14th and Swann and were marching north in a streetwide wedge, using their clubs to move looters toward MPD officers accompanying them in squad cars and paddy wagons. As they marched, they passed Nick’s Grill, owned by Nick Stefanos. As of yet, its plate-glass window and the window in its door had not been touched.
Strange started up the hill on foot with two other police. He passed a used-car lot at Belmont Street, where a Chevy had been set on fire. Orange light colored his uniform and danced at his feet.
The drizzle had turned to hard rain. Strange adjusted his hat, pulling it down tightly on his forehead so that its bill would deflect the water away from his face. He could see other police on side streets, inside and outside their cars, talking nervously among themselves, trying to light damp cigarettes. He walked on.
At the top of the hill at Clifton, youths hurled rocks and bottles at buses and the last of the cars that were still using 14th. A bottle went through the window of a squad car parked sideways in the street. Strange chased one rock thrower down but lost him as he cut into an alley. The boy looked to be in his early teens. A young woman cursed at Strange from an open apartment window as he walked back to 14th. He didn’t even turn his head.
Strange walked north. He saw some police regrouping at Fairmont Street. He saw the broad back of an officer who was gesturing with his hands as he spoke to the others. He knew from the broad gestures and the way the man stood that it was Lydell Blue. Strange came upon the group and shook hands with his friend. He and Blue stepped back from the others.
“What’s goin’ on with you, brother?” said Blue. “Heard from my man Morris up in the Sixth that you thwarted a robbery today.”
“I didn’t thwart shit,” said Strange. “My partner got shot while I was duckin’ behind a car.”
“I expect it took the juice out you, man.”
“I’m good.”
“You’re on your second shift, right? You all right to be here?”
“I
Their attention went north as the voices of the crowd there neared a frenzied pitch. Between the next street, Girard, and beyond to Park Road, hundreds of young people began smashing the windows of clothing, liquor, and hardware stores, and looting their contents. Uniformed police waded into the crowd, waving their clubs.
“We better get to it,” said Strange, pulling his nightstick as other officers gathered around them. Blue pulled his nightstick, too.
The officers went into the crowd with their sticks high. They apprehended some looters and chased others into alleys. These same people, mostly youths and young men, emerged from the alleys minutes later and resumed their looting. Strange took a rock to his back, felt the sting, and turned and saw the man who’d thrown it, who was smiling at him from the crowd. He chased the man with an explosion of energy fueled by adrenaline, and as he reached him swung his nightstick, clipping him on the shoulder. The man, who was Strange’s age, tripped and went down. Strange held him there until a paddy wagon, slowly collecting looters, arrived.
“Tom-ass nigger,” said the man.
Strange led him without comment to the paddy wagon and pushed him roughly into the back.
Strange’s next capture was a running boy who had bumped into him, looking over his shoulder as he tried to carry a stereo system down the street. The boy dropped the stereo to the asphalt as Strange got him in a hug. He looked into the boy’s eyes, saw himself at twelve, and let him go.
About five hundred MPD officers and CDU police had now arrived on the 14th Street corridor due to the call-ups and overlapping shifts. Fire trucks had arrived as well. Still, the police and firemen were badly outnumbered by rioters, unprepared for the frenzy that had ensued, and rendered impotent by the restraint orders they had been given.
At half past midnight, fires were set at the Central Market and the Pleasant Hill Market on opposite corners of the intersection at 14th and Fairmont. The Pleasant Hill fire spread to Steelman’s liquor store beside it and to the apartments above. Firemen tried to extinguish the blaze as they were surrounded by taunting crowds and pelted by rocks and bottles from the street and from the rooftops of the adjacent buildings. Police threw tear gas canisters into the crowd. They tossed them from on foot and out the windows of roving squad cars and paddy wagons. CDU officers used grenade launchers to shoot tear gas onto the roofs from which offenders were attacking them with projectiles.
The rain had stopped. Burglar alarms rang steadily in the night. Smoke drifted in the street through the light strobing off the cherry tops of the squad car roofs.
Strange sat on the running board of a fire truck, a wet rag in his burning, tearing eyes, his throat raw, his breathing short. A fireman had handed him the rag. The tear gas had driven back the crowd, but it had also incapacitated many of the uniformed officers, who had no masks. Strange watched two women coming down the street, laughing and holding up dresses against one another to check their fit, tears running down their faces. They were of his generation. They were his color.
He looked around the street and saw no police he knew. He could not see Lydell.
A white police officer walked by him, dirt on his face, rubbing at his eyes, unaware that Strange was sitting on the truck. The police officer said, “Fuckin’ niggers” to no one, then repeated it, shaking his head as he walked on. Strange watched him pass.
He thought of Carmen: where she was and what she was doing tonight. She was with her friends, probably, from Howard U. Talking about this, getting behind it, most likely, while he was out here fighting it. He thought of his brother and what he would say if he were still alive. His father and his mom. The conversations they’d all be having, the spirited debate, if they were together again on Princeton. What would his father tell him to do if he were here right now?
Strange dropped the rag to the street, got up, and walked to an area of disturbance to the south.
At the Empire Market at 14th and Euclid, a group of youths had attempted to set fire to the looted store. Police had driven them away with tear gas, but they had returned. One of the young men threw a canister back at the officers who had thrown it at him. Strange joined the officers in their attempts to repel the assault. The boys disappeared into a nearby alley, returned fifteen minutes later, and tried again. Police were successful in chasing them off but were called back north to quell more rioting. When Strange returned with other police, the store had been set ablaze.
Strange stood in the street as firemen trained their hoses with futility on the store.
A woman his mother’s age, wearing a housecoat, came out from a nearby apartment building and handed him a teacup full of water. Strange thanked her and drank it down, lapping at it like a dog. Strange and the woman watched the market burn, their faces illuminated by the flames and embers that rose into the night.
STRANGE FOUND BLUE down around U Street near dawn. Police now lined the strip, and most of the citizens had gone indoors. Tear gas and the smoke of fires still roiled in the air, and burglar alarms continued to sound. But it seemed as if the trouble was done.
Two hundred adults and juveniles had been arrested. Two hundred stores had had their windows broken, and most of those stores had been looted. Many buildings had been destroyed by fire.
Some windows of the F Street Hecht’s had been broken, as had the windows of D.J. Kaufman’s at 10th and E, near Pennsylvania Avenue. Scattered window breaking had been reported on Mount Pleasant Street, 7th and Florida, and in Park View, where kids had hurled rocks from moving cars. But the rioting seemed to have been contained to the 14th Street corridor.
“Go home,” said Blue, his face streaked with dried tears of dirt.
“I’m on till eight.”
“I talked to my CO,” said Blue. “He said you can go. Take those boys you came with, too.”
