grand a day.'
The two men were carefully crossing busy East 40th Street, leaving the Ford parked across the way.
'Brother,' Curry said, trying to grasp just how much money twenty thousand dollars was. 'No wonder they think this joint owes 'em a few jobs.'
'No wonder,' Ness said dryly.
At the front entrance of the market building, a yellow-brick structure a block long and half again as wide, a mostly colored crowd had gathered. Men, women, young, old, they were restless and packed and noisy; Curry couldn't understand much of what was being said, but the mood of the crowd seemed not one of anger, but curiosity: They were pushing and shoving to see better. Ness pushed through them like a knife through soft butter, saying 'Excuse me' in a loud voice with the edge of authority. Curry followed along, feeling some trepidation that Ness, apparently, did not.
The crowd was louder toward the front, and obviously angry. A line of picketers with signs-NEGRO EMPLOYMENT NOW; BOYCOTT WOODLAND MARKET; NEIGHBORHOOD JOBS-Was blocking the doors. They were well dressed. Curry noted; suits and ties on the men, Sunday dresses and hats on the women. They looked like a church group. Maybe they were: One older man wore a clerical collar.
'Keep back!' a uniformed cop was saying; he had his nightstick in hand. He was speaking not to the picketers, but to the crowd, which was pressing in closer. Even the picketers seemed unsettled by the burgeoning mass of humanity.
Between the picketers and the crowd were ten cops, all white, spread out as thin as a pensioner's paycheck; they looked tired and exasperated and, Curry thought, frightened, though to the untrained eye the cops wore fierce expressions.
Ness looked over his shoulder at Curry. 'They can't be doing any business in there,' Ness said loudly, right in Curry's ear. 'I'm going inside. Stay here!'
Ness moved forward; he spoke briefly to a cop, who recognized him, and several of the cops saw Ness and grinned, as if the cavalry had arrived. Perhaps, Curry thought, it had.
Ness approached the picketers. He sought out the older, dignified man, a preacher if his collar was to be believed, a tall, balding, bespectacled individual in the middle of the sign-carrying group. Ness offered his hand and the man, after a heartbeat, shook it. Ness spoke briefly, politely. The cleric nodded and allowed Ness to pass by him and enter the building.
Five minutes went by. Curry stayed on the edge of the crowd; without a uniform, joining the spread-out cordon of cops would be futile. He stayed there, alone in the crowd, one white blank face in a sea of black hostile ones, feeling for the first time what it was to be in the minority.
Part of the feeling was fear; but it was a more complicated feeling than that. He would lie awake that night thinking about it, as unsettled as the cops holding back this throng.
Over to his left, Curry saw an angry black woman in her fifties shouting at a cop, a florid-faced veteran who obviously knew his way around a nightstick. The cop moved close to the woman, and with his hand on the butt of his holstered gun, the nightstick tight in his other hand, began to shout back at her. His face was as red as the stripes on Old Glory, and the woman was matching his anger, the veins and cords standing out in her neck as though straining to keep her head attached to her body. Several other women, all of them, like their shouting friend, wearing floral dresses and Sunday hats, began screaming angrily at the cop.
Who suddenly drew back his nightstick, grabbing on to the woman with his other hand, clutching her arm.
Curry moved forward, but someone else moved faster.
Curry hadn't seen Ness come back out from the market, but he obviously had; he gripped the wrist of the nightstick-wielding hand of the cop, and pushed him back, firmly, but with no apparent anger. The cop, his grasp on the woman's arm broken, glared briefly at Ness, then recognized him, and the red drained from his face and he was as white as a lamb, and as sheepish.
The woman, whose anger had been replaced by fear, looked at Ness and smiled and nodded, and she seemed embarrassed, as well, but the crowd was still yelling, and closing in.
Ness moved back to the picket line and yelled, 'Please!' at the top of his voice.
The crowd ignored him.
He yelled it again.
And again.
And the noise subsided just enough for him to get it out: 'The market is closed!'
The noise picked back up, as that news was discussed, and then as Ness repeated, 'The market is closed!' it again subsided.
'The market is closing its doors for the day,' Ness said, loudly but not yelling. 'Please disperse!'
It took several more tries. 'You've closed the place down! Disperse peacefully!'
Finally, Curry moved toward Ness, as the crowd behind them began milling out and away.
Ness had approached the older, dignified man in the clerical collar and was speaking to him.
'The market manager agreed to shut down early,' Ness was saying, 'to put an end to this confrontation.'
Normally the market stayed open well into the evening.
The preacher was nodding. 'A wise decision,' he said.
'Well, frankly,' Ness said with a small smile, 'they haven't done a hell of a lot of business today, thanks to you folks. You effectively shut them down, anyway.'
'We did not resort to violence, Mr. Ness.'
'I know that. If you had, you'd be in jail, Reverend Hollis.'
So, Curry thought, this was Hollis, the Future Outlook League's founder and leader.
'And,' Ness said, 'the president of the stall operators association will meet with you tomorrow morning, here at the market, to talk about jobs for Negroes-if you'll agree to call off your picketers.'
Hollis raised a forefinger. 'I'll only do that if…'
'Mr. Hollis, I'm not a negotiator or a mediator between you and the stall operators. I'm just a messenger. There's a gentleman waiting inside to speak to you. I suggest you go inside, before the doors are locked.'
Hollis nodded. 'Thank you, Mr. Ness.'
He offered his hand and Ness, twitching a smile, took it, shook it.
Hollis entered the market; his fellow protesters, their signs leaned against the side of the building, were relaxing, smiling, patting each other on the backs.
Ness approached one of the cops; they were watching warily as the crowd continued to disperse.
'Sergeant Wilson,' Ness said, 'gather your men, just over there.' He pointed off to one side of the building, away from the picketers.
'Yes, sir.'
Within five minutes the dozen officers were grouped in two rows of six, standing at attention.
'Relax, men,' Ness said, with a wave. 'You had a tough situation here today. I know you did your best. But some of you didn't help it any, bullying that crowd of onlookers.' He looked sharply at the cop who had come within a whisper of using a nightstick on the colored woman. 'What's your name, officer?'
'Peterson,' the cop said, a defensive tone in his voice.
'What exactly did you think you were doing?'
'Well… my job. Keeping the niggers in line; they were disrupting the marketplace, sir.'
Ness winced at the word 'niggers.' He walked over to Peterson and stood very close to him; looked him right in the face. The two men couldn't have been more than an inch apart, Curry figured.
'I don't give a damn what color they are,' Ness said. 'They're citizens who we're hired to protect and serve.'
Ness backed away; he looked at all the men, hard. The sound of produce trucks could be heard in the background, grinding sounds that went well with Ness's barely controlled outrage.
'My men aren't going to go around beating up women with nightsticks.' He glared at Peterson. 'Is that understood, officer?'
Peterson swallowed. 'Yes, sir.'
Ness looked at every face. 'Is there any man here who disagrees with me? Is there any man here who thinks it's our job to beat up civilians, colored or white?'
