he had last been addressed that way.
"Let's begin by finding out about you." The interviewer drew a printed pad toward him. Part of the new hiring technique was that applicants no longer had to complete a pre-employment questionnaire themselves. In the past, many who could barely read or write were turned away because of inability to do what modern society thought of as a standard function: fill in a form.
They went quickly through the basic questions.
Name: Knight, Rolland Joseph Louis. Age: 29. Address: he gave it, not mentioning that the mean, walk-up room belonged to someone else who had let him share it for a day or two, and that the address might not be good next week if the occupant decided to kick Rollie out. But then a large part of his life had alternated between that kind of accommodation, or a flophouse, or the streets when he had nowhere else.
Parents: He recited the names. The surnames differed since his parents had not married or ever lived together. The interviewer made no comment; it was normal enough. Nor did Rollie add: He knew his father because his mother had told him who he was, and Rollie had a vague impression of a meeting once: a burly man, heavy-jowled and scowling, with a facial scar, who had been neither friendly nor interested in his son. Years ago, Rollie had heard his father was in jail as a lifer. Whether he was still there, or dead, he had no idea. As for his mother, with whom he lived, more or less, until he left home for the streets at age fifteen, he believed she was now in Cleveland or Chicago.
He had not seen or heard from her for several years.
Schooling: Until grade eight. He had had a quick, bright mind at school, and still had when something new came up, but realized how much a black man needed to learn if he was to beat the stinking honky system, and now he never would.
Previous employment: He strained to remember names and places. There had been unskilled jobs after leaving school - a bus boy, shoveling snow, washing cars. Then in 1957, when Detroit was hit by a national recession, there were no jobs of any kind and he drifted into idleness, punctuated by shooting craps, hustling, and his first conviction: auto theft.
The interviewer asked, "Do you have a police record, Mr. Knight?"
"Yeah."
"I'm afraid I'll need the details. And I think I should tell you that we check up afterward, so it looks better if we get it correctly from you first."
Rollie shrugged. Sure the sons-of-bitches checked. He knew that, without being given all this grease.
He gave the employment guy the dope on the auto theft rap first. He was nineteen then. He'd been put on a year's probation.
Never mind now about the way it happened. Who cared that the others in the car had picked him up, that he'd gone along, as a backseat passenger, for laughs, and later the cops had stopped them, charging all six occupants with theft? Before going into court next day, Rollie was offered a deal: Plead guilty and he'd get probation. Bewildered, frightened, he agreed. The deal was kept. He was in and out of court in seconds. Only later had he learned that with a lawyer to advise him - the way a white kid would have had - a not guilty plea would probably have got him off, with no more than a warning from the judge. Nor had he been told that pleading guilty would ensure a criminal record, to sit like an evil genie on his shoulder the remainder of his life.
It also made the sentence for the next conviction tougher.
The interviewer asked, "What happened after that?"
"I was in the pen." It was a year later. Auto theft again. This time for real, and there had been two other times he wasn't caught. The sentence: two years.
"Anything else?"
This was the clincher. Always, after this, they closed the books - no dice, no work. Well, they could stick their stinking job; Rollie still wondered why he had come. "Armed robbery. I drew five to fifteen, did four years in Jackson Pen."