Native Son - Richard Wright [114]
Reports were current that several Negro men were beaten in various North and West Side neighborhoods.
In the Hyde Park and Englewood districts, men organized vigilante groups and sent word to Chief of Police Glenman offering aid.
Glenman said this morning that the aid of such groups would be accepted. He stated that a woefully undermanned police force together with recurring waves of Negro crime made such a procedure necessary.
Several hundred Negroes resembling Bigger Thomas were rounded up from South Side “hot spots”; they are being held for investigation.
In a radio broadcast last night Mayor Ditz warned of possible mob violence and exhorted the public to maintain order. “Every effort is being made to apprehend this fiend,” he said.
It was reported that several hundred Negro employees throughout the city had been dismissed from jobs. A well-known banker’s wife phoned this paper that she had dismissed her Negro cook, “for fear that she might poison the children.”
Bigger’s eyes were wide and his lips were parted; he scanned the print quickly: “handwriting experts busy,” “Erlone’s fingerprints not found in Dalton home,” “radical still in custody”; and then a sentence leaped at Bigger, like a blow:
Police are not yet satisfied with the account Erlone has given of himself and are of the conviction that he may be linked to the Negro as an accomplice; they feel that the plan of the murder and kidnapping was too elaborate to be the work of a Negro mind.
At that moment he wanted to walk out into the street and up to a policeman and say, “No! Jan didn’t help me! He didn’t have a damn thing to do with it! I—I did it!” His lips twisted in a smile that was half-leer and half-defiance.
Holding the paper in taut fingers, he read phrases: “Negro ordered to clean out ashes…. reluctant to respond…. dreading discovery…. smoke-filled basement…. tragedy of Communism and racial mixture…. possibility that kidnap note was work of Reds….”
Bigger looked up. The building was quiet save for the continual creaking caused by the wind. He could not stay here. There was no telling when they were coming into this neighborhood. He could not leave Chicago; all roads were blocked, and all trains, buses and autos were being stopped and searched. It would have been much better if he had tried to leave town at once. He should have gone to some other place, perhaps Gary, Indiana, or Evanston. He looked at the paper and saw a black-and-white map of the South Side, around the borders of which was a shaded portion an inch deep. Under the map ran a line of small print:
Shaded portion shows area already covered by police and vigilantes in search for Negro rapist and murderer. White portion shows area yet to be searched.
He was trapped. He would have to get out of this building. But where could he go? Empty buildings would serve only as long as he stayed within the white portion of the map, and the white portion was shrinking rapidly. He remembered that the paper had been printed last night. That meant that the white portion was now much smaller than was shown here. He closed his eyes, calculating: he was at Fifty-third Street and the hunt had started last night at Eighteenth Street. If they had gone from Eighteenth Street to Twenty-eighth Street last night, then they would have gone from Twenty-eighth Street to Thirty-eighth Street since then. And by midnight tonight they would be at Forty-eighth Street, or right here.
He wondered about empty flats. The paper had not mentioned them. Suppose he found a small, empty kitchenette flat in a building where many people lived? That was by far the safest thing.
He went to the end of the hall and flashed the light on a dirty ceiling and saw a wooden stairway leading to the roof. He climbed and pulled himself up into a narrow passage at the end of which was a door. He kicked at the door several times, each kick making it give slightly until he saw snow, sunshine, and an oblong strip of sky The wind came stinging into his face and he remembered how weak