In the eight months that followed, the motivation for the murder had been described as racial unrest; economic unrest; sex unrest; blood lust; obeah; soul music and kinky reggae; insanity; and, finally, the unsubtle beginning of a terrifying Pan-Caribbean revolution. These were not mutually exclusive, it was understood.
Recently, however, San Dominican's prime nun ister, Joe Walthey, had simplified the sociological aspects of the crime. 'No matter what else,' the dictatorial black said over rolling, blipping island TV, 'these men must hang, or this island shall never find peace with itself again. Mark my words on this.
'The life of Francis Cichoski must be avenged,' Walthey repeated @ times before he finally faded from the television screen.
At 10:30 A.M. Judge Andre Dowdy read his verdict in an unsteady, emotion-packed voice.
'All three of you men-Franklin Smith, Donald 'Chicki' Holt, Leon Elmore Rachet, ' he read, 'are found guilty of the murder as presented in evidence before me and this court. All of you will be taken to the Russville jail, and there be hanged no more than one week from today. May God have mercy on your souls. And on my own.'
'An' on yo' ahss, too!' young Leon Rachet suddenly screamed out in the hushed courtroom. 'An' on yo' ahss, Dowdy mon. '
Franklin Smith turned to the teenager, winced, and said, 'Oohh, Leon, mon.'
At 10:40 the dull gray roof of the Potts Rum Factory blew off like a slapstick comedian's hat;
then flashes of leaping flames of orange and red fired up into the balmy clear blue sky.
Literally within minutes, the Coastown factory was gone; an entire block of the capital was hopelessly ablaze.
At precisely 1:00 two white foremen were beaten senseless with ball bats at the Cow Park Bauxite Mines.
A hundred car windows were smashed in an executive parking lot.
The executive dining room was rushed, and all the prime ribs and hot hied chicken were either taken away or destroyed. Inside the courtroom in Coastown, meanwhile, Franklin Smith and Chicki Holt screamed obscenely at Judge Dowdy. Their already hoarse, long-haired American lawyer screamed at the elderly judge, too. they called him 'mama's man'; 'runny ass'; shit pussy'; 'blood clot.' Young Leon Rachet stood by quietly, simply watching. He reached inside his back pocket and produced a black beret for his sweaty head. At fifteen he fancied himself part Huey P. Newton, part Selassie, part Che. During the mad courtroom screaming, he turned to Franklin Smith and told the older man to shut his 'black nager-boy mout.'
Strangely, the thirty-year-old man did as he was told.
Outside the cigar-box courthouse, the reggae singer Bob Marley was being blasted from loudspeakers on top of a rainbow-colored VW van.
Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.
Angry black faces screamed at the courthouse building as if it were alive. Rude boys in the crowd carried posters promoting the cause of the revolutionary colonel Monkey Dred, and also of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Pretty, innocent-faced schoolchildren waved beautiful hand-painted banners-GO HOME ADMIRAL NELSON; GO HOME LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER; SAN DOMINICA A BLACK REPUBLIC.
Shiny-faced city policemen marched up Court Street behind see-through riot shields. People threw ripe fruit at the police. Mangoes, green coconuts, small melons.
A nut-skinned man in army fatigues ran up to a TV camera and made a bizarre, contorted face into the lens. 'Aaahh deangerous!' he shouted, and became famous across the world.
a row of five Hertz rentals was blown up with plastique at Robert F. Kennedy Airport outside Coastown.
At 11:30 the three black murderers were led out onto the shiny white courthouse porch.
The San Dominican terrors were about to begin in earnest.
Fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet had on a Day-Glo flowered shirt and dark Tonton Macoute sunglasses. His black beret was tipped slightly over one eye. Deangerously. At first Rachet smiled broadly as he waved his handcuffed hands high over his head like a prizefight winner. Then, as the police shoved him down the glaring white steps, the boy began literally to scream at the sky
'Dred kill yo', mon! Monkey kill al you'! Slit al yo' troats. ' Over and over the boy screamed out the name of an island revolutionary.
'Monkey Dred slit me own auntie's troat. Ayee! Ay-ee! '
. Suddenly a well-dressed black man in the crowd screamed out above all the other noise. 'Gee-zass, mon. Oh, Gee-zass Ky-rist!'
Someone had thrown a sun-catching, silver Frisbee high up into the air. It curved down into the crowd around the handcuffed murderers.
As fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, where the back door of a black police Rover was flung open to receive him, his eyes turned up toward the suddenly descending silver Frisbee-and a white man in a Panama suit and hat stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots into the mad boy's face.
Carrie Rose watched the s@ge, possessed teenager crumple up and fall. She was among the large group of white tourists behind police lines. She hoped the rest of the terrors would go as smoothly as this one had.
Robert F. Kennedy Airport; Coastown, San Dominica
Tuesday Evening.
At 9:45 that night, an American Airlines Boeing 727 began its light, feathery approach down into San Dominica's Robert F. Kennedy Airport.
The massive silver plane glided in amazingly low over the blue-black Caribbean.
